Perennial Favorite
I always felt bad for Kineticist. She’s a one-joke character whose source material has only gotten further and further away. (Airbender was a 2005!? Damn I’m old.) That means her raison d’être has slowly receded into the distance with time, and our adorable aerokinesis expert has seemed less relevant with every passing month. Thanks to the recent Netflix acquisition though, our totally-not-Aang is back in the saddle!
If you’re anything like me, the first time you saw Airbender you immediately began drawing up campaign plans. For my group, question #1 was system. Maybe we could reskin Exalted and run it as a Dragon-Blooded game? Or what about dusting off Wushu to keep things nice and rules-lite? I mean, of course we could use Pathfinder and play as an all-kineticist party, but then we’d have to figure out how those mechanics actually work! My group was all on board for the idea, but it wound up going into the “next campaign” file anyway.
It’s crazy the way all those cool ideas wind up in the backlog. When an IP is in the public eye, the initial rush of enthusiasm is an unparalleled source of creative mojo. Take my own group for example. Guardians of the Galaxy was big when Starfinder came out, and I’m pretty sure that movie is the reason my group is still playing. But here’s the thing: Guardians happened to hit my group at the right time. It was around just as we came open for a new campaign. Some of our other cool ideas weren’t so lucky:
- In the Court of the Marlin King — You’re all courtiers in an underwater kingdom vying for His Majesty’s favor. Lie, cheat, and backstab all the gillmen!
- The Underdark Campaign — Everyone is drow. Try to become the #1 noble House in Menzoberranzan!
- The Lunar Game, Part 3 — Remember when we used to play Exalted? Why don’t we go back and finish the storyline? Weren’t we about to invade the Blessed Isle?
- West Marches — I’m tired of being the forever GM. Why don’t we do an episodic rotating-GM sort of thing in the West Marches style?
- Quantum Knights — You can be anything from anywhere in the multiverse! Hillbilly sasquatch. Cyborg hoverbike racer. Whatever. It’s a dimension-hopping Savage Worlds campaign where you have to save all possible realities!
What does any of that have to do with Airbender? Well, every one of those ideas had its antecedent in pop culture. The courtly Marlin King game came up when Game of Thrones was taking off. So did the Underdark idea. Quantum Knights drew inspiration from Sliders, Quantum Leap, and Dr. Who. The Lunar Game and West Marches both came up thanks to different gaming releases that were making waves at the time. Unfortunately, with the passage of time and the changing zeitgeist, these things slowly dropped off the radar.
It makes me wonder if I’m the only one dealing with this problem. What about the rest of you guys? Do you ever find yourselves caught up in campaign-planning frenzy when the next hot thing drops, only to watch enthusiasm slowly peter away? What does your own backlog of never-played-campaigns look like? Tell us all about your favorite campaign ideas (and the things that inspired them) down in the comments!
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About fifteen years ago, I started a D&D 3.5E campaign in a homebrew Stone Age setting, where everyone had a spirit guide animal in the form of either a familiar or an animal companion (as if they were a wizard or druid of their character level). It was great fun, everyone loved it, and it ran from level 1 to level 12 or so.
It certainly lasted a lot longer than anyone’s enthusiasm for The Golden Compass, which was what gave me the idea.
Neat! How’d you balance out which classes get the familiar and which get the companion? I’d think the latter would be more powerful.
Wasn’t really a problem… companions are definitely more powerful in combat, but familiars are much more intelligent and stealthy, capable of doing a lot in stealth missions. Somebody’s rat companion stole a very powerful magic ring from a famous gladiator, so that was pretty cool.
Random little detail – the Kineticist wasn’t inspired by Avatar. It was meant to be more evocative of characters like the protagonist of Firestarter or Carrie.
I could be wrong, and I’d definitely be curious to see the dev notes. But there’s blood-bending in there, and that’s a pretty specific superpower.
https://www.cbr.com/avatar-last-airbender-pathfinders-kineticist-class-playing-benders/
Shame Bloodkineticists haven’t got the most iconic part of Bloodbending.
I think though that, like most good classes, Kineticists drew inspiration from many sources. Avatar sure, but other elemental manipulators aren’t uncommon, as well as Carrie and Firestarter as mentioned (the Iconic is absolutely an expy of Firestarter’s Charlie), and of course general Telekinesis.
General Telekinesis sounds like a fun character… XD
Back when the Goblin Slayer manga first started showing up in the weeb community, someone noticed that the “adventurer sign up sheet” was nearly the exact copy of the 5e character sheet. Throw in some pretty looking characters and edginess and suddenly everyone wants to run a super dark goblin hunting 5e game. Putting aside how some abilities feel like it could be straight from dnd, it still plays as a narrative fantasy plot with perhaps homage to table top gaming, it did feel like it introduced a new wave of tabletop gamers from the weeb and anime community.
And sure enough it only took like, a month, before people started realizing that the hype of grimdark goblin slaying in dnd is just a rehash of older edition orc raiders attacking village and spawning half-orc, only with smaller greenskins. Not to mention that while Goblin Slayer presents itself as a “gritty and realistic take on Dungeons and Dragon adventuring”, it falls rather flat outside of its narrative when you actually play in game, and suddenly all those issues you’re told about in the story (Not wearing a helmet, using large weapons in a narrow space, using hand-to-hand combat against larger monsters), don’t actually exist in game you play and were just there for dramatic purposes.
In the end it brought new players into the tabletop fold and that’s great, but that only happened before people realized that Goblin Slayer’s story is just filled with melodrama, not to mention it’s ain’t even original if you want a grimdark and gritty take of fantasy dnd. Berserk had been doing that up until the end of the Eclipse, and Gutts is pretty much the poster boy if “Anime Barbarian with a big ass sword and a dark past”.
Im sure there’s still some who would write one shots or even an campaign inspired by why they read from Goblin Slayer, but that only goes so far when you only need to appeal to people’s emotions and depict this race of creatures as nothing but evil so your party can go on a guiltless racial extermination driven by your hatred for this partial group of people based off a depiction that puts them in a very negative light, and shows no redeeming qualities. Works as a good plot hook, but once they take the bait you’re gunna need to work on it more than just that. Get past the knee-jerk reaction of seeing what terrible things your goblins/orcs/demons/Whatever do and figure out how it actually relates to the overall story and world itself. But that’s where it usually gets shelved and the campaign dies there, and the adventurers just sort of accept that whole thing was an unfortunate reality of life and move on with their lives.
Is this speculation, or did you actually play in such a game? Because that sounds like the voice of experience right there.
Twas one of the many campaigns I went into, played like the session 0 and one real session, and than just sort of died, yeah. The usual issue was one-dimensional antagonists Don’t really bring much RP opportunities: when you can try and really talk or even trick goblins, characters like cards or anyone who is more of a skill monkey fall flat, so players began to drop, DM just ghosts us, and eventually the discord server just vanishes. The sad and unfortunate fact of life of trying to crib off hype but not having any other substance to back it.
Oof. This COVID-19 business seems like the perfect time to try pickup games, but everything I hear about ’em makes the idea sound awfully frustrating.
I like Goblin Slayer well enough, but I find the base premise kinda ludicrous
Like, it seems to be a regular occurrence of goblin attacks and women being taken and tons of people getting killed and blah.. and it’s like.. why isn’t everyone taking this seriously?
Starts butting up against the ol suspension of disbelief after a while, when even highly ranked, well respected people have been affected, and like, there are goblins roaming a city and killing people on the streets.. and the city guard are like ‘lol, goblins? We aren’t gonna bother’
.. people are getting killed on the street and you aren’t gonna bother?! What are you even guarding?!
My current campaign is actually based on a Tumblr post. Specifically the one about the party of half-human half-siblings who are all the children of a stereotypical seductive bard, now looking for their father. (For a fun twist, the bard’s the king of their home nation. This way, I get to call the campaign “Royal Bastards.”)
The thing is, the idea was on its way to waning enthusiasm and getting buried in a notebook until the Covid quarantine hit. Suddenly, we couldn’t play our LANCER game effectively, since Roll20 doesn’t get along with hex maps. So I stepped up, and the dumb Tumblr post has kept us gaming since late March. Plus, I’ve been able to work in some suspiciously familiar giant robot wreckage, (thank goodness for Pathfinder’s high-tech rules,) which the players were thrilled to see.
Turning that challenge into an opportunity! Good show.
I know that the guy on the Glass Cannon Podcast did the same thing, stepping back from the dangerously contagious in-person Giant Slayer game to do Roll20 sidequests instead.
We did the half-siblings campaign and it went to level 18 when we finally settle things. Dad was dead and we had to find his stash, turns out that the point was to turn us into adventurers to then kill and fuel his transformation into a lich.
Based on an adventure seed in the Forgotten Realms AD&D 2 box set, even.
My Pathfinder 2e game has two half-goblin/half-orcs and a regular goblin whose father is a traveling, super-sexy goblin bard. My backup character is a half-goblin/half-elf from the same father. All of them are on a quest to track down and beat up their father (the fullblood goblin is a legitimate son, but that just makes him want to hunt down the dad EVEN MORE).
Squidward face?
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/003/047/omg.jpg
Most of what I’ve seen of AtLA has been the Dutch dub, but once, a friend was watching a particular episode in English, where uncle Iroh tells Zuko to ask himself “Who are you? What do you want?” and I was like “Seriously…?!”
Like most melodrama, it doesn’t really work if you come in halfway through.
Also: You best not be talking smack about Uncle Iroh. 😛
No, it was just incredulous surprise that he was quoting the central questions of the Vorlons and Shadows from Babylon 5…
(Which I then had to explain to my friend.)
Well there’s my problem. Never got into Babylon 5.
I gotta admit though, in a vacuum like this it does sound a bit… psychobabble?
“Tell us about your feelings, Zuko.”
Wasn’t the first enemy the party in that D&D cartoon face Tiamat?
It was not a balanced campaign.
Honestly I feel bad for 4 Element Monk no matter what. It was clearly from the phase of design where they assumed everyone would have 8-encounter adventuring days with 2-3 short rests, and is otherwise quite sub-par. There’s a reason it’s the most fan-revised subclass.
I’m weirdly obsessive, and so once an idea gets into my head it stays there until I either get it out, or I realize it’s a bad idea. I tend not to crib much from external media because my own inclinations are already there.
That said the main villain does have an interesting sweater: https://www.exocomics.com/545
Shortly following the initial release of Attack on Titan, I found a ruleset for an Attack on Titan rpg, which seemed like a lot of fun. Never actually got a group together to do it, though.
Some other indefinitely shelved ideas:
Magical girls in a dystopian cyberpunk setting
Exploring the nation of Torrezon from Planeshift: Ixalan
Running the Tomb of Horrors as an Indiana Johnes-style archeological expedition (though to be fair the last was done once with Tamoachan)
Around the same time, I was working on a book called The Veranthea Codex. During the run-up to the KickStarter, this was one of the teasers:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/135154/Veranthea-Codex-Beztekorps-Prestige-Class–FREE-PDF
Clearly something inspired one of my teammates on that project. 🙂
Oh boy, potential and half-played campaigns! I got a few.
Doom’s crossing – A horror campaign centered around four manors of four NPC friends, each of which befell a horrible tragedy that cursed their manors and the crossing itself, evils slowly leaking out of each manor into the village they occupy. Each a dungeon in its own right, representing a different kind of survival horror theme. One is full of hivemind-like monsters with infectious and ‘meat moss’ qualities (inspired by the Annelids in System Shock 2). One is full of deadly, sadistic, traps (Saw). One is full of undead haunts and strange, unnerving constructs and homunculi. And the final one is a twisted, dimensionally confusing demiplane of an unhinged caster who’s cold, calculating, and sees others as mere experimental pawns for mad experiements (Portal).
Zilean’s Revenge – a play-by-post story I played until I got too burned out and busy to continue DMing it. The gist of it is that an ancient lich, beaten long ago by heroes, returned, as the heroes were forced to imprison it forever, unable to kill it due to not knowing where its phylactery was. The isolation drove said lich mad until Kobolds accidentally unearthed its prison and released it… Now it’s spreading chaos and death cults, mad as a had. This setting also featured Discworld’s Death, haunting the Wizard of the party (originally a joke, turned into something more over time)
Onionworld – A world where there is no ‘sky’ or ‘underground’. The world is like an onion, seemingly endless layers of biomes one under or above the other. An ocean might be right underneath a lava plane, and below that a jungle. Meanwhile, above you hangs a frozen wasteland. The gravity of this world depends on the world’s revolutions – what is up slowly becomes down as you travel the equator, or as time passes. A potentially infinite sandbox world to play in, as PCs explore the biomes or attempt the seemingly impossible task of reaching the ‘end’ of the world, inwards or outwards.
Felidae – Back when I was naive and assumed GMPCs or GMNPCs could work. A town that’s full of… Well, cats. So much so that you need permits to keep any canines. The twon also has the (mis)fortune of being inhabited by a thief, a ‘cat burglar’ who can steal seemingly anything – from the underwear you’re wearing, to the gem you swallowed, to your shadow. The authorities long abandoned any hope of catching the thief, as they’re seemingly harmless – every stolen item eventually finds its way to the city’s orphanage, which was turned into a massive ‘lost and found’ business, making any loss more of a inconvenience. In fact, the town officials realized the charm of this thief, and turned her into a sort of mascot to attract tourists. The PCs would, of course, meet this thief and slowly learn their story.
Pimp my demiplane – This one isn’t well fleshed out, but I have a simple concept in mind – the PCs start the adventure as owners of a permanency’d demiplane, having cleared it of its monster threats and freed an NPC who has some measure of control over it (a butler construct, Djinn, amnesiac wizard, etc), offering the PCs ownership in exchange for restoring the demiplane to its former glory. From there, it’s their job to acquire funding, magic items or material components to turn a simple empty stretch of land into their own private house, castle, possibly even kingdom! As they improve their demiplane, they may discover ancient treasures or even dungeons hidden within it’s magical confines (as well as plot threads of greater threats), or use its dimensional properties to travel the world in search of new improvements.
System Shock, Portal, Discworld, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Pimp My Ride. Quite the collection of inspirations.
There’s more references thatn that!
OOTS for the villain of Zilean’s (who’s name is borrowed from LoL).
Felidae is both a movie reference (Watership down, but with cats) and the ‘thief’ is based off of the Disgaea 2 thief class. Doom’s crossing borrows from a lot of horror tropes and movies/games, including Silent Hill, Saw, Event Horizon, Resident Evil… The demiplane thing probably can use a better ‘name’, but is based off various simulation games where you build a house or base/HQ for yourself. Works well if you do it with Kingdom Rules or such.
my sandbox campaign was supposed to (or rather is going to) play in the Pathfinder Online setting.
The idea was to play the game and use screen shots of scenery to supplement the maps.
I managed to sell the log in data just before it went downhill and staff was reduced to two devs back at Paizo.
Ouch. That is some rough timing. Did you just have to abandon everything, or did some vestige of the campaign survive?
well, the timing was good for me. paid a few hundred $$ for the kickstarter and got an equivalent in minis, adventure modules, maps and cash back.
I‘m just not getting pictures of settlements and dungeons for my own pen & paper game.
Final Fantasy IV is just kind of my perennial source of campaign ideas.
Only ever played 7. Why 6?
IV is 4. VI is 6.
But to answer the question, I think it’s because it was one of the first games I ever actually played almost all the way through (I never managed to beat Zeromus and the GBA cartridge glitched and wiped my save data.) IV was heavy on kitchen sink fantasy tropes, so basically every area of the game has its own unique identity. The airships were always one of my favorite parts of the series, and I like to include airships as one of the most common forms of long-distance travel in my game worlds. The whole moon plot in the final segment in the game has also been heavily influencing a campaign idea I’ve been cooking up recently.
Teach me to do the comments without my glasses…. 🙁
In my group we don’t play things based on the hot stuff. First of all, i am the one in charge of the plot and setting and i don’t like to do that. Is easy to say: “Oh, GoT is cool let’s play it” but then you may find that GoT is too grimdark for you. To know if you like something the best is the test of time. For example, Warframe is a game i really like, i love it. But when i start playing it after a time i left it, i was kinda bored, i wasn’t advancing that much and got other things to play. But like some months of leaving it i realized i keep thinking of it. SO i returned to the game and now i am about to get the 450 daily tribute milestone. Liking something now doesn’t mean you will like it later, not liking it now doesn’t mean you will not like it later. Sometimes the best thing is to wait and find how much you like that special thing. The second reason is that the rest of the group whole-hearty agrees with me. Once i tell them of a Naruto/Fable: The Lost Chapters setting i have made, they were thinking it was good. For me it was too Naruto to my liking. I may allow myself to be inspired by something but if i feel that my project is just a reskinned ripoff i will leave it. I prefer to play directly the original than to sin of unoriginality and theft. So we don’t play then the hot stuff, but the Good Stuff. That said we are no without unplayed and leftover campaigns 🙂
For the left unfinished we got a biopunk campaign we need and want to continue but we can’t for the plague. One we are on our homes without playing, two the themes of the campaign are not the best mix with the actual situation. So it’s on standby for now. Good thing we left thing at the middle of a chapter, bad thing it was just previous at many of the things builded so far to explode and as it’s say: “For shit to hit the fan”. Then the real fun would begun 🙁
The unplayed one is a prequel of several things on the most grand part of the setting. I have almost everything organized, at least on my front. But then again with the plague we can’t play. I am really excited for this one… in the good way i mean. Not only i could finally show a golden age for the gods, i was to finally reveal and deal on lots of the setting things. The gods during the previous and originals Festivals of Creation, the demons and the origin of the Art of the Deal, the Void and the false-gods, the God of Words that becomes the Big Bad later, the hells’ first rebel and how these things are tied together 🙁
Oh, and thanks for the news. Now i can wait to see another beloved media ruined and burned on the altar of unasked continuations Q_Q
Korra was enough >(
No worries about continuations. They’re just streaming the original. 🙂
It’s crazy popular though. Loads of people (re)discovering the IP. Hence today’s comic.
Wait and we will see. Hold no hope, for them will die and extinguish Q_Q
I really get in Abyssal mood writing about this 😛
I’ve certainly experienced this. Have had plenty of game ideas based on some passing fancy only to never put it together in time for me/other people to care. And even more often, played a short lived game of something that died and then never saw something quite like it because the moment had passed.
Though in my experience the later has happened more just after a series has ended. Everyone finally has all the answers to the questions that will get answered, so the show can’t screw up your game’s canon but people still care. But that means the momentum is short lived because people quickly move on to the next thing.
As an example, I played in a post Legend of Korra game for all of a month before the GM vanished and never saw another Avatar based game again.
I guess that, like Kineticist herself, there’s an important distinction between homage and ripoff.
If the entire premise of your campaign is “let’s play the show,” then it’s going to get old in a hurry. Seems to me that the more sustainable version is “here’s my own world with elements inspired by.” That way you can use the source material as inspiration rather than the sum total of the project.
Generally, I don’t base campaign ideas on current popular trends, so I’ve actually had the opposite problem more. As in one of my (former) players would create one-note characters based on something they recently saw – then quickly get bored of the idea and want to change characters to the next trend (& repeat).
That said, I’ve long wanted to either find a system (or even try making one) that could emulate the Holy Grail War from the Fate/series.
I’ve actually seen a few attempts at that. Most notably an Exalted hack. Unfortunately, ot was on a website that has since shut down, so I’m working from memory to describe it.
The basic idea had been using heroic mortals with thaumatugy as magi, and building servants as gods. That exaggerated the power gap, but the hack starved most servants for essence, especially since using any peripheral essence risked giving away their true name.
I wonder if that’s tied to the pop culture inspiration, or if it’s a player tendency in general. I mean… Why is there a relationship between changing characters often and pop-culture inspiration?
I’ve actually seen a few attempts at that. Most notably an Exalted hack. Unfortunately, ot was on a website that has since shut down, so I’m working from memory to describe it.
The basic idea had been using heroic mortals with thaumatugy as magi, and building servants as gods. That exaggerated the power gap, but the hack starved most servants for essence, especially since using any peripheral essence risked giving away their true name.
Sorry for the double posting. Don’t know how to remove this.
No worries. Our forum technology is old and busted.
Recently I started a new campaign for my group that had wrapped a campaign up, and I gave them a total of 7 concepts of various types to choose from (though a few were very similar, with two even being the same concept with different tones and levels). Obviously, the group only chose one. (Though they picked a good one – ancient aliens.)
Of the campaign concepts I have lying around, there are three that I have some interest in:
Shadows over Oxder: My second campaign concept ever. A mountain town hires the PCs to provide security and look into some attacks on trade caravans. You see, there’s going to be a lunar eclipse in the middle of the night on the fast-approaching winter solstice, and the local leaders are adamant that NOTHING will go wrong and everyone’s just being a bunch of scaredy-cats. So… shadow monsters.
Shadowfire: I’ve mentioned this super-detailed setting before (Lord of the Rings mixed with post-WWII occupation of Germany/Japan), but I’m still waiting on the right conditions to do a campaign in it (roleplay-heavy, low-combat players in for a long haul and who can be trusted to not start abusing any authority they may be given).
The Infernal Syndrome: A weird version of the “what thing inspired this campaign” answer, because this concept is a fusion of two Paizo AP books (the 4th book of Hell’s Rebels and the 6th book of Council of Thieves), which have similar concepts (breakdown of order in a major city), enemies (humans and devils) and levels (10-12 range). The PCs would be elite police in a city, only to discover that the city’s Hell-worshiping humanocentric dictator from 100 years ago has somehow returned, starting an insurrection against the current government. The PCs have to put this down by finding the mastermind behind the chaos while also avoiding the powerful devil-worshipers controlling half the city. It gives a “fugitives but also on a manhunt” dynamic that I think would be really fun. If I ever get a group that wants to try jumping up to high-ish levels to start with, I think I’d try this. (It wouldn’t be the only time I’d smashed two APs together – the ancient aliens campaign I mentioned above is mostly a mix of the Second Darkness and Iron Gods APs because it surprisingly works.)
I think mashing up multiple campaigns works well because they can be a bit linear at times. When you’ve got two linear plots running side-by-side, it’s a lot easier to feel like jumping back and forth between them opens up options for players. Plus there’s the excitement of never knowing which plot point is tied to which campaign.
It also has the bonus that you can skip the parts of the AP that you find to be boring or problematic. (“This book in the AP’s really not that good, but the same-level book in the other one is great!”)
Obviously you need to pick APs that have similar themes and tones or this won’t work at all. Carrion Crown and Strange Aeons might work together, but War for the Crown and Giantslayer probably’s wouldn’t. In my case, Council of Thieves and Hell’s Rebels are easy fits, since both are single-city urban campaigns in Cheliax with a fair amount of subterfuge and devil-using enemies. Second Darkness/Iron Gods was a bit more work, but I basically took the locations, plot and antagonists of Second Darkness and put in all of the alien ruins and monsters of Iron Gods. (Also some stuff from a 2e Playtest minicampaign, Doomsday Dawn.) The drow worship aliens instead of demons and the ancient elf conspiracy is about keeping aliens secret, not the drow. Since a lot of Iron Gods is wandering around and making random new enemies each book until you reach the BBEG (who has no power outside of the Book 6 dungeon and never even heard of you until that book) having Second Darkness’s more present, organized enemy faction works wonders for pacing and keeping the players on-track. (“Hurry! We can’t let those sneaky drow steal the tech in that newly-discovered ruin!”)
Though now I want to think up other good AP combinations. Serpent’s Skull and Mummy’s Mask? (Both treasure hunting campaigns, either the lost city in the jungle is NotEgyptian or import the rival treasure-hunting factions system to Mummy’s Mask.) Jade Regent and Shattered Star? (Hunting for the shattered star pieces in oni-controlled notChina/Japan, rather than Varisia.) Ruins of Azlant + Skull and Shackles + Kingmaker? (Running your own colony/pirate hideout.)
Had a kineticest in my party for a game I recently finished GMing (Pathfinder 1st ed).
It was kind of a running joke that they missed most of their attacks, to the point where they started using the options that were saves but had much, much lower damage
then we hit level ~15ish, and they got the tools to start maximized empowered on every blast.
Then they hit a boss for 380, vaporizing it instantly at the start of round 1.
Moral of the story; don’t fuck with kineticests.
More seriously though; Kineticest in pathfinder is a SUPER feast-or-famine class, because unlike every other class, as they level they pile all of their damage into one attack, rather than using iteratives. This makes the kineticests that hit on touch really good, since they can pretty consistently hit that one big blast. Unfortunately, the physical blasts that do the real damage are physical, not energy, so they have to hit real ac.
What most people don’t take into account though, is metakinesis.
Kineticests are like inquisitors in that they are the gods of ending a single-encounter day instantly. Nothing says ‘fuck this boss’ like Empowered Quickened Maximized Double Compound Blast hitting for somewhere in the range of 800+ to a single target, on touch ac.
I love kineticest. It’s probably objectively worse than playing a sorcerer and just themeing your spell choices around one element, but I still love kineticest.
There’s nothing that makes me feel like a badass more than a completely ludicrous crit. Honestly, I think that’s why crift-fisher builds are as popular as they are.
Scythes, Guns, picks.
Slap on a cyclops helm and end lives.
That is, if your GM is insane enough to let your character lay hands on both a 4x crit weapon and a cyclops helm.
Ah, Wushu! A little known gem that I love to bits for its versatility and focus on exciting action over simulation. Good to hear you have great taste, Colin.
I’m making an effort to learn more games this year. Gotta keep those horizons properly expanded!
My timing always seemed to be a bit more delayed than others, it feels like. One of the first times I tried running a campaign (never made it to session 2, and was fighting the party to even get through session 1) was based off of Sliders in my head, though was probably closer to Chrono Cross. Before the days of Pathfinder, and was trying to work out a magic-based firearm for it, too. I still remember most of the notes for that one… jumping back and forth between two versions of the same world with one historic twist, trying to figure out the cause of a cataclysm in one that was avoided in the other, without drawing too much attention to the fact that they were dancing between worlds while working to make ends meat.
On other shorter notes, once I realized “can actually replicate the full idea of a series in a tabletop” was possible, I clung to an idea of following the Megaman X storyline all the way through to Megaman ZX era. And then there were ones with ideas similar to Castlevania and Metroid… none of which ever went anywhere. (Came to realize I’m probably not the best for running games. Minimal organizational skill and time management means “not ready for any session”.)