Story behind your screen name?

[Frosty]

I don't think I know any evil or unfriendly gamers, most are pretty friendly folks. You get together to play because you want to get together with people with common interests. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

They were still playing D&D in the '80's?????  Spent way too much time playing back in the pamphlet days....

I agree some of the best  times was playing characters with terrible stats, why Regnad Kcin, whos first *4* rolls were sixes almost made it to join with the rest of the party, except he was killed by a 1 hp orc....

[Frosty]

Heh, heh, heh! YES that's exactly what made D&D fun! Everybody in our group, except Russ S. (who had entire manuals committed to memory and could roll a character and flesh it out as fast as he could roll the dice.) brought a number of pre rolled characters (spares) so we didn't have to sit and kibitz if ours got killed off. We enthusiastically believed in "run flat" spares.

Conflicts in alignment killed off new or old party members until whoever was DM ing set some game rules. For example it took a group vote to play a Lawful Good character, usually in a module where it'd work. 

Gotta go, I need to drive to Anchorage to see about some shafting drops so new club members can have an anvil. Going to pick up Baxter too, he's made all his Nose Work runs and it's not fair to make him spend two days in the RV while Deb and Ronnie compete. 

I have me a day ahead, gotta go. Later, 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Red53]

Nickname was bigred turned to red overtime and 53 was my football number 

[Bantou]

On 5/23/2021 at 11:19 AM, Frosty said:

Everybody rolls super hero characters and you're killing demigods and such right from the start. BLECH!

 

Part of that is 5e and part of it is the DM. I reserve the right to tell my players no if I think it will make them too overpowered for the campaign. My biggest frustration is with the dice. I swear my players make sacrifices to the dice gods before every session. They make fantastic rolls 75-80% of the time and my monster rolls suck an equal percentage. I know it isn’t me though because my DM PC (we have a player that can’t play as often so I play the character when she is absent) rolls on par with the other players. I’ve had them walk out of three “deadly” encounters now without a scratch because of the rolls.

 

Edited May 25, 2021 by Bantou
Language

[ThomasPowers]

What you never sat down with a new buy of dice and roll each one 100 times and see if any have a natural tendency to roll high or low and then put a small mark with a marker on them...?

I gave up on a gaming group  where one fellow ALWAYS rolled maximum/minimum with about 5 minutes per roll adding all his pluses/minuses to it. When they went to 4 I bowed out.  I wanted to pit my wits and cunning to succeed not stand by while one guy used "atom bombs" every fight.

[Frosty]

e1 maybe e2 rules say the DM is supposed to roll the dice behind a screen. It was one of the first rules we ignored except for special circumstances. Like the time a demon carried my longest lasting an favorite PC to a nether region of purgatory.  

Too many fantastic rolls resulted in using the DM's dice. If someone is just lucky they got to play their luck. 

One of the guys we played with loaded his dice. drilled a little hole in the 1 pip and glued in a piece of lead shot and painted it to match the die. In every case they landed loaded side up most often. 

We were wondering why his dice got unlucky and then they got lucky when he switched attack for saving dice. 

Some time later he blew it by asking me if I knew a way to make lead shot smaller. "Huh, why?" "It needs to fit in a hole but it's too large." He admitted loading his dice when I called him on it. and we talked about what and how he loaded them. Drops of molten lead had the expected un-hideable results.

I have zero idea why the heavy side tended to come up with such a high statistical probability. I palmed several to play with. Shining a bright light through them showed the shot clearly enough. I sanded the 1 side down and the shot was just below the bottom of the pip dimple. 

The epoxy he used (the then popular brand 5 min stuff) was softer than the plastic so it should've reduced the elastic rebound making it more likely to land shot down. Heavier, less bounce and flat, and the heavy side landed on top probably 80+% of the time. HIs crazy loaded dice landed a 1 - 20, 1 - 12 1 - 8 depending on if it was black or white something like 80% of the time. Not a 4 on the 20d, a 3 on the 6d, etc. 1 or high number.

No Thomas, I've never test rolled dice for probable results. Good idea though I might just drive Deb crazy when she gets home from the dog trials. <evil grin?

Frosty The Lucky.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

It's not cheating if its just manufacturing variability---right?

[Frosty]

Of course not, test selection is actually a good idea I just never thought of it. I'm good with it, I don't think I've ever played with a DM who would've objected, certainly not a second time.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

BTW was that loaded dice guy playing a rogue or a thief?

[Frosty]

No, a lawful good paladin,  For a short while. We discovered it was pretty unplayable even with loaded dice. The party ditched him and the player had to roll up a new character. HIs next character Garzus is the one who won a wish and the player wished he had something like 100 hit points. And another one bites the dust. 

Having a super character doesn't play well in e1 e2.  e5 maybe but the couple times I've played just weren't any fun, it was like playing army with a kid who always had a machine gun and lots of hand grenades. Everybody missed him and he never missed. We may have been 8-9 but knew that just wasn't reasonable, everybody isn't Audey Murphy and he didn't come away unscathed. PTSD tortured him the rest of his life. 

Anyway, being vulnerable until you've earned and won some power makes it worth playing. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[SinDoc]

While I don't remember by first D&D characters name, my favorite was Kree Sharptooth, a very gangly and unimpressive looking Kobold in a party consisting of various chromatic dragons. Everyone always looked at the dragons to whom they should be worried about unbeknownst to them that the little Kobold with them was in fact a level 40 Wizard (first campaign where we continued into epic levels). Game towards the end consisted of large scale battle between massive armies (hundreds of thousands) between gods and us self proclaimed gods. Each person in the party was an effective level close to 80 or something. Things get nutty when you are that super powered.

That game ended when he tried to cast some universe altering magic and caused the material and astral plane to be ripped apart down to the molecular level . Made a note to myself that when dealing with insane magic like that, make sure you can't fail the spell craft check required to cast said spell  

This was all in 3.5E.

[Frosty]

Exactly.

Frosty The Lucky.

[SinDoc]

I still have that character in a notebook in the drawer with all my old D&D books. I will have to try and find him and see what his final level ended up being before he killed reality lol.

[ThomasPowers]

I had a friend who used to run D&D games for charity; bring your favorite character and they could be any level you want; *BUT* you paid a dollar per level into the charity fund!

One fellow had a 100th level character that never made it to the actual dungeon.  Random monster encounters were based on *your* average party level and he was travelling alone....

My old group had besides the "serious" campaign; also a "B"  campaign as in B movies with heavily modified rules; (role for perversion for example and Otissian Clerics (God of Elevators)  a high level spell for them was "summon elevator" so if the party was being sliced and diced and made into julian fries, they could cast the spell and step inside the elevator and disappear and come back later to try to resurrect any party members whose remains could be found...

[SinDoc]

That sounds like a fun event and an amazing spell lol.

Our campaign started out somewhat modest at level 10 or so with dragons. How to Train Your Dragon had just come out and our DM really liked it so it with the backdrop of the start of the campaign. I did not want to play a dragon since all you would start with was the base race, so I picked Kobold and became a super stacked wizard right off the bat . Near the end he was effectively immortal with all the raw magic power he had. If he hadn't ripped reality apart, I don't think he could have been actually killed. Also in regards to destroying reality, chronomancy is a heck of a magic to screw up on. 

[Frosty]

"B" campaigning sounds like fun. Join the game where the Ford Chevy dispute gets REAL!

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

In general our campaigns started out with everyone at level 1; back in the tan pamphlet(s) days.  I grew to dislike the books as they interfered with peoples imaginations and encouraged rules lawyering.   Like what happens if you cat ice storm and anti gravity at the same time?  Do you get anti-flying monster fire?

B was a hoot and if you played a character named Ford I'd bet that sometime a large piece of metal with a Chevy emblem would drop on you.   Fnord however, would not be noticed Fnord.

[Frosty]

Some of the best games I ever played were around a campfire sipping adult beverages. Our  dice were short straight sticks marked on 3 sides making a d4. Rolls used: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 per roll. Our characters were generated, sometimes by vote or acclaim, character sheets were scratched in the dirt or written with charcoal on a piece of wood. When a character was killed we burned his sheet.

It was all imagination with rare dice rolls, everybody had an imaginary adventure till we were too tired to sit around the fire and hit the sleeping bags. 

I thought it'd be fun to bring a little black or flash powder to mark events. Happily common sense invaded the voices and they pointed out I'd be holding a quantity of explosives in an open pocket sitting around a FIRE while enjoying an unanticipated level of intoxication. Oh O-K-A-Y, drunkenness. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

Shoot Frosty you could have gotten your TBI years earlier---or traded it for "Burns over a significant percentage of the body".  I don't let folks imbibe and work in my shop, including myself!  I can get stupid enough just having low blood sugar---in fact my wife has my two best forging friends trained to ask me to check my blood sugar if I start acting squirrely.

Now D&D games 40+ years ago; well alcohol may have been involved at times.  Like when half the party was hit by a random transmutation spell and all the iron in their body turned to some other element. The DM said we were dead but the chemistry major said that element had the same oxidation levels as iron did; so if it was instantaneous it should be ok---for a while...So we ran back to the vampire infested village and gave a lot of undead heavy metal poisoning...Any D&D game where the CRC Manual was the one most consulted might be considered a little odd.

[Frosty]

I often marvel I've lived long enough for the parts to start wearing out.

No alcohol or drugs allowed in my shop. We opened a cooler outside after a get together but till the power tools and fire were off water or soda was it on the shop floor.  The guys who know me keep an eye out at meetings. Alone I catch when I'm drifting off center but in groups I tend to get going and not notice. 

It's good to have back up.

The lab where we played was a soils lab so unless an AASHO or ASTM manual helped we just died in those situations. It was good place though, there was a fridge, microwave and our favorite pizza parlor "Mazzi's" knew right were to deliver.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

My grandfather always said, "wearing out is better than rusting out".

[Frosty]

It's better to burn out than to fade away. . .(I think) can't think of the name of the song. 

Like Mike said. Life without a purpose is just processing air and food.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

My My, Hey Hey, Neil Young (Also had "Rust Never Sleeps")

[Charlycuervo]

Hi, the story behind my nick...
My real name is Carlos Godoy, my friends call me Charly el cuervo (raven).
Cuervo is for two reasons: the soccer team I like is known as "Los Cuervos" so the fans of they are knowed as "cuervos" and the second reason comes from a jilted lady who sayd about me "this guy is really like a raven".
So "Charly el cuervo" becomes Charlycuervo.