Just thought I would throw this out here and see if anyone else played Nerd Poker. I’ve been a fan of Pen and Paper RPG’s most of my life starting in the mid 80’s with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and steadily expanding my habit ever since. I have a pretty big collection of stuff but most of what I play is… D&D Call of Cthulhu World of Darkness Rogue Trader Fear Itself In the miniature war gaming department I play Warhammer Fantasy (Dwarves and Dark Elves) Warhammer 40k (Orks and Dark Eldar) Warmachine I also have a butt ton of board games. If anyone else is interested in table top gaming I would love to here from you. What you play or anything cool you are doing.

D&D/Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun for my RPGs. Warhammer 40k Imperial Guard (47th Harbinger Heavy Artillery) And Magic: the Gathering (just old duffers at a kitchen table, no tournaments)

Very nice… I forgot about Pathfinder. I keep looking at Flames of War and would like to get into some of the WWII Pacific Theatre stuff but I have been resisting the urge to take up another game because I fear my wife’s wrath.

ermtony … who I haven’t seen on here in a while was into that …or his friend snuffhead either … here is his website http://ermtony.pbworks.com/w/page/14871474/FrontPage

I was going to say @ermtony as well. I know he hasn’t been well - he had a heart attack last year - but there might be more news on his website. I never really got on with miniature wargaming - although friends of mine did some excellent Vietnam games using a variation on the Bodycount rules - but I used to enjoy AD&D and Call of Cthulhu.

Never heard of the Bodycount Rules… Sounds interesting, I’m assuming it’s a wargaming system?

Yes - it’s squad/platoon based for Vietnam-era gaming. I’ve no idea who published it or when - the games I’m talking about were back in the late 90s and the collective gaming memory of the participants went back at least to the early 1980s!

@Justin I actually found a PDF download of it on Drivethru RPG… It still has people playing it from some of the images I found on the web. It looks interesting.

i used to be into warhammer 40k tabletop, but the cost as a kid pushed me away to just playing on the computer. spacemarines… but my own, slightly chaos-y chapter. i cant remember if i did it before or after i read about the soul drinkers chapter. once i can find work again i hope to look into it and start again if it hasnt died out round me.

Back in the early 90’s when I got into it the first time around it was way too expensive of a hobby for a kid. (technically it still is…) I tried playing Space Marines at the time and you had to order sprues of shoulder pads or weapons and stuff if you wanted a different chapter, you didn’t just go buy a box of Space Wolves like you can today. About 8 years ago I got back into it and found a game shop in the area that had a pretty active group and I made the mistake of playing Orks. I didn’t realize at the time that you needed 30 minis to equal a unit of 10 Space Marines so several hundred dollars later I had enough Orks to actually be worth while. I haven’t had a chance to play in a about two years now since my wife and I had twins and that kinda puts a damper on the whole, spending $40.00 on a box of plastic toy army guys. I’m just hopping that the game will still be around in a few years so that I can play with my kids and give me an excuse to buy 3 times more… But Hun… It’s not for me it’s for the kids!

Imperial guard is just as bad. You have two choices, either buy 10 for one (IG vs SM) and go infantry or buy uber expensive heavy armor and artillery (and still buy the infantry for a meat shield) but man does a field of leman russ with a baneblade and manticore/basilisk backfield throw the fear of the God-Emperor into people. My oldest son is twelve and has started a tau army. This method works as we get 40k stuff for eachother for holidays and birthdays.

@SandwhichIsles that sounds like a good setup. i very nearly went tau… not seen anyone use them. also had a friend who used necrons. never saw anybody else go with those either.

Yeah… IG is a hoard army unless you go with the big guns. My wife got into the Dark Eldar for a while but she didn’t like to go to the game store to play because some of the guys there were really hard to play with because they kind of acted like jerks when they played with her. I’m just hoping that one of my kids will eventually get into it. Then it’s go time HAHAHA.

I played wargames as a teen in the early 70’s I think I played with D&D when it first came out in 74, but that was a long long time ago in a Universe far far away (Arizona)

@tboyer That’s still great that you got a chance to play. I didn’t start playing until the mid 80’s but sometimes it feels like a Universe far far away… I played D&D for years in Jr. High and then into High School before I discovered cars, girls and… girls. The last several years have been pretty interesting for War Gaming, you can find a game for just about anything that interests you these days. If you are a history buff there are tons of games out there for different periods in history, if you enjoy fantasy settings there are a lot of those and sci-fi as well. It’s not a inexpensive hobby by any means but it can be a load of fun if you get in with the right crowd of people. I’ve always enjoyed wargamming… It’s like chess on an epic scale, with little toy soldiers you get to paint!

I too was an very avid rpg gamer in the end of the 90´s, having played a lot of Rune Quest, Lord of the Rings (ICE edition), Cyberpunk, Kult and a bunch more. I started playing Warhammer 40k by the time the “Rogue Trader” edition came out here in Spain, yep that´s right, the edition Games Workshop sold as a book and came without a single miniature (no problem…I got my hands on 2 sets of Space Crusade and used the miniatures (only Space Marines & Orks but a good start). Fast forward a few years later I stopped playing when they started selling the 4th edition (I´ve already bought everything of the 3rd edition including a lot of suplements) when I realized that if you want to be into the Games Workshop games you have to be ready to keep buying and buying and buying again new sets of miniatures and army books everytime they feel it´s time to make some more money. These days when I have a bit of time (not often) I prefer to play boardgames that need less time, money and are pretty rewarding in fun terms, anyway sometimes I still miss the fun of a good pen & paper RPG adventure…

I think the thing that ticks me off with GW is that (personally) I feel like they don’t care about the game as much as the miniatures. They are getting pretty ridiculous with the game system and updates/new systems every few years and at $80 to $100 for the “rule” book it’s just not practical for a lot of people to play. Then you hear them cry around about how they can’t expand the hobby… Well no crap! You want people to buy a $80.00 book that will only be good for maybe 3 or 4 years and 75% of that book is just full page pictures of armies or fluff that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual game. They can’t expect to grow a hobby and get NEW players or younger players at those price points. I can’t blame a parent for NOT buying their kid a $80 - $100 book and then needing to turn around and spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on paints, tools, minis and all the other things that come along with the game. I enjoy RPG’s and board games much more now than I did years ago and I run a 5th Edition D&D game every Sunday for a few friends of mine and it’s pretty much the highlight of my week!

@SnuffnStuff How is 5th ed D&D? Never made the jump past 3.5/Pathfinder here.

I really like it… I absolutely HATED 4th Edition with a passion so I was really skeptical about 5th. Wizards of the Coast offers a free PDF download of the entire game rule system (which is pretty awesome on their part) and I think that the choice to do that had a lot to do with how people felt about 4th Ed… I downloaded the PDF and really looked it over and liked what I saw so I picked up the Players Hand Book… I think the best part about it is that they took all the things that worked from previous editions and really streamlined the system. If you liked AD&D or even Basic D&D with the open ended flexible system but still mechanically sound like 3.5 you will like 5th. They have distilled down Skills and Feats into basic categories so you don’t have players min/maxing all over the place and opened up a lot of the old “feats” that were specific to a “class” so everyone can use it. At first I wasn’t a fan of the smaller skill/feat list but after a few months of DM’ing it’s really an awesome system. The most important aspect to me is that they have returned to the focus on Role Playing and not just crunching numbers. It makes the game way more fun to play.

That sounds awesome. My group took a pass on 4th for the same reasons, but having run 3rd for… god, 15 years (where has the time gone). Anyway, we’ve been slowly moving toward upgrading as soon as we reach a majority in favor. I’m the DM, so I could just force it, but I don’t want to alienate people.

Jumping from 3.5 to 5th is going to be a change… mechanically you are dealing with a lot of the same, ascending AC, d20 basic for the most part but there are some major differences. The biggest being the skill/feats which takes some players a while to get around. Now skills are all tied to an ability score… So if I have a rogue who wants to pick a lock it would be under Dexterity/Sleight of Hand, you add your Ability + Proficiency with slight of hand/thieves tools together and then add them to whatever you roll for your result. It sounds confusing but it’s actually really easy because the math never changes… For example… You have a Dex of 16 which gives you a +3 Mod You are level 1 so you have a +2 Proficiency bonus (The Proficiency bonus is applied to all DEX roll because you are a Rogue and Dex is a primary ability.) Because you are a rogue you can “specialize” in thieves tools so you get to double your Proficiency bonus So Dex is a +3 and you add the Proficiency Bonus + 4 to get a +7 Modifier to your roll. So then in the game as a DM you would assign a Difficulty to the lock… Say the Difficulty is Average so DC 15 so 15 is the number they are trying to beat. Player rolls a d20 and adds their modifier, d20 roll is a 10 (+7) = 17 DC of the Lock was a 15 so the player opens the lock… The really nice part is that once you have figured out what your modifiers are for a task they don’t change until you level up the ability or do something that would effect that stat… It’s a big departure from adding +/- modifiers to rolls but it speeds the game up because the roll is always the same you are just increasing or decreasing the target number they are looking for by the DC.

Sounds more streamlined. Maybe if I lobby from the position that we’d actually get more play time in I can make it fly.

I would check out the PDF that WotC has available for download… It really is the entire rules set so you can test play it without spending a dime on the books. Plus if you have players who aren’t ready to invest in the PHB it’s got everything you need. Just doesn’t have all the pretty pictures and some of the more advanced stuff. You will be missing a few character classes and races and a few other odds and ends but by itself it is a playable demo. http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules

One of the most awesome updates is the Advantage/Disadvantage system… Say your player is trying to pick the lock mentioned above. During Combat… You can have the player roll at a disadvantage… Instead of rolling 1d20 and adding their modifiers… they roll 2d20 and take the lowest result and then add the modifiers… By that same token if they are trying to pick the lock and it is something they have seen a dozen times before you can say Roll with Advantage… This time when they roll 2d20 they take the highest number… It’s a cool system because now you aren’t coming up with a +/- modifier you are letting the dice come up with it for you. So in a situation like combat if the players have a monster Flanked… They roll there To Hit’s at advantage… 2d20+modifiers taking the highest result… Makes for some really awesome (or horrific) successes and failures and speeds up the game by lightyears.

I played a little Battlefleet Gothic a long time ago, still got the models somewhere but I enjoy looking at them more now.

I loved Battlefleet Gothic… I still have a few of the minis but the majority have been lost or broken over the years during moves and such. I had Titan Legion too which was a great game but again… Lost most of those minis years ago.

Most of the time I played Avalon hill and SPI war games. I had read about role playing games before D&D but D&D was the first one that I played and the first one that most people had any knowledge of. I also played Empire of the Petal Throne, another early RPG. but life gave me more than enough to deal with

Absolutely! Ive played owod, aka old world of darkness, nwod, new world of darkness, DnD based games, and some with a system.known as The Window which is a very lite system.

Very awesome everybody! Now we just need to get a game going over Skype or something Hahaha… We can all sit around with snuff, pipes and cigars and play D&D. @tboyer I believe I might have a few things from Empire of the Petal Throne stashed away somewhere. I’ve never played the game but I have heard of it. @Rogue WOD is one of my favorite game system. I was ticked when White Wolf stopped producing the hard copies and went to PDF. Every year at Origins in Columbus I try to pick up something that for the new system. My wife really likes it, that’s her go to system.

@SnuffnStuff I can see where your wife is coming from, the wods are great. very complex, but keeps it simple at the same time, I used to play ttrpgs on an irc, my go-to was a wod game.

I have a Roll20 account that I created a while ago. I don’t do anything with it. I was supposed to run a play by post forum game but the guys I was planning on playing with never could commit… Now I just run a D&D game every other weekend for some friends. That’s about all I have time for anymore myself so it’s probably for the best.

We should turn this thread (or start a new one) into an ongoing play by post game of some sort since we all check the site here regularly anyway.

Damn you… How am I supposed to resist this kind of temptation. You sir are the devil… >:)

You are right, the devil has come to snuffhouse. I am the devil! So, what system?

=)) Well I think it would work best with a rules lite system. We would also need to find a platform for dice rolling etc… I’m open to suggestions on the system.

Have to think about system, I’m open too. As for dice rolling, we’re all gentlemen here, I would venture to say we could roll our own dice and be trusted to post an accurate result.

I would be in agreement with that… Dice rolling is on the honor system… If it is somehow discovered you are cheating… You must forfeit your next order of snuff to the rest of the group! This is your first and final warning… :))

Anyone played Neverwinter Nights?

@baconpete yeah sure have… I even mess around with the Neverwinter MMO from time to time but haven’t had a chance to play much lately.

@SnuffnStuff I’ve heard about the MMO somewhat, is it any good?

@baconpete I like it… It’s not as “open” world as something like World of Warcraft but there are plenty of things to keep you busy. It’s definitely a good game if you are a casual player or don’t have an entire group of people you play with. Most of the quests can be done solo so that part is nice if you aren’t in a guild or can’t find a party. The character classes are pretty standard but they are interesting and you can get some cool stuff as you level up. It’s free to play so you aren’t out anything but your time if you want to check it out. The other thing that is nice is that it isn’t Pay to Win… You aren’t going to run into people who buy their way to greatness in the store or anything like that. Most of what you buy is ether cosmetic stuff or unlocking quest packages.