RotR, Reapercon, GMing again, MTTC, moving closer to the rules

Rise of the Runelords

So that RotR game I was invited to way back that had the pixie incident. Yeah, it finally ended at 3am this past sunday morning. It's been a crazy ride, at the end Karzug killed one of us, and had several of us below 10 hit points multiple times. Some of the spells we had access to were late book spells, and may have skewed the power in our favor, but in the end it was the longest, toughest, craziest five rounds of combat I've ever seen.

Reapercon 2014

Yes, we went. It was a blast. My brother and I played several warlord games, and painted. I painted up a battletech warhammer that got a certificate of recognition. My brother's Mina won a silver. The new hotel for the event is really nice, and despite my fears, its still the close and friendly feel that reapercon 2013 was. We played some great custom R.A.G.E. games, including their dungeon crawl, and cowboys and gunslingers. C&G is probably the most fun I've had with the rage system yet. We found we were playing the tough rule in warlord way wrong, so we're rehashing our army builds and plan to actually play in the tournament next year. Ben and I have several paint project ideas in mind. Our goals are to both score better than this year with everything we enter. I'm also gonna push for two entries.

GMing again

Well, with Runelords over, and the other GMs I was playing under out of town for 4-6 months, its time to step behind the screen again. I'm looking at three games at the moment. One is online for the MTTC people I've been playing with. Several of them are new to Pathfinder, and one is new to Pen&Paper as a whole. The next is picking up the slot from the runelords GM since his schedule is wonky now, I'll also be adding a kiddo of the players. We'll start with the beginner's box and go from there. The third is continuing the game I was running for Ben and the parents. I've got good notes for that already, I just don't remember how far they got last session.

MTTC

Speaking of MegaTokyo:The Clans, that has indeed started up cleanly again. We're now playing at www.rpgclans.org bewarned though, mature content. Shinyai was just getting adapted to tokyo when things started getting crazy, and the government has put up devices that might as well be anti-magic fields. So even the average thug is an interesting fight. However, someone nasty is about to step out of the shadows and into the fray!

Getting back to the rules

For no good reason what-so-ever, I was stat-blocking Kenshin Himora from the anime Rurouni Kenshin this week. I've noticed a lot of things that have been in games I'm in are actually house rules (nat 1 meaning something bad on attacks, such high stats, CMD for feints). So far these haven't really been problems, but I think I'm going to move my games closer to the regular rules for a while. I think some of the house rules that can kick a player in the chin are actually to "balance" characters with really high stats. So I'd like to see what happens if things are closer to the book after all. It also means toning down my npcs, but hey that's fine, they were built powerful to deal with powerful characters.