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Author Topic: Shamdemic year 2 begins, you clowns still gaming from behind computer screens?  (Read 8911 times)

Eirikrautha

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Haven't missed a beat.  Despite being in a hotspot, almost no one outside of the folks in the nursing homes here has died.  I've gamed once a week in person the whole time (in addition to playing ice hockey once a week ever since the rinks reopened... some guys on the team got it, after a few days they were back on the ice).  Most people around here recognize that the quality of life matters more than the quantity, so we're still going to live life to the fullest.  I could get killed in a car accident tomorrow (and have a greater chance of that happening), but I still drive every day...

Kyle Aaron

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I guess you had to live in Lombardy during those terrible days to understand how bad and scary and bleak the situation was. Places like Bergamo were tomb cities. There is one thing that, I guess, will remain with me forever: every time I think back to those days I see them in darkness, like if everything was always happening during the night.
You said you would not speak of this after it's over. I think you should.

I mean, don't become a storygamer and write an adventure module for it, let's not go too crazy. But do speak. You speak well.
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Slipshot762

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anti-lock brake sensor on wifes car started wonking out today, just days after the vax, so i think its safe to conclude that the vax causes automobile break down or sensor interference. probably 5g nanites trying to borgify my shit. if you don't hear from me in the next 5 days send big tiddy beeches wif pizza, surround this land with holy symbols, and warn your children and grandchildren to never come here.

Mistwell

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Or have you graduated to double-masking at a table? Maybe your group is excitedly planning a campaign, but only after everyone gets the experimental vax and an anal swab.

Our group tried killing everybody we know with the CoronaChan, but after a year of gaming as usual, sadly I must report a total lack of fatalities. Alas, the best we could do was a couple people got the sniffles.  O Chinese bat soup, how thou hath failed us.

So, how many of you have returned to gaming with your friends in reach of the pizza?

Meh. I ditched my Star Wars RPG group because they had a case of the terminal stupids and I stopped having fun. Otherwise, I have been writing, working (a lot, 20% essential worker raise), and getting married to a wonderful gamer girl who is now moving in (she has a lot books, I have a lot of books, our house is one continuous library complete with cats).

Currently the gang and I are discussing a road trip to the USS Razorback for a sleepover with gaming involved. Gaming, on a submarine, in cramped quarters, with booze - what could be better?

Wow Jeff, congratulations on getting married! That's awesome!

And yeah gaming on a submarine would be epic. If you do it, you gotta tell us the whole story here.

jeff37923

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Or have you graduated to double-masking at a table? Maybe your group is excitedly planning a campaign, but only after everyone gets the experimental vax and an anal swab.

Our group tried killing everybody we know with the CoronaChan, but after a year of gaming as usual, sadly I must report a total lack of fatalities. Alas, the best we could do was a couple people got the sniffles.  O Chinese bat soup, how thou hath failed us.

So, how many of you have returned to gaming with your friends in reach of the pizza?

Meh. I ditched my Star Wars RPG group because they had a case of the terminal stupids and I stopped having fun. Otherwise, I have been writing, working (a lot, 20% essential worker raise), and getting married to a wonderful gamer girl who is now moving in (she has a lot books, I have a lot of books, our house is one continuous library complete with cats).

Currently the gang and I are discussing a road trip to the USS Razorback for a sleepover with gaming involved. Gaming, on a submarine, in cramped quarters, with booze - what could be better?

Wow Jeff, congratulations on getting married! That's awesome!

And yeah gaming on a submarine would be epic. If you do it, you gotta tell us the whole story here.

Thank you!

We're still getting it together for the submarine sleepover, but it is offered through the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum (link below).

http://aimmuseum.org/submarinesleepovers/
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S'mon

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My elderly aunt recently got very sick from Covid - mostly because she got badly dehydrated from fever and didn't go to hospital for that until it was an emergency. Dehydration from food poisoning fever/vomit/diarhorrea nearly killed me back ca 2001 so I could see it coming.  :( Her son, his wife and even their young daughter all got very sick too.

It's a weird disease, most people who get it barely notice, but you do get these really bad clusters. It doesn't behave much like flu at all. I don't agree with lockdowns or compulsory masks, the damage done by the reaction to Covid has far exceeded the destruction wrought by the disease itself - but that destruction is real, even if mortality figures are often inaccurate. The best guide is the elevated all-cause mortality data, which is not susceptible to mis-recording non Covid deaths as Covid. It does show noticeable spikes in several countries, mostly around March-April 2020.

Reckall

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The best guide is the elevated all-cause mortality data, which is not susceptible to mis-recording non Covid deaths as Covid. It does show noticeable spikes in several countries, mostly around March-April 2020.
I earlier mentioned the town of Bergamo and its surroundings. The local newspaper usually prints a page of obituaries every day. At the height of the pandemic they were printing ten pages of obituaries every day (https://tinyurl.com/u74u3v4s). That notion alone sobered up a lot of people who were babbling about "just a bad flu".

Coffins were stacked everywhere inside the hospitals. At night the Army vehicles collected the dead and brought them to the crematory (this is still today one of the most enduring images from the pandemic https://tinyurl.com/3xvrt59p). Relatives got a ticket with a number. After a week you got a phone call and you could go to collect the urn with the ashes. Of course any bureaucratic error meant that you ended up with someone else's ashes - but you will never know.

And yet no other region or city in Italy was as ravaged as Bergamo was. Why this happened is still a mystery. Was Bergamo hit before anyone else and so no one knew about prevention? Was there a genetic factor at work? Here in Milan, after seeing what was happening only half-an hour away by car, they built a COVID hospital wing from the ground up in a week. It remained (and still is) mostly empty. We Milanese were hit hard but we managed (even if barely). I guess that how this virus managed to be so unpredictable will be the subject of studies for years.
For every idiot who denounces Ayn Rand as "intellectualism" there is an excellent DM who creates a "Bioshock" adventure.

Pat
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And yet no other region or city in Italy was as ravaged as Bergamo was. Why this happened is still a mystery. Was Bergamo hit before anyone else and so no one knew about prevention? Was there a genetic factor at work? Here in Milan, after seeing what was happening only half-an hour away by car, they built a COVID hospital wing from the ground up in a week. It remained (and still is) mostly empty. We Milanese were hit hard but we managed (even if barely). I guess that how this virus managed to be so unpredictable will be the subject of studies for years.
Thanks for the summary. If anything this pandemic has shown how little we really know about diseases when they first appear and how long it takes to get a handle on them, and covid-19 is a particularly weird example. It seems to spread how it wants to spread, regardless of what we do. I think the biggest failure of public health during this pandemic is the failure to convey that uncertainty. People wanted clear answers, and public health provided them, even when that was exactly the wrong thing to do. So we ended up with a cadre of people demanding everyone else follow the Science!, without realizing the (lowercase) science is lacking or at best highly ambiguous, and that led to a counter-reaction and another group that's essentially ignoring the pandemic. Which of course hardened along partisan lines because everything these days has to be made political.

Mistwell

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Guys, I am enjoying the discussion (particularly this stuff about Italy, and the science about the virus). But Pundit is going to come down like the wraith of God pretty soon I suspect if we don't get this puppy back on the gaming aspect of things pronto. I don't want to see anyone smashed because they got caught up in the conversation.

So, are you guys still gaming behind computer screens?

Pat
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Guys, I am enjoying the discussion (particularly this stuff about Italy, and the science about the virus). But Pundit is going to come down like the wraith of God pretty soon I suspect if we don't get this puppy back on the gaming aspect of things pronto. I don't want to see anyone smashed because they got caught up in the conversation.

So, are you guys still gaming behind computer screens?
True. At least for me, one disadvantage of the new forum software is the "unread posts" makes it really easy to find new posts, while overlooking what forum they're in, so I find conversations tend to bleed back and forth.

One thing I'd be curious about is how many different types of online gaming people use. The play by post forums here seem fairly dead (based on the unread posts metric), are they more popular elsewhere? A lot of discussion is on the various online tabletops, are there other options? And for face to face, how to connect now that game shops are shutdown or out of business?
« Last Edit: March 14, 2021, 03:05:15 PM by Pat »

S'mon

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One thing I'd be curious about is how many different types of online gaming people use. The play by post forums here seem fairly dead (based on the unread posts metric), are they more popular elsewhere? A lot of discussion is on the various online tabletops, are there other options? And for face to face, how to connect now that game shops are shutdown or out of business?

I've got two weekly Roll20 groups and one PBP on Dragonsfoot running - they're all in the same campaign setting though, and interact/impact on each other. Plus I use the 5e D&D Roll20 VTT for screenshots to post to the 1e AD&D PBP. I think VTT is vastly more popular than PBP. And unlike me most people are using voice & often video (typically via Discord) to play remotely, which I'm not keen on. I find online play by text has its own benefits whereas w video it's a v poor version of tabletop.

Eirikrautha

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One thing I'd be curious about is how many different types of online gaming people use. The play by post forums here seem fairly dead (based on the unread posts metric), are they more popular elsewhere? A lot of discussion is on the various online tabletops, are there other options? And for face to face, how to connect now that game shops are shutdown or out of business?
Roll20 (thought we're looking to switch to FoundryVTT soon) and Skype for the remote players.  The only real issues are the difficulty hearing everyone when they talk at once and the over-reliance on pretty, third-party maps.  Otherwise, the game is pretty close to a live RPG...

Mistwell

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We've been doing Roll20 for about 7 years now but one change i've noticed recently with one of my groups is a long text chain between sessions each week. Some of it is role playing, and some of it tactical discussions for how to deal with a challenge which is part role play and part just hashing out ideas as players. It's really added a lot to our sessions, and is similar to play-by-post but with a different tone.

For example, that group is currently 2nd level, and we're 250' up a narrow tower. We killed some flying creature baddies in a room (in a tough battle), and now we know there are more even more powerful ones above us on the top of the tower. So we were trying to figure out how we could win that battle, and how we can scout it first, and whether we should just bail and return another day.

That conversation lasted all week, we multiple posts from most of the players every day. And we managed to come up with a scouting plan, and a tentative battle plan if we went into battle, and also some tentative plans to bail depending on how the scouting mission went.

That was hugely fun, and pretty well simulated what our PCs would have done in that room hanging out for the 45 minutes we were there trying to decide what to do next. But it's likely a conversation that would not have happened much during the Roll20 portion of the game because we just don't have an extra 45 minutes in real time to discuss a single possible battle like that most sessions. But during the week, we can all spare 5 minutes here and there.

S'mon

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One of my Roll20 groups does a lot of active inter-session play whenever a session ends with downtime - I think 5/7 of them are active on the message board. It can add a lot to the game.

In the other group only 1 person was interested, they are more casuals.

Spinachcat

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Also, great thread for really getting to know the other gamers on this site, well done.

That was the objective!

Most of our gaming crew still believe gamers as a whole are a smarter, savvier and more independent bunch. Yes, I have endeavored to disabuse them of this notion. I also suffered from that same delusion pre-internet, but that's long cured after a decade of increasingly laughably idiocy overtaking our hobby like "RPGs are unsafe", "orcs are black people", "dungeon wheelchairs", etc.

None of my crew spend time on RPG forums so I'm regularly accused of making up stuff like "WotC put content warnings on TSR PDFs". I assumed most of this forum were "gaming" behind screens,  but this thread was to ensure I had proof.

I particularly enjoyed the crying in fauci responses, but it was also very nice to hear not everyone has forgotten that math and science works and has chosen to live as free men in a world of broken slaves.