Hi

[kylekuzma]

[The original post was overwritten by a spammer that hacked the author's account]

[CraigStern]

Hi Kyle! I'm Craig, I'm doing a real-time, live-actyion role-play of the apocalypse. :'(

[bugfartboy]

live-action role-play of the apocalypse

I didn't realize True Messiah had gotten that popular. Are you sure it's just role-play, though? It would certainly explain why this timeline seems so dark, if it's not.

Lately, I've been playing a game of "Do I actually want to abandon running my Curse of Strahd campaign, or did I just not get enough sleep last night?"

[ArtDrake]

I'm not gonna say where I'm from, but I've been playing Massif Press' Lancer, a science-fantasy mech-building tabletop game set in a utopian spacefuture! It's a lot of fun!

[bugfartboy]

Massif Press' Lancer, a science-fantasy mech-building tabletop game set in a utopian spacefuture!

I'm going to have to save the link to their itch.io page, in the event I ever manage to convince my group to play something than D&D. Any fun stories you'd like to share?

[ArtDrake]

Yeah! So, mechs are often categorized in Lancer by their battle roles -- front-line brawler, damage soak, dps, debuffing enemies, and buffing allies: Striker, Defender, Artillery, Controller, and Support. There's often overlap between these, but it's a starting point for describing what someone's broadly doing in a fight.

My partner and I both play Artillery mechs -- we both sit in back and dish out damage from afar. But our mechs are almost diametrically opposed, within that category: she plays a Barbarossa (huge, slow, heavily armored, fires cumbersome superheavy guns, classically an Artillery mech; we call it "Count Chonkulus"), while I actually play a Tokugawa (small, quick, brittle, fires mostly tiny auxiliary guns, classically a Striker mech).

Anyway, when we first crash-landed on the planet we're on, we were attacked by a raiding party from the local warlord, which was led by a lady called Captain Phoebe, which we repelled pretty easily, disabling all the mechs but Phoebe's, who made a beleaguered escape.

Fast forward a few missions, and she shows up again, in an ambush, swearing over open comms to exact her revenge for the humilating defeat she suffered. In the first round of combat, my partner and I two-shot her mech. Specifically, as a Veteran, her mech basically has two health bars, and once you lose the first, you have to roll on a table to see the consequences: her consequence was her mech immediately getting KO'd.

It was really satisfying, too -- the second and lethal hit was from the Barbarossa's enormous Cyclone Pulse Rifle, which just deals bonkers damage on a hit, and has a nasty habit of one-shotting lesser mechs.

My partner's mech-pilot callsign is 'CABOOSE', and in reference to the fact that her enormous gun is devastating in action, her nickname is "Caboose on the loose." So that time, when Phoebe's mech got unceremoniously junked in one Pulse Rifle shot, my character chimes in over open comms, deadpan: "Captain Phoebe, I regret to inform you that Caboose is very much... on the loose."