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...umm, did you just model that?
Umm... Yes? It wasn't hard... and I did it about an hour before that post. And it has bump, diffuse, specular, and reflectivity amount maps...
...crikey that's good.
That would have taken me a couple days and I'd still be messing around figuring out the UV map.
So... no more comments on tabletop roleplaying?
...well other than I prefer it to MMOs and video games (both online and standalone) as
...I feel tabletop RPGs are more "social" as one has direct face to face interaction with the other players and GM.
...I can actually get into playing character (hard to do so in chat especially since I am dyslexic and my keyboarding speed is slow because of my arthritis)
...I am more free to customise my character as I see fit. as well as determine her appearance and mannerisms.
...as a group you can establish and agree on "house rules" to suit the style of the campaign better.
...if someone is being a total obnoxious backstabber, power monger, rules lawyer, or attention whore you can show them the door.
...everyone usually chips in for pizza.;
...I'm not locked into a "carved in stone' predetermined path (provided the GM is a good and imaginative one).
...I don't have to spend money on renewing subscriptions or having the latest mods.
...I don't have to spend money to upgrade my system, (or in the case of a console, buying new one), every time there is a major update to the game's graphics.
...I don't have to worry if my Net connection is fast enough to keep up with everyone else.
...I don't have to worry if my system is fast enough to keep up with everyone else.
...I don't have to worry about falling way behind everyone else if I don't get online and play every free hour I have per day.
I've always preferred the idea of traditional pen and paper RPGs to the MMORPGs. I started back in the 80's with some Basic D&D and then moved into AD&D and a Dragonlance campaign.
In the late 90's, I was involved with a 2E AD&D campaign with some "Highlander" based house rules that morphed into some based on the Amber Diceless RPG rule system. Later, the same GM started another campaign in the same settings but incorporated some side adventures within Traveller and Hero Systems universes that touch on his main campaign world.
It was during this time that I found and started using DAZ Studio to create character portraits as the GM liked to give "extra-credit" for character development outside of the games.
Where to start, where to start? Probably with the current stuff! I'm a cWoD ST for a lively group of misfits, for whom I run an ongoing one-city chronicle wherein they must balance an uneasy alliance of supernaturals. We also switch off and play a good deal of Exalted 2nd, and one of my players is running a Dresden Files game for us on the Fate System, which we are enjoying greatly. Another one of my players has just taken up the DM mantle and has started running a Pathfinder game set in Skyrim for us. It's pretty fantastic.
I'm big into the role aspect of the roleplaying, mostly because dice hate me (although I keep buying them in the vain hope of finding a set that doesn't roll horribly all the time), but I finally settled on the reason I've hated combat for the entirety of my life: in every group I've ever been in, the majority of players take at least 5 minutes to decide and implement their single turn of combat, making it drag on for-eeeeever. I've recently found out that I don't dislike combat at all, when it's done quickly and efficiently, and I've been living it up with a little slip of a Dawn character I made for an Exalted game. Tiny little blonde thing from the North, with a giant fey-killing sword gone a-hunting Deathknights.
I have in-progress pieces of about sixty characters, and I'll slowly tack them up here as I finish them up.
Here's a thing I did of one of my Exalted Twilights casting Death of Obsidian Butterflies last year:
What a nice idea :)
I am Tabletop Roleplaying player and gamemaster for years (more than 20), and I started to use DAZ Studio to be able to show my PC and NPC to other players.
First one I did with enough success to be shown is a Sith character for a D6 StarWars, I still love the light I had on that one.
I was rendered with Luxrender.
One thing I've been involved in for the past 15 years or so is a mailing list for the old mayfair DC Heroes game from the 80's, briefly resurrected in the early 2000's as Blood of Heroes. It's as versatile as the Hero system, doesn't require a scientific calculator to make characters, and it's not quite as easy to make a "broken" character. Said mailing list will usually post writeups of movie, TV, and other characters in the system, using careful observation of what they actually do in their media, and not what they say they can do.
F'rex, how many times has Superman said, "Great Krypton/Scott! He's stronger than I am!", then gone on to completely wipe the floor with said schlub.
We store our writeups here: http://www.writeups.org/index.php And just to be warned, despite it being the repository of the DC Heroes Mailing List, there are actually fewer DC characters there than you might expect. The reason is that many of the official DC Heroes writeups are still pretty accurate, and it would be a copyright violation to reprint those.
The next one is my Face / Mage for Shadowrun 4th edition, I play her in a high levels characters campaign (for that who know that game system, my character is 4th level initiate, 2000 xp creation points).
She is not just a shadowruner, she is one for the black ops of an AA corporation.
I did a lot of try of clothes for her, so there 3 of them.
That one is my orion character :) yeah again a girl.
I worked a lot to make the Gamemaster allowing an Orion character in starfleet...
It's for a LUG Star Trek rpg campaign.
She was scientific officer when I did that render. It's a blender cycle render (exported from DS).
I don't have much more good renderings, so i'll stop there with this one.
He is character for mage the awakening (nwod) campaign, he was a conman before awakening as magician.
That sounds hilarious. I've heard Shadowrun is very broken mechanically but the setting itself always sounds so fun!
Oh, Shadowrun can be a pain in the posterior given a properly paranoid GM, trust me.
I am hesitant to post my Drakensang PCs, because their stories (namely the lineage of Bolek the quarter-orc bard) may not be suitable for the forum rules... But I can show you the uncensored version of one of my RRRR renders featuring a custom system:
http://hope.ly/1zvTjH5
PS Valandar got me pondering whether Bolek's gear isn't too Welchy. I mean, his two-handed axe Thud is fine (the link is just statistics, the look is totally plain), but I'm a bit worried about his Blessed Accordion of Doom...
1 ) Those weapons were gained at lvl 14 and 16. In original and 2nd, those are mid-high level non-epic weapons. Consider that a Paladin of about 15-16th level has a +5 Holy Avenger at that time, and by 20th level people have intelligent weapons with special purposes and such. AND, they were created by the GM, not me.
Also, for, say, 3rd ed, Thunder's Edge would probably simply be a +4 Defender with Shocking, equal to a +7 total bonus (where Epic doesn't begin until a total of 10 "plusses"), and Dragon's Tail would likely be a +3 Flaming for a total of +4 "plusses" - FAR from Munchkiny.
2 ) Only got a "Database Login Page" whenI clicked your link. :(
Oh, Shadowrun can be a pain in the posterior given a properly paranoid GM, trust me.
I am hesitant to post my Drakensang PCs, because their stories (namely the lineage of Bolek the quarter-orc bard) may not be suitable for the forum rules... But I can show you the uncensored version of one of my RRRR renders featuring a custom system:
http://hope.ly/1zvTjH5
PS Valandar got me pondering whether Bolek's gear isn't too Welchy. I mean, his two-handed axe Thud is fine (the link is just statistics, the look is totally plain), but I'm a bit worried about his Blessed Accordion of Doom...
Yeah, in DnD, that is fine. I'm just used to Drakensang, which is very down-to-earth and has just a few weapons with some powers. The link I shortened may not work without shortening, but try it:
http://www.gamebanshee.com/cgi-bin/search/banshee_search.pl?_layout=Drakensang_Items_Page&_cgifunction=search&Drakensang;_Items.id=665
..ugh double post. they need to separate the "Edit" and "Quote" buttons better.
...nice.
Still a SR3 junkie here (lots of unfinished business that never was resolved when they changed the time setting)
I have been collecting a lot of clothing, props, vehicles, and sets that I feel would work well for Shadowun scenes (coflek-gnorg over on Rendo does some excellent cyberpunk themed sets).
Yeah the total SR geeks would probably point out if the gun the character was holding wasn't a perfect replica of a Ares Predator or his/her wheels didn't look exactly like the Eurocar Westwind as pictured in Rigger 3. Hey, I'm not modeller, if it looks good enough to fit the scene and gets the feeling across, that's fine with me.
Here are two oldies one of my little Decker Violet for a desktop wallpaper and my namesake KK.
Have more recent stuff on the workstation but it's not powered up the moment.
I've just started a new campaign last week. (5th edition D&D this time)...
A mad god is stealing (or is he duplicating?) chunks of other worlds, so the players who were mountain guides go outside the inn at he base of the mountains after an intense storm and the whole mountain is gone instead there's a forest with ruins ouside the inn and the path that lead to the mountain is joined (badly) with path leading to the forest.
The new campaign will let the player move between different D&D campaign worlds, meet new friends and enemies in roles you don't normally find them in.
I usually use DAZ for the setup pictures for my campaigns, the new minotaurs gave me an idea, so whoever moved the Tauri's chunk of the world cut the corner off his maze and now he's upset. So my next render will probably be two completely different terrains butted up agains each other, some ruins and a minotaur. (If only I could find a figure that would work for a modron...)
Old style Modron, Planescape style, or 5th ed style? And the lower tier ones, or the humanoid ones?
Old style low tier are easy - Morph Emotiguy into a geometric shape, add body parts from robots. Also might work for newer low tier, as well. The others would have to be morphs on one of the human figures, with or without additional geometry conformers / props.
By the way, after much internal debate, for Thunder's Edge I decided to go with a variant on the design I originally had back in the 80's: A mostly normal late period Western style, with a bit more fantasy "eagle" design to the crossguard and pommel, crackling with lightning.
...and this is why you are a PA and I'm customer. Very nice work.
Whipping up a quick maille hauberk tex for the tunic from the Night Guard set, then it's time to find the right hair... :D
Ah, I found a modron substitute
(everywhere he sweeps the difference between the worlds merge together)
So he's like a dimensional "Gaussian Blur"? :D
And here's Valandar the Red, by the way (haven't done any postwork, and the displacement I added to the maille seems to be poking through the vest):
Going back to the tabletop roleplay:
What are peoples' thoughts about the various editions of AD&D?
My thoughts:
1st ed: The grand daddy of them all - but the least versatile for character creation.
2nd Ed: Effectively, upgraded 1st ed. THAC0 may have been a pain, but for the most part I felt like this was 2nd ed stremlined and more efficient. Non-weapon Proficiencies filled the long-needed "skills" slot, and so on.
2.5 ed ("Player's Options") : Simply put, 2nd Ed for powergamers and munchkins. While it technically allowed a lot more variation, it was too easy for someone just half trying to create a character that could, for example, create a 1st lvl character that could do over 100hp damage in one round, WITHOUT getting into the really ridiculous bits.
3rd / 3.5 ed: Finally cleaning up stats, and making skills more important than ever, while simplifying other things, I thought this ed had a lot of potential. On the other hand, while some things were simplified, others were more complex, and levelling a character sometimes took as much work as creating a brand new 1st level character. And with all the various feats available, and then the Open Gaming License meaning everyone and their brother made books compatible, and eventually all semblance of game balance was lost.
3.75 / Pathfinder: See the tail end of 3.5 ed. Also, some classes not only were overpowered, they broke immersion in a fantasy world, such as the Gunslinger.
4th ed: An attempt to completely reinvent the game, some people called it "D&D the MMO" because of its attempt to meet online playstyles halfway. However, the biggest problem was every class pretty much felt the same, and most abilities pretty much locked you into using a combat map, with square spaces no less. Almost every class developed abilities for ranged, melee, area of effect, crowd control, and even teleporting.
5th ed: In some ways a return to 2nt ed, while keeping aspects of 3rd and bring in some new ones. A lot of combat modifiers (such as invisibility or being prone) have been rolled into "Advantage" or "Disadvantage", skills, saves, and attack rolls now all base off a single value for your level, and the classes feel different again (unlike 4th). Archetypes almost remove the need for most multiclassing or prestige classes, though the former is still an option. Currently my favorite edition to play, and probably the best for trying to get in new players in the existing paradigm: Simple enough to get them in, while keeping versatile enough for a lot of custmization.
I've really only played 3.5 and 5. On the one hand, my massively overpowered halfling bard in 3.5 is fun. On the other hand, 5 does feel more balanced, and in some ways easier (once I got used to the fact that sorcerers are pew pew and can't really do crowd control effectively any more). Fuseling's paladin is much more effective in 5 because a lot of the things that gimped that class in 3.5 are fixed.
Depending on the level, Sorcerers and Wizards can do some SERIOUS crowd control of the physical variety. Wall spells, Cloudkill, and Stinking Cloud, just to name a couple, can really bottleneck an onrushing horde. :D
Otherwise, CC has usually been a Clerical / Bardic thing, with wizards and sorcerers being pretty much artillery. :P
Depending on the level, Sorcerers and Wizards can do some SERIOUS crowd control of the physical variety. Wall spells, Cloudkill, and Stinking Cloud, just to name a couple, can really bottleneck an onrushing horde. :D
Otherwise, CC has usually been a Clerical / Bardic thing, with wizards and sorcerers being pretty much artillery. :P
In 3.5 she could use Hypnosis and Sleep very effectively, just for example; in 5 Hypnosis is gone and Sleep is gimped by having it work by rolled HP in a cone effect instead of on a will save (and Hypnotic Pattern and Crown of Madness work only in very specific situations). There's been a peculiar pruning and weakening of the enchantment spells at low to mid levels.
Other mind-altering spells that once had a use in non-combat RP or interrogation are also useless or much less useful now (look at what they did to Charm/Persuasion/Suggestion).
...my experience with D&D actually wasn't my first exposure to RPG s (will touch on that later).
Basically played the old D&D though .3.5. Did a little bit with 4, but like "Shadowrun 4" found it way too "MMO-ish" for my taste and made an "expeditious retreat" back to 3.0/3.5.
In particular, enjoyed Forgotten Realms (3.0/3.5) as it was probably one of the best thought out world settings for the game. Lots of colour with additional race variants, classes, spells, items, pantheons, as well as exhausting your pocketbook with additional sourcebooks and modules which went into deeper detail on just bout every aspect of the setting.
The one downside of third edition, you had to have money to keep up with all the sourcebooks and manuals that were released (and I'm not even taking into account all the open source stuff like the Slayers Guides or Mongoose Publishing expansions). One fellow in a gaming group I was a member of had literally everything that was published. His library of 3.0/3.5 books was only eclipsed by his collection of books for RIFTS (the latter when stacked was about 5' tall). The other issue is all these resources made the game a min-maxer's delight . There was another fellow in the group who never had a character that didn't have at least 3 - 4 classes (not counting prestige classes). I always strove to have more "focused" characters maybe with two classes or a single and prestige class as they were not as much a chore to maintain and level up. Unfortunately in the group they tended to assume more of a back-up roll to the mega multiclassed characters that could dish out 100hp of damage in one blow or spell and not break a sweat.
4th edition was a disaster. As mentioned above, character classes seemed too homoginised and everyone seemed to have access to some kind of quasi mystical power. We actually found ourselves having to stop to consult the rules more frequently than in previous editions as descriptions of abilities and actions seemed rather vague as to the mechanics.
Haven't played the newest version as the groups I currently participate in were so put off by 4th ed. they went back to 3rd or to something different altogether (like the group that now does "open" role play).
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As to my first RPG experience, it was with a small press game back in 1982 titled Beasts Men & Gods. Like AD&D it as was basically fantasy setting with the usual races but it differed in that it allowed for a more individualised character than just your typical "fighter, mage cleric. thief". The Combat system was a little more detailed as it was based on hit location and instead of an "all or nothing" system with armour (depending on the type) absorbing a certain mount of a blow. Like Shadowrun, it used a two tier system of stamina and hits (the latter which were more of fixed value set by your character's physique score and class). Weapon damage was balanced so say, a longsword would do maybe 1 point added to the strength bonus of the wielder. Only a critical hit would bypass stamina altogether and do major physical damage. There was also a critical miss as well so if you flubbed up you could hurt yourself or a comrade.
The game also used novel concept of "paired attributes" where you rolled four control dice and assigned them to each grouping, then made individual rolls for each attribute using 2 dice and adding that to the control value for the final attribute score This way, the values for related attributes (for example Strength and Constitution) would be closer to each other. All secondary attributes like Body, Stamina and such were calculated off the main attributes, adjusted by class and experience level rather than randomly rolled.
Armour was was purchased in parts rather than as a whole suit which allowed for different mix and match combinations to best suit the character. Each piece added not only to the character's defensive value but absorb value for that particular part of the body as well as encumbrance.
Spellcasting was based on a mana points system rather than "x" number of uses per day. Between encounters one could rest up and be able to cast more spells, unlike in D&D where once you cast your one magic missile and light spell and the character was done for the day. Mages also were not restricted from wearing amour or using weapons like swords & such. Granted, they were not the best of physical combatants (if they aspired to become powerful spell slingers) as the combat bonuses were lower, but they could at least defend themselves better until help arrived (no "gee I have only three hit points and a kobold could take me out in one hit"). Armour, while not prohibiting spell casting, did increase the chance of spell failure (and it didn't mean the spell would simply fizzle as like with a critical miss, there was a table to roll on that had various different effects including misfires and backfires. Anothe nice thing is mage or priest could also create temporary and charged magic items at lower levels.
GMs were basically allowed to set the "fleshing out" rules tailored to their own campaigns as to how much money or what equipment a character had. What several of us did was use the social status tables from FGU's Chivalry and Sorcery to add a little more colour and intrigue. To create monsters and creatures we simply designed them according to the character generation system with both generic ones (which all used the same sheet) as well as major personalities. Most of the time (particularly in my scenarios) the adversaries were other "people" and not just monsters or creatures.
The game didn't have a specific world it was set in so it allowed the GM to make up his or her own. There were plans for additions like a monster/creature expansion and adventure scenarios, but the publisher couldn't compete against the then "big money" of TSR, and other established game companies at the time. For its day I still see it as rather innovative.as again it allowed for more flexibility than the the biggest name system on the market.
1st edition - We considered unplayable and used Wizard and Melee (what became GURPS) for combat
2nd edition - Playable but you always had to have to book open on the table for all the charts and tables (2.5 wasn't playing at that time)
3rd and 3.5 - loved, wasn't playing toward the end when all the weird books came out
4th - We played that and liked a lot of the concepts, but not the game as a whole. (but this was the first time you could put 100 orcs on the table and could finish the game in one session) Used a lot of ink printing characters and cards. Very hard to gamemaster with all the teleporting and pushing mechanics. We finally switched to Savage Worlds.
Pathfinder - Great but it seems yo be slowly turning into a superhero game. Finally had to impose a rule of allowing the core rule and one other book when creating characters; otherwise the table didn't have room for the map.
Next and 5th - The game very playable, but the first module "Horde" badly written (the second module doesn't look any better); we abandoned it after 5 sessions, and have started a new campaign.