schneefink: Babylon 5 (Bab5)
schneefink ([personal profile] schneefink) wrote2025-07-14 08:33 pm
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Stars Without Number, With Adventures

We've now played four half-day sessions of our "Stars Without Number" campaign and I'm having a lot of fun.

Our party owns and operates a mining ship, and our first two sessions featured quite a bit of asteroid mining, and also a rescue mission and exploration. Then the space pirates attacked! Not us directly but the space station we are currently based at, so we helped fight them off. And then our latest session was mostly shopping & intel gathering & planning: it sounds like there's an entire fleet of pirates, likely from outside the system, and they've sabotaged and possibly taken over several stations/planets/routes. We'll find out more next time!, which sadly won't be until September because of vacations.

I really like my character. I'm a teleporter! (Talk about wish fulfillment.) Partial psychic/partial expert, because I thought being a full psychic would be overwhelming and I was mostly interested in one discipline anyway. Being able to teleport is so cool. I can teleport 1000 kilometres already and take three people with me.
I'm also really happy with my role in the party. In our main campaign I'm the youngest cat in a group of older and more headstrong cats, which I found difficult sometimes. This time I decided to play a character with more authority, and I've enjoyed it a lot. While all of our party members own the ship together and have equal say, on the bridge I'm the captain; and more importantly, I'm the one keeping track of our money and inventory. (Idk why our GM was surprised that I made a budget and business plan after the first session ^^ )
Our DM told us to prepare back-up characters in case we die, and I did, but I really hope I survive. I even ordered a nice mini figure for her :) As a party I think we've good odds of survival: we have a medic, a biopsionic (=healer), and I can teleport us out in emergencies. Fingers crossed.

I also really enjoy the system, both the setting and mechanically. Playing in a sci-fi world is a welcome contrast after around three years playing in a fantasy world as cats. And playing someone with supernatural abilities feels especially cool after three years as a non-magical archer.
One thing I didn't expect to enjoy this much is leveling up. In our previous system we earn adventure points and we can spend those on improving abilities/skills/etc., but it's more gradual, which tbh makes more sense in-universe. Buuut, leveling up just feels cool. Especially when I can pick new abilities.
What I like less is how ship combat works. So far it's been a little tedious as it seems like half the party always has very little to do; but I suspect that's also because our combat options as a mining ship are limited. We'll see how it goes. We just upgraded our weapons because of the pirates.

Once again our GM has underestimated how long it'll take us to get through his plot so we'll have to see how far we get/what happens when our fifth cat comes back from her year abroad. But until then I really look forward to our next adventures.
lakeeffectgirl: (Default)
Lake ([personal profile] lakeeffectgirl) wrote2025-07-12 09:28 pm

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I am on vacation AGAIN, which still feels like good motive to post - Lake, you might think, weren't you just on vacation? Yes, but I am still using up the vacation time from 2024 that I did not take because we were so short-staffed the whole flipping year. And now it's July and I haven't used any of 2025's vacation! Of which I have a lot because I have been at my job for twenty years now. Anyway! Our second attempt at finding a full-time third shift person starts on Monday, so I will immediately be training that person - but he has related knowledge in his previous job so should hopefully be a fairly quick train and was looking for something less stressful than his last job, which we are. (Unlike the last person, who quit because she was bored.) Crossing my fingers!

I have not done much while off - took my sister to the new Jurassic movie, which was decent. I am old enough to remember seeing the original in the cinema so none of the ones since have been as good. This one was closer to the original in tone, which I enjoyed, but the dinosaurs are all CGI now, and you can tell. Jonathan Bailey is the Alan Grant-style character in this and he got some good moments, and he's a fine actor, but as I am not a Bridgerton girlie I really don't care about him, lol. (Also his one really Alan moment would have been better if the dinosaurs in it weren't so stupid-looking! Their tails were idiotic! Gah!)

Also watched Sinners, which was great.

I have little else to report. I am still very into The Pitt and have many a WIP - two are basically done and just need me to be in the mood to edit/tinker and then post. I assume I will be in the mood eventually so am just letting the rough drafts be for now. Which is probably a good skill to practice, vs. hurrying up. Also waiting for fandom5k to open; it got pushed back another week so is now much closer to the end of the month. Which does give me more time to do another edit, I suppose.