I drunkenly jumped on the Ogre Kickstarter (the Big Damn Box version) and I have yet to get all the counters punched out.
I’ve already played more online than I have of the $150 box sitting in the closet
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Why do you not live closer to me?
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Unless you are the gm, the correct answer depends on your gm.
If you are the gm, it’s whichever one you understand and can hack instead of have to hack just to give a kid a chance to survive a snake-bite.
I hate crunching. And I never got into Pathfinder and I don’t like the class-level approach, or fact that the giant core book doesn’t include the bestiary volumes I through DXVIIII.
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I got the draft pdf for the upcoming Savage Worlds Adventure Edition. I haven’t read the whole thing, and can’t recognize all the changes.
Now there’s a lot I like about the system, old and new. I like that I can build characters instead of having to roll for them. I like that I can build characters with disabilities and/or unusual abilities. (The Core rules for Basic, Mythras, and Pathfinder don’t allow this.) I like that, when there are a lot of characters rolling at once, I can often pick up 1 die each, instead of tracking 2+ dice for each character, and making sure they don’t get mixed. (The D6, Shadowrun, Storyteller, and Cortex systems all require multiple dice. And I don’t like Storyteller.)
But there are a few things I don’t like. The biggest is the rift between major “Wild Card” characters and minor “Extras.” I’ve thought of a couple ways to narrow the rift. Since Wild Cards roll 2 dice, if I treat everyone as Wild Cards, I may as well learn Cortex and use it instead.
I see 3 basic approaches.
1st, I could treat everyone as extras, which would make player-characters much weaker and most existing scenarios much harder.
2nd, I could drop the wild die but increase everyone’s abilities and skills by 1 die type. If human abilities start at d6, that also allows more room for non-human animals to have lower abilities, as well as higher. It would require new target numbers, instead of 4 and 8. It would quickly end up forking the system.
3rd, I could treat everyone as near-“Wild Cards”. I would add 1-2 wild dice per group and have them replace the lowest regular dice.
Regardless, the Adventure Edition draft doesn’t offer any suggestions yet.
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Some relatively minor issues:
There are a lot of changes to the skill lists, though they are relatively balanced. There shouldn’t be any need to convert non-player characters from the old system to the new. Though there are times I’d like to try characters without 1d4 in some standard skills.
The old and new standard language rules count each language as a separate knowledge skill. Which can eat up a lot of skill points. There’s a “linguist” (sic) edge for polyglots.
They have added quick encounter rules to speed things up. Good!
I’d like to see social conflict rules.
I haven’t quite figured out the new chase rules or changes to the other combat rules.
I’d like to see more ways for experienced characters to avoid being hit (and killed) in combat because it looks like offense outpaces avoidance. And historically, inexperienced soldiers suffer heavier casualties.
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I’ve been pretty good at resisting the last few Steam sales, so I didn’t feel too bad about the expense. I too have a lot of unplayed games, but the problem with those games is that I don’t want to play any of them right now.
I’ve been playing Sunless Sea off and on for the last week, so that’s at least one purchase justified. 
I’m enjoying it so far, but I’ve found it to be surprisingly difficult. It seems like lots of games these days start you out with a risk-free tutorial and then ramp up the difficulty gradually, but this game is just like “ha ha, sucker, you’re dead.” It’s kind of a rogue-like, now that I think about it, but with a game mechanic that I don’t find nearly as annoying as a true rogue-like. Basically, you have a lineage of semi-related characters that can benefit from the actions of their predecessors (at least theoretically – I’ve never made enough progress for that to actually happen).
You play a series of ship’s captains, in game terms. My second captain went cannibal rather shockingly quickly after a minor provisioning mistake. I suspect he would have eventually consumed the whole crew, but everyone went insane and threw themselves into the sea before that could happen.
“10/10, would eat human flesh again,” as they say in the review threads. 
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offer ends dec 30, 3am pacific
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Done.
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I’ve played about 370 hours of Sunless Sea over 3 years. That and Darkest Dungeon are, hands-down, the best bang for my buck purchases, ever.
I backed Sunless Skies on kickstarter but haven’t played much beta. The 3D spaceship mechanics were too annoying, so I figured I’d wait on the final product.
Edit: I realize 370 hours sounds bonkers, but there is that much lore, and so many games nowadays are unpausable. With the kids, I need something where I can play 5 minutes, walk away three hours, then play twenty more.
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so desert bus is out?
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Finished Red Dead Redemption II yesterday…absolute opposite to GTA V for me, I really enjoyed it end to end. Probably the best I’ve played since The Witcher 3. Ah well, on to the backlog now.
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Grabbed a copy, fired it up and suddenly remember about FallenLondon.com that I haven’t logged onto for … Years?
So now that’s two games to play
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I haven’t really played since I followed the Seeking Mr. Eaten’s Name quest to the end, and my character self-destructed. I will, someday.
The main developer of Fallen London and Sunless Sea, Alexis Kennedy, left Failbetter and is working on the new Dragon Age. If anyone can make the Fade fun, it’s the mind that gave us some of the sodden ship’s logs you find in Sunless Sea.
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I went ahead and downloaded Sunless Seas on the PS4, if there’s any social component. Also, I’m mired on Fallen London. Turns out the mere mention of any Failbetter Game causes me to give them more $$.
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Sunless Seas update: it’s essentially a menu-driven resource-management exploration puzzle with occasional bouts of top-down-naval-battle-mini-game, but I’m still quite enjoying it.
For me, the writing and the mood music really are that good. It’s slow-paced and a bit grindy at times, yet it still manages to create a genuine sense of tension and drama.
Mr. Frobisher, for example, has been my most successful captain to date (in that he’s survived more than a couple expeditions beyond London).
When he’s limping back to port, boiler running on fumes, literally starving to death and, to top it all off, on the brink of true madness, you really start to care when you realize you could lose it all so close to home.
Notice the “1/10” in the portrait above. That means he has one crew member out of a possible ten. He started with eight crew when he set sail from London, but they ran short of supplies on the journey home, and even though Mr. Frobisher himself has refrained from consuming that most rarified of meats, he has nevertheless studiously ignored the mysterious circumstances surrounding the rather alarmingly precipitous drop in the number of able bodied crew aboard his vessel.
To reiterate: he’s been my most successful captain so far.
This is the almost perfect, charmingly weird, semi-casual game. I’m surprised at how much I’m liking it.
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Are you on PC, or another platform? I can’t get my guns to fire on PS4. Never had this issue on Mac or Linux.
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I’m on PC. No issues firing my gun, so far. The mechanics are a little weird in that I have to click the gun icon to fire, instead of the target, but I’m guessing there are keyboard shortcuts I’ve not yet found, and that will make more sense once I can afford a boat big enough to mount more than one gun.
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Default key for your main gun is 1
I assume if you get a second gun, it will be 2
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Good to know. I may have to switch from wasd to the arrow keys to steer the boat, so I can use my left hand on the numbers to shoot.
I also bought some flares the last time out, but didn’t get a chance to try them before Mr. Frobisher was most cruelly murdered (mere hours after I talked up his success, no less) by a surprisingly aggressive iceberg creature he was unable to outrun.
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My last time I played I left London headed for the Basalt Lions and got about four quadrants away and realized I didn’t actually get repaired and barely made it back in one piece to get repaired. Turned right around and tried it again and got caught twixt a a big crab and some pirates making London with only 20 hull left.
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