The problem is still there if look at out-of-combat utility. The martials now can hang pretty well in combat but still get outclassed in a major fashion outside of it. Casters while paired down still have their toolbox full of solutions - spells. Need stealth? There is spell for that! Diplomacy? Sure! Travel? Right at ya! Healing? Got spell for that! Want to talk to animals or plants? Pfff, please. All of this IN ADDITION to combat competency.

It depends on the DM more than ever with 5e, really. Warlocks, for example, get very good cantrips but have almost no spell slots, meaning they're very dependent on long rests - does your DM let you take a long rest fairly often? Or does he force you to go through big dungeons without the opportunity to sleep? Same with OoC abilities. Magic is versatile and can make things easier but casters are wet noodles physically, and sometimes athletics can save your neck. There's no spell for rowing faster to escape a swarm of bloodthirsty leeches. In other words it's not a math issue in 5e, it's really down to your DM's relative leniency and your own imagination.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

Well, warlock slots replenish on short rests. So they can feel underpowered compared to sorcerers, bards, wizards, clerics and druids if you're only getting one or two combats per day, but if you're doing the recommended 6-8 encounters per day with a few short rests in between then they're going to feel powerful.

Oh yeah, I meant short rest. But again, how many DMs follow the "recommended" encounters? With mine for example we have probably 1-3 maximum per session, with basically a guaranteed long rest between them, which means everyone can blow all their spell slots pretty much at will. True, I can blow my combat maneuvers too, but they're way more modest when compared to a fireball or whatever.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

Yeah, it seems to be pretty common that groups are coming nowhere near the recommended number of encounters per adventuring day, which goes a long way toward making long rest classes (full casters minus warlocks, paladins) seem to shine really strongly when compared to short rest classes like fighters, warlocks, monks, etc.

It depends on the DM more than ever with 5e, really. Warlocks, for example, get very good cantrips but have almost no spell slots, meaning they're very dependent on long rests - does your DM let you take a long rest fairly often? Or does he force you to go through big dungeons without the opportunity to sleep? Same with OoC abilities. Magic is versatile and can make things easier but casters are wet noodles physically, and sometimes athletics can save your neck. There's no spell for rowing faster to escape a swarm of bloodthirsty leeches. In other words it's not a math issue in 5e, it's really down to your DM's relative leniency and your own imagination.

Kind of. It was never really a issue of math. The problem is that spells can accomplish things without a roll or just do things that martials will never be able to do. My cleric in 5e was a combat powerhouse plus he had tons out-of-combat utility (scrying, healing, divination etc.). This was always the issue with magic in D&D - the problem is that skills simply are not worth it if you have a spell that can do the job. Of course sometimes they can help but most parties just prefer to use a spell. Of course this is DM dependent but the issue is inherently baked into the system.

Yeah, it seems to be pretty common that groups are coming nowhere near the recommended number of encounters per adventuring day, which goes a long way toward making long rest classes (full casters minus warlocks, paladins) seem to shine really strongly when compared to short rest classes like fighters, warlocks, monks, etc.

A lot of stuff in DnD seems based around the oldschool playstyle of kids, college students, or dedicated hobbyists getting together for gigantic 8 hour+ sessions one or more times a week, rather than normal adults with dayjobs and conflicting schedules getting together a few times a month for a few hours at a time, with frequent absences due to holidays, vacations, obligations, etc. And with six players, there's just not time to run more than a couple of combats a session, and then that would be a super combat-heavy session compared to what we normally do.

Zdan wrote:

Kind of. It was never really a issue of math. The problem is that spells can accomplish things without a roll or just do things that martials will never be able to do. My cleric in 5e was a combat powerhouse plus he had tons out-of-combat utility (scrying, healing, divination etc.). This was always the issue with magic in D&D - the problem is that skills simply are not worth it if you have a spell that can do the job. Of course sometimes they can help but most parties just prefer to use a spell. Of course this is DM dependent but the issue is inherently baked into the system.

Yeah, you're right about that, rogues do have a lot of OoC utility but the rest kinda struggle. Although they've tried to alleviate that somewhat by giving some extras on the side for certain subclasses - battle master fighters get some extra tool proficiencies so you can do some cool crafting type stuff. Carpentry and blacksmithing come in handy more than you'd think. Even so, I'm planning to dip into warlock for a couple of levels with my fighter, and the utility from the cantrips I get, even with a crappy spellcasting modifier, are definitely part of the appeal.

I still think intimidation should have the option to use strength instead of charisma, which would help a lot. You'd think a huge guy could just intimidate people with his presence.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

Per adventuring day meaning in-game day. You could have an adventuring day take multiple sessions to complete. Ours usually do!

There is the variant rule section that specifically says you can swap other abilities for certain skill checks and specifically lists Str instead of Cha for intimidation. Definitely and under-used variant rule I think.

Dog nobody in our group is going to keep track of how many spell slots and whatnot we've expended between sessions two weeks (or more) apart, especially considering some of the players may or may not even be there the next time. Least of all the DM.

iamntbatman wrote:

There is the variant rule section that specifically says you can swap other abilities for certain skill checks and specifically lists Str instead of Cha for intimidation. Definitely and under-used variant rule I think.

Oh, I didn't actually know that. I'll have to bring it up to the DM.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

Yeah because you're a giant grognard, you giant grognard. Literally half of our group has never played any kind of RPG before, virtual or otherwise. One of our players had to get a new character sheet a while back because she anxiety-puked on it between sessions. Nobody is going to be planning out using spell slots over 6 weeks of real time.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

Heh. And I remember when THAC0 was a thing. And playing with the Rules Cyclopedia. And Mystara. And weapon mastery rules. And domain management being baked into the game. Now that was planning - especially when you played a fighter (who got the most out of the D&D endgame rules).

That's cool as shit! I'd love to one day have the space, disposable income and feeling of security of having a solid regular gaming group where I felt putting in the work to make awesome terrain stuff like that would pay off.

That's very cool, good job. I've been thinking a lot of making a transportable, modular terrain board for skirmish games. Right now it's not in the top of my hobby priorities (I need to get some regular skirmish games or a campaign going to hook in my friends on this), but it's something I -really- want to try my hand at.

Campaign's starting to slow down...we had our first session in a month last weekend, and we probably won't play again until October I don't think. Man...really itching for a weekly game. Gotta make that happen sometime in my life but it's just too hard here since it's just as likely people will work like 9-6 as they'll work like 2 pm - 10pm. Hard to schedule a weekly game on the weekend as that's a huge commitment.

Anyway...last session we headed into the keep in the dwarven stronghold, which has been taken over by this court of dark, malevolent fey intent on bringing their Queen Nicnevin back to life from the seven hags that we learned are her constituent parts. As we ascended the keep inside the mountain the interior changed from utilitarian dwarven carved stone to bizarre rounded glowing crystals and tangles of black, rubbery roots. Those of us who passed some saves could see through this illusion to see that the dwarven architecture remained, the other elements a sort of intrusion of feyscape through the thinness of the convergence of the planes. We came to a room with four tall dark elven warriors in black plate armor wielding long glaives, surrounding a large gong. Peering as best we could through the illusion we saw them to the corpses of the dead dwarven nobility, animated by the spirits of long-dead grey sylvan knights. They came for us and it was a brutal fight, and our fighter found out that by hitting the gong he was instantly transported to the bottom of a pit. We all did our best to rush past the knights and hit the gong to join our friend in the pit, popping in one at a time to find four driders descending from the walls around the pit and filling us with arrows. Our fighter (an Eldritch Knight) misty stepped up out of the pit and started to lay into the driders though he was taking lots of damage. The ranger came through and spent a turn scaling the wall of the pit to fight them up close with sword and hand crossbow, and the warlock kept up greater invisibility and stayed in the pit to do as much damage as possible to the four glaive-wielding knights that, you guessed it, followed us through the gong-portal one by one. After one turn of spellcasting I was down to six hit points, so polymorphed myself into a giant ape and climbed up out of the pit and begun hurling boulders at the driders, which were retreating up the walls and attacking at range with their longbows while the knights came in with their glaives.

I took well over 200HP worth of damage in that fight and was knocked out, as was the ranger, and the fighter went down but was brought back up with just a few hit points remaining, but we finally managed to drop the last foe. Somehow our warlock remained unscathed but everyone else basically blew through every last trick in our bags and barely escaped with our lives. We ended the session with the trickster rogue member of the dark fey court shouting his congratulations to us from afar, taunting us with his bravado in our weakened state.

Sounds nail-bitey. I like that everyone was basically having to turn their bag of tricks inside out to survive. Sounds fun! Glad the DM didn't cock that up. Also, congratulations! Now to tend to your gaming blue balls for the next few weeks..

Scorntyrant wrote:

More or less finished building by gaming table for Bolt Action and other historical games over the weekend

Bitchin. Reminds me of a combination of Memoir 44 and Conflict of Heroes 2d tables. Nice stuff! When it's in use, take some pics.

Actually, since it's just the DM who can't make next session, I'm gonna DM a one-shot of Honey Heist, which is a one page RPG where you play as criminal bears. I'm gonna rip off Critical Role in that I'm gonna have it set in our D&D campaign's setting somewhere...now I just need a story for why a bunch of bears would be trying to steal shit.

Anyone play SAGA here? Went to a mini tournament on the weekend. Was kinda roped on the rules as I hadn’t played for a year and it’s now the second edition of the rules. At 4 points I took my generic Viking warband - warlord, 4x hirdman, 4x berserkers and 2 units of 8 Bondi each. Tanked 2 of the 3 games as I came up against Norman’s both times - just got shot up by archers and hit-and-run attacked by cavalry I couldn’t catch. The game I won was against Anglo-Danes - we inadvertently refought Stamford bridge except this time the norsemen chopped the English into cat meat.

_________________

Mike_Tyson wrote:

"I think the average person thinks I'm a fucking nut and I deserve whatever happens to me."

I’ve only actually played SAGA once, 1st edition, just to try out the rules, but I really want to delve into the ruleset – though not for dark ages games but using it with GW models to play with smaller warbands than our big(ish) 8th edition armies. I really like the rule set and hope I can convince my group to start yet another project so we can use them (my dream is to use the rules for an old school chaos warband campaign set in the Warhammer Chaos Wastes – if anyone played Path to Glory or even Warhammer 4th edition that’s kinda the mindset I’m after)

This weekend we had our biggest game event of the year – 11 dudes renting a summerhouse in the other end of the country and just nerding out with miniature games, board games and old action movies. It’s the second time we do it and it’s just great. My buddy who lives on the island we visited had yet again prepared awesome terrain for both fantasy and sci fi games and it’s just a joy to game on. We had a large, brutal Mordheim campaign going with many ups and downs, a few guys played Infiniyu (miniature game, sci fi skirmish), a couple tried their hand at Shadespire, people played MTG draft and we had some big board games going on – Blood Bowl Team Manager and Rising Sun. Just an awesome 3 days.

Normal DM is busy so can't prep or likely come tomorrow, so we're gonna finish up the Honey Heist adventure! I really recommend doing a game of this if you need a break from your regular RPG campaigns. It was really fun coming up with a way to tie in a plot with a group of criminal bears trying to steal something set in our D&D campaign world.

So far, the players (a black bear, sun bear, and honey badger) met at a mead bar in the woods, with sort of a New Jersey gangster owlbear named Wise Guy tending bar, who introduced them to the boss, Rear Ensign Waldo Astonbury of the 702nd Expedition of the Hollerin' Hellbeasts, a company of giff (anthropomorphic space hippos) mercenaries riding on board the spelljammer Drone Vashik, owned and operated by some mindflayers. The mindflayers are after materials and technology to mass produce weaponry (mostly firearms tech) for their war with the githyanki, so have hired the giff mercs to go get this stuff with a promise of a cut of the spoils as payment. Astonbury used to be a 3rd. Lt. but was demoted for accidental firearms discharge and essentially marooned on our planet on a wild goose chase.

Anyway, he's learned that the beekeepers' guild near one of the towns in our campaign world has an Eversmoking Bottle that they use to calm the bees, and which could possibly applied to mass produce smokepowder for their guns. The beekeepers are taking a caravan of honey for sale in a big frontier town out west and are holed up in a guest house known as The Fortress, and have the Eversmoking Bottle with them. Our heroes, the bears, are to retrieve it, return it to Rear Ensign Astonbury, and any honey they might steal is theirs to keep.

First they had to get into the town, which they accomplished by ambushing a family on a cart, mercilessly slaughtering them, then impersonating them to get past the guards. Once inside they made their way to the inn stables to find a contact who might be able to help them get into The Fortress. They terrify the stable boy who goes running off, then sneak in and find their contact, a grizzly named Bear Fieri, who's the pet of a halfling food critic who's in town to try the local delicacies at the inn. Fieri is something of a food critic himself, and him and his assistant, a foul-mouthed squirrel named Deez, are writing a book about traveling and eating across the fantasy landscape called Dungeons & Diners & Dragons & Drive-Ins & Dives. He's heard that the inn in town, The Nine Trees, is famed for a dish called the Bacon Cheddar Beef Bomb, which is bacon boiled in cheddar poured over a roast beef stuffed with a roast duck. If they get him some to sample, he'll give them the info.

They proceed to walk right into the front door of the inn and put on some ridiculous circus act that has everyone laughing their asses off and cheering, then manage to somehow successfully snag a bowl of the Bacon Cheddar Beef Bomb off a table before scurrying back to the stables. Bear Fieri was mighty impressed with both the deed and the dish, and gave them a key to the back door of The Fortress (a chewed-up bent fork) and gave them name of a guy named Shakes who might be able to draw them a map of the Fortress interior as he's the only bear to have been inside and lived to tell about it.

A couple friends from church are coming over this evening to play Mage Knights: a favorite of mine from back when I was in high school. I don't think I've played it since then but have a TON of the little figurines. Should be fun. Any other fans of Mage Knights?

Found the sourcebook for "Trail of Cthulhu" in my local library and borrowed for the sake of something to flick through. Looks like a great update to the old Call of... system, but gameplay aside it's one of the more thoughtful sourcebooks I've read in that it actively encourages a serious consideration of the setting in terms of both implicit and explicit addressing of the less savoury aspects of HPL's worldview, how race and class plays out in-world (with the resource points system for how much NPCs trust your character, what sort of environments you can move around in without drawing attention) and with its 30's settings how the fashionable totalitarianism of the times would play out in-game.

While I'm 100% a wargames guy, I'd really love to play through a few scenarios of this if I could find a group and make the commitment.

I'm waiting on my local games store to get the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. It was probably the first major RPG to get translated into Polish so I gotta check out the new edition at least. If it's good then I will say goodbye to D&D and gladly go back to the Old World.

I've heard good things about that, but I don't really have much knowledge of or interest in the setting and lore of Warhammer, and my gaming group has enough trouble as it is with mastery of D&D 5E to be switching to something else.

Speaking of D&D...felt a bit of a bummer just now. Scrolled up and saw my last post about our campaign was about a session nearly three months ago now, and it had been a month then since our last one. That means we've only played D&D like three or maybe four times in the back half of 2018, and it's slowed way down. Granted, the other DM took a break so we did two sessions of Honey Heist that were fun, but felt like a distraction, then we were supposed to do this Halloween one-shot that another player was running but it got pushed back a few weeks, then of course it's longer than a one-shot and the second session kept getting delayed, until we're finally playing again this weekend. For some reason she decided to meld together various systems (Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu and D&D 5E) because she thought that would be easier or something, but it's mostly been ridiculously confusing for everyone involved and really badly balanced. Oh well.

Fuck man, I'd just really kill to have a dependable weekly game going. Maybe someday.

I feel that, my group has been on holiday hiatus for the last month or so and will be until the new year. We do meet very consistently every other week, but with a somewhat large group (5-6 players, depending on one player's class schedule) and relatively brief sessions (2-3 hours max), it feels like it takes us forever to do anything, and a good chunk of our sessions is taken up by just remembering what the fuck we're supposed to be doing. We've been meeting for two years and just hit level 9 - and we started out at level 3.

It's definitely a good time on the whole, but I'd love to be able to meet weekly, and for longer periods of time, too. Unfortunately nailing down a time that a group of young adults, none of whom work simple 9-5 jobs, can get together is an ordeal in itself. Another D&D group made up of co-workers has been "meeting" for almost a year now, and only managed three sessions. To put that into perspective, two of the members of that group starting dating and also broke up all within a space between sessions. So who the fuck knows what the protocol for that is. Does each one get half the group?

At least my Gloomhaven group is going strong. iamntbatman, you probably can't get Gloomhaven in Korea (it literally weighs 22 pounds and I shudder to think what that would cost to ship there), but the minute you move back here, fucking get yourself a copy and a reliable group. You'd love it.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

My group for Gloomhaven only meets every other week (the opposite Tuesdays as my D&D group) but we're getting through it pretty steadily. We've each retired one character apiece, and we're getting close to retiring our second. I could actually finish my personal quest and retire my berserker anytime I wanted, but I'm killing things so hard right now that I'm gonna take my time.

Honestly, Gloomhaven's price tag is a bit hefty, but compared to similar "big box games" like Kingdom Monster Death or Cthulhu Wars or whatever it's cheaper AND more worth the money AND more flexible. 2-4 players is easy to get together, it's no big deal if everyone can't make it every session, and you can easily finish an encounter in 2 hours. Our group does 2-4 encounters per session. Compare that to Twilight Imperium or whatnot where a single game might take fucking 8 hours to finish.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

My group for Gloomhaven only meets every other week (the opposite Tuesdays as my D&D group) but we're getting through it pretty steadily. We've each retired one character apiece, and we're getting close to retiring our second. I could actually finish my personal quest and retire my berserker anytime I wanted, but I'm killing things so hard right now that I'm gonna take my time.

Honestly, Gloomhaven's price tag is a bit hefty, but compared to similar "big box games" like Kingdom Monster Death or Cthulhu Wars or whatever it's cheaper AND more worth the money AND more flexible. 2-4 players is easy to get together, it's no big deal if everyone can't make it every session, and you can easily finish an encounter in 2 hours. Our group does 2-4 encounters per session. Compare that to Twilight Imperium or whatnot where a single game might take fucking 8 hours to finish.

How does it work when someone misses a session? Are their characters simply not included, and it doesn't imbalance anything? Or do they other players also control the missing player's character?

Actually this dude I know who lives in my previous city here has Gloomhaven. It does look fun, but that's a really long (and expensive) trip for a gaming group. Committing to something on weekends is pretty tough since people (myself included) often have to cancel in order to do other stuff, of course, and the regular weeknight game night thing is just not really possible since you have a pretty even split of people who work more conventional like 9-6 type schedules and people who work more like 2pm - 10pm.

How does it work when someone misses a session? Are their characters simply not included, and it doesn't imbalance anything? Or do they other players also control the missing player's character?

It's literally the easiest thing ever. Every mission has setup rules for 2, 3, or 4 players, which affect how many monsters spawn, and whether they're normal or elite. All story-affecting progress is based on either the game world or your party as a whole (you have a "party achievement sheet" that tracks what your group has done). The only thing an absent player would miss out on is loot and XP. I suppose if one player missed like, a dozen sessions, and ended up 5 levels behind everyone else, they might not end up having a lot of fun, but the monster level is based on average party level. Plus, XP generation varies a lot between classes, with some farting it out with practically every action, while others have way more trouble getting any, so even if every player makes it to every session, you're going to end up with a certain degree of level disparity.

However, there's a thing in Gloomhaven called prosperity, which basically measures how well the city of Gloomhaven is doing. You can improve this over time, mostly through accomplishing story mission goals, and once you reach a level of prosperity (they run from 1-9), every active character whose level is below that number can instantly choose to jump their character level to match the prosperity level, and every new character you create automatically starts at the prosperity level. Considering every player will be retiring multiple characters throughout a campaign, everyone is constantly bouncing back and forth between levels. For example, my 'zerker just hit level 6, since she generates XP at a more modest amount, whereas the guy playing a Mindthief is already almost level 8. But, he's getting ready to finish his personal quest and retire that character, which means the next character he starts (probably a spellweaver) will start off back at level 4, which is where our global prosperity is at right now. Another guy missed a bunch of sessions, but just stuck with his original character, whereas the rest of us retired at least one already, so we all ended up being at about the same level despite the difference in overall attendance.

In short: you don't need to worry in the slightest about someone missing sessions. They would have to miss a crapload for it to even make any difference at all.

_________________

MorbidBlood wrote:

So the winner is Destruction and Infernal Overkill is the motherfucking skullcrushing poserkilling satan-worshiping 666 FUCK YOU greatest german thrash record.

It's literally the easiest thing ever. Every mission has setup rules for 2, 3, or 4 players, which affect how many monsters spawn, and whether they're normal or elite. All story-affecting progress is based on either the game world or your party as a whole (you have a "party achievement sheet" that tracks what your group has done). The only thing an absent player would miss out on is loot and XP. I suppose if one player missed like, a dozen sessions, and ended up 5 levels behind everyone else, they might not end up having a lot of fun, but the monster level is based on average party level. Plus, XP generation varies a lot between classes, with some farting it out with practically every action, while others have way more trouble getting any, so even if every player makes it to every session, you're going to end up with a certain degree of level disparity.

However, there's a thing in Gloomhaven called prosperity, which basically measures how well the city of Gloomhaven is doing. You can improve this over time, mostly through accomplishing story mission goals, and once you reach a level of prosperity (they run from 1-9), every active character whose level is below that number can instantly choose to jump their character level to match the prosperity level, and every new character you create automatically starts at the prosperity level. Considering every player will be retiring multiple characters throughout a campaign, everyone is constantly bouncing back and forth between levels. For example, my 'zerker just hit level 6, since she generates XP at a more modest amount, whereas the guy playing a Mindthief is already almost level 8. But, he's getting ready to finish his personal quest and retire that character, which means the next character he starts (probably a spellweaver) will start off back at level 4, which is where our global prosperity is at right now. Another guy missed a bunch of sessions, but just stuck with his original character, whereas the rest of us retired at least one already, so we all ended up being at about the same level despite the difference in overall attendance.

In short: you don't need to worry in the slightest about someone missing sessions. They would have to miss a crapload for it to even make any difference at all.

Ah, that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I'll give it a shot some time, if I can get a few interested people.

I'll probably be playing Gloomhaven with a friend of mine who got it as a wedding present. I almost bought it myself, but where the fuck would I put it? It would take up an entire IKEA Kallax cubby all by itself. I don't have enough cubbies for that.

Unfortunately, I feel like I'll get tired of the people I'll be playing with before I get tired of the game. :/

Starting (rebooting?) a homebrew 5e campaign with a few of my friends soon, plotting out a regular schedule. We put an hour into it a couple years ago before life took some wild turns for all of us and our DM, one of my best friends, has been building maps and props and whatnot.

Our campaign slowly wound to a halt. We only had a few sessions in 2019, as it was just really hard scheduling things. This experience has made me think that it might be pretty easy (by comparison) to schedule things under more normal circumstances. We have one guy living in Korea with fairly normal work hours who goes to bed by 10pm, two guys living in Korea with academy hours (i.e. work starts in the early afternoon and ends 9 or 10 pm), one person on the U.S. east coast (now in Europe), and one person on the U.S. west coast. For a while we were playing U.S. Friday night/Korea late morning as our start time, but it's rough asking people to dedicate their Friday nights even every other week to D&D, as well as people's Saturdays. I honestly just crave a weekly weeknight game. Anyway now the one guy's in Europe, making scheduling virtually impossible, the first guy's really busy this summer with classes, and I'm about to move to Europe myself, so I think things are pretty much done. I was really hoping for just one more session to wrap up a little, but no dice.

Yeahhh...maybe sometime I'd give that a whack, but I think playing through a screen really takes something away from playing in person. Sharing snacks and drinks, the physicality of role-playing, plus just the way mics and speakers are it's just harder to hear people Skyping in and harder for them to hear the group at the table, harder to get a word in since you can't as easily pick up on body language cues, etc. It's just not the same