Die Schwarze Katze

[schneefink]

Our D&D campaign was put on hold due to COVID and still hasn't resumed. I hold out hope that we'll continue the campaign one day... fingers crossed.

In the meantime I've found another group to play TTRPGs with. We're playing "Die Schwarze Katze", an off-shoot of the popular German TTRPG "Das Schwarze Auge" where everyone plays as a cat. It's fun! We've played four sessions so far and have already faced dogs and ghosts and allied with sentient cockroaches and are currently planning to rob a group of thieves.

I'm having a surprising amount of trouble with my character. We're a party of five: two of them are new players that play mostly passively so far, and two of them play fairly chaotic characters who tend to be impulsive and go off on their own (and get into trouble.) I sort-of accidentally fell into the role of planner and peace-maker again. I like thinking about what our options are and how to do things, and making use of allies is just smart. It just gets frustrating to feel like I constantly need to keep an eye out and be ready to stop other party members from doing something impulsive and, uh, counter-productive. I know I don't actually need to, even if they "screw up" that can still lead to other unexpected and fun situations even if it makes things harder for us, but that's hard to keep in mind in the moment.
And being indecisive on how I want to play this has also made it hard to get a grip on my character. I hope that it'll become clearer in our next session. Goal for tomorrow: don't stop anyone from making a stupid decision if they want to.

Comments

[sholio]

Ha, yeah - the game that I've been playing for the last few years (a Buffy-derived paranormal-investigator game) has a "reckless" attribute that three of our five regular players picked for their characters, so while I didn't really intend for my character to be the voice of reason regularly - she's not! she's a tank! she's pure of heart and dumb of ass! - the general team dynamic is that me and the other guy who doesn't have "reckless" spend a lot of time talking them out of doing extremely unwise things. XD

[schneefink]

Oh wow, three out of five characters being reckless sounds like a very chaotic party :D

[nonesensed]

Sending good vibes and crossing my fingers too in hope that your D&D campaign gets to resume again soon!

"Die Schwarzhe Katze" sounds like fun! What kind of system does it use?

Accidentally ending up playing the "mom friend" can be a tricky situation to land in - I've been there myself a few times, especially when I'm playing alongside new players. Hope you feel/felt you could relax and have fun this session!

[schneefink]

Thanks :)

DSK uses its own rule system, which I think is modeled after "Das Schwarze Auge" but since I never played that I can't say for sure. It's similar to D&D in that you have attributes (strength, intelligence, courage etc.) and those contribute to special abilities (lockpicking, melee combat, hiding etc.), but instead of rolling one d20 and needing to be over a certain value, here you roll 2d20 and need to be under a certain value. Depending on by how many points you are under, you have achieved a certain degree of success.

Last session was a lot of fun :) The group isn't quite "clicking" yet but I think we're getting there.

[nonesensed]

Oooh, a 2d20 system, haven't seen many of those! Sounds like a fun challenge for the brain, wanting to roll low on a d20 instead of high (at least that's the challenge for me when I switch systems).

The growing pains of a new group sure can take a while to work themselves out - I hope you get to click soon and that you also keep having fun until then!

[schneefink]

I think it is a good compromise between "many TTRPG players like D20s because D20s are cool" and "using one D20 means you have a very high variance for challenges." Fortunately I am currently only playing this system so there is no risk of getting confused if high numbers are good or low!

The group is working together better every session :)

[nonesensed]

Oh yeah, 100% I agree. I understand why people make D6s only game systems, since a lot of people have 'regular dice' around the house anyways, buuuut for people like me with ridiculous dice collections I really want to use all those shiny shiny dice, especially my D20s~ And sticking to one system at the time is a smart move XD

Yay, that's great to hear! <3