My face to face group just ended a campaign in a sudden haircut op: We had been fumbling through a deeply corrupt and criminal city in a loose bundle of small adventures when the city guard suddenly took us all down and it was strongly suggested that we would end up either dead or in forced labour somewhere. The GM explained that he had imagined this all quite differently. He had required us to be Lawful Good, and had hoped we would take it upon ourselves to clean the city of scum in some way. Alas, we did not: we made attempts to find other good people, failed, and then one of us signed a contract as a pit fighter and the rest of us tried to make sure he’d survive that and / or placed bets on his fights. The exasperated GM saw no way out but to end it hard.

That was then. Now is now.
And now a new campaign with a different GM launched.

Btw: the System is Midgard, the oldest (albeit out in a 5th edition now) German language tabletop RPG.

Midgard

In a lot of ways it is not that different from D&D, but some wrinkles: As a German system combat is a bit longer than in D&D: there is no statistical AC as defense, but rather a defense roll to negate a successful attack, and when the attack prevails, armor as damage reduction. In addition, every successful attack, even if blocked, costs stamina. If stamina runs out, a character is too tired to block with any skill, they can get clobbered.

Life Force does not rise with levels: You have your life points and they are fixed. You can only raise your skills to get better at doing things and your stamina so you can fight longer. In that way, any Life point loss is definitely a physical wound.

Magic also needs a roll to succeed and costs stamina, and everyone has a certain amount of Magic Resistance to maybe negate spell effects.

That said, we were a group of

Explorers

We started in Faux-Scotland, but the GM said everyone can play whatever character from that world. On Midgard there is a fixed geography with faux-earth-cultures all over the place; now our group has one faux-Northerner (me, Gerald MacRathgar), one faux-Latino (Alessandro), three faux-Asians (Kazuto Kirigaya and the sisters Mi-tsu and Ka-tsu), a scholar hailing from faux-Rome (Nox Caelum), a Halfling (Ilva) and a small magically gifted Gnome (Bongo, master of Drums).
We began in a classic tavern, first-level characters; in narration we already know each other and are a team that has just completed another Exploration mission, but we all have zero XP and are still noobs with low skill levels.

We learned that we have a while before we get a new mission from our guild, so we sat there drinking and heard sailors on a neighbouring table talk about weird effects they had witnessed on the open sea. One of our number, ninja-type Mi-tsu, went over to ask them for details, but they walled up and refused to talk. Then I decided to shake things up and instigated a tavern brawl with said sailors, on the pretext that they had “insulted” my friend.

Fun was had: I went there counting on our superior numbers to even the odds, but I found myself all alone at first, because none of the party came with me. So the brawl started with me getting beat up solidly (missing all my swings and blocking theirs with my face). Seeing me go down triggered the rest of the party to join in and save me. So finally I had my brawl, until the massively built tavern keeper waded in to establish calm, or else.

After this genre-appropriate interlude we received a message that we would get our next job right away, for some secret but time-sensitive reason. We went, got a weird box that seemed to wriggle, and learned where to bring it: Off continent to some island far west that none of us know yet – there we should hand it over to a certain person.
Obviously we agreed and went on our merry way.

The leadership of our Explorer’s guild told us to elect a leader and more or less by chance I got that role – but anyone who knows adventurers knows they are impossible to command. Well, for starters I took control of the wriggling and shaking box, which I tied down strongly, and we set out.

We went over land and reached the harbor city, where we started to listen for rumors, and two of us went to the big magic school library, where they had a tough time to get past the tough librarian. Meanwhile, others tried to learn something about our destination island from seafarers, alas without success: nobody knows it. Suspiciously, the GM repeatedly asked who has the box, so we must keep a strict eye on it at all times.

Off to a good start, let’s see where this adventure shall take us.