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Since you're talking about griefing in D&D now I can't believe nobody has posted the Head of Vecna story:Steve Jackson Games website.... posted:
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May 8, 2009 10:56
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Trainmonk posted:That's the excuse most people use. It's also the one that sounds the most like bulllllshit. You haven't heard the difference in voice acting in Mass Effect, then.
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May 8, 2009 14:49
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Oberleutnant posted:Decapitation Frenzy This is griefing. Wow that is devious.
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May 8, 2009 15:40
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:(This thread went from Greifing to Share cool RPG stories p. quick) That's because so often the two are one in the same. For example, I give you "The Black Sands of Death". Sadly this one was pulled on me by my own DM. While playing a greedy "sell his mom for a nickle" SOB mage, we get lost in the desert, and stumble across a cave system. The DM takes me to the side, and tells me to make a knowledge roll, fairly high DC, but I had insane bonuses, and made it. He tells me that I know the sands of time are hidden in this cave, and gives me some clues where they are. So I end up leading the party in the right direction, and the moment the DM goes "you see sparkling sands..." I immediatly state that I jump directly into them, in an attempt to take all the power. His response? "You jump in, and your body disintergrates." Cue me yelling and being pissed at losing everything. I had fallen for a greed trap, which he uses constnatly as it never fails to catch one of us. He still brings it up in any game in which I play, just a little patch of black sand in some way shape or form. Bastard.
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May 8, 2009 16:23
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chairface posted:One of these two (who by then had become "Those idiots" by way of reference in the party, for their IC and OOC actions) bravely jumps on the canister and explains he has a very high skill in "Being Fat" and wants to use it to smother the gas canister, thus containing the gas safely. The GM didn't believe him and I have to stifle my laughter and tears while verifying that he does indeed have a very high skill in "Being Fat." He does successfully contain the gas and I wind up having to pin a medal on him for his meritorious service in "Being Fat." Jesus Christ I am loving crying here. chairface posted:1. Stealing a tractor and driving it instead of their mechs in a military parade. Those guys sound awesome as hell. Some of the best moments in pen & paper games come about as a result of some moron pulling the stupidest stunt imaginable and the rest of the group getting dragged into the ensuing insanity. For example, in a short-lived D&D campaign, I played an rear end in a top hat Gnome Wizard named Ignatio McVillainous. Ignatio was Chaotic Neutral, and his character concept was basically that he was a fledgling supervillain - flashy, deranged, and motivated more by greed and love of fame than cruelty or hatred. He was good at making things - magic items, alchemical stuff, you name it. Now, each player started off in a different place, and the DM had circumstance bring us together. He decided that Ignatio got kicked out of the inn he was staying at because he wouldn't stop cackling and waking up the other patrons during his midnight experiments. Well, that would not do! Ignatio met up with the party, arranged to be given protection in return for making items and offering magical assistance, and then returned to the inn "to collect my personal effects." The innkeeper let him go back up to his room one last time, at which point he tied a rope to a flask of alchemist's fire (basically napalm that ignites on contact with air), threw the rope over a rafter and tied the other end to a bedpost, then placed a candle under that end of the rope and lit it. Once the rope burned through, the flask would fall to the floor and shatter, creating a small but easily-doused fire which would cause minor damage! That would show that meddling innkeeper. As he left, Ignatio made sure to rant about the group of powerful adventurers he was joining - mentioning each of them by name - and how you'll get yours, you and all these luddite imbeciles, you wait and see. As the party was leaving town, they saw a huge plume of black smoke rising from the inn. I furrowed my brow at the DM. "He couldn't put the fire out?" He just looked back at me with the biggest you-are-an-idiot expression ever. "Alchemist's fire burns anywhere, including underwater. Do you really think some podunk innkeeper can beat down the flames with a blanket?" So, I had to explain to the rest of the group that we were now all fugitives wanted for arson and possibly murder. That was fun!
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May 8, 2009 16:40
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HORSE RAPER posted:Inn story I once played a low-level illusionist named Brellon Angstryfe (ok, his name was Brian, he just lied a lot) who had a penchant for brazen acts of recklessness in an attempt to gain street cred. The adventure started in a coastal town in an inn filled with pirates, rogues, and general drunken scum. It was supposed to be a typical "party finds common grounds and decides to work together" origin-type event, but instead began with me buying enormous amounts of liquor for all the pirates, regaling them with ridiculous tales of wealth and bravery, and getting into horrible debt from gambling with pirates and the cost of liquor. Being level 1, I didn't have anywhere near enough money to pay off the evening, so I asked the bartender to keep a tab, went up to my room, rigged up a rope, and then hung myself out the window. Well, I hung an illusion of myself, which was in reality several chairs to weigh the thing down. Then I hid in another room, jumped out the window when people found my "body" and ran like hell. I don't even remember how the GM managed to start the adventure after that scene.
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May 8, 2009 16:58
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Paranoia is pretty much the best game for this. Our team had been dispatched to investigate a warehouse owned by a shady rich guy. But first, we had been assigned some new equipment to test: One pair of voice-activated rocket boots (turned on and off by yelling ON, and OFF), some water-activated explosive pellets, and a box labeled 'emergency escape device'. We collect our shiny new toys, and proceed to the warehouse. After getting there, and killing the guard-tiger with little effort, we examine the interior. There are several large vats filled with some strange fluid, and a rickety old catwalk hanging over them. After climbing on the catwalk, I dove into the vats to see what was at the bottom. I discovered some corpses weighted down by cement blocks, but couldn't get a better view because of all the liquid. So I get the idea to blast some holes in the tank with my laser gun. It works, and the liquid drains out of the tank and into the warehouse (sending the guy with the water-activated explosives scampering up onto the catwalk). I find some plot items on the corpses, but find that the walls of the vat are too slippery for me to escape. I call for the guy with the rocket boots to help me out. Here is where things go wrong. Unbeknownst to us, the explosive pellet guy had slipped one of his pellets into the rocket boots. Rocket boots guy lands in the corpse vat, and we prepare to take off, but before we're ready, someone outside shouts, “ON”. Rocket boots guy shoots upwards, dropping me back into the tank. Eventually, he hits the ground, and the water now filling the warehouse activates the explosive and blows his leg off. Down to one boot, he continues flying around out of control until he slams into the catwalk. Explosive pellet guy falls off, hits the water, and explodes. Meanwhile, another teammate takes advantage of the chaos to use his mutant power- lightning. The only other poor sod on the ground is electrocuted, and collapses face-first into the ankle-deep water. He drowns. Rocket boots guy continues flying around until someone remembers to turn off his boot. He slams into the wall, and is knocked unconscious. Lightning-man decides to flee, and opens the Emergency Escape Device. He finds a pair of sneakers. To recap, over the course of thirty seconds, one guy explodes, one loses his leg, another drowns, his assailant stands around examining his new sneakers incredulously, and me? I'm still stuck in a vat full of dead people. We did a lot dumb things like this, including, but not limited to: setting fire to a group of protesters, starting a twenty-car pileup by tossing a molotov cocktail onto a busy freeway, blowing up a locomotive, conducting a high-speed interview with a reporter driving alongside our truck (while simultaneously engaging in a gunfight with some angry robots), rigging a self-destruct device to rocketboot guy's replacement leg, and hacking a medical bot to give me a useless third arm.
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May 8, 2009 17:58
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Trainmonk posted:That's the excuse most people use. It's also the one that sounds the most like bulllllshit. Well, in Mass Effect the female PC did actually look a lot less funky than the male one and had much better voice acting. But then again, it's Mass Effect. We all know the real reason they picked female is the romance option! 
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May 8, 2009 18:32
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Vicissitude posted:I finally have a funny one, but I think it's only accidental griefing. I was playing Free for All CoD4 yesterday and I just kept screwing over the same guy. Certainly not intentionally, but it probably seemed that way to him. I'd kill him, he'd spawn in front of me and I'd kill him again. He'd be in a firefight down the way a bit and I'd kill his target then him. The one time he called in a helicopter, the only one in that match, I ran indoors to take cover. Turns out there was a mounted machine gun in there, so I decided to shoot down the copter. Then I saw who'd called it in. I felt a little bad for him, but he still came out on first place. the helicopter itself will grief the gently caress out of people it seems. the other day I killed a guy with one of the mounted LMGs, then about 15 sec later my helicopter got him, then another 15 sec later killed him again with the mounted LMG, and bang the helicopter got him again. then he left  there's just some matches where it seems that drat chopper has it out for you.
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May 8, 2009 19:00
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go3 posted:there's just some matches where it seems that drat chopper has it out for you. There's a reason for that. The CoD4 helicopter determines it's primary target using 4 specific criteria. 1. Score. Higher score = higher priority target. 2. Proximity. If you're close to the chopper, it's more likely to attack you. 3. Primary weapon. The chopper hates LMGs a lot, merely dislikes snipers, assault rifles, and SMGs, and ignores shotguns. 4. Threat. If you attacked the chopper at all, you're a threat. Whoever scores highest on a combination of all 4 is who it attacks. However, it won't attack you if at the beginning of it's minigun burst it can't see at least 50% of your body. If it starts attacking you and you move behind cover, it will continue trying to shoot you through the cover for the rest of the burst. edit: Basically, if you're team MVP and you attack the chopper, it's pretty much gunning just for you unless it can't find you. Promoted Pawn fucked around with this message at 19:22 on May 8, 2009 |
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May 8, 2009 19:17
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Nibbles the Shark posted:Well, in Mass Effect the female PC did actually look a lot less funky than the male one and had much better voice acting. The female PC in Mass Effect was invariably ugly as hell. I'm not sure from where you got "less funky". The male heads were at least vaguely human. Plain, perhaps, but not straight-up ugly.
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May 8, 2009 19:37
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Dissolusion posted:All this pen and paper griefing just reminds me of this video (I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen it): Little late on this, but this is topnotch. Part 2 is loving amazing. I'm digging on the RPG greifing! I have one involving Shadowrun: My character was the talker of the group, so while I was good at getting us high-paying high-level jobs, my combat prowess was a little less than stellar. The game was pretty much my first RPG experience, and I never really got a grasp on the rules, but the GM was nice enough to help me along. At one point, one of our party members was trapped in a building with our target we were supposed to kill. (I forget the exact details, but I think it was vampires) This particular party member was insufferable, both in character and out of character, and I in particular hated him. So while the group was trying to plan out an attack, I was elsewhere "getting supplies." While they were yelling about what to do in order to get their teammate out, I proceeded to go to a shop with a friend of mine (my character had a LOT of contacts) and asked her to "hook up" my ride. Fast forward to a couple hours gametime later, the team gets a cell call that I'd taken my car, set the auto-navigation, and blown up the building with a timebomb as it crashed into the front. All the while my character is standing on a hill in the distance with goggles on, smirking and smoking while watching the explosion. Of course, the rear end in a top hat player raised a poo poo fit, and got lucky in that he was chained up the basement, so we just had to dig him out. Of course I played it off like "hey, just doing my job!" acting like I wasn't intentionally trying to kill another player.
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May 8, 2009 20:51
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chairface posted:Grief-reversing in PnP Mechwarrior 3rd ed: bein' fat  The DM for a Shadowrun campaign I was in griefed our party pretty bad - our antagonist sent a flower-selling girl with a basket of grenades who killed us all, while we were having a meeting in a romantic italian restaurant.
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May 8, 2009 21:49
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Gorilla Radio posted:I never was able to play pen and paper (There's no community at all in Srbija). So I am wondering if there are any tales of LARP griefing?... I went to a convention once and some friends of mine were LARPing some Vampire: The Masquerade. It was my first (and only) time LARPing, so they gave me a really simple job. A gargoyle bodyguard to some elite vampiress or some poo poo. From what I remember, the gargoyle was strong, could turn to stone, and could talk to animals. The proceedings start out fruity enough with some twenty minutes spent drinking out of goblets and talking about vampire royalty crap. Finally, some kind of quest gets underway and it's everyone's turn to leave the ballroom. It is at this point in time that my character decides to make a point by standing in front of the only exit and turning to stone. Cue ten minutes of the vampires trying to move this unwieldy stone rear end in a top hat. One girl ended up rolling damage to her foot for trying to kick me. Unfortunately, a gargoyle is pretty stupid so they managed to mind-control away from the doors. Still, it was a good run.
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May 8, 2009 23:34
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My favorite paranoia story has to be us being sent to infiltrate another hive complex. We were given this really neat stealth car with lots of buttons. We were of course told not to mess with anything. Once the computer had stopped talking i immediately hit the biggest button i could find causing us to stop dead in our tracks and power off. After about an hour we got the thing back on and immediately the computer asked us who had messed with the buttons. Speaking fast i told the computer we all had trying to start it back up. My compatriots gave me a look that could kill, but i was praised by the computer for being honest, and we were then asked who had hit the most buttons. Well the engineer had done the most repair actions to get us running again so it was him, but he denied it. So the computer just fired a beam at him that begin to melt him, and his last words where "but Tyrs hit the first button!", to which the computer replied, "yes but hes honest". Right after we got started again, I hit the big button again. Our clones were woken up and we where sent to infiltrate another hive complex. We were given this really neat stealth car with lots of buttons. As we left we saw from the outside this really neat stealth care with a rocket-powered anvil smashed through it. I managed to get a nice string of cars lined up along our path. My mutant power let me put people to sleep pretty easy so the other pcs were just there for the ride. My guy had been a plant from the complex we were going to infiltrate ourselves and was doing everything i could to stop that mission. The gm had forgotten this from the last game we had played and was just shocked that i kept sacrificing my clones. It was nice it was so easy. TyrsHTML fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 9, 2009 |
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May 9, 2009 00:23
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I used to play a lot of D&D with some friends from my high school. The only two noticeable things I've done are pretty tame compared to killing entire parties. My first character ever was a dwarf cleric. A dwarf cleric that I rolled terribly for and had no stats above mediocre. Anytime we had to do something that required any type of skill check other than fortitude, the entire party had to help me. Then add to the fact that I had, on several occasions, accidentally destroyed valuable things in my ignorance, made for my second best character. The other one of note was a gnome illusionist. Only instead of evil like the few previous examples, mine was good. So good that he refused to actually deal leathal damage to anyone. No magic missiles for this wizard. Oh no, color spray and hypnotize are my main spells! Kill the dangerous orc with my staff you say? Subdual damage only please! Having several illusion spells at my disposal came to a culmination when we were traveling through an electrified river/cave. I critically fail a lot, so when our raft shakes and we all make balance checks, my magic staff goes into the electrified waters and blows me off into the dark cave. Later the group encounters an ogre mage and 3 ogres. Guess who's tied to the ogre mage's back and using illusions to make him think that his sword has magical intelligence. I tried to diffuse the situation, I really did, but then our resident "evil" sorcerer character blasted me and the ogre with fire. So I instructed the ogre to dump him in the water, and encase him in ice so he couldn't hurt anyone. I failed to instruct the ogre to take the giant ice cube out of the water so every round he took the pittance of electrical damage until we finally killed him.
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May 9, 2009 02:03
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The party I played D&D with for years had a consistent pattern of, in any fight with a longstanding villain (a boss fight, more or less) we'd all wind up trying to one-up each other with progressively more ridiculous stunts. This trend was unintentionally started when one party member, a level 2 rogue at the time, elbow-dropped a level 7 orcish shaman head bad guy from the belltower of a church. The rogue barely survived, and the rest of us recognized our cue and charged the shaman while everyone was basically stunned in awe of our lunatic rogue. This continued for literally years of play, with some OOC changes to our group, and across several IC campaigns. If one of us dropkicked a guy off a building, the next would have to leg-drop him from there. If one of us shoved grenades up someone's rear end and set the off, the next would have to run someone over with a steamroller somehow. Our GM mostly tolerated it since it did often make us pretty predictable in the big villain combats, and thus they could be appropriately paced and scaled so as to be neither impossible nor anticlimactic. Then last year, due to moving away, I joined another group, who were all completely flabbergasted when (D&D 4th ed this particular time) my paladin grappled the head bad guy and drug him off a ledge, rp'ing this as powerbombing him. The fall killed us both. This new GM had apparently never *considered* the ledge would be used as, well, a ledge, and the new group of players was unaware anyone would deliberately drag someone in a grapple off a ledge (or that it was a contingency the rules covered) and pretty much everyone just looks me astonished like: "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!" "Chekov's Rule." "What?" "Yeah, that thing, in drama, where if there's a gun on the wall, someone better shoot someone with it by halfway through the play." "That doesn't apply to D&D, or scenery like ledges!" "Sure it does, the ledge was there; I had to powerbomb him off it." "But you died too!" "Chekov's Rule demanded it." I think they still don't understand it, but if there's a bad guy, and a ledge, it just has to happen. They all loved it when using a similar plan that didn't get me killed, I rode a boulder down a cliff-face to smash through a stagecoach.
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May 9, 2009 02:23
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m2pt5 posted:Guys often play female avatars because they like the attention If I have to stare at an rear end for hundreds of hours, I prefer it to be a female rear end. Dunno about you.
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May 9, 2009 04:05
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TyrsHTML posted:My favorite paranoia story has to be us being sent to infiltrate another hive complex. We were given this really neat stealth car with lots of buttons. We were of course told not to mess with anything. Once the computer had stopped talking i immediately hit the biggest button i could find causing us to stop dead in our tracks and power off. After about an hour we got the thing back on and immediately the computer asked us who had messed with the buttons. Speaking fast i told the computer we all had trying to start it back up. My compatriots gave me a look that could kill, but i was praised by the computer for being honest, and we were then asked who had hit the most buttons. Well the engineer had done the most repair actions to get us running again so it was him, but he denied it. So the computer just fired a beam at him that begin to melt him, and his last words where "but Tyrs hit the first button!", to which the computer replied, "yes but hes honest". Right after we got started again, I hit the big button again. I've never played any form of D&D, but this alone has me intrigued; hilarious.
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May 9, 2009 04:13
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Hob_Gadling posted:If I have to stare at an rear end for hundreds of hours, I prefer it to be a female rear end. Dunno about you. Well yeah. That's why I play female characters. If anyone asks (like in an mmo or whatever), I'll gladly admit I'm male, though.
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May 9, 2009 04:14
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Hob_Gadling posted:If I have to stare at an rear end for hundreds of hours, I prefer it to be a female rear end. Dunno about you. You're staring at your character's rear end? I'm usually watching what's happening in the game itself, but that might just be me.
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May 9, 2009 04:20
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Rixen posted:You're staring at your character's rear end? I'm usually watching what's happening in the game itself, but that might just be me. Maybe you would be staring at your character's rear end more if it was a female one 
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May 9, 2009 04:22
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No homo.
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May 9, 2009 04:50
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Hob_Gadling posted:If I have to stare at an rear end for hundreds of hours, I prefer it to be a female rear end. Dunno about you. I've heard this argument a million times and all it does is remind of the morons who go to see the latest terrible movie just for the hot chick in it.
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May 9, 2009 04:59
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Chomp8645 posted:I've heard this argument a million times and all it does is remind of the morons who go to see the latest terrible movie just for the hot chick in it. So the people who choose guys would be the idiots who keep renting Steven Seagal movies then, right?  The customizer for girls is fine. I made my chick look like Claudia Christian (Susan Ivanova) from Babylon 5! And the voice actor almost sounds like her, too! Oh God... Russian-bi-sexual-telepathic-Jews... UNNHH... 
Mister Facetious fucked around with this message at 05:13 on May 9, 2009 |
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May 9, 2009 05:08
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BiscuitErsedRenton posted:I've never played any form of D&D, but this alone has me intrigued; hilarious. Paranoia is a great game. We were given a simple task. Clean the floor of red deck using the service robots. Cue random power outages and such hijinks. Well we got the bright idea to ask the very helpful service robot why this was going on. His answer was "the computer has all things running smoothly". We then proceed to inform him that the lights were off, and the computer had told us that that would not happen. He shuts down in a paradox and his chest opens. In the chest there is a button. Being good citizens we walked over to the nearest computer panel and asked the computer what to do. He tells us to hit the button to restart the robot. So we did. This blew the robot up. The computer then asked us why we had blown up his robot. We replied that he had told us too. A new service bot was sent with the new clone of the guy who was talking to the computer. The first thing we did to this robot was to explain the situation to him. He immediately shut down due to the paradox of the computer telling us one thing and a different thing happening. So being helpful we (mostly me, with my group trying very unsuccessfully to stop my robot destroying rampage, one guy blew himself up by trying to make a weapon to stop me and somehow igniting the cleaning solution he was carrying) began to tell every robot we could find. All of them. Seems that tank robots don't have logic circuits, and only talk about 3 things. Murder, crushing things, and wishing it could fly. All the while my group is talking to the tank and trying to not be blown up by them i was off making a robot costume out of shut down robots. They nearly got it to go away when i came up, announced i was a robot and computer had said to remove the traitorous humans. I did not realize that his cannon could fill the ENTIRE hallway with fire. By the time a game is over my group is laughing so hard we can barely stand up let alone roll dice. TyrsHTML fucked around with this message at 07:01 on May 9, 2009 |
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May 9, 2009 06:44
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TyrsHTML posted:Paranoia is a great game. Oh man, I wish I could have seen that in its full glory, that sounds loving AWESOME. It makes me curious to actually try and play one of these games sometime, but I'd worry about being griefed by other players or the GM... On the other hand, well, guess I'll have a story to put here then.
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May 9, 2009 10:19
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Chomp8645 posted:I've heard this argument a million times and all it does is remind of the morons who go to see the latest terrible movie just for the hot chick in it. When I was a little kid MUDding I learned from observation, that female characters got free poo poo and help way more than males, so I would often make a female character to beg. After a while it got to be a hassle to transfer poo poo from my beggar to my other characters, so I would just stick with the female character and play it. In WOW I rerolled a level 50 hunter decked out in purples to a female, in large part because I couldn't stand the posture of my male troll, or frankly most of the male Horde-side character models in WOW, either. In Virtual On I prefer to play as Fei-Yen, which is a giant pick robot dressed like Sailor Moon. Not much of an rear end to look at and nobody thinks I'm a female for choosing it, though. coyo7e fucked around with this message at 16:40 on May 9, 2009 |
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May 9, 2009 16:37
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The_Censorship_Nazi posted:Oh man, I wish I could have seen that in its full glory, that sounds loving AWESOME. I have gone to some conventions and man people there take this poo poo seriously. In that environment having a good time with the game and the gm is the worst grief you can do to a player. These are the guys who have little black note pads and are taking notes of everything every play does and says. I go out of my way to find ways to kill people in these games especially because most of the time they will walk from the game if they lose a clone. You get 6 free in this game. This game expects you to die. Not these guys trick them into getting into a garbage compacter instead of an elevator and they go mad. Its really and amazing thing to watch. I spent one game stealing the notepads when people did not notice and changing the names in them (The gm backing me up the entire time and not letting them change names back, you could only write about an action once. If you changed the info your clone forgot it. I on the other hand had a memory altering mutant power that let me gently caress with them both in game and out of game) By then end most peoples notes pointed to themselves as commie mutant traitors. out of 6 guys 3 said they where never playing a game with me again, and one just walked away without his stuff never to return. The main thing of Paranoia is it was written to be a spoof and meant to be played with no regard for self or others. TyrsHTML fucked around with this message at 16:59 on May 9, 2009 |
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May 9, 2009 16:55
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I forgot the story of my illusionist (the same one that hung himself) who claimed to be a might evoker. For those not in the know, specialist mages in D&D like the Illusionist or Evoker have "restricted schools" where they cannot cast certain types of magic as a tradeoff for their power. Well, having told the party I was a might Evoker (the kind of wizard that makes fireballs and blows people up) the reality was I specialized in Illusions, with absolutely no damaging spells. I didn't like violence and had never learned to cast fireballs, but I did want people to like me and had aspirations to be the greatest court wizard of all time. So basically I had to spend my entire career casting illusory lightning bolts, pretending to set fire to things, and warning the party of "highly resistant monsters" if my illusions failed to scare things off. And when undead would appear, the entire party would have no clue why i had suddenly become completely useless.
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May 9, 2009 18:05
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I only have one D&D story to contribute. Before we begin, let's note that we had a shapeshifter in our party, and a rogue who was a total dickhead IC. The setting was this] Our party was infiltrating a gigantic military encampment in order to steal some information on the whereabouts of a very important plot mcguffin. We knew the DM had been planning this adventure for weeks, so we were actually trying to play along and be nice. We snuck in the back of a small building, only to find ourselves face to face with the general of the army. The rogue promptly tried to stab the general in the face. I looked to my DM and said, "I'll make a roll to try to react and stop him." Rolled a perfect 20 on the table, stopped the rogue, and took the general hostage - but during this fracas the general had managed to start the base alarm. The rogue takes this opportunity to again stab the general in the face - and he succeeds. Now all of us are stuck in this tiny building, with the full force of an army bearing down on us. In addition, we very clearly have one dead leader of the army bleeding out in our hands. Clearly, the DM had intended for this to be the culminating fight of the campaign. I have a brainwave. gently caress fighting, let's crap our way out of here. I tell the shapeshifter to take the general's form. He steps out the door in said form, points in some random direction, and yells, "Enemy intruders... THAT WAY!" The DM, at this point very annoyed, forces him to make a roll for how convincing he is. He rolls a perfect 20. The confused troops promptly charge in the wrong direction entirely, out of the camp. By the time the fracas has died down, we've looted the information we needed and exited the camp from the opposite direction. The DM has his head in his hands. I'm not the best storyteller. You had to be there. The entire thing unfolded in the span of a few minutes, and we were basically winging it the entire way.
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May 9, 2009 18:19
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Having never played a tabletop game I may be approaching this from the wrong direction, but why would a DM get mad about the players going an unintended route? Isn't being able to improvise and loosen up the story framework the whole point of being a DM? (hell, to me it sounds like goodtimes. "Oh you want to improvise Mr. Illusionist? Very well... let's improvise.  ")
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May 9, 2009 19:07
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Ledneh posted:Having never played a tabletop game I may be approaching this from the wrong direction, but why would a DM get mad about the players going an unintended route? Isn't being able to improvise and loosen up the story framework the whole point of being a DM? (hell, to me it sounds like goodtimes. "Oh you want to improvise Mr. Illusionist? Very well... let's improvise. Depends on the person. Some have a giant stick up their rear end about what they think should happen and what they'll allow, others are more likely to enjoy taking things in stride and just let their players have fun doing whatever the hell they want.
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May 9, 2009 19:09
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Ledneh posted:Having never played a tabletop game I may be approaching this from the wrong direction, but why would a DM get mad about the players going an unintended route? Isn't being able to improvise and loosen up the story framework the whole point of being a DM? (hell, to me it sounds like goodtimes. "Oh you want to improvise Mr. Illusionist? Very well... let's improvise. Some DMs really suck and improvising and can't think anything up outside of their little preset story. A good DM will have a nice story that he's perfectly willing to through out the window if the players get creative. I've led Paranoia campaigns without even preparing beforehand.
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May 9, 2009 19:14
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Kessel posted:
That's amazing. I love when a simple roll of a d20 griefs the DM and his grand schemes.  I think sometime I might want to pick D&D back up, this thread's really making me miss it.
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May 9, 2009 19:30
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^^^^^ Has anyone besides me played Rolemaster? The great thing about that system (besides open-ended critical rolls and skill bonuses,) is that certain dice rolls are gauranteed to cause weird poo poo to happen, on top of successes and failures all being potentially open-ended. If you roll eleventy-one (111) in Rolemaster, it's always a critical success, far far better than rolling 100 and getting to roll again and add the total together. Also there is uhh, I think 66, which is a gauranteed bizarre occurrence.. Climbing a wall with a spiderclimb item that requires 3-point contact with the surface in question? Roll a 66 and a rat comes out of a handhold, goes up your sleeve, into your shirt and pants, causing you to fall 75 feet onto solid carved rock floor. ...I'm not positive if this was a set part of the loremaster rules or something our GM had come up with, but 111 and 66 were always interesting outcomes on the roll charts. Ledneh posted:Having never played a tabletop game I may be approaching this from the wrong direction, but why would a DM get mad about the players going an unintended route? Isn't being able to improvise and loosen up the story framework the whole point of being a DM? (hell, to me it sounds like goodtimes. "Oh you want to improvise Mr. Illusionist? Very well... let's improvise. As anyone who's played a tabletop rpg or strategy game knows, it's easier to herd cats. I tried GMing and I simply couldn't think fast enough on my feet to come up with new stuff; sometimes it really can be frustrating to get a whole adventure planned, map out dungeons and monsters and treasure, figure out a premise to get everyone to the entrance of the dungeon... Then someone goes, "Hey look, a rare butterfly!" And suddenly some completely asinine plan comes out of groupthink, and before you know it the entire party is off chasing bugs to sell to alchemists or some poo poo. I'm totally a griefable DM, that's why I don't run campaigns. 
coyo7e fucked around with this message at 20:12 on May 9, 2009 |
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May 9, 2009 20:06
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coyo7e posted:As anyone who's played a tabletop rpg or strategy game knows, it's easier to herd cats. I tried GMing and I simply couldn't think fast enough on my feet to come up with new stuff; sometimes it really can be frustrating to get a whole adventure planned, map out dungeons and monsters and treasure, figure out a premise to get everyone to the entrance of the dungeon... Our DM had spent 3 weeks building a dungeon. It was meant to take us some 30 hours of game play to get through if we managed to stay on track. We enter and the dwarf cleric kinda looks around does his look for secret doors thing and finds nothing. But there was a tiny stream of water that went past the entrance. So being a cleric of high level he did what any sane person would do. He used stone shape to make a path through the wall the direction water was going. Imagine our surprise when we found that the water funneled into a pool that radiated healing magic and a cave filled to the brim with treasure, and a magical teleport system that would seal this horrible place behind us forever. Seems the little stream would have healed us for a couple of hp if we had drank it then after we wandered all the way through this dungeon we would find this pool and be all OHHH. Our cleric just made a door that skipped the entire dungeon. The gm just gave us the loot, then realized we had in fact done exactly what we where supposed to and gave us all our exp. He then very neatly folded up his map and went and had a smoke for about an hour. Poor guy.
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May 9, 2009 20:19
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TyrsHTML posted:Our DM had spent 3 weeks building a dungeon. It was meant to take us some 30 hours of game play to get through if we managed to stay on track. We enter and the dwarf cleric kinda looks around does his look for secret doors thing and finds nothing. But there was a tiny stream of water that went past the entrance. So being a cleric of high level he did what any sane person would do. He used stone shape to make a path through the wall the direction water was going. Imagine our surprise when we found that the water funneled into a pool that radiated healing magic and a cave filled to the brim with treasure, and a magical teleport system that would seal this horrible place behind us forever. Seems the little stream would have healed us for a couple of hp if we had drank it then after we wandered all the way through this dungeon we would find this pool and be all OHHH. Our cleric just made a door that skipped the entire dungeon. The gm just gave us the loot, then realized we had in fact done exactly what we where supposed to and gave us all our exp. He then very neatly folded up his map and went and had a smoke for about an hour. Poor guy. Griefing the GM is best when it's accidental. The cleric did the perfectly logical thing, in what I assume was fully good faith, and he accidentally shattered the GM's plans. Beautiful.
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May 9, 2009 20:38
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TyrsHTML posted:Our DM had spent 3 weeks building a dungeon. It was meant to take us some 30 hours of game play to get through if we managed to stay on track. We enter and the dwarf cleric kinda looks around does his look for secret doors thing and finds nothing. But there was a tiny stream of water that went past the entrance. So being a cleric of high level he did what any sane person would do. He used stone shape to make a path through the wall the direction water was going. Imagine our surprise when we found that the water funneled into a pool that radiated healing magic and a cave filled to the brim with treasure, and a magical teleport system that would seal this horrible place behind us forever. Seems the little stream would have healed us for a couple of hp if we had drank it then after we wandered all the way through this dungeon we would find this pool and be all OHHH. Our cleric just made a door that skipped the entire dungeon. The gm just gave us the loot, then realized we had in fact done exactly what we where supposed to and gave us all our exp. He then very neatly folded up his map and went and had a smoke for about an hour. Poor guy. Sheesh, couldn't he have just hand-waved a reason not to throw out an intricately-planned and probably fun-to-play dungeon? "Stone shape doesn't work on these magic walls," or "the trickle of water goes deep underground, and you'll be trapped forever if the tunnel collapses under the weight." Hell, he could even let you find the healing pool but relocate the treasure and teleport system to somewhere deeper.
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May 9, 2009 21:23
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| # ? May 13, 2024 21:57 |
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It isn't a total waste; you can generally get some use out of all those wasted areas. In the above instance, all those mid-dungeon traps and puzzles could always find their way into another dungeon.
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May 9, 2009 22:10
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