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Here at ___ and ___, we are on the look out for bright-eyed over-achievers who aren't above getting their hands dirty and really going the extra mile to deliver results. We're client-focused, and our clients are power players who demand the best. Surround yourself with a firm of real movers and shakers, just like you. Under our watchful eyes your unique talents will be honed to the razor's edge, and our helpful support staff will make you feel like your entire life was just leading up to the moment you joined ____ and ____. We're hungry for you to achieve with our group, because like you- we don't take no for an answer. As all the go-getters here at ___ and ____ already know, sometimes it takes a little unorthodox thinking to seal the deal. We're looking for candidates that aren't afraid to break a few eggs to make the caliber of omelet our clients have come to demand. If knowledge is power, then our organization is the rabid pitbull in the global information nursery. We're waiting for you to come home to ____ and ____. ___ and ____. More than you could ever be on your own, and more than you can possibly imagine. PS pick a more evil name than preston and preston dude
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Sep 8, 2010 20:15
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| # ? May 9, 2024 11:48 |
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Monaco-Sato SludgeCorp Paragon Satan and Sons
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Sep 8, 2010 22:56
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Pharmaskittle posted:Monaco-Sato
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Sep 8, 2010 23:25
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frest posted:PS i think he's trying to evoke an American-Psycho style sense of slightly ominous corporate menace (the firm in American Psycho was Pierce and Pierce) by contrasting the mundanity of the business name with the horrible things that go on there
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Sep 8, 2010 23:50
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:i think he's trying to evoke an American-Psycho style sense of slightly ominous corporate menace (the firm in American Psycho was Pierce and Pierce) by contrasting the mundanity of the business name with the horrible things that go on there Also worth remembering that the firm itself in American Psycho had nothing particularly menacing going on, at worst was just enabling Bateman's existing psychosis because of how isolated he was within his office. The fact that it was a law firm didn't really play into the building tension and juxtaposition of the mundane/grotesque, that was mostly done via Bateman's personal life and journal. What I'm saying is that "generic corporate speak" isn't necessarily going to leap out as "EVIL OPPRESSIVE FICTION." It's just mundane. Like playing d20 modern where the villain is heart disease or diabetes
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Sep 9, 2010 00:00
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frest posted:Like playing d20 modern where the villain is heart disease or diabetes diabetes kills more people than vampires and it does it right in plain sight also i see what you mean but "Deathblood Industries" or "Cthulhucorp" is a little too on-the-nose. maybe something subtle. "Shipman and Fish Enterprises".
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Sep 9, 2010 00:04
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:diabetes kills more people than vampires and it does it right in plain sight I'll give you that
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Sep 9, 2010 00:05
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He needs to be heavy-handed because he doesn't have the players at the table rolling dice yet. He's basically pitching the game idea and trying to recruit players, and right now he might as well be pitching a real company, which is pretty boring even compared to someone else who might just walk out and say "hey guys you're going to be playing as members of an evil company, you know like wolfram and hart or weyland yutani," and then sitting down. The cue cards are really grating though, those need to go wholesale. If you want to throw out exactly what's going on, maybe have your in-character pitch and then hand out a short syllabus that spells out what the game's going to be like for real.
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Sep 9, 2010 00:05
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Why not just make the firm something like "Hart and Weyland". They're not "cthulhutech" levels of obviousness but in the context of corporate recruitment people will probably get the idea.
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Sep 9, 2010 00:28
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Hard to go wrong with Poor, Nasty, Brutish, & Short.
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Sep 9, 2010 00:29
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Dewey, Kilham, and Howe
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Sep 9, 2010 00:37
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Badnasty and Associates
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Sep 9, 2010 07:25
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:Dewey, Kilham, and Howe  ) and it's direct enough without totally beating the idea into the ground.
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Sep 9, 2010 08:49
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:diabetes kills more people than vampires and it does it right in plain sight drat, embodiment of a terrible disease as the major villain. . . I want to find a way to run that game now.
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Sep 9, 2010 19:23
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Isn't that Nobilis
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Sep 9, 2010 21:41
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:Dewey, Kilham, and Howe I always prefered Dewey Cheatham and Howe in this joke Burk & Hare Industries
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Sep 9, 2010 23:45
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Gomi posted:Hard to go wrong with Poor, Nasty, Brutish, & Short. We're all team players at PNB&S
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Sep 9, 2010 23:46
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Liesmith posted:I always prefered Dewey Cheatham and Howe in this joke yeah, that's the original, but i'm guessing this corporation does more evil than just cheat people.
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Sep 10, 2010 00:04
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So since there's apparently no general M&M thread, I'll just throw this in here. I'm still pretty new to GMing, though I've run a number of sessions over the past 3 years or so(one-shots of various systems mostly), and M&M, both 2e and 3e, is giving me some trouble. I just can't really seem to grasp how to construct challenging encounters, and most of the enemies I make die in one or two hits. This includes big boss-type characters. I managed to find some weird formula for 2e that's helped me at least figure out what general PLs and numbers of enemies there should be for players to fight, which seems to work okay for 3e, but the enemies themselves are just sort of dying way too quickly. Minions I intend to mostly get one-shotted at PL10 since they're usually just thugs or weak robots or whatever, but it should take more than two rounds to defeat a big supervillain, which seems to mostly be my problem. They just go down too quickly. Is there some baseline rules for making enemies that I'm probably not grasping? They seem to do enough damage whenever they need to, but fights are over pretty quickly and none of these ever seem to feel like they're a threat. I just don't understand where non-minions should be at, defensively, as a generic sort of starting point for a longer fight I guess. I think it might be that I'm wary of the players just not being able to hurt these enemies and in my head I'm not understanding what the dice rolls will do to their offense VS the enemy defense correctly. I'm not sure. I love M&M for it's openness but I get really lost when making enemies as a side-effect of that.
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Sep 11, 2010 18:27
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Kelp Plankton posted:So since there's apparently no general M&M thread, I'll just throw this in here. You want your boss-types to have a pretty huge toughness score, or some way to avoid taking damage every round. A huge toughness score will allow him to soak up some damage at first, and when you roll badly on a toughness save he won't instantly get knocked out. Don't worry about them not hurting him, even with +20toughness you can get hurt by +10 damage attacks, and if your players use power attack and team attacks they can definitely hurt him. A bad guy with high defense and low toughness is a lot more likely to get wasted before you have a chance to do much with him. Now of course you probably shouldn't give every bad guy a big toughness score, so consider feats like Interpose to improve their survivability, or give them abilities that allow them to harm the players indirectly. Statistically it's better to be on the Damage side of the trade-off. If your target has +10Def and +10Toughness, you're better off having +7atk and +13damage rather than the other way around. Keep that in mind if you want to make your villains threatening. Or just give them +13/+13, if your villain is alone against a group of heroes he needs all the help he can get. Don't be too afraid of your villain knocking the heroes silly, just give them hero points if he does and consider that finding out how to defeat the villain is an adventure of its own. As for minions, I find that the best way to use them is to make pretty heavy use of the team attack maneuver, so they can soften up the heroes before a confrontation with the villain.
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Sep 11, 2010 21:51
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My party is convincing a group of pacifist monks to take-up arms and defend their camp from the raiding goblins. (They're ripping off magnificent-seven-samurai, but it was the players' idea.). What are good D&D4E mechanics for running a fight against more goblins than the party could take-on themselves? The whole point is that the monks were crucial to the fight, but I don't want two dozen minis on each side of the battle. Obviously I could just do it as a skill-challenge (with diplomacy to inspire, and history for tactics, and so on.) But is there a way to run it as actual combat?
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Sep 12, 2010 02:59
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I've thought long and hard about some of the feedback I've received, and I've decided to drop the idea of an in-character recruitment pitch entirely, saving it for when players come over to the table to generate characters. It was fairly half-baked to begin with, and it should have been obvious to me that my problem with making it work was that, in fact, it was a bad idea. The company's still called Preston & Preston, specifically because it is so banal. Also because I already sent out the recruitment packs.
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Sep 12, 2010 03:21
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Sam_I_Am posted:I don't want two dozen minis on each side of the battle. If you want to run the combat, run the combat. If you want to abstract the NPCs contributions to the combat, then use skill checks or whatever and keep them out of the combat. Honestly, don't roll dice for monsters or npcs to attack each other. That's the epitome of pointless simulation-ism; if you want the monks to have a meaningful contribution to the battle let the players control them as NPC helpers. If you don't want to do that, then make their contributions take place away from the conflict that is centered on the PCs.
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Sep 12, 2010 04:47
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Etherwind posted:The company's still called Preston & Preston, specifically because it is so banal. Also because I already sent out the recruitment packs. Oh god I hope there's no setting-mandatory knowledge in those handouts because no one even reads that poo poo when it's for a real job... let alone a fake roleplaying game job
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Sep 12, 2010 04:50
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frest posted:Oh god I hope there's no setting-mandatory knowledge in those handouts because no one even reads that poo poo when it's for a real job... let alone a fake roleplaying game job There's not. You're also wrong. Everyone who received one of the packs read the stuff; they realised pretty quickly that it was for a game, one they'd probably like to play in, and people are willing to put more effort into something they like than something they're forced to do.
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Sep 12, 2010 04:54
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So after reading the SCP wiki obsessively, I absolutely must include a couple ideas from it in my campaign as encounters. http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-173 The first one is this. tl;dr version: a paranoia monster that doesn't move as long as someone's looking directly at it, but can move up to 2 meters in a single blink of an eye. My implementation: some plot hook leads to the heroes encountering, or perhaps unknowingly releasing a D&D version of 173 (perhaps a statue similar to the Weeping Angels). The party will have some clues to its nature at this point, and while they see it for the first time, I'll be rolling behind my screen for all of them. Since humans blink an average of once every five seconds, I'll be rolling a D6 per player, and each 1 is a blink, with each successive roll incurring a -1 penalty. A blink resets this penalty, and if everyone blinks at the same time, the statue shifts 1 or 2 squares (haven't decided yet), and if it can attack, one of the players will be stunned/lose a significant amount of HP. Now, once they figure it out and try not to blink, I'm thinking of having them roll fort saves not to blink (with the same cumulative penalties/resets as before) each round, since I'm sure they'll figure out some system to not blink all at once. But is this a bit gimmicky? I know I love the idea of 173 a little too much to be objective about this, so tell me what you think. Also, I'm thinking of implementing a version of http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-087 The basic idea would follow something similar to the exploration logs (with both of these I'm trying to instill a creepy sense of horror and dread with the inexplicable happenings), but if a player gets captured by the face, I'm wondering what to do. One idea I had would be to have any player captured be sat out temporarily while the rest of the party gets to the top, then have a brief solo session in another room. Maybe for the rest of the party, 30 or so minutes passes while they climb to the top, but for the captured person, they're in an alternate dimension/reality/plane where they have to face their greatest psychological horrors/fears and fight their way out, or endure, or something, and weeks, maybe even months or years, pass in their reference frame. Then when the party reaches the top, Member X is found laying facedown and unresponsive for some time before he/she slowly recovers. Thoughts?
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Sep 12, 2010 06:31
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Those both sound like ideas much better suited to a non-D&D system. The first one in particular sounds like a shitload of bookkeeping for a gimmick fight. For the second one, splitting up the party rarely works well. And "Being separated from the group in order to face your greatest fear" is a chiche to boot.
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Sep 12, 2010 06:47
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Yeah, I know the problems associated with splitting up the party. I figure if I do that, I might save it for the end of the session, and maybe do it via email or phone call later. And the greatest-fear thing was just my first idea (and your first idea's always a cliche, they say). I'm still playing with ideas for that. As for the first one, I think you might be right. I'm open to any ideas on how to make it work, if possible, though, haha. But I also might just shelve it for another game/system. 
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Sep 12, 2010 06:54
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I would totally dig a Weeping Angels fight, because that episode of Doctor Who scared the absolute poo poo out of me. I think the problem is that (as noted) it's a ton of bookkeeping. Plus your players may do mean things like point out that blinks don't work that way. I'd definitely abstract it a lot initially, and then consider adding a few factors. Like something that is dimming the lights or making them flicker. You'll have to figure out a way so that "I pull out my sunrod and stick it on this thing's ear" isn't an option, although if you're trying to run a game with horror elements you definitely need to control the light sources in general. Then run it as a skill challenge, with the players trying to roll to keep the lights burning in the face of... well, whatever. Maybe a cult of wind genasi that keep the creature fed and are trying to extinguish the lights. Success on a (X) roll means that they prevent the light from going out; failure means that they relight it (or it briefly gutters), but during that time the creature has rushed forward.
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Sep 12, 2010 07:21
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Sam_I_Am posted:My party is convincing a group of pacifist monks to take-up arms and defend their camp from the raiding goblins. (They're ripping off magnificent-seven-samurai, but it was the players' idea.).
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Sep 12, 2010 16:40
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How do I handle suffocation/drowning mechanics? I think I remember reading it's one minute of breath for every +1 bonus to your Con modifier. Does that sound right?
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Sep 13, 2010 21:08
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Uh, it was twice your constitution in rounds (= 6s) I think. Edit: vvv 3.5 vvv Hungry Gerbil fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Sep 13, 2010 |
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Sep 13, 2010 21:12
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^^ oh, okay. In that case, yeah, Constitution score x2 in rounds (and a CON check every round after that, DC increasing by 1/round, once you fail one you have three rounds left).Sam_I_Am posted:What are good D&D4E mechanics for running a fight against more goblins than the party could take-on themselves? The whole point is that the monks were crucial to the fight, but I don't want two dozen minis on each side of the battle. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Sep 13, 2010 |
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Sep 13, 2010 21:28
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I'm starting a Play-by-Email game for a bunch of close friends soon. The gist of it is that in this high magic fantasy setting, in a commanding position on the continent, there is a kingdom that has, by warfare and economic power, come to dominance over the rest of the land, lead by its right and honorable king. The human King, now approaching his centennial, is succumbing to old age, and word has it that he will finally declare his successor in the two weeks leading to his birthday. The players are all the vassal rulers of the other states that the Kingdom has either hegemony over or a strong military alliance with. They'll be converging on the city, making friends and spiting foes in a short-term politics-driven rumble. Play By Email is the format I picked because it's possible players may not interact face to face for a long time, especially if they are enemies. The question I have to TG is this- I've got NPCs and major officials designed, secrets to be discovered, and the capital mostly whipped up. One of the key gimmicks of all this is time- It's two weeks to the Birthday Celebration when the players arrive in town, so splitting their efforts may result in things not being done in time. Should I construct a full schedule of events for the players to move around in and meet each other in, or should I just have one or two bullet point events and otherwise leave things fluid?
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Sep 13, 2010 21:45
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Mad Fnorder posted:The question I have to TG is this- I've got NPCs and major officials designed, secrets to be discovered, and the capital mostly whipped up. One of the key gimmicks of all this is time- It's two weeks to the Birthday Celebration when the players arrive in town, so splitting their efforts may result in things not being done in time. Should I construct a full schedule of events for the players to move around in and meet each other in, or should I just have one or two bullet point events and otherwise leave things fluid? I'd leave things fluid, since it's a good bet someone's going to forge a will and bump the old guy off around day 4.
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Sep 13, 2010 21:54
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I would go into the game planning to do that so it's worth preparing a couple of responses to would-be assassins
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Sep 13, 2010 22:07
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Nicolae Carpathia posted:diabetes kills more people than vampires and it does it right in plain sight Derleth and Sons.
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Sep 13, 2010 22:20
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I still like the tagline "we're all team players at Poor Nasty Brutish & Short LLC"
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Sep 13, 2010 22:23
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Liesmith posted:I would go into the game planning to do that so it's worth preparing a couple of responses to would-be assassins Well, the Old King does have an Actual Guardian Angel, for one- not that it makes it impossible, just difficult. I'll probably plan 4-9 formal events and intersperse them in the week, as well as things like Funerals if and when they're needed.
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Sep 13, 2010 23:43
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I'd like to plan a heist encounter for my 3.5 campaign. The basic idea is there's a large gaming house inside the main city. The gaming house itself has all sorts of magical enchantments to keep people inside, doorway illusions, magical locks, enchanted chests. I was just going to have a spiraling dungeon with gradually more high stakes games with each level, but I feel like I'm missing something. Any ideas for an Ocean's 11 style heist encounter? edit: also anyone have a good resource for generic world maps? SnatchRabbit fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Sep 14, 2010 |
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Sep 14, 2010 18:47
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