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For as long as there have been separate threads for Best and Worst Gaming Experiences, there have been claims that someone or other is posting in the wrong thread. But who the hell would only follow one or the other? I propose a union of the two towers. What should I post here? Anything that happened in a non-computery game that you were party to or witness of, which you think deserves to be recounted. It can be funny, triumphant, disgusting, adorable, whatever. Keep in mind that we reserve the right to advise and nitpick. As a personal favor to me, please don't tell us about the time you rolled a number when you really wanted another number, unless what a player described as the result of that roll was really, really terrible/hilarious/fantastic. Feel free to repost the fittest and most vigorous stories from the old threads: What's the worst experience ever? There are many contenders, but this remains my favorite (emphasis mine): Samej posted:Most annoyances aside, the overall worse experience I've ever had in tabletop would have to be during last years LGS 40k tournament. I was playing my 1000 point Necron army and my brother had his Chaos Space Marines. What's the best experience ever? The next one you get to have with your cool friends. What the gently caress does cat piss have to do with anything? quote:RETAIL: THE WRATH OF CAT PISS MAN Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Oct 9, 2015 |
# ? Jan 13, 2012 00:56 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:36 |
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Doc Hawkins posted:For as long as there have been separate threads for Best and Worst Gaming Experiences, there have been claims that someone or other is posting in the wrong thread. But who the hell would only follow one or the other? I propose a union of the two towers. Good move Doc Hawkins posted:As a personal favor to me, please don't tell us about the time you rolled a number when you really wanted another number, unless what a player described as the result of that roll was really, really terrible/hilarious/fantastic. Exactly. I once recounted a game of D&D to my son's ex and I left out the good bits and described a few successful rolls. She said "You sound like Rimmer recounting his Risk game". She was a "first-class nerd" (the Red Dwarf quote gives it away) and would have enjoyed tabletop RPing.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 01:31 |
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Crossposting a recent experience from the Greg Stolze thread.quote:After getting my group pumped for an Unknown Armies game, I started paging through the conspiracy theories/ideas section. I had a laugh remarking to my players that the section on Elvis simply reads "He's dead." A good, solid group really is the greatest treasure in gaming.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 02:45 |
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Sweet. The campaign I ran over the last summer, the intro game of which I talked about here (non-clickers: started as one-shot Call of Cthulhu D20, everyone plays themselves, discovers occult conspiracy where former members of their gaming group are trying to sacrifice the group to Tsathoggua to gain supreme gaming power, cult leader driven off but not defeated, players beg for campaign), was collectively my best gaming experience, as it finally showed me that it could be as much fun to gamemaster as to game, something I could never understand before. Once the game resumed, the players/characters went immediately and appropriately crazy with occult investigation, and networking with everyone they could think of to try to figure out if they had missed any conspirators the first time around (they ended up being arrested for manslaughter and awaited trial for the six months that passed between the first and second games, and had plenty of time to make plans in-game). One of their first plans was to try to bust into a place they were pretty sure was a former cult safehouse. Well, one of the players had taken a flashbacks Hindrance (I converted to Savage Worlds' "Realms of Cthulhu" for the campaign), and the very first time they tried to coordinate an ambush on the water tower they thought cultists were inside, he blew his Spirit roll, and immediately thought he was back in the park where they had been assaulted by supernatural forces the last time they were planning an ambush; through re-enacting his past behaviors, he got into his nearby car and managed to botch a driving roll and drive over one of the other PCs waiting in the bushes, who of course thought he was being attacked and opened fire on the car, which managed to trigger the OTHER PC who had taken flashbacks, who then began furiously struggling against imagined cultists trying to drag him into the darkness (knocking himself out in the process through a botched Fighting roll). All while the single member of the party not either having flashbacks or being attacked by someone with flashbacks had no idea any of this was going on (I think he was wearing ear protection and did not hear the shooting), and went through with the ambush all by himself. And this was all in the first new session. I think we all were pretty sure the party was going to kill themselves before the end of that game.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 03:02 |
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Quarex posted:Well, one of the players had taken a flashbacks Hindrance (I converted to Savage Worlds' "Realms of Cthulhu" for the campaign), and the very first time they tried to coordinate an ambush on the water tower they thought cultists were inside, he blew his Spirit roll, and immediately thought he was back in the park where they had been assaulted by supernatural forces the last time they were planning an ambush; through re-enacting his past behaviors, he got into his nearby car and managed to botch a driving roll and drive over one of the other PCs waiting in the bushes, who of course thought he was being attacked and opened fire on the car, which managed to trigger the OTHER PC who had taken flashbacks, who then began furiously struggling against imagined cultists trying to drag him into the darkness (knocking himself out in the process through a botched Fighting roll). All while the single member of the party not either having flashbacks or being attacked by someone with flashbacks had no idea any of this was going on (I think he was wearing ear protection and did not hear the shooting), and went through with the ambush all by himself. And this was all in the first new session. I think we all were pretty sure the party was going to kill themselves before the end of that game.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 03:07 |
If quoting yourself isn't out of bounds, I'd like to quote the most notable experience I've ever had or likely will ever have with a tabletop game:substance1987 posted:While it doesn't hold a candle to the guy who shot someone over Warhammer 40k earlier in the thread, I remembered a bad experience of my own. which spawned this reply: Yawgmoth posted:I guess his rebuttal was a little too stoic. Which still makes me giggle.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 03:12 |
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Feel free to fertilize the new thread by strewing about past posts, even when they're by yourself.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 03:28 |
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Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Mar 31, 2017 |
# ? Jan 13, 2012 04:13 |
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A few years back, I was running a 3.5 game with my friends, Forgotten Realms setting. Schedules required us to all make our characters individually, and they didn't really know how to play, so I was there for each one. We had our standard mix of fighter/rogue elf, human paladin, etc etc. But one guy, Burt, made everything worthwhile. He made a sorcerer, who was a worshiper and agent of Cyric, the setting's mad evil god of treachery and whatnot. The rest of the group were all working for the church of Mystra, one of Cyric's arch enemies, to find some artifact. He wanted to join the party under the guise of a Mystra agent, and secretly sabotage the group's plans, and report his findings to Cyric. Of course, he spent all of his money (they started at about 5th or 6th level) on some belt or something that boosted his bluff, and focused on that skill. And we proceeded with the game, the other players completely unaware of Burt's secret. Until one session, when the party was faced with this wounded demon in some temple, and were basically all about to die, when Burt pops up: What languages does the demon speak? Um, lemme see...common and abyssal. Oh, ok, good. I speak abyssal! Can I bluff him to talk him down? Sure, go for it. Rest of group just kind of stares at him while he rolls, and successfully convinces the demon that he is an agent of Cyric, and is trying to work against these fools to foil Mystra's plan. Nobody else in the group speaks or understand abyssal, so he tells them "oh, I just told him that we are an elite strike team from the church, and that there has been some kind of mistake". This continued for the campaign, with the group growing more and more suspicious of Burt until he finally revealed his true nature. Along the way, he'd been turned to the ways of neutrality by THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP, so the group let him keep going with them. It was a glorious campaign.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 04:18 |
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Yawgmoth posted:At what point in all this did you begin looping Yakety Sax? Because really, that seems like a mandatory thing. The best part is that this was probably not even the worst flashback-chain-reaction in the campaign. They ended up investigating the deaths of two cemetery keepers, and discovering that basically every newly buried body was being stolen. This eventually led them to climbing a ladder down into an underground tunnel complex filled with deformed stunted humanoids, and hilarity. The second player with flashbacks from above was leading the party, when he was jumped by one of the aforementioned humanoids (ghouls, naturally), and he ended up beheading it on a critical success. This triggered #2's memory of beheading a masked assailant, only to learn he had just beheaded one of his old friends. So #2 started freaking out, particularly since one of the other masked attackers from that scenario had turned on his master and was now a member of the party, and was right behind #2 in the marching order--and was carrying a readied tear gas grenade he was about to throw down the tunnel. Naturally #2 then tried to behead the reformed-cultist, just as he had previously. Shocked reformed-cultist dropped the grenade when trying to defend himself, which looked to the first player with flashbacks (just arriving in the tunnel) like reformed-cultist had turned on the party (which #1 had been predicting would happen), leading to #1 freaking out and scrambling back up the ladder and pulling it out of the warren to save himself. This time, the hilarious "people entirely uninvolved with this catastrophe" were the two players waiting a few hundred yards away at their vehicle, trying to get a cell signal, casually smoking and talking about e-readers as the rest of the party imploded.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 04:28 |
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Nothing will ever convince me that CoC was intended as anything other than a dark comedy game.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 05:58 |
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Yawgmoth posted:Nothing will ever convince me that CoC was intended as anything other than a dark comedy game. I just sent out an e-mail to my players recently saying that, after careful consideration, the movies that come closest to the feel I am trying to capture are Killer Klowns From Outer Space and Monster Squad. Both genuinely funny b-movies that also somehow manage to be terrifying in unexpected and disturbing ways nonetheless. If you have never seen either, I guess you have to trust me, but they both do a fantastic job playing the villains completely straight--which works wonderfully via the absurd nature of the entire endeavor, as well as the unsurprisingly comic nature of the protagonists. For example, capturing people in cotton candy cocoons should be hilarious, but then you see the fattest clown stick a crazy bendy-straw into one such cocoon and drink blood from the corpse inside, and you just do not know what to think anymore. Also I firmly believe that movie set everyone who saw it as a child on the lifelong path to clown-fear.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 07:19 |
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I'd like to stress this qualifies as a worst experience for the GM, who was trying to run a serious, terrifying game until Donnie got hold of the plot and headbutted it into submission.Etherwind posted:I'll try to remember it in full. It's a worst experience, so it fits in here.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 07:22 |
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Donnie is exactly the kind of person I would always want in my game crew.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 07:49 |
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The funny thing about this is that the Best Gaming Experiences thread was originally created because too many people were posting awesome experiences in the Bad Experiences thread. But times have changed. Anyway, I've been saving up some of my favorite posts from the past two threads for a while now. Unfortunately I do not remember who posted most of these, and Google isn't helping, so if anyone knows, please tell me so I can edit it in. Wandering Knitter posted:I once gamed with a man who spent an entire session rubbing the flat side of a knife against his neck while glaring at the other PCs. quote:One game, we were going along the side of a mountain, and we were ambushed by something, so the dm let me summon orcas on the slope so I could cause whale-alanches. quote:Pure sandbox games can be pretty fun, but they are entirely dependent on DM creativity. If you're drawing a blank that session the game grinds to a halt. I remember a D&D game where the players fought a Manticore on 3 separate combats because I couldn't figure out what they should be doing. I think I ended up fluffing it that the succession of Manticores were each avenging the previous Manticore, Inigo Montoya style. quote:the bard spent the entire fight a little distance away, breakdancing so hard that it filled the other pcs with righteous courage. occasionally he would cast some sonic damage spell and yell "bam!" while striking an insolent you-got-served pose. one of these spells struck the deathblow. quote:Every Sabbat game I ever saw was nothing but one big munchkin wet dream. If it wasn't random slaughter and carnage (equestrian demolition derby anyone?), it was nothing but goth-Dragonball episode. In fact I know one game where the characters wanted some more experience so they got on bus and drove to a series of warehouses full of ninjas just so they flex their potence/celerity/obtenibration/vissicitude/temporis. quote:Someone once told me a story about RIFTS being played in a gaming shop, he said something about rolling a crit with a knife, and that the crit rules said to roll every die readily available. Well they were in a drat game shop, so naturally being total nerds they rolled the store's entire inventory of dice. Ended up destroying a planet. quote:Lionel's biggest achievement came when Bob asked him to make a new character. Lionel found a demonic form power he really, really liked. It let him eat anything with no penalties. quote:Well, the guy would show up with his books and stuff, then five minutes or so after we started he would slip out a bayonet and whetstone and start sharpening the bayonet. He'd randomly slam it down into his pile of books, interrupting whoever was talking and leaving the rest of the table wondering if he'd finally snapped and was going to kill us or something. He never did, nor did we ever find out if he had the gun that the bayonet would have attached to. Very quiet otherwise, played a mild-mannered elf wizard whose goal was to build a peaceful tree house with a library and alchemical lab. Guess he counts as an "American Psycho" type dude. All of his books had little triangular puncture wounds that went from the hardcover front to the hardcover back. His PHB was like swiss cheese, and was always the one given to newbies who didn't have their own gear. quote:The paladin, as his FIRST course of action, drops chain-trow and declares he shall bugger the unicorn awake. Angry Diplomat posted:I had an important villain flee to an impregnable fortress once. he was hiding inside this tower made of evil purple stone that was stronger than steel, with an enchanted door made from the same stuff. when they found out they couldn't put a dent in the walls or penetrate them using magical means, the bard says, "alright, I want to go to town and hire a wizard and a druid of at least these levels to accompany us for a day or so." And my personal favorite quote:Oh, man, the first campaign I DMed fits squarely into this thread. It was 3rd edition, and the PCs were a half-orc barbarian, a halfling rogue, a human bard, and, because the party was looking a little fragile, my DMPC, a human fighter. I realize DMPCs are usually terrible and all that, but seriously, with an unoptimized fighter, what could go wrong? I also loved the story about the guy whose friend had a homebrew campaign with superpowered elves who needed to touch a tree every 24 hours, and then the players blew a hole in the planet and it turned into a post-apocalyptic campaign, and all the elves died. I only have a small excerpt from it saved, though. Cygna fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jan 13, 2012 |
# ? Jan 13, 2012 08:08 |
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J Bjelke-Postersen posted:Donnie is exactly the kind of person I would always want in my game crew.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 10:54 |
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Posted this in one of the old threads, but probably my most memorable gaming moment/session was from my first Exalted game.quote:It was set during WWII and the premise was that suddenly Exalts were coming back. My character was Exalted Lenin, risen from near death and determined to kick Nazi rear end. After the intro Exaltation session the GM and I reached an impasse. He wanted the various characters to make their way to England to join up under the auspices of the supernaturally aware M16. I pointed out the difficulty of this, but since Lenin was on the run from Stalin he had to go somewhere. So my plan was to have Lenin manifest a hammer via Glorious Solar Saber, disguise himself as Thor and sail ashore with his followers, make his way to Parliament and publically join the fight against Hitler. I reasoned that there was no way the British could see this coming and that it would probably work on the grounds that once you have a magic-wielding demigod appear on your shores the last thing you expect is for him to be someone else in disguise. Also only crazy people would see this coming. It was pretty fun.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 11:54 |
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In the previous Worst Experiences thread, I talked about my current D&D (3.5) group and my worries that it had all the elements of becoming a Worst Experience. Much to my pleasure, it hasn't and actually has gone smashingly. (As a side note for those who remember, the DM has in fact gotten the girl he was interested in, and they've actually been amazing together despite the initial rocky start.) Probably our best moment thus far was the halfling-breathing dragon. As we neared the end of the campaign, our party encountered a heavy magic shield around a fortress we needed to get into. After a bit of painful experimentation, we discerned that it was too powerful to dispel and would prevent entry by anyone who wasn't a dragon. Now, we could get around this - the party's druid had picked up an item that allowed her to wildshape into a dragon once a day for a while. This was obviously designed as a solo challenge for her to get in, grab what was needed, and escape back to us. That meant we were morally obligated to bypass it and ruin that plan. Our GM, being dragon-obsessed, had granted access to the splatbooks he had. Which were all dragon-based and more or less useless to us. But our solution was in there, too. In the Dragon Magic splat, there's a couple of spells meant specifically for dragons. One is a quirkly little level 1 spell called Hoard Gullet, temporarily giving the dragon a second stomach that acts as a bag of holding to carry around a small hoard. The weight limitations were pretty strict, but when half your party is halflings and the wizard has a Staff of Size Alteration, you can get away with a lot. So we rode through the shield inside the dragon's magical stomach. In a bit of a panic that we used this obscure utility spell in such a way, the DM tried to be clever and had our druid intercepted by a pair of guardian wyrms. For all her talents, Bluff was not a skill the druid had, and things started to go very badly. The rest of the party decided to strike. When she next opened her mouth, we came out like an avenging army. Using Telekinesis, the invisible halfling rogue/assassin turned into a guided missile and promptly got two sneak attack crits on the one wyrm, bringing it down to under 10hp. It was killed a moment later by the dwarven fighter's magic throwing hammer. The other wyrm ate a full attack action from the halfling ranger/rogue, who was optimized for maximum fire volume. I think he made something like eight attacks in one round, each with various damage bonuses that instantly reduced the wyrm to a dead pincushion. Weeks later, the dragon's halfling breath weapon is still one of our favorite moments from the campaign.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 15:56 |
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I ran a session today and I'm still not sure if it was a good experience or a bad one. It was certainly a harrowing one to run. I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the GM Advice thread, but I'll put it here because I'm pretty sure the best advice is just going to be "talk to your group and figure out what they actually want out of the game" anyway. For the past several sessions, the party's been tracking down a wizard who's been breeding huge swarms of insects, which have been getting loose and attacking people. They break into his tower and after surviving a couple of traps and some difficult fights with giant insects set by the wizard as guardians, they find out that the wizard's abandoned the tower and continued his research in a hideout deeper into the swamp they're in. Since they're all tired and wounded, they aren't confident of beating the wizard in a fight in their current state, and they finally have hard evidence proving that the wizard has gone totally off the deep end, everyone decides that their best course of action is to head to the nearest city and petition them for help -- that is, everyone except the party's archer, who thinks that the wizard's going to do something terrible very soon, and wants to go and stop him right away, even though the party is wounded. So far, that's not totally unreasonable given what the party knows. What is unreasonable is that when the rest of the party refuses to change their minds, he decides to go off on his own and confront the wizard with or without their help. The party's mage and healer, not wanting to see their ally get killed, respond by tackling him to the ground. So here are three members of the party, all wrestling with each other in swamp mud that they know is infested with flesh-eating worms, over whether they should go fight the wizard now or later. The archer manages to break away and at this point the rest of the party finally decides: gently caress it, we're tired enough already without following this idiot to our deaths. So they all find a nice fallen log to sit on, set up camp and wait a while, hoping against hope that he somehow gets back alive. This wasn't as bad as it could have been, because the game was online so the players weren't literally sitting around a table watching as I spent most of the last hour of the session interacting solely with the archer's player, but I still feel like it was a bit of an unsatisfying end to the session for them. Anyway, the archer reaches the wizard's lair and finds him in a relatively lucid state, so he manages not to get horribly killed. Instead, the two of them strike a deal: the wizard will move his experiments further away from civilisation and refrain from troubling the local people, as long as one nearby city signs an agreement not to disturb his swamp and another dismantles a dam that's causing the swamp to dry up. The archer accepts the offer, and heads back to the party to see if they're willing to cooperate. And that's where the session ended, and where we'll be picking up next week. Here's the issue: I think that the archer's player was within his rights to do what he did, even though it was reckless and stupid, and in hindsight I'm almost glad it happened. His decision had meaningful and interesting consequences that would probably never have happened if the party had stayed together, our group had an explicitly stated understanding that PCs aren't required to all work as a group toward the same goal at all times, and there had been situations in the past where the party was split up or working at cross purposes that turned out well and were fun for everyone. So if my sympathies in this situation lie with anyone, they're with the one player who went off on his own, not with the four players who wanted to keep the party together at all costs. But at the same time, his decision did make the game less fun for some of the other players at the time -- one said that he felt as if he was being blackmailed into following the archer in order to keep the party together, even though that wasn't the archer's player's intention. I don't want to tell the players that the party has to stay together or try to curtail their arguments, because I want them to be able to decide what to do for themselves without my interference: that's something I've been clear about with my group right from the start of this campaign. But if they're disagreeing to the point where PCs are coming to blows with each other and players are getting frustrated as a result, when do I step in and how?
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 16:10 |
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I think you can divide PCs into those who want to end their careers in quiet retirement, those who want to become gods or the nearest possible equivalent, and those who want to stand before the gods (or equivalent) and bellow "NO GODS! NO MASTERS!" before launching The Revolution.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 16:56 |
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I'm in a new level 1 4e campaign. The party is in a tourist trap 'dungeon' run by kobolds like a D&D version of Chuck E Cheese. The kobolds die with a wink and the acid pit trap is corn starch in water with dye. After the midpoint concession stand we find an actual dead kobold killed with a safety weapon stolen from our Ardent. After some investigation while other party members hold the doors for time, the next round of enemies manage to burst in and see their murdered family member. My halfling bluffs them into believing his day job is as a crime scene investigator for the local sheriff, so they'll be better off if they calm down and don't disturb the evidence. The rest of the party continues piecing clues together as I handle the employees. As things come to a head this exchange happens: "I assure you we will apprehend the fiend. It is my duty for king and country." natural 1 on bluff "This is an elected republic short stuff."
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 18:57 |
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I've talked about this game/group a few times in the old Worst Experiences thread. The system is basically the Marvel Superheroes RPG with a bunch of houserules, an the setting is Every loving Thing Ever. If it's another RPG, it exists in his game. If it's a card game, it's a world. If it's a movie, a comic book, a novel series, a TV show... anything. Some worlds are combinations of >1 of the above. You can play literally any combination of anything if you bullshit your "I have a concept for a new character" pitch well enough. It's a game that makes RIFTS look simple and focused by comparison and it's a pretty enjoyable game if you can completely stop giving any fucks towards balance or sane mechanics and just have fun with it. It's also a totally ongoing world kind of thing, where he just uses the "setting" as it is forever. He's been doing this for the past 20 years or so. It can be fun, but a lot of times it's a total pain in the rear end because he has no understanding of game balance and is one of those "I need total realism as I understand it in my game" kind of guys. So for my last story with them, we all made new characters who were chosen for whatever reason to fight Zadkiel and stop him from taking over heaven and then reality itself. Did I mention he likes to take comic book/movie/game plotlines and run them without even filing the serial numbers off? He does that a lot. Anyways. Since he likes to give his bad guys super awesome powers that we never get access to despite him repeatedly saying that he wouldn't prevent us from getting anything if we found a way, I decide to make a character that would have a way: a Blue Mage. A blood elf blue mage, because blood elves from WoW eat magic. Makes sense to me, and him as well. And then he asks if I want to have WoW Mage spells as well as the blue mage power-learning ability! I say yes because why not, who turns down extra powers? So now I have a mage that has a bunch of utility powers and learns new ones by getting hit by them. I had also taken a bunch of flaws like "overconfidence", an addiction to pain and to gaining new powers, a nemesis, high curiosity, etc. for advantages like "lucky" (get a certain number of rerolls per session) and "daredevil" (getting a huge bonus whenever I attempt something exceptionally dangerous to myself, like for example throwing myself in the way of an oncoming attack!), and basic things like good reflexes, iron will, that sort. And thus we play and we, by strange coincidence, all have ways of learning enemy powers. I can learn them by being hit by them, another player can learn them by consuming the souls of the dead, and another can learn them by seeing them being done and practicing them in downtime. Only one can't, and she's the GM's wife. She starts out with stats well over everyone else's, a god-level tracking power, constant regeneration, and a slew of demon powers. Because she's a demon with amnesia so she doesn't remember being evil. So she's a good demon. We largely ignore her because she always does this poo poo and almost always fails to capitalize on her ridiculous overpoweredness. We roll our eyes and push on. Long story short(er), we assault heaven and fight Zadkiel and his minions to try to take back heaven after chasing a guy inadvertently working for him around multiple worlds and fighting the D-list villains of Marvel. I have picked up a number of interesting powers at this point from them, as well as a couple pokemon and some new characters he thought up on his own. We were also given amulets that gave us Ghost Rider powers so he couldn't just immediately kill us all, since apparently he can't directly kill them. So instead he has his black angels try to do it. We all get a secondary form that does the ghost rider flaming skull thing, and makes all of your damage have added hellfire damage. Now, in his game he's got this thing called Purefire. Purefire is sentient, divine fire that angels and really good mages can wield. There's also Hellfire, which is used by demons and really evil mages, and also the ghost riders. And then there's anti-Purefire, which is like corruption incarnate and used by these guys. Try as they might, no one has ever gotten a character allowed to use any of these, regardless of backstory or plot. We've got character who have caused literal genocide who can't access these. So when one of them conjures up a bow and arrow made of anti-purefire, I take the opportunity and try to catch it. And I catch it with my left hand, only because of the huge boost from my daredevil merit. I takes half my hp in damage from the arrow, then another 30% from the resulting fire in my soul. Then Gabriel (specifically, the Gabriel from the end of the Prophecy movies, who was helping us because the GM always needs to have at least one GMPC with us) jumps into the fray, with his purefire, the anti-purefire I just caught, and the hellfire from the ghost rider amulet all struggling for dominance when I activate my blue magic learning. The GM goes for a bathroom break and tries to figure out what exactly the gently caress happens, because a lot of setting material is in his head only, including the exact workings of these divine fires. His decision? I get the power to summon up a bow that is made of and fires arrows consisting of all three at once. The one that takes the fore is the one that will hurt the most. I conjure up my new bow, and fire off an arrow. It hits Zadkiel in the head, and it goes through, doing x4 damage. He's not dead, but he is weakened so much that God can banish him to hell to be torn apart by demons, which is just as good (and lets the GM bring him back later, slasher movie sequel style). Then God requests we return the amulets and we will get our rewards for aiding in returning things to the way they should be. But I can't take mine off! Also, my fire has turned completely black. The amulet fused with me, and now I permanently have a secondary form that makes me look like this along with some damage reduction. Really awesome way to end the game for me, I thought. Then he tells me that he is planning on sometime soon running his game over IRC for some other people who have moved out of the area, and would love to have me join in and play this character in said game. So I shall be guaranteed many more stories of memorably good and memorably bad quality! oh wow this got long.
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# ? Jan 13, 2012 20:32 |
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I along with a couple gaming friends once joined a play-by-email game of Magic Realm someone was organizing. If you don't know, Magic Realm is a very complex fantasy boardgame of the "RPG with no DM" sort; it's wargame-y but has surprising depth. It's also kind of grognardy and the rulebook is amazingly incomprehensible (but has since been rewritten in plain English more than once, thankfully.) Anyway, playing this game pretty much consists of MOVE CAVES-12 and so on (again, it's old school wargame-y) so the actual gameplay is pretty dry. Except that right off the bat, one of the players takes it upon himself to launch things off by posting a big freeform-RPG style wall-o-text intro about his character (the Elf). I remember it starting with something like Some Weirdo posted:You're downing your ale and planning blah blah [note: he's telling you what your characters are doing and thinking in his post, that's usually a red flag] when suddenly a horrible stench assails your nostrils. It permeates the room and you look around to see the door open, and the Elf walks in taking no notice of (it went on and on) His email didn't even contain a move. The rest of us were just and wondered if he emailed the wrong list or something, but no. And what the hell was it with the Elf "stinking"? There's nothing even vaguely suggesting this anywhere in the rules, or flavour text (which is almost non-existent, it being an old school wargamey grognardy game) or anything. The guy just up and decided that not only were we playing some in-character freeform RPG, but somehow decided that elves stink, too. God, this was probably almost 20 years ago and it's still a profoundly WTF gaming moment. Its like the guy was from a different planet.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 00:38 |
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Shadowrun. Shadowrun never changes. Our runners were based in Seattle. We received a job that, as part of it, required us to drive a freight truck from Point A to Point B. But both points are in Boston, which, in Shadowrun, is essentially in an entirely different country with its own police force/government. We got into Boston illegally with forged papers and it all went downhill from there. The driving part seemed like such a secondary aspect of the job that we didn't put much thought into it. Collectively as a group we're like "Who wants to drive?" and our big troll street samurai "Jack" pipes up, "I'll drive." So we're cruising through some Boston neighborhood in our big truck loaded up with soda, Jack's driving, I'm in shotgun, we've got some guys in the back, and a rigger in his own vehicle pulling up the rear. Cue gangers. Some guy on a bike pulls up beside us and shoots out a tire. "Roll your Drive skill," says the GM. [Game System note: In Shadowrun, your skill is a number that determines how many D6 you get to roll against a specific target number. Most skills range from 1-6, plus you can usually augment your roll with extra dice from various dice pools once per round, but you can usually only add up to a total of your skill. So if you had a 4 in Drive, you could roll 4 dice plus 4 from your Combat Pool and have a really good chance to succeed at whatever task you might need to perform. Most target numbers start around 4, plus or minus modifiers for added difficulty.] Jack's player's eyes go wide and he looks down at his sheet for a moment, then solemnly grabs two dice. "You have a Drive of 2?!" cries the rest of the group. "No, I get 1 from my combat pool." He rolls his two dice... snake-eyes. And in Shadowrun a result of all ones basically means a catastrophic failure. So basically we ended up jack-knifing a semi in the middle of an intersection, taking out several pedestrians and the ganger that originally shot out the tire in the process. More gangers pull up, and Jack proceeds to fire his huge assault rifle out the window at them, full-auto, mowing down any other innocent bystanders who happened to avoid the truck hurtling down the street. Fire-fight commenced but the damage was done. Our rigger picked up that police were on their way and we basically fled into the neighborhood, leaving the truck and everything else behind. Then it was just a series of unfortunate events even trying to get back to Seattle. I vaguely remember jumping out of the third story window of a brothel, getting shot at with laser weapons by military personnel wearing power armor, and "escaping" into the sewers. And we didn't even get paid because we messed everything up. Moral of the story: Stay out of Boston. sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Jan 14, 2012 |
# ? Jan 14, 2012 00:41 |
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Benagain posted:I think you can divide PCs into those who want to end their careers in quiet retirement, those who want to become gods or the nearest possible equivalent, and those who want to stand before the gods (or equivalent) and bellow "NO GODS! NO MASTERS!" before launching The Revolution. I've noticed that every character I've ever made does this: -All my fighter/melee/big strong dude characters always seem to be striving for quiet retirement, owning a tavern, opening a school, etc. -All my greedy/sneaky/thiefy characters end up nursing a huge god complex. They want all the money/power and will stop at nothing to become the gods of money/power. -And all my Mages/wizards seem to be the NO GODS! power to the people revolutionary types. Your post just sort of brought all of that into focus for me.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 01:35 |
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I was feeling nostalgic and pulled all my little stories from the Best Experiences thread (who's ready for WAY TOO MUCH TEXT!?):Doomsayer posted:One of my best experiences with roleplaying was with, shockingly, an evil campaign. I thought it was a horrible idea, but all the players were really insistent on playing evil. It actually ended up with them playing as the bad guys from the campaign (With a few of the same players) we had played during the summer. So while before they were fighting the Generic Dark Lord Meyas, now they were working for him. Doomsayer posted:[Later that year] that same group has managed to (in a near-future Sci-Fi game) clear a skyscraper full of terrorists (ala Die Hard) when they were trapped at a party, shot said terrorist leader through a plate glass window (into an explosion), blew up a gang with a motorcycle (with a flaming rag jammed in the gas tank), rammed a jeep into what was effectively a dire tiger, killed a sniper by heaving a (different) motorcycle through the window he was shooting from, convinced a group of gang members that the pilot was God and the talky character His prophet, fist-fought a clan of extreme sports barbarians, blew up multiple bars, fought several invisible space ninjas, stole a helicopter (in mid-flight), managed to entirely circumvent the Big Bad's monologue using a summoned skeleton (whose ribcage was stuffed full of C4), used said stolen helicopter to fight a demon (the Big Bad) on top of a skyscraper, and the pilot killed that demon in free-fall as he, the demon, and the torn-apart helicopter all plummeted to the earth; all in the same campaign. Doomsayer posted:So, tonight we wrapped up a campaign. It was a weird sort of "accelerated" campaign where we wanted to start a new campaign, but were invested enough in this one that we wanted to see it through. Long story short, it ended up with the party split, 2 working with the BBEG, 4 working against. It was an incredibly intense battle, taking place on a floating chunk of rock hurtling through the air above a massive war between earth and the heavens occurring below them. Towards the end of the battle, they finally bring the BBEG (named Finnoc) to his knees. The Sorceress blasts him off the edge while the fighter hurls his sword into Finnoc's chest to seal the deal and finish it; yet just before it connects one of the players fighting alongside Finnoc uses a move where they switch positions, leaving Finnoc unconscious and the Paladin (the one who sacrificed himself) with a sword in his gut several yards away. Finnoc rises to his feet, attempts to charge the sorceress, she dodges and hurls a bolt of ice into his chest, sending him stumbling off the edge, plummeting to the earth below and he's dead before he hits the ground. Doomsayer posted:My group is playing a modern zombie campaign right now, using D&D 4e rules. The game takes place on the tourist trap resort island of Isla de Vida, sort of a Barbados type of thing. The characters are: Meemmmoriieeesss... I have the best groups. More recently I'm playing a really awesome game of Dark Sun PbP, but that has less stand out awesome moments and is just more or less consistently excellent. Doomsayer fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jan 14, 2012 |
# ? Jan 14, 2012 07:42 |
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I have only ever tabletop gamed once, and it was mediocre, but parts of it, I think, need to be recounted. DnD 4th edition. Dragonborn paladin, dragonborn cleric, elven wizard, halfing rogue, and me as a half-elf Star warlock. Everyone is really interested in playing but no one other than the paladin actually knows what they're doing, and the GM is a great guy but has no clue how to GM. We're running Keep on the Shadowfell and being generally incompetent, but fun is occasionally achieved. Now there are two things you need to understand. One is that the name of the guy playing the cleric was Luciano. Everyone called him Luc, which I always mangled the pronunciation of and called him "loosh" or "looge". The second is that the guy playing the wizard is the best kind of completely insane guy. The character's name is Quarion, who always refers to himself as QUARION, THE GREAT WIZARD. The player always gets in character and puts on a crazy high-pitched voice. Quarion is always going off on tangents about how he is THE GREATEST OF ALL WIZARDS and that he's TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, DON'T YOU KNOW, and he's basically the craziest old man except an elf and with the ability to blow up a battlefield with fireballs. He also constantly casts Ghost Sound or whatever it's called to make it sound like other party members are farting at inappropriate times. At one point, we fight kobolds, and Quarion takes a tiny amount of damage from a javelin. He immediately freaks the gently caress out and makes a beeline for the cleric, screaming that he's horribly wounded and needs healing. The cleric, not quite sure what to make of this, does so, and Quarion proclaims "Ah! You have saved my life! In gratitude, I believe I shall create a new kind of recreational sport, the sport of sliding rapidly down iced slopes, and I shall name it Luge in your honor!" I very nearly died from laughing. (as a side note, the dragonborn paladin's backstory said that he was a member of the Order of the Broken Fist, who are so named because their founder once faced a deadly opponent without any weapons, so he just punched his enemy into submission and broke both of his hands in the process ) Would anyone be opposed to me posting stories from RPing in City of Heroes here? Been there a long time and I have quite a few both best and worst stories.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 13:08 |
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TehWarsmith posted:Would anyone be opposed to me posting stories from RPing in City of Heroes here? Been there a long time and I have quite a few both best and worst stories. I've always been too fearful of what madness I may find to poke my head into the Virtue server, even just for giggles. So at the very least you have one guy's morbid curiosity.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 13:19 |
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Best experience just happened. It will pale in comparison to some of the others, I guess, but it's pretty cool. Two of my friends and I have been gaming since we were 8, and gaming together since we were 13 or so. My one mate's wife has played with us a few times, and my girlfriend hasn't played before (RPGs, that is, we've been doing regular boardgames for a year now). We haven't played any tabletop RPG for about 3 years, apart from a brief foray into 4th ed (hosed up by using Keep On The Shadowfell, which isn't a terrible adventure, but the combats are pretty dull). We're in our 30s now, and started on red box OD&D. My mate said on New Year's Eve that he was going to run a new 4e game as his new year's resolution, and we played tonight. It was wonderful. He managed a really classic D&D feel in 4e, which is accessible to his wife and my girlfriend (in that they don't have to learn a million arcane rules just to play). There were rumours of an evil cult, an investigation, and a short dungeon crawl with two longish encounters and a puzzle. The whole thing only took 4 hours, and that's with three people not familiar with the system and two people who've never played 4e, one of whom has never played any RPG. The DM used puzzle pieces from Mansions Of Madness, but mixed up the mechanics (the rune puzzle, if you're familiar with it, but doing it in the "wrong" order resulted in a small burst of necrotic damage and the puzzle resetting). The encounters were tough but acheivable - I burned through most of my healing surges, my action point, and all my encounter/daily powers by the end, but nobody died - mostly due to great positioning by the newbies. I had heaps and heaps of fun, it feels good to be gaming again, and we're going for fortnightly games until this adventure is finished, a short break while I gear up the sequel which I'm DMing, and then fortnightly again until that's done. Then we'll see if we want to go to a different system or campaign.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 15:49 |
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AlphaDog posted:Best experience just happened. It will pale in comparison to some of the others, I guess, but it's pretty cool. Y'know, this story may not be a tale of insane stunts, or driving a DM to drink. but I think it's one of the best stories of any of the threads so far. Friends having fun with the hobby, and introducing newbies to it in non-horrifying ways. Kinda the entire point of RPGs in my opinion.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 17:44 |
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Ahem.Doc Hawkins posted:What's the best experience ever? Everything is proceeding as I have forseen it.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 17:52 |
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As long as we're feeling nostalgic, I'll repost my contribution to the last thread and add a new one that I just remembered from ages ago.Kestral posted:Had one of my best moments from the player side of the screen on Saturday - one of those sessions where the game is over, you're turning out the lights, cleaning up the dishes, putting the chairs in order, and you can't stop thinking about the game. I woke up thinking about this scene today, and it's clear I'm going to have to write it down somewhere to get it out of my head, so it might as well be here. This next one is from almost six years ago, under Exalted 1E. I've posted it on RPGnet before under an old ID, and it's been making the rounds there and on a couple of other forums ever since whenever Exalted comes up. Needless to say I'm proud of it, but mostly I'm proud of my players since I had almost no hand in it whatsoever. This was originally posted in a thread called "[Exalted] Actual Play Atrocities" Kestral on RPGnet posted:Hoo-boy. Guess it's time for this.
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# ? Jan 14, 2012 19:45 |
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It occurs to me that the way we play CoH is more like tabletop than anything else. We have a close-knit group of friends with a lot of different characters, we come up with interesting things that could happen if you put different characters together, and then whoever is the primary architect of the current plotline acts as the ST. This is greatly assisted by the Mission Architect, the buggy but extremely flexible player-made content creator. This particular story is about the single greatest thing I have ever seen someone do with the Architect. It's also rather short, which is nice. A friend's character, who can best be described as a nerdy as gently caress teenager who wants to be both Green Arrow and Batman (tech bow, crazy trick arrows, detective skills, genius-level intellect) goes to investigate why the power has died in an office building. He calls in me, a psychic who, in addition to powerful telepathy and telekinesis, is capable of molding reality with her mind to produce protective shields and teleportation effects. She senses something very ... wrong inside the building, but does not sense any human minds, inside this large office building in the middle of work hours. They head inside, and meet up with a police inspector who happens to have supernatural powers and a magical sword. (He's a pretty cool guy.) They search the building, and find the staff. They have all been transformed into completely blank, white, faceless silhouettes that have been rendered mute. Then they realize that they can't talk, and indeed no sound can be produced inside the building. My character compensates by relaying thoughts between the three of them, but they are still freaked out, because the things are following them. What the ST did was so amazingly simple. She put all the NPCs inside in blank white tights and blank masks. She set them as hostile to the players.. Then she removed all of their attacks and powers. So these featureless things followed us through the entire building, crowding around our characters, trying to get closer to us, and the farther into the building we went, the larger the crowd got, until the rooms of the office building were packed full of mute shadows of human beings, surrounding us on every side and just ... standing there. And of course, she told us to turn off our sound as we went into the building. We were so freaked out and tense that when some of the Silenced actually moved through the crowd and attacked us we jumped out of our costumes. These ones were different, they were actually wearing equipment, though it didn't make them any less terrifying. They were also brutally hard to fight, and if not for the detective we wouldn't have made it. Eventually we made it to the top floor and went into an office. We looked out the window, and saw that the same thing was happening all over the city. The people, all the people, were being Silenced, and the buildings were being whitewashed into featureless white rectangles. I sent a mental message to a contact outside the city, who was still in control of herself, but confirmed that this was happening everywhere. To make a long and tense story short, we stumbled upon a mage that had managed to protect himself from the phenomenon, who told us that the Silence was a manifestation of the Void, the nothingness between dimensions, that was attempting to absorb our world into itself. He told us that the only way to stop it was with the opposite of Nothing and Silence; Imagination and Creativity, and told us where we needed to go. We met a girl who appeared to be made of ink. She left a dripping trail behind her, and wherever the ink dripped it turned to a rainbow of colors. The aggresive, armored Silenced had pinned her down, but we fought them off and saved her, and then she and the mage transported us to ... somewhere else. What happened next wasn't clear, but when we returned to our own world, the Silence was gone, and we could speak and hear again. The world and the people were restored. My character actually did some loops in the air and shouted for joy. We asked the rainbow-girl, Inki, what she had done, and she just smiled and said that the Void was no more. She had "colored in the blanks." We asked the ST why our characters had been spared, and she said that the inspector had been protected by the spells on his sword, and that the Silence had not touched the psychic because "it saw her as its own." For the archer there was no explanation, at least not one she could explain, and that disturbed both the players and the characters greatly. The ST in question never, ever does anything without a reason, and will fit plot points into place years later. We all remembered what had happened, as did the mage, but no one else had any knowledge of how close the world had come to oblivion. We agreed it was better that way.
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# ? Jan 15, 2012 03:02 |
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Always good to hear about the AE being used in nifty and creative ways (I didn't even realize you could make enemies with no attacks). All I've ever done was a gimmick short set where it boiled down to 'Robot Masterminds Robots are stealing a giant laser'. The rare occasions people ran through it they didn't hate it at least after I worked out some kinks (Long recharge single target to Summon only heals on enemies good. Empathy Area heals on summoners bad) Testing in there for various gimmicks reminded me the hard way that NPC powers do not always = PC powers. I think it's fixed now, but at first NPC robot mastermind Protect Bots summoned those forcefield generators instead of casting single target buffs. Imagine a whole room full of shield generators. Now imagine the Empathy area heal mixed in. Yeah, that got out of hand fast. Also, a bunch of enemies armed with nothing but damage auras. In hindsight that would be unfair to stalkers what with the damage breaking stealth, but that's no problem damage auras do like, half a Brawl's damage per tick-OH MY GOD why is it doing that much damage!? Oh, right. Enemies. So an added layer of how impressed I am by your story, is what your ST probably had to go through to make sure the whole mission functioned. EDIT: An added question. How did your ST go along for the ride? Did they follow along with stacked stealth? Did you run it in test mode with godmode/enemies ignore on ST so they wouldn't get distracted? Section Z fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jan 15, 2012 |
# ? Jan 15, 2012 03:57 |
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The ST was actually playing the inspector, and narration was mostly delivered through him. We usually do something like that. At one point there was a series of missions where the main villain hired a bunch of our villain characters to help her steal weapons for her plan - the people she hired weren't important to the plot, but they let everyone follow along and show the players what was going on behind the curtain.
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# ? Jan 15, 2012 04:05 |
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There should probably be some sort of explanation for the thread title in the OP.
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# ? Jan 15, 2012 10:00 |
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Benjamin Black posted:There should probably be some sort of explanation for the thread title in the OP. In a terrible group there's usually one person who smells like cat piss. In my groups it'd probably (unintentionally) be me. I have many cats. I remember a quote from one of the previous Best Experiences threads about a game of... I forget if it was Exalted or Five Rings or what, but one of the main characters was a demigod whose badass moment of the quote was getting every person in Japan and of Japanese descent to call out to Amaterasu to show they had not forgotten their mother goddess. I don't remember a drat thing about it beyond that, does anyone know what I"m talking about?
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# ? Jan 15, 2012 10:41 |
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Doesn't sound like Exalted or L5R, but maybe Scion?
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# ? Jan 15, 2012 10:56 |
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Flavivirus posted:Doesn't sound like Exalted or L5R, but maybe Scion? It very well may be; I honestly have no idea what system it was, I only remember that it makes me warm and fuzzy and every time I read it.
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# ? Jan 15, 2012 11:30 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 04:36 |
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Malachite_Dragon posted:I remember a quote from one of the previous Best Experiences threads about a game of... I forget if it was Exalted or Five Rings or what, but one of the main characters was a demigod whose badass moment of the quote was getting every person in Japan and of Japanese descent to call out to Amaterasu to show they had not forgotten their mother goddess. I don't remember a drat thing about it beyond that, does anyone know what I"m talking about?
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# ? Jan 15, 2012 15:50 |