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Psalmanazar posted:I just overheard some people talk about how their DM hands out Xbox style achievements for cool stuff characters do. Also one of them just said "As a furry" and another said "as an anime fan" to start their statements. They are also apparently running a My Little Pony themed game. I am going to start doing that thing bolded. And continue to not do the thing from everything else in that story. I already hand out extra XP for that kind of thing, but some pre-defined achievements (some that they know about, and some that they don't) can't hurt at all.
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Feb 27, 2012 00:52
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If you give people rewards for stuff, then it reduces the perceived inherent value in the action. For example, kids are less likely to find schoolwork engaging if their parents pay them for letter grades. Achievements encourage people to do certain stuff, but they lessen the enjoyment of the action in favor of the short-lived rush of getting an award. Choke-slamming Satan is reward enough on its own. Just let it happen.
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Feb 27, 2012 01:05
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Male Man posted:If you give people rewards for stuff, then it reduces the perceived inherent value in the action. For example, kids are less likely to find schoolwork engaging if their parents pay them for letter grades. On the other hand, if my parents had paid me to get high letter grades, you bet your manly rear end I would have brought home straight A's whenever possible. v  v I never had an allowance, so money was a motivator for me.
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Feb 27, 2012 01:09
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Male Man posted:If you give people rewards for stuff, then it reduces the perceived inherent value in the action. For example, kids are less likely to find schoolwork engaging if their parents pay them for letter grades. Because I've read things that say just the opposite. Edit: Rewarding people for just doing stuff is what lowers their intrinsic motivation. Rewarding them for doing things WELL is a good motivator. Chaltab fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 01:18
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Chaltab posted:Is this actually true or are you making it up? Yeah, it's called the overjustification effect, and it's a real thing but as usual it's a little more complicated than the pop-psych version of it. If there's a simple take-home message at all, it's that you probably don't need to reward people with tangible benefits for doing what they're already more than happy to do spontaneously: everything else depends on the kind of reward and the circumstances. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 01:29
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The experiment I remember was to charge parents money when their children missed school. Attendance went down. Welp!
Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 02:02
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Been following this thread for a while but I haven't contributed anything because I don't roleplay anymore. I just remembered a pretty good one though so let me tell you about the only time I played Shadowrun. It was at Dragoncon in Atlanta a few years back (don't remember what year exactly but it was at least three or four years ago). I was all kinds of excited about trying new game systems but there wasn't much interest in most of them and almost every pickup game that wasn't D&D wound up getting canceled. Luckily though a friend and I managed to get into a Shadowrun game with precon characters and a published adventure. I got a street samurai, who I think was human. I seem to remember him getting the heavy weapons troll. The adventure revolved around a rich kid who got kidnapped, and our job was basically to see if maybe his parents could save money by hiring us for less than the ransom and having us go rescue him, and if we failed, to go ahead and drop off the ransom for them because getting the kid back was what mattered. We did some digging and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the kid had set us up, this was all a big scheme to extort money from his parents. Since the Fixer who set us up with the job was my character's contact (level three or something like that, they told me it meant we were pretty close) it was pretty easy for us to find her and start asking very suspicious questions. When she acted offended that we thought the mission was a setup, we reasoned that she must be in on it so we decided to tie her up and interrogate her. After a while of this and us getting increasingly frustrated on our inability to browbeat her into confessing, it dawned on us that the Fixer was innocent. We had just busted into her place and started hitting her for no goddamn reason. At that point I got really worried and had a quick exchange with the GM.  : Wait a minute, a Fixer's job is to be well-connected, right? : Yeah.: Which means she knows plenty of other paramilitary thugs like us?: It's likely, yeah.: Oh poo poo. poo poo. Guys, there's no way we can leave her alive after what we've done.Being a street samurai, I figured I'd probably have some kind of code of honor that would require me to do the deed since it was my contact and my fuckup. We snuck her into an alley behind a Piggly Wiggly (or some Shadowrun equivalent, I don't remember) and I decapitated her with my katana and we heaved the body into the dumpster and ran off. Now the ransom deadline is coming up, we have no clues at all, and we've accomplished nothing other than murdering what I understand to be my character's best friend in all the world. Despite this nobody has yet questioned the idea that the kid is the mastermind behind all of this. We figure no problem, we'll just go meet them at the docks like we were instructed, and we'll pull some crazy hero poo poo once they show up and everything will be okay. We get down to the docks only to find out that they sent a robot to meet us. Not a big robot we can ride or anything like that, just a little R/C helicopter type thing. It has a little door it opens up as it hovers in front of us, waiting for us to put the ransom money in. At this point we're all stumped, and with no aces up any of our sleeves we just shrug and put a penny in it. It flies off and we're completely unable to track it. For most of the adventure the other players have been laughing their asses off and the GM has been looking a little bewildered. He says "okay... They didn't even include an ending that would fit that, so I'll just read the ending you were supposed to get because it's funnier that way." He tells us the ending in the book has the kid and his friends take us all out for cake and ice cream. He says it's the happiest ending he's ever seen in a Shadowrun adventure. Instead we have a dead kid, a dead Fixer, no pay, and two pissed-off rich parents who would surely have terrible things done to us if this were a campaign instead of a one-shot that ended with us on the docks realizing we were the demons.
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Feb 27, 2012 02:04
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Doc Hawkins posted:The experiment I remember was an experiment to increase school attendance. The intervention was to charge parents money when their children missed a day. Attendance went down. Welp! "Hey we're just going to punish somebody else when you miss school, so don' do that!" Combined with the fact that the only kids who really have an option/desire to skip school (fourth graders aren't going to purposefully miss the bus or something because what the gently caress else does a fourth grader have to do?) are going to be angsty preteens and teens who "hate their parents and you have the most ill thought-out consequence imaginable!
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Feb 27, 2012 02:07
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Chaltab posted:Is this actually true or are you making it up? For real, although I'm necessarily simplifying things. I'm not addressing motivation at all. Hell, achievements are probably a really good motivator. I'm only discussing how much enjoyment the players are getting out of the game. To be fair, the overjustification effect only applies to tangible awards. I don't know whether achievements would affect as a tangible award or not, so to be on the safe side I recommend that you just compliment players for doing cool stuff. So, you know, what you already do.
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Feb 27, 2012 02:26
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I don't give out acheivements after sessions, but instead I give out bonuses to skill checks if a player puts extra effort into narrating it to be as dramatic or cool as possible. A few days ago I ran a one-shot of Castle Falkenstein and in the dramatic climax the party forced the dastardly villain to admitting to a serious crime. This was an opportunity for the eavesdropping NPC captain of the guard to reveal himself and attempt to arrest the villain, who responded by drawing a pistol. Party members tried and failed to leap in the path of the bullet or draw their pistols faster and the captain of the guard was shot square in the chest, a critical wound that would likely take his life unless attended to immediately. This was the spotlight moment for one player, who had been playing a renowned physician during the game and yet had managed to bungle the moments when he needed it most, appearing hopelessly ignorant in conversations with the lowly castle doctor and failing to treat the wounds of an injured party member, resulting in botched injuries that would take weeks to heal. These past failures must have been weighing on his mind because, when I asked him to make a simple Physician skill check, he instead launched into a narration. The Physician fell to his knees beside the dying captain, a series of flashbacks racing through his mind. He remembered when he was a child witnessing his uncle being shot in a duel (actually part of his backstory that had come up earlier), seeing the life slip away from a beloved relative with a similar fatal chest wound. He remembered struggling to get through medical school, finally perservering despite regularly failing at the healing talents he relied on. He remembered the faces of a procession of patients he had tried to save but had failed. Finally, remembering his failure at healing the party member, a character who in the backstory was a stalwart friend since childhood, but who now struggled by with a single wound left, the good doctor reached for his bag of tools, closed his eyes and whispered: "Not this time!" He succeeded spectacularly at saving the captain's life with a high-valued card play and the +3 bonus I gave him for his amazing narration.
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Feb 27, 2012 02:27
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Doc Hawkins posted:The experiment I remember was to charge parents money when their children missed school. Attendance went down. Welp! I haven't read that one, but there was a trial done ni Israel where they started to charge parents for collecting their kids late after school. basically the teachers were babysitting for an hour and couldn't go home. Rather than causing people to collect the kids promptly, they actually left them there longer and in greater numbers because paying the money negated any guilt.
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Feb 27, 2012 02:35
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^^^ That is what seems to happen, yeah. Commodification of social pressure weakens it.GruntyThrst posted:"Hey we're just going to punish somebody else when you miss school, so don' do that!" Hahaha, yeah, except the whole reason for the experiment was to find ways to counteract problematic numbers of kids being kept home to work in the house/fields. It wasn't held at your school, you see. Kosmonaut posted:
There really should be a Shadowrun Fiasco playset.
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Feb 27, 2012 02:48
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Kosmonaut posted:Shadowrun Gone Bad It's like a Michael Mann movie set in the future.  AgentF posted:Doctor: The Atonement Ahahaha, nice, I love it when game mechanics and improv theater meet at a glorious crossroads like that.  Also, should I crosspost my WH40k Deathwatch highlights in here or keep them in the 40k Roleplay thread?
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Feb 27, 2012 04:38
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InfiniteJesters posted:Also, should I crosspost my WH40k Deathwatch highlights in here or keep them in the 40k Roleplay thread? poo poo, if there any good of course post em here, that's what this thread is for! Edit: Actually if they're terrible post them here too.
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Feb 27, 2012 05:10
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If you insist! Allow me to recollect the highlights of our group, the Emperor's Angels of Failure. DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
*Brother Mathias of the Imperial Fists (Devastator) *Brother Gottfried of the Black Templars (Assault) *Brother Sanguis Aerugo of the Blood Angels (Techmarine) *Sanguinary Priest Anvilus of the Blood Angels (Apothecary) *Brother-Librarian Calibos of the Dark Angels (Librarian, obviously) ADVENTURE THE FIRST - Fun Times With Tyranid Scout Organisms: In Which The Angels Descend From The Heavens to Retrieve A Wayward Techpriest With Sensitive Intel On Chaos Activity Before Tyranids Eat The Planet And Look Like Total Morons In The Process. -One Marine consistently throwing grenades backwards -A Tyranid gaunt surviving a direct hit from a missile while others around him are destroyed due to bizarre dice flukes -Our Techmarine punching things so hard they EXPLODE.  -My character finishing off a 'Nid warrior by punching its head off and claiming it as a trophy. -Our Devastator's rockets hitting everything but the ground. -My character's bolter jamming on the first turn of combat in the first battle of our first session of the game. -Our group failing hysterically to dispose of a quaint group of 24 'gaunts and 2 'Nid warriors while an Imperial Commissar conversely wracks up kills like he's a Primarch. -Our Devastator knocking a Trygon silly with a concussion rocket -Our Assault Marine dumping a grenade down said Trygon's throat...For 1 damage.  -A random Guardsman finishing off said Trygon by just un-loving-loading on it with a heavy bolter. (Error here on GM's part RE: full-auto fire, but too insane to deny.) ADVENTURE THE SECOND - Bumper Cars/Tanks: In Which The Angels Slowly Learn To Harness The Emperor's Chariots And Hunt For A Heretical Ordos Xenos Inquisitor. -Our Blood Angels' Baal Predator attempts to manuever out of the enemy's line of fire and runs into a wall. -The uber-Commissar joined us for an encore and demanded that his tank's pilot drive him close, that he might hit them with his sword. -A tank in our midst (mechanized assault mission!) turned traitor at an inopportune time, but we thwarted by dogpiling it with our own tanks for maximum tank shock. -After dismounting, we interrupt a Chaos ritual in a building with excellent efficiency, partly thanks to our arrived-mid-game Librarian, who does a good job of playing up his secretive schtick. Our Black Templar hears vox chatter from the body of a dead cultist, listens in, hears that our target is sending reinforcements to check out the clatter, and our Black Templar dares the heretic scum to come to him. He then crushes the voxcaster. What a guy!  -Our Librarian prettymuch instantly frying a Night Lords Chaos Marine in one turn. Our Librarian gets poo poo done! ADVENTURE THE THIRD - If You Run Out Of Targets, Shoot Yer Buddy: In Which The Angels Get New Toys, Shoot Lots Of People Dead, And Must Help 8-Foot-Tall Angry Men Work Through Their Differences: -My character repeatedly discovering the joy of a Storm Bolter + Metal Storm rounds and removing huge chunks of enemy heretic hordes. -A pair of Dreadnoughts having their drat assault cannons jam. Fortunately they had storm bolters in their other arms!  -Getting attacked by some apparent Alpha Legion moles disguised as Ultramarines. -Coming upon some Dark Angels firing on unarmed civilians for apparent Chaos cooperation. We got them to come along with us instead. We concluded that the covert Alpha Legion presence is inciting the citizens to paranoia, causing them to fire upon the loyalist forces which would then cause the loyalists to fire back, sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt. -Regrouping with the Company Captains of the three Space Marine battle groups also assigned to the operation, and attempting to discern where amongst the Space Marines the traitors are hiding...Only for about half of the Captains' Honour Guard to turn against us as a Alpha Legion warband leader IN FREAKING TERMINATOR ARMOR and his Chaos Sorceror buddy teleport down to face us. -Once again our Librarian gets poo poo done and fries the Sorceror with disturbing ease. -Relentless firepower finally downs the warband leader, only for him to turn into A GODDAMN DAEMON PRINCE. -Through more dakka and our Librarian's mad skills (and also the Captains drawing most of the fire that would otherwise hit us) we down the Daemon Prince. As we regain our bearings and lick our wounds, our Librarian goes over to examine the remains of the Sorceror's armor...And finds it bears the chapter markings of the Dark Angels. poo poo. JUST. GOT. REAL. ----- Thus concludes the Chronicles of Fail for now. More mayhem to report in about a week! InfiniteJesters fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 05:13
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Male Man posted:If you give people rewards for stuff, then it reduces the perceived inherent value in the action. For example, kids are less likely to find schoolwork engaging if their parents pay them for letter grades. Exception: Commission-based sales people and other ENTJ-ish individuals who directly co-relate Numerical Worth=Inherent Worth. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 06:10
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Yawgmoth posted:You are the best DM, please run a game that I can play in. I actually can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not  Some people really hate that style of gaming. Psalmanazar posted:I just overheard some people talk about how their DM hands out Xbox style achievements for cool stuff characters do. Also one of them just said "As a furry" and another said "as an anime fan" to start their statements. They are also apparently running a My Little Pony themed game. I've been sorta doing the bolded bit for years. Tales of your exploits spread, and suddenly you're not "Regdaz" anymore, you walk into town and people are calling you "Regdaz Dragonslayer" (or Kingsbane, or The Traitor, or The Chicken Hearted, or whatever). I might start getting them to write down cool stuff they did in the style of xbox acheivements though, or set them tasks for official titles, like stopping the chief bandit then being able to call themselves "Protector of the King's Highway". (Edit: that will be hilarious once they accumulate several titles, like the bit in A Knight's Tale). Playing a game where you pretend to be pony fans fans playing a game about ponies would be kind of cool, but I get the sense that's not what you mean. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 07:16
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AlphaDog posted:Playing a game where you pretend to be pony fans fans playing a game about ponies would be kind of cool, but I get the sense that's not what you mean.  : My character whines and rolls a die. : Okay, roll the dice to see what he gets.: I got a seven.: Alright, after modifiers your character rolls a natural eight.: He reminds his GM about his +2 leather saddle.: Yup, he reminds you a bit testily that again, he didn't forget. The GM describes to your character in stirring detail how the results of the dice roll teach his character about the importance of friendship.: Awesome. My character starts clopping. : My character clops with you and says "thus, the learned garner more appreciation for many of the show's subtleties."Something like that? Kosmonaut fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 07:58
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Jesters, your stories aren't really...stories. They're just a list of things that happened. Had a D&D game today. We got XP from last session (finally taking us to level 3). We got achievements, which are just verbal and don't do anything. Mine got "Uhhh, you die", because I pulled out a soul-arrow after immediately seeing it kill someone else, dying instantly. (Luckily, it led me to an adventure as a nearly-undead zombified husk, so I wasn't out of the session). This week our party cooperated a ton more. We got a mission to contact Jorm, who turned out to be. Northlander and a prisoner. We talked our way into the prison (by explaining that we were doing prison ministry). We ended up going to a vault of the dead, and in a battle with an EXTREMELY tough vampire spawn. Despite my best efforts to rebuke it, it kept turning gaseous. The way we got it to turn back? Disrupting its grave. Our characters would do damage, get messed with, and then have to goad him back into a corporeal form. After botching a "knowledge: religion" check, my character knew that staking vampires somehow killed them, so it took us several tries to figure out where and how. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Feb 27, 2012 08:32
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Kosmonaut posted:
Nah. More like you freeform or act out the being-a-pony-fan part while playing an actual game about ponies. Since I know jack and poo poo about my little pony, I can't comment on how you'd actually do it. You can do the same thing with AD&D by playing the game-as-written while pretending to be awful grognards (and have arguments about obvious rules, note-passing to the DM, stealing the treasure before other PCs arrive, stupid poo poo with portable holes or immovable rods, whatever). Or Vampire: The Whateveritisnow while pretending to be super edgy goth kids. Or RIFTS as terrible anime fans. It's hilarious with the right group, but if you get someone who is actually like that and they realise that everyone's mocking them... well, to be honest it just gets funnier.
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Feb 27, 2012 08:33
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Hmm your idea seems pretty hip but I kind of want to try mine now. I've never watched My Little Pony so I think it'd be a lot of fun to get a few drunk people together to roll random dice and declare what asinine things their bronies are doing to get kicked out of the game room at the convention. My Little Brony: Journey to the Hotel Security Office
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Feb 27, 2012 08:47
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Vampire Player: The Masquerading As A Force Of Darkness When You're A Pimply Fat Nerd.
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Feb 27, 2012 08:49
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AlphaDog posted:Vampire Player: The Masquerading As A Force Of Darkness When You're A Pimply Fat Nerd.
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Feb 27, 2012 09:12
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Colon V posted:Didn't White Wolf already do that joke? Like, a decade ago? You talking about the picture with the teenagers sitting around sticking daggers into their hands and rolling human bones and poo poo? I wish I could find it.
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Feb 27, 2012 09:21
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How I got my username, AKA The indomitable Count Fitzgarraldo This one's from my current gaming group, and it's how I ended up being called a smug sociopath. It's an odd mix of awesome and atrocious roleplaying. The tale of Count Fitzgarraldo comes from my first experience with Vampire: Dark Ages. I was actually quite thrilled about getting to do some more serious RP'ing after mostly playing large amounts of Paranoia, and a campaign of Praedor (which ended up with my character being a pirate wrestler called Ratface who wore the skulls of his defeated enemies as decoration, but that's a whole other story of awfulness). At this point the little I knew about Vampire was what I had read on reviews of Vampire: Bloodlines, so I mostly expected a lot of backstabbing and lurking in the shadows. So, I made myself an obfuscation/awareness-maxed Nosferatu called Count Fitzgarraldo. I had just discovered Kinski/Herzog-movies, so he was a mixup of several Kinski characters. His name, from Fitzgarraldo, his general look and lifestyle from Nosferatu, and his personality... from motherfucking Aguirre Now, Fitzgarraldo had a whole bunch of personality flaws, including territorial, vengeful and a few more. Essentially, I played him as the most sadistic, conniving and vindictive motherfucker you could ever imagine. At first I made his moves very meticulously. While other players were duking it out on the town square and impaling each other on crosses stolen from the town church, I made preparations to enter the city unnoticed (in a coffin) and turning the town cemetery into my territory. Then, two things happened. First, the GM introduced an NPC that decided to proclaim himself the town prince, and enforce strict laws upon the PC's. We obviously didn't take it well. Second, one of the players, Abe, rolled a new character, called Bellatrix. Yes, Bellatrix. As in, belladonna+dominatrix. A female character with maxed out appearance and a bunch of skills like Majesty and Summon. Essentially he wanted to play seductress. We all knew it would be awful. Now, a little about Abe. He took this RP'ing very seriously. Seriously, as in, he always had to win, and usually make other players suffer in the process. His characters often were annoying gimmicks meant to piss off or gently caress over other players. He has overall killed a few campaigns by starting a spiral of backstabbing by trying to gently caress over everyone else, even in co-operation-oriented games. And this was Vampire, so we knew it would be bad. The GM tried to subtly warn him. Subtly warn, as in making an NPC exactly like Bellatrix and having the NPC try to seduce Fitzgarraldo. This led to Fitzgarraldo decapitating her and putting the severed head on display in the trophy room of his castle. Too bad Abe wasn't all that great on reading "subtle". So, as the only PC, he sided with the prince, and allied against the rest of the party. So, we met him at an elysium with another player, Mark, to try to convince him to ally with the PC's. Not one to listen to reason, Abe instead decided to start throwing around his powers at the elysium, which led to Mark torching his PC's face off. The prince's men arrive, and me and Mark end up on the run at the countryside. They give chase, and Bellatrix accompanies them. And summons us. I have enough willpower to resist it, but Mark doesn't and he gets captured. Out of loyalty for the rest of the group (altogether, 5 of us), he chews his tongue off when prince attempts to question him about other conspirators. I manage to escape and go into hiding. GM: So, Abe, what do you do now? Abe: I'm going to keep summoning him every day.  *A moment of silence* Me: You know I'm going to loving kill you now. With her face burned off, Bellatrix needed some time to heal. Luckily for me, Abe was being vain as gently caress with is character, and decided that getting her good looks back was more important than dealing with the vengeful nutbag Nosferatu out for her blood. This gave me about a a week in game time to get my poo poo together. Mark, whom they had captured, was to be executed in ten days. That's when I would strike. But I couldn't do it alone, so I proceeded to build myself a team of assassins. I hired ten mercenaries, and proceeded to turn them into into vampires. I spent the ten days training the gently caress out of them and covertly buying supplies, such as crossbows, a ballista, and a bunch of tremere-made vampire killer arrows. All the time I'm doing this, Abe's throwing notes at the GM as well. To ensure his safety, I'm sure. I'm positive there will be a counterattack, and he's scheming to assasinate me. I tell the GM my plan. Me: So, the prince's castle is pretty heavily guarded, right? GM: Yeah, guards on the walls, and the gates are impenetrable. Me: What about the poo poo chute? GM: The what? Me: Old castles had poo poo chutes on the outer walls, you know, for the crap to drop into the trench. GM: (Barely holding his laughter) Well now that you said it, yeah, you can climb through there! So, my plan is to sneak in through the poo poo chute with my band of merry Nosferatus, get through the castle and sneak on the roofboards of the crown room, where Mark's trial is being held, then murder the gently caress out of Bellatrix. I had a deal with the GM, that they would fire once I snapped my fingers. All this time, Abe's passing notes to the GM, and being smug as hell. The ceremony/trial begins. Mark's there, chained, and Bellatrix is standing next to the king, proud as gently caress. Rest of the party, not uncovered as conspirators, are in the crowd, watching. The prince begins his speech, talking about the horrible crimes Mark has committed against his empire. Abe is gloating. And I snap my my fingers. GM stops talking, stares at me. The whole party is now wondering what's going on. GM starts to laugh, then begins rolling dice. GM: Abe, you're hit with a ballista bolt. Abe: What the gently caress!? GM: Then an arrow... and another... and another. Altogether you're hit by 6 bolts. The ballista bolt impales you into the wall. You go into torpor. Abe: What? What the gently caress is this? GM: (To the rest of the party) You turn to look up, and you see 10 nosferatus in black cloaks disappear into the attic. The whole party:  GM: Also, a strange odor of poop floats around the room. Me: I told you I'd loving kill you, Abe. Now the rest of the party is laughing, as I start to tell them how my plan had worked. The GM's laughing his rear end off, and telling me he allowed this because the poo poo chute idea was so awesome. Abe's silent, and his lip's quivering. Then he lets it out. Abe: You're... You're a smug sociopath! And I pity you!  And those notes he sent to the GM? They were all detailed descriptions about how he wanted Mark to be tortured and executed  Fitzgarraldo went to live through the whole campaign, killing several of Abe's following insufferable characters, and being a source of a whole lot of other fondly remembered stories. A smug sociopath fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 09:36
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Kosmonaut posted:You talking about the picture with the teenagers sitting around sticking daggers into their hands and rolling human bones and poo poo? I wish I could find it. Gaming experience: it turns out that when you negotiate with an elder dragon, you really should bring more to the table than "we may know people who might be willing to enter their own deals with you, but that's, like, totally their decision, nothing to do with us, what no we won't bring them to you." Otherwise you can easily end up entering a different deal altogether, namely "do whatever the dragon tells you or get the gently caress eaten." My players have to work on their negotiation strategies.
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Feb 27, 2012 09:37
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Kosmonaut posted:You talking about the picture with the teenagers sitting around sticking daggers into their hands and rolling human bones and poo poo? I wish I could find it. This one?  That was actually the inspiration for me and a friend creating a very very rules-lite WoD type system and a series of mini-settings. Gamer: The Embarrassment. Pensioner: The Complaining. High School: The Cliquening. Sportsfan: The Drinking. Goth Band: The Bloodied Sadness Of The Eternal Dark. And so on. We played a few. They were kind of funny, especially the Pensioner one. Then we discovered Everyone Is John and just played that instead, often with a previous agreement on theme. Edit: Somewhere, I have a PDF of the rules and some of the "settings", it has lovely lineart and everything. I'll try to find it to upload. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 09:46
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Yeah, that's the one I was talking about. Please tell me you made a Pensioner splatbook. A smug sociopath posted:I love player-on-player backstabbing stories, got any more? Kosmonaut fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 09:48
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Kosmonaut posted:
Sure, actually there are multiple just from Fitzgarraldo. I'll post more when I have time to write them up.
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Feb 27, 2012 10:00
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No splatbooks or anything. I think the format was 2 pages of rules, 2 pages of skills/abilities, and then one page per "setting", which would have been specific rules (A pensioner may not have a Physical stat of more than 2, but get "go off on a tangent" as a free skill, that sort of thing) and a few adventure ideas. We were talking about trying to sell the PDF if we got enough settings, but there's really only a limited number of these things you can look at before they're not funny any more. -- A gaming story: We played Deadlands, after several abortive attempts to get started. I pulled whatever special card you can draw during creation that means you're actually undead. I played an undead huckster (spellcaster), and I unintentionally cheesed the system. I took a spell that let me reload 2 bullets each round, and I carried 2 sawn off shotguns for loving up anything that got too close to me. That meant, in the end, that without using any magic except that minor reload trick, I could fire 4 shells int eh first round and 2 shells every round thereafter for some ungodly amount of damage as long as I was close to the enemy. Being undead, I couldn't be "winded" easily (winding is like being temporarily hosed up by damage and unable to act), so it turned out the best tactic was to cast some sort of shield-type thing, then just charge forward and blaze away with my shotguns. The Gunslinger PCs would sit back and pick off any enemies that tried to run away from this small irishman with the magically reloading scattergun. If they got too far away, the Mad Scientist PC would cut them down with his steam powered gyrostabilised sniper rifle. It was entirely unintentional, and extremely hilarious, especially since I'd built the guy as a sneak-thief-gambler-wizard not as a tank. If I recall correctly, the GM ended up dropping a steam engine on me, or it might have been an ironclad. I was sitll "alive" under there, but since the other guys couldn't figure out how the get it off me, they had to leave it, and me, there. So I rolled up a giant drunken irish priest who did the exact same thing except with shield spell, strength spell, and a magic (holy?) club. The huckster was unintentional, but the preacher man was entirely planned. The GM from that game has promised to get me back when I get my Deadlands/FATE game up and running. Deadlands is awesome, but I'm sure we weren't playing it "right". VVVVVV You, on the other hand, are doing it exactly right. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 10:13
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So my friends and I have just picked up Pathfinder, our first attempt into the world of RPGs, and I have discovered something, my friends are too drat clever. On our 4th gaming session ever, me DMing and them at level 2, I wanted to try a difficult monster for them to attempt, so I made an encounter with a mighty bone golem, far far above their fighting ability, but I wanted to see how they handled it and of course I would do something to let them survive should they all fall to it. The creature would start asleep, and be woken by any attack or attempt to move past it and start a brutal battle. However they had a better idea. One of them took a magical feather they had that when a command work is said it suddenly transforms into a 50-foot oak tree, placed it delicately inside its open chest, and said the word. So now there is a beautiful magical oak tree in a dungeon with a large ribcage around the trunk. Then later in the same dungeon a swarm of flesh eating cockroaches starts buzzing towards them. The wizard out of offensive spells, the warriors discovering their weapons are useless against the sheer numbers of bugs, they calmly think of a plan. One person takes his small barrel of lantern oil, pours it on the barbarian, the other gives the barbarian his amulet that absorbs fire damage. He then walks forwards, gains the attentions of the hungry cockroaches, waits for them to swarm all over him, then the wizard uses a simple ignition spell. A few minutes of burning barbarian later, he laughs at the crispy roaches as the amulet is handed back to the proper owner. Many battles later they are wandering along a narrow ledge, only wide enough for one person at a time, when they are ambushed by a nasty creature who managed to get in the middle of the party. Disorganized and in a bad initiative order, the wizard looks at his spell list, and figures something fun. Party takes damage, people getting paralyzed for 30 rounds of combat and such, finally it is the wizards turn. "I cast enlarge creature." "Wait what?" I say. It takes me a moment to realize what he is doing. "Well the creature resists it... *fails will save* Well... It just became giant and fell off the cliff I guess." I think I'm going to have fun messing with them, as they will have ruining my plans. Fashionable Jorts fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 11:03
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My Lovely Horse posted:Gaming experience: it turns out that when you negotiate with an elder dragon, you really should bring more to the table than "we may know people who might be willing to enter their own deals with you, but that's, like, totally their decision, nothing to do with us, what no we won't bring them to you." Otherwise you can easily end up entering a different deal altogether, namely "do whatever the dragon tells you or get the gently caress eaten." My players have to work on their negotiation strategies. Oh, I've got a few like that. The first concerned a game of Exalted, in which one PC was mayor of a small town. He also decided to be named 'John Borrison' and banned drinking while underground, bendy horses and other such ludicrous things. It transpired that some of his citizens had been kidnapped by fairies (i.e. very odd elves). The party made their way into The Wyld, found said fairies and demanded the release of the people. The Fairy Lord claimed the villagers had entered of their own free will, and just had to ask to leave to be allowed. Said villagers were too drugged out of their minds to ask for anything, no matter how much the players asked. John's solution? It was something along the lines of 'If they've kidnapped my people, I'll take some of theirs.' and used a pied-piper style power to lead a fairy-conga back to his town. So far, so good. But he hadn't thought any further than this, and when he stopped dancing, the compulsion ended. Also, there were a lot of fairies. Surely they didn't ALL fail the resistance rolls? Eventually, there was a conversation that went something like this: John: Alright, we're at the village. I'll stop dancing now. GM: It takes a little longer for the elves to stop dancing, but they eventually do so, and start watching you. John: Ok. I address the elves. "Listen up, you lot. I've captured you now, you hear?" Elves: "Have you?" John: "Yes, I've led you here and then... I... Oh god." Elves: "We're going to open a circus!" They did, and John made of his secret escape tunnels, where his secretary tried to kill him. The rest of the party saw an explosion of razor-blade butterflies burst through the wall of his office, and neither were seen again. And as for dragon negotiation, I've been on the wrong end of that one. The party was caught up in a net-trap, when the dragon arrived. It informed us that we were trespassing in it's forest and demanded tribute. Capitulating, I gave it an unidentified magic item we recovered from a goblin king. A crown. Turns out, the crown had artifact status, and ate minds. When one wears it, they either have their mind eaten, or get access to the knowlege of all the previously eaten minds. The dragon failed it's save, and keeled over right in front of us as soon as it tried the crown on. We were very proud of ourselves, until we met it's mother. We lied through our teeth with that one.
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Feb 27, 2012 11:46
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A smug sociopath posted:
You know, it's really ironic he called you that, because 1) He clearly believed he was untouchable, hence he was smug 2) Perhaps more important than 1, all his notes, rather than some sort of defense or protection, was about torturing AND killing Mark's character, which technically makes HIM the sociopath (okay maybe that's not the most accurate description of a sociopath, but you know what I mean) 3) He was a complete and utter idiot on top of that, ESPECIALLY considering how No 2 (Notes about torturing and killing) and No 1 (passing notes and being arrogant) interlinked. Pity you? Pity HIM. Actually, don't, he sounds like a complete Stan-esque tool.
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Feb 27, 2012 11:59
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So, a few moments of fun from the DFRPG. The PCs are a couple of shapeshifters from a family of shapeshifters, a police detective who learned Evocation from the city-god of the Twin Cities, and an off-brand John Constantine in a modified setting: the White Council is much less hands-on, and the Wardens are basically a boogeyman. The two shapeshifter PCs are being pursued by some evil cultists, who are trying to blackmail one of them into killing someone - the 'someone' in question being a protrusion into three-dimensional space of the primordial principle of deception and malice. Cop Caster decides to figure out what he is by opening up the Sight, allowing him to see - and remember perfectly forever - what this guy actually is! Bearing in mind that things were going well up to this point - no hostility or anything - he mentions that he's doing this, and I hand him a few brief notes on the overview of this extradimensional monstrosity's appearance, and a note with how much Stress he's going to take if he doesn't take some kind of consequence to allay it. He opts to take a Severe consequence, -6 Stress, keeping him just on this side of conscious, and has his character scream and dash out of the meeting. The others naturally blame the entity, and run after him. The brilliant part comes in when they catch him. They ask him what he saw, he looks at me, and I say, "Go on, tell them what you saw. It's etched in your memory perfectly." He then proceeds to improvise it's appearance, based on my fairly skeletal notes that I'd passed him. It was originally supposed to be vaguely draconic and shadowy in nature, but he extemporized that into some bizarrely intriguing quetzal-type creature and managed to really nail the sense that what he was describing was, while horrific, not the worst part of it. The player had been pretty quiet on the whole IC speech thing - he'd say, 'My character greets everyone, and sits down', and so on - and so this sudden IC monologue on the cosmic horrors he'd see was just a moment of and 
FrozenGoldfishGod fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 12:05
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AlphaDog posted:I actually can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not
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Feb 27, 2012 14:09
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Golden Bee posted:Jesters, your stories aren't really...stories. They're just a list of things that happened. :< Okay. Bit new to this (posting AARs on the internet, not tabletop RPGs), so...Sorry. I'll come back when A) I know what I'm doing, and B) I have something more storyworthy. (Only entry up there that makes for a good laugh is the 1st session anyway.)
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Feb 27, 2012 14:45
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You didn't do too badly, they sound like they would've been hilarious if you were there, and with a little bit added to them would do very well. Just fill in the blanks next time.
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Feb 27, 2012 15:16
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Also, maybe put in some context for non-40k fans, so we can better understand the story. Stuff like: "Tyranid (Hive-mind specialist battle-bugs, think Zerg on crack.)" "Primarch (Basically, uber-marines. The sons of a living god from which all Space Marines are descended.)" "Trygon (Whatever the goddamned gently caress a Trygon is, probably something big and dangerous.)"
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Feb 27, 2012 15:35
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Will do! That much said, in summary... -Session One: We couldn't shoot worth poo poo. -Session two: We couldn't drive worth poo poo. -Session three: We couldn't---actually, we did pretty good this time. I'll rewrite them later when I have time to recap three whole sessions. 
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Feb 27, 2012 16:24
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Captain Bravo posted:"Trygon (Whatever the goddamned gently caress a Trygon is, probably something big and dangerous.)" Nailed it. "Big and dangerous" are basically all the important attributes of a Trygon other than the fact that it burrows a lot and spits static bolts on its way into melee.
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Feb 27, 2012 17:16
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