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thiswayliesmadness posted:Edit: Something I was wondering. Has anyone really had a long term evil game work out well? I found them fun as one shots or small games, but long games always devolve into full on party conflict. Of course it didn't help my gaming group back in the day wasn't the best. I should have realized how much of a pain one player would be when he insisted he his druids name be "Lord DukeKing Numbnuts". I ran one for maybe six or seven sessions -- I think the main thing that kept it together was that a criterion for generating a PC was that their goal had to be "somehow murder the King". The forces of good were organised enough, and a big enough threat, that they didn't really have time to betray each other.
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Mar 25, 2012 22:27
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Basically the best way to have an evil party is to pretend you're planning for a Vampire (masquerade or requiem) game, with the only difference being that the PCs won't burn in sunlight.
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Mar 25, 2012 22:49
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My group is two sessions into a Dark Sun, Epic level, Evil campaign and it's been going great so far. I'm assuming it's the harsh tone of Athas, but it's refreshing to be able to interrogate and murder a group of innocent travelling merchants on the dunes in order to assume their identities, and not have to worry about how their poor families will feel about this whole mess. "The Sorceror Queen has given you backstabbers a task, don't gently caress this up!" is a pretty good party motivator as well.
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Mar 26, 2012 00:41
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Siminu posted:"The Sorceror Queen has given you backstabbers a task, don't gently caress this up!" is a pretty good party motivator as well. Strangely, you never see the Sorcerer Queen and her astonishingly dapper senior advisor together.
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Mar 26, 2012 01:26
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Siminu posted:My group is two sessions into a Dark Sun, Epic level, Evil campaign and it's been going great so far. I'm assuming it's the harsh tone of Athas, but it's refreshing to be able to interrogate and murder a group of innocent travelling merchants on the dunes in order to assume their identities, and not have to worry about how their poor families will feel about this whole mess. I'm brand new to Dark Sun, but isn't this kind of thing the norm? It seems like there are no good aligned NPCs in the whole place. Everyone is living in terror and don't go outside because even rocks have psychic powers and want to eat you.
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Mar 26, 2012 02:22
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B.B. Rodriguez posted:I'm brand new to Dark Sun, but isn't this kind of thing the norm? It seems like there are no good aligned NPCs in the whole place. Everyone is living in terror and don't go outside because even rocks have psychic powers and want to eat you. Yeah, altruistic good is a very rare thing in Dark Sun. Unless you have a group of pathological goody-goodies. Never before have I felt like That Guy for fitting my character to the world flavor.
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Mar 26, 2012 04:57
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Upon discussion with some of my other gaming buddies, it was decided that probably our most notable gaming experience - certainly one of the most memorable - had almost nothing to do with a game at all. We were gaming at one guy's apartment and decided to order pizza; it was a pretty big group that night and several of us wanted different pizzas so we ended up getting like four pies. No big, right? Having witnessed this transaction, a wandering pothead (2HD monster) promptly knocked on my buddy's door and asked if we had any weed he could buy off of us (the precise phrasing was "You, uh... you got any trees, man?" which I have to admit, I had not heard before), much to the confusion of the fairly square apartment-owner and the amusement of the rest of us. It was funny - and memorable - because despite the fact that none of us were recreational drug users (at the time), you couldn't exactly fault the kid's logic, you know? "Hey, that's a lot of pizza for one apartment. They don't have music playing, so it's probably not a party, so... they must have the munchies! Right?" It's a not-unreasonable conjecture! So, yeah. That was the gaming experience that they made me promise to post, if only because the utterance of "You, uh... you got any trees, man?" shuts down a game for at least ten minutes while we all laugh like hell.
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Mar 26, 2012 05:35
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Dareon posted:Yeah, altruistic good is a very rare thing in Dark Sun. Unless you have a group of pathological goody-goodies. Never before have I felt like That Guy for fitting my character to the world flavor. Strangely, the party I'm in right now is almost all good aligned characters, including a loving SiltRunner Defiler. I still don't know how that works. It's really weird being the only beacons of goodness in a terrible, terrible world.
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Mar 26, 2012 05:47
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:"You, uh... you got any trees, man?" Dude just wanted to play a Treant. +5 Level Adjustment is gonna take some DM convincing. Dareon posted:Yeah, altruistic good is a very rare thing in Dark Sun. Unless you have a group of pathological goody-goodies. Never before have I felt like That Guy for fitting my character to the world flavor. Getting good characters to work in Dark Sun seems a little easier the higher the level is. The good die young under the dying sun, but I ain't telling that Pyreen Superdruid that selfishness will get it further in life. The DM's been running things where we played an unaligned party in heroic tier (focus on survival in a hostile shithole), and played a good party in paragon tier (focus on the uphill struggle for positive change in a hostile shithole). The Evil Epic Tier is the conclusion of the campaign trilogy. I assume the new theme will be (gently caress you I got mine and I'm taking yours, in this hostile shithole). It took about half a session, but the group I play with seems to be pretty comfortable with co-operative evil. Coming striaght from good characters, the new tier scenario was this: The Gulgan spies in Tyr that our good tier characters had captured a session before were being sent by Tyr's Templar for interrogation and information extraction at the fortress of, essentially, a private torturer organization. Our party is sent by the Gulgan Sorceror Queen (or posibly her astonishingly dapper senior advisor) to Tyr to free the spies before they spill the beans. Half the session was spent discussing the various ways of sneaking into the fortress. We could bribe officials, or sneak and steal templar prisoner deliver documents, or chat up the locals at the bar, or sign on as new recruits. The options were all generally reasonable courses of action for standard adventuring parties. Midway through, evil finally clicked. "Let's just ambush, interrogate, and butcher one of the delivery caravans outside the city," someone suggested. "We're evil now, and our dark rituals could probably get a sweet boost from human sacrifice." Discussion of alternatives immediately stopped. Slaughtering merchants outside the city for their clothing and badges turned out to be way quicker than all that pussyfooting bullshit. We might even stab that captured spies to death in their prison cells instead of extracting them from the enemy stronghold. Evil is gonna be easy, 'cause good is dumb.
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Mar 26, 2012 05:51
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Siminu posted:Midway through, evil finally clicked. We had something similar in our first Praedor campaign. We had been hired to provide security for a trade caravan going through some bad territory for a small pay. On the first night, we were standing guard while the rest of the caravan was asleep. "Hey, why don't we just take these guys out and sell the caravan goods ourselves? We'd make a lot more bank that way." "Can we make a bonfire of the corpses?" "Uhh... Sure, why not." "Let's do it!" We eventually ended up becoming actual pirates, and it was pretty awesome.
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Mar 26, 2012 07:56
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I have a few good and bad stories, but this one was the first time that a game session was actually banned from being mentioned at a university gaming club I belong to. But children are NEVER evil! When my girlfriend was in university, she decided to try running a 3.5 D&D campaign at the university. I was asked to play by several of the players as well as her, so I dusted off an old character for a game that fell through and figured what the heck. To ease herself into GMing, she decided to run a one-shot from the Wizards site and see how well it went. The adventure itself was rather run-of-the-mill, miners falling sick and dying, kobolds appearing in the mine, "please save our village" and such. Now, at the start, we were only three PCs and a PC-NPC (a player who never showed up for the sessions for the longest time, but had given his character sheet to the GM anyways), a barbarian, bard, rogue (me) and the PC-NPC cleric, who we nicknamed "Healbot 5000". The adventure went about as well as you would imagine, killed kobolds, tried (and failed) to stop the barbarian from tasting what was in each barrel as we passed them, trying (and failing) to convince the barbarian that "No, wooden spoons are not actual weapons. No, I don't care if you keep critting with the spoon and one-shotting kobolds with it. No, you can't buy an adamantium vorpal keen spoon", until we reached one large chamber where there were several large fires broken out. While we're poking around the broken material in the room and searching the bodies of the dead miners, we find some more kobolds.  (GM): As you search the room, you find two smaller kobolds hiding under a cloak- (Barbarian): I THROW THEM INTO THE FIRE! (Myself and the bard burst into laughter at this) : But... but... THEY WERE CHILDREN! Why would you throw children into the fire? What is wrong with you? They didn't do anything wrong! (All three of us laugh even harder at this) (Me): To be fair, you just said they were smaller kobolds. For all we knew, they could have been midgets. And besides, they're in the middle of the mine, surrounded by dead miners, with a large force of kobolds, who are evil. Yeah, safe bet they were guilty of SOMETHING.Now, we were playing this game in one of the hallways of the university, and another group of gamers were about 10 feet down the hallway planning another game (I think it was a Stargate RPG of some sort), and one of the players... took offence. Not to the fact that we killed kobold children. No, he took offence with my reasoning.  : What? No, children are always good! No child is evil! Children arn't like The Good Son! (Bard):But... the monster manual says that kobolds are evil.: No! It says they're usually evil, which means that not all kobolds are evil, and you did an evil act killing the children!: First of all, my alignment is borderline evil as is. Second, they're with a group of kobolds that are killing miners.: But they're children! They can't be evil! Eventually he wandered off, and the GM finally got us to stop laughing. : So is there any other sadistic things you monsters want to do?: ... I pull out some marshmallows and begin roasting them over the burning children.It took us another 15 minutes or so to stop laughing at that (GM included this time) and continue the session. Are we allowed to post second-hand stories? Because tales of "Children are NEVER evil!" continue in the second campaign that was banned from being mentioned in the club, involving black dragon hatchlings.
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Apr 4, 2012 08:31
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Are we still adding to the Deck of Useless Things? Because I've got one from a typo on a player's sheet. Clock of Elvenkind. Gives a bonus to hide and move silent checks, but is a 200lb grandfather clock that rings loudly on the hour. I'm also a little concerned about my gaming group, as our 'that guy' is the one giving me and another player a lift in. We seem to have lost a trio of players rather quickly as well. He's the sort of person who has to be the best at fighting, regardless of game style. After I suggested running Shadowrun as the cops, in a CSI-inspired game, he began planning the most efficient way to wield a minigun.
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Apr 4, 2012 10:26
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Elfface posted:Clock of Elvenkind. Gives a bonus to hide and move silent checks, but is a 200lb grandfather clock that rings loudly on the hour. God drat it. I was going to check posts in a few watched threads that didn't have many replies, and then go to sleep. Now I'm wide awake after how much I laughed at that.
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Apr 4, 2012 11:39
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Elfface posted:Are we still adding to the Deck of Useless Things? Because I've got one from a typo on a player's sheet. I think we've moved on to the Deck of Many Bears. 1. Grizzly (1d6 appearing) 2. Brown (1d6 appearing) 3. Polar (1d6 appearing) 4. Panda (1d6 appearing) 5. Red Panda (1d6 appearing) 6. Malayan Sun Bear (1d6 appearing) 7. Beartato 8. Hirsute gay man, lectures party about how red pandas aren't technically bears (1d6 appearing) 9. Berenstain Bears (1d4 appearing) remind party to brush their teeth and say their prayers every night 10. Kodiak (1d6 appearing) 11. Skoal (1d6 appearing)
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Apr 4, 2012 15:21
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Clock of Displacement. Makes you think it's half an hour earlier than it actually is (True Seeing negates).
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Apr 4, 2012 15:35
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some loving LIAR posted:I think we've moved on to the Deck of Many Bears. 12. Owlbear (1d3 appearing) Apparently, our group has a thing for them to appear at inopportune times. And yet, they have a perfectly valid ingame reason to do so - escaped colloseum beast, wild encounter, wizard's transmutation experiment. I think it's gotten so far that once I described a particular wizard's encounter with a horrible llycantrophic disease (wereowl, because why not have it be a semi-useful thing for a flying wizard in his lone tower), the party almost decided to attack the poor guy that was looking for a cure for, or at least a damper on his condition because 'HOLY gently caress OWLBEAR  '
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Apr 4, 2012 15:59
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some loving LIAR posted:I think we've moved on to the Deck of Many Bears. Heh. Reminded me of this comic. http://nedroid.com/2012/01/side-job/
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Apr 4, 2012 16:10
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some loving LIAR posted:9. Berenstain Bears (1d4 appearing) remind party to brush their teeth and say their prayers every night
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Apr 4, 2012 17:49
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Randalor posted:Are we allowed to post second-hand stories? Because Please do, I'd love to hear this 
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Apr 4, 2012 18:20
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Dinictus posted:12. Owlbear (1d3 appearing) 13. Cross to Bear You are suddenly seized with a tremendous sense of guilt for a past mistake or failing. While this has no statistical effect on gameplay, you are often kept awake at night and will occasionally become maudlin and drift off in the middle of normal life, looking into the middle distance and reflecting on the incident.
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Apr 4, 2012 19:53
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Clanpot Shake posted:My mom read these to us, but I don't remember a lot of religious stuff. Did I just not pick up on it? (I brush my teeth religiously) You didn't pick up on it. Momma Bear is a killjoy Christian and forces her warped 50's views on her kids and Poppa Bear.
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Apr 4, 2012 20:02
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B.B. Rodriguez posted:You didn't pick up on it. Momma Bear is a killjoy Christian and forces her warped 50's views on her kids and Poppa Bear.
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Apr 4, 2012 20:06
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I was referring more to The Berenstain Bears Say Their Prayers. There are more. Where I grew up the hardware store was also a Christian bookstore, and they had several (apparently authentic) hyper-Jesusy Berenstain books, which I can't find on Amazon. (This one is from three years ago I guess.)
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Apr 4, 2012 20:30
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B.B. Rodriguez posted:You didn't pick up on it. Momma Bear is a killjoy Christian and forces her warped 50's views on her kids and Poppa Bear. This is funny because my mom really likes those books and considers herself a feminist. (she didn't like us watching the muppets because there was only one girl character and she was an annoying bitch)
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Apr 4, 2012 21:21
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JustJeff88 posted:13. Cross to Bear 14. Carebear Roll a d6. If the number is even, gain a +2 bonus to Speed (Spring in your Step) until the day is over. If the number is odd, gain a +2 bonus to Charisma (Care-bear Smile) until the day is over.
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Apr 4, 2012 21:56
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JustJeff88 posted:13. Cross to Bear This is a small wooden cross that fits comfortably in one hand. Once per day, you can change it to a small wooden figurine of a bear. It has no other properties.
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Apr 4, 2012 21:58
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Wahad posted:14. Carebear All your skill rolls to intuit directions automatically fail for the rest of the day.
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Apr 4, 2012 22:04
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16. Right to Bear Arms You encounter an avid crossbowman who expounds to you that bows don't kill people. Orcs do!
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Apr 4, 2012 23:42
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17. Bear Naked 1d3 dire bears, mysteriously bereft of fur, appear and attack the party. They can be convinced to stop attacking if they are offered suitable clothing. 18. Unbearable Pain Random party member is cursed to suffer terrible pain whenever he is more than 50' from a bear of any type.
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Apr 5, 2012 00:03
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19. Grin and Bear It Party member becomes cursed with "anytime you smile, someone gets gruesomely eviscerated by a bear".
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Apr 5, 2012 00:08
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#bear. Bear Bear Bear Bear bear bare-pun bear bear barely-pun beared bearbear bear bear bears bearbearbearbearbear.
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Apr 5, 2012 00:11
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homullus posted:#bear. Bear Bear Bear Bear Singularity. All will become Bear.
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Apr 5, 2012 00:17
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homullus posted:#bear. Bear Bear Bear
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Apr 5, 2012 00:18
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20. Bear Grylls. He won't leave until everyone drinks their own urine.
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Apr 5, 2012 01:32
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21. Everyone just play dead until the bear goes away
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Apr 5, 2012 02:16
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22. Running Bear Foot - Your feet suddenly become thick, savage bear paws. Destroy any armor on your feet immediately. Any kick attack made by you now deals slashing damage.
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Apr 5, 2012 02:42
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homullus posted:#bear. Bear Bear Bear Yeah, I'm pretty much here, too. I miss awesome stories.
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Apr 5, 2012 03:42
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23: Bear hands For when you need to kill fast, and bullets too slow.
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Apr 5, 2012 03:54
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So I know it is not as impressive as some of the other stories in this thread, but I have a story that came out of a session that I had tonight. I was at the D&D Encounter session- I'm brand new to rpgs in general (i.e. only been playing the past 3 weeks or so) so I'm there to test the waters and find a good group. Anyway, There is a human Monk, a Goliath Warlord, an Eladrin Ranger and a Wild Magic Sorcerer (me) and we're in a temple- in a floor that we had cleared the last session, and we loot the place, got some good loot too. At the end of the hall, there's a magic statue that emanates cold- so our cold-resistant monk goes and inspects it- seeing some water in a bowl, he sloshes it around(we've exausted all other options at this point, we know we can go further, but don't know how). Suddenly an Ooze appears and grabs the Monk. I'm off to the side of the statue, by the library. The encounter went something like this. DM: Suddenly there is a roaring sound as an Ooze appears from the liquid, walls of ice block the doors and stairs, two tenticles emerge from the pools on the sides of the room. Roll for initiative.  Me: 22 Monk: 3 Warlord: 13 Ranger:16 The DM rolls the dice, looks at me and says: You're first. What do you do? The Warlord does a dungeoneering check, succeeds and we find that it has 5 vulnerability to fire. Me: I cast Chromatic Orb. I roll the dice. 20, my first 20 ever. Me: That's thirty plus 4 (Charisma bonus) plus 3(Dexterity bonus) plus 1(proficiency on a magic dagger I found). <Rolls for damage type> 2, that's fire damage. Everyone stops and looks at me, I'm level 1 and I just threw out 43 damage. The DM looks at the table, at me, then at the table again. We're 10 minutes in, 7 of those have been searching for loot. DM: The Ooze hardens and shatters, leaving a crystal heart behind. If you sell it, the heart has a value of 100 gold to each party member, you also gain 350 experience. I sit there stunned, I beat a boss in 1 round, due to a lucky crit on my daily spell. The DM stops, looks at us and says: That was supposed to be the entire encounter- so in order to actually have you guys play, the tenticle minions remain, I've buffed them up too. Have fun killing them. Those loving things took us close to an hour to beat. So that's my story, not really super impressive compared to some of yours but so far it's been my greatest moment in my admittedly small time of playing.
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Apr 5, 2012 05:39
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I played one of my best games this Sunday: We were playing a Pathfinder Society game with the following party: Lvl 1 Barbarian - myself Lvl 1 Dex-Fighter Lvl 2 Wizard Lvl 2 Cleric Lvl 1 Alchemist The final encounter was with a boss pirate lady, whom we were supposed to rescue a hostage from and get her to stop attacking certain ships. We had arrived at a cove aboard another ship that we had taken back from her lackeys (killed the leader, other two were slept/surrendered), but bungled our stealth rolls, so we had to talk her down. We ended up having to let her go free in exchange for the hostage, but she wouldn't promise to stop attacking the wrong ships. This wasn't sitting particularly well with us, when I notice that our ship has ballistas. After the hostage was safely aboard our ship, we immediately give chase and try to shoot out her rudder. Some things to know: Nobody in the party knew how to run a ship, the only guy with decent dex to shoot with was the fighter, and I had the helm. To contrast, the pirate crew were expert seamen with a captain who could magic the boat to go even faster than normal. Despite landing a good shot on the rudder, we couldn't break it, but we did manage to provoke her into attacking. At this point, the alchemist decides to upgrade the ballista ammo by adding explosive bombs to the tips. Cue a naval fight where this pirate was making smooth passes at us, strafing with crossbows (the ship itself was unarmed), I'm barely keeping our ship moving straight, once causing her attempted ram to miss due to my own error in steering. The Fighter is launching explosive ballistas, trying to snipe the pirate lady at the helm, while the Alchemist is tipping and reloading the ballistas. None of the bolts managed to hit the pirate lady, but the explosive tips caused the deck around her to get torn up pretty badly. Eventually, she manages to come up alongside us and board, but the Alchemist blew out one of the boarding planks, I rage out on any boarders on the other plank, and the rest of the party dogpiled the pirate boss after she jumped across, taking her out quickly (thankfully so, turned out she was a magus with acidic blood and lots off buff/debuff spells to cast). Easily one of the most epic level 1 adventures I've had.
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Apr 5, 2012 06:00
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