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I have a story that happened just last week. It is long and in depth, so feel free to read the TLDR at the bottom. Or as I shall call it, "How I narrowly avoided being in a Battletech RPG run by a Furry Asperger's sufferer because I said the Dervish is butt". There is a nice local funny book shop I go to. I have been going to it for the last 15 years outside of the 3 or 4 dark years they were out of business. (A friend and I were like the LAST people in his store for that closing.) Once a week they have a general board game and the like as they are trying to get the clientele to realize games other than Magic exist. Out of boredom if nothing else. Since Magic is drat profitable in my area. Well I normally show up just to do my Pathfinder game which is a hodgepodge of Beginner Box rules, 4th ed D&D Essentials rules, and some SRD stuff all shoved into a casual friendly monster bash sort of game. We started with 4th ed but after a TPK I asked if the 3 players I had at that point would like to give the Beginner Box a shot and they did. They also quite enjoy it since its more like 1983 Red Box D&D and 4e had a baby than anything else. We have since grown to the point I have a player pool of around 10 people. (Thankfully in no session has everyone showed up. We are loud, silly, and goofy. Its more a bullshit session where where we roll dice from time to time. The 18 year old gay kid says innuendo related things. The old guy with the cane says similarly dirty things. A 20something lady calls the old guy creeper and has lots of biting humor at the rest of us, sometimes insisting I never have monsters attack us because we are now Facebook friends. We have a ridiculous amount of fun.) Well one of the board gamers there mentioned playing Battletech and the boyfriend of the lady with the biting humor said he had the boxed starter but couldn't really make heads or tails of it. So I decide on one of the non Pathfinder weeks to run one of my awesome tutorials for Battletech. I bring out the Heroscape terrain and make a giant and impressive battlefield and we have 9 players moving their rides around and shooting at each other. I show up for boargame days more often and the first Battletech board gamer guy I once see pick his nose while playing Catan Dice. I am a bit grossed out and gave him a dirty look (and washed my hands after the game) and he never did it again that I saw. The guy seemed a little odd but poo poo, who isn't? (I work at a casino and a huge percentage of my friends and family have. The stories we have make most crazy gamer tales seem minor in comparison.) Well he wants to run a BT RPG campaign. I ask when and while I would have to get up a couple hours early and possibly leave early for the weekly D&D Encounters game I go play at a different store, it IS possible for me to do. He emails me back and forth with what's going on and I mention what I might like to play which he doesn't seem to exactly comprehend at first but eventually it seems ok. Now I work weekends so I rarely answer unimportant email or anything on weekends. About a day after a message he sent me that wasn't all that important he emails me asking me what's up and why I haven't responded. I explain the little bit above and am a touch worried but.. ehh. Then we talk in person a bit more and I begin character generation for the current edition of the BT RPG. Which is a horrible mixture of lifepath, skills, feat like traits, and spending 6500 xp for attributes and said skills & traits. I'm not feeling too confident but the 2 hours I spent that day would be finished the next day. Which took like another hour. And I STILL wasn't finished. Now between then I had asked about what kind of mech I would get and he said people would have lights and mediums. (It was 3065 era but the selection was mostly 3025 machines for any BT folks in the audience.) I noted while looking over the rules that I could have a custom mech by spending exp on it. So I mention this to him and am told "GM God Ruling: NO". My favorite mech is the Griffin, a 55 tonner with 2 long range weapons and a fair speed. He also mentions that 3 people will be playing in the first game and everyone else will get slotted in. He doesn't say when and this is yet another inkling not all is right in the land of Mechs and Honey. The next day I find there are six of us as players, 3 others folks I have gamed with before. We find out the GM's friend got to select all our mechs with no input from the rest of us really allowed. I mention that one of them, the Dervish, is quite sucky, and another, the Hunchback, hits hard but is kind of slow and horribly short ranged. I give folks both old and new some advice on mechs to use or not use, and I may have called the Dervish "butt", as it is a word I picked up from an old Mac gaming podcast. Nobody really seemed to care much and actually listened to what I had to say. I choose one of the other mechs available, a Phoenix Hawk model with a different weapons loadout than the normal stock design. One guy who is also in my Pathfinder game is using a Raven who I do warn him about the dangers of XL engines which are very fragile, especially for what he wants to do with it. (Close in attacks.) He says my character also has less XP than everyone else (with some folks' PCs' starting skills making them equivalent to a Jordan or a Tiger Woods in their prime. BT players will know what a 0/0 pilot is. We had one.) because someone asks why he is giving me some minor trait for free. Not a trait I want but.. ok. GM's rules and all. Its time for me to head off to Encounters so I let him borrow the metal Raven mini I brought in case he didn't have his own (he didn't) and went on my way. I do the Encounters thing, a crazy old guy threatens one of the teenaged kids on one of the two tables we have running Encounters each week (husband and wife team, one runs one table, one the other) and the clerk has to run him out TWICE but otherwise all seems well in gamer land. Then I get this email from the Battletech GM: I hate to do this too you, but you're not welcome at my table for Battletech. Your attitude is piss poor railing against every mech design you hate or whatever. I can't have a player with an attitude like that. Needless to say, I was a little stunned. I didn't think I said anything out of line or insulting, I just gave the mostly new to Battletech group some of my experience playing the game since 88 when I got it as part of my Jr High graduation presents. (And lots of Megamek play where Dervishes did nothing but fail me.) So I was concerned so I emailed him back with the following: thought I was just stating an opinion. And most 3025 stock mechs are in fact terribly designed. Its pretty much a known and given thing by nearly every Battletech player ever. And did you really think I was gonna be completely thrilled with ZERO choice of mech whatsoever without any sort of give and take at all? And honestly if you had an issue with me.. why not talk to me in private instead of waiting 8 hours and emailing me? Instead of having me waste what is now 3 hours making a character. Maybe I would have apologized, explained what my INTENT was and we could have moved on. Now honestly? I tried to be fair and see his point of view, even saying I might have apologized had he talked to me about it. Because I would. If I am a dick, purposeful or not I will usually apologize about it if informed. Then I receive this lovely response a few minutes later: You sir are an rear end in a top hat when it comes to Battletech. You are rude, obnoxious and pushy about it. I am Autistic, I do not do well in spoken conversations. Given what I know about you I do not really like you. I likely won't be going to Board Games any more because of you. Stating an opinion is not what you do, you sir cram your thoughts down other peoples throats. My friend who is using the Dervish liked it just fine. Stock 3025 designs do not inherently suck, they are not crappy, they require thought about how to utilize them properly. You continue to be rude and offensive even now by telling me that I gave you zero choice in mechs. You could have just accepted what was presented to you but nooooo, you have to go off on some immature tirade about every little thing that doesn't meet your expectations. I'm going to remove you from my address book now and block your E-Mail address. He is autistic? Oh dearie. I didn't know that. I thought he was just a little.. odd is all. I try not to judge and we had gotten along pretty well I thought to the point one week I wasn't able to be there for gaming he had emailed me saying it was chaos without me there.  Now the guy that did take the Dervish I told him he was more than welcome to it, and gave him some tips on future upgrades and the like and I gave him a list of the simple weapons chart from Battletech so he could better have an idea of what mechs could use what and the various capabilities of it. He seemed pretty receptive to my input. (Our commander basically a BT newbie? Ok.. whatever.) Well I look at the bottom of the GM's emails and there is a sig file with links to his blog and his Deviant Art page. Wondering if this might explain a bit more WTF was going on I check as I hadn't looked at either yet. His blog was a year inactive badly written movie review thing. His DA? Well his own work was mostly some decent photography. Until you looked at his giant avatar and the text underneath. A furry art thing with his handle. And informational text saying he has Aspergers and is trying to make it through life as a 30 something. The REAL scary was the art he favorited. Mostly bigger than their body breasted furry stuff. As I don't have a DA account thankfully all the NSFW stuff was covered up, with merely scary descriptions. I then go from being a little worried I had in fact been a douchebag to breathing a sigh of relief. But.. the crazy continued. 2 days later I get yet ANOTHER email from him even though he said he had blocked my email and removed me from all his lists: It is not an opinion when you call nearly every mech available to the group "butt", that is rude, offensive, and obnoxious to new players. Secondly, it is not my job as GM to give the player everything they want. Ok? He had already stated his case and effectively told me nothing I said would get to him anyhow yet 2 days later he seems to need to tell me the same thing he already did. TLDR: I avoided playing Battletech with a person who claims to have Aspergers and who is also a furry with a disgustingly huge breast fetish who I saw pick his nose during a dice game because I called one of the robots "butt".
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May 7, 2012 11:42
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Captain Rufus posted:TLDR: I avoided playing Battletech with a person who claims to have Aspergers and who is also a furry with a disgustingly huge breast fetish who I saw pick his nose during a dice game because I called one of the robots "butt".  But... Dervish is not butt! It's more like lower back, or the cleft of the buttocks.
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May 7, 2012 12:46
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You didn't answer the most important question: Did you ever get your Raven mini back?
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May 7, 2012 13:01
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calling a thing butt is offensive, because butt is a noun. I am autistic, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to speak a new language from now on.
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May 7, 2012 13:11
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Something Battletech-stock is a butt? You sir are a cad without honor! I AM AUTISTIC AND I KNOW WHAT I SPEAK OF!
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May 7, 2012 14:35
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Any GM that says "it's not my job to give you things you want" or any variation thereof is going to be a lovely GM, since it's obvious that they don't want to run a game so much as tell you their poorly written story and have you fill in the dialogue.
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May 7, 2012 14:39
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Get a Dervish mini and glue fake boobs to it, about 3/4 as big as the mini itself. It'd be a great peace offering.
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May 7, 2012 14:48
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Volmarias posted:You didn't answer the most important question: This is exactly what I was wondering as soon as it was lent.
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May 7, 2012 16:36
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For a while I played a 3.5 campaign as a druid. He rode a dire shark with air breathing and fins to feet cast on him and was basically the silliest mount ever  During the campaign we also kept kraken inside a bag of holding to unleash on our enemies (I know things can't live more than 10 min inside of a bag of holding, our DM houseruled it because he thought it was hilarious). That party also lacked anyone who could discover and disable traps, causing some pretty close calls early on. We decided to get around this by just summoning an orangutang to take point and trip all the traps for us. Later in the campaign, our sorcerer got baleful polymorphed into a tiny viper but made the will save to retain all his spellcasting abilities. It actually turned out to be very useful, he got a nice AC bonus for his size, was poisonous, did a great job scouting, and could ride around in my pocket shooting fireballs I tried to make him my animal companion but it didn't go over very well.I was not a very good druid 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 know this is from a while back but the first long-term 3.5 campaign I played in was an evil campaign that lasted for about a year. It works pretty well if you don't have chaotic evil players because most of the time, working together is way more beneficial to your end goals than coup de gracing party members in their sleep. We started as a level 1 neutral party and as always seems to happen when we play neutral, we almost immediately turned neutral evil. We ended up retiring our characters when we hit somewhere around DR5. Was definitely my favorite D&D campaign of all time too. We had a dread necromancer in the group that worked fantastically with my sorcerer because of her obsession with Veil of Undeath. Some of my one shot characters worship my old sorc now Her portfolio is a little unpleasant but what do you expect from a demigod with ranks in Blood Magus?
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May 7, 2012 16:42
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I usually end up having to be the DM so I've been enjoying actually playing in our local Eclipse Phase campaign now that we have somebody that actually bothers to learn the system rules and prepares for the game sessions. Anyway, everybody except myself is new to rpgs and are basically playing variants of mercenary and assassins so I decided to roll up a charismatic hypercorp executive that could basically run damage control when the rest of the team blows up things that are important and that is what I did for our first few sessions. That all changed when are mission lead us to Mars. See on Mars we had to operate out of the equivalent of space Tortuga, bunches of criminal cartels growing into a semi permanent black market settlement. This is because a high ranking member of our organization has gone rogue, forcing us to go underground and cutting off a number of resources. My character, being a legitimate businessman doesn't want to be involved with this sort of dealing. Instead, he sets up shop in New Shanghai, a large city nearby and also the location for the rogue agent's hypercorp headquarters. Since this is crazy sci-fi, I also sends a fork, a slightly reduced digital copy of myself, to Eres Mons, the black market hovel the rest of the group is located at. At this point I just take over playing as the fork, who has a forged identity, and things rapidly go crazy as the forked personality isn't worried about how his actions would reflect on the company. Within a couple of sessions, the fork is has become a drug kingpin and is rapidly headed toward becoming an NPC as his personality shifts further and further away from the original. Playing the thug for a change was fun but my real favorite moment is when the rest of the team hooks back up with the original when their mission leads them to New Shanghai. The whole time that the gang and my character's fork was working in Eres Mons to gear up and establish themselves a base of operations, I was playing my original character to the side with the GM. Now the big bad guy of the mission runs a hypercorporation that deals in genetic research and produces a large percentage of the bodies people need to download their digital conscousness into and, on Mars, people without bodies or who have to resort to living in cheap robotic bodies are treated as second class citizens at best or indentured servants at worst. My character had been using his contacts and cash to gather skilled people who were tired of the hypercorp regime and provided them with bodies and funds to find other like minded souls. This had been going on for a few in game weeks, so when the rest of the party shows up in New Shanghai, they find out that they will be backed up by a number of anti-corporation terrorist cells.
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May 7, 2012 17:28
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Captain Rufus' Autistic Not-Friend posted:Stock 3025 designs do not inherently suck, they are not crappy, they require thought about how to utilize them properly. I laughed when I read this. It's the standard go-to defense for things that are butt that some players seem to think are good. Like 3rd edition Rangers in D&D. They are not crappy, they just require the DM to actually throw your favored monster at you in order to utilize them properly. But seriously, that's an old, well-beaten, decomposed dead horse that is already an untold number of flies now. Speaking of 3rd edition though, that reminds me of a fun quest I had with my friends back in high school. These friends of mind (I'll call them Derek and Aaron) decided to run a campaign where there were two separate parties - one good, one evil - fighting against each other. Pretty typical stuff, really. My good friend Jim and I constituted the Evil side, and despite being down one against the Good Guys we simply ended up being better than them in every way. When they went to rescue the mayor's daughter, by the time they got back we had burnt the village down. When they tried to catch up to an ally of theirs, we managed to get to him first. Even in combat we beat the pantaloons out of them. We never ended up fighting in direct combat, but it's safe to say it would have ended poorly for them. Why? One time during out quest to fulfill our Evil Plan (our Plan was so Bad, so Evil... It did many Bad Things to people... That are Good! That's why we liked it), Derek and Aaron decided to ambush us with barbarians. And now for a bit of game mechanic dullery. Jim and I were playing a Rogue and a Monk respectively. For being so evil, we actually worked together fairly well. We utilized a combat style we called "curb stomping" - we would tumble up next to opponents and flank them and because I was a Monk, I was able to try tripping them up any time I hit them. Being a Monk, I could hit them many times in one round of combat meaning that more often than not, opponents would end up flat on their asses. My friend, being a Rogue, could then begin sneak attacking them for massive damage. Hence why we called our ancient art of combat "curb stomping" - once the opponent was on the ground, we stomped them until they never got up again. So anyways, the two barbarians ambush us. After applying a liberal amount of curb stomp, they're dead in two rounds and never hit us. Derek looks stunned that we offed them so quickly, but Aaron is relentless. "Two more barbarians jump out of the bushes!" he says. Two rounds later, Jim and I's characters are dusting themselves off from another vicious curb stomp. By now, Aaron is incensed. It's clear that he designed this encounter to take away some of our hit points, which are a little harder for us to regain since we have no cleric. "Three barbarians jump out and attack!" Three rounds later, we finally stop wasting time and start looting the seven dead bodies with their heads buried in the dirt. Aaron is besides himself. He really can't believe that his 'masterfully' planned out ambush of a bunch of barbarians failed to even so much as scratch us. He is ready to pull his ace out of his sleeve. Aaron wildly gesticulates in our direction in a manner that resembles frantic pointing. "Three more barbarians..." Derek finally recovers from his shock. Noticing that Aaron is 1) doing nothing to us and 2) feeding us gold and experience, he finally puts his foot down. He grabs Aaron's arm. "That's enough, Aaron..." We politely resume filching the dead barbarians. Later that day, the good party would get into combat with a bunch of barbarians and their main fighter would get killed in a single attack by one of them through sheer, dumb luck.
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May 7, 2012 21:13
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Here To Help posted:Honestly, recapping it all like this makes me sure that I'm finished. There were plenty of fun moments, even today - but the hassle just isn't worth it. Dude basically your entire group sounds pretty terrible but I'm really curious about a couple of the things you posted. Why do you think 3.5 clerics "don't heal things to death. Full stop." I know you can't heal offensively in 4e, but it's a super powerful strategy against undead in 3.5. How'd you manage to lose the ability to cast spontaneously? And why for that matter, spontaneous casting owns. Why are you mad that your party expects you, the only healer in the party, to heal? I can totally understand not wanting to babysit a moron wizard who thinks he should melee  (to be honest, I'd probably let him die if he kept doing that poo poo), but it IS kinda your job as a cleric to heal. I can honestly understand players getting mad at a cleric who won't heal and just tells everyone to buy pots and belts of healing, especially when that body slot could go to a belt of battle instead. If you wanted to go full CC with a dab of healing on the side, why not just roll a druid?I'm sorry if I'm coming across as combative I am just confused as hell about some of the stuff you posted.
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May 7, 2012 22:51
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Triangulum posted:Dude basically your entire group sounds pretty terrible but I'm really curious about a couple of the things you posted. Why do you think 3.5 clerics "don't heal things to death. Full stop." I know you can't heal offensively in 4e, but it's a super powerful strategy against undead in 3.5. How'd you manage to lose the ability to cast spontaneously? And why for that matter, spontaneous casting owns. Why are you mad that your party expects you, the only healer in the party, to heal? I can totally understand not wanting to babysit a moron wizard who thinks he should melee The problem with in-combat healing, as I understand it, is that it's a waste of a turn. Healing barely keeps up with monster damage and that's before you worry about things like save or die. Wouldn't it basically always be better to make the monster dead for ever than to prop up a teammate for one extra round?
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May 7, 2012 22:57
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Especially in 3e, healing doesn't keep up with damage dealt. So the cleric spends his entire turn recovering hit points that will probably more than vanish before his turn comes back around. It is FAR more efficient for the cleric to spend his turn increasing the lethality of his party so that they don't need the healing. Save the actual healing for between combats.
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May 7, 2012 23:13
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nimby posted:Get a Dervish mini and glue fake boobs to it, about 3/4 as big as the mini itself. It'd be a great peace offering. Even the Dervish doesn't deserve THAT. All it needs is the SRM 2s and 2 tons of ammo removed for 4 more heat sinks, the 2 LRM 10s turned into 4 LRM 5s, and the weight savings turned into more armor so it doesn't explode when you look at it funny. (Case and Double Heat Sinks are nice too. Then I guess you could pop in some Streak SRMs with the HS weight savings and not melt any time you fire your guns.) What's sad is perhaps I might have been a bit negative. It wasn't intentional and if the dude or anyone else had like said something to that effect I would have probably been "Oh poo poo, I am an rear end in a top hat. Sorry. I didn't mean to be. My bad. If I ever do that again just tell me to shut the gently caress up." because I aint out to hurt anyone. This of course is what a normal, well adjusted adult would do when confronted with something they possibly find upsetting. Naturally the GM being an Aspie Furry this was not the solution he took. Of course finding Battletech players who aren't hosed in the head seems to be nearly impossible. I've had way more fun playing BT with people who don't play BT than people who actually play the game. Edit: And hopefully I shall get the Raven back tomorrow when I go down to play boardgames. I'm bringing Dragon Strike, the TSR Heroquest like board game that is mostly famous online for the ridiculous VHS tape it came with that both Spoony and James Rolfe have mocked. Sadly my copy did not come with the VHS tape. But it was only 5 bucks so worth it for parts alone. But the boob thing brings up another tale, this one short. The tale of the Donggrinder For a time I was playing Warhammer 40K that terribly balanced overly expensive game that usually manages to still be fun. One fellow was building a Slaanesh force for the Demon army list. For those not in the know, Slaanesh is the god of pleasure and sensations. Basically he is the god of SEX, DRUGS, and ROCK & ROLL. However most players seem to only focus on the first part. The fellow in question was one of those. Now, this game shop has children come into it. Its the place I play D&D Encounters, which at the moment has 2 pre JR High kids in it. (One of which is a sweet little girl who with the help of her mom brings us fresh baked goods nearly every week. Sometimes so fresh its still warm out of the oven. I've gotten her father to play as well. IMHO its good bonding time and something a kid remembers even into adulthood.) At this time the Encounters hadn't started running yet but we at least had one 14 year old kid playing 40K and children did come down to look at us playing with our toy mans. There is a large unit in the Demon army called the Soulgrinder. Its a spidermech lower body with a demon holding a sword and a big cybernetic arm with 2 gun thingies attached. He brings his built but unpainted Grinder in one day and its got all sorts of Green Stuff Sculpting Epoxy bits on it. I am checking it out, and kind of impressed with the smoothness of it all. Then I realize what the greenstuff bits replacing the gun ARE. My hands were on a pair of giant greenstuff cocks. I also then see it now has one booby, a big baboon rear end in the back, and a pair of cock & balls that isn't ridiculously large in the groinal area. I am a bit terrified. Many of us then give him poo poo over this.. thing and he claims his roommate put them on there. SUUUURE. Over the next few weeks we all continue to mock it, and one game session I put a napkin over it, claiming my Tyranids are sensitive and shouldn't see such things. I also try to avoid the temptation of chopping the 2 large gun phalli off. Its not my property. I do however tell him he should remove the wieners and in the groin region put a giant fake heroin needle, ala Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and give it a giant pair of shoulder mounted speakers that could blast Dio so loud you could hear it from space. (Which would be pretty impressive given that sound doesn't work in space. But its Slaanesh and 40K. They could find a way.) He apparently finally removed the bits but he thankfully hasn't been seen for a few years. And that is the tale of the Donggrinder. Edit the second: vvvv My character was gonna be a super smart Latino guy from Chicago who spent a good 200 XP on "Interest Old Sci Fi and Interest Old Horror" and I would endure trying to make those rear end 3rd ed box set plastic Griffins decent enough and paint one up to look like Michael Myers from Halloween and he would call his ride "The Boogeyman". That or possibly a Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger scheme. Because he really loves his ancient rear end horror films. Silly mech paint schemes is NEVER a terrible idea really. Silly perhaps but never terrible. Hell, I was painting up a Clan 2/IIC Star to be a rough approximation of the Shuffle Alliance from G Gundam. Because I am a dork. Captain Rufus fucked around with this message at 23:54 on May 7, 2012 |
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May 7, 2012 23:16
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Dr Nick posted:The problem with in-combat healing, as I understand it, is that it's a waste of a turn. Healing barely keeps up with monster damage and that's before you worry about things like save or die. Wouldn't it basically always be better to make the monster dead for ever than to prop up a teammate for one extra round? While it does take a standard action for the cleric, so does having your caster or melee characters pop a potion. In my mind it's more efficient to keep waste your turn healing a player with a high damage output than have them waste their turn by eating a healing pot. And honestly, I've never played with a cleric who couldn't outheal a monster's damage by a significant amount (granted, my group consists entirely of serious min maxers). 9 times out of 10 I don't even have to use anything higher than cure moderate to give a full heal, even on characters with a ton of HP. If you know you're the main healer in a good or neutral party, there's basically no reason not to worship Pelor, take the healing domain, and then go for the Radiant Servant route. Also taking an item like an amulet of retributive healing really helps the "can only heal one person at a time" issues before you get mass cure light (especially if you're filling the off tank slot in really small parties). If you build it right, you can end up healing for way more than any monster of level appropriate CR can output in a couple rounds.
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May 7, 2012 23:20
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Triangulum posted:While it does take a standard action for the cleric, so does having your caster or melee characters pop a potion. In my mind it's more efficient to keep waste your turn healing a player with a high damage output than have them waste their turn by eating a healing pot. And honestly, I've never played with a cleric who couldn't outheal a monster's damage by a significant amount (granted, my group consists entirely of serious min maxers). 9 times out of 10 I don't even have to use anything higher than cure moderate to give a full heal, even on characters with a ton of HP. If you know you're the main healer in a good or neutral party, there's basically no reason not to worship Pelor, take the healing domain, and then go for the Radiant Servant route. Also taking an item like an amulet of retributive healing really helps the "can only heal one person at a time" issues before you get mass cure light (especially if you're filling the off tank slot in really small parties). If you build it right, you can end up healing for way more than any monster of level appropriate CR can output in a couple rounds. quote:This of course is what a normal, well adjusted adult would do when confronted with something they possibly find upsetting. Naturally the GM being an Aspie Furry this was not the solution he took. Of course finding Battletech players who aren't hosed in the head seems to be nearly impossible. I've had way more fun playing BT with people who don't play BT than people who actually play the game. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 23:26 on May 7, 2012 |
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May 7, 2012 23:22
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MadScientistWorking posted:How the hell does that work? I'm starting out playing Pathfinder and the only healing spell I have access to (Cure Light Wounds) is outpaced by the amount of damage I can do at level. I know literally nothing about Pathfinder but it basically boils down to gearing carefully, prestige classes, going for every single thing that increases your caster level for healing spells, and metamagic feats. Granted it's a little rough at lower levels but at mid to high levels you can one shot undead bosses if you do it correctly  Clerics are stupid broken Triangulum fucked around with this message at 23:37 on May 7, 2012 |
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May 7, 2012 23:33
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Triangulum posted:While it does take a standard action for the cleric, so does having your caster or melee characters pop a potion. In my mind it's more efficient to keep waste your turn healing a player with a high damage output than have them waste their turn by eating a healing pot. *damage being "things what kill your enemies" which of course becomes trivial for primary casters after about level 7.
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May 7, 2012 23:41
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Can we have one thread in this subforum that doesn't degrade into edition wars?
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May 7, 2012 23:49
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This has nothing to do with the edition, just whether it's time-efficient to play cleric as a healbot.
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May 8, 2012 00:07
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Golden Bee posted:Can we have one thread in this subforum that doesn't degrade into edition wars? Yeah, man. You're reading way too much into this. No one has even mentioned 2nd edition afaict.
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May 8, 2012 00:17
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Yawgmoth posted:It's even more efficient for everyone to save the drinks for after the fight and have everyone throw damage* at the opponent. There's not a single time when healing someone in combat is a better idea than just trying to kill whatever's making that person need healing. Well yeah of course if they're gonna survive for at least a little bit longer you might as well just murder whatever's going after them. But if they're going down (especially if it's a sorc/wiz) you're probably better off just healing them because let's be honest, you aren't outdamaging the sorc or wizard unless it's all undead. I'm not saying "in every situation ever you should just be healing and gently caress everything else" man, I'm saying there are plenty of situations where it's better to keep your DPS characters standing and dealing damage than just worrying about whether you got to nuke something this round. Granted, I've only been playing for a couple of years so it's very possible someone will point me to some maths that totally contradicts that and if so, cool it's time to rethink cleric strategies for me v  vAnyways, for some actual content: My worst gaming experience, like a lot of people's, had very little to do with the game itself and everything to do with the players. I used to live with a bunch of the dudes from my D&D group and our gaming group would often drop by totally unannounced for impromptu sessions. We weren't expecting to play at all that night and all the roommates were fairly drunk by the time the whole group gathered to roll dice. Not a huge deal, game's not gonna go super smoothly but whatever. And then Alan shows up. Alan is honestly a super cool dude but back then he had a serious drinking problem and on top of that was probably the most belligerent and noisy drunk I've ever met. We play for a couple of hours and he just gets drunker and drunker and drunker, eventually reaching the point where he's screaming at the top of his lungs about killing people and rolling around in their blood and stuff. Basically, poo poo that sounds really worrisome if you're overhearing it without any context. Every time we tell him to shut the hell up or at least keep it down a little, he screams "gently caress YOU I'M ROLEPLAYING A DWARF" and tries to flip the gaming table. Eventually he manages to take out a lamp and the table while a few of the bigger dudes are trying to restrain him but everyone is really too drunk to do anything logical or effective. The rest of us are repeatedly calling our landlady and trying to get her here because she's the only one who can talk any sense into him, but she won't pick up her phone. And then one of the neighbors knocks on the door. He's super worried because he heard screaming about killing people and wants to check to make sure we aren't being murdered by some lunatic or something (he's a pretty cool dude). Once he sees what's happening inside and hears the constant "gently caress YOU I'M A DWARF" poo poo, he tells us we have 15 minutes to shut the gently caress up or he's calling the police. So two of my idiot friends get the brilliant idea to give Alan a screwdriver spiked with Seroquel (it's an antipsychotic with really powerful sedative properties), naturally without telling anyone else the loving terrible plan they've concocted. It does work though and he passes out within 20 minutes and then spends the next couple of days sleeping on the couch. Not as dramatic as getting your finger shot off or being chased with a knife but still a really, really unpleasant experience. He (obviously) wasn't invited back to any games until he got his drinking problem under control. The phrase "I'm just roleplaying my character!" has been banned at our table ever since that fateful night.
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May 8, 2012 00:21
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Triangulum posted:Granted, I've only been playing for a couple of years so it's very possible someone will point me to some maths that totally contradicts that and if so, cool it's time to rethink cleric strategies for me v If you cast a spell and heal someone, you've bought one person one turn, maybe. If you cast a spell and stun the attacker for a turn, you've bought everyone a turn definitely. Which is the better action?
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May 8, 2012 01:20
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Fair enough, I've honestly never played clerics outside of campaigns that were incredibly undead heavy (my DM loving loves undead) so my opinion on healing's utility is probably really colored by that.
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May 8, 2012 01:26
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Triangulum posted:Drunk-rear end Dwarf. That reminds me of Jensen, who was almost responsible for a no drinking and gaming rule in our group, before we decided to just have a no Jensen rule instead. Jensen has a drinking problem. Jensen is also a lightweight. I have no idea how he manages to have such low tolerance despite drinking regularly. Everything that happened in this story happened after three regular strength beers and one weak vodka and coke. We're playing Unknown Armies and Jensen is a Dipsomancer, a mage fuelled by booze. So he's drinking to get in character. I've had other people drink during games before without it causing a problem (hell, we ran a drinking game session at one point), so this seemed fine. For the first three hours or so he's completely fine, no indication of drunkness whatsoever. Over the course of the next half hour he rapidly goes incoherent -> belligerent -> unconcious. We've got a half hour or so left of game so we figure we'll let him sleep on the sofa til we're done and then wake him. Waking him turns out to be a challenge, and we briefly consider leaving him there. But 1)We don't want to be responsible if he dies or something, 2)We're playing on university property and don't want trouble if security finds him and 3)He has work the next day and we're not dicks enough to leave him there. So we eventually get him up, he says he's going to the toilet, we wait there for him. Ten minutes later he isn't back. Oh dear. Check the toilets and yup, those are his feet under the cubicle door. Banging on door and calling his name has no effect. Climbing up on the sink and looking over the top we see him passed out on the toilet, pants around ankles. What to do? Aha! We fill a pint glass of cold water and dump it out on his head. No response. Eventually someone has to lean over with a stick and slide the latch so we could get the door open and drag him out. We get him concious enough to walk and drag him off campus to the nearest tube station. My involvement ends her because I was travelling the opposite direction, but a player who lived near him agreed to help him get home. Along the way he apparently threw up on two different trains, refused to be moved from the floor of the train, took them on a wild goose chase for a cab that didn't exist, had to be physically carried off a train, and threatened to kick a stranger who was helping move him. He was fortunately too drunk to actually carry through with his threat. In the end the kind player who'd been looking after him stuffed him in a taxi and paid the £15 fare out of his own pocket. And this is why Jensen isn't allowed in games any more. (Also it later turned out he was an awful human being with a history of doing lovely and unacceptable things.)
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May 8, 2012 02:04
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I played in a very memorable session of Eclipse Phase last night, one of the players in the game I usually run on Sundays being exceptionally generous and putting together a standin game while I get my poo poo together. While I don't have time to write up a full session report now, all I can say is that the moment at which I leaned out of a speeding moon rover, screaming Cantonese invective and shooting wildly at my own crazed alpha fork while my untrained muse drove was when I finally realized that something, somewhere, had gone horribly wrong. Thanks, Jedi425, I'm going to cancel my game more often now. You brought this on yourself.
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May 8, 2012 03:55
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To clarify a few things: First my ACF replaces the ability to spontaneously heal with the ability to spontaneously cast from my one of my domains. In this case the time domain. Second while its possible for me to like, use a bunch of spells to specialize against killing undead, or spend heal spells to do so, I could also just haste my party instead and win even faster. I'm not upset that my party expects me to heal. I do heal. I felt for a single person I was covering healing very well. However it is not the 'job' of the cleric to heal. It is the job of the cleric to win. Healing is not a preferable way to win because its slow, spell inefficient and sucks up actions. Healing outside of combat with a wand ought to be the default way to heal. In combat heals are for emergencies. Rather than looking at the cleric and saying 'hey dude your not healing enough' my party ought to have been thinking about ways to kill our enemies faster thus reducing the damage they take. Keep in mind we are level 7, in a 3.5 adventure book. We don't have nearly enough money for things like belt of battle. Our character wealth is about a quarter or even less of what it ought to be and my party members have their own notions about what to spend money on - terrible wizard wants real estate (?) and all our melee types want gauntlets of ogre strength. It took me quite a while to convince them to get anklets of translocation and chronocharms of the horizon walker. A couple of dirt cheap items that assist greatly with positioning and movement. The amulet of retributive healing would have been fine, but nearly always I was not the one who needed healing. Radiant servant is a fine prestige class, but you'd have to dedicate a lot of item slots and feats to what you suggest limit my capabilities pretty severely in other areas. Regarding your comment about dealing damage, my character put out the 2nd greatest amount of damage behind the barbarian and I'd have probably pass him pretty quickly. But that's not really my focus because usually casting hold person or haste is much better. My character was effectively the only caster in the group. Terrible wizard uses bad direct/aoe damage spells or very rarely a bad control spell. No buffs and no save or suck/die stuff. I need to worry about not just keeping people alive, but keeping them buffed and our enemies locked down. I feel like I designed my character very well to cover as many bases as possible and that focusing on healing exclusively would have actually hurt the party more than it helped. Here To Help fucked around with this message at 06:11 on May 8, 2012 |
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May 8, 2012 04:49
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Man, I love it when someone has such a poor idea of the game mechanics as to strongly desire real estate in dungeons and dragons. Genuinely, it's just the most lovably retarded thing. What a god forsaken idiot, bless his little heart.
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May 8, 2012 06:55
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We were hearing a lot of rumors about an old decrepit moathouse that was infested with cultists and monsters. All he could talk about was who owned the deed to the moathouse? How much would it cost for us to buy the moathouse? I reasoned that since it was an abandoned moathouse filled with monsters no one 'owned' it and that if we wanted to set up a base there or whatever it would be free. This answer was not satisfactory and we spent quite a while in town unsuccessfully trying to find the rightful owner of this fine property.
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May 8, 2012 08:42
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Here To Help posted:We were hearing a lot of rumors about an old decrepit moathouse that was infested with cultists and monsters. All he could talk about was who owned the deed to the moathouse? How much would it cost for us to buy the moathouse? The appropriate thing to do is to have some unscrupulous grifter get wise to this, proclaim that he is the rightful owner, thank you for clearing out the beasties, and offer to sell the place to you for a sweetheart deal for your kind service. Oh, just half of your gold, whatever that is, that's fine.
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May 8, 2012 15:18
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Volmarias posted:The appropriate thing to do is to have some unscrupulous grifter get wise to this, proclaim that he is the rightful owner, thank you for clearing out the beasties, and offer to sell the place to you for a sweetheart deal for your kind service. Oh, just half of your gold, whatever that is, that's fine. Then, after the party moves in, have the mayor/lord/ whatever send the taxman by to collect on several years worth of back taxes owed.
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May 8, 2012 15:24
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Last night was a pretty bad experience for me and everyone else involved. For the past two months or so I've been playing in a game store with a group I found online. It's been fun hanging out with them, but the DM is terrible. He's running a modified version of a Swedish RPG from the early 90's, and has come up with an arbitrary way to measure the "difficulty" of a player character based on their skills, armor and weapons. He adds everyone's difficulty values together and uses the total to design encounters. I've also told him he should limit the amount of slots in the party, but he says he doesn't want to turn anyone who wants to play down. When I joined there were four of us, but the number has steadily grown and last night there were two new arrivals that brought us to a total of 12. Anyway, when the last session ended, we were on our way to hunt down a demon that had been rampaging around a group of villages. We'd decided to take a shortcut through dangerous territory, and so he started off by saying we were ambushed by goblins. He checked his notes and brought out his calculator. "...61 goblins." Then he started placing tokens on the table. It took four hours to kill them all, and both of the newbies (who had to start with under-equipped and under-experienced characters) died. Even though we kept urging him to make the goblins run away when half of them were dead he insisted that all enemies must fight to the death or the difficulty system would break down. Next time I'm bringing D&D 4e and asking if anyone wants to try it out instead.
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May 9, 2012 11:42
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I don't see that taking any less long with 12 players.
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May 9, 2012 11:48
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My Lovely Horse posted:I don't see that taking any less long with 12 players. Make sure not a single one of them has a ranged attack for maximum hilarity (and so the theoretical 12 PCs at once do not just get turned into pin cushions). I'll be right back with the exact numbers. EDIT: Okay, range in total experience per encounter for a Five Man Party seems to be average 500 or a bit more Experience for a Level 1 Encounter, which gets them to level Two in Ten or less fights. Let's be cautious and say a flat 500 in this example, to reach 1,000 Experience split between five people (5,000 grand total). Level 1 minions are 25 Exp each. 12,000 total exp for twelve people to hit level two. Ten 1,200 Encounters to reach level two with Twelve Players. Which brings us to!... 48 Level one Minions (which all have 1 HP each, Can't Hurt On A Miss) for a single Level one (1,200 Exp total) Encounter meant for twelve players... Huh, guess it WOULD be faster in 4th Edition. vvv I am not good at the Maths, okay 
Section Z fucked around with this message at 12:09 on May 9, 2012 |
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May 9, 2012 11:51
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12 PCs vs. 61 minions. Whoever has area attacks makes large holes in the army, whoever has single-target attacks mops up survivors. That would even work very well as an illustration for one system vs. the other, especially since 4E has a difficulty system built in. 61 would go above the recommended number and probably still be easily and relatively quickly resolved. e: dude if you use only minions you can just say "number of PCs x 4."
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May 9, 2012 12:06
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Makes a lot of sense. Plus even the low level PC's get to feel powerful as they wade through the mewling forces of their foes. Nothing builds confidence like taking on a huge mob of guys and wiping them out. And if you build it right the character can be designed for exactly those kind of fights. I'm pretty sure there's a feat for humans which gives them damage resistance 5 once their health hit's a pre-defined point. Once that kicks off they can literally rip the minions apart taking no damage in turn. They look cool and the player is happy and will come back for more. Win win.
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May 9, 2012 13:55
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I'm not sure what you guys are getting at, unless you are playing a tabletop wargame, I can't see how fighting that many dudes at once can possibly be fun. I frequently play with 6 people total and having even 3 monsters per character gets tedious. Its a case of yay we won before combat started, but we have to waste time rolling now.
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May 9, 2012 13:57
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Well it's not really fun, but it'd be more fun in 4E than in drakenkällare or whatever they call it in Sweden. And let's face it, once you have 12 PCs on the table with an appropriate amount of enemies, your encounter is a tabletop wargame. Although with the 60 minions, if you have anything in the party like a wizard with Stinking Cloud, you can probably call it right then.
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May 9, 2012 14:05
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| # ? May 14, 2024 19:48 |
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I guess with 12 people its less odd. If the DM had any skill in him he could burn through the monsters turns pretty quick, and if you are already waiting for 11 other players to take their turn every round, you'd be used to waiting for things to be resolved.
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May 9, 2012 14:11
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