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Speaking of Fantasy Flight, I'm going to mention that I own WoW the board game and both expansions for it. I'll know go hang my head in shame in the corner and you can throw things at me at your leisure.
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May 18, 2012 19:22
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I have 4 of FFG's "big box" games, Twilight Imperium, Descent, Starcraft, and Horus Heresy. My friends and I have had a blast playing all of them, but I think Horus Heresy is the only one with a semi-decent rules book. And map 2 for Descent can go gently caress itself. It's almost literally "If the players buy a few bows, they win."
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May 18, 2012 19:25
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Randalor posted:And map 2 for Descent can go gently caress itself. It's almost literally "If the players buy a few bows, they win." A mate of mind had Descent and I'm fairly certain *every* expansion, booster, or whatever - he was mad for it. It was tactically very engaging, but a huge time sink (quelle surprise). My first time playing I ended up with a caster type with huge range bonuses and AoE spells, so I literally would just stand at the end of long halls and blindly nuke rooms with no idea what was in them. Kind of trivialised the map, I must say.
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May 18, 2012 20:13
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Descent tends to have a very fine balance point IME - it often swings from impossible to trivial with the right silver or gold treasure. Or swings on one wrong decision in the second turn, and kills you.
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May 18, 2012 20:27
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Psykers. I could fill a text book with why they are both the best and the worst thing about 40k. Tzeentch Is A Spawncamper or how to burn 10 fate points in that many turns into the first session We were warned beforehand that this adventure would be a lot more meatgrindery then usual for DH so were all told to stat up two characters each, which thankfully isn't hard in DH, rolling for stats, some basic things like starting cash and stuff, figuring out what items to take with said money and thinking up a bio. Eventually we ended up with 3 guardsmen, an assassin, 2 arbitrators(one belonging to me), a psyker(!), a cleric, an adept(mine) and a tech priest. The jist of the story was that we were at the gate of what passes for a haunted manor in 40k. After a bit of discussion on where to start, we decide that there could be all sort of things jumping out of the shadows at us given our double character and our psyker cast Inspiring Aura, a passive buff that wards against Fear and Pinning effects. Her rolls: 9 Psychic Phenomena(slightly bad poo poo happens as a side effect of the psychic power) 81 Perils of the Warp(very bad poo poo happens as a possible result of the previous roll) 90 The Surly Bonds of Earth(the psyker and everything in 1d100(some number I can't remember) meters around her fly up at 3 meters/turn for 1d10(rolled a 10) turns, then crash down for 1d10+20 falling damage) As you might have guessed from the title, this is a TPK.
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May 18, 2012 23:01
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I just want to say, I love your choice of names for your story Yawgmoth. I can also completely understand your rage at not being told jack or poo poo about the rules. Though my own personal annoyance variant there is actually KNOWING the rules, or being told to look something up. Then when it turns out I'm right just being dismissed with "Oh, It's a House Rule/We don't do that here" despite it being nowhere to be found on the accessible typed up list of house rules. Why tell someone to loving look it up if it doesn't matter what's in the drat rules?
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May 18, 2012 23:10
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Yawgmoth posted:For those of you who play Magic: have you ever seen someone get taught how to play by their teacher using a tournament-ready monoblue control deck and the student being given a monogreen stompy deck made out of poo poo from the back of the closet?
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May 20, 2012 16:33
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Pierzak posted:What the gently caress? People actually do this? That is pretty much how a friend, who is a great dude except for this one blind spot, attempted to teach me how to play multiplayer first person shooters. Five-minute rounds of getting railed in the head approximately every 5-8 seconds. It's the only kind of video game he plays, he'd really like to have someone else to play against, and I'd like to help him. But not until he understands the basic concept of offering someone who is way, way below you in skill level a handicap.
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May 20, 2012 16:41
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Pierzak posted:What the gently caress? People actually do this? It was actually kind of sad since he didn't really have any friends, just people who wouldn't mock him to his face. He was the "my uncle works at Nintendo" kind of type, and his cheating was really obvious to anyone who actually knew the game and watched him for it; poo poo like tapping lands twice (the 'tap once at 10o, then again at 90o' trick), stacking lands directly on top of each other so you couldn't get an accurate count (and lying about it until it mattered), and the best one: playing a bunch of poo poo really fast and saying "I already played it so you can't respond!" Having known how much this sucks, I have built 5 good but simple decks, 1 of each color, for teaching people how to play. Everyone I've taught has said how much they like my method and a few have actually gone out and made decks of their own, which really pleases me. Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 17:07 on May 20, 2012 |
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May 20, 2012 17:04
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Yawgmoth posted:Having known how much this sucks, I have built 5 good but simple decks, 1 of each color, for teaching people how to play. Everyone I've taught has said how much they like my method and a few have actually gone out and made decks of their own, which really pleases me.
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May 20, 2012 23:34
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 Yawgmoth posted:Everyone I've taught has said how much they like my method and a few have actually gone out and made decks of their own, which really pleases me. He takes pleasure from trapping people in an addictive hobby that will suck up all of their money and time, leaving them as nerdy shells of their former selves! His evil plan has been exposed!
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May 21, 2012 00:29
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I've never played Bang! exactly the same way twice. That's what happen when you learn from other players instead of the rulebook.
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May 21, 2012 01:50
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Re: Learning To Play Magic From Douchebags Several years back, a group of friends who played set up a whole game of three other people just to teach me how to play. The game was explained, we played an hour or so, and I enjoyed it a lot. I wanted to play more, but I was spending all of my money on booze at the time and decided it would cost too much out of my inebriation fund. Fast forward about three years, and I'm dating a guy with a metric shitload of magic cards. I ask him to teach me how to play. He sets up the decks and plays through the turns of the "learn how to play" sheet, and then the next turn comes up, our first turns out of the tutorial, he goes first... "I tap these things, do this, this, this, that, and.. you're dead. Wanna play again, babe?" I never touched the game again.
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May 21, 2012 02:08
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Amykinz posted:Re: Learning To Play Magic From Douchebags That bag of dicks probably thought he was so cool, too 
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May 21, 2012 02:29
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Amykinz posted:Re: Learning To Play Magic From Douchebags
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May 21, 2012 02:31
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Amykinz posted:"I tap these things, do this, this, this, that, and.. you're dead. Wanna play again, babe?" I understand that some people just have to win all the time, and new players are easy pickings. But I would think that if you're good enough to be good at the game, you'd be smart enough to realize that playing hardball right off the bat is going to net you precisely one poorly won game and a rather hacked off friend, whereas going easy and cranking up the "difficulty" bit by bit is going to get you a regular opponent who might actually provide you with an interesting game every now and then. And isn't multiple games against someone at least slightly skilled preferable to one game against someone you're likely as least half playing the game for?
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May 21, 2012 02:38
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At my biweekly D&D game we are a big group. We have about 7 players, and 9 characters. 2 of the characters are leftover from players that ended up leaving more on them in another post. But Yesterday was the worst experience I have ever had at a social event of any kind. I had invited a friend of my girlfriends over to join the party. She has played D&D a lot before and was looking forward to playing again. We get her a character rolled up and we are good to go. So we get there and we are going over last minute details on her character sheet when suddenly one of the players comes into the room. I look up to say hi and am greeted with a camera flash from his cell phone. I follow the path and his phone is pointed right at our new players chest. Normally I am a pretty loud guy but I just didn't even know how to react to that, She looked up and saw that he was STILL holding the phone that way and we finally asked him what the gently caress he was doing. He replies with "Oh my phone sometimes has the camera flash go off when I power it on." which is the biggest bullshit excuse I have ever heard. I ask to see his recent photos then, Because in all honestly this is a pretty creepy guy. He freaks out and puts the phone away. And he refuses to admit what he was doing with the phone out and pointed at her chest for the rest of the night. And now we are out a cleric, and a friend. Great. I'll post about the other 2 players that dropped out later if anyone else is interested. They include a guy who constantly smelled like pot and a girl who was always dying.
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May 21, 2012 02:41
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TokenTrevor posted:Camera-chest. I would have literally beat that dude's rear end, seriously that's some loving borderline rapist level poo poo there.
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May 21, 2012 03:24
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I assume you mean both out of character?
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May 21, 2012 03:25
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Tardcore posted:I would have literally beat that dude's rear end, seriously that's some loving borderline rapist level poo poo there. Yea And that lovely part is I even warned him before she came "like Hey man I'm not trying be a jerk, Just try to be cool when she is over. She had to leave her last game for a guy being a creep to her, I'm telling everybody." Which isn't true I only told him out off all the players because he was the only one to worry about. But here it is the next day and the cleric player has quit the game. So now we are up to 3 characters with players that have left. I pretty much told him to gently caress off just now, so I will likely be without a game here soon too. Golden Bee posted:I assume you mean both out of character? If you mean pot guy and dying girl, Yea. I'll just go ahead and put them in this post I suppose. So pot guy and Dying girl were a couple that we started the D&D game with. Along with Bard (whose real name I still don't know), creeper and his girlfriend ( another player that left, but at least we killed her character off) and of course me. Well from the first session dying girl is angry and loud, which is whatever, As long as she can cool down once the game starts. And oh did she cool down. About an hour into it she says " I gotta lay down, I'm having a seizure." just like that, gets up walks to the couch and lays down. So pot guy goes over to check on her and they decide they have to leave for the night. OK no biggie I guess. We will get the plot started rolling. So the next time she gets about 2 hours in before her "Ovaries are exploding" but this is apparently ALSO solved by simply lying on the couch. Pot guy decides to keep playing until she starts crying about pain, so they leave. Again in the middle of everything. We play their characters through the night and assume that'll be the end of it. Either she will go to the hospital over this obviously serious complaint and we can write them out, or it'll be dealt with by next week and they will stop leaving so much. Either way it'll be solved. How wrong We were. So the next meeting takes about a month to get together, schedules conflicting, I guess it's hard to play D&D when you gotta spy through girls windows for pictures. We finally get there and notice pot guy and Dying girl are there so we ask about her pain and if everything ok. They say yea it got taken care of. So we start up the game. and not 30 minutes in she is now having a heart attack. she heads towards the couch of healing and falls asleep. Pot guy steps out to smoke a bowl and then drives them home. We just stop including them in the story at this point. Finally a few months later they say they wanna come to the next session, We ask if they are gonna be able to stay or not, and they say yes. They don't even bother showing up. We say gently caress it. And give Pot guy's mage to the barb who joined later and really wanted to play it. Turns out they hadn't leveled up since level 3, everyone else was 7 by this point. The wizard had about 5 spells dedicated to sleeping things, darkness, obscuring mist and whatnot and 1 attack spell. Which we never even saw him use. Dying girl had a cleric that we just wrote out of the game because we were gonna bring in my friend. It had heal minor wounds and then nothing else checked on the sheet. Savage Shulkie fucked around with this message at 03:53 on May 21, 2012 |
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May 21, 2012 03:38
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I've managed to read through the whole thread and I definitely have some stories to post, but I wanted to get this out of the way first.Ratspeaker posted:I also loved the story about the guy whose friend had a homebrew campaign with superpowered elves who needed to touch a tree every 24 hours, and then the players blew a hole in the planet and it turned into a post-apocalyptic campaign, and all the elves died. I only have a small excerpt from it saved, though. Mathemagician posted:I just remembered a truly terrible role-playing experience, as opposed to the number of mildly depressing ones I've encountered. This guy I would play with up at college by name of Jake was probably the hands-down, worst person I've ever played with. He was such a blindlingly psychotic min-maxing, rules exploiting bastard that I don't know why I ever played with him more than once, let alone DM.
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May 21, 2012 08:43
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Amykinz posted:Fast forward about three years, and I'm dating a guy with a metric shitload of magic cards. I ask him to teach me how to play. He sets up the decks and plays through the turns of the "learn how to play" sheet, and then the next turn comes up, our first turns out of the tutorial, he goes first... I used to be this type. It's a particular kind of immaturity where you think that proving yourself superior to other people is a way to get them to like you. The thinking goes that by beating someone soundly they'll be impressed and either worship you, or beg to play the game again so as to see your awesomeness in action again.
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May 21, 2012 15:22
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There's been a lot of talk in the thread lately about 'healbots' and the healing economy of various editions, so I thought I would add my own story. After years of playing with terrible people, all of them moved away or stopped talking to me because of their own various psychoses. Stuck with no one to play D&D with, I ended up going to a twice a month RPGA thing, which for those that don't know is basically any random rear end person can show up, and if they have or make an RPGA-legal character, they can participate. RPGA only ran 4e while I was around, and they split it into 1-3, 4-6, and 7-9 tiers. Since any random rear end person can play at RPGA, what you ended up with was literally everyone playing a striker (high damage, low health). Now, I tried playing a defender or a controller a few times to balance out the roles, or even a few leaders, but of course since I was always the only non-striker people would piss and moan about how I was 'unoptimized' for healing and how I wasn't doing my job etc. etc. This paired with a particularly malevolent DM who often ran games that ended in a TPK in the first encounter, I decided to fight back the only way I knew how. And thus Supercleric was born. He wasn't originally called Supercleric, and I never called him that, but it got to the point where everyone forgot his name (it was Legate of Celestial Mercy Incarnate). Supercleric was a dwarven cleric I had built as a Pacifist Healer (all healing stuff is better but if you ever damage a bloodied enemy, you're stunned), decked out with all the best healing powers, feats, etc. I decided that Supercleric decided he was the chosen one of Berronar Truesilver (dwarven god of healing in FR) and it was his job to keep do-gooders kickin rear end in his name. He also wore no clothing except a chainmail bikini and had a cross shaved into his chest hair. I also found a fairly accurate mini to represent this. His main at-will was Astral Seal, which did no damage, but gave the enemy a sizeable penalty to all defenses, and made it so that the next time an ally hit it, they got hp back. Now, this power was designed to just provide 2 or 3 hp back, but optimized it brings about 3x that much back. So every turn, someone in the party is getting a good 1/3rd of their max hp back, and that's BEFORE I started using healing powers. Healing Words were enough to bring any character back to full hp, Healer's Mercy was enough to heal everyone about 3/4 of their max hp, and so on. I'm also throwing out temporary hp on allies like crazy and insane debuffs on enemies (Bane for -5 to ALL defenses AND attacks for 1 turn). But the main course was Moment of Glory, which pushes enemies back and prone. Oh, also it gives all allies resist 5 to all damage, just so long as they're vaguely near me when I cast it. And the duration is as long as I spend a minor every turn concentrating on it. Now that may not seem like a big deal, but in the 1-3 and 4-6 tiers (which were the only tiers we played), that's like a 50% reduction in all enemy damage. I'd call out "Moment of Glory next turn guys", and everyone would immediately rush towards me and wait for the glorious goodness. Or the combo of using an action point to Moment of Glory and then Hymn of Resurgance to give everyone a saving throw or some temp hp. Now the malevolent DM didn't like Supercleric. At all. On account of his not being able to kill anyone while Supercleric was around. He eventually got to the point where he would send every enemy in the encounter to try to kill me as quickly as possible, but my AC was stupidly high (Dwarven Finemail) and I had a fair amount of HP to boot and could heal myself without 'wasting' heals with the Dwarven Finemail. And while he was wasting his time trying to crack my armor, the party of nothing but strikers would be getting backstabs and headshots and whatever else on them. Eventually the DM's had a meeting or something and got fed up with Supercleric so they started running 1-3 again so I couldn't play him, but that was only a month or two before RPGA shut down entirely in my area. In the meantime though, I noticed that the malevolent DM had kind of loosened up about killing the players off though, which could be because the other DMs told him Supercleric was his fault, or maybe he was fearing Supercleric's reincarnation. (Supercleric isn't dead, he's just badass enough to reincarnate whenever he wants). I have a couple more stories from RPGA, including the Good Guy Gang adventuring company, the crazy weirdos that would show up, and going to the titular Cat Piss Man's house.
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May 22, 2012 08:34
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I'm a pretty flexible guy, play in a fairly varied group of games over time, so all my bad experiences are usually ones where the group ends. This latest group-ender is just a stumper, because I honestly can't figure out who triggered it the most. Dresden Files rpg over irc. Was working pretty well. I liked my character and we were getting used to the system and having fun. The only complaint I had was a difference of opinion with the GM, and that's where the trouble started. See, I've always been of the opinion that groups are full of civilized people that can pretend to not hear things they're not supposed to know, but he liked to keep the verisimilitude a bit more exacting, and if there was some info that only one character would know, he'd tell only that character, in a private message. This in itself wouldn't be a problem, but Dresden Files had these long, involved magical rituals that can take 45-minutes plus to do, and he'd do them in private messages, too. So if we weren't in battle, there'd be long lulls while we waited for the magic users to do their hocus pocus. Chat would be entirely dead. Whatever. Sandwich making time. In any case, the last session we had, everything was normal. Our druid-type-person was working on a spell to track down someone who had put a hit out on us. I was surfing the web and waiting for them to finish. They come back, and announce the spell was successful. Everyone gets their gear ready, starts heading for the safehouse door to exact a little payback. The druid asks, "So, where we going?" And the GM explodes. Starts ranting about no one listening to him, logs out, disappears for weeks. Deletes the IRC channel. To this day, I have no idea what happened. Did the Druid get that info and ignore it? Did the GM misunderstand what he said in text form? Was there some back room drama I wasn't privy to? No idea at all. I really should just give up on IRC games.
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May 22, 2012 09:51
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Bobulus posted:I really should just give up on IRC games. IRC games are just pretty good (Not that my only games have ever been IRC games), you just need to make sure everyone is active and not loving around and paying attention to the game. If you're playing with friends you can usually trust them to do this, it's just when you're all strangers to each other and the DM it gets to be a problem.
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May 22, 2012 10:37
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Yeah, I work odd hours so it's hard for me to find a real life group, but I vastly prefer skype groups to irc groups for just that reason, that the players are more engaged. Every IRC game I've played has ended in disaster, but I'm not sure if I can blame that on the IRC or just the groups of strangers. Not sure if I told this one, but I had one irc GM who got way too attached to his NPCs. I don't mean, like, plot-important NPCs. I mean that he'd make names for his random grunts and get attached to them like player characters. We were playing a Firefly game with him and someone got a lucky roll and one-shotted a security guard, and he threw a huge tantrum because he'd spent a long time on that random mook security guard. Punished us by pulling some bullshit with a grenade in a corridor that had the shockwaves bounce back and forth, over and over, hitting us dozens of times and killing / rendering unconscious the majority of the party from full health.
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May 22, 2012 11:08
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Mathemagician posted:After years of playing with terrible people, all of them moved away or stopped talking to me because of their own various psychoses.
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May 22, 2012 12:05
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CAPSLOCKGIRL posted:IRC games are just pretty good (Not that my only games have ever been IRC games), you just need to make sure everyone is active and not loving around and paying attention to the game. Last night, they had the simple decision to go in a cave or continue on around a mountain pass; I had to prod them to make the decision. I'm telling myself it was because it was getting late and people were tired, but this seems to be happening a lot. It's taken three sessions (about 12 game hours) to get where they are, and I had expected them to get through this bit in one.
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May 22, 2012 16:58
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Yawgmoth posted:This is true. I'm DMing a game right now where the players all say they're having fun, but holy poo poo it's like pulling teeth to get them to actually roleplay. If I give you a paragraph of description and you don't react in any way, it kinda kills my drive to run a game! DM: "With your keen senses you pick out an unsettling sound in the air. A powerful noise unmistakeably made by a pair of gigantic leathery wings striking the air. With your gaze drawn towards the sound, you look up at the sky to see a silhouette of dark wings block the sun as it swoops down from the sky. The ground tremors as the beast hits the ground, and now you see that before you is a black dragon, with scales as dark as the deepest abyss. With acid dripping from it's terrifying teeth it turns it's fire red eyes upon you with a clear motive. Lunch."  : "I wonder what it's AC is?"
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May 22, 2012 17:49
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Pierzak posted:Sounds like the common element was you. There were quite a few crazies that showed up to RPGA. Well actually, all of them were crazy in their own little way. My apologies to anyone I describe who is a goon, as I wish you no ill will. Here is a brief summary: Dave, who ran the local RPGA chapter, who wasn't a bad guy but once he started talking about something, it was impossible to get him to stop. He would get on these hour long rants about how the 80's Conan movie was terrible and the new one was good, or how this edition was better/worse than that edition, and so on. Which is obviously bad when he's DMing, since the game would just grind to a halt every time this would happen. As a player he would always make these elaborate rules-exploitave characters that never turned out very effective. Kevin, the aforementioned malevolent DM, was actually a very nice person and a great roleplayer, but his DMing was something to behold. If he didn't kill at least half the party per adventure, he would get sullen. His favorite thing to do was, after killing off the party, give his analysis on everything they could have done better, which was pointless because the problem was always completely overwhelming odds or monsters 3-4 levels above the party's. As a player he was a lot of fun to play with and added a lot of character to the game (go figure). Norm, who is probably a goon (hi Norm). Lives and works on his parent's farm so he was gone about half the year for the harvest, but the times he was there we got to enjoy his strange, quiet rejoinders and his unsettling characters, who were always women and always shifters (half human half wolf  ). Now there were a fair share of women that showed up to RPGA and they didn't 'roleplay' half as weirdly as Norm did. Creepiness aside, he would tend to play controllers and end up hitting the party with his burst effects half the time.There were a few stragglers, who'd show up a couple times or one time then never show up again with no explanation (although in many cases it was Kevin's TPKs). An old dude and his wife who were hardcore 2e players, who tried to use their homebrew 4e characters that were decked out in dozens of magic items and got real mad when they couldn't. They never really understood the 4e rules even though everyone was very understanding and helpful (everyone may be weird but they were nice when it came to that), but they'd continually get pissy and eventually stopped showing up. There were a couple other regulars, including Dan, who seemed like a totally normal, if maybe a bit socially awkward, guy, who had a mullet and would occasionally bring his wife to play too. A couple times after he'd show up he'd get a call and have to leave, he said because "his wife didn't want to be home alone", which I thought was weird but didn't really question it. I later found out why, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Dan and his wife were both very knowledgeable about the rules, and both played totally normal characters. Dan tended toward rangers and his wife (whose name I am forgetting) towards tanks and fighters iirc. Because the local gaming shop where we usually played was undergoing renovation, Dan and his wife invited everyone to play at their house, and Dan would even DM. This sounded fine to everyone. So me and my brother use the GPS to find the place, and it's literally in the worst part of town where someone gets shot like every day (trust me, it's bad). The wife mentions later that they have a "protective ring of drug dealers around the house", which is why I assume she sometimes doesn't like being home alone. We knock and go in, and there's a peculiar aroma filling the entire house. It's a mix of cat litter, cat piss, musty old house smell, and the smell of what I assume was a lack of cleaning judging from the piles of debris. This pervasive aroma is partially explained by the dozen or so cats scampering around. Don't get me wrong, I like cats, but neither Dan nor his wife even mentioned having cats, let alone this many. Everyone else shows up, and the woman who's a manager at McDonalds shows up with shakes for everyone, which was nice. Dan, who has never DMed at RPGA before, slowly stumbles his way through the adventure, often requiring his wife's help to read the DM notes (at RPGA they come as a kit with the adventure). Suddenly, without explanation, he rises and violently hurls in the sink, then sits back down as if nothing happened. When questioned, he says he has a dust allergy, which if true makes sense because it certainly was a dusty old house. A bit later on, one of the cats makes a weird noise, and then the entire room is filled with the foulest smelling, putrefied gas I've ever experienced. Apparently one of the cats was sick, and went to the bathroom, which is why the house smells like a biological weapon went off. Only a couple other people notice it, which was the weird part for me. The wife apologizes, throws some baking soda on the cat box which does nothing to remove the smell, and gets back to playing. At this point the rest of the session is a blur, as I believe I had failed a sanity roll. Once the gaming shop was renovated, the owner said we couldn't play any more (because he was a dick), so that was the last RPGA session I ever went to.
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May 22, 2012 20:50
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You failed a sanity roll when you didn't immediately walk out of a house that should have been condemned as a biological hazard. Seriously, why would you stay? Hope you'd get used to the smell and not notice it?
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May 22, 2012 22:10
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Mathemagician posted:This paired with a particularly malevolent DM who often ran games that ended in a TPK in the first encounter, I decided to fight back the only way I knew how. And thus Supercleric was born. 
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May 22, 2012 23:50
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Well, I guess I should put it here... So here i go : I will start with the basics : up until the beginning of last year, I had barely ever played any RPG. I knew how they worked and I was to be quite honest rather interested in playing a few sessions with friends, but at the same time it definitely wasn't one of my top priorities. So that year I met a guy at my uni (let's call him Ivan) who ended up becoming the GM for a group of friends. The first campaign we played was a little Star Wars campaign that didn't go beyond 2 play sessions. Now I've never been a huge SW fan (I've only seen 4 out of the 6 movies, never played any of the videogames or watched any of the cartoons), but I always liked the feeling of the universe because it's basically cowboys and samurais in space. Our group was composed of : - C (huge star wars geek): a padawan from a rather ugly race that needs to constantly wear a gasmask. He was fun to play with, even if he was clearly trying to make his character go to the dark side as fast as possible (but hey, I can't say I blame him, if I was some sort of pig disgustingly ugly alien with demi-god powers, I can't say I would always make the wisest choices) - T (other huge star wars geek): the walking tank. Big armor, more blasters than needed, enough explosives to ruin a planet, kind of a sociopath, and perfectly captured the feeling of "thank god that guy's on our side". - A : the worst diplomat ever. I still don't understand to this day why he decided to play a roleplay class if he didn't like roleplaying. Aside from that, he didn't do much, but I guess he had fun and he didn't prevent us from having fun too, so whatever. - Me : So we didn't end up playing that campaign for long for reasons that I don't really remember, but we had fun while it lasted. So a few weeks later, when Ivan proposed to start a bigger D&D campaign (4E), we accepted almost immediately. This time we had (in no particular order): - C : Tiefling Rogue. Terribly optimized (to be honest, it was his first serious character and nobody ever explained him how to make a "working" rogue), but apparently he went through the trouble of writing a backstory and was rather enthusiastic. He ended up not being able to come to every gaming session because he didn't live in the same town as we did. - T : He went through several characters. In order : Human Cleric, Revenant Avenger (Human Cleric died then came back from the dead), USELESS Shifter Rogue, Eladrin Wizard (or Sorcerer, I can't remember, he died so fast), Goliath Fighter. He was fun to play with but at the same time, he was also a rather uncontrollable element. He crashed our flying ship (twice), backstabbed a city official for more or less no reason (though he had it coming) and spent an entire fight throwing knives and never hitting anything. - A : Elf druid. I don't hate A, but he wasn't really good at roleplaying and his tactical skills were kinda... lacking. As in, "I will try to shield my friends from attacks with my 14 AC and my 8HPs". Oh well, I wrote his eulogy and we had a very nice funeral. With like almost 15 seconds of silence. His next character (Goliath Warden) killed his horse so he could eat it. I think that says it all. - O : stereotypical Dwarf Warrior. He was really fun to play with (he had a great dwarf silly accent), but he ended up not being able to come to our more or less weekly gaming sessions. - B : a very good friend of mine. Played a Human Barbarian that was nearly unkillable by conventionnal attacks once he was bloodied, had a big great axe that allowed him to rush THROUGH people and almost wiped out an entire battalion on his own. Good roleplayer too, we had a little schtick where he would ask my slightly smarter character what some complicated words meant. - M : Successively a Dragonborn Sorcerer and a half-elf Bard. He was pretty good at Viciously Mocking enemies and womanizing bards are fun to be with, but again, he couldn't come often. - L : M's Girlfriend, played a Human Cleric. She was always helpful and nice (in character she would heal us, and OOC she would bring cake), but same as above, she ended up not being able to come often. - J : played a Human Ranger. He was pretty good at his job, enjoyed good roleplay, but could get somewhat unlucky (he lost his bow in fight, while being specialized around bows). J is now in another country (it's just over the border mind you, but that does mean he won't be able to come anymore). - P : Dwarf cleric and veteran roleplayer. I wish we played together a little longer. - An : she played a Human Barbarian (coincidently a cousin of B's character). She was issued an extremely well optimized character and holds the record for the highest damage ever inflicted in a round ( critical on a 7d12 attack and extremely good results on a 5d12 attack plus various bonuses for a total of 143 points of damage). You should have seen the smile she had that day. - E : another very good friend of mine and a veteran roleplayer. His (female) Half-Orc Avenger had maybe the most fleshed out backstory of all our characters, ripe with betrayal, honor and tragedy. Like me, he is a Resident Evil geek so that made going through weird, bloody and zombie infested manors and dungeons much funnier ("I can't pick up that sword, I already have 6 items in my inventory" "I wonder what would happen if we were to rearrange those portraits by the age of the people on them... Nothing? this manor sucks" "I hope this is not *insert random character's name*'s blood" everytime we found even one droplet of blood). Also our characters were married. Or just engaged, I don't know anymore. - Me, Human Warlock. I can't really pass a judgment on myself so I guess I was about average. Wow, that was a lot of people. Keep in mind that a good number of them only came to our gaming sessions a few times, and rarely at the same time. But aside from that, it was a great group, there was no creepy moments, everyone was friendly and I have a lot of good memories from that campaign, both awesome successes and ridiculous failures. I also GM'd a few sessions on the DK system (rules light french d20/d6 system) with more or less the same people, but this time in a much lighter fantasy setting (with just enough steampunk to make guns and steam powered combine harvesters). I gave them lots of money and a gun making company, as well as excuses to go on adventures. I'm not a great GM, but I guess they had fun. Highlights involve a day at the colosseum, the weakest necromancer ever and adventures with the most dangerous alcohol known to man. Also, we had started a campaign in Eclipse Phase, that was just awesome: - We're sent on a space station that hasn't given sign of life for a good time now by firewall. So far, so good, even if it's our first time playing, we all realize that this is the kind of crap we're gonna have to deal with now, but we remain optimistic this is just an introduction mission, so maybe that only means fixing some gear and whatnot. Every last one of our optimistic plans goes flying out of the window when a lifeless corpse crashes through it as we are approaching the station. We all put on our vac-suits (except for the robots) and manage to land the ship in the station's hangar, but there's no power in the hangar so that means I, the flexible space octopus will have to find a way to put the power back on. I venture out in space, go through some sort of rock cracking shaft (the space station was apparently used to mine asteroids, kinda like in dead space.), reach some sort of control panel, put the power back on and wait for my friends to come rendezvous with me because I'm just way too scared to get out of this relatively safe spot (read : not safe at all). After that, we separate in small groups and explore the station. We quickly come in front of a few problems : there was apparently some sort of space fungi on one of the rocks they mined that drove the people on board crazy and all mutant, the "windshield" of our ship is still broken, so that means we can't leave, and even if we could leave, we would have to access the station control room to adjust our jump, which we can't do right now because the door's locked. Also the doctor of the station has gone insane, somehow grafted scalpels to his arms and is most likely spying on us through the airducts as we speak. Great. We actually manage to solve those problems one by one. First, we use some sort of super duper machine to create a new windshield out of space diamonds (remember we are on a mining station), then we unlock the control room, go there and move the station around so that we can "jump" back to where we came from. Oh yeah, also now the doctor is trying to kill us. We lock the door to the control room, break the windows and climb out of the station. We go around, I put my thermite charges on a door, blow it up, and the depressurisation (along with a few grenades from our tactical expert) has the doctor thrown out into space. Our tactical expert goes back to our ship while our barsoomian freelance journalist messes up bigtime on his climb role and starts drifting into space. We contact him through the tactical network and tell him to try using the blast of his shredder (space shotgun) to propel him back to the station. He messes up again and is thrown even farther into space. When he messes up a third time, I say "gently caress it, I'm coming to get you" and I run back (technically, an octopus cimbing on a space station in 0 gravity isn't really running, but I was in a hurry anyway) to the control station. I had previously discovered it could be detached from the rest of the station and used as a ship, so I did just that and went to save my buddy (needless to say he had taken some pretty heavy mental damage by the time I got there). I did mess up my parking on my return to the station so we had little time to get back to our ship, but we managed to launch safely. E's character, an extropian smuggler (we used the pre-generated characters, if you had not guessed already) had, like the greedy bastard he is, taken samples of the mind altering, body corrupting, horribly dangerous fungi and hidden it into one of the secret compartments on his snake robot body. This luckily didn't end up being a problem (the fungi died during the trip back home), but that betrayal was a great moment for everyone involved. Okay, that's it for the good experiences, now, for the bad stuff, which I will keep short because I want to sleep : Ivan doesn't talk to us anymore because he is pissed off at us for some reason, and also because he has "cooler friends" now. So now I'm sad not only because someone I thought to be a good friend doesn't talk to me anymore but also because he justs refuses to GM anymore so the big D&D campaign we had been playing for almost 2 years is now dead.
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May 23, 2012 01:37
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As any GM knows, Monty Python quotes are the best way to kill a good session. Something like that happened to me when GM'ing a Shadowrun Campaign during my university time. The (involuntary) culprit was a nice enough girl  who had joined our group. She was a really good roleplayer, and had quite a lot of experience with Shadowrun / Earthdawn. ONLY with Shadowrun and Earthdawn, though, not with any other system, which would prove to be the undoing of the grand finale of my campaign.Right. So, over multiple sessions I had been dropping hints that something's happening in the background, and that the runs are tied together. The general idea was that an experimental AI had gone rogue, was taking over a research complex and tried to be released into the Matrix, Shadowrun's organic version of the internet. To this end, it was trying to conspire with Horrors, Shadowrun's and Earthdawn's stock lovecraftian entities. Cliché and not entirely compatible with the game world, admittedly, but it was good fun and the players liked the buildup. In the final few sessions, the players decided to infiltrate the complex. OK, so I start ripping off System Shock and we have a fun Shadowrun dungeon crawl. plays an elven shaman, bit hippie-ish and pacifistic, face of the group due to in game skills and generally being a great role player.The final session went really great. We got a claustrophobic lovecraftian atmosphere with strange things lurking around each corner, and even I as GM found the atmosphere eerie and oppressing. So, for the grand finale approach, the group, beset by horrors and close to the edge of their sanity, decide to stop fighting. Instead, they decide to approach the AI and convince it that allying with the horrors beyond existance will not accomplish its goals. approaches the computer's main terminal : "All right. You have finally reached the entity responsible for the devastation and the horrors in this place. The entity who was responsible for [insert recap]. Several turrents train on you and the other group members. You have this one chance to convince the AI not to ally with the horrors. What do you say?"    :  : "Friend Computer! We have come here..." :  
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May 24, 2012 13:58
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Blackstone posted:
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May 24, 2012 14:05
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It is Paranoia, but it had the same effect on the session as Monty Python. I wish there was a way to run games with a Monty Python atmosphere. Not just catchphrases from Holy Grail, the real deal. Probably impossible by definition.
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May 24, 2012 14:30
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MadScientistWorking posted:That is Monty Python?? If you hadn't have said anything I would have thought it was a Paranoia reference. Mylovelyhorse is right, that was an (again: unintended) Paranoia reference. I didn't want to spoil the ending by mentioning Paranoia in the first paragraph.
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May 24, 2012 14:36
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My Lovely Horse posted:I wish there was a way to run games with a Monty Python atmosphere. Require all the players to dress as pepperpots.
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May 24, 2012 14:36
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My Lovely Horse posted:I wish there was a way to run games with a Monty Python atmosphere. Not just catchphrases from Holy Grail, the real deal. Probably impossible by definition. Have the players drop acid and play "Toon" or "It Came from the Late Late Show?"
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May 24, 2012 15:59
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My Lovely Horse posted:I wish there was a way to run games with a Monty Python atmosphere. Not just catchphrases from Holy Grail, the real deal. The Spanish Inquisition explicitly compliments their "nice red uniforms". I think this may not be a coincidence.
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May 24, 2012 16:19
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