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pw pw pw posted:For people who have spent 200+ dollars and countless hours assembling a tyranid army, it is literally worth crying about. We don't play competitively with each other, we have done many silly missions and objectives, and the Tyranid army wasn't actually his. Its owned by one of the others we play with, he had just been playing it many games in a row to see what they were like. So I could understand being frustrated by spending money on something that isn't good, but that wasn't even the case. Plus his primary army is Tau, so he should be used to losing horribly 
Fashionable Jorts fucked around with this message at 23:39 on May 26, 2012 |
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May 26, 2012 23:35
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Oh, well if that's the case he sounds like a whiny bitch. But tyranids are no laughing matter 
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May 26, 2012 23:38
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pw pw pw posted:Oh, well if that's the case he sounds like a whiny bitch. Yeah, going off of his actions in Pathfinder and a couple online games we've played, I would have to agree with you. Its a shame as to what happened to Tyranids, I had a tiny amount of them in 4th (yay battle for macragge) so I was disappointed by how lame the new codex got, just the sheer lack of customization it had. But since this isn't the 40k thread, I shall instead tell of the latest fun times we've had with Pathfinder. So since people have been crazy busy lately, the last couple games we've played have just been me (DM) and two others, whom we shall call Travis and Chris, as those are their names. Travis is playing an evil half-orc barbarian, with the usual hulk smash style of play, Chris is a neutral elf wizard who died a few adventures ago but was brought back to life but his body is now made out of glass-like crystal. Travis's character, being the dumb brick he is, thought that the wizard is now a living god and secretly started worshiping him. Thinking that just him worshiping the elf wasn't enough, he decided that any goblins or orcs we come across must be "converted" into the new religion. His method of conversion is cutting the leader of the group into small chunks and threatening the others to follow them or die. He even paid for some townsfolk to make a very basic version of a scripture to hand out to the new followers. This goes on in secret for a little while thanks to help from the witch character I occasionally play while DMing a small group and her amazing bluff skills. So noticing that there are now about 10 goblins following Travis's character around, the wizard finally sense-motives high enough to learn of the plot. Upon hearing this, he gets excited and informs the party of a very large gathering of goblins (crazy high local and geography knowledge rolls). After slaying about half of them and burning down assorted human villages to impress them, they now have a small horde of cultists. The best part was during the torching of one of the small villages, as the wizard flys above. "Why am I doing this?" he shouts, tears in his eyes, as he looses another fireball upon a thatched roof hovel. "Because it's awesome." was the only reply we could give. To summarize the next few games they now have over 500 goblin worshippers. United in the fear of the wizard and living in a small dwarven town that they claimed with fire, they are working on making a 60-foot statue of the wizard out of solid gold. The statue may take a while, as it will cost nearly 700,000 gold. I think they have a foot. Fashionable Jorts fucked around with this message at 00:04 on May 27, 2012 |
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May 27, 2012 00:01
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You'd think they'd want to make the statue out of crystal, given the subject.
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May 27, 2012 00:10
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Yawgmoth posted:You'd think they'd want to make the statue out of crystal, given the subject. That's what I said, but nope. He wants gold. Says it's more impressive.
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May 27, 2012 00:15
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kannonfodder posted:That's what I said, but nope. He wants gold. Says it's more impressive.
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May 27, 2012 00:20
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kannonfodder posted:whom we shall call Travis and Chris, as those are their names.
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May 27, 2012 00:53
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Had another great session last night. The first adventure was a sort of investigation, and my players seemed to really enjoy the combat aspect, so for the second one I gave them a pretty straightforward dungeon crawl. In the middle of it, however, I had them encounter a group of rival mercenaries with a redneck giant for a leader, who wanted something the party had. Rather than jump right in, the players elected to talk, which is what I was hoping for. I gave them three rounds to talk to the various mercenaries, but rather than just roll checks, I asked them to also tell me what they said to the NPCs. I was hoping to encourage more roleplaying, and it worked. Most of them focused on the giant, hoping to talk him down from a fight. Even with their bard leader working overtime, the giant was on the verge of starting combat when it came to the last turn of the third round. My brother, this being his first session, thought about it for a moment, then said "I want to tell him a joke." I decided to run with it. Me: All right, for a joke... roll me a Streetwise check. Brother: 17. Me: Well, tell the joke. Brother: What did the leper say to the prostitute? Me: What? Brother: You can keep the tip. At this point the whole table took a moment to think about it before getting the joke. They reacted with a mixture of horror and hysterical laughter, and it stopped the game cold for five minutes. Now, the result on the check wasn't high enough, but I figured that given the reaction the joke got from the table, I could let that slide. My brother, playing a halfling rogue, talked a redneck giant down from a fight with a gross joke, and the party got to advance. After two really railroady sessions, I decided at the end of this one that I was comfortable enough with my improvisational skills that I could just take them off the rails. From here on out, I'm just gonna whip up adventure hooks and some stats before the games and let the players have free reign over what happens.
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May 27, 2012 19:21
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Here's a terrible experience from when I was younger and dumber. I once joined a group online that was kind of terrible and I stayed with far too long. The first sign of trouble was when I wasn’t allowed to play a half-orc, because they’re not pretty. I went with a human wizard instead. The GM tells me my character has been living in this little swamp town the party is traveling too, and that’s how we’ll meet up. Halfway through the session, the GM introduces the mayor of the town and mentions “Oh, you’re married to him, by the way.” The mayor of the town is literally the Sniper from TF2, down to his house having jars of piss in it. All the other PCs had imaginary girlfriends, too. One guy even had a succubus and an erinyes who were twin sisters somehow, and fought over him. We travel around and eventually arrived at a bar. As we enter, the rest of the party freaks out about the woman doing magic tricks on the stage. She was apparently some villian who was obsessed with being beautiful and had tried to charm them into loving her. We’re about to attack, but oh, it turns out she’s suddenly reformed, and she wants to be best friends with my character. She proceeds to talk only about makeup and how she desperately wanted a man to love her. That game fizzled out pretty quickly. We got a few sentences each about what happened to our characters. One became a king, one founded an arcane university, one figured out how to become a god. My wizard got “Oh, you found a very nice man and settled down. You were very happy.” He ran another one after that. I shouldn’t have joined, but I really wanted to roleplay and didn’t know where else to find a group. The first session started with his super powerful immortal NPC pimp herding us on to a train full of prostitutes with a shotgun. The pimp would send us out on missions for the various towns: There was no real rhyme or reason to it, but the GM kept implying the pimp had some intricate scheme that we just couldn’t comprehend. While on these missions, my character was constantly falling into pits of lava or about to be sneak attacked, with no chance to make a save, only to be rescued at the last moment by a tuxedo mask rip off. The GM would drop hints about tuxedo mask’s identity, and it was pretty clear he was supposed to be David Bowie. He got pretty irritated when we guessed it. The next session, he had tuxedo mask reveal himself as Abraham Lincoln. Eventually I realized that I wasn’t having fun and left.
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May 29, 2012 22:10
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KimotaBoom posted:The next session, he had tuxedo mask reveal himself as Abraham Lincoln.  I think you have just provided the most horrifying story here. Not only for the fact that it is blatently loving creepy, but for the fact that its hugely obvious that these fuckers would have been happier without a rules system to get in the way of their wank fantasy.
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May 29, 2012 22:16
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A masked Abraham Lincoln that acts like David Bowie sounds like a pretty hard to thing to gently caress up, shame your DM couldn't cope. 
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May 29, 2012 22:17
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KimotaBoom posted:Here's a terrible experience from when I was younger and dumber. I'm glad your pretty wizard attained her ultimate reward of a BFF magical girlfriend to have slumber parties and do makeovers with and a second husband (because one wasn't enough to cure her of the adventuring bug). What a terrible story
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May 29, 2012 22:24
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So I have a story about being That Party-Killing Overly-RPing Guy. In my defense, I was 17. Disclaimer: this was back in 98. Absolute veracity not guaranteed. I was in high school and so was everyone else in the group. Except Jesse (NHRN). Jesse had started the group when he was 15 and was probably about 19 or 20 at the time I started playing with them. Everyone he had played with at the beginning had graduated and moved on, while he... hadn't. If anyone so much as mentioned that his continued presence was slightly creepy, they'd get a rant about he had founded the group and he had the most right of anyone to be around. My personal suspicion was that a lot of his motive was to have an excuse to hang around the high school and hit on stupid freshman and sophomore girls. He actually had some amount of success doing this. He wasn't any sort of gamer stereotype physically (except for the stubby little ponytail) and he usually could keep a girl going for a few weeks to a couple months until she wised up and ran the other way. Everything he lacked in fulfilling the physical stereotypes, he made up for in behavioral ones. Think of the most annoying 12-year-old xbox live gamer you've ever met and you have some idea of how he interacted with others. Anyone he didn't like was a "human being" (male) or "bitch" (female). His method of "debating" was to scream the same sentences at the other person until they gave up. If he was first to the pizza, he would pick random toppings off and eat them while debating which slice he would take. They still told the story of how he had once locked himself in a bathroom stall and cried for an hour because he lost out on a treasure roll. Speaking of, let's go to in-game behavior. As soon as the party got into town, every time: "I go to the whorehouse - and I get TWO of em! At the same time! Hurr hurr!" If an enemy in a module was described as female, expect his wizard to bust out the sleep or the charm person or whatnot, so he could lovingly describe what he would do to them until forcibly stopped. He usually played some multi-class of thief, so he would have a justification to constantly steal from the party. He is the whole reason I know about the net.carnal book. Oh. And all his characters were named "Jesse". I think that's enough of an introduction. Let's get to the actual story of how we got rid of Jesse. He had for a couple months been running a necrophiliac necromancer (I refuse to go into details, except that when we found that RPG standby of a burned-out village filled with the dead victims of the big bad, he told the DM he was separating out all the female corpses "for later". He actually said something like "All the women ... and the girls. Hahahaa.") I was playing a ranger and my best friend was playing a druid. We kept telling him (in character) that what he was doing was against the natural order, the cycle of life, and was really disgusting. He gave out his stupid nasal laugh and said "Well, I like it." as if that settled matters. One day at lunch, the game came up and I told the current GM something like "if (my character name) gets a chance to do it and get away with it, he's going to kill Jesse's character. I don't care if that's purposely blowing a healing roll or actually attacking him when he's low on HP, but he's supposedly CG, and Jesse may as well be LE. If he was an NPC, my guy would be actively trying to kill him, not going around with him all buddy-buddy." We had a brief debate about the "PC halo" (which I still don't believe in), whether it was more evil to kill an evil person or to let him live and even cooperate with him, and how exactly I was planning to kill him in-character and get away with it out-of-character. (Again, in my defense: 17.) A couple months later, we were doing a dungeon crawl and got split up (read: some of the group had finals and was too busy to show up). He, I and the druid ended up ambushed by a bunch of drow. I got pretty torn up, the druid was down and bleeding out, and Jesse was at something like 3 HP when it was all over. Of course, he immediately asks if any of the dead drow are female, and he's bending over one to "search her pockets... and her shirt, haha"; I catch the DM's eye and make a stabbing motion. DM rolls a d20 - it's a 19. "As you're bending over the drow priestess, you feel a sharp pain in your side. (roll) 7 HP damage." "What? That's loving bullshit! You little human being! (blah blah blah)" and he storms out. Next meeting, he shows up as usual and starts talking about what his necromancer had been doing the previous night, when the DM cut him off. "Uh, Jesse... you got killed at the end of last session, remember?" "What, those faggots didn't have me raised?" "Apparently not. That character is dead." So he pulls out a pen, scratches out "Jesse" on the sheet, and writes in Jaime, claiming to be the previous character's identical twin brother, here to find his friends and investigate what happened. DM: "No, no, you gotta roll up a new character." Jesse flies off the handle again and then storms out of the room and slams the door so hard the glass breaks. That got him banned and we never had to deal with him again. (Punchline: The last I heard of him, he was in trouble for buying booze for the underage. ) sfwarlock fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 02:26
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So DivineCoffeeBinge, when do we get to hear the latest developments from Coruscant? I want to know if that massive buried star destroyer ship-thing gets reactivated and rips from the ground like the Yamato in Star Blazers. or like the movie version. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Jun 1, 2012 |
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Jun 1, 2012 06:59
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Agrikk posted:So DivineCoffeeBinge, when do we get to hear the latest developments from Coruscant? THERE WAS A STAR BLAZERS MOVIE?!  Son of a bitch!
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Jun 1, 2012 13:26
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Malachite_Dragon posted:THERE WAS A STAR BLAZERS MOVIE?! Did the US version come out yet? The Japanese version, Space Battleship Yamato, was a really excellent action/scifi movie. I can't see them putting a lot of the cool speeches into a US film though, and westernising it will lose a lot of the flavour. For the record, I don't watch anime (apart from 2 Ghibli films which were kinda cool), but I loved Star Blazers and Captain Harlock when I was 6. I really do think westernising this film would be a mistake though. A good dub would be nice, because the fan-made subtitles were pretty strange in places.
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Jun 1, 2012 14:00
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Agrikk posted:So DivineCoffeeBinge, when do we get to hear the latest developments from Coruscant? If all goes according to plan, game will happen tomorrow and then I'll come back and share the story. And it will, I am certain, be glorious.
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Jun 1, 2012 15:46
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:If all goes according to plan, game will happen tomorrow and then I'll come back and share the story. I will sit here meeky and await the coming of the Gospel.   
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Jun 1, 2012 17:22
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I'm running a heavily modded D&D4e game right now, sort of an anti-steampunk game where the players are the oppressed underclass trying to overthrow those swish bastards with clockwork zepplins. I'm really pleased with the party I have: Thorni: A Dwarven paladin (the setting has no demonstrable gods, so paladins are more a sort of secret order of superheros) trying to free his people from slavery Angela: A Rogue working for the setting's Mafia, who are hedging their bets by having some allies in the rebellion Blink: A Blazer (reskinned Dragonborn -- condemned criminals who've undergone a supersoldier programmed, so that they can shoot lightning out of their eyes). Zoe: An artificer, turncoat daughter of one of the Empire's ruling families, and Mad Scientist. Somta: A religious fanatic from one of the nations crushed by the Empire, now working magic by snorting the incredibly hazardous magic gems that more sensible mages keep at arms' length to power their spells. Fredi: A ranger and member of one of the old families who are backing the rebellion, and also the leader of the group by virtue of nobody else wanting to get the blame when things went south (spoilers: they went south at an average rate of once per session.) The party are hired to investigate a village where one of the Rebellion's contacts has gone AWOL. The village could potentially be a key point on a network smuggling dwarven slaves out of the mines where they're forced to work, so the rebels want it at least vaguely sympathetic to their aims: they don't need everyone in town waving the flag, but they need a situation where a stray dwarf gets shepherded to safety, not reported to the Empire. As the PCs arrive, under cover of being a salt-trading company, they stop in at the inn and are accosted by a couple of the local toughs and Sam, the slimy little poo poo leading them, who isn't happy about someone else coming in and being a bigger power in the village than him and his people. Fredi sweet-talks Sam into meeting the next day and talking things through. Fredi remains blissfully ignorant that she messed her diplomacy roll, so Sam figured out she wasn't telling the whole truth right off the bat. At lunch, Sam invites her to come with him and meet the head of the family. Thorni and Blink come too, with Angela, Zoe and Somta following at a discreet distance. Sam takes her to a field, where he pulls the bag off a scarecrow's head to reveal the last rebel contact, still alive and pegged out in the field, and demands Fredi explain who he is and what she's really up to. E: E: Smilies replaced with character names. Whybird fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Jun 2, 2012 |
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Jun 2, 2012 03:08
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Fredi thinks quickly, and comes up with a story that he's an old enemy of hers who is trying to block their salt trading business. Sam offers her the opportunity to kill her enemy here and now, and hands her a knife. She realises she can't murder the party's contact in cold blood, and tries to stab Sam. A pitched battle in the cornfield occurs, with the party eventually defeat Sam and most of his minions, drag him off to an abandoned windmill, and stay to torture as much information as they can about him. They learn that Sam is the lieutenant of the Gorristers, a family of criminals and thugs, and that Sam's brother will no doubt be coming for him. They pump him for some more information, then kill him by beheading. After heading back to the town and spending some time getting their contact warm and alive, the party hear that the Gorristers are demanding their heads, or they will burn the village to the ground. The party reunite and decide to fake a handover, then ambush the Gorristers as they come to collect. There follows a session of planning as the PCs transform the local inn into an ambush site, and finally in the evening the head of the Gorrister family comes down with an entourage of goons to collect Fredi,  and Angela.Fredi is in the inn, pretending to be tied up. The others are hidden at various points, well-armed. The Gorristers pour in and start threatening Fredi, demanding to know where the others are and where Sam is. At which point, Angela asks if she can emerge from her hiding-place on the balcony and throw Sam's head at him, which she's carried with her this time, at the head of the family as a first move. I let her roll for it. Natural 20. Not only does she hit the horrifying badass patriarch of the Gorristers with his dead cousin's head, but with a natural 20 she manages to throw it so that it kisses him on the lips before landing on the floor at his feet, staring up. The patriarch spends the first two rounds of combat frozen up in shock, while Blink blasts his minions away with his gaze and Fredi grabs her weapons from under the table and hacks into him. They manage to take the whole lot with barely a scratch, capture the Gorristers alive and have them executed by a lynch mob. The next time the players return to the village, the pub sign's been replaced. It now shows Sam's face being hurled through the air, and is named "The oval office's Head". E: Desmilified. Man, those seemed totally readable last night. Whybird fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Jun 2, 2012 |
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Jun 2, 2012 03:13
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Whybird posted:excess smilies
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Jun 2, 2012 04:05
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The worst Traveller campaign Around 2002 or so, one of the guys in my home game (  from this post) had picked up a box of old Traveller stuff on Ebay and wanted to run a game of it.Important things to note for this story: The extent of most of everyone, other than the GMs, knowledge of Traveller is; 1) space and 2) you can die in character generation. First Session: We start with character generation, suffering a few untimely reactor incidents along the way. At the end of it, I had a retired Marine Corp Master Sergeant who had discharged after a few combat tours to a nice pension. The other main character in this story was ended up with a doctor. There were two other players, but for reasons that will become apparent I have no idea what they were. The game starts and the players are part of a crew of a cargo hauler, hauling cargo across ~space~ to somewhere. My character was the first mate (maybe I was captain  ), while the doctor was the ship doctor (obviously) and the other two players were doing ~stuff~. Hint of a plot hook consisted of a young couple in cryo, that are being transported to our destination. *sets the above scene* What do you do?Well that's odd since he knows that we know nothing about the setting, and our character motivations were literally randomly rolled 5 minutes ago. "I continue to be the First Mate of this ship." Then start doing first matey things, like inspections and drills or whatever. The good doctor  , starts to ask questions about the couple in cyro since they are the only thing that even hints at a plot. The GM lets us prattle on for the rest of the session, while remaining largely silent other to answer direct queries about the environment and couple. While this is getting a bit boring near the end, an opening session of getting into characer isn't that bad. The other two players are similarly quiet and the doctor continues to unravel the mystery of the frozen people. (Is this unusual to travel via cryo, who knows?)Second Session: *briefly recounts the last session* What do you do?Thirty minutes of roleplaying the first mate of a cargo hauler later, I get up and go for a smoke (this being before iPhone games existed.) After I come back in, I ask what trouble they have gotten into. Well, it appears that I am performing experiments on the cryo couple. huh? What are you talking about? Do you mean like DNA sampling to confirm their identify or something?Remember, at this point there is nothing suspicious about these two people other than the GM mentioning them as part of the cargo. There is no in character reason to even care they are on board (and the OOC reason is pretty dumb too.) No, I am using them as subjects in a narcotics addiction test. huh?!? What the gently caress! Why are you doing that?!? I want to see the effect of cryogenically induced narcotic dependence. Well, I guess I don't know that in character. I continue being first mate.I then go back outside for a smoke, and chat with my neighbour for a bit because gently caress THAT poo poo. I appreciate this is a douchey thing to do, but I wasn't seriously going to sit a table with someone roleplaying like a 13 year old. After a bit I come back in to find that things had managed to progress further into deeply disturbed territory, and cargo bay 5 was now a psychopaths sadistic playpen. Suddenly I receive a hail from an approaching Federation police cruiser, requesting that we prepare to be boarded. Since my character still has no idea what is going on, I let them board us. The doctor panics and kills both of the passengers since they can ID him, on account of him bringing them out of cryo to torture them for a bit. I will never know whether the police arrived because one of the other players sent them a message, or if that was actually how the plot was supposed to go. I actually would not put it passed him to plan on boring the party to death for two sessions, then have the police come for no reason. All the crew gets sentenced to life imprisonment, despite no one knowing anything about it and only the doctor being elbow deep in entrails. *sets the prison scene* What do you do?gently caress you gently caress you gently caress you He is literally going to make us roleplay life imprisonment. Ok, I know what to do first day in prison. I walk into the lunch hall, find the biggest dude in there and show him how I won my Stellar Cross at the Battle of Cyngi Iv.I then pass a note to the GM. Good doctor, you are walking back from you work station. Suddenly someone steps in front of you from around a corner. I turn and run. There is another prisoner there, and they start advancing. I give up, because there is nothing I can do to stop it. They stab you to death with prison shanks. That is a crying shame. *pays the nice men their cigarettes*We all agreed to not play Traveller again. ~~~ I think he was creating a sandbox for us to play in, however there were two fatal flaws to that plan. 1) No one knew anything about the setting. 2) He put us in positions, but then nothing to push the character out of that routine. GM: You are a bus driver. What do you do? Player: Drive the bus I guess. GM: Do go on.
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Jun 2, 2012 04:13
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That's really hard to follow because of the emoticons.
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Jun 2, 2012 04:25
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TOOT BOOT posted:That's really hard to follow because of the emoticons. Mine or his? I can strip them out for legibility.
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Jun 2, 2012 05:22
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Give fake names not good enough, goons complain. Use smileys instead, goons complain. some people can't win. Though I'll admit having to split the story into multiple posts just from smileys alone is a bit awkward seeming. In ocrumspurg's case though, I'm pretty sure they are just loving with you man, that's reasonable smiley usage.
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Jun 2, 2012 06:00
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ocrumsprug posted:GM: You are a bus driver. What do you do? I'm imagining the
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Jun 2, 2012 06:08
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So I've been running an "evil" 4eberron campaign for about 18 months where the party is a group of low-ranking Aurum members who are trying to carve out a criminal empire in the underbelly of Sharn. I've made the Aurum kind of Cosa Nostra meets S.P.E.C.T.R.E., so the party gets to indulge in both Sopranos style backroom tune-ups and Hank Scorpio-esque supervillainy while nipping any potential Chaotic Stupid in the bud. It's kind of sandbox-y in that they get to do whatever they can think of within reason to grow their little corner of the operation, but they still occasionally requests for "favors" from the higher ups in the Aurum. Their most recent favor was they had to assassinate an official in the city government and then rig the election for his successor so that the Aurum could consolidate their grip on Dura. Currently we have a Bard, Battlemind, Barbarian, Mage, and Rogue in the group. Everybody is new to the setting, so I play pretty fast and loose with a lot of things in Eberron. One thing I slipped into the setting was a funicular railway system in Sharn that acts as kind of a subway system. After spending a while stalking their target, the party decides they're going to try to take him out at his favorite restaurant on the waterfront of the Hilt. They start planning out in meticulous detail how they're going to infiltrate the restaurant staff and lace his dinner with fantasy-ricin so it looks like his death was from natural causes. About halfway through the planning session, the party's battlemind comes up with an objection. The following ensues: Battlemind: Look, I know that this is supposed to look like an accident and all, but I wanna be sure we get this guy. What if the food gets switched, or we don't use enough poison? Bard: Well what do you suggest? This can't look like a blatant hit, so cutting his head off at high noon is basically out. Battlemind: The train station in Precarious. He takes the same train home every night, right? Let's level it. Bard: You're talking about blowing up the whole train to get one guy? Collateral damage much? Battlemind: No I'm talking about blowing up the whole station. The top one, that way all the wreckage falls and crushes the bottom one too. Only way to be sure. Besides the docks are mostly Tyrant turf. Who cares if we drop some trains on em? Barbarian: Dude, that's like, a major terrorist act. The authorities are gonna come down on whoever did that like the wrath of God. Battlemind: Yeah, you're right. We need a fall guy. Who's hosed with us lately? The group spends a few minutes batting suggestions around and then the Battlemind hits it. You know that scene in the animated version of The Grinch where the evil grin slowly spreads across the Grinch's face when he gets the idea to steal Christmas? Same expression on the Battlemind. Battlemind: Hey Mage, did we sell all the stuff we took off of those Emerald Claw guys when we wiped out that cell down in the Cogs? Mage: Hrm lemme check. *riffles his inventory sheets* Yeah we've got a couple sets of clothes, some jewelry and the identification papers they were using. Battlemind: Great. Here's what we'll do... The Battlemind then lays out in explicit detail how they're going to bomb the train station with the official inside, fake a ransom letter from the Emerald Claw, and some other stuff. The other group members chime in, and soon the plan includes setting up a club that is hurting the business of the club they own as a front for the Emerald Claw cell and drop point for the ransom. Then they'd run the offical's Aurum-controlled replacement on a "Remember Precarious Station  " platform that'd probably see him swept into office on a landslide vote.Me:  So let me get this straight, you're going to kill hundreds of innocent people and scar the collective psyche of the entire nation so that you can be "sure" you hit your target, then use the opportunity to get back at the Emerald Claw and get your bar's primary competition shut down by the government?Party: Yeah we're also gonna use the propaganda potential the bombing generates to get our guy into office. Me: Wow. You guys are assholes. Battlemind: I take that as a compliment. tl;dr My players are awesomely creative, but can also be terrifyingly sociopathic.
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Jun 2, 2012 07:09
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Verloc posted:Me: This is amazing, your players are amazing, I want to play D&D with all of you.
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Jun 2, 2012 10:30
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The Good Professor posted:This is amazing, your players are amazing, I want to play D&D with all of you.
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Jun 2, 2012 10:40
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So what I'm getting from this is, Dungeons and Dragons caused 9/11. I knew it all along
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Jun 2, 2012 13:48
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Colon V posted:Me, too. I wanna be the Lawful Evil guy who shoots the generic "guy who's taken a little kid hostage" villain. Because if he's not serious, then there's nothing to lose, and if he IS serious, he can't be trusted to negotiate with anyways. Funny you should say this: I've been that guy. In my defence, I was playing a young beholder at the time, so not acting like a sociopathic rear end in a top hat would have been seriously out of character. The party were refugees in hiding from an oppressive invading empire that, for various reasons, wanted them all dead. We came across another group of refugees, who ended up running away from us (mostly my character's fault: they fled in panic as soon as they saw it). They left behind their wagon, containing most of their earthly possessions and a sick child who was in no condition to run. Over the next few days, we nursed her back to health and tried to get her to the nearest town. We hadn't had too many chances to do actually heroic things instead of just running for our lives, so we're all feeling pretty good about saving her. My character in particular develops a grudging respect for the kid over time, mostly because she's the only human it's met who seems genuinely unafraid of it. Anyway, things are going fairly well for us and we're about a day's travel away from town when we run into a patrol of imperial soldiers. A fight breaks out, we kill most of the soldiers, but the last survivor sees the girl hiding nearby and grabs her as he flees. He holds a knife to her throat as he backs away, warning us not to come any closer. I realise that if he escapes he's probably going to report on our location and call for reinforcements to hunt us down, so I try and use telekinesis to pull the knife out of his hand. I critically fail, flinging the knife straight into the kid's throat. The soldier freaks out, drops her and runs for it: the fighters chase him down and kill the hell out of him, while the party's healer (a charlatan with some basic medical skills) critically fails an attempt to stabilise the kid. The girl we'd spent the last two sessions trying to save bleeds to death in the healer's arms. The session pretty much ended right there, with everyone needing some time to process what just happened. We'd all signed on for a fairly gritty game where we'd likely be making all sorts of moral compromises while fighting for our survival, but nobody was expecting things to get quite that dark, that soon. In hindsight it was a memorable moment that led to several PCs' character development taking unexpected turns, but I felt kind of bad about it at the time.
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Jun 2, 2012 15:49
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Verloc posted:Me:
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Jun 2, 2012 15:56
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I decided to write out my worst gaming experience. I was 15 or 16 at the time, a high school kid who before then never played D&D (mostly because I never knew about it) and I got invited into this group. Besides the fact that they helped me build a pretty badly built samurai at the time (we were watching Kenshin at the time), I was having fun. Well after four or five sessions I was told I was going to be running Star Wars D20 for them, even though I didn't know anything about the rules. I had never played Star Wars D20 at that point and never read the book because I was told literally about ten minutes before the game. That shoulda been my first clue, but I had no where else to go and it was about a 4 hour walk home through the middle of nowhere if I decided to leave, so I was sorta stuck. Well this was also my first DMing experience so I wasn't that great. I had them start off inside a room that had a large shielded door in their way. The Jedi (I dunno why I let the 28 year old man be a jedi), took a thermal detonator and threw it against the door and blew it up. Of course being a new DM I had not prepared for that contingency so I tried to make it up as I went along but the players were having more fun trying to ruin my game and do everything they can to troll me. I don't think I ever went back. Instead I got into playing at the comic shop near me and that was always more fun.
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Jun 2, 2012 20:26
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Verloc posted:Me: Wow. You guys are assholes. This only makes me wish we had bombs and trains in the evil campaign I'm in. The most evil thing we've collectively done is release a chemical weapon in a manor house, killing the equivalent of a Roman senator, his wife, and 15 house servants. We're trying to basically create a guild racket with the teamsters and longshoremen and this senator was against that idea. In terms of 'gently caress, that's cold', an NPC approached our group to get revenge on a man he suspected of killing his brother. His brother was a tanner and had invented a nifty tanning technique and then turned up dead. Now his partner is making all kinds of money off that technique. The 'client' didn't have any money or really anything to purchase our assassination services so we went to the partner and told him someone wanted him dead, but we'd make him go away if he made armor for us, free of charge. The partner didn't really believe us but was suitably intimidated to make a counter-offer we could never live up to: The client had to die in public and his cause of death had to be irrefutable. Two weeks later, the partner sees the client stroll into the local gladiator arena, completely of his own volition and will, and get turned into stone by a basilisk. When we asked the partner where he wanted his new statue delivered, he told us we'd have our first set of armor very soon.
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Jun 2, 2012 21:00
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BlackIronHeart posted:Two weeks later, the partner sees the client stroll into the local gladiator arena, completely of his own volition and will, and get turned into stone by a basilisk. Well, now I'm curious: how'd you pull it off?
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Jun 2, 2012 21:33
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Lots and lots of lying. We brought in the client (Keler) and one of the PCs (Liakos, the actual crime kingpin of the city) introduces him to my character. I pretend to be some ice-cold killer and talked about how I had scouted out Darae, the target, but he was well-protected and it was going to be costly. Keler was basically a dirt farmer so he had nothing to pay up with and we hemmed and hawed until Liakos suggested we fix a fight at the arena. We'd bet on Keler, he'd win, and that would pay for the hit. Keler didn't want to kill a person, even though he was hiring assassins, so we promised he'd fight an animal. We'd even drug it for him. We played up how we wanted to avenge his dear, departed brother for him and this was a guaranteed ticket. We fast-talked him so hard, he left the meeting feeling righteous. We do fix games at the arena, that wasn't bullshit, but we fix them alongside the priests that run the place. We had a chat with one of them about needing this guy gone and the basilisk was their idea. Poor guy never knew what was coming.
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Jun 2, 2012 22:48
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BlackIronHeart posted:We do fix games at the arena, that wasn't bullshit, but we fix them alongside the priests that run the place. We had a chat with one of them about needing this guy gone and the basilisk was their idea. Poor guy never knew what was coming.
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Jun 2, 2012 23:06
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Colon V posted:Where are all these cool evil campaigns happening, and why am I not a part of one? It's just like real life: you either invite yourself to one, or you start your own.
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Jun 3, 2012 01:05
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So. I promised Star Wars story, you're gonna get it. I had two thoughts between the last game session and this one, and by "thoughts" I mean "ideas that will cause trouble for the GM," so naturally I opened with those. Those thoughts: 1) Remember the timed message from the Emperor I talked about in my last post? Well, see, that message had stuff like message headers and the like that I could use as a base to forge a new message. Said message had a high enough difficulty that I had to blow a Force Point to use it (and considering that my Forgery is at like 30, that's saying something - but these message forms are specifically called out in canon as being ridiculously hard to forge, so whatever), but I pulled it off. Several copies were placed in the hands of couriers and delivered to high-ranking COMPNOR agents. The messages read, essentially, as follows: "This message is being delivered by courier because normal communications channels are suspect. I have reason to believe that a cabal of ranking military and political officers have been plotting a military coup in order to seize control of the Empire in the event of my absence. COMPNOR is now the sole instrument of my will which I can indisputably trust. I hereby place full military and civilian jurisdiction in the hands of COMPNOR and COMPFORCE. All military officers who resist this transfer of jurisdiction are to be imprisoned or, if necessary, neutralized. In addition, the following individuals are to be imprisoned immediately on suspicion of sedition:" And there followed a list of names, including the High Inquisitor, Admiral Piett, Moff Jerjerrod, and so on. Now, I'd already laid the groundwork for this ploy with my earlier "Imperial spy" message saying roughly the same thing, so it turned out to be pretty plausible. The head of COMPNOR and the planetary governor both saw through the ploy... ...but the COMPNOR line officers didn't, and they promptly got into shouting matches, and occasional shooting matches, with the military, just as I was hoping they would. After a while, in fact, we stopped seeing Army troops; COMPFORCE took over completely. For those of you unfamiliar with the Star Wars universe, COMPNOR is basically the SS; they were intensely loyal to the Emperor, well-equipped, and poorly-trained. This situation turned out to be sort of like if Hitler died, Donitz took command, and then Himmler said "No, Donitz, I'M in command" and then they shot at each other for a while. (To continue with WWII metaphors, our GM described the resulting engagements between us and COMPFORCE as "you're the crack Japanese troops facing the Americans at Saipan. You have the training and the expertise; they've got the numbers and the new M1s you haven't seen before because up until now you've mostly faced Marines with Springfields." Luckily, we're significantly more doctrinally flexible than the Japanese had been, by which I mean our doctrine tends to be "kill the other guys and win, I don't really give a gently caress how you do it.") So that was Idea #1. 2) Using a virus I'd implanted in the guts of the HoloNet while we were there last time, I was able to access HoloNet systems logs. This is important because the HoloNet - the only source of real-time FTL communication in Star Wars - can't be accessed in Hyperspace. What happens is, when a ship drops out of hyper it pings the nearest HoloNet relay and says "Okay, I'm back in normal space now." Meaning we could look at those pings and know when every HoloNet-equipped ship in the Galaxy had dropped out of hyper - and roughly where. (It's kind of like tracking a dude using a cell phone - you know he's somewhere in range of a particular tower. Unfortunately HoloNet relays are sparse enough that you can't really use them to triangulate.) This is, as I'm sure you can appreciate, an intel bonanza. This turned into an extended Computer Use roll for which I needed to accumulate a total of just under 400. Which took me six rolls, or six in-game hours. (told you I was minmaxed) So those were my two Nefarious Ideas, which were pretty solid, I think. We also opened with one important bit of intel - namely, a couple of fighters showed up (a Y-Wing and an A-Wing, IIRC). They came all the way from Endor. Two big shifts between our game and what happened in the films, near as I can tell; these details are sketchy, as they were delivered in-character, but here's what I've got. For one thing, in the films the Imperials had a lot of TIE Interceptors (these dudes). There were fewer of them in this Battle of Endor - but in behind the Rebel lines there dropped a metric fuckton of TIE Advanceds (these guys). They wreaked havoc behind Rebel lines even before the Death Star opened fire. For another, when the Rebel lines shifted in response to the Death Star being operational, the Death Star moved after them. Ships were blowing up everywhere, the shield generator on the forest moon got shut down, General Calrissian went in on his attack run... but the thing didn't get blown up. It did use its main gun on a portion of the fleet. Home One - the Rebel flagship, which had most of the Rebel Admiralty on board, as well as General Crix Madine (our nominal CO) and, um... Mon Mothma - well, no one knows where it is. It's not pinging on the HoloNet network, but General Solo's men groundside sent a quick recon flight up and didn't see its wreckage, so it could be in hyperspace or it could have a damaged HoloNet unit or it could be a cloud of vapor after catching the Death Star's main gun, we have no idea. We still have no idea about the disposition of Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, or Emperor Palpatine. (Leia is with Han, though, which means my hopes for Leia falling to the Dark Side and becoming Empress are dashed, alas. Oh, and this also means that as near as we can tell... um... we're kind of the High Command until someone shows up to tell us we're not) What responsibility do we, as players, bear for this canon shift? The leading theories are that A) by using fighters as effectively as we have (and we've used them even more effectively than they do in the films) we've shown the ISN that, yes, starfighters are awesome and you should invest in them instead of viewing them as disposable chaff, and B) we've been directly responsible for the winnowing-out of a lot of incompetent Imperial officers. Our GM won't give a direct answer on that just yet, though. Grr. So that's a pretty lengthy post. I'd say that sets the stage nicely. Now I'm gonna go outside, have a smoke, come back and post about the poo poo we actually did once game got underway - and what the GM threw at us in response.
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Jun 3, 2012 04:00
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Your game is the best game, and I don't even like Star Wars games.
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Jun 3, 2012 04:10
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