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Coward posted:Cool stuff about Gods. Man, that is wild. I wish I had some players with an appreciation for that kind of mythological mood for a game. Does Smallville have systems for magic and the like or is that improvised by your players? Anyway, a dumber story: So my college gaming organization runs a one-shot LARP every year called Munchkin-Land. The premise is that you can play any character that exists, anywhere. From movies, tv shows, games you were in, mythology, anything. It's not a serious game, but has a tendency to be super lame due to people playing their special snowflake changeling or whatever. I usually do not attend. But this last year, me and some friends had the idea of going as the stereotypical adventuring party. Upon thinking about it more, we decided to not only do that, but go as the stereotypical group of terrible players playing their awful, stereotypical characters. Since this idea was too dumb to not do, we went for it. If I remember right, the Players/Characters were: 'Jessie' (a girl) the power-gaming Diablo/WoW addict, interested in high damage numbers, experience, and nothing else, playing a half-orc barbarian. Her orc had no character traits and her main question when encountering other players was 'how much xp is this guy worth?' 'Rose,' playing 'Darkrose,' her 10-year old character that she played in every game ever, filled to the brim with powers from 3rd-party supplements no one else had read. As a shadowy and mysterious character, she only ever spoke by whispering and passing notes to the DM. We all misspoke her name, calling her 'Shadowrose' or 'Darkflower.' 'Lisa' (I don't remember all the 'player' names), playing 'Hermoine Targeryen' as basically a new-to-games disinterested sort, our cleric who spent most of her time texting and not paying attention to game except to heal occasionally and ask irrelevent questions, it was great. I think her holy symbol was the Toyota logo. I played 'Carl' the creepy game store patron who appears to have no real friends and invites himself to your game. I played Sorcerar, the Wizard, an awfully optimized Wizard that spent most of his time casting useless spells (I gotta save my spells for something important!) and claiming bogus racial bonuses for being an Aasimer. Finally, we also had Louie, our long-suffering GM, who narrated our interactions with other LARP characters as though we was making up the dungeon as we went along, and was constantly trying to get us back on track to his terrible, predictable story. We brought a 12-pack of Mountain Dew and a fat bag of Cheetos to game for good measure, and spent most of our time accosting other characters for their magical items and attacking the tougher looking ones for XP. A bunch of other guys were playing characters from Hellsing, I think, and upon meeting them we accused our GM of stealing his monster ideas from anime. My favorite interaction of the night was when we encountered a character from a Mexican soup opera: Me: Greetings, Traveller! I am Sorcerar, the mighty wizard! I am looking for magic relics to aid in my quest! Do you know of such items? Guy: ¿Que? Louie: Okay, he speaks to you in a foreign language. Me: Is it Draconic? I speak Draconic! Louie: No, it's, uh, Spanish. Me: Ooh! I forgot I get an extra language for being an Aasimer! Can I make it Spanish? Louie: What? okay, fine- [he then had to run off because several other party members were attacking some Joss Whedon character] And then I proceeded to accost this guy very dramatically in broken Spanish for magic items. All in all a very stupid but enjoyable experience.
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Jul 4, 2012 20:21
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Augustin Iturbide posted:A bunch of other guys were playing characters from Hellsing, I think, and upon meeting them we accused our GM of stealing his monster ideas from anime.
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Jul 4, 2012 21:15
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Golden Bee posted:Coward, I -love- Smallville. Unfortunately, I need something that's pick-up-and-play ASAP, often with non roleplayers, since I'd be using it in a waiting room situation (ahead of being needed on set). I read Smallville system and really want to run it soon; I feel it'd work better than Buffy for a Buffy style game. Yeah, I get what you mean. Although Smallville is GREAT for non-roleplayers, I've found. Do you at least have the time to do the character creation? Because that really gets people's interest. Smallville doesn't do Monster of the Week that well, I feel, or at least it isn't using its strengths. But I have heard a similar sentiment about Buffy in Smallville from a few people, so I'm sure it's worth giving it a shot. Augustin Iturbide posted:Man, that is wild. I wish I had some players with an appreciation for that kind of mythological mood for a game. Does Smallville have systems for magic and the like or is that improvised by your players? The fun of this game I'm running is the bouncing between world-altering high myth and the clichés of TV dramas. Going from formally challenging another God with a series of trials to prove their right to rule, to a childish private bitching session about how the God of War is a jerk is supremely entertaining. As the game's based on Smallville, there are systems for superpowers, but the superpowers are less about mechanical effect and often more about dramatic effect. For example, the Super Speed power gives you the ability to show up in whatever scene you want, no matter where you were last scene. However, it's easy to just discard a lot of that and use more general rules to let players improvise what they need based. The system is much more focused on social engagement between characters. It's more important how strongly they believe or feel about things, so what powers they can pull out in-game is incidental. It's this reason that I've been enjoying the Gods game so much. There's no need to balance anything or painstakingly catalogue every sphere of influence, but there are mechanics in play to let things be resolved in a non-arbitrary way. And my players just keep on giving awesome. The player of the God of the Wild has sought and obtained submissions for what his hideous beast (a bearsnakeeagle) looks like:    Augustin Iturbide posted:All in all a very stupid but enjoyable experience. I admit to having been a member of the Camarilla for a while, and that's pretty much the way a group of us played it. Going to other cities and discovering they took it so seriously was a really depressing experience.
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Jul 5, 2012 00:31
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Seriously out-of-character? Personally I have no problem with people playing it seriously in-character, at least as long as the drama doesn't flip over to the real world v v
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Jul 5, 2012 00:45
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Tollymain posted:Seriously out-of-character? Personally I have no problem with people playing it seriously in-character, at least as long as the drama doesn't flip over to the real world v is holding up a pretend glass of wine. Like, faux-classy. v "The quality of the performance has gone downhill since the previous conductor's mishap, hasn't it?"
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Jul 5, 2012 07:06
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Coward posted:I admit to having been a member of the Camarilla for a while, and that's pretty much the way a group of us played it. Going to other cities and discovering they took it so seriously was a really depressing experience. The city of Tampa is, or at least was when I was around, known for basically explaining to other cities that the larp is in fact just a game (by killing their characters). People get mad. Oh, they get mad.
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Jul 5, 2012 08:36
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Plotac 75 posted:The city of Tampa is, or at least was when I was around, known for basically explaining to other cities that the larp is in fact just a game (by killing their characters). People get mad. Oh, they get mad.
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Jul 5, 2012 09:07
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Plotac 75 posted:The city of Tampa is, or at least was when I was around, known for basically explaining to other cities that the larp is in fact just a game (by killing their characters). People get mad. Oh, they get mad. I was staying in St. Pete a few years ago and wanted to try to find some local gaming people in the area, and now I really wish I had!
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Jul 5, 2012 17:27
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Kavingi posted:I was staying in St. Pete a few years ago and wanted to try to find some local gaming people in the area, and now I really wish I had! To be fair it was a slightly undeserved reputation. But I believe the motto is still "The city of Tampa does not apologize for its cheese."
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Jul 5, 2012 18:30
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I've never done Camarilla stuff, I've heard way to many crazy stories about it to ever want to try. I have done smaller LARPs: My local campus group runs a year-long LARP of a different system every year, and it can be pretty fun at times. One year had a nWoD Werewolf-Mage-Vampire game that was actually pretty fun, mostly due to the fact that the Mage players were mostly incompetent enough to give the other creatures a fighting chance. I got to play a badical Obrimos who thought he was the Slavic god of the sun. One year I actually ran a Hunter: The Vigil LARP that ended up a massive headache and I have several worst experiences from it, mostly from bizarre and awful players. Last year was Unhallowed Metropolis, an absolute mess of a game that was only fun because I got to play a mad scientist and build a giant robot that destroyed Parliament. Next year is Unknown Armies and I hope to method play a Dipsomancer. edit: To clarify, Unhallowed Metropolis the system and setting are terrible, the game itself went surprisingly well. Augustin Iturbide fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Jul 6, 2012 |
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Jul 6, 2012 03:09
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I'm playing in a Mage The Awakening LARP at the moment, and it's pretty great. Only one or two truly insane people in it. It actually lead to one of my Best Experiences, which was when my previously sort of ineffectual Thyrsus tore open the sky and shattered the veil to avenge the GoV sanctioned assassination of his mentor, before faking his own death and fleeing to a Free Council safe house in Siberia for a few months.
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Jul 6, 2012 04:05
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Had an amazing run of Arkham Horror on the 4th. One of my friends is playing the dilettante and got the motorcycle in his starting gear. Couple turns go by, he gets an encounter, and it goes like this: : A boy comes up to you. "Hey mister, you dropped this!": Mister? This kid needs glasses.: He hands you something and before you can react, he's gone. Draw a common item!: [draws another motorcycle]And everyone lost it. Trying to picture that exchange and figure out how you'd drive two motorcycles at once.
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Jul 6, 2012 16:05
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Obviously you rig up string around the throttle and brakes, and then stand on them with one foot on each seat.
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Jul 6, 2012 16:25
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Lipizzaner Motorcycles?
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Jul 6, 2012 16:28
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The Lord of Hats posted:Obviously you rig up string around the throttle and brakes, and then stand on them with one foot on each seat. Hook up a small trailer to them as a chariot. e: This has been a dream of mine for years
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Jul 6, 2012 17:43
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Yawgmoth posted:And everyone lost it. Trying to picture that exchange and figure out how you'd drive two motorcycles at once.
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Jul 6, 2012 22:56
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Motorcycle Catamaran.
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Jul 6, 2012 23:05
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Jul 6, 2012 23:21
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I'm DMing a Dark Heresy game of my own for once and while I have resisted the temptation of putting in Slaaneshi porn or psykers that serve no purpose but being a source of PotW, my party is making it hard for me to not just declare "everybody burns one fate point and wakes up in a hospital1d5+5 days later" 3 sessions in, they have: -Instigated a bar brawl by publicly asking around for info about the heresy they were investigating, then prioritize shooting up drunks and let the only actual heretic present get away with shanking their contact(result: 4 dead including contact and suspect). -Got arrested, which I let them avoid because an anonymous person called with top level clearance codes stating they would "deal with any irregularities internally", then they proceeded to reveal their identity anyway(while a possibly traitorous Arbites is a plot point). -Ended an assassination attempt on them because they've blown their cover already(and fail to realize that triggered the attack) by setting a subway train on fire(wounding an undercover arbites and half the party) -Got themselves arrested again by detaching the burning train cars and standing around next to them, then saying too much again to the responding arbites(I put a bounty on the assassin and let them use that to pay off the fine) -Finally walked up to the site they're supposed to be investigating, an old abandoned manufactorum that was rumored to be a hideout of heretics. Seeing a pair of assault rifle toting thugs by the door, they don't put two and two together but instead walk up to the guards, whip out their =I= badges and demand they open the gate because they are investigating a possible heresy.  -In the resulting firefight, they nearly kill one of their own with friendly fire... twice. I'm running out of ways to avoid them causing a TPK in every scene Edit: Maybe I should switch over to Paranoia.
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Jul 7, 2012 00:46
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Go the Spies Like Us route. Reveal that the PCs are actually assumed to be incompetent and are there solely to catch the attention of the traitorous Arbites while the real team identifies and destroys him. There are a number of different directions in which your players could go after learning that their bosses all think they're fuckups, but most of them are bound to be entertaining.
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Jul 7, 2012 00:50
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Throw them in a penal legion and let them work out their aggressive impulses the hard way
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Jul 7, 2012 05:28
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Maybe ask the players if they're trying to get their characters killed?
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Jul 7, 2012 06:53
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Having had good experiences with Fiasco, I tried Danger Mountain! from the same team. The game failed horribly. There was no central rule structure and the rescue mechanics made no sense - we would've rescued only 2 people, since the dice turned early. I think we played wrong, but the failure was intense.
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Jul 7, 2012 09:02
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I just had a Best Experience right here on Something Awful. If you were unaware, there's a Play-by-post forum here; one style of games that seems fairly prevalent uses the PDQ system, and is called a "Godgame;" you're playing a deity of some sort who goes around doing God stuff. Go team you. One of these games is JamezBfod's Patchworld, in which everyone starts off as a dinky little +2 deity and has the chance to grow in power as one accumulates worshippers and such. Back in December, my character, Padavine the rain-goddess, was killed - oops. (Pretty much a fuckup on my part combined with an unclear understanding of the rules) Well, Jamez was cool and gave me the opportunity to keep playing as a mortal follower of Padavine trying to revive her; this character, whose name is Bad (yes, I know, make your jokes now), has driven a bunch of plot despite being the single character in the game who can barely do anything. He has also developed a tendency to try and help make the world a better place despite the fact that he is always wildly outclassed in every fight he gets in - and he's been lucky enough to survive. Hell, thrive, even. Earlier tonight a god named Sothhude got killed and his death allowed an otherworldly horror to attempt to emerge into this plane and eat everyone, which would be bad, and as Bad was nearby and noticed it, he decided - naturally - to do something about it. And so he decided to try to hit the Cthulhu-analogue with a stick. GM flips a coin to see if this plan has even a chance to succeed. Lands my way. GM makes rolls; essentially, we tie. GM flips another coin as a tiebreaker... it falls my way. My mortal hit Cthulhu with a stick and Cthulhu basically stopped and went "Ow! Dude, that stings!" and stopped trying to enter our reality long enough, I'm hoping, for the actual Gods to show up and close the hole he's trying to come in through. Gods are cool and all, but... mortal with a stick beats all, it would appear.
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Jul 8, 2012 10:26
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:mortal with a stick beats all, it would appear. Sometimes, the dice just go your way. And it's glorious when they do. Though, now I'm imagining a Punch and Judy show involving a mortal and a Cutethulhu.
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Jul 8, 2012 10:59
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I just had a Best Experience right here on Something Awful. That thread is on my "to-read" list. I love the PDQ Godgame threads, but they just tend to peter out way too quickly. I Am Communist seems to be doing a great one in http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3492111 though.
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Jul 8, 2012 12:50
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Volmarias posted:That thread is on my "to-read" list. I love the PDQ Godgame threads, but they just tend to peter out way too quickly. I Am Communist seems to be doing a great one in http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3492111 though. Yes, he does seem to be doing a great one, but he didn't take my app so gently caress him, he gets no plugs from me. 
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Jul 8, 2012 13:45
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So I've finished the character generation for my Traveller game. We're running the pirates of Drinax module. Suggested books included the Scoundrels expansion (which was ignored) and the Aslan book (which was not ignored). Given that when generating an Aslan you can be one of: An Aslan who grew up in Aslani sapce (uses Aslan rules for generation) A human who grew up in Aslani space (also uses Aslan rules for generation!) Or an Aslan who grew up in Anglic space (uses core, human generation with stat modifiers) So naturally my group of four players has taken one of each combination. Furthermore, none of them have any questionable pasts which is amusing as the module is all about pirates!  We have the Aslan (human) Scientist who won the Nobel Space Science Prize, the Human (aslan) Military Officer who become a homeless psychic for a while, the Aslan military soldier who became an officer just before he left the service (and has a history for getting into duels when his officer is incorrect (he got the same event three times!)) and finally the Human admiral from the court of Drinax itself who had a spell at being a diplomat.In the 15 minutes of session we had after we finished character generation and I set the scene, they already started butting heads. They're too honourable to steal the ship and run, but I have no idea how they're going to actually manage to agree on stealing anything. The Aslan warrior and the human Aslan Officer want to steal from humans, and if they have to steal from Aslan want to let them know first as is honourable. The Human on the other hand wants to be efficient and steal from the Aslan. And the Aslan Scientist just doesn't really care. I can't wait for this Saturday when they actually have to figure out what to do. 
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Jul 9, 2012 06:33
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Funny start to the campaign. It reminds me of when I rolled (and rolled and rolled) up a Rear Admiral Fleet Surgeon from the imperial Navy for a spot as ship's doc on board a 400-ton subsidized merchant. The GM ruled that there's no room for that kind of character aboard this type of campaign and made me roll a different character. If I'd taken a half a second to come up with a story for the fleet surgeon, I would have said he was forced into retirement due to some terrible disgrace and was unable to find income any other way. I think the juxtaposition of a fallen noble on a tramp freighter would have been awesome to play, but oh well... I'm excited to read about how your campaign develops. I think you might have mentioned it somewhere but I can't remember: which Traveller rules system are you using? Mongoose? GURPS? Something else? Do you have any plans to look into Marc Miller's new rule set when it's released next year? Agrikk fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Jul 9, 2012 |
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Jul 9, 2012 07:04
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Mongoose Traveller, when I got interested in buying Traveller a few years ago it was the easiest to get a hold of and had decent reviews from what I saw. But I like the idea of Traveller so I'm definitely going to look into T5. I joined a game on RPoL because I wanted to play but I think I have a slightly clunkier and sometimes grubbier vision of the Traveller setting then they do. Everyone else in the game seems to think it's like Star Trek 2010 or whenever it came out, where I see it more like Battlestar Galactica; at least in terms of how technology works.
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Jul 9, 2012 07:08
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I've been looking in the old threads but I can't find this story: A group (possibly all playing orcs) befriend the village idiot orc and he becomes a close friend NPC. When the large dumb orc is killed in battle, they are all dumbstruck and genuinely get angry at what killed him. I'm using a similar character in my game, (to eventually unite the characters in my group who don't get along 100%.. or even 50%) but I'd like to read the story again.
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Jul 10, 2012 05:02
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Well, was hoping to have another session of the God game this weekend, but that's been put on hold, so instead I'll share an old story. The names have been changed in order to preserve my right to exaggerate things. Back at uni, back in the mid-late '90s, there was a group of friends who would meet up and play. An unassuming and friendly young chap called Jeff overheard them discussing a game, and, delighted to find fellow role-players, asked to join in. While generally a really nice guy, he was a bit too enthusiastic about bad ideas, and had yet to develop a level of maturity. This wasn't so much of a problem playing a mostly silly knock-around Shadowrun game, but then he requested to run for the group a huge, sprawling epic AD&D 2nd Ed game he'd written. When I started watching these games, I was amazed and dismayed. Admittedly, he had a fully-fleshed out setting with maps and a strong sense of a living world, and clearly enjoyed making the characters feel important and like they were having an impact on that setting. Where it was going wrong was that, well, Jeff kind of struck me as the kind of person who really, really just wanted friends and thought that the best way to make them happy was to just give them everything they wanted, or everything he thought they wanted. He would have insane homebrewed magical items wielded by villainous lieutenants or masterminds be easily snatched up by the characters. Usually after these villains were killed in two rounds by the insane homebrewed magical item the party picked up off the last one. This was often because he didn't quite understand how powerful the weapons were, and put them in the hands of NPCs who were underpowered and too easy to defeat. Numerous NPCs were there to just act as plot direction posts or as foils for whatever puerile plan the players decided was funny at the time ("Okay, you made your Pick Pocket check so the Chancellor doesn't notice that you've taken down his trousers and continues his speech in front of the War Council while they stare in shock at him") or would fold immediately upon seeing how mighty the party was. Combat was ridiculously easy as any and all foes would be easily trounced, and he would express surprise and amazement at how powerful and dangerous the PCs were, and how quickly they took down the enemy general. I'm fairly sure he didn't realise exactly how much he'd been giving them, and so while his 1 AC, 48 HP "big bad guy" MIGHT have been appropriate for another group, the fact that most of the party could kill him in two rounds by themselves without even being hit in return by his Mace of the Volcano! seemed to completely surprise him. The thing that summed it up for me was the Dragon Landing Roll. The party is being attacked by a dragon, which even for them is going to be a bit of a fight. In order to engage them on the ground, the dragon comes to land. Someone makes a joke about needing a check to make sure he lands properly. Eager to please, Jeff takes him at his word and makes a Dexterity check for the dragon. Jeff figures dragons are big and unwieldy, gives the huge lizard a Dex barely above 10 and then subsequently fails the check. Jeff rules the dragon essentially crashes into the ground while landing, so the party run up and stab the gently caress out of it while it's down. Combat over, everyone wins! You guys are awesome! I tried playing in a couple of Jeff's games, but the fact that he was just too eager to please us made the game immensely dissatisfying. There was no sense of adventure or challenge if everything we wanted was given to us on a platter. Coming up with cunning plans was never worth it, because the stupid plans, or no plans at all, were going to work anyway. We couldn't even get a decent amount of role-playing done because he'd be too eager to interrupt us with the next awesome and amazing thing he'd want to show us we could conquer. To his credit, though, he never fudged things or cheated on dice-rolls / difficulties to make things easier on his players. All dice, I think, were rolled openly and he had internally consistent logical rules for everything. It's just that in that planning stage he made them all ridiculously easy. It's all well-and-good playing a Minotaur's mechanics to the hilt, but it doesn't matter if it's not a challenge for any of the party. Because of this, a LOT of dragons crashed into the ground over the course of that campaign. Those of us who were more on the same wavelength eventually moved on to our own group and played numerous fantastic games. Jeff was left out of a lot of games because he was not a great player - his sense of how a game would run didn't really work with the way the rest of us were playing, and polite requests for him not to do stupid things in games were ignored. But there were people who LOVED Jeff's games and he continued running games for them. Some were nice, uncomplicated folks who just wanted a relaxing game. But one guy, Mike, was in it to win it.
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Jul 13, 2012 01:53
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Coward posted:Jeff's games Mike had NO problems with Jeff's games. This was because Mike was a minmaxy powergamer. He would do everything he could to try and get the most ridiculously powerful character in any game he played. He was the kind of man to scour obscure supplements for any kind of edge he could get. Thinking about it now, it'd be interesting to see how he would've gone with his characters in the era of 3E. But in 2nd Ed, he devoured the Player's Options books for his intake of cheese. And, of course Jeff's games rewarded him even more as his characters would single-handedly mow down any opposition with spectacular flair. Mike could get a little annoying, especially as he would sometimes get petulant if his powergamed character sheet couldn't flex an entire room to death. I seem to recall he got a little sulky in a Shadowrun game when a Magic-focused character got to Banish a Manifested Spirit and exercise his niche role before Mike could slaughter it with his super-cheesed gun character. So, you'd see how Mike quite enjoyed playing Jeff's games. And Jeff was happy because he got to let Mike have fun. But there was one occasion where things went a little bit wrong. Mike was playing some ridiculously super-charged Wild Mage in one of Jeff's D&D 2nd Ed games. He'd pulled some insanity from Skills and Powers, and a bunch of various different supplements to have monstrously over-the-top stats, and the ability to cast terrifyingly powerful spells. And he loved it. The party comes across one of the Big Bad Guys, and he begins unloading some plot elements before the combat starts. Everyone else is politely waiting for Jeff to finish the speech, but Mike leaps in and, perhaps using the "I'm Chaotic Neutral!" excuse, declares he's launching a super-powered Fireball spell at the Big Bad Guy. With a big grin, Mike picks up stacks of d6s and just rolls an ungodly amount of damage that would easily annihilate any villain Jeff decided to include, and possibly most of the surrounding countryside. And he sits back, pleased, victory assured. Jeff looks sadly and apologetically at Mike and rolls percentile dice. It turns out Mike wasn't paying much attention, and the Big Bad Guy is a Death Knight. Death Knights have a percentage chance of spell reflection. Jeff's scrupulous following of the rules and always rolling openly suddenly work against a player. Mike's eyes widen in horror as he realises what's just happened. Panicking, he picks up his character sheet and begins flipping back and forth, desperate to find some way out of this. He may possibly have had the Hit Points to survive a normal Fireball, but not one that he himself has powergamed to this pants-wettingly scary level. He has no items, no spells, nothing that can stop this. For a little too long he madly tries to find some way of avoiding the poo poo-ton of damage about to roll into his character's face, but he can find no tricks, no cheese, absolutely nothing that he can do against the onslaught he has unleashed. He stares open-mouthed at his sheet as the table erupts in laughter. Through his own cheese, he managed to vapourise his character. Jeff was a bit unhappy that he'd made Mike sad, but most of us were highly amused that despite Mike's minmaxing and Jeff's Monty Haul GMing, neither of them could save Mike's character once he decided to start casting that spell. Of course, Mike was back next week with homebrewed rules he found on the internet for playing a Ghost, which of course made his character even more powerful. I think Jeff let him. Coward fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Jul 13, 2012 |
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Jul 13, 2012 01:54
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The mention of Shadowrun by Coward (great story, btw, Coward!) reminds me of my favorite Shadowrun character. Not my favorite Shadowrun character I've ever played - my favorite one period. See, our Friendly Local Gaming Store was run by a guy named Bill. Bill was either a good guy or a colossal prick depending on who you talked to; he had a personality that was very outgoing, but as a result of that he seemed to forget that not everyone was his best bud. You can make off-color jokes and ask for help moving with someone you've known for a long time, but it's less endearing when you do it with someone you've known for ten minutes. But, well, I liked him. He ran a store that was a massively influential part of my life during my formative years and for that he gets plenty of slack from me. Now, Shadowrun games in the store tended to be very... fluid. The way it worked out was that most everyone had a character or two, and if someone wanted to run Shadowrun, it was generally open to all comers; bring your runner, grab a seat. There were no lengthy campaigns, just episodic runs with an ever-shifting cast of characters (and gamemasters). For Shadowrun, it was a pretty neat setup. Well, Bill's character was in a lot of these games - they were at the store, after all, and he was always there. And Bill's character was a Street Samurai called Cowboy. Now, you'd think with a name like that he's probably playing some Texan lone wolf type straight out of a Clint Eastwood movie, and you'd be very wrong. Sure, Cowboy wore chaps, but they were of the assless variety. Cowboy was played as the most stereotypically campy gay guy on the planet, right down to the lisp and the limp wrist (in hindsight it's woefully offensive but hell, I was in high school). After a few runs people started noticing something about Cowboy; for a street samurai, he never seemed all that eager to get into any fights. He was always the one trying to talk his way past guards and help plan tactical advances and otherwise try to do things sneaky-like, which was cool and all, except he had no appreciable stealth skills so he never actually did the sneaking; he just helped plan for the ones who did. Anyways, one run... Cowboy had been a fairly active character for a couple of years at this point, and privately some people were starting to wonder if anyone had ever seen him, you know, shoot anyone. The general consensus was that Bill, as the store owner and fixture, was trying hard to keep Cowboy out of the limelight so that his players - his paying customers - could hog the glory, and this was thought to be cool of him. But one run that had, sadly, to end. Three runners are rushing to an elevator that will take them out of the arcology with the stolen data; the team's Decker had disabled the alarms, and my Rigger was waiting outside in his car to provide the getaway (and, with the use of several drones, possibly the covering fire). All's good in the hood, it's gone off without a hitch... but someone tripped a magical alarm or something, and several large borged-out Trolls are running down the hallways after the team as they reach the elevator. The team is Cowboy, a fairly combat-ineffectual decker, and a mage that tried and failed to paralyze the trolls but had trouble with their heavily-cybered bodies. So Cowboy sighs heavily, and pulls his guns. "Hey Dave," Bill calls over to another gamer, "grab me two of those dice bricks, the Chessex ones."  (these guys) Dave grabs them, brings them over to the table. "Take four dice out of each," Bill tells him, and the rest of the store has all gathered around to look at this point because Bill rolling dice as Cowboy is not a thing that happens often. Four dice? we're all thinking. Jesus, is he just that lovely a joke character? Dave offers the dice to Bill, who shakes his head, reaches out, grabs the two bricks of dice, and dumps them on the table. Everyone kind of stares. "Guys," Bill tells us, "I am playing a street sam. Just because Cowboy doesn't like to shoot doesn't mean he's bad at it." The one and only time any of us ever saw Cowboy fire a weapon, he mowed down the hulking Troll-borgs, reholstered his weapons, and as the elevator door closed sighed sadly, "There goes my perfect record."
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Jul 13, 2012 02:56
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Cowboy 
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Jul 13, 2012 03:12
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Dave offers the dice to Bill, who shakes his head, reaches out, grabs the two bricks of dice, and dumps them on the table. Okay, for those of us less familiar with the Shadowrun rules... I'm gathering that four dice is weaksauce and 68 dice is... impressive. (Was it 72-4 or 72-8? Because I could read what you said either way.) How many dice would be typical for a character in his particular niche?
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Jul 13, 2012 06:22
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FredMSloniker posted:Okay, for those of us less familiar with the Shadowrun rules... I'm gathering that four dice is weaksauce and 68 dice is... impressive. (Was it 72-4 or 72-8? Because I could read what you said either way.) How many dice would be typical for a character in his particular niche? The way I understood it it would be 72-8. An optional rule in the 20th anniversary edition is to limit the dice pool to 20 or twice the sum of the character’s natural Attribute + Skill ratings, whichever is higher. I think the max that would allow would be something like 36 dice. So either way 64 or 68 dice in a pool is ludicrously high. I can only hope that was for multiple shots. Lallander fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jul 13, 2012 |
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Jul 13, 2012 06:32
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Kobold posted:Okay, that's the kind of power character I wouldn't mind seeing more often. Has it, but isn't trying to use it at every opportunity. His poor record. Bill wasn't actually trying to be nice. Bill just hated rolling that many dice.
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Jul 13, 2012 16:39
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Lallander posted:The way I understood it it would be 72-8. An optional rule in the 20th anniversary edition is to limit the dice pool to 20 or twice the sum of the character’s natural Attribute + Skill ratings, whichever is higher. I think the max that would allow would be something like 36 dice. So either way 64 or 68 dice in a pool is ludicrously high. I can only hope that was for multiple shots. It was. And, to be fair, I could well be misremembering the number of dice he removed from each brick (this was back in the mid-90s, and I'm old and don't recall so good). The upshot is that it was a ludicrously high number of dice from a character that had been ruthlessly minmaxed. It's funny; talking to Bill about it afterwards, he told me about how he'd designed Cowboy to be a combat monster who'd essentially had a life-changing event that caused him to turn his back on the whole killing people thing. Which is kinda cliche these days but at the time, it was seriously one of the first times I ever encountered the notion of not building a character to do the poo poo you want him to do. Like, if I'd tried building the same concept I'd've made him an average combatant and put more attention on social skills and the like, because that's what he'd be doing in the game, I'd want him to roll enough dice to succeed at it, right? The idea of building a character that was not well-optimized for his role as a means of exploring how that affects the gameplay - in effect, making the stats work in service to the character and not the other way around - was a huge revelation for me back in those middle-of-high-school, look-how-many-orcs-I-can-kill days. Really, when you get down to it, that's what made the experience so notable for me, personally - the revelation that low stats can be fun to play, too.
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Jul 13, 2012 16:53
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| # ? May 14, 2024 09:22 |
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Really, when you get down to it, that's what made the experience so notable for me, personally - the revelation that low stats can be fun to play, too.
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Jul 14, 2012 04:15
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