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This. One of my favorite phrases is, "what's in the room?" This is when things have gone horribly wrong either because a plan is busted or the dice went wrong and now you are scrambling to get out and the only weapon you have will be a wine bottle or a table leg. A friend of mine always makes min/maxed characters and cheats the dice so that he can be the best guy ever and kill more than everyone else and never fail at tasks. We all know he cheats. He knows we know but cheats anyways. Whatever man. Play however you need to to have fun, but please don't flex superiority at me when you cheat to get there. I say playing a character with weaknesses is way more satisfying because there exists a chance of failure and after that failure one must improvise and overcome.
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Jul 14, 2012 04:42
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Agrikk posted:This. Even framing the question as success or failure seems to me the wrong way to look at it. The attraction of the ability to fail a roll is that a given roll represents a place where the story will diverge. Instead of the gallant heroes saving the day, they might fall short despite an honest effort and be left to deal with the aftermath of their failed endeavour: since the bad guy got away, now there's suddenly a lot of monsters attacking a town; or, because they didn't find out about a plot in time, a key figure is assassinated and his replacement becomes yet another antagonist for them to eventually defeat; and so on. Looking at it from the perspective of winning or losing just doesn't click for me, but then I prefer to explore consequences and story more than I care about big numbers.
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Jul 14, 2012 08:10
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A good system guarantees you control of your failure. In Fiasco, you get to control your success or failure, but not at what. One of the examples in the companion has one player controlling the end of the scene and wants to succeed, and the other sets up "Your assassination target is your nephew."
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Jul 14, 2012 08:59
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Nietzschean posted:Even framing the question as success or failure seems to me the wrong way to look at it. This can work in the opposite direction as well. I was once in a game where we managed to kill a plot-relevant lv15 bad guy way earlier than intended (We were lv8) and the DM rolled with it and had the bad guy's death change the flow of the story. To explain, one of the PCs (A Bard) was working with the bad guys behind the scenes and was planning on betraying us. He decides he like us, and tells his commander, a 15th level Vampire, that he's not going through with it. A few lucky rolls later, the Bard traps the Vampire in his bag of holding. After coming clean to the party and handing over some useful info he picked up while in their service, we began to work on the pressing issue of what the hell to do with our Vamp-in-a-bag. We plan as such: we take the bag into the middle of a nearby desert at noon with no shade for miles, have the priest hallow the ground we're on, set up half a dozen triggered spells aimed at whatever comes out of the bag, and have the Bard dump the Vampire into the middle of this little trap of ours. The vampire gets vaporized as soon as he gets dumped out of the bag, but not before he yells out "ACERAK WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE!" (Anyone who recognizes that name will easily figure out our 'punishment' for killing this NPC) and leaves behind only a withered hand. That emits a magic aura that nearly blinds the mage when he uses Detect Magic on it. One good Knowledge: Religion check by the priest reveals that our little friend had the goddamned Hand of Vecna on him. Our little lv8 band of pissants were now in possession of something that the Vampire's boss will surely want back. We decided that we needed to get rid of this thing FAST. So we sell it to the High Priestess of Lolth in the Drow Capital of the Underdark for a cool 5 million gold, no questions asked either way. Then we decided to investigate this Acerak fellow after kitting ourselves out with this windfall. Cue a fun romp through the Tomb of Horrors in which the bard gets stripped naked, gets his gender reversed, and I get torn in half by a 4-armed gargoyle. We all got better after the DM decided she'd had her fun and had Olidammara (who had victimized us earlier in the campaign) fix everything. Except for the gender swap - the bard had to deal with that for an extra week because Olidammara thought it was hilarious. Sadly, we never got to finish the story due to the school quarter ending and the party getting torn apart by out of game stuff, but it was great to have a DM who took a derailed plot and rolled with it.
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Jul 14, 2012 09:26
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It seems my Dark Heresy group has fixed itself overnight. They went from not being able to recognize a heretic when the latter was pointing an assault rifle at them, not finishing any encounter without significant collateral damage before saying "don't worry, we're from the Inquisition" to everybody around to exploring in pairs, leaving guards stationed outside of whatever building they are in, preparing escape routes and vehicles, occasionally stopping to evaluate what they've discovered so far, checking corpses for useful objects, staying silent wherever possible, preparing ambushes when informed of enemies ahead, taking prisoners without killing them, actually interrogating the prisoners they take and actually co-ordinating in combat as to who is attacking who and avoiding enemies about to be hit by weapons prone to friendly fire. I think they may have taken me a bit too serious when I told them that now that everybody is a bit comfortable with the system, I'd start giving them some proper challenges  Tonight is the next session, I'll report back with the results.
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Jul 14, 2012 13:03
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Asehujiko posted:Tonight is the next session, I'll report back with the Watch The Wire if you haven't already, that series is full of noncombat problems for investigative types. An Arbites-Inquisition-Heretics-Ordinary Citizens game based on The Wire would be phenomenal.
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Jul 14, 2012 17:55
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mllaneza posted:Watch The Wire if you haven't already, that series is full of noncombat problems for investigative types. An Arbites-Inquisition-Heretics-Ordinary Citizens game based on The Wire would be phenomenal. Oh, indeed.
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Jul 14, 2012 18:28
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Asehujiko posted:It seems my Dark Heresy group has fixed itself overnight. They went from not being able to recognize a heretic when the latter was pointing an assault rifle at them, not finishing any encounter without significant collateral damage before saying "don't worry, we're from the Inquisition" to everybody around to exploring in pairs, leaving guards stationed outside of whatever building they are in, preparing escape routes and vehicles, occasionally stopping to evaluate what they've discovered so far, checking corpses for useful objects, staying silent wherever possible, preparing ambushes when informed of enemies ahead, taking prisoners without killing them, actually interrogating the prisoners they take and actually co-ordinating in combat as to who is attacking who and avoiding enemies about to be hit by weapons prone to friendly fire. My most striking memory from Dark Heresy is a cleric with a heavy flamer unloading into a crowded marketplace under the logic that it's better for a thousand souls to make their way to the Emperor than it is to let the one heretic that may have been hiding among them go free. Of course the heretic in question was not in the crowd, and we never really explored the consequences and ramifications of slaughtering a bunch of random civilians, under the logic that "hey it's 40k this poo poo happens all the time," and besides we were ~player characters~ with things to do.
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Jul 14, 2012 19:17
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Nietzschean posted:My most striking memory from Dark Heresy is a cleric with a heavy flamer unloading into a crowded marketplace under the logic that it's better for a thousand souls to make their way to the Emperor than it is to let the one heretic that may have been hiding among them go free. Of course the heretic in question was not in the crowd, and we never really explored the consequences and ramifications of slaughtering a bunch of random civilians, under the logic that "hey it's 40k this poo poo happens all the time," and besides we were ~player characters~ with things to do. Sounds like the Rogue Trader game I played in, except that I was the one with the heavy flamer, playing a blind Astropath, we were in the middle of a crowded market square meeting a contact who was an old friend of the Rogue Trader's father, and four people started opening fire on us. In my defence, I had already drawn the heavy flamer (drew it as a precaution when the contact approached us because we had no idea who the hell this old person was) and only fired it in self defence after everyone else had acted. From the way the GM was describing the scene, it sounded like most of the people in the square bolted as soon as the four opened fire. Nope, the civilians were standing around like sheep, despite 8 people shooting at each other. I broke the GM's brain when I asked how much experience we got for the civilian casualties.
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Jul 14, 2012 19:42
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mllaneza posted:An Arbites-Inquisition-Heretics-Ordinary Citizens game based on The Wire would be phenomenal. It would be really heretical though!
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Jul 14, 2012 20:15
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Randalor posted:Sounds like the Rogue Trader game I played in, except that I was the one with the heavy flamer, playing a blind Astropath, we were in the middle of a crowded market square meeting a contact who was an old friend of the Rogue Trader's father, and four people started opening fire on us. In my defence, I had already drawn the heavy flamer (drew it as a precaution when the contact approached us because we had no idea who the hell this old person was) and only fired it in self defence after everyone else had acted. From the way the GM was describing the scene, it sounded like most of the people in the square bolted as soon as the four opened fire. Nope, the civilians were standing around like sheep, despite 8 people shooting at each other. I remember one time in Rogue Trader we'd killed this really powerful demon, and he'd dropped some kind of ultraevil death blade or something like that. I asked what was special about it, and the GM said that the blade gained a fair bit of power for every life it took (and corresponding soul sent to be rent by demons in the warp). Me: "Hey... we've got like over ten thousand crewmen, right? We could easily lose a hundred or so without even noticing. Do we have to dump the blade overboard?"  Everyone else: 
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Jul 15, 2012 01:45
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Me: "Hey... we've got like over ten thousand crewmen, right? We could easily lose a hundred or so without even noticing. Do we have to dump the blade overboard?" So did you check the performance reviews to decide who'd be in that hundred? That's one way to give them a severance package...
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Jul 15, 2012 02:05
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So my Traveller game ran yesterday. One of our members had tennis at our normal time, so we ran in the morning on Saturday much to the distress of one of our players. At any rate we spent a while working out how to get the ship working a bit better. They chose to fix the jump drive so it didn't have a -2 DM to all checks, as well as reduce maintenance costs and improve the hull a little. Once that was done we got to hiring some random pirates for the ship. The crew ended up being: A Pilot and a Navigator from the Navy (I let the Admiral call in some contacts being, well, an Admiral. He didn't get many considering they're technically pirates right now). From the  side of the universe they garnered:A gunner called Jim Cheese who had a network of contacts. Pete the Stench, an engineer with an eyepatch, Belit the Reaver, a marine who has a burning desire for revenge, William Magnus, a sour tempered medic, Scarlet Sal, a gunner with multicoloured hair and Black Jack, a marine who thinks he has Psionic powers. I also rolled Ramsay Grog, who was an alcoholic. I was sad they didn't take him, I didn't even need to fudge any rolls for him! So now we had a crew and the Harrier had been patched up a bit so the game needed a bit of direction. The players decided to test their feet by going after an easy target first, flying to the adjacent system. Asim had been recently reconquered by King Oleb the XVI, by following in his ancestor's tried and true footsteps of orbitally bombarding the poor planet into submission. There's probably a reason that the planet is about 1990's level of tech. They went to one of the system's gas giants, figuring that there'd be a good chance of pirates being there and almost blew a poor mining vessel into space dust. The mining vessel mentioned there was a group of pirates there preying exclusively on Aslani vessels that were trying to avoid the pirates in the next system, which was a 2 block jump to the next star. Considering the group had 2 Aslani and a naturalised human, they decided to land at the local star port and piss off the pirates. So the Human-Aslani and the Aslani took Black Jack with them and went to the local seedy bar, where the human proceeded to recite epic poetry at the group. After the crowd got annoyed at them for being, well, aliens Jack wanted to run off. When the Aslan picked him up, the crowd used this as the excuse to beat up the foreigners that they wanted. The crowd then got punched around by the Aslan and the human, who hid his telekinesis with melee attacks (to a limited success) while Jack proceeded to pick-pocket the crowd. Eventually when Jack got caught with his hands on someone's cred-stick, the players had to step in and try and save him. He got away and dashed back to the ship and the Aslan and Human had to follow chase. The Aslan that grew up as a Human? Well, he went down to the surface, bought some food in the market and went to the local library. Being a scientist, he was a little annoyed not only to find paper books but also that they were wrong! So he went and bought a ball-point pen and started making corrections until he got chased out by the librarian. So the Harrier blasted off into space without even clearing departure or anything and then headed to the other gas giant in the system. Sure enough, after their little exhibition at the space port one pirate corsair was hot on their tails. Pretending to be the 'system police' for a pre-spaceflight world they wanted to board the ship. So we got down to space combat as the Harrier shot first, and missed. There was a tense moment as two of the three shots from the corsair were going to hit, but due to the ludicrous tactics bonus to initiative my group has they managed to use their four reactions to dodge the shots entirely. Then they got one solid hit on the corsair. The corsair is essentially a floating cardboard box with engines and guns. It crumpled losing its engines entirely, taking power-plant damage and losing all of its hull and half of its structure in a single attack. So the crew board the now helpless pirates and then deliver them a surprising ultimatum after getting the location of the pirate's base. They would permit one pirate to live, either to join them or to choose his death after everyone had fought to the death. So after all of the turned into  they now have a pirate they're going to stick into low berth as they go to plunder the pirate's base and take their last vessel out.It turned out pretty well. I look forward to getting to develop the NPCs a bit as well, considering the pirates all turned out to have fun little quirks.
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Jul 15, 2012 12:37
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A good friend of mine runs the store where I play Magic. Since I only recently started playing, I hadn't heard any of the gossip about the players, and my friend took this opportunity to relate the following story to me as I picked up a box of boosters: "Yeah, the Magic judge, <Judge>, he kinda grates on my nerves. Like, he's always loud and noticeable, even when he's only addressing the person next to him and not the whole group. I think it's almost subconscious now. "Funny thing happened a while ago along that line. Judge brought his fiancee to Friday Night Magic. Nothing much really happened until she leaned over to the guy next to her, showed him a card, and said, 'How does this work?' Judge lost his mind at that point, started shouting, 'Why did you ask him? Why didn't you ask me? That guy doesn't know anything!' She turned around and said, 'Because he doesn't make me feel like a dumbass for not knowing!' "They took it outside for a while at that point and everyone went back to playing. Then Judge walks in and loudly announces, 'Well, no sex for her tonight!' I don't know if it was a "you had to be there" story, but I was laughing my butt off.
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Jul 15, 2012 15:55
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ItalicSquirrels posted:"They took it outside for a while at that point and everyone went back to playing. Then Judge walks in and loudly announces, 'Well, no sex for her tonight!' I seriously do not understand how couples like these even operate. Why would she stay with a guy who treats her like she's a moron?
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Jul 15, 2012 16:07
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Yawgmoth posted:Oh I'm sure she's just crestfallen over that. This confuses me too. Overheard a teenager referring to his girlfriend the other day, the phrase was "The stupid bitch doesn't even know what a planeswalker is." I can't imagine wanting to casually refer to my girlfriend as a stupid bitch, or the girl who would want to be with that guy. People are strange. 
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Jul 15, 2012 16:11
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Jerk Syndrome. First guy to show them anything resembling affection or niceties, so they cling to them like glue. I saw more then a few of my friends go through this in high school 
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Jul 15, 2012 18:13
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ItalicSquirrels posted:"They took it outside for a while at that point and everyone went back to playing. Then Judge walks in and loudly announces, 'Well, no sex for her tonight!' I have a feeling he wasn't the one to make that (ahem) ruling. Just a thought.
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Jul 15, 2012 18:17
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Malachite_Dragon posted:Jerk Syndrome. First guy to show them anything resembling affection or niceties, so they cling to them like glue. I saw more then a few of my friends go through this in high school  It sounds like that girl may be reaching the end of her tolerance of that assclown's behavior, at least.
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Jul 15, 2012 18:23
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I played my first game of Fiasco a few weeks ago. It wasn't overly awesome, but it did end in an epic clusterfuck battle between a group of bandits, a sheriff's posse, a ton of indians, and the cavalry. I've been itching to play some more since, and today I taught the game to two friends of mine. We chose the Gangster London playset and, after a short introduction to the rules, started to setup the game. We ended up with: "Fast" Frank Creed: dock worker and underground boxer. He had done some time after an old fighting ring he was part of got busted. Kevin McAllister: long-time crook and gambling addict, who had met Frank while in prison for armed robbery. Owen Creed: A pretty inexperienced dude in his early twenties. Frank's distant relative, who he had never met. Owen idolized Kevin, who had got him involved with the gambling and small-time crime world. Kevin and Owen had heard of a really good insider gambling ring, but they Needed to get the respect of some really shady fellows in order to get in. They had information that Angus, Frank's uncle, had a stash of expensive drugs hidden somewhere. Being a bit hasty, Kevin had already negotiated a deal for the stuff with Vladimir, a Big Deal russian mobster. Things had happened, they had missed the deadline for the dropoff, and now Angus was dead. Frank was staying in Angus' house and had been with the old guywhen he died. Among the other ramblings of the dying man, he had heard him repeatedly mutter something about "snow in the attic". Act 1 opened with both Frank and Kevin and Owen being pressured: Frank by two cops, Winston and Marv, who suspected Angus of stealing a load of drugs but did not have any evidence to back it up; and Kevin and Owen by Vladimir and a gun-wielding crony of his. Kevin managed to negotiate a reschedule of the deal for tomorrow night (the day of Angus' funeral), and was sent on his way unharmed with Owen. "You get one reschedule. One. After that, no more." Frank on the other hand was sent back home with a black eye and a cracked rib after he told Winston that he did not know anything about any drugs (and also to screw off). There was some fun roleplaying, after which we wrapped up Act 1 with Frank catching Kevin and Owen browsing through Angus' papers in a room they broke into and, with the help of a shotgun, forcing them to fill him in on the deal. We started Act 2 on the day of the funeral, and spent the first couple of scenes with Frank and Owen slipping free of the funeral crowd to rummage around the family house's attic and leaving Kevin downstairs as a lookout. Kevin noticed Vladimir mingling with the funeral crowd and started upstairs to warn the others of his presence, but bumped into the russian in an empty room. "I think it unfair you got to reschedule and yet I did not. Half an hour from now, you bring the stuff." Trusting his two friends to have found the drugs by now and wanting to placate Vladimir by showing him the goods, Kevin showed the russian upstairs. Meanwhile, Owen had found the stash hidden under some floorboards. It was empty. Vladimir entered the attic behind Kevin and saw the open stash, but got jumped by Owen and Frank when he took a step towards it to see inside. Owen did not fare well and took a fist in the guts, but Frank was an experienced fighter. He also had an old croquet mallet. Frank and Kevin dumped Vladimir's corpse into the drug stash and, while Owen was freaking the gently caress out, made plans to escape the house in the only car available: The Hearse. The act finished with the guys managing to shake off the russians in a Frantic Chase. During the Aftermath montage, Owen continued freaking out and buggered off home to frantically pack his bags. Kevin produced a bag of drugs, which he and Frank would sell in order to afford leaving the country, but was interrupted by the police knocking on his door. Kevin was arrested and Frank got run over by a cab while trying to escape. In his last montage bit, Frank was in the middle of regaining (painful) consciousness when he saw Winston and Marv approaching with a baton and a pair of handcuffs held ready. So that was pretty fun. But the absolute highlight of the game was Owen's player's montage of Owen getting kidnapped, tortured in the cargo bay of a ship en route to Russia, and finally being brought to Vladimir's boss. He had a hobby of taxidermy. Owen wound up in his room of "Cautionary Examples". Me and Kevin's player's expressions while Owen's aftermath was unfolding:   Owen's player had rolled zero: The Worst Thing in the Universe. We all agreed that his fate was indeed bad enough.
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Jul 15, 2012 21:14
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I had a first for my table last night: a long-term PC came out of the closet. It's normally an adventurous save-the-world sort of game, but the PCs are in a period of extended downtime between heroics where our sessions consist mostly of character development an community building. We've also had a lot of relationship drama that's been simmering for months come to a boil, resulting in a hideous love triangle between a PC and two NPCs: one a psychic who hunts rogue psychics, the other a particularly dangerous breed of telepath newly awakened to her powers. The PC is a hormone-addled teenager who's been mooning over the hunter for months. The hunter has been slowly warming to the idea, and they nearly hooked up after a long night and a lot of alcohol before he decided better of it. The telepath is a recent arrival who may have put the psychic whammy on the teenager the night he turned the hunter down, using him to keep the hunter off her back. It's ugly. After a big blow-up between the love triangle, the teenager stormed out into the woods to cool off. Another PC, his younger brother, went after him to make sure he was all right. They commiserated about the whole terrible mess, but it was shallow conversation since neither of them have had a real relationship before and there's only so much they could say. The conversation turned to why he's in love with the telepath anyway, because it seemed to come out of the blue. After some soul-searching he realized he couldn't explain it and chalked it up to being "one of those things." In an effort to draw his brother out, the younger brother admitted that he'd been in a similar position: when they were growing up he had an unrequited crush on their mutual best friend, an NPC of the same gender. The possibility that this PC might be gay has come up once or twice out of character, but it came as a complete surprise in-character. It happened at the end of the session so we didn't have time for any immediate fallout, but it should be fun to watch going forward. The older brother's player has said in no uncertain terms that if it were anyone else his character would have told them to get back in the closet and never mention it again, so it'll be interesting to see what this does to their relationship.
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Jul 16, 2012 01:00
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I once played a Jedi character whom I decided would turn out to be a lesbian. It was supposed to be a big reveal, as not even the character understood that she was gay - and why would she, living a sheltered existence in a universe where every canon character is either A) heterosexual or B) asexual? (Yes, there are a couple of gay characters in the EU, but they're very obscure and certainly nobody my character would have heard of.) But then when my Jedi first said "I've never been interested in boys," everybody went:  "Oooh, I see." So her coming-out surprised absolutely nobody when it eventually came.
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Jul 16, 2012 01:25
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Pththya-lyi posted:I once played a Jedi character whom I decided would turn out to be a lesbian. It was supposed to be a big reveal, as not even the character understood that she was gay - and why would she, living a sheltered existence in a universe where every canon character is either A) heterosexual or B) asexual? (Yes, there are a couple of gay characters in the EU, but they're very obscure and certainly nobody my character would have heard of.) With all of the weird stuff in the star wars universe, I think homosexuality ranks pretty low on the "well that's odd" scale. C3PO never forget 
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Jul 16, 2012 12:42
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Volmarias posted:With all of the weird stuff in the star wars universe, I think homosexuality ranks pretty low on the "well that's odd" scale. You'd think so, but according to LucasArts there is no homosexuality in Star Wars.
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Jul 16, 2012 15:24
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:You'd think so, but according to LucasArts there is no homosexuality in Star Wars. ...what.
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Jul 16, 2012 15:25
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:You'd think so, but according to LucasArts there is no homosexuality in Star Wars. What, like how there was  no prostitution in Soviet Russia?
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Jul 16, 2012 15:31
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Mikael Kreoss posted:...what. No, wait, my apologies - turns out that was BioWare that said that, which is ironic, really; I seem to recall that the forces behind that decision were attached to LucasArts in some fashion but since I can't recall details and I can't find any supporting evidence in three minutes with Google so I might just be crazy.
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Jul 16, 2012 15:34
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Fantasy Craft II: Azteca Boogaloo [Previous Story] So last time I posted an FC story I forgot to introduce the party. They're working for an Adventurer's Guild as essentially freelance troubleshooters. When bad things happen the guild hires a group to handle them. The setting is loosely based on Pre-Napoleonic Europe/North Africa (and because we're unimaginative gits we used the actual names of countries.) Major points of divergence besides the obvious include the Conquistadors failing due to Drow/body horror spider infestation, and the complete lack of European colonization of America. Many countries have more of one fantasy race than the others, but Humans are everywhere. Aurelio is my character. A Spanish Saurian Dragoon, he started off being a shooty guy who happened to ride a Utahraptor into combat and has wound up becoming just as adept with his cavalry sabre as we've leveled up. He's devoutly Catholic, and suffering from horrible PTSD after his role in the fighting against the Drow and La Azteca. He's the elected leader of the group. Edon is a relatively new Human addition to the party, having rerolled after losing interest in his prior Unborn (magic robot) character. He's a scholar with a rifle who I'm pretty sure is some sort of mage - but I have never seen his sheet. He generally is busy pulling apart our last kill to figure out how to kill the rest of them better or such things. And has knowledge of demons somehow.  Adelais is a Fire Giantess mage from the Ottoman Empire (having lived in present-day Turkey), and basically has taken on the role of healer because she's the only one with any ranks in Medicine at the moment. She is festooned with gigantic pistols and a literal cannon for when she's not busy shooting deathrays of ice. Stannislav is an Orcish fencer from Russia, and basically is a complete combat monster whose M.O. is to total defense in order to get big ripostes off and sit at a nearly untouchable 22 defense. He likes to fight and drink and fight to pay for the tabs he rings up when he drinks. Jubokko is a a literal Oni, having wandered over to Europe over the ages because he was bored. He wears little to no armor, has a sword the size of a man, and wrecks poo poo all goddamned day. He winds up taking the brunt of most combats (despite being unarmored) just because with his gigantic sword and constant drunken hollering he's the one who gets all the enemies' attention. tl;dr we're a ragtag band of misfits bouncing around Egypt killing things for pay and then spending all of that pay on drink. - The party had just finished up the God-Rat job and were on the way back to the Guild when they decided to stop and see if the villagers they rescued from it were doing alright. They head to a small native village and discover some incredibly odd Hyenas. With human heads. The natives plead for help, as the abominations have begun to attack their village in the night. Aurelio and Edon stay behind to plan the attack, while the rest track the beasts to their lair. Realizing he can do little without more direct knowledge of the enemy, Aurelio leaves Edon to rejoin the party at the lair's mouth. After a long and bloody combat, the Hyena-things are beaten and Edon bursts in with the revelation that they're demon-possessed and does his best to bind them. They catch the demon possessing the one that was the "pack-leader," and stick it in a bag. Adelais then laughs at the idea of demons and opens the bag. Bad idea. One horribly failed fort save later, Edon is puking up sewage, though he is not possessed. The party returns to the village, and then to the guild, and spends a month in Cairo. Aurelio, having had some horrifying memories brought back by the demon, sinks into deep depression and turns to alcohol even more heavily than usual. Eventually, everyone's broke again due to their partying ways and return to the Guild for another assignment. The Guild has a few interesting assignments for the group, and they decide to go with investigating reports of a "Ghost ship" drifting into the Mediterranean. They depart from Alexandria and spend a few days on a guild-hired ship. On reaching the Ghost-ship, it's discovered to be a Spanish galleon. After clambering onto it, they discover a survivor in the crow's nest. Hernandez brings the bad news. La Azteca (the aforementioned horrifying spiders) have infested the ship, he estimates at least 100 of them. He survived by holing up in the crow's nest with every gun he could find and shooting them as they climbed. However, he has rigged the powder magazine to blow - he was just unable to light it. Jubokko decides that any attempt to go down the stairs would likely result in an ambush and begins hacking away at the deck, making a hole big enough to drop through. Edon refuses to go with this plan, insisting on staying abovedeck while the party heads below. He succeeds, and everyone but Aurelio gets their first ideas of why La Azteca is so terrifying. The interior of the ship is filled with horrifying, fleshy growth and webs. Spiders surround the party, and corpse-puppets of the crew attack them as well. After holding them off long enough and killing over twenty of the spiders, Jubokko hears something from the surface. He leaps back up through the hole, finding Edon suffering from a horrible case of "Spider infestation in my loving leg aaaaa." He does the only thing he can think of. He cuts the leg off. Edon passes out and remains unconscious for the rest of the adventure. Jubokko brings him belowdeck, not wanting to leave him to the spiders. Adelais quickly binds the wound, stabilizing Edon and keeping him from bleeding out. Jubokko hacks another hole into the floor, and the party drops right next to the powder magazine, into the treasure hold. Confronted by a pair of lizard-puppet Driders,one of which was Ramirez - an old comrade of Aurelio's in life - and a single Drow Drider. The drow retreats, as the party tries to hold off the onslaught of smaller spiders from among the gold bars - the room clearly being a trap - while Aurelio does his best to rig the magazine to blow. The corpse-puppet of Ramirez is crushed by Jubokko, as the exoskeleton of the spider-half comes to life and begins fighting on the party's side, seemingly looking for revenge on the other spiders. As the second puppet is destroyed, Aurelio finishes rigging the ship to blow. Aurelio, Adelais, and Stannislav start climbing out with Aurelio carrying Edon slung over the back of his raptor. Jubokko stays behind, being caught in the shoulder by a spear from the drow. He drops his sword, and does a flying leap to grapple her, body slamming her through the bottom of the ship. Ramirez grabs a torch and lights the ship, it explodes as Jubokko dives through the hole and the party leaps from the deck. The drow is taken as a captive, the water burning away her spider-half. The session ends with the party on a raft heading back to the ship that brought them here, wondering what the gently caress the Spaniards were doing trying to bring a drow to Europe.
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Jul 16, 2012 16:59
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Edit: Nevermind, on second thought that's kinda creepy.
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Jul 16, 2012 17:03
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:No, wait, my apologies - turns out that was BioWare that said that, which is ironic, really; I seem to recall that the forces behind that decision were attached to LucasArts in some fashion but since I can't recall details and I can't find any supporting evidence in three minutes with Google so I might just be crazy. To be fair, Bioware changed their policy on using terms like "gay" and "lesbian" on the TOR forums, stating that the terms were banned in the first place to prevent their derogatory use. I believe their hearts were in the right place, they just went about it clumsily.
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Jul 16, 2012 17:55
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I once played a game of D&D 3.5. Everyone in it was fairly new. Our party consisted of: Me, a paladin and lawful good servant of justice who happened to look and sound like an evil overlord, complete with black spiky armor. A halfling thief, expert at acrobatics and lock picking And a fighter specializing greatswords. Over about 5 hours we: Accidentally burned down a village due to the fighter's player being an idiot (note: A reoccurring theme) Shorty brought a turkey along to act as emergency rations. This turkey had the biggest body count of our group and was promoted to a dire turkey as a reward. Encountered a heavily cursed and trapped treasure chest. Our theif managed to get all but the last lock opened, so we improvised. The trap set for it consisted of of a trap that shoots poison darts in the radius around the chest. The room had several stone pillars in it. With a bit of rope and a few 2x4s, we managed to set the trap off unharmed while all the darts clanked off the pillars. My divine mount was a horse drawn wagon. This was allowed, because it meant the group didn't have to manage rations or ammo (the wagon has a sufficient amount in it) and the wagon had a ballista mounted on it. Ever see what a holy ballista does to a demon? Awesome stuff thats what. We found a deck of many things. I got a flaming vorpal sword. the thief got imprisoned by a mad god (whoops), the dire turkey got: a pocket castle and a level 5 servant to follow him around. Ah, good old Level-5-fighter. Good guy he was. The player fighter was dead, mostly due to hilarious idiocy.
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Jul 17, 2012 01:37
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Joe sky lives.
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Jul 17, 2012 01:47
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Agean90 posted:Me, a paladin and lawful good servant of justice who happened to look and sound like an evil overlord, complete with black spiky armor.
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Jul 17, 2012 03:49
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Colon V posted:I need to play a "scare 'em straight" Paladin eventually.
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Jul 17, 2012 08:29
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Pththya-lyi posted:To be fair, Bioware changed their policy on using terms like "gay" and "lesbian" on the TOR forums, stating that the terms were banned in the first place to prevent their derogatory use. I believe their hearts were in the right place, they just went about it clumsily. As soon as the legacy update came out, the first thing I did was marry my two male jedi to eachother. Its utterly meaningless outside of getting access to account-wide perks, nobody can actually see this, but gently caress if I can't have my goony, passive-aggressive protest against "there are no gays in star wars"
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Jul 17, 2012 08:52
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Had an incredible session of Hunter on sunday. Our party is: Myself, a lucifuge who is possessed by a greed demon. My big abilities are huge hellfire blasts, taking demon form, and being able to make something focus its hate at me. A lucifuge in the malleus maleficarum, who specializes in vampire hunting and blessed weaponry. Has a raven familiar, and can heal others (but not himself) with a touch. A politician with mob ties who tries to turn a blind eye to the corruption in his own office while fighting the darkness in his off time. Just recently found out he has lucifuge powers. A skinchanger who hunts vampires because they killed his family, and completely misses the irony in attacking them for being twisted mockeries of life while he turns into a hybrid man-cougar. Also can manipulate fire. A 5th guy whose backstory I'm not actually clear on, but he's a lucifuge who is new in town who hunts werewolves. Also a lucifuge, mostly utility/debuff powers. --- As a prologue to this: we had just stopped a haunted bracelet from being stolen by a vampire, and then had a fake made to act as a decoy. We kept the real one to see what could be done with it. So we check up on things and find out that the woman who was supposed to be delivering it hadn't come back. We go to where she was supposed to deliver it, some giant boat at the marina. We sneak aboard and find a ton of boxes in the hold, and each of them is the same way: some mundane things, a bit of packing material, then some illegal things. Poached animal hides, automatic rifles, and the body of the woman, completely drained of blood. The skinchanger takes the hide of a cheetah and we try to find out more about the guy who owns this boat. We find a crewman and press him for info, and get that the owner is a vampire. We also find out that he's returning to the boat via the raven familiar, so we go to intercept. We find him just getting on board, with the gangplank getting pulled up. We try to get him to come down because none of us can fly or jump 20ft forward and 10ft up. We taunt him with the fact that we have the real bracelet. Instead of falling for it or ignoring us, he offers to make a trade; the bracelet for something he has that we want. Our vampire hunters level guns, our politician just wants him out of town because the less vampires the better, my character is torn between more power v. the downsides of that power, and our werewolf hunter is completely mystified by the party being split on this. We kind of discuss amongst ourselves what to do ("let's just hear him out" v. "he's a vampire, all vampires must die, ergo") while my character has a more frank and open discussion with the vampire about what exactly he would be teaching me. And then the two vampire haters open fire. He draws his gun, I pop demon form as soon as I hear gunfire and then use my taunt power because I'm the only one with both the armor and health to get shot at. Plus if only one person needs healing it saves the priest from having to run around a lot. I roll and get a whopping six successes. He shoots me, and the bullets do aggravated damage! Ow. gently caress. The others shoot at him, and the werewolf hunter goes to get another gangplank so we can board. Between the vampire's huge defenses and regeneration through blood, we end up doing bits of damage that keep getting healed and hellfire is only doing slight bits of agg to him. I fly over with my demon wings to get a bit more of an edge on hm and to use my claws, which I have a bit better dice pool for. I am still being shot at, and since it's agg the priest can't heal me of it; I'm down to spending 1 willpower every turn to heal one point through my demon form. At one point I am up to nine aggravated damage and realize this is a losing fight, so I take a deep breath and dive, using my wings to get some bonus speed. He jumps in after me, using celerity to swim faster. The others have no idea what to do and end up watching me and the vamp sink beneath the waves. The session ends there, me & the ST head off to discuss what happens to my character, and the others debate what to do with the haunted bracelet/how likely it is I survive. Out of sight of the others, the vampire basically says "you're too good to just kill and at this point it's a toss-up to who would get the killing blow. So I will offer you the Embrace for a cease fire." Being power-hungry and almost dead, and knowing that refusing likely means I die, I accept. The next session is going to pick up a couple of (in game) weeks after this, and I am going to have to hide my new nature like a mad beast and/or do some amazing sweet-talking. Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jul 17, 2012 |
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Jul 17, 2012 16:26
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FredMSloniker posted:So did you check the performance reviews to decide who'd be in that hundred? That's one way to give them a severance package... Pretty sure we'd have been culling from the guys who don't merit "performance reviews"... which may or may not be a substantial proportion of the crew.
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Jul 17, 2012 16:41
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Colon V posted:I need to play a "scare 'em straight" Paladin eventually. I like to play rear end in a top hat paladins that take their vows seriously, but who lose control sometimes. The Paladin code would be so difficult to maintain for a person and I like to play them as human beings who sometimes do things against their nature because it's such a high ideal to live up to. Usually I'll be a servant of the god of Justice so that I deliver harsh punishment to those who deserve it and I'm steadfast in my oaths to others. We were playing the Pathfinder Kingmaker Adventure Path and I played a Paladin who had a sentient sword that was a family heirloom passed down from previous Paladins. It pretty much hated me, as I took it before my training was complete when my father died. I had been traveling with it for some time, dealing out what I thought was "true" justice to the evil that I judged. When we first started and reached the little camp that was under constant attacks by bandits, I offered the rogues a chance to surrender and face a trial for their crimes. When they refused, we slaughtered all but one when he agreed to lead us to their base. Instead he led us to a den of trapdoor spiders and escaped, then led us on a merry chase through a swamp until we finally found him. I think I surprised everyone when I hung him from a tree as an oath breaker. We finally found the bandit's lair, but we convinced their leader to join us after we had killed the rest of her troops. She was afraid of the real bandit leader and wouldn't join us unless we could guarantee her protection, so I made an oath that I would keep her from harm. In the final fight with the big bad, I was tied up with his owlbear in a grapple when he shot her with a super sneak attack that just flat out killed her. My character got super pissed. He disentangled himself from the owlbear and chased after the bandit leader. Along the way there was a bandit that was trying to surrender to us, but I was just blind with anger and used a hero point to kill him. My sentient sword twanged in outrage, but I didn't care, I just kept chasing the dude. We all finally caught up with him and the fighter ended him with a few chops, but I came down from my rage and realized what I had done. I took the bandit I had sworn to protect and tied her to my horse, told everyone I was riding for the nearest big city to try to get her raised, and told them to loot what they could. We eventually did get her raised and she became a loyal follower that we trusted with patrolling the borderlands of our kingdom, so that was pretty cool. The DM said that I had come very close to falling when I killed the helpless bandit who had surrendered out of anger, but he was a pretty bad dude and that I probably would have executed him for his crimes later anyway. We didn't play many sessions after that, I think the exploration in that module really killed the DM's desire to keep running it. We were using the alternate rules for kingdom building where the more hexes you had under your control, the better your cities were, so we explored as much as we could. This turned into a lot of random encounters, but instead of fast fowarding through the trivial ones, we had to play them out. It was a fun game, I just wish it had continued because I really liked my character.
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Jul 17, 2012 17:07
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:You'd think so, but according to LucasArts there is no homosexuality in Star Wars. Meet Medrit Vasur, the gay Mandalorian blacksmith. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Medrit_Vasur
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Jul 17, 2012 18:53
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PhotoKirk posted:Meet Medrit Vasur, the gay Mandalorian blacksmith. "Medrit Vasur" sounds so incredibly like a Homestuck troll, I had to do a doubletake to see when the character was created. Except the last name only has five letters when a troll's would have six. WHY DO I KNOW THIS 
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Jul 18, 2012 08:11
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