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Trojan
Sep 16, 2004

Best Custom Title I ever.

Zemyla posted:

My dad has had that exact same experience, with the Kamchatka Seven holding off all comers, always being whittled down to seven, but no further. Is it something about Kamchatka that makes people badasses?

I had the Samurai Seven in Japan throughout most of a game too. I've also held out Fortress Siam against many a marauder

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Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Suleman posted:

PDQ #: Talking Heads
Coming up:
Cardinal BRIAN BLESSED
Chasing a naked assassin with an air gondola
Hunt for the knife man, who is made of knives
The invisible assassins and their seeing-eye animals

Unfortunately, Venustiano's player was unable to attend many of the later sessions, so it was just Balicci (and Parrot) and Chuck (and Head) against the world. We did okay.



Our next assignment was taking care of the safety of our employer's favored candidate for the post of the Doge of Venice, during his election campaign.


Chasing a naked assassin with an air gondola

We did actually uncover a plot to assassinate our Doge candidate. We found the assassin's general location by busting some heads, hijacked an air gondola and came in through the window. While we were kept busy by mad doctor Gennesi's mutant tiger, the assassin, "Filthy" Luca had escaped. However, he was having a bath and didn't have time to put on his clothes.
So, we got back on the gondola and set out on a chase through the city, trying to find a naked man. We found many, but they were trying to disguise themselves with clothes, the clever bastards. The tracks eventually ended by a cathedral, which was closed at the time. We should probably have stopped there and gotten a warrant or something. Pffft.
We smashed through a stained glass window with the air gondola and stormed in. The clergy were less than enthusiastic about helping a crazy bird man and a "sodomy demon", though. After some arguing with the priests, with a shout of "WHAT THE gently caress ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!" in came Cardinal Bertorelli, a rather big and bolsterous cardinal, whose name we immediately forgot. From that point on, he became Cardinal BRIAN BLESSED, and we imagined all his lines spoken (yelled) in the magnificent voice of BRIAN BLESSED.
Despite our offer to check for the assassin in his cathedral and under the robes of the nuns, the good cardinal drove us off.


The bells! The bells!

So, with the assasin still on the loose and with a rather big repair bill on our hands, we had to think of some other plan. To protect the candidate during a parade, we scouted ahead for any ambush or sniping spots. After some detective work, we found a room where a nun was assembling a helicopter-propelled gatling gun. Yipes.
After a brief fight, we tied her up and disassembled the contraption, lugging it to our air gondola, where we set it up. We check the next location, the bell tower of the cathedral we were at earlier. Sure enough, there is Luca in monk's robes, aiming a large rifle. We are at a stalemate! Sure, Balicci could get a lucky shot with the gatling gun, but from the safety of the tower, the killer could easily shoot Chuck and send us crashing down. This calls for a careful approach, maybe landing nearby and ascending the tower to engage the killer in close combat. Yeah, gently caress that.
Balicci aims the gun past the killer to inside the tower, where the bullets ricochet off the bells, causing incredible deafening noise that instantly incapacitates Luca. Stunned, he stumbles off the tower, but with some fancy piloting, we intercept and catch him. Grateful for the save, he volunteers some information as we hand him over to the officials: He was hired by cardinal BRIAN BLESSED! Dun dun dun!

Suleman fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Aug 13, 2012

Quantum Mechanic
Apr 25, 2010

Just another fuckwit who thrives on fake moral outrage.
:derp:Waaaah the Christians are out to get me:derp:

lol abbottsgonnawin
So my Mage players have had their first real encounter with the Abyss.

They tracked down a spate of killings to a local mortal cult, and through the Mastigos (Mind Mage) rooting through the minds of some of the cultists, discovered they'd been raising soul-stealing revenants through the use of an Abyssal tome given to them by an actual Mage, a Scelestus (Abyss-serving Mage).

They managed to find the apartment of the cult leader, and the human-skin-bound tome under lock and key in his room. The Mastigos put the cult leader under a domination spell, and not wanting to mess with the book any more than necessary, they decided to douse it with gasoline and set it on fire.

It burned, but as it burned it also screamed. The Obrimos (Forces Mage) PC quickly cast a spell to damp down the sound, but casting it too close to the book allowed its connection with the Abyss to mess with his spell and cause a Paradox.

In the case of this Paradox, instead of damping down the screaming, it caused it to reverberate throughout the whole city block. The screaming snapped the cult leader out of the mind spell, and seeing the book granted to him by his dark master burning, leaped forward and grabbed it.

The party were now faced with a burning man holding a screaming book, his eyes bubbling pitch down his face, shambling towards them with inky black nothingness rolling from his body. The other PC, another Mastigos but with powers more based around spirits, tried to awaken the spirit in her pistol and start firing.

Another Paradox.

This one sent the spell wheeling into the man, who stopped, shuddering and jerking, then howled and burst apart like an overripe fruit into a mass of oily tentacles and alien suckerfish mouths - an Abyssal manifestation.

The PCs did the right thing when faced with an Abyssal spirit - booked it. The Obrimos ran into the corridor outside the apartment, and asked if there was a firehose handy. As the creature tried to gain its bearing in reality, he unwheeled the firehose, turned it on, and combined his Forces and Matter magic to transmute the stream of water into liquid nitrogen.

He started blasting frozen chunks off this Lovecraftian entity with the firehose until it collapsed into a bubbling, oily pile and disapparated, then did the same with the book.

Section Z
Oct 1, 2008

Wait, this is the Moon.
How did I even get here?

Pillbug
Kill it with fire!... Oh god fire isn't working! What would Star Trek do!?... Reverse the polarity! :hellyeah:

Error 404
Jul 17, 2009


MAGE CURES PLOT

Quantum Mechanic posted:

So my Mage players have had their first real encounter with the Abyss.

They tracked down a spate of killings to a local mortal cult, and through the Mastigos (Mind Mage) rooting through the minds of some of the cultists, discovered they'd been raising soul-stealing revenants through the use of an Abyssal tome given to them by an actual Mage, a Scelestus (Abyss-serving Mage).

They managed to find the apartment of the cult leader, and the human-skin-bound tome under lock and key in his room. The Mastigos put the cult leader under a domination spell, and not wanting to mess with the book any more than necessary, they decided to douse it with gasoline and set it on fire.

It burned, but as it burned it also screamed. The Obrimos (Forces Mage) PC quickly cast a spell to damp down the sound, but casting it too close to the book allowed its connection with the Abyss to mess with his spell and cause a Paradox.

In the case of this Paradox, instead of damping down the screaming, it caused it to reverberate throughout the whole city block. The screaming snapped the cult leader out of the mind spell, and seeing the book granted to him by his dark master burning, leaped forward and grabbed it.

The party were now faced with a burning man holding a screaming book, his eyes bubbling pitch down his face, shambling towards them with inky black nothingness rolling from his body. The other PC, another Mastigos but with powers more based around spirits, tried to awaken the spirit in her pistol and start firing.

Another Paradox.

This one sent the spell wheeling into the man, who stopped, shuddering and jerking, then howled and burst apart like an overripe fruit into a mass of oily tentacles and alien suckerfish mouths - an Abyssal manifestation.

The PCs did the right thing when faced with an Abyssal spirit - booked it. The Obrimos ran into the corridor outside the apartment, and asked if there was a firehose handy. As the creature tried to gain its bearing in reality, he unwheeled the firehose, turned it on, and combined his Forces and Matter magic to transmute the stream of water into liquid nitrogen.

He started blasting frozen chunks off this Lovecraftian entity with the firehose until it collapsed into a bubbling, oily pile and disapparated, then did the same with the book.

Obrimos as gently caress. :black101:

They may be a bit churchy, but goddamn, do I love playing Obrimos mages.

Tailfnz
Oct 13, 2011

I'm delightfully forgettable.
I think I'm godawful at telling stories, but I've got one that may be entertaining enough.

During a long-running D&D 4E campaign I partook in, our party found themselves in a ruined tower, the lair of a Green Dragon that had been terrorizing townsfolk throughout the nation. After working our way up and killing a few pseudodragons along the way, we encounter the dragon's chamber at the top, an enormous room filled with treasures and statues.

The dragon doesn't notice us at first, but we needed a way to take him by surprise, in order to not be his instant lunch. At this point, our Warforged Paladin has a most brilliant idea: to hold perfectly still, and carry him close to the dragon under the guise that he is a statue that the rest of us are delivering in order to pay tribute.

The DM, thinking this is probably the most clever we'll ever be, goes with it, but at a high DC for the mother of all Bluff checks. Of course, blind luck would have it that all five of us succeed, four of us with Natural 20s. The Dragon totally buys this and allows us to place the statue right behind him, despite his general attitude being "kill everything that isn't me or my minions".

The Warforged holds still while the rest of the party hides behind some mountain of gold pieces after pretending to leave, and waits for the dragon to turn around. At this point, he yells out "SURPRISE, FUCKER!" and lands a massive blow to the dragon, scoring a critical hit, and taking down nearly a third of his HP in one go.

Needless to say, that dragon's skull ended up as a helmet for our Warlord.

E: I've got one or two more if anyone wants to hear them.

Tailfnz fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Aug 14, 2012

Huszsersvn
Nov 11, 2009

Nice world you've got here. Shame if anything were to happen to it.

Here is a choice quote I can offer from a game of 4th Edition D&D I recently oversaw.

(Dream sequence, near the beginning of the game. A level 1 Paladin sleeps after a hard day of beating things into submission.)

This dream has gotten foggy. Now what?
>Should I walk through the fog?

Don't ask me. Do it.
>I stride through the fog, curious as to what lies ahead.

Striding through the fog, you get this vague sense of flying, yet you're not leaving the ground.

Two great, glowing slits open up above you - the eyeslits of Torm's helmet.

Torm lowers his fist to you. Torm's fist is the symbol of his power and guardianship.

Fistbump Torm?
> Fistbump!

You bump fists with Torm. Torm is pleased with you. You gain one extra healing surge for use each day.

You have leveled up.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Huszsersvn posted:

You bump fists with Torm. Torm is pleased with you. You gain one extra healing surge for use each day.

You have leveled up.
It's the little things like this that make a game really fun.

synthetik
Feb 28, 2007

I forgive you, Will. Will you forgive me?
This Fiasco liveplay/tutorial showed up on MeFi today.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/08/tabletops-qfiascoq-captures-the-heart-of-roleplaying

Quantum Mechanic
Apr 25, 2010

Just another fuckwit who thrives on fake moral outrage.
:derp:Waaaah the Christians are out to get me:derp:

lol abbottsgonnawin

Error 404 posted:

Obrimos as gently caress. :black101:

They may be a bit churchy, but goddamn, do I love playing Obrimos mages.

The best part is the Obrimos isn't even built for combat. He's a weedy PhD student quantum physicist who put most of his points into mental stats, and yet has squared off head-first against a werewolf, a living nightmare, a frenzying vampire and now a cosmic horror from beyond space and time.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!
Running D&D 3.5 (Eberron) with heavy houseruling. The players have stumbled upon a small town in the middle of the Mournland, which is odd because it's a huge wasteland full of gently caress You. They quickly figure out that the town is full of crazy Xoriat worshiping cultists, and that they're probably going to end up as sacrifices if they let it happen. These guys are however really out of practice and end up giving away most of their plan. What they don't get is that their leader actually plans to kill either the PCs or the rest of the town, and isn't picky which group dies so long as there's enough death going on in the main chamber to finish the ritual.

So they barge in, and the leader starts channeling a spell. No one can ID it because they can't roll above a 3. The party monk/fighter warforged charges up, then uses a flurry for nonlethal damage. He does a huge amount of damage and knocks her out. Then the party psion drops an energy wall in a dome over the monk & leader, facing outward. He barbeques all of the cultists in one go.

I love my players. They prevent a horrible ritual from being completed, then complete the horrible ritual themselves in the same round. :D

Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Aug 15, 2012

Tailfnz
Oct 13, 2011

I'm delightfully forgettable.
My other fun story from that same 4E campaign I talked about earlier.

So the party is in an abandoned fishing town on the coast of the continent. The thing is that the town hadn't been empty even a day earlier. Something had happened to the townsfolk, and they had disappeared. After some investigation, we came to the conclusion that a raiding party of Sahuagin (however the gently caress you spell that) had ninja'd the poo poo out of the town, and had abducted and killed all of the inhabitants.

We made this assessment after finding and killing a Sahuagin scout, but not before he signaled others. We needed a plan, fast, or we'd be meat within minutes. Our Druid had a moment of clarity and devised a brilliant scheme.

He would stand between two of the wooden shacks that bordered the town on the main road, disguised via Wild Shape as a "female Sahuagin" (in the sense of the most over-the-top, giant-breasted, pin-up styled, cartoony way possible) to lure them in while the rest of us waited in those two buildings to ambush the Sahuagin from both sides. It was an incredibly stupid plan on all accounts.

And it totally loving worked.

The Sahuagin rolled abysmally low when trying to identify him, and totally bought his Bugs Bunny-style disguise. Only when they were right next to him did they realize something was wrong, but by then it was far too late. The Warforged and Warlord crashed through the walls on both sides, with yet another battle cry of "SURPRISE, FUCKERS!" (a staple of our "plans"), and we took them down in a few rounds despite a few of us taking tridents to the face.

"Operation: DISTRACTION FISHTITS" was an enormous success.

E: Grammar

Tailfnz fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Aug 15, 2012

Quantum Mechanic
Apr 25, 2010

Just another fuckwit who thrives on fake moral outrage.
:derp:Waaaah the Christians are out to get me:derp:

lol abbottsgonnawin

Suleman posted:

Star Wars Saga: Dissing beats lightsabers.
Aberrant: That time I played psychic Colonel Sanders.
DnD 4e: Roy Orbison got pimp-slapped by Satan and other stories.
DnD 4e, part deux: Bardy McFly vs hobo zombie Magneto and other stories.

I was the GM for all four of these.

Xhee Nangan was a fantastic character in a cast of equally fantastic characters in the Saga game. The other highlights were a psychotic Gungan berserker and a wealthy heir spacer and his protocol droid (the two players made a really great shared backstory). I think the crowning moment for the group, besides destroying a Sith Lord partially through insult-based combat, was air-dropping onto a clone army and fighting the commander and his personal guard while the pilot ground-strafed the others from their freighter.

Really I can't take credit for how great the games were because the character interactions were what made them.

Actually talking about the second DnD game reminds me of possibly the greatest character I've ever seen in a DnD game, Big Bear.

Big Bear was my friend's experiment in making a viable Beast Mastery Ranger in 4e. He was a Halfling, who dual-wielded Spiked Gauntlets and fought alongside his fast companion, Little Bear, an actual bear.

This DnD campaign was set several hundred years after my first, where the party were now legendary figures of the past, even to the point of having cities named after them. This player's original character was Guy, a Human-come-Genasi (long story) Warlord. He decided that, in the period after the game, he travelled the land searching for new cultures and challenges. He came across the fledgling Halfling settlements in some of the southeastern forests and spent some time with them.

In particular, he taught the Halflings about strength. They were fearful and timid, and easy fodder for the various beasts in the forests as well as the Tiefling lands to the south and even some of the closer Human settlements. He decided to go with a metaphor - "strength is like the bear. Be like the bear."

The Halflings heard his words, and completely misinterpreted them. Instead of being like the bear, they decided to be the bear. They built a whole culture around emulating the bear in every possible way, to the point where bears had a sacred, almost mythic quality. Big Bear was the apex of that culture, every way the paragon of being the Bear. He fought like the bear, wrestled like the bear, ate like the bear and lived life like the bear.

Big Bear was also not very smart. In fact, Little Bear had a higher Intelligence score (Little Bear was actually quite possibly the smartest member of the party). This led to Big Bear assigning traits to bears that did not actually exist, and emulating them. He could climb walls, because bears could climb. He could leap great distances because bears could leap. He eventually learned to breathe fire (Monk multiclass) because bears can breathe fire.

His crowning moment was when a cult opened an interdimensional portal above the main human city of Zenith. A vast, ancient entity began to crawl out, spreading darkness across the sky. Big Bear signalled to Gate, the group's Warden, to give him some air.

Big Bear sailed up into the sky, fists balled, and punched the Lovecraft tentacle beast square in its oily eye.

Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Quantum Mechanic posted:

I was the GM for all four of these.

Xhee Nangan was a fantastic character in a cast of equally fantastic characters in the Saga game. The other highlights were a psychotic Gungan berserker and a wealthy heir spacer and his protocol droid (the two players made a really great shared backstory). I think the crowning moment for the group, besides destroying a Sith Lord partially through insult-based combat, was air-dropping onto a clone army and fighting the commander and his personal guard while the pilot ground-strafed the others from their freighter.

Really I can't take credit for how great the games were because the character interactions were what made them.

Actually talking about the second DnD game reminds me of possibly the greatest character I've ever seen in a DnD game, Big Bear.

Big Bear was my friend's experiment in making a viable Beast Mastery Ranger in 4e. He was a Halfling, who dual-wielded Spiked Gauntlets and fought alongside his fast companion, Little Bear, an actual bear.

This DnD campaign was set several hundred years after my first, where the party were now legendary figures of the past, even to the point of having cities named after them. This player's original character was Guy, a Human-come-Genasi (long story) Warlord. He decided that, in the period after the game, he travelled the land searching for new cultures and challenges. He came across the fledgling Halfling settlements in some of the southeastern forests and spent some time with them.

In particular, he taught the Halflings about strength. They were fearful and timid, and easy fodder for the various beasts in the forests as well as the Tiefling lands to the south and even some of the closer Human settlements. He decided to go with a metaphor - "strength is like the bear. Be like the bear."

The Halflings heard his words, and completely misinterpreted them. Instead of being like the bear, they decided to be the bear. They built a whole culture around emulating the bear in every possible way, to the point where bears had a sacred, almost mythic quality. Big Bear was the apex of that culture, every way the paragon of being the Bear. He fought like the bear, wrestled like the bear, ate like the bear and lived life like the bear.

Big Bear was also not very smart. In fact, Little Bear had a higher Intelligence score (Little Bear was actually quite possibly the smartest member of the party). This led to Big Bear assigning traits to bears that did not actually exist, and emulating them. He could climb walls, because bears could climb. He could leap great distances because bears could leap. He eventually learned to breathe fire (Monk multiclass) because bears can breathe fire.

His crowning moment was when a cult opened an interdimensional portal above the main human city of Zenith. A vast, ancient entity began to crawl out, spreading darkness across the sky. Big Bear signalled to Gate, the group's Warden, to give him some air.

Big Bear sailed up into the sky, fists balled, and punched the Lovecraft tentacle beast square in its oily eye.

Big Bear also had rocket boots. Thanks to the rules being pretty slack in the last session, I think he was flying all over the place, breathing fire and punching people.
Little Bear managed to outroll the entire party on several occasions. He also had his own badge.

There were other interesting characters in the game. The game was set in a magitech city named Zenith. This was our second game in the setting, but we'll get to the first game later. Damnit, I was hoping to go through these in chronological order, but now I have to elaborate on this one.

I played Gate. Gate was... well, he was basically a hobo who claimed to be the Protector Of The City. He could back this claim up with his electromagnetic powers. He was a total nutcase, a magophobic loose cannon in a city ruled by mages, but his dedication to protecting the city was unwavering. He loved the city and its technology without actually understanding it very well.
Mechanically he was a Storm Warden, with his powers being reskinned as using electromagnetics in various ways, like pulling an opponent close, or ripping the surroundings apart and pulling the bits and pieces of the city to form a sort of mech-armor around him.
As it later turned out, he was also undead, a Revenant brought to life in order to, according to him, save the city. So he was Hobo Zombie Magneto.

Shepard was a paladin, a paladin of SCIENCE. So scientific, in fact, that he had his Religion skill replaced with Arcana. His powers were actually based on advanced technology, which IIRC was integrated to his plate armor. He was a huge believer in technology, to the point of blind devotion.

Lucas was a bard. He was from the future, which technically makes him Bardy McFly. Lucas's disdain for this primitive period and his general snarkiness brought him to odds with some of the other characters, especially Shepard and Gate. Lucas had slept through his history lessons, but he did know that something terrible was going to happen. That was bad. However, to him, what was even worse was when we actually broke causality and did something that hadn't happened in his world. This could potentially mean that we had erased his world, his timeline, from existence. The previously carefree bard was severely depressed for several sessions, before he found his resolve again. Drama!

Later, we were also joined by Number 48. He was a modron. A cheery modron warlord with a very large vocabulary, a tendency to break the fourth wall ever so slightly, as well as an endless collection of hats and a sword larger than he was.

When I have the time, I'll try and share some of their adventures and stories. Our good GM is of course free to assist me, because I don't remember everything.

LongDarkNight
Oct 25, 2010

It's like watching the collapse of Western civilization in fast forward.
Oven Wrangler

Radish posted:

I'm running the Kingmaker campaign...fairy story

That was better handled than in our game. We burned down the fairy village as retribution for their pranks and have been in a campaign long guerilla war with them. Little bastards are tougher than the Viet Cong.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Undead Tailfnz posted:

"Operation: DISTRACTION FISHTITS" was an enormous success.
I can't read this and not think of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWSIlmeHlzw

HiKaizer
Feb 2, 2012

Yes!
I finally understand everything there is to know about axes!
Since it came up in IRC I got told to post it here. This is the tale of my second ever roleplaying game, and it will amaze you to learn once I have finished reading it that I do not hate 3E DnD.


I was in second year university at the time. It'd taken me one year to stop being kind of nervous of the other nerds on campus and to fully integrate, and I'd joined the roleplaying club. It was pretty useful at the time because I didn't have a group to play with. So I joined a game which sounded kind of cool, it was using DnD which was nice because I'd played computer games and knew how it worked at a basic level and the premise sounded okay: The church of the Good God of Healing wanted us to go purge and cleanse a temple of evil. Standard heroic stuff! The GM was using his own homebrew setting which is probably best described as Fantasy Warhammer with Rokugan tacked onto an island chain in the corner. I'm not even kidding, the GM was using all the clan names and all of their stereotypes and so on that went with them. And he wanted to publish it! He also had tribal orcs living somewhere and there was a desert with I can't believe it's not Egypt and we worship a Sun God. Oh and cockney Goblins. Those last three were the most inventive and thus most interesting things of the setting.

I had three friends in the game as well as the GM's girlfriend and a random extra guy. One friend was going to be a Mystic Theurge at the GM's recommendation and had to sit through the whole game being only occasionally relevant in combat. He never got to level 7 either which was a dick move by the GM. Furthermore almost everything we did was made irrelevant and then pushed into our faces. We fought fights that were basically designed to almost, or outright kill us every fight. We gave some stones to some alchemists to try and figure out what was going on with them. The alchemists became gay evil cultists because of this for...some...reason, corrupting stones and all. The temple we had to clean out was impossible for us to actually clean out as the bottom floors were submerged in acid and we couldn't survive or breathe in them at level 6.

There was also a trap which basically looked like a fireball trap and even left some charred gear of the victim behind, but what actually happened was the GM's girlfriend's character got stabilized at 1HP, teleported to a demonic torture chamber, turned against us and then tried to make my character feel bad for 'abandoning' him despite my character having no rational reason for thinking he could still be alive. Oh and in addition to gaining fire, lightning and acid resistance (the first two for party spells, the last because acid temple) he was a rogue and got given Orc-bane bolts specifically to kill my character because we'd been friends and I'd 'betrayed' him. The GM's girlfriend was in on this the whole time as well.

My friend who was supposedly going to be an awesome Mystic Theurge? Well the GM had a greater reward in mind for him. He was admittedly a bit of a rules lawyer and had annoyed the GM once or twice for various things. The fight with our ex-PC took place on the floor above the levels submerged in acid and we had to make con checks every round or suffer penalties. When we went down to investigate the next level there was lots of clearish but murky liquid. We assumed horrible tainted water, the GM decided it was acid. He made my friend roll to not slip on the stairs and then when he failed, told him he'd fallen into acid and died without a save.

It got better though, when we went to leave the horrible hellish place we'd gone into the GM told us we couldn't leave because the temple had shifted into a demonic plane. We had to hole up in a room and have the cleric pray to her god for intercession to save us. We got to stay in a locked and sanctified room for the next two months in game time for us to get rescued. In this period we had to roll a bunch of sanity checks not to go crazy and flee the room. Only the cleric and my Druid made it, the characters who had will saves. The others died, got raised as zombies to further taunt us from outside our room.

Oh did I mention this game was set in the same world as his long term game? Yeah, we were a side story and got to be rescued by the lvl 18 party. One of them was a half-angel at this point, just further reinforcing just how little chance we'd ever had at succeeding.


The GM isn't a bad person, but it was a bad game and I basically avoided all IRL games with him after. His idea of tuning did not match my own and he liked playing all his games as grim survival horror which I simply didn't care for. The game would honestly have been much worse had I not been playing with two other friends, so there was some good in it I guess as I made a third. But it did a lot to make me realise how flawed 3E was and frame a few perceptions about generally being nice as a GM and not trying to kill my players.

Ironically in hind sight, I really started to like 2E DnD after that game...

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!
That sounds like less "survival horror" and more "Let me masturbate to your powerlessness" which for some reason D&D seems to attract more of than other games. That wasn't really 3e's fault (although 3e does have a list of flaws a mile long), that game would have been just as lovely in 2e or 4e or WoD or Shadowrun.

Section Z
Oct 1, 2008

Wait, this is the Moon.
How did I even get here?

Pillbug
No intentions of an Edition Wars. I can not give any legitimate comment about 3rd/3.5/pathfinder because I have never played them. I have only owned 2nd edition ADnD books which I barely understood, and Played 4th edition.

However, out in the internet or real world, every time I talk with people who say that they like 3rd edition better after I comment on how I've like the infrequent with pals 4th ed play I've done (I like my powers selections thank you very much. Whooo fun with fighter!). There are either unabashed Caster Superemacy nuts... or people who show me things like this.

http://www.coyotecode.net/profiler/view.php?id=14129

To which they gave a "I rolled for those stats!" when I commented "And here my highest stats tend to be 18. You're not helping my biased opinion that everyone who hates 4th edition misses their Godlike beings"

I know my opinion is an biased one, I know that 3rd/3.5 etc can work just fine and that 4th ed can have some legitimate problems (Such as a higher reliance on a Map compared to 3rd, or so everyone I play with keeps telling me). But this sort of thing is basically the only kind of wild opinion I run into firsthand.

Complain about 'cheerleader healing' (they actually complained about Warlord heals right before they showed me that sheet), then praise something even more ridiculous.

EDIT: I never even noticed it had a typed out background. My original once over stopped at "They say 4th Ed Powers are stupid and then wave 25 Strength level 2 Half-Gold Dragon Elf Monk in my face". I'm afraid to read it at this point.

Section Z fucked around with this message at 07:22 on Aug 17, 2012

HiKaizer
Feb 2, 2012

Yes!
I finally understand everything there is to know about axes!

Yawgmoth posted:

That sounds like less "survival horror" and more "Let me masturbate to your powerlessness" which for some reason D&D seems to attract more of than other games. That wasn't really 3e's fault (although 3e does have a list of flaws a mile long), that game would have been just as lovely in 2e or 4e or WoD or Shadowrun.

Oh yes I agree so. In hind sight I just thought it was disengenuous to run use a system designed for high-fantasy to run a lethal survival game. Sometimes I think that GM really just wants to run 40k or Warhammer Fantasy and hasn't realised yet.

berenzen
Jan 23, 2012

Section Z posted:

EDIT: I never even noticed it had a typed out background. My original once over stopped at "They say 4th Ed Powers are stupid and then wave 25 Strength level 2 Half-Gold Dragon Elf Monk in my face". I'm afraid to read it at this point.

It's pretty bad, but it's honestly far from the worst I've seen.

Grand Prize Winner
Feb 19, 2007


Do you have access to the worst you've seen? Post 'em.


Let's see more poo poo going wrong!

Clanpot Shake
Aug 10, 2006
shake shake!

So I just finished my third ever DMing session and first session without an adventure module, running my own original (not original) ideas. The game is Dark Heresy, the players an Imperial psyker, techpriest, and Imperial cleric. The mission: find and stop a terrorist thought to be active in a hive city on the planet Bront given only a name known to be an alias. Pretty open-ended investigation.

So, after getting a feel for the city and meeting a bruiser from the lower hive named Bruce, they make contact with the crime boss who controls most of the lower hive, Danica Void-fist, who may have information about their man. She'll provide information in exchange for a job: collect on the 3,000 throne debt of a wayward degenerate. Easy enough.

They find this guy in an apartment in a nice part of town. Using their Inquisitorial authority, they make it known to the local and federal Imperial police forces that they're not to respond to any calls coming from or around that address that day. Ok, I think, they're going to give him a good roughing up, which was good, as I had prepared for a fight.

They get there, lure him to the door on the pretense of the cleric spreading the Emperor's good word and totally kick his poo poo in when he goes to close the door and storm the apartment. He looks like poo poo, his apartment looks like poo poo, and everyone in the room has drawn weapons - a bit of a standoff. The fallen noble points a gun at a techpriest and says that within 30 seconds of firing a shot the arbites across the street will storm the place to keep the peace.

The techpriest says, "Oh yeah? Try it, see if they come." At this point, I kind of stutter. I explain to the player this man is pointing a gun at him and he just said to shoot him and see what happens, in a tiny apartment with a hit almost guaranteed. He shrugs, so the noble shoots him, hitting for some damage. They proceed to intimidate the poo poo out of him, with the psyker using his terrifying aura power to get a substantial bonus to intimidate. Terrified, he submits and they ransack his place and person and find that he of course has nowhere near enough money to pay off his debts.

Now, at this point I'm thinking they'll go the usual route of roughing him up and taking a finger or dragging him back to the crime boss, but no, not these players. They concoct a ridiculous plot where they take this sweaty, pale, terrified drug addict who happens to have very wealthy parents to a small, poor cathedral the cleric had checked out earlier. I hadn't really prepared for this locale, so they didn't gain much in the way of their overall mission from the head priest there when they'd checked it out the day before, just local flavor.

Anyway, they drag this guy down there (which is near the bad part of town so he's sweating bullets for fear of someone seeing him) and talk to the old doddering priest and work out the following arrangement. This addict, who they named Elias, would enter the Emperor's service as a novice in this poor excuse for a cathedral. In exchange, the acolytes would speak to the guy's parents and convince them to make a very generous donation to the cathedral, with them taking a cut (to pay off the guy's debt).

So, the psyker stays at the cathedral with the drug addict (who is terrified of him) while the techpriest and cleric go back to the safehouse to make a phone call. They ring up the kid's parents house and speak with a stuffy servant, explain the situation, and find that the guy has been cut out of the family and disowned. They explain he's turned a new leaf, joined the church, etc. and the church really needs money to make improvements. The patriarch won't even take the call.

So, like any good servants of the Inquisition, the techpriest heads down to the local Arbite office and speak with the chief (who they had previously made aware of their presence/identity) and have him send word (armed officers) to the family manor to notify the family of a possible investigation into their affairs on the grounds of insufficient piety. A ploy, but too terrifying not to be believed.

Shortly after, the patriarch calls them back and arranges to meet with his son at the cathedral (under heavy guard of course, as he never leaves the upper hive without substantial protection).

So, they've got a drug addict in early-mid stages of withdrawal and his dad, who they need to write a check, will be their in an hour. They throw some clerical robes on him (2 sizes too large), impress upon him the absolute necessity of convincing his father that he is a devout servant of the Emperor (rather than that he'd cleaned up, which didn't work last time he asked his dad for money), and load him up with a dose of stimm to stave off withdrawal.

Dad pulls up in his motorcade with heavily armed goons and walks in. The pepped-up son, played by the psyker for this scene (just so it wasn't me having a 2-sided conversation with myself) perfectly roleplays a hyper, bug-eyed zealot and explains what they plan to do with all the money. The dad is skeptical until talk of his name being emblazoned in gold on basically every improvement they talk about, after which he's totally into it. He cuts a check for 4,000 thrones to the church and gives it to the old man head priest.

They walk with the old man to the bank where he gives them 3,000 thrones as arranged (to continue the Emperor's work) and they convince him to invest the other thousand in Iocanthian ghostfire pollen futures. They deposit the money in a savings account (rather than carrying hard cash in a bad part of town) and head down to meet the crime boss.

The crime boss is very surprised they were able to come up with the money. They give her the account information, and she gives them a lead on the terrorist and a small cut of the money.

I had prepared for absolutely none of this. These players...

Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying
Everything else aside, a Toriko-themed game where the party powers up by killing and eating delicious monsters is a great idea.

Your XP would be based just as much on how well you cook the monsters as on how difficult they were to slay.

Delve into ruins to recover the great lost recipes of the ancients!

Quest to find the enchanted kitchen knife of the gods!

Sindai fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Aug 17, 2012

Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Suleman posted:

PDQ #: Talking Heads

Coming up:
Cardinal BRIAN BLESSED
Chasing a naked assassin with an air gondola
Hunt for the knife man, who is made of knives
The invisible assassins and their seeing-eye animals

After the incident at the parade, Balicci (and Parrot) and Chuck (and Head) were hired for another job. The city had acquired ownership of an abandoned amusement park, which was originally closed because of mysterious, gruesome murders of some circus performers. It became our job to investigate the place and see what's up.

So we set out in our new steam-carriage, the Machina Mysterioso, which still smelled of drugs and pet food. Chuck believed the cases might be related to some old murders he investigated alongside inspecter Jasone Krueger, and that the culprit might be one Frederick Vorhees. That session was actually spent almost entirely on various references, as our investigations had us digging through old newspaper articles written by people like Lois Lanne, Clark Kentson and Supe R. Mann. There was Petros Parquer as well, and his drawing of the crime scene, along with the strong-man in the grasshopper costume, whose name turned out to be Ben Grimsson. Stupid, but lots of fun.
As we investigated, though, we found out the murderer had been described as being made entirely of sharp blades, and thus called the Knife Man. At the amusement park, we ran into the monster, and chased it through a haunted house, where we were beset by moving wax figures of historical villains. We also beat the Knife Man, except it was only an automaton replica, just like the wax figures.
In true Scooby-Doo fashion, the culprit turned out to be the caretaker, the brother of one of the murder victims. However... the real Knife Man was actually a powered suit, which had apparently gone out of his control, and was now hunting him! It attacked!
After giving us some painful wounds, the Knife Man grappled Chuck. With the two enormously strong monsters locked in place, Balicci used the opportunity to run up Chuck's back, sit on his shoulders and blast the Knife Man in the face until there was no more face to blast. The threat of the Knife Man was over.

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Clanpot Shake posted:

I had prepared for absolutely none of this. These players...
You have a good group. Don't lose them.

straylightunity
Dec 20, 2005

Scapegrace.

Colon V posted:

You have a good group. Don't lose them.

Share any more good stories they produce, too. That sounds like a great session.

Recycling Centerpiece
Apr 28, 2005

Turn around
Grimey Drawer
Here's a story I was recently reminded of: a D&D 3.5 campaign one of my friends wanted to run, based on the MMO Guild Wars. Not a terrible idea; the world is fleshed-out as hell, and he was fairly new at DMing so we gave him a pass on it. Not much different from using Forgotten Realms or Eberron or whatever. Overall, it wasn't so bad for the first dozen or so sessions, but he just couldn't resist two traps of newbie DMs: "it's not my fault you're too weak", and overpowered Mary-Sue foe who only keeps us alive for his amusement.

We were given orders to help defend a base from an army of Charr (reskinned Orcs), with less-than-subtle hints that our best bet was to sneak away from the walltop and come in from behind to pin them against the walls while the generic soldiers picked them off with arrows and ballistas and whatnot. We agreed that's a good idea, but the army (somehow) showed up before we were aware of it so they got first turn. He had all the enemy mages go on the same count, which happened to be first, for simplicity's sake. 8 wizards all fire Enlarged Fireballs at where we were standing (for a total of 56d6 damage, average 196) from 1200 feet away, killing all of us instantly before we were even aware of them. We obviously complained a bit, so he decided we could start it again, but letting us go first this time, while saying it's not his fault we didn't make our saves. Even if we had, only the Paladin would have survived taking even half damage from that.

A few sessions later, he decided to stray from the game storyline and start making up new stuff. Joy. A large group of bad guys are guarding an altar we need to reach, so the Druid shapes into a bird, scouts the area, and reports back. We spend about 10 minutes real-time formulating a strategy against such superior numbers and finally come up with a plan. We burst from hiding, throw out some battlefield control spells while the physical types shoot down anyone who managed to escape. End of round 1, we're feeling good about ourselves and drooling over the experience and loot we'll get for beating such a difficult fight. Suddenly a guy waltzes in from the other side of the battlefield, throws down a couple 9th level spells, killing all the enemies in one turn, destroying their bodies and the altar we needed to reach to reclaim something they were going to sacrifice. Then he turns and teleports away. DM rules that there's no loot because the corpses were destroyed and we get no experience because we didn't really do anything and also we failed our mission to reclaim the McGuffin.

Eventually, a new player comes in who's familiar with the setting, so he and the DM sit down in private and discuss the character's backstory, motivation, and ties with the local seemingly-good group of templar-type guys who've conquered a third of the continent in the name of peace and unity. There would be tons of good characterization, as he learns his order is actually worshipping evil guys and his reactions to that. He makes a Sorcerer who focuses on buffing the hell out of himself, turning into a Hydra, then going apeshit with 8 attacks per round. Shortly after he's introduced, a large group of undead attacks the camp, headed by the supercaster Mary Sue. Guy goes through his buffup routine (having no idea who this guy is or what he can do), and runs over to the caster, thinking that the undead will disperse if the leader is killed. Caster throws a Prismatic Wall on top of him as he charges, forcing Sorc to make 7 borderline-impossible simultaneous saves, or have lots of bad stuff happen. As he was rolling them, the DM kept saying "I really hope this doesn't kill you. It would really be a shame, since you're tied in with the story so much." After failing each and every save, he ended up as a dead insane hydra statue in another random dimension. DM actually called him out on not metagaming enough.

He's gotten much better as a DM once he learned he's better at a more free-form world, where he spends more time adjudicating the players' actions than forcing plot on them. Sometimes that works, but not really with him. That game ended when one of the players had to leave (who incidentally was the DM of another story I posted in the old Bad Experiences thread).

Guildencrantz
May 1, 2012

IM ONE OF THE GOOD ONES
My group is slowly reaching the wrap-up of an utterly epic campaign, played in our GM's own setting. It's basically a vaguely steampunk-ish fantasy setting, on the verge of the industrial revolution, where a world war broke out midway through the campaign. The group is a bunch of spies, initially pawns in the games of the great powers, but we eventually managed to accumulate enough influence to start playing our own game. It's an awesome whirlwind of intrigue.

The characters are:
"M", a spy, wizard, aristocrat and overall femme fatale from the Elven Kingdom.
Malcolm, a dwarven warrior, runesmith, heir to a family fortune banished for political reasons, hard as nails and in it for the wealth and glory.
Comrade "Knuckles" (not a Sonic reference, we don't even play in English so it's a translation) - played by me, a freedom fighter/terrorist from the occupied Halfling Cities. An idealistic-yet-ruthless political radical from a working class background, party rogue, works to gain freedom for his homeland and topple the world's regimes.
Flavius Victor, a human spy from the Republic (Rome but with humans and gnomes), who transitioned into nurturing a pet griffon for some reason. Suffers from a magical form of bipolar disorder, where he randomly transitions at inopportune moments from smooth-talking spy into stunt-performing, kick-em-inna-balls action hero antics.

In the setting you have a bunch of the standard fantasy races, plus the Centaurs. The Centaurs are the world's sole evil race, basically the Mongols crossed with Hitler - they occupy the continent's central plain and, since they're basically unsuited to everyday tasks due to their hosed up physiology, they rely on masses of slaves. They follow a crude, hideous ideology wherein two-legged beings are animals to be rounded up and treated as chattel. Midway through the campaign it was revealed that, while the other races evolved, the centaurs are basically demons, summoned into the world a few thousand years ago in an arcane ritual that got out of control and toppled an ancient civilization. The plot is pretty involved, and absolutely great - our GM has completely outdone himself.

A couple of my personal favorites:

1) This is less a spontaneous story and more of a brilliant way to frame a campaign event.

If there's one thing to be said about our group, it's that we're a bunch of schemers. We don't really gently caress each other over, but we do pursue our own agendas secretly. Now, in the early stages of the campaign, we robbed a dwarven bank for the halflings' underground independence movement. Since I was both the party rogue and not allowed inside for being a filthy poor shorty, we accomplished this by smuggling my guy in under M's skirt - racial size disparities do come in handy! She got into a meeting with the owner, I jumped out and shanked him, then broke into the vault and we made off with the loot. Unfortunately, it quickly turned out we had been set up, as several cells of the independence movement were "coincidentally" caught the next day after stings at drop-off points. We skipped town and buried the treasure to use later. Meanwhile, Malcolm's player kept passing notes to the GM and his character disappearing.

Later on, we managed to complete a mission for the Republic where we freed a particularly important slave from the centaurs. As it turned out, the guy was heir to a former state in centaur territory, and he was used to set up a slave revolt and establish a new, small and fairly chaotic country, consisting almost entirely of branded runaway slaves. After several twists and turns, including being arrested for treason and clearing our names, Malcolm's player kept handing over notes as soon as we got back to civilization.

A couple of sessions later, we - the players - arrive at the house where the game was to take place, grab our beers and snacks and sit down to play. The GM recaps the events, then gets up from his seat and moves over to the couch. Malcolm's player - who had NEVER GM'd before, but mentioned wanting to run a one-shot - takes his place and hands out a bunch of character sheets. All dwarves.

"You're veterans of the Dwarven Imperial Army", he says. "Old, grizzled guys, a former special forces team, now largely relegated to desk jobs and reminiscing about the glory days. However, lately one of you" - he points at one of the players - "got a message from your grandson. Apparently he's in trouble and hid a cache of treasure underground in the Halfling Cities. He's asking you to retrieve it and deliver it to a certain upstart duke who declared independence from the centaur Steppe..."

And so a player stole all our loot while developing his own subplot and GM'ing a side session, and we all actually had a blast with it. Gramps developed into an important NPC, too.

2) Now, the Duke is a pretty cool dude and quite smart, but unfortunately nobody around him has any idea how to run the place, his "army" is a bunch of people with pointy sticks and some unruly mercenaries who spend as much time pillaging the countryside as they do fighting the enemy, and the centaurs are closing in. Malcolm's stolen cash isn't quite enough. We came over there to help him, since it's nice to have someone owe his country to us and it'd suck to lose that. We're given a quest to blow up a dam, which would flood the river that makes up the front line and prevent the invasion from happening for a while.

So my character and M are sneaking up from one side to plant the charges while the other two form a lookout party. We're trying to get through some bushes past the centaur guards, but unfortunately she fucks up her stealth check.

GM: You trip over a dry branch and it goes "CRACK" loudly.
Us: oh gently caress
GM: You hear a voice going "what was that?!" and the sound of hooves.
We try to hide, stealth checks go wrong.
GM: The hooves are very close now. The centaur yells "get out of there!". You've been discovered.
Me: Well, gently caress, I... Hm. I pull down my pants.
GM: What?!
Me: I pull down my pants and stumble out of the bushes, fall to my knees, put my hands over my head and go "don't hit me, master, so sorry, don't hit me!"
M: (catching the drift) I rumple up my clothes and stand up with a terrified expression.
GM: Oh... Oh Jesus. Nice. Roll Deceit.
I succeed critically.
GM: The centaur gives you a look of utter revulsion and smacks you with a whip. "A halfling and an elf? Gods, you loving two-legs are disgusting. Bloody animals. Send 'em out for firewood and what do they do?! Ugh. Get back to work, it ain't breeding season yet!" He trots off.
M: If you ever mention this to anyone, I swear I'll turn you into a toad.

CRISIS AVERTED.

Later in the same session, Flavius's action-hero persona kicked in while we were trying to sneak away, all professional-style, from a party of centaurs before the explosion. He promptly decided to tie a rope into a lasso and wrangle one of them to ride. Several ridiculously lucky dice rolls later, he's on top of an extremely pissed-off horsedude, having his own personal extreme rodeo while the utterly confused centaurs run into each other in disarray, keep getting hooved by the guy being ridden as he rears trying to throw Flavius off, and we slaugher them. Cue massive explosion in the background, end session.

I love my group.

Guildencrantz fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Aug 19, 2012

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Guildencrantz posted:

I love my group.
I don't even know these guys, and so do I. :allears:

Coincidentally, what language do you guys play in?

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Guildencrantz posted:

I love my group.
Your group is incredible.

Guildencrantz
May 1, 2012

IM ONE OF THE GOOD ONES

Colon V posted:

I don't even know these guys, and so do I. :allears:

Coincidentally, what language do you guys play in?

Polish. In the purest of coincidences, the halflings in the campaign world have Slavic names, are perpetually occupied by one power or another, and have a reputation as gloomy, bitter, politically obsessed bastards who constantly plot to gain independence, bicker among themselves on how to best accomplish this and accuse one another of treason.

Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Suleman posted:

PDQ #: Talking Heads

The cast:

The GM: An experienced guy who translates and writes RPGs for a living. Never shot down our ideas, and we love him for that.

Venustiano: Fencing dandy detective with strong morals and a soft spot for women. Something of a foil for the rest of the party.

Corto Alberto Balicci: Mute gunslinger and daredevil. Shares a bizarre telepathic connection with his parrot, Parrot, a smartmouth who speaks for both of them. Specializes in trickshots and action movie scenes.
With an additional pair of bird-eyes, Balicci has a superb sense of space and distance, allowing shots that would otherwise be impossible.

Chuck D. Head: This guy. No, really. Chuck is the body, Head is the detachable head that can be used as a throwing weapon. Chuck specializes in being a scary monster and dealing with other monsters. Head specializes in being a very aerodynamic smartass.


Coming up:
Cardinal BRIAN BLESSED
Chasing a naked assassin with an air gondola
Hunt for the knife man, who is made of knives
The invisible assassins and their seeing-eye animals

As Balicci and Chuck returned from the amusement park, tired and covered in cuts from fighting the Knife Man, they noticed a strange eye symbol carved on their apartment door. Chuck was confused, Balicci was frightened. He urged the group to escape and kept watching the sky and rooftops warily. In the safety of an underground train station, Balicci explained the situation through Parrot: They were being chased by Invisible Assassins.

The Invisible Assassins were an old secret order of killers, who had ages ago developed an alchemical elixir that could make them invisible for a time. This wasn't entirely without drawbacks, however. You see, with light now completely passing through their eyes, they were blind. To counteract this, they developed a strange medical procedure involving brain surgery, which allowed them to link a human and bird mind together, permanently. Most chose hawks and other predatory birds, for their superior sight. Some preferred owls, for their night vision. In one, and only one known case, a parrot was chosen.

Ruthless invisible killers, armed with ancient techniques and incredibly accurate bird eyes in the sky. Not a terribly good situation, Chuck agreed. How could they deal with something they cannot even see? After some thinking they got a few paint guns and improvised talcum bombs, that they could use to counter the invisiblity.

Deciding to bait an attack, we went to the public park, keeping an eye out for strange birds. Suddenly, we saw something in the horizon. Something big. It screeched.
What we saw revealed some things to us.
The invisible assassins had developed the process further. They could now use it on other creatures besides birds.
Like bats.
Like mutant bats the size of a man.

poo poo.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy
So around four years ago I was in a 3.5 campaign that was in many ways a standard "start from humble beginnings and eventually save the world" story (albeit a well-done one that we all enjoyed), but ended up by pure accident being more awesome than any of us were expecting. Party members were:

Kyrien, Aasimar bard. My character, the face of the party, total unrepentant douchebag. Obsessed with being recognized as one of the greatest heroes of his age, used Leadership to start a Scientology-like cult midway through the game.
Eldred, Tiefling wizard. Everything Kyrien isn't. Really shy, nervous, soft-spoken guy, with humble aspirations but a very good heart. Often apprehensive that his demonic heritage will take control and lead him down dark paths.
Roen, Human fighter. A blacksmith's son who deserted from the army, very laid-back and down-to-earth with a wry sense of humor. Easily the most normal and grounded member of the party, and sorta the real protagonist when Kyrien wasn't (in-universe) hijacking the narrative.
Drew, Half-elf druid. Full name is literally Drew Id. While his player is an awesome guy and was great to RP with in other games, he really phoned it in this campaign for some reason. Ah well.

So our first major antagonist was a psychotic nobleman named Count Virag who'd been throwing the people of his county into prison for increasingly flimsy reasons and using them as test subjects for his necromancy. Unfortunately, once one of us forgot his actual name and called him Otto Von Vampire, the name stuck and taking him seriously as a legitimate threat became nigh impossible. He was basically a standard mad wizard, led to some fun encounters but didn't have much of a memorable personality.

He did have a consort and second-in-command named Felicia, though, who was actually a vampire. And after the climactic battle between us and his zombie army where we killed Virag (Roen literally punched his heart out, this becomes important later), Felicia grabbed Virag's corpse and took off. We all tossed our strongest remaining buffs onto Roen, he climbed onto the one available horse, and we wished him godspeed in his epic chase. It was close, it was tense, but several hundred feet out from the rest of the battle Felicia finally managed to kick his horse to death. Roen crashed onto the ground and from there Felicia used her monk speed bonus to get away.

From there we moved on to other arcs and other foes, including one session where we did literally nothing but think of ways to use our newfound influence and piles of gold to turn the party hometown into something of a major city. But one night while Eldred was walking back to his wizard's tower, he was accosted by a shadowy figure and got several levels drained in the surprise round. Sure enough, it was our friend Felicia. She was looking for Virag's heart, which was necessary to have his whole body in the same place and start the rituals for turning him into a Lich.

She said she knew that Eldred was keeping the heart in his tower, and asked that she invite him in so she could take it. If he cooperated, she'd take it and be on her way with no trouble, whereas if he didn't she'd kill him and get someone else to invite her in. One of his beloved students, perhaps. Eldred knew she wasn't just going to leave peacefully like she said, but he was isolated and badly hurt so he felt like he didn't have a choice. He invited her in, led her to where he was keeping Virag's heart, and... she thanked him and departed without any incident.

So she'd already had two opportunities to kill members of our party, because one-on-one Roen or an injured, level-drained Eldred were certainly no match for her. But she'd declined them both, which got both me and Kyrien thinking. Either she wasn't as strictly evil as we'd figured, or she had her own agenda that involved letting us live (or both). Virag certainly seemed pretty gung-ho about the concept of "massacre the PCs", so at the very least she didn't seem to share that mindset. It was interesting, and I started to wonder what Felicia's angle was. I mentioned the idea to the DM, and he grinned like I was clever for figuring something out.

Fast-forward several session and levels to our next encounter with Virag. We'd received word that he'd successfully ascended to Lichdom and had kidnapped the prince of one of the kingdoms we were trying to wrangle into an alliance against the Evil Bad Empire. So to secure the kingdom's goodwill and get rid of Virag once and for all, we set out to confront him at his bitchin' sweet pyramid lair. Descending into the tunnels underneath it we had a fight with several powerful undead led by Felicia. She taunted us about the fact that the prince would soon be turned into a mummy and ride at the head of Virag's undead host, but after we dispatched the undead with Felicia and she fled once more, we figured resting and recovering our spells was more important than saving this prince clown. 5 minute adventuring day, gently caress yeah.

So we headed back out into the desert and used some combination of spells to get a safe resting place a hundred feet or so up in the air and invisible. Felicia came out of the pyramid at one point and again informed us (or where she thought we might be, I guess) that, no seriously, the prince was gonna be turned into a mummy any hour now, but we didn't have all our spells back yet so whoever was on watch at the moment ignored her and stayed up there. A couple hours afterwards, a slightly larger party emerged from the pyramid. Virag, Felicia, a bone golem, and a slew of other scary undead. This was most definitely the final battle.

It was the most enjoyable, cinematic battle I've ever had in D&D. Everyone on both sides flying around like animes, constant fire spells and flaming weapons providing illumination in the otherwise lightless night sky, a harrowing wizard's duel between Virag and Eldred where the latter was barely managing to counter and shield against the Lich's onslaught, Roen and the bone golem having a duel of their own as they spiraled up into the night. Roen finally drove his spear up into the golem's core and levered its body above him, and with the magic operating the golem broken, a shower of bones fell around him while he floated like a badass.

Felicia brought Drew down to negative HP and was about to do the same to Eldred, but we finally managed to put Virag down so she fled once more. After stabilizing Drew we pursued into the pyramid, only to be met by Felicia hanging from the ceiling like Spider-Man, crawling slowly backwards, and looking to start up a conversation. The party- particularly Drew who was a little salty about getting knocked to negative health and having his levels drained- were of the mind to just kill her anyway, but I convinced them to let Felicia speak her piece.

Turns out she did have an agenda of her own. Virag was controlling her through some necromantic rituals, preventing her from trying to harm him or directly conspiring with others to harm him. Moreover, any command he gave her she had to obey, though he was arrogant enough that he never really realized she could carry out the letter of a command while ignoring its spirit. So the command he'd given her was that if he fell in battle, she was to return to the room where his phylactery was kept and guard it until he re-formed. Which she was doing now. Slowly enough, of course, that we could follow her and just barely beat her to the phylactery itself.

In return for not taking a more charitable reading of Virag's commands, she had a few requests. To be allowed to live, of course, and to be granted citizenship in our home kingdom's undead barony (a previous arc had been about another necromancer nobleman named Baron Czernbog, who surprisingly wasn't evil. He raised undead to give souls a chance to atone for the crimes of their lifetime, and in return for our help getting his undead recognized as citizens he pledged his army of redemption-seeking dead to our war against the Evil Bad Empire). She wanted pardons for all the crimes she'd committed while under Virag's control. These all seemed eminently reasonable.

Despite some grumbling we agreed to her terms, and she held up her end of the bargain. From there she and Kyrien started dating (they'd already been flirting in a "look how clever and cool I am for flirting with the enemy mid battle" way, because they were both giant theatrical dorks), and he started using his cult's influence to make her a public hero. Sorta an inspirational "every one of us is capable of redemption and heroism, no matter how far gone we think we are" figure. The campaign ended a few sessions later with a battle against the Evil Bad Empire and their scary demons, but the final fight against Virag and Felicia joining up with us were much more of a real climax.

The best part is that the DM later informed me that none of the Felicia characterization was initially planned. She was just supposed to be another general-purpose villain, if an unusually competent one, and her declining to kill Roen and Eldred was more because the DM didn't want to be the kind of dick who kills off party members when they're isolated from the rest of the party. But when I floated the theory that she was more complex and had her own plans, his grin was a "Welp, that's cool. Might as well throw it in!" reaction.

tl;dr I misinterpreted some charitable DMing decisions as a secret agenda on the part of a recurring villain, and in doing so accidentally caused her to have interesting characterization.

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Jonny Angel posted:

tl;dr I misinterpreted some charitable DMing decisions as a secret agenda on the part of a recurring villain, and in doing so accidentally caused her to have interesting characterization.
As a DM, I love it when this happens. :hf:

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Colon V posted:

As a DM, I love it when this happens. :hf:

Same here. There's nothing quite like your players coming up with something more awesome than you did and then somehow you get credit for it.

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!
Wanna play with that DM.

Seriously, this is the kind of skill that doesn't come along often.

E: also, more than anything in there, I think I like the concept of the good-guy necromancer raising people so that they can redeem themselves, or live what they missed by dying early or something.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy

thespaceinvader posted:

E: also, more than anything in there, I think I like the concept of the good-guy necromancer raising people so that they can redeem themselves, or live what they missed by dying early or something.

Yeah, Czernbog was awesome. He hit all these Obviously Villainous notes and had a really creepy mad scientist affect, but it was largely because he'd foregone learning any social graces in favor of studying the arcane. I'd also like to note that when Felicia was leading us to the phylactery chamber, she kept losing her sentences midway through and starting them again with different wording, because she was running up against the limits of the "Do not conspire with others to harm me" command. It was pretty awesome on-the-fly dialogue writing on his part, with her getting a little frustrated about being her inability to be direct and a little embarrassed at the nudge-nudge-wink-wink constructions she was being forced to use.

Sadly I haven't managed to get into another of that DM's campaigns since, but my understanding is that he's been running a game for the last 3 years in a homebrew system of his about a ragtag band of fixers working for an interstellar criminal cartel. I'll see if I can't get him or one of his players to relate a notable experience or two from that one and then copy-paste it here.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Suleman posted:

In one, and only one known case, a parrot was chosen.
I love all the implications this has. You don't even need to tell a story, that one sidenote just really says it all.

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Doktor Per
Feb 26, 2007

Look guys, I'm a lady!
We're playing CyberPunk, last session they traumatized and broke a rapevictim (his rapists who were PCs were killed by terrorists) who ultimately killed their entire family, broke into their house and poisoned the longest living character, paralyzing him. The face of the group then shot the guy's leg off with a hand cannon, admitted to his crime and got sent to the police station. They work for the local government as bounty hunters so they're not too worried.

Tonight we start at the hospital, Bill Williamson is being treated (roughly) to try to bring his body into a stable condition. One of my players, playing a British dual wielding SMG infiltration specialist named Quentin Blackthorne III. He decides that he needs to check in on Bill and that he needs to disguise himself as a doctor. He looks around for something useful, finds a snickers bar (chunk missing) and a janitor going to the bathroom.
He follows the janitor, sees there are two guys doing their deeds in the bathroom stalls so he gets down to business. Melting the chocolate under hot water, when he hears the toilet flush. Quickly he conceals the choco-turd greets a doctor who leaves his stall. Shakes his hand with the turd (doc crit failed his perception check on the choc) Waits for the doc to leave, tosses the turd over to where the janitor is sitting and I roll for cool to check for the freak out effect.
23 on a ten sided die. That's a pretty cool guys. So he just flings the choc back, finishes his business with intent on punching Quentin's lights out. Quentin ain't havin' none of that, the moment the stall opens he smashes the guy's teeth out, steals his clothes and tosses his guns and clothes in a garbage bag. Leaves the public hospital restroom where a furious choco smeared doctor is returning. The argue back and forth, Quentin licks the chocolate off the doc's hand saying "that's not my poo poo." Then he coldclocks the doctor (who needs facial restructure) in front of 7 witnesses and three security cameras.
So he runs like hell, bolting past a security guard, a couple of cops, loses them. Gets spotted when his phone starts ringing, by the security guard, setting off another foot race where the security guard is dominating. But then he just gets choked out and Quentin goes free right untill his boss calls him about thirty minutes later asking him what the gently caress is going on, and then to go straight to the police station to file a report.

Oh boy, I thought, he must know he's in deep poo poo and has to treat this ground really delicately. So I start the questioning. He feeds the cop this story where two hospital workers were chasing him with poo poo, and he beat them in self defense, stole the janitor's clothes because his clothes were poop smeared, ran off and choked out the security guard in self defense.
:cop: "Can you explain to me this scene?"
He shows a video off Quentin licking the hand.
:colbert: "I was informing the doctor that it wasn't my poo poo."
:cop: "So you've eaten your own poo poo?"
:colbert: "This really depends on your definition of-"
:cop: "It's a yes or no question."
:colbert: "Yes."
:cop: "And that was poo poo?"
:colbert: "It wasn't my poo poo."
:cop: "But in your expert opinion was that poo poo?"
:colbert: "I'm not a poo poo expert, haven't you eaten your own poo poo?"
:cop: "No. As you licked the doctor's hand, did you taste something you could medically describe as poo poo?"
:colbert: "... it was chocolate."
:cop: "And that's why you knocked him out?"
:colbert: "He was trying to smear me with it!"
:cop: "And after that you ran from the security guard and police officers."
:colbert: "I didn't see any police."
:cop: "They were the ones shouting STOP, THIS IS THE POLICE!"
:colbert: "..."

During this entire fiasco the other players have been shouting at him like a loud rowdy conscience from the get go. "Just take out your guns and shoot him. Kill everyone, put on some make up, dress up like a nurse and blow up the whole hospital." to "just think for a moment! We're trying to live here, we work for the government, they send their worst criminals to a prison colony game show!" And the detective pulls out his ace, a looping video of Quentin picking up the half-eaten snickers in the hallway.

:colbert: "That's circumstantial at best. Also I know people who are into poo poo play so it's probably a sexual act so I'm suing for rape."
:getout:

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