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Rampant Dwickery posted:I’m relatively new to tabletop RPGs, having spent most of my childhood playing RPGs with rules similar to kill puppies for satan. I just got together with an RP group, and we just had a blast going through a Pathfinder campaign. I love this story and want to hear more. It's the orc sending Zombie Giant Princess Helga off with her own milk carton portrait stapled to her chest that makes it perfect.
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Oct 7, 2012 14:00
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Rampant Dwickery posted:Not our crew. Seeing the opportunity, the orc rips a poster off a deserted alley wall, goes straight back to the camp, nails it onto the zombie’s chest and tells the necromancer to direct it towards the city. This is wonderful. It's exactly the sort of thing my usual group would do in that situation. Unless they decided to side with the giants and besiege the city instead, their reasoning being along the lines of "giants are way cooler than humans". Actually, that reminds me of a story. In the Hackmaster 4e module "Little Keep On The Borderlands, one of the major plot points is that some monsters are gearing up to attack the keep. Now, the players are supposed to go "Oh no, not our base of operations! These evil beings must be stopped!" Except that this being Hackmaster, the citizens of the Keep had upset the PCs pretty bad, and the PCs had upset them. They were only allowed back in because they were drat good bounty hunters (they brought in so many lizardman teeth!) Anyway, upon discovering the siege engines being built, wall scaling drills happening, etc, the party collectively goes "Cool! A siege!", throws their lot in with the bad guys, and eventually storms the keep, kills everyone inside it, loots everything that looks valuable, then sets it on fire and rides away at the head of a column of orcs, hobgoblins, and bugbears, swearing to pillage the gently caress out of the rest of the kingdom. It was awesome. Edit: The other time I ran that module, the party figured out the whole counterfeit coin thing early on, had an argument about economics and money laundering, and then set up an even better counterfeiting operation with logical, practical ways of getting rid of the dodgy coin. We hardly touched the actual game rules in 6 months of play. We're often not very good at the "bold heroes" thing. More edit: One time, back in the 90s, I think we were playing AD&D, and the dungeon contained a big inexplicable pool of acid. The PCs decided that since acid is so loving valuable (just check the phb!), this pool was probably worth 1000 times what the actual loot from the dungeon was worth. So they spent 4 or 5 sessions devising a way to get the acid out of the pool, into barrels, and into the city to be sold. They were having fun, and I don't see it as the GM's job to say "stop having fun and get back to killing goblins". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Oct 7, 2012 |
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Oct 7, 2012 14:15
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AlphaDog posted:More edit: One time, back in the 90s, I think we were playing AD&D, and the dungeon contained a big inexplicable pool of acid. The PCs decided that since acid is so loving valuable (just check the phb!), this pool was probably worth 1000 times what the actual loot from the dungeon was worth. So they spent 4 or 5 sessions devising a way to get the acid out of the pool, into barrels, and into the city to be sold. pretty much every adventuring party that encountered that pool of acid did this.
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Oct 7, 2012 16:17
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Reminds me of a time some years ago in a 3.5 D&D game. Low level party (I think lv3-4?) finds this huge adamantine door in a cave. We were supposed to pick the lock or find another way in or something, since the party sorcerer had just been using acid splash and lesser acid orbs to melt locks. What happened instead was the party sorcerer using all of his spells for the day on acid splash and lesser acid orb to melt the rock around the hinges; at which point we stole the door, took it back to town, had some nice weapons made for those who used weapons, and sold the rest. I think we ended up with 50,000gp to gear ourselves up after the new weapons.
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Oct 7, 2012 16:29
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Last night was the first session of a new game. We were discussing our characters while the DM did some last-minute stuff, and one guy mentioned offhandedly that he had actually wanted to play his other character, but he couldn't, because this was a level 10 game and it would be too difficult to scale them down. Because he was level 154. I thought he was joking, so I made some crack like, "Did you earn every one of those experience points?" Of course he had. He'd been playing this character for years, starting from first edition and converting for each new edition up to 3.5, and eventually his entire party was playing a level 150+ campaign. How could anyone handle a level 154 campaign when the math for normal epic levels becomes so complicated that each round of combat takes an hour? They had spreadsheets. What does a CR 154 encounter look like? Is it even possible to get it that high using published D&D monsters? No answer on that, which is too bad, because whatever he was fighting must have been amazing. His 10th-level character was a half orc/half troll with 40 strength, 20 charisma, and epic-level equipment. He rode a magic half-basilisk ostrich that could breathe fire. His character sheet was on his laptop, nobody was allowed to see it, and he couldn't figure out how to calculate his own attack bonus. 
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Oct 8, 2012 06:16
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To answer your first question, there are some things like Neutronium Golems that are intended as ridiculously overpowered monsters, so they could be taking on those. If I were the GM, I would ask to see his character sheet. I think he did something (or several dozen) wrong when making his character. Especially if he doesn't know how to calculate his attack bonus while being in an epic-level game...
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Oct 8, 2012 06:52
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Our RPG group ran a short Shadowrun game recently. Our newest addition, Aaron, won handily by doing something the GM didn't anticipate. I was the GM. Aaron, briefly, is a bit younger than the rest of us, quieter and less experienced with RPGs. A nice guy though, just a bit withdrawn. The set-up was a group of Shadowrunners had a job as a social engineering test hired by a corp's director of security. During the run, the corp's director of security was killed by a spirit sent by one of his underlings who coveted his superior's job, which a runner happened to witness. Unfortunately for the subordinate, the spirit ended up becoming unbound and managed to kill him. The now unbound spirit was now in possession of the new director of security for a corp, and began hunting down the runners. The players had no knowledge of this, but managed to come into contact with the various members of the first group of runners. They fought a helicopter full of corporate security that the hacker downed in the forest around a magical lodge. They headed back to the city to confront the Johnson who set up the first batch of runners, and end up making a deal and escaping with him after the wards to his apartment blew, and the players are forced into an elevator, which inevitably plummeted to the sub-basement where they fought off a spirit-controlled pack of giant rats. Finally, they make a run on the same installation that the first group did, bringing along a rigger-controlled giant robot as a diversion. They manage to fight their way inside, freeing one of the captured runners from the first group, and making their way to the spirit. Aaron was playing a Troll Street Shaman, and while the rest of the group was holding off corp security, figuring out their bullets had no effect on the spirit, or whipping off a meager spell or two, Aaron looked at his sheet and noticed a skill. Banishing. "Hey, so what does this do?" I hadn't thought of nor anticipated this. Hell, I had to look it up. And after I did, I said he could try to banish it. He rolled, blowing Edge in doing so (Edge gives you bonuses to your roll), and succeed. He got five successes on his roll in a game where two is considered a solid success. I told him that the spirit lets out a shriek as it's form is sundered from the material realm with a gesture of his hand. The entire table erupted in congratulating Aaron, and I commended him too, telling him I hadn't anticipated that. It was good to see the smile on the face of the introverted guy, and feel that sense of shared triumph when someone gets to be a hero, even in a game, for just a small moment.
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Oct 8, 2012 07:15
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Ratspeaker posted:...level 154. How? Like, in what version of the game is that possible?
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Oct 8, 2012 13:19
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The campaign I described in my previous post way the gently caress back in this thread has wrapped up. I'll post to describe the ending, since it was awesome, but in the meantime, here's a tidbit: I've taken over GM duties and I'm running something completely different - we went epic fantasy previously, now I'm rolling with supernatural horror in a real-world setting, namely, 1970's Poland. The players are a super-secret task force to deal with unexplained cases that seem to contradict the government's official materialist worldview - basically an Eastern Bloc X-files, with all the general everyday shittiness that entails. This also means they have to both solve them and provide a cover story. I only ran one session so far, but my main goal with this campaign is to experiment with various gimmicks to better terrorize my players. Nature herself decided to grace our game with the tried and trusty cliche of a dark and stormy night, and we sat inside with the wind howling and the rain pounding against the windows. They were sent to solve a couple of weird, seemingly impossible murders in a remote, crappy village. The killings were in fact committed by the ghost of a guerrilla fighter from the war, trying to get revenge on the people who ratted him out to the Germans 30 years earlier - only he got confused and murdered the wrong people, as well as stalking a young girl similar to her aunt (also killed by the Nazis), his lover in life. The group is making progress, treating this as a murder mystery, questioning the locals, and digging through the parish archives of the local church. The church is also where the only phone in the village is located, and one of them already got the first bit of supernatural interference when he was talking on it and suddenly heard someone speaking in German. His character, naturally, rationalized it as the phone lines loving up, but the players were already getting jumpy. Fast forward to the imminent arrival of the climax: they are in the church, piecing together the bits of the puzzle, they've just found out about the mass execution of the resistance fighters and the village's dirty little secrets. A number of tiny things about their surroundings seems wrong - all of them possible to explain, but unlikely when taken together, so I've got the mounting dread going. At this point, two things happen simultaneously: the phone rings and someone starts banging desperately on the door. So, with a reasonable amount of trepidation, one of them goes to pick up the phone, the rest answer the door. And here's the gimmick: I hand the phone-answering player a pair of earbuds connected to my real-life cell phone. He was kind of surprised but went along with it. The rest answered the door, and I told them how the aforementioned young girl runs in, weeping, screaming for help and shouting "get away from me" at some unseen presence. Meanwhile, the phone played a little sound file I compiled specially for the occasion, consisting of screaming and gunshots over the dominant sound of a woman crying desperately. (yes, I ripped that off from Event Horizon) The player listening to it couldn't hear what I was narrating in the next room and had no idea the girl had come in. As if the sound hadn't freaked him out enough, when he took the earbuds out, I told him the first thing he hears when he puts down the phone is a woman crying. The poor guy was honest-to-god pale, eyes-bulging frightened when I said that. It had an effect on the others as well, since they saw IRL how disturbed he was but didn't know what he heard. I feel a little guilty, but the group congratulated me for managing to actually scare them with an RPG  Although I'm afraid I might give them nightmares with what I have planned next. It's kind of hypocritical to enjoy this so much since I'm a giant pussy who couldn't sleep after watching the Shining. Lesson learned, though - audiovisual gimmicks work for immersion in a horror game! Plus this is a great way to isolate a player when you live in a studio apartment.
Guildencrantz fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Oct 8, 2012 |
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Oct 8, 2012 16:27
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AlphaDog posted:How? Like, in what version of the game is that possible?
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Oct 8, 2012 17:42
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Guildencrantz posted:Meanwhile, the phone played a little sound file I compiled specially for the occasion This part interests me (well, it's all interesting but this is one I have a question about). I've certainly put together collections of maps and other images as aids for a game, but never a sound file. I've actually just started a Trail of Cthulu game (the 1930s-Cthulu GUMSHOE one) and have wondered about that. How did you compile it? What tools and resources did you use?
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Oct 8, 2012 17:49
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Technically, the editions of D&D prior to 4e don't have a level cap. It's just that they didn't really design the game for much beyond level 20.
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Oct 8, 2012 17:56
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Yawgmoth posted:A game in which you end up racking up a total 11,781,000xp. Hell, the 3e ELH only has monsters that go to (iirc) about CR 80, so at some point you have to start not only killing gods (who always give each character XP = your level x1000), you also start having to create gods just to kill them in order to level since there's no setting where there's >70 gods. Well, when you are playing the original AD&D rules you get 1 XP per gold piece, and it was possible for a treasure type H-loaded red dragon to have a hoard upwards of a million gold in value... Since clearly in a campaign of this much awesome, every red dragon will have a maxed hoard. And since red dragons with this kind of hoard are "so hard" to kill, he probably did away with the one level advancement per adventure rule. So it's only twelve dragons killed. Per character. 
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Oct 8, 2012 18:47
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homullus posted:This part interests me (well, it's all interesting but this is one I have a question about). I've certainly put together collections of maps and other images as aids for a game, but never a sound file. I've actually just started a Trail of Cthulu game (the 1930s-Cthulu GUMSHOE one) and have wondered about that. How did you compile it? What tools and resources did you use? I'm actually using that system! No Cthulhu mythos here, but it's great for anything with similar themes anyway. I basically just used Audacity and a bunch of sample clips I googled and youtubed. The software is super user friendly, I know literally nothing about audio editing and still find it easy to use basic effects and create a sound that's unsettling and "wrong" in the right frame of mind. I'm going to use images as the aid for my next game, but I have a few ideas on more auditory mindfucks to concoct.
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Oct 8, 2012 19:43
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Guildencrantz posted:I'm actually using that system! No Cthulhu mythos here, but it's great for anything with similar themes anyway. I've used Audacity, but just for editing. I've never combined audio files, but that's a great idea! Also I just Googled "can Audacity reverse audio" and you can reverse the audio file to have people talking backwards (for regular creepiness or instant language-sounding nonsense). Now I'm going to have to look up some sources myself.
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Oct 8, 2012 21:03
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A long time ago we started keeping high scores on Dungeon Quest (old boardgame, recently re-released) and upon realizing just how much fun it was to look back on the list on the rare occasions we played, we started keeping scores in Arkham Horror. This was done by means of a brief entry on a notepad with date, investigators, old one, score, who survived, and any notable happenings. Here's part of one we had kind of forgot about : "Michael McGlenn - Did nothing of note. Went promptly insane upon meeting his first monster, then went on to consistently fail every fight or gate close he attempted. Lost his dog in Yuggoth."  but man did we crack up remembering that.On a similar note, played Last Night On Earth a short while ago and it was drenched with character due to how we rolled and what was getting drawn. It's a zombies boardgame with B-Movie stylings. The Sheriff starts armed with a revolver ('out of ammo' discards on a low roll). He has a special ability to get another revolver (instead of a normal draw card) when he searches. He proceeded to spend the game literally picking up a brand new revolver and going "click!" (or miss, followed by "click") on the very first shot, discarding the empty gun, retreating from the zombies, running somewhere else to pick up another revolver, and do it all over again. He finally was cornered in the barn and it took him two or three turns to just manage to shoot a zombie advancing on him. So the Sheriff spent the game running around town, picking up all these revolvers he had apparently stashed literally everywhere, none of which were loaded with more than one round (if that) and he could barely hit poo poo to save his own life near halfway through the game, never mind anyone else's.  In the same game, the priest stubbornly stayed in the church, searching over and over again trying to find some scenario-needed items while zombies closed in. Pretty hosed-up church considering that (according to the cards he's drawing) he's pulling shotguns, revolvers, dynamite, etc from under the pews and floorboards. By the way, the priest character can't use guns  Surrounded by 6 or 7 zombies, he has FAITH on him (grants a die roll bonus, which is good but not super-awesome or anything.) First, he's how combat works: it's risky to go hand-to-hand with zombies. You (the human) will usually win, but bare-handed you'll only "fend off" the zombie (i.e. nothing happens.) You have to roll doubles to kill the zombie without a weapon. Even with the FAITH bonus, 6 or 7 zombies is a horrible thing to face unarmed. The priest goes on to roll like a madman, high doubles left right and center. Bare-handed, he KILLS all but one (and fends that last one off), and goes right back to searching like nothing happened.  I like thematically-strong games and it's great when things like that happen. The Eyes Have It fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Oct 9, 2012 |
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Oct 9, 2012 00:12
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Mister Sinewave posted:I like thematically-strong games and it's great when things like that happen.
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Oct 9, 2012 00:23
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It turns out that way sometimes due to rolling/card combos, but it's not actually a campy game per se. 
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Oct 9, 2012 00:27
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Mister Sinewave posted:Zombie game My god. I remember playing this game in my old college gaming club. We never had anything this hilarious happen though 
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Oct 9, 2012 12:12
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Yawgmoth posted:A game in which you end up racking up a total 11,781,000xp. Hell, the 3e ELH only has monsters that go to (iirc) about CR 80, so at some point you have to start not only killing gods (who always give each character XP = your level x1000), you also start having to create gods just to kill them in order to level since there's no setting where there's >70 gods. If he's been playing since 1e then he's probably had that much xp for years. I'll bet he had 11 mil back in the 2e days, it's not like it was that hard to get back then. Converting by xp rather than by level would be retarded but not unimaginable. Or, of course, he could have converted by level and just played a lot. Either way I cant see why he did it though, having an epic level character is fun for a gimmick sesh or two but then you retire him and make someone reasonable.
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Oct 9, 2012 13:26
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Tollymain posted:My god. I remember playing this game in my old college gaming club. We never had anything this hilarious happen though I don't know how you can avoid it. Every Zombie Card is an invitation to make with ridiculous roleplay, or at least make a silly voice.
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Oct 10, 2012 06:27
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Randalor posted:If I were the GM, I would ask to see his character sheet. I think he did something (or several dozen) wrong when making his character. Especially if he doesn't know how to calculate his attack bonus while being in an epic-level game... We all took the DM aside afterwards and told him to please, please check his character sheet, so hopefully it'll be fixed by next session. If not, well, more stories. I'm know he's lying about starting in first edition. He's not nearly old enough for it to make sense, unless he had a really weird DM. Yawgmoth posted:so at some point you have to start not only killing gods (who always give each character XP = your level x1000), you also start having to create gods just to kill them in order to level since there's no setting where there's >70 gods. Since I'm a big goon, the only thing I could think of while he was telling me all this was a quote from an old TGD thread. crime fighting hog posted:Earlier people were talking about level 50 D&D games, but the nard who practically lived in my game shop back home boasted about his level 72 Fighter, and my friend and I sat around thinking of what the hell you fight at level 72.
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Oct 10, 2012 20:36
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So, a story from my Zelda D&D Game: The Time our Ranger murdered a bunch of Bronies The game is set about 30 years after the events of Skyward Sword when the kingdom of Hyrule is first being established. The Party: Ash, Swordmage who fell from another world where the Zelda games actually exist, though have since been lost after a magical apocalypse of sorts Cheren, the titular Ranger, a fugitive from Calatia Khashana, a dreamperson Cleric from Koholint Island given life somehow by the Wind Fish Houndaer, a Subrosian (Drow) magic user who came to the surface to escape the Matriarchy Kavone, a Minotaur Warden, whose player was unfortunately absent this session --- Previously in the game, the characters had come across a faceless, naked man sitting in a pool at the estate of one Goichi Kakariko--future founder of Kakariko village. Khashana had performed a ritual on him and discerned that his identity had been forcibly stolen by a man, who she got a glimpse of via the ritual--a red-beared man in a Russian hat. After finishing a major quest in Death Mountain, the party opted to track this bearded man down and find a way to heal the Naked Man. So after doing some leg work, speaking with an adventuring party that had gone and searched for the tower and found nothing, and stealing a Lens of Truth, they went after the Tower itself, which was secreted away in the Mountains between Hyrule and Calatia. Cheren and Houndaer went in first and saw that there were numerous magic-wielding acolytes as well as hired thugs. They also noticed that there was a giant bell--an alarm, they determined, considering the howling winds that swept through the valley kept shouts from carrying very far. Instead of hiding when the first guard spotted them, Cheren immediately drops him with her bow. When a second guard finds the body and runs to the bell to ring it, Houndaer murders him and stuffs his body under the bell to hide it--and then uses a spell to freeze the dongle and keep the bell from ringing. So now, the Ranger has basically free reign to snipe every acolyte and merc within range. One of the mercs makes a charge against a prone hound and does some damage, but a lucky roll on his next turn sees the merc turned into a Popsicle. Now nobody knows what this tower was built for, who the acolytes worship, or anything of the sort, but after they murder literally every guard without alerting the rest of security, the swordmage sees , previously obscured by the Tower, a statue of an enormous winged unicorn, on which is written "The Radiant Celestia". And being from a world that was once like the real world, Ash gets an uncomfortable feeling. So the five enter the tower and discovered that it's full of neckbeards and geeks who seem far more interested in the entertainment shows on their Crystal balls than in defending the tower, and after a few questions, Ash realizes the truth: Cheren had just murdered a bunch of Bronies. Still a bit confused, they head to the top of the tower, deal with some Bokoblins, and then speak to the bearded man, Balian. Balian tells them that the acolytes are all fools. They promised him a path to get to Celestia, but all they really seem to care about is watching cartoons. He has lived for thousands of years thanks to a curse Hylia put on him before the days of Demise, and now wants his life on the mortal coil to end. He shows the party an ancient stone tablet that contains secret knowledge of the cosmos and points out a passage about 'The Benevloent Celestia', though he also admits that there's a legend the passage can only be understood by one who has slain a god. Ash has done this in his back-story (he had help) so he realizes that the tablet actually reads 'Celestia of the Benevolent', referring to a place in the Astral Sea where the just are rewarded in death. Disappointed and on the verge of hopelessness, the party manages to convince Balian to return the identities he's stolen and see Zelda to see if she can rescind his immortality. (And the Naked Man turned out to be Goichi Kakariko's son, Shigeru.)
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Oct 10, 2012 21:00
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I like your GM.
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Oct 10, 2012 22:16
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Guildencrantz posted:The campaign I described in my previous post way the gently caress back in this thread has wrapped up. I'll post to describe the ending, since it was awesome, but in the meantime, here's a tidbit: Holy poo poo, I would love to play Soviet Ghost Busting. Or just read about it. It would make an awesome urban fantasy series.
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Oct 11, 2012 01:34
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VanSandman posted:Holy poo poo, I would love to play Soviet Ghost Busting. Or just read about it. It would make an awesome urban fantasy series. It is a new Russia now, my friend! Many exciting business opportunities in previously state-run industries!
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Oct 11, 2012 06:37
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Mister Sinewave posted:The priest goes on to roll like a madman, high doubles left right and center. Bare-handed, he KILLS all but one (and fends that last one off), and goes right back to searching like nothing happened. I sure hope he at least quoted this at some point in the struggle.
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Oct 11, 2012 10:30
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AlphaDog posted:How? Like, in what version of the game is that possible? One where the GM works for Blizzard? The just keep adding on new stuff at the end for years and years :P Also if I'm GM and you're not showing me your sheet, I will assign stats to you and they will stand, not your sheet. And they won't be very good stats either.
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Oct 13, 2012 05:50
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Keiya posted:Also if I'm GM and you're not showing me your sheet, I will assign stats to you and they will stand, not your sheet. And they won't be very good stats either.
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Oct 15, 2012 20:25
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Yawgmoth posted:If I'm the GM and you won't show me your sheet, you aren't a player in my game. I don't have the time or the patience to deal with people like that during my free time. Granted, that's more to make it more easy to remind people that yes, I've had that item/skill since character creation you idiot. Or for more optimistic reasons, to remind other players I take requests for using my reaction powers in 4th ED DnD for example.
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Oct 16, 2012 00:48
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As a player, if people ask I share it, if they don't I just keep it where it's useful to me. Which as often as not is somewhere others can read it anyway.
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Oct 16, 2012 03:49
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One of my players is a coward. Not his character, mind you. The actual player. We were playing Shadowrun 4e, and the team had just infiltrated an isolated medical research facility that had fallen off the grid. Inside, they discovered broken windows, bent metal and signs of combat, but no bodies. Turns out the MedSci facility had been a front for an Insect Spirit Hive, and the group just happened to stumble in on a recently summoned Mother Spirit. Dispatching the Insect Soldiers with relative ease, the Mother Spirit blocked off one of their escape routes, lightly damaging the Mage in the process. The Mage player, having taken a single box of Stun damage, immediately drops prone on his turn and spends five minutes looking at the Actions list for something he could do. When we tell him to pick something, he settles on nothing. Not cast a spell or even blindfire his gun. He just does nothing. Everyone else had really character-defining moments, like the Hacker who dove into the Bulldozer and rammed the Mother Spirit, or the Street Sam who ate all but 1 box of Physical Damage but still managed to finish her off with a well-placed Sniper Bullet to the skull. The Mage's contribution to the encounter was Do Nothing, fail to heal the Street Sam, then summon a Fire Spirit the turn the Boss was slain. We all kinda laughed at him for it after the fight was over though. He's not a bad guy or anything, but you put him in a pressure situation he'll either panic and not do anything, or spend 20 minutes staring at his iPad trying to decide what actions to take. He also doesn't roleplay, at all. He never tries to get in character or flesh out his Contacts, and constantly switches out characters for whatever new fancy he picks up. Who almost always turns out to be a Face. It's irritating when the party chatterbox spends 30 seconds stuttering out a conversation, then gives up half-way through in order to roll it instead. I've been trying to get him more involved in the storyline, but every time I do, he shrugs and asks which skill he needs to roll to get what he wants. Magic Rabbit Hat fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Oct 17, 2012 |
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Oct 17, 2012 05:17
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I don't know what to do about social roleplaying, but I'd try giving a guy like that a 30-second to 1-minute shot-clock to make up his drat mind each turn. If he does nothing, he takes one of whatever the system's lowest type of damage is. What's the in-game justification, you ask? It's "goddammit [player name], do something!"
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Oct 17, 2012 07:12
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I think my favorite game to run was always Amber. For those of you unfamiliar with the setting, Amber is a universe created by Roger Zelazny in 10 books and a few short stories that represents an eternal struggle between order and chaos, focused around the Order end of the spectrum as the eternal world of Amber. Children of the royal family are effectively immortal (barring murder), have the ability to walk through the universe as gods and find anything they want, are generally stronger and faster and more powerful than anything they meet in "shadow", the worlds that lie between the poles. One of the overriding themes of the Amber books as well as the game is "power has its price". The books are rife with examples of characters taking on power with strings attached, and it becomes clear early on that the only powers you can truly trust are the ones you earn with your blood and sweat and experience. At the same time, characters are regularly surrounded by artifacts and magic and devices of unimaginable capabilities, and GMs are encouraged to have fun with it. In this particular game, I had about half a dozen players, of various archetypes. The character creation system forces players to bid against each other to determine who's best in Strength, Psyche, Warfare and Endurance, with the winner of the auction pretty much the unbeatable champion in their particular category. So there were characters who had bid hot and heavy to make combat monsters, and others with psyche and magical powers. And one guy who hadn't bid once. If you don't bid, you'll never be quite as good as the bidders, but you can play it a lot more low-profile. And low-profile he was, a middle-of-the-road sorcerer who dabbled in a lot of the game's possible powers and stayed out of the limelight. So I gave him a spikard. In Amber terms, a spikard is basically like a magical nuke. It's a ring that serves as a sort of spell supercomputer, allowing you to draw on energies throughout shadow to power your magic and pretty much allowing you to wreck poo poo at will. In the books, one character uses a spikard to essentially stand up to the gods of the Amber universe, and I had this player stumble across one in a disused storage room in the castle. He immediately began investigating it. Did it have any spells laid upon it? No. He researched it, trying to figure out who it belonged to. No record. I'd intended it as a no-strings-attached gift, to gently caress up the balance of the game and shake up the group. I was waiting for him to put it on and turn into a supervillain and start wrecking poo poo. Instead, he decided to observe it for a while and make sure no powerful being from another plane wandered by to claim it. Nothing happened. Finally, he picked up the ring and put it in his pocket. The next time his character got into a sticky situation (which I of course set up almost immediately) I figured he'd use the ring and we could get started. But he froze up. He thought that the moment he put this thing on, I'd start laughing my rear end off and destroy him with it. So he figured out a way out of the trap without using the artifact. All the while silently eyeballing me across the table, as no one in the group knew he had the thing. So I put him in another situation. And again he resisted. And again. And again. He never once put the god drat ring on and used it. At any time during the rest of the campaign, he could have pulled this thing out and effectively hosed up any trap or encounter I had set up. But he didn't. The guy would have made Gandalf proud. The game ran for months, and I threw everything but the kitchen sink at him, trying to get him to put on the Ring of Unlimited Power and destabilize things. But he was so terrified of the price tag attached to his free gift, it remained unused in his pocket the entire time. When the game folded and the secrets came out the other players went berserk.
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Oct 17, 2012 11:14
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kazmeyer posted:He thought that the moment he put this thing on, I'd start laughing my rear end off and destroy him with it. He was well justified in thinking this, seeing as how the Amber rules explicitly tell the GM to do poo poo like this.
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Oct 17, 2012 12:07
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NinjaDebugger posted:He was well justified in thinking this, seeing as how the Amber rules explicitly tell the GM to do poo poo like this.
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Oct 17, 2012 13:38
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That sounds awesome. Were it one of my players, I would have rewarded them every time they resisted using the "dangerous" ring. Then if they never used it at all, I would have made it clear at the end that they did the right thing in not using it. Because I'm storygamey like that I guess. It would have been funny as hell watching everyone else have a shitfit about one guy never using the god ring though.
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Oct 17, 2012 13:45
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AlphaDog posted:That sounds awesome. As a player, I know the recurring sticky situations each time I resisted using the ring would have cemented the idea that it was a trap. As a GM, I totally agree with the idea that no matter what you originally intended the players ALWAYS make the correct decisions, at least for heroic type games. There might be consequences, it might not be the easiest path, but their choices always get them on the desired path.
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Oct 17, 2012 17:13
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Yeah, this story basically means "my players are familiar with Amber." A free spikard? poo poo, that's gotta be a trap, right? Heh. For the unfamiliar, Amber DRPG is built on a point-buy system; spend points, get powers. However, there are many ways for characters to basically cheese out powers they've not paid for; the books encourage GMs to allow this, but to ensure that each of these 'free' powers has strings attached that will bite the player in the rear end down the line. This is because the books were written as a masterpiece of adversarial GMing. Erick Wujick is apparently one of those dudes who looks for opportunities to twist the knife at every opportunity. ...'Course, the last time I pulled the 'okay, there'll be consequences later' bit was when one of my players managed to attune themselves to the Jewel of Judgment - arguably the single most powerful and fundamental artifacts in the entire Amber cosmology - and then he turned around and slew the Serpent of Chaos, embodiment of all that is not Order, becoming a new Serpent in the process and triggering a cataclysm that destroyed many worlds and most of the elder Amberites, leaving only their kids, the PCs, to run the new universe that shook out of the deal, in direct (and slightly heavy-handed) parallel to the Ragnarok myth. So maybe I shoulda bit him in the rear end later, but, well, Rule of Cool trumped all.
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Oct 17, 2012 17:47
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I just had the best game of Tales of the Arabian Nights last night. For those that don't know it, the game is basically a giant random choose-your-own-adventure. The game told all of us neat stories about being heroes. All of us except Adam. Adams character immediately got turned into a donkey, imprisoned in jail, spoke to his jailer about Allah, bribed his jailer with money (donkey-bucks), became lost at sea, was rescued by a group of strange people who forced him to join in a marriage ceremony for two other people and the ceremony changed him from a she-donkey into a he-donkey, went insane, became a human again (still with a penis) and then got married. The rest of us just got treasure and poo poo.
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Oct 20, 2012 21:48
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