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I've always thought you could incapacitate a Jedi easily enough if you just had a slugthrower of any sort. Tommygun, revolver, semi-auto... as long as you shoot before he realizes it's not a blaster, he's likely to get a face full of molten metal.
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Oct 27, 2012 18:23
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Eat lead space wizard!
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Oct 27, 2012 18:37
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This has gotten derailed from Good & Bad Gaming Stories. If you guys want to chat about Star Wars perhaps there's an existing thread or you could create a new one. To help get us back on track: We're playing a short Pathfinder game currently, and the PCs are in the depths of an ancient druidic monastery which contains a lot of monsters in cells. The druids put them there long ago, as the players discovered, both as a way to protect humanoid races, but also to potentially release them against the druids enemies should the need arise. So there's a magical console which controls the magical & non-magical barriers of the cells and the PCs find the key which controls it. Yahtzee. The party druid raises the magical barriers, which had previously been lowered, so they would have an easier time getting through the complex. Unfortunately, they leave the key in the console & walk off. For some background, the PCs had tracked monsters back to the old monastery, and learned that a witch had breached the complex and was releasing the monsters as she was looking for something inside. The PCs are trying to stop her and she appears every now & again to harass them. Also Druidic is a secret language in Pathfinder that only druids can learn. So a bit later, they encounter the witch again, and she has the key to the complex. She tells the PCs that she's released all of the monsters. The party's trigger-happy gunslinger shoots the key out of her hand & the party druid turns into an owl and catches it as it falls. The PCs fight the witch's dragon, then hurriedly rush back to the console to close the cells- only to find that they were already closed. The witch couldn't read druidic. It was a lie, & a ruse to distract them. It's good to mess with your players sometimes.
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Oct 27, 2012 18:50
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Kumo posted:Also Druidic is a secret language in Pathfinder that only druids can learn. Unless they put skill points in linguistics, which allows secret languages  I always have so many fuckin' languages because I play high-int characters. My DM last time was like, "Well you overhear these gnolls talking but oops! Too bad none of you speak gnoll, I bet this is some crazy poo poo they're coming up wi--" "I do!" "Wait, seriously?" "Yeah, of course. I speak, like, Gnoll, Gnome, Druidic, Aklo, Dwarven, Common, Draconic, Elven, Halfling, and Celestial dogg, I RP a man of the science of language" "... Oh. Well, they're, uh, they aren't really talking about anything interesting, I was just fuckin' with y'all." Fur20 fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Oct 27, 2012 |
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Oct 27, 2012 21:55
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Booo! One of your players shows initiative and planning ahead, give them something! A tip, a quest hook, bad DM!
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Oct 27, 2012 22:12
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I'd probably take that as an opportunity for fleshing out the world a little more - turns out they're both talking about their preferred meal, or what they think of the other's new weapon, or something of that nature. It may seem insignificant, but my players always get a kick out of something like this happening, even if I can't come up with a plot hook right away.
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Oct 27, 2012 23:03
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Then again, players ALWAYS latch on to minor details. If you say they're discussing which goblin chef makes the best stew, the rest of the play session will involve a transracial cooking contest. Guaranteed.
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Oct 27, 2012 23:32
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Golden Bee posted:Then again, players ALWAYS latch on to minor details. The players will attempt to escape by demanding a cook off. I would support this, rule of cool etc.
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Oct 27, 2012 23:36
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Goblin accepts the challange, says that the dish to prepare will be blargityblargtic. Player rolls to translate, GM says "You're not really familiar with this exact term, but the root words seem to be "human" and "meat". Cue existential crisis as the players have to decide between throwing the contest, or cooking up a villager. Surprise twist at the end, blargityblargtic is the goblin word for human-style meatloaf. 
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Oct 27, 2012 23:44
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Golden Bee posted:If you say they're discussing which goblin chef makes the best stew, the rest of the play session will involve a transracial cooking contest. Guaranteed. This is how great games are born.
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Oct 28, 2012 00:08
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Chaltab posted:I scrolled up from the Last Post and saw this and thought, "Oh god, 50 Foot Ant, here we go again." (apologies for this pages back reply following intriguing SW-chat [and gently caress the Sun Crusher. KJA  ])Oh, crap, yeah. I completely forgot that Stan was the name used in Ant's stories. Apologies for the scare; I should take more time when considering how best to conceal my friends' names in future! And, no, I don't think Stan was specifically angling to get Skumm killed to get a new character, that's just the way Stan was. He was a little bit odd that way, always approaching the game from a completely different angle from the rest of us. Another member of the Shadowrun group was a guy called Jacob. Jacob was usually the GM, and was a more forward and aggressive personality. He liked to help shepherd and work with the less socially adept people in the loose group of players, and Stan was under his wing almost from the get-go. For Jacob, he was helping Stan become a better person and a better player, getting him to open up and engage more fully with the game and the game world. Unfortunately, this often completely fell apart when Stan inevitably took an unexpectedly baffling approach to a situation and we discovered this somehow flipped Jacob's triggers. Jacob's response regrettably tended to be rather shorter-tempered than one would expect, and he would repeatedly give Stan pointed advice only for them to be ignored or applied in exactly the way Jacob didn't want them to be applied. Watching Jacob's face get redder and his voice higher pitched as Stan somehow over and over again managed to infuriate him was mesmerisingly hilarious, and their tag team at the table led other players of the group to compare them directly to Ren and Stimpy - it was very easy to imagine Jacob shouting, "YOU EEEEEEEEDIOT!" as his head cartoonishly exploded. In one game we were given a job to infiltrate a Corp's warehouse and steal back a large inventory of stock. We had a tight timeframe because we knew that in 20 minutes, no matter how good we were, there was bound to be an alarm and we would be swarmed with Corp Security. The goal was to break in quickly, neutralise on-site security, then everyone pitch in and load a vehicle-lift with the stock from a sub-basement, wheel our wheels in, and then try to pack as much as we could before we reckoned we'd be out of time. Jacob was already slightly annoyed at this stage because the warehouse we're at is the second warehouse we'd been to. We'd spent ages carefully masterminding a raid on the first warehouse only to find out they'd already moved the stock to a second warehouse. Jacob was particularly pissed off because he'd been the key architect of a brilliant plan only for the GM to eventually reveal we'd wasted our time. So our first brilliant idea, thanks to Jacob probably wanting to vent some anger, is a shock and awe tactic of firing a missile we'd just stolen from the last job into the warehouse. Surprisingly that actually worked, and buoyed by confidence Jacob leaps through the hole and begins punching the crap out of everyone. Perhaps influenced by a recent Exalted game, Jacob has made a Gecko Shaman into a wuxia fist-and-feet, running-along walls, leaping madman. He has great success in the opening round as the rest of his lag behind him, but by the time the guards have regained composure, they get a few good rolls in before we can provide Grasshopper covering fire and he gets knocked down with Deadly Stun damage (knocked unconscious). Our super-cyborged gunslinger with an almost-zero Essence, the Gentleman, tries to cover for Grasshopper but also goes down before we can clear the room. We're now down to our inside man NPC, my character (a sniper) and Dr Klaw, Stan's Rigger. With Jacob quietly fuming in a corner, his frustration piling, we ride the vehicle lift down to the sub-basement and take stock of the stock. The NPC and I exchange looks knowing that we're not going to be great moving the stuff, especially as we're very quickly running out of time. But with Dr Klaw's help we might be able to make it. Stan decides to now reveal he didn't ride down the vehicle lift but is still upstairs. Jacob demands to know why, but Stan just says he's ringing his Fixer. Turns out Stan is convinced that we need everyone up and running in order to load the vehicle lift, so with our only Mage down, and no other way to heal anyone, Dr Klaw is going to get his Fixer to send in someone with Healing spells pronto. The GM says it'll take 15 minutes for someone to get there. I expected that with that done, Stan would then come down and help us with loading the stock. I was wrong. Stan explains calmly that it would stupid for him to go down there because the guy who shows up won't recognise anybody and won't know what's going on. So Dr Klaw will just sit there for the 15 minutes until the guy arrives, pointedly not helping load the lift while we know that any minute now the Corp's main security detail will turn up. Recovering for dumbstruck jaw-dropping, Jacob is now almost livid with rage. The GM tells him he's recovered one box of Stun damage, which means Grasshopper is now up and about. With his Heal spell, the Shaman manages to fix one box of damage, staggers to his feet and goes to explain to Dr Klaw that they should be helping load up the lift ASAP as they ride it down to the sub-basement to join me and the NPC. A shouting match begins with both sides trying to convince the other how stupid the other person is being. Jacob is getting more and more incandescent, Stan getting more and more stubborn. Jacob keeps trying to get Stan to understand that they're running out of time and they need to help get all the stock out. Stan keeps telling Jacob that it'd be stupid to do it without the full team at full health and they should wait for the doc to show. At this point I remember just getting up and going to the toilet as the argument didn't seem to be ending any time soon. I get back just in time to have Jacob turn to the GM and say, "Right, that's loving it. I'm shooting him." There was a pause, and the GM finally said, "Are you serious?" "You bet I am," Jacob said with gritted teeth as he grabbed a fistful of dice. So Grasshopper whips out his SMG and sprays a full-auto burst at Dr Klaw at point-blank range. In Shadowrun if you have damage of either Physical or Stun, you take penalties (and those stack). So with the amount of damage he was on, even though it was point-blank, the attack completely missed. Every single last bullet from the spray missed. I turned slowly to find out what Stan's reaction would be. This badly crippled Shaman he's been arguing with just fired a gun at him, but did to be fair completely fail to hit him. How would Dr Klaw respond to this situation? I was actually surprised by how Stan sensitively handled it. He viciously counter-attacked Grasshopper, but did use a Shock Glove as he definitely didn't want to kill him. The stupid thing was that Grasshopper is one or two boxes off Deadly Stun. A Shock Glove is a weapon that can do huge amounts of Stun damage. So clocking Grasshopper with a Shock Glove just meant a small bit of Stun damage, and then overflowed immediately into Physical damage, thus giving him more damage than he actually took in the firefight with people who weren't on his side. We did all wonder why Dr Klaw didn't just punch Grasshopper without the Shock Glove. So, with Grasshopper subdued, Dr Klaw hefts him over his shoulder and rides the lift all the way back up before taking a seat and waiting for the medic to show up as Jacob explodes in the wings. The healing Mage eventually shows up to help. He takes one look at The Gentleman and shakes his head (with an Essence barely in the positives, he's got too much cyberware to make a healing spell close to possible). But he's able to heal Grasshopper! Which he manages to do, and heals exactly the same amount of damage as Dr Klaw just did to him. So the entire experience was all completely for nothing. (We managed to get out with the goods thanks to the GM being nice, only experiencing a running gun battle as we attempted to lose the Security when they finally showed up. It was agreed that the mission had been so awful the characters would disband the group and reform under a new trading name, and Grasshopper was quietly retired) I keep thinking this anecdote has a moral, but I have no idea what it is.
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Oct 29, 2012 02:25
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"Don't play Shadowrun with Stan and Jacob"?
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Oct 29, 2012 18:20
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We played Apocalypse World the other day. One of the players is a madman with his face covered, chains wrapped around his body (he doesn't have the key to the padlock) and armed with a chainsaw. He's becoming pretty friendly with some of the villagers, believe it or not.
Tiger fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Oct 29, 2012 |
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Oct 29, 2012 21:27
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Tiger posted:We played Apocalypse World the other day. One of the players is a madman with his face covered, chains wrapped around his body (he doesn't have the key to the padlock) and armed with a chainsaw. He's becoming pretty friendly with some of the villagers, believe it or not. I know you meant that as a description for one of your characters, but I choose to imagine it as one of your friends showing up to play tabletop games wearing chains and a mask.
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Oct 29, 2012 23:10
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I'm pretty sure the most Fun I've had in an RPG was a freeform one-shot with a single rule (which had a handwaved in-universe explanation that didn't make a ton of sense): if you (the player) laugh, your character instantly explodes, and a replacement character shows up once you've stopped laughing. We had each character have a single magical power, with no repeats allowed on your future characters, so that your character actually felt like they died, instead of just saying they exploded and nothing else happened. The game started out kind of tense as nobody wanted to "lose", but quickly ended up being great. I'd definitely recommend it, possibly with a variant where if the GM laughs, they become a player and the player to their left becomes GM.
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Oct 29, 2012 23:21
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cheetah7071 posted:I'm pretty sure the most Fun I've had in an RPG was a freeform one-shot with a single rule (which had a handwaved in-universe explanation that didn't make a ton of sense): if you (the player) laugh, your character instantly explodes, and a replacement character shows up once you've stopped laughing. I need to try this as soon as possible.
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Oct 30, 2012 00:01
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cheetah7071 posted:I'm pretty sure the most Fun I've had in an RPG was a freeform one-shot with a single rule (which had a handwaved in-universe explanation that didn't make a ton of sense): if you (the player) laugh, your character instantly explodes, and a replacement character shows up once you've stopped laughing. Awwww hell I'm going to play that on Sunday.
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Oct 30, 2012 11:34
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Nietzschean posted:I know you meant that as a description for one of your characters, but I choose to imagine it as one of your friends showing up to play tabletop games wearing chains and a mask. You don't play elfgames with Bane?
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Oct 30, 2012 13:57
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Running a super-villains campaign; started them all off in a prison so they can bust out in style. They all wear special collars that restrict their powers, so right now they're trying to figure out how to get em off and bust out. As their introduction, they're eating lunch, and decide to all crowd around one of the other players -- A 9ft 380lbs Sabertooth type. Here's what one of them had to say.quote:First thing you do on the inside is find the biggest guy you can. They can shut down strength, speed, energy blasts, pyro hydro ferro and telekinesis. But they can't shut down big. Big is forever.
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Oct 31, 2012 06:41
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Antinumeric posted:You don't play elfgames with Bane?
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Oct 31, 2012 06:57
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The White Dragon posted:You haven't lived until you've rolled the d20s with a musclebound, six-foot-tall moke from Waianae who you've never heard not speak in the scariest "guy who beat up white kids in school because they were white" Hawaiian Creole English ever, pound six pack Heineken in as many minutes no prob, then seen him unironically put on a Druid cowl, slump over, and talk like Ian McKellan as Gandalf. That sounds like it would be a heck of a story.
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Oct 31, 2012 11:44
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So a while ago I posted about my group's campaign here and you guys seem to have enjoyed it. Read it if you haven't since most of the following won't make any sense if you don't (and possibly still won't if you do). I'm happy to say we've finished the campaign, it took a turn for the epic and the finale was a blizzard of loving awesome. Before I describe it, however, I will deliver a massive spergout about the universe because I have somehow deluded myself into hoping you'll enjoy it, and it's kind of necessary for the stuff that constituted the ending. The Gods Must Be Crazy poo poo was going down. The centaurs were on the move and kicking rear end, allied with the elves against pretty much everyone else, and it was up to us to Save The World (of course). Throughout the campaign, through bits and pieces and the occasional infodump, we discovered the cosmology of the setting, which I think is immensely cool, pretty creative and ties into the next stories, so I'll share it here. We discovered where the Centaurs had come from and what had happened to all the forgotten ancient gods. The High Men, a race known in our time as big, burly idiots useful at best for simple menial tasks, had a highly advanced civilization a while ago, and before it fell, they worshipped six gods who ruled the world. The gods were arranged in opposing pairs that kept each other in balance, but at some point they fell, and the High Men civilization with them - which suspiciously coincided with the first recorded appearance of the Centaurs. The loss of most of their power and followers gradually drove all of the gods insane and ineffective. Not fishmalk-insane, but each had an obvious, legitimate mental illness. I can't remember most of their names, but the gods were: - The Bull-God of Law, whose domain was order, stability, justice and tradition, patron of lawmen, kings and administrators. After the Fall he got super-OCD and his surviving followers retreated to a hidden, totalitarian city that remained the exact same forever; more on this later. - Frath, Lynx-God of Change, whose domain was liberty, progress, art and luck, patron of outsiders: poets, revolutionaries, beggars, visionaries, thieves and innovators. When he went nuts, he turned anti-social and manic, decided he just wants to watch the world burn and only supported scattered groups of aimless pseudo-anarchists. - The Bear-Goddess of Life, her domains were peace, fertility and community, and she took care of farmers, foresters and physicians. She became depressed and passive after the fall. - Belgord, the Lion-God of War, whose domains were strength, honor, courage and so on - your run-of-the-mill war god who answers the prayers of soldiers and warriors. The Fall threw him into a thousand-year psychotic rage and he looked for followers in the isolated southern jungles, where he made an Aztec-style civilization regress to barbarism, worshipping him through constant total war and mass human sacrifice. - The Spider-Goddess of Darkness, who thrived on the night, secrets, arcane magic and intrigue. Not evil though, she was the patron of mages, assassins, occult scholars, spies and similar shady figures. She retreated into dark caves and corners, phobic and paranoid about the sentient races, and magic became more and more of a science, practiced predominantly by the elves who now live in an Eberronish state where magic fuels quasi-technology. - The Eagle-God of Light, whose domains were the sky, glory, truth and beauty. Known among his followers as The Best God, he was arrogant as all gently caress and patron to those who considered themselves too cool for the other gods: glory-hounding warriors, entertainers, monument-building architects, perfectionist craftsmen, populist leaders, decadent aristocrats and the like. Naturally, he took losing worshippers pretty badly and just had his griffons attack everyone out of raw, narcissistic frustration. As it turned out, a thousand years ago, when the High Men advanced greatly and put their trust in civilization and technology, the gods decided something had to be done, so they gathered together and each sacrificed part of his/her power to create a new deity: one representing raw, wild nature itself, with all of its brutal dynamics. This being, bound to a physical manifestation locked in a temple complex, took the form of a Horse-God and with no counterpart, turned out to be a violent rear end in a top hat and far too powerful for the others to hold back. He vomited forth the Centaurs, who ran amok, respecting nothing but strength and enslaving or destroying all other inhabitants of the lowlands. Thus, the Fall. Now the gods were slowly returning, and we contributed. Aside from the general coolness of a campaign centered around healing the fractured psyches of mentally ill deities, we had to accomplish this by finding out what happened - which I described above, but we learned it all gradually - and finding new high priests for each of them. So the party traveled the centaur-ridden Seven Steppes, exploring ancient ruins, piecing history together and manipulating global politics in a time of war. The Duke whose rear end we saved married a priestess of the Bear-Goddess, and with a whole nation converted to her worship she was back in the game. We found, defeated and then allied with a spider-demon, helping her and bringing the Spider-Goddess back, then rescued a Highman berserker who was channeling Belgord and got him into shape. But the real kicker is what all this did to our characters: As my character, the halfling revolutionary, discovered more and more about Frath, I decided that a religion whose creed is "no gods no masters", and for which blasphemy is the highest form of worship, is one I can get behind. Frath occasionally contacts his followers and is basically all "what the gently caress are you doing, I don't want to be worshipped you spineless pussy, go topple a regime or invent Dadaism or something", so pretty much the best god ever. After discovering a cell of his worshippers, I converted and managed to bring them back to the older principles. The big lynx in the sky returned to fomenting proper revolutions. When we blew up that dam I mentioned in my previous post, the flood revealed an underwater city, which turned out to be Vargun Dasz, holy city of the God of Light. When Flavius Victor, our bipolar superspy, found some griffon eggs, he chose to nurture one. As he got into better contact with the Eagle-God, his behavior strayed more and more in the "action hero" direction, until eventually he refused to be addressed as Flavius, saying "it's just Victor now". Half his personality was completely consumed by the other, as he embraced the commandment of "thou shalt be a totally radical kickass dude" and essentially turned into Archer. Except with a griffon instead of a sports car and carefully polished shining armor instead of a suit. M, the elven mage, as we were dungeon delving helping out the avatar of the spider goddess, was sufficiently impressed by the promise of arcane power to decide that she looks good in black - and to pull some strings to forge a claim to the throne of the Elven Kingdom. This leaves Malcolm, our hardened dwarven warrior. Relying on science and technology his whole life, he remained basically an atheist. As you can imagine, this is a difficult position to sustain when you're regularly having therapy sessions with literal gods, but that's exactly the kind of stubborn motherfucker he is. However, in the course of our adventures, his grandfather (the one who helped him steal our stuff) was slain by the centaurs. An enraged Malcolm took an oath to personally beat the Horse God to death with the claw end of his warhammer. When told that this was impossible, he just shrugged and said "I don't care, I'm an atheist. And gently caress you, I'm going to murder a God or die trying."  he did Next up: Domain of the Bull God, or Please Fill Out Divine Intervention Form Y67-b Guildencrantz fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Oct 31, 2012 |
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Oct 31, 2012 14:37
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robziel posted:That sounds like it would be a heck of a story.
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Oct 31, 2012 19:14
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cheetah7071 posted:I'm pretty sure the most Fun I've had in an RPG was a freeform one-shot with a single rule (which had a handwaved in-universe explanation that didn't make a ton of sense): if you (the player) laugh, your character instantly explodes, and a replacement character shows up once you've stopped laughing. Holy poo poo, this is brilliant and I need to try this. Preferably with a complete slapstick setup similar to what had to be the funniest session I've ever played. (tangential yarn incoming) It started somewhat unremarkably - we (the players) were spending the weekend at a summer house, having brought with us almost nothing but dice, paper and pencils, and ungodly amounts of vodka. We actually had some "serious" sessions planned, but of course titanic, please-kill-me hangovers tend to get in the way of that. So our least experienced player decided to pop a one-shot, her first real attempt at GM'ing. As it turned out, we were given basic character sheets in what could barely be called a system, and informed that we were in the Dragon Age universe (she's a huge fan). The first half-hour or so was spent slogging through an uninteresting fight with darkspawn, and I was convinced we had a total dud on our hands. Then weird poo poo starts happening, some strangely-dressed people appear out of a shimmering portal, carrying some unusual device and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the cast of Sliders. Of course we grab the plot hook... ...and our party of incredibly conventional fantasy adventurers is transported to a medium-sized Eastern European town in 2005. Cue Les Visiteurs-style hijinks as we roleplay our utterly confused characters completely misinterpreting cars, buses, convenience stores, running water, phones, Christianity and all that, while performing the simple fetch quest to hunt down a vampire (we did). I don't think I've laughed as much in my life, although most of it is obviously "you had to be there" type stuff. Highlights include: - Finding and wearing modern clothes in an attempt to fit in, marred by medieval fantasy sensibilities. You can guess how that went. ("Wow, enchanted shoes that light up when I walk! And I can have jokes about beer written on my clothes, how great is that?") - Being thrown out of a supermarket for walking up to the cashiers from the exit side and asking for a keg of ale - The party rogue intercepting a bag of stolen mobile phones from random thugs and throwing away everything but the old Nokias, as they clearly represent sturdy craftsmanship - Subsequently attempting to exorcize the demons speaking from within the blasphemous device - Upon seeing a cemetary: "Holy poo poo guys, I know why there aren't any dwarves. These people crucified all of them!" - Enthusiastically latching on to a priest who informed us that the Bible is the surest protection from demons, and afterwards fashioning pages from it into makeshift holy armor. You know, against vampires. - Finding ourselves in a really shady club, my mage asking around where he can find lyrium and explaining to confused people that he means magic powder. Cue massively coked-out stereotypical wizard. I'm positive there's a Charlie Sheen "warlock" joke in here somewhere. And much more. Everybody should play in a 1980's fish-out-of-water comedy movie in RPG form at least once in their lives. Only put in "laugh and you explode" into it this time.
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Oct 31, 2012 20:41
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Guildencrantz posted:7 gods No joke, I would read the poo poo out of this if it was a 7 book series.
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Nov 1, 2012 22:31
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Guildencrantz posted:- Enthusiastically latching on to a priest who informed us that the Bible is the surest protection from demons, and afterwards fashioning pages from it into makeshift holy armor. You know, against vampires. This is a genuinely awesome idea and I must steal it.
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Nov 1, 2012 22:52
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Your friend may very well make a good GM, as she can clearly think outside the lines and come up with something that's interesting and fun for the group. Which in the end is really the most important attribute for a GM to have!
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Nov 2, 2012 00:04
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I'm pretty sure one of the players in my current game is shaping up to be a Notable Experience of his own. Whether a good or a bad one I'm not yet sure. He thinks outside the box with his plans. So far outside the box that sometimes he loses track of what the original plan was supposed to be. Like the time when after the party had fought zombies who'd had their bodies hollowed out and filled with rats, he suggested keeping the rotting, diseased skins as a clever zombie disguise. In the end he was content to just keep a rat and try to train it. At the end of the last fight where the party ambushed a stagecoach there were some dead horses left over. He decided he wanted to take one of their heads because "maybe I can use it for a prank". The other players are terrified of him. They're convinced he's got some sort of master plan that he's working towards and they haven't figured out what it is.
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Nov 2, 2012 14:30
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Whybird posted:The other players are terrified of him. They're convinced he's got some sort of master plan that he's working towards and they haven't figured out what it is.  I think at one point I had a shiny bauble, a cat, pig, eye patch, monocle, boot, a bunch of cool rocks, and a pair of tongs in my one Pathfinder game. The scary fact being is that I used the cat, eye patch, and boot to great effect in that game.
MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Nov 2, 2012 |
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Nov 2, 2012 15:11
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So way, way back in the day the owner of our FLGS ran a homebrew quasi-AD&D 2nd Edition game. It was very freeform and rules-light. It was also... well... let's say everyone was encouraged to break out their oddest character concepts that no one else would let them play. One dude had three characters over the course of that game, but the first was a wizard whose name I forget. Everyone's around 4th level or so, and we're all gathering at Major City of Homebrew Fantasy World and getting our marching orders from the Head Wizard. Now, one of the things the GM did was he ensured that every character had 'something neat' - usually a magic item or something that would fit their niche. So PC wizard goes up to Head Wizard and receives an enchanted spellbook. It has an infinite number of pages and contains literally every spell of 1st or 2nd level. The catch is that the moment it is no longer in physical contact with his skin, it will teleport back to Head Wizard's Library, so he'll have to go and scribe spells into his personal spellbook if he wants any use out of it. And the dude - we'll call him Chris, because that was his name - was psyched. He's going through different sourcebooks and making a note of which spells he wants and how nasty they can be et cetera. And he goes to the local tavern, Whitebeard's, which has become the party's default watering hole, to start scribing spells. He sits down, he gets ready to start working, and then he hears a crash; across the tavern, one of the other PCs has just broken a bottle or something and the local barmaid (who was very attractive and was represented by the miniature for a Shadowrun Rocker, as there was a dearth of decent female miniatures in the store; thus, she was referred to as 'Mondo Babe With A Mike') was sweeping it up. So Chris says "Okay, I put the book down and go to help." GM: "You... want to run that by me again?" Chris: "Yeah, I put the book down and go help Mondo Babe With A Mike clean up." GM: "....okay!" So then he says "Okay, now I start scribing this list of spells," and when the GM asks him where he's gonna find those spells and points out that the magic spellbook is gone, Chris groans and feels stupid for a bit. So he goes back to Head Wizard to ask if he can borrow it again, and Head Wizard calls him stupid and refuses to do so - but he will grant Chris a boon. He gives him an enchanted cloak of Camouflage, one that's apparently even better than the standard-issue magic hidey cloaks; take your eyes off it and you'll lose it, because the magic is always on. So Chris is walking back to the tavern through the town square when Thak, another PC, runs up. Thak is an orc - or more properly, an Ork. Thak is a very Warhammer-y Ork. At one point Chris had cast a Charm spell on Thak, and started giving him orders and such, and Thak's player just grinned. "No no no. Reread the spell description again. That spell doesn't mean I'll do your bidding - it means you're my best friend." Thak's demonstrations of his friendship were often not to Chris' liking, good-natured though they were. Thak had decided that his best friend the wizard was too squishy, and if there was a fight he might get hurt. So clearly the solution was to help his friend not get in fights by being able to run away faster. Thus, clearly, his friend the wizard needed to be red. Because if you red, you go FASTA. This is why Thak had acquired a bucket of pig's blood from the butcher and was currently running towards Chris' wizard yelling "I paint you red, you go fasta!" Why Chris didn't just pull up the hood on his cloak and hide, I will never know. Instead he decided to humor his friend Thak, and let Thak paint him red. Only he didn't want to get blood on his nice new cloak, so he took it off, neatly folded it, set it down on the grass, and then got splashed with blood. His next words: "Okay, Thak, you painted me red. I'm gonna go to Whitebeard's and wash up." Thak: "Okay! Bye friend!" GM:  Naturally, when Chris went back to look for his cloak after several in-game hours he could not find it. This all took maybe 30 minutes to happen, by the way; it's not like the memory of the first time he forgot about his magic items' whereabouts and conditions was anything but fresh in his memory... Another of the characters was Grunt. Grunt was a dwarf who communicated entirely through grunting noises and hand gestures. Never spoke a word of Common, but understood the rest of us just fine. Grunt also wore a cooking pot for a helmet. ...well, actually he wore the cooking pot in order to hide his Helm of Comprehend Language, which is why, despite having an Intelligence score of like 2 - and thus being too stupid to know any languages - he understood the rest of us. And everyone else, actually. Later he got hold of other items that boosted his Intelligence... but he still never spoke. Deliberately, this time.
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Nov 2, 2012 16:10
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I dunno, magic items with caveats like that are really dick moves. I've had poo poo like giant magic
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Nov 2, 2012 18:07
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The White Dragon posted:I dunno, magic items with caveats like that are really dick moves. I've had poo poo like giant magic All he had to do was flense off some skin and tack it to the book, problem solved. VVV I feel that if the DM is being a dick, then it gives carte blanche to the players to do likewise. Samuel L. Hacksaw fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Nov 2, 2012 |
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Nov 2, 2012 19:50
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Yeah, the "here's an awesome magic item! Oh, you like that? HAHA TOO BAD NOW IT'S GONE" thing is something that I only ever see people with huge control issues doing. It's a double dick move to say "I'm gonna give you this thing, now here's an event that will bring you into the party and integrate you somewhat with the setting that if you get involved with will permanently revoke that thing! Do you keep that thing I gave you or do you try to have fun? you can only pick one." Although if you wanna get super pedantic you could ways say "the book is still in contact with my skin, as when I touched it some skin cells were naturally shed onto the book and you didn't say how much skin or if it needed to be attached to the rest of my body."
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Nov 2, 2012 19:57
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While I agree with the whole "dick move magic items" thing, I'm not sure if it would technically apply in this case. The first item seemed like a pretty good way of justifying his low-level wizard having a wider variety of spells at the start of the game, and the second... why didn't he just put something on top of the cloak to mark where it was? I admit that that was a dick move, but at the same time, he knew in advance about the downsides.
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Nov 2, 2012 21:37
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Randalor posted:While I agree with the whole "dick move magic items" thing, I'm not sure if it would technically apply in this case. The first item seemed like a pretty good way of justifying his low-level wizard having a wider variety of spells at the start of the game, and the second... why didn't he just put something on top of the cloak to mark where it was? I admit that that was a dick move, but at the same time, he knew in advance about the downsides. If he just wanted to give the guy a bunch of spells he says "okay, the Head Wizard is going to let you use his spellbook for transcribing but not take it out of his library so just pick some stuff" which has the additional feature of being much, much more realistic. The problem isn't really with the items so much as it is that the GM seemed to be actually setting the player up to fail.
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Nov 2, 2012 21:44
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My astropath decided to Dominate a sewer monster to stop it from attacking the party and proceeds to roll doubles -> Perils of the Warp -> Destruction
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Nov 2, 2012 23:25
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Yawgmoth posted:Yeah, the "here's an awesome magic item! Oh, you like that? HAHA TOO BAD NOW IT'S GONE" thing is something that I only ever see people with huge control issues doing. It's a double dick move to say "I'm gonna give you this thing, now here's an event that will bring you into the party and integrate you somewhat with the setting that if you get involved with will permanently revoke that thing! Do you keep that thing I gave you or do you try to have fun? you can only pick one." Dude got the magic cape of camoflage and was explicitly told "If you lose track of it you will never find it". What does he do? He sets it down on the ground somewhere and fucks off. Dude couldn't even put it in his pack when he was done getting painted red. He just loving left it in a field. I don't think that the GM should gently caress players but the PC or the player himself deserved that one.
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Nov 3, 2012 00:25
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Yeah, normally I hate magic items with strange clauses, but both of those seemed really innocuous, and the dude sounded really, really out of it. When he's working on transcribing spells because if he lets go of the book it disappears, and then just puts the book down and walks away, that's some short-term memory loss poo poo or something. If the dude was a first-time roleplayer, then maybe it's kind of lovely, because he's not really used to thinking in that way yet, but if he had any experience with thinking in character, it's all on him.
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Nov 3, 2012 06:05
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Nah they both pretty clearly were gotcha deals, there was no reason to have that skin contact clause other than that the GM was specifically planning from the start to screw him ASAP. Isn't that sort of thing, like, how you train people to be the bore who won't walk into a room without casting a dozen divination spells and poking every possible surface with a ten-foot pole? Stupid careless player, haw haw, but how fast do you think the game woulda started dragging if the guy was 'careful' and started taking the time to clearly detail how he could in no way be construed to be in violation of the terms of this unwinnable arrangement while hobbling around trying to perform the functions of an active player in a game, while the GM threw more and more poo poo at him to try and distract him from productively using his incredibly volatile super-items and trick him into letting go of the drat book/cloak for half a second? Sounds to me more like the player was smart enough to not play that game and just quietly let the power-crazed adversarial GM 'win' at the first opportunity before poo poo started getting nasty. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Nov 3, 2012 |
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Nov 3, 2012 06:20
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| # ? May 14, 2024 22:40 |
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I dunno, maybe it's a feature of not really playing with any terrible GMs lately, but I'm just not seeing it. He gave the player the ok to transcribe whatever spells he wanted, he only put 1st and 2nd level spells in there, and he double-checked with the dude to make sure that he was ok with putting the book down and walking away. Sure, he didn't outright tell the guy "Hey, don't forget, you can't do that", but letting players screw themselves is the most important skill a GM needs. If the guy had just waited a little longer, and scribed the spells he wanted, there wouldn't have been any issue at all. I mean, you're kind of ascribing a lot to their motives, dude. From what we've seen, the GM seemed pretty cool. He immediately gave the player another, neat item when he lost his first. And who the gently caress is going to go through that much trouble for a spellbook with 1st and 2nd level spells? The guy already was just planning to transcribe what he needed, it seems to me purely a case of the dude just forgetting something important, and shooting himself in the foot.
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Nov 3, 2012 06:38
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