|
goatface posted:That's hilarious and sad.
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 02:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 15:10 |
|
|
Side Effects posted:TL;DR: A fat nerd gets so angry at kids that he has a heart attack and then uses the experience to better his life.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 03:08
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:I have never heard a story about wargames of any stripe that didn't end with "and then he threw a tantrum and stormed off", usually with a table flip and/or merchandise damage added in. That's because wargaming doesn't really make for very good stories otherwise 
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 03:10
|
|
|
Tollymain posted:That's because wargaming doesn't really make for very good stories otherwise girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Nov 11, 2012 |
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 05:32
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:I have never heard a story about wargames of any stripe that didn't end with "and then he threw a tantrum and stormed off", usually with a table flip and/or merchandise damage added in. A friend and I messed around with WH40K for a bit. I had fun painitng the minis, and the Orks vs Space Marines thing was cool and kinda roleplay-ish for a wargame. Then we decided to pack the board and minis into the car and check out the local "warhammer club", which has apparently been running for 20 years and has 40 or 50 members. We got to the hall they rent every second saturday, and had a Bad Experience. Or maybe a Neutral Experience. We walked in, and sure enough there were people playing Warhammer (fantasy, 40k, the one with the spaceships, etc). Everyone there was gaming. Nobody looked up from their games as we entered. There was some awful metal playing relatively quietly from a lovely laptop. I politely interrupted a guy at a table near the door to ask who we'd speak to about joining. He literally just grunted, pointed, and returned to his game. My comment wasn't rude, it was literally "Hey man, we were wondering about joining your club, do you know who we need to talk to?" So we went over to the table he pointed to, and asked how to join the club. The dude said "hang on", and then kept playing and ignored us for the next 10 minutes. Nobody in the hall was really talking to each other, either. They were kind of hunched over the game tables doing a minimum amount of speaking. Vow of silence? Just really awkward guys? Front for a weird bondage club? I don't know, but it was pretty creepy so we left.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 05:55
|
|
|
I'm imagining a Warhammer-themed bondage club and snickering.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 06:23
|
|
|
Nietzschean posted:I'm imagining a Warhammer-themed bondage club and snickering. In the grim darkness of the future there is only rope play.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 06:35
|
|
|
DivineCoffeeBinge posted:In the grim darkness of the future there is only rope play. Oh I doubt they'd limit themselves that much.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 07:26
|
|
|
quote:Horrible 40K Stories Man, my experience with 40K has pretty much been the exact opposite. My friend got me into playing Imperial Guard a little over a year ago (Same guy who's currently DMing our Only War game), and fortunately right after I bought my army we found a great 40K group on our college campus filled with friendly guys and girls. One of the very few perks of going to my particular college!
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 17:27
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:I have never heard a story about wargames of any stripe that didn't end with "and then he threw a tantrum and stormed off", usually with a table flip and/or merchandise damage added in. Selection bias! People are way more likely to repeat those kinds of experiences than "One time we played a game and everything happened as is normally expected, all participants had fun and parted on friendly terms."
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 21:05
|
|
|
Doc Hawkins posted:Selection bias! People are way more likely to repeat those kinds of experiences than "One time we played a game and everything happened as is normally expected, all participants had fun and parted on friendly terms." Compare that with other games of this forum, which have a roughly equal-ish split between happy endings and  .
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 21:19
|
|
|
I think it may be that we remember cool poo poo we do in role playing games because it's not just mechanical, but also narrative. War games don't have the same type of investment.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 21:25
|
|
|
Yeah, Tabletop Wargames Awesome/Terrible Experiences are like Rimmer's RISK diary. "And then... I rolled a double-six!" As an example, a game of 40k. My opponent was playing Necrons with Whatsisname the Lightning Lord, who causes a lightning storm in the first turn that strikes your enemy's units. Each unit has a 1/6 chance of being hit, doing d6 hits, so not usually too big a deal... Until he rolls hits on 2/3rds of my units, for a lot of damage. This causes enough damage that most of them run away, and as I've not had a turn to move, they flee off the board. And that's how I was nearly tabled before I had a turn. On the flip-side, I remain proud of the time in Warhammer I neatly dropped a cannonball on the head of the enemy magic-user, who had been hiding outside a unit to avoid combat.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 21:55
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:To some degree, but I would expect to at least hear a "I did something really cool and/or totally lucked out and/or had a positive experience that no one threw a loving hissy fit over for being on the losing end" but I only ever hear them when actually called for, and even then only maybe 5% of the time. I dunno. Most card games are the same way, the notable stories involve people being incredible assholes. Mr. Maltose posted:I think it may be that we remember cool poo poo we do in role playing games because it's not just mechanical, but also narrative. War games don't have the same type of investment. This has to be it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 21:58
|
|
|
Adelheid posted:I dunno. Most card games are the same way, the notable stories involve people being incredible assholes. Mr. Maltose may have the right of things as far as this thread goes, at least.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 22:11
|
|
|
The thing is that you can take a story about a DnD game, easily change the game-related jargon to something most people can understand, and retell the story to people who don't play PnP games and probably make the story funny. It's a lot more difficult to do that with magic or wargaming. If your audience doesn't really know it, they probably won't enjoy the story overmuch.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 23:36
|
|
|
AlphaDog posted:Just played Basic D&D again. The guy running it hadn't touched those red books since 1991, when he was 12. That sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. I need to do something like that at some point. And the door that requires you to log in is simply amazing.
|
|
#
?
Nov 11, 2012 23:46
|
|
|
Ratpick posted:That sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. I need to do something like that at some point. Yeah, that right there is 'adversarial' GMing done right.
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2012 00:09
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:I dunno, maybe it's just because I've played more pokemon/magic/etc. but I've heard decent amounts of both good/clever/lucky gameplay and crazy folk/bad players. RPG good/bad experiences are more transferable I think. "Then he killed the giant using only a pair of nail clippers!" or "Then he tried to bribe the mafia don using money stolen from his own safe!" dont really require you to be intimately familiar with the game system invovled. "The time my Kurgan deck decapitated a Connor deck despite only have one life and having to come within one card of exerting to exhaust cards and top-deck an upper attack when, as it turns out, he wasnt holding an upper-left block" requires you to know some of the rules of the Highlander card game to understand. I mean, dont get me wrong, that was sweet as gently caress, but if I were to go into detail about it peoples eyes would glaze over. Wargaming "notable moments" are similar; Only notable if you know the system/scenario. So notable moments about card/war games tend to be about the players, not the games, and the interesting stories will be negative, as "We played some blood bowl, had a good time" is less notable than "The time one of my friends had a meltdown literally threw another out of his house after losing 5 times in a row despite spending more on one card than his opponent spent on his whole deck".
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2012 00:36
|
|
|
Well, let's see if I can make a wargaming anecdote that isn't a "Dear Christing Hellfuck, what is wrong with people" story perhaps vaguely interesting (although I guess it is a Rimmer-esque "...and then I rolled a six and then a four!" sort of thing). We were playing Warhammer fantasy battle in some earlier edition, and I am an unashamed lover of the Skaven. For those unfamiliar, they are sneaky hordes of chittering lunatic ratmen, constantly scheming and backstabbing each other. They used to have a rule that no army got which allowed their missile troops to fire directly into melee fights, with any hits being a 50-50 toss-up to see if they hit the enemy or your own troops. Because, hey, there's always more rats! They are also the only army that gets to have their heroes lead from behind the whole unit instead of in front. They are also arguably the most technologically advanced race in the setting for one main reason. They don't care or even understand safety requirements. They are also mostly immune to the corrupting influence of the powerful but dangerously unstable magical Warpstone, and constantly find excuses to ram it into machinery to make it more dangerous and unstable. I would not be surprised if Deadlands' Ghost Rock owes some of its genesis to Warpstone. So I put together a Skaven army of Clan Skryre that had as many of the unstable Warpstone machines as possible. I went through the book looking for every entry that had a dice roll to see if something went disastrously wrong. My hero units got given whatever gear I could find that would hilariously blow up in their faces if they ever got a 1. One of the weapons I brought to the battle was the Lightning Cannon - a terrifying, huge brass artillery piece that uses a massive chunk of Warpstone to blast evil green electricity in a straight line down the field. It was fairly nasty, and also had a misfire table that included the possibility of it exploding or going wild on me. The battle gets under way. His troops are charging around the place slaughtering my cowardly chunks of ratmen. Soon, however, I suddenly realise I can angle a clear shot from one of my Lightning Cannons on the back line through two of his really heavily armoured knight units. Perfect! I roll the dice, and of course get a misfire. My friend chuckles darkly and I laugh because finally my army is doing what it's supposed to be doing and blowing itself up for giggles. The misfire table doesn't cause an explosion. Instead, the Cannon overheats and spins randomly around the place before firing at maximum power. I cringe before picking up the scatter die (just a die with arrows on the faces, to get a completely random direction) to determine the direction. My general is practically standing next to the freaking thing, and if it fires to the left it'll take out my Warplock jezzail snipers and blow up my other Lightning Cannon. If it fires to the right, the maximum power will slaughter some of my much needed veteran backup units and possibly atomise another hero. The scatter die tumbles along on the table and my friend yells out, "Bullshit!" while laughing. The die comes up in exactly the same direction as I fired, giving me a maximum power shot through his two heavy cavalry and wiping the floor with them (and killing a unit of Skaven slaves milling around aimlessly, but who cares, they were going to panic and run away next turn anyways). Almost any other angle would've either hit nothing, nothing important, or killed a whole lot of my own guys. We had a bit of fun imagining the Engineers manning the device suddenly scream in terror as soon as they realised it was overloading, shouting, "RUN! RUN!" and diving for cover as the massive machine spun in place, only to end up in the exact correct line and fire at full power. They pick themselves up, dust off, all agree that they meant to do that and immediately begin trying to claim credit for it to the General. The game was pretty much over there and that sealed the win for me. There were some other misfires, but nothing quite as notable as that. Perhaps apart from the item that I had on my General that powered him up but would kill him at the end of the battle if I rolled a 1. I rolled a 1.
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2012 02:33
|
|
|
What effect does losing your general at the end of a battle have?
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2012 02:58
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:What effect does losing your general at the end of a battle have? It was a while back, but I think under the rules for that item your opponent scores the points as if he'd killed him.
|
|
#
?
Nov 12, 2012 03:03
|
|
|
I want to talk about Paul. Paul is a very cool guy, who has devoted most of his life to becoming an original badass. It's like every lie a neckbeard tells you about how cool he is came true and combined into one person. He also has absolutely terrible luck with his roleplaying characters. No matter what we play, it's almost guaranteed that Paul's character will die horribly. Initially it was mostly due to his own stupidity, but in recent years he's just had a mind-blowingly awful run of luck. The first time I played with Paul, our group was doing a MERP game. It's Rolemaster, so there are about a billion charts full of horrifying ways to die. We needed to sneak into a keep. We initially planned to storm the gate, but after noticing there were several dozen archers on the wall, we held back and decided on an alternate plan. Paul, for whatever reason, didn't catch this part. He stormed up the hill, a magic user who had yet to learn a spell and didn't wear armor. The archers shot on sight, and our GM managed to roll every separate effect on the critical puncture table. Paul's character took an arrow in every vital organ and all limbs, and would have died in two rounds of painful agony had the second arrow not severed his spine and kept him from feeling anything below the neck. In another game, we were playing dark noir versions of cartoon characters. Since Ghostbusters was technically a cartoon at one point, Paul was allowed to play as occult investigator Dr. Peter Venkman. The game wasn't intended to have any over supernatural overtones, so he mostly ended up finding a bunch of red herrings and generally making everybody paranoid. Which was great, our group loves that kind of thing. He gets kidnapped and held hostage by the villain's right hand henchman, who throws him out a second story window when he mouths off. Which he would have survived, but our Inspector Gadget player chose just that moment to fly up to the room and save him. Venkman ended up sliced to bits by Gadget's helicopter blades. My favorite was in a 3.5 gestalt campaign in which we played as classic video game characters, which is a good campaign for stories on its own. Paul was playing as Mega Man, who was essentially a warforged with an arm cannon. Our party had gotten messed up bad and barely limped out of an encounter with a couple of displacer beasts, but all we had to do was climb a ladder, a tall ladder that just required two very easy climb checks. Most of us just took ten, but since Paul only had one hand and was functioning on single-digit HP, he had it marginally tougher. DM: Okay Paul, you just need to not roll a 1. Paul: Okay. *rolls not a 1* DM: Great, you make it to the top of the ladder. Salvation is at hand. One more roll, Paul. Not a 1. Paul: Okay. *rolls a 1* poo poo. DM: I didn't tell you to roll yet, Paul. I wasn't ready. Do it again. Paul: Sorry, okay. *rolls another 1* God dammit! DM: Paul, that hit your glass. I need a full roll of the die or it doesn't count. Paul: Come on... *rolls ANOTHER 1* ARE YOU loving KIDDING ME!? DM: Dammit, Paul! Well, you only fall about 50 feet. You can survive this. *DM rolls max damage, taking Paul past -10* At this point, one of the other players text messaged Paul. Paul's message notification sound is Mega Man exploding. Paul has lost over 20 characters over the ten years I've known him, but those are the most noteworthy.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2012 16:30
|
|
|
This Paul reminds me of myself, only with just rpgs instead of everything.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2012 16:47
|
|
|
Ximum posted:Paul's message notification sound is Mega Man exploding.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2012 18:15
|
|
|
Friends don't let friends play in games where random die rolls can get a PC killed.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2012 20:52
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:Friends don't let friends play in games where random die rolls can get a PC killed. The alternative being what, exactly? GM fiat getting PCs killed?
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2012 23:53
|
|
|
Nietzschean posted:The alternative being what, exactly? GM fiat getting PCs killed? Either non-combat oriented games, or if you must play an adventurey game, just don't have the PCs die when they go under unless it's dramatically appropriate and the player is ok with losing the character. I have never once had a character go unconscious due to die rolls rather than plot and thought "it'd be great if I could die here".
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2012 23:58
|
|
|
Apart from some kind of deus ex machina, how would your perspective handle a situation in which multiple members of the party or the entire party were knocked out as opposed to killed? I don't see much of a mechanical or symbolic difference: in either case, you're sitting at the table while unable to do anything for a bit, and you don't get to play that character anymore. Of course you don't think your character dying is a good thing. That's the implicit motivation for you to avoid getting your character killed. PCs dying tend to muck up the works, not only for the individual player but for the rest of the team.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 00:00
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:Either non-combat oriented games, or if you must play an adventurey game, just don't have the PCs die when they go under unless it's dramatically appropriate and the player is ok with losing the character.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 00:05
|
|
|
Nietzschean posted:Apart from some kind of deus ex machina, how would your perspective handle a situation in which multiple members of the party or the entire party were knocked out as opposed to killed? I don't see much of a mechanical or symbolic difference: in either case, you're sitting at the table while unable to do anything for a bit, and you don't get to play that character anymore. Of course you don't think your character dying is a good thing. That's the implicit motivation for you to avoid getting your character killed. PCs dying tend to muck up the works, not only for the individual player but for the rest of the team. This is also why I don't play in RPGs that are glorified skins on wargames. This isn't really the thread for this though and I apologize for the derail.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 00:05
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:This is also why I don't play in RPGs that are glorified skins on wargames. This isn't really the thread for this though and I apologize for the derail.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 00:40
|
|
|
It's a rare game where your risk of death is between 1/8000 and none. Probability itself wanted him to fall off that ladder. Anyways, I played another game of Fiasco. (Maybe you can tell I like Fiasco). It was the Hong Kong '97 action set, where we had four awesome relationships: Partners in Adultery where one had a sibling on the other side of the law who was hunted by a loving assassin who was a newlywed with a secret. In other words: I ended up playing a hitwoman (Paula Shao), who had married a low level criminal (Hwan Chao) for a nefarious purpose. Along the way, I fell in love with the target of my assassination (Fan Wei), a semi-disgraced cop whose brother "Al Capone" was a drug-taking thug, who was the boyfriend of my husband. Things people did that were nice -Al and Hwan shared a beautiful dinner overlooking the night market and the harbor. Below, a street fight raged over a drug deal they'd bungled, with thugs attacked each other with bats and cleavers. Paula bailed her husband and his friend out of prison. Things people did that were not nice Fan got his brother Al Capone arrested during a raid at an all night disco. -This was retaliation for Al Capone, who sent Fan to prison for alleged drug trafficking. (It involved Al Fedexing drugs to Fan's apartment with Fan's name on it). -Hwan stole Paula's bankbook and tried to rob her blind; -A bunch of triads beat the poo poo out of Hwan and Al in prison -Paula used Al and Hwan to oversee drug deals and draw Fan into the open at a park outside of town; -Fan set a trap for his own brother, not wanting to get screwed again. Fan's low standing in the police department, in addition to calling in a lot of favors, led to a squad of dregs, who chased Al through the woods... --Which allowed Paula to shoot Fan through his binoculars. Things that were just unlucky Paula lost a heel escaping the park, linking her to the scene of the crime: --Her bank book was confiscated when Hwan took it, and allowed Fan link the large random deposits to crime families ---She was arrested by a personal shopper while buying new shoes. Hwan delivered a package from Al to Fan's house, but assumed someone would sign for it; When he knocked, the only people at the apartment were cops, telling Fan's father about Fan being killed. Al Capone was sitting pretty, until Hwan snitched, leading to one of the least comfortable prison terms of all time, with Hwan given the cell across from him to watch it. Fan made his way into all of mainland China's police manuals, as a cautionary tale. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Nov 19, 2014 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 01:22
|
|
|
If Paul and everyone else involved is having fun does it matter what system they're playing?
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 02:08
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:Then make a thread for it because I really curious as to where exactly you're going with this, where you're coming from, what you consider a "glorified wargame", and what games you do play that are so very different from the baseline. Sent you a PM.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 02:18
|
|
|
Ratpick posted:That sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. I need to do something like that at some point. It's really easy to set it up, because apart from the pile of pregens and the "only 4 people in the dungeon" rule, that's pretty much how you'd play Basic D&D if you'd never touched an RPG and just read the rulebook. I mean, poison attacks were literally "save or die", and the optional rule for poisons was "the DM predetermines how much damage to roll on a failed save". The door was amazing, yes. I went over the DM notes a couple of days after the game, and found that there was a piano in another room (that we missed) that if inspected would be seen to have "password" engraved under the keyboard. Yes, the password was under the keyboard. gently caress. Error 404 posted:Yeah, that right there is 'adversarial' GMing done right. Well yeah, we're oldschool players, and the red box is what we collectively started roleplaying with. It's hard to do a similar thing in a newer game where character creation takes longer than 60 seconds (it's literally "roll attributes and HP, buy equipment, pick your one spell if you're a magic-user or elf, pick a name"). You could play exactly like we did without the pile of pregens and the houserule "your new guy arrives when you finish making him up". There are no rules about adding a new character into the game. There aren't even guidelines. He can just show up in the dungeon (the solo adventure in the PHB has this pretty much happen - your fighter wanders into a dungeon and meets a cleric and adventures with her). Specifically, the Red Box does only one thing - dungeoncrawling - and does it pretty drat well for an ancient game.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 02:31
|
|
|
I guess for a good card game story: I was playing Magic the Gathering Online with a couple of goons, one of which was fairly new. As we play to have fun I targeted the new player’s tiny little wizard with a buff card, then another, then another. Before long we had the terrible "Buff Wizard" (for those that play magic he was a 1/1 red wizard with a tap power that I made I think 30/30) the new player then gave him a knife and robot armor (making him I think drat close to 40/40) and he proceeded to kill me and a couple others while the other goons could not stop him and yelled at me, in a joking way, about the horror that I had created while I yelled about how he’s gotta be swole and to obey the muscles. I still laugh when thinking about the "Buff Wizard". I think he was finally stopped by a card that just outright kills a creature, with the corresponding Carl from Aqua Teen comments about how good muscles are against knives. I like giving new players horrible weapons of mass destruction.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 02:41
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:Then make a thread for it because I really curious as to where exactly you're going with this, where you're coming from, what you consider a "glorified wargame", and what games you do play that are so very different from the baseline. There is literally a thread for  indie games, to say nothing of threads for various out-there un-war games, to say even more nothing about Fiasco, which makes frequent appearances in this thread including on this very page.It's great to be into wow-gamey stuff like 3e, but please don't pretend like it's the only poo poo ever shat. e: Actually, speaking of Fiasco, the bestest briefest survey of rpg possibilities is probably just the Bully Pulpit Games corpus, especially their free downloads. Just please do direct further inquiries in the appropriate thread. 
Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Nov 15, 2012 |
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 18:16
|
|
|
Doc Hawkins posted:There is literally a thread for  There is a massive gulf between "combat is the only thing that matters" and "the only rules I need are the most basic of conflict resolutions" and it's full of games. Don't put words in my mouth, and especially don't conjure entire opinions out of nothing and attribute them to me.My "inquiry" was to cheetah specifically and what he personally was playing, not a general call-out for information on games that are not wargames. Since he made his posts here, this was the appropriate thread.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 18:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 15:10 |
|
|
Also Call of Cthulhu is clearly a nothing-but-combat glorified wargame. Since that's the only kind where characters die regularly.
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2012 18:52
|
|
