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Guildencrantz posted:Ahahahahaha drat son. Even with our Rule One (no torture, ever) I'd be worried to do that because my players would still probably do something nasty like cutting off a body part or something. If they decided to just humiliate the poo poo out of him, you have a pretty good group in the making. Yea, I'm really glad my group isn't nasty or anything, they're more about the shenanigans so i trust them not to do anything over the line. The bathroom exchange was actually hilarious because when the dude tried to go to the bathroom ( I can't remember why he wanted to do this, I didn't make the players ever have to piss), I told him the door was locked. He busted down the door and 1 hit KO'd the guy in the bathroom. When I rolled to see if anyone noticed, he got an 18. The second dude just simply wanted to use the bathroom but the player yelled, "NO WITNESSES", killed him on sight,and rolled a 20 on the witness part. They always get really lucky when it comes to rolling for stupid poo poo like this, and then when the situation is actually dire they constantly make terrible rolls. In my opinion that's what makes for the best results. Captain_Indigo posted:The party Charisma is always fun to play with as a DM. The one time I let my old group choose their own stats based on a certain number they could pick from. One guy gave himself 1 of every stat except charisma, which he gave himself 25 of or something stupid like that. He would always hide during fights but man, he was a smooth talker 
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Jan 6, 2013 01:58
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So this happened in the latest session of the D&D game I’m a player in: The game is based on Castlevania, specifically taking place parallel to the events of Symphony of the Night. We’re a group comprised of three first responders to Dracula’s advances, and two demon ambassadors from hell sent to put Dracula on notice for getting too big for his britches. The Paladin, a righteous defender who also likes to dance The Wizard, canon character Maria Reinart, who is surprisingly foul mouthed for a 17 year old girl in the 18th century. The Warlord, my character, whose specialty is having ridiculous athletics skills despite being like 50-something. The Rogue, a peasant from hell who likes to stab things. Her player wasn’t here for this game. The Warlock, a hellish noble who likes to curse things. The Warlord doesn’t like him much for being a demon and all. His player wasn’t here for this game. So we took a few wrong turns and have been lost in the catacombs beneath Dracula’s castle for a while, and we decided to take some boats down an underground river without considering that we might need a way back UP river. We also ran into Abaddon, the Angel of Destruction, but he got eaten trying to help us escape aberrant horrors. Eventually, we followed the underground river to a rather large underground lake with a pillar in the middle. While Maria is probing it with her magic senses… it wakes up. Turns out it was a sixty-foot tall Earth elemental. Fortunately, he’s pretty nice. He tends to the fish that swim in his lake. After debating a few options, we ask the Elemental for directions out of the underground lake. He points us on, but just then… Death shows up. Death is usually one of the higher level bosses in the Castlevania games, but our party is almost suicidally reckless, so we’re not exactly quaking in our boots to fight him. (After all, if the Belmonts can take him alone, surely we can do it as a group of five!  )But for some reason, Death has only been using underlings against us to the point that the party has been taunting Death and calling him a wimp and a coward. Death reminds the Elemental that he was supposed to protect the lake from intruders.  Oh, they’re intruders? I thought they were humans. Kill them or I’ll kick you out of your room and kill your fish.We taunt Death once more as he flies away, but the party gets its wires crossed. Paladin, who is rowing the boat with Rogue, is trying to run away. The Wizard, who is in the boat I’m rowing along with the Warlock, casts an ice zone spell that minimally damages the Elemental, but starts freezing the lake around the Elemental to give us a place to stand if we have to fight. On my first turn I leap out of the boat (which only I have the Athletics to effectively maneuver) and grab on to the Elememental’s arm. My plan is to climb up to his head and apply blunt force trauma. I’m not sure what I thought this would accomplish on an elemental, but after round two, I failed to hold on to the giant’s arm. So failing that, I drove my spear into the elemetnal’s belly and did a heavy amount of damage. Meanwhile the Wizard hit it with magic missile repeatedly, and after the second time the Elemetnal observed that we were actually starting to hurt it. Then I realize… we can both win this. I tell him to pull his punches but make it look good, make it look like he’s killed us. In round three, I ask the elemental to smash me through the ice, which he does easily. The rest of the party retreats in our boats while I swim to the shore—and for good measure the elemental makes a vast wave that smashes our boats into the rest of the party—Maria using Ghost Sound to provide some Wilhelm Screams of our demise. The Elemental thunders about how he has defeated us, and we sneak away in the ruckus, hearing, down the hall, some Fishmen crowing about how the Elemental destroyed the intruders. Tl;dr: we fooled Death into thinking we were dead.
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Jan 6, 2013 05:13
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Froghammer posted:
Moving this tale over to here to avoid grog.txt from being locked again. This is a story. A story about one man and his dealing with a Filipino autist in a 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons game. I should start with Adslahnit himself. Some of you may be familiar with that name, primarily with his Charop shenanigans on the WotC board; he is also known as Touhoufag on /tg/, and would often post weird builds and offer advice on D&D while posting pictures of Touhou characters. His claims to fame include breaking 4th edition a month before it hit the bookshelves, and getting sued by WotC for distributing pirated PDFs. When I say he is an autist, I am not joking--he is legally autistic, and a high-functioning one at that. He has a way with numbers that can put most game designers to shame (not that it's saying much), and in passing contact with him there seems to be nothing really wrong with the guy. I think that, were he given proper treatment at a younger age, he might have turned out better...but as it is, he's intolerable once you get to know him. And oh, I got to know him. I did not start off gaming with him. We talked briefly on /tg/ here and there, swapping Charop stuff or discussing touhous, and at some point we contacted one another over mIRC. Or rather, he came to me, asking for advice on how to play a character in what I think was a nMage game. He didn't really know how to convey feelings very well, or how to deal with people on a personal level, and he wanted to know how best to do that in-character. I figure, well, why not? Perhaps this would help him beyond just trying to roleplay. Oh, how naive I was! I'd look back on it and wonder how I could tolerate him like I did, with his control issues and his all-encompassing desire to finish a campaign, any campaign, but I'm getting ahead of myself. At some point later on, he mentioned there was an opening in a 4e Eberron campaign he and two others were in, and I jumped at the chance. Dude, I said to myself, Eberron! I've always wanted to play that! Excitedly I made myself a character, one that I'm still proud of--a warforged Avenger of the Path of Light named Book, a kind of enlightened golem hell-bent on killing all the Quori. Adslahnit and another player were both more and less original; you see, Ads had a thing for the Touhous, and liked to play one in a game. Sometimes he was subtle about it, other times overt, but he still used actual fluff within whatever game it was to make it a reality. In that way, he was clever, but it strained at the fibres of the narrative at times (more on that later). So what did these two make? Satori and Koishi Komeiji. Both as young Kalashtar girls, one as a psion and the other as...well, I can't recall what Koishi was, a bard perhaps, but it didn't really matter all that much. To their credit they made it work and played it up very well--Adslahnit played Satori as a barely-sane emotionally dead control freak, and Koishi was a space cadet moonchild with occasional lucid moments. There was a third player, who rolled an ice-themed monk, but he was pretty irrelevant both to the campaign and to this story. From this point I will refer to them by their character names. Satori...Satori had this desire to finish a campaign. He'd been stuck in a series of one-shots and short-lived campaigns for a number of years now, and for one reason or another they always fell apart; that he couldn't seem to grasp that he may have been at fault never seemed to occur to him. I think by the time I joined it was reaching a kind of fever pitch within him, as despite not being the DM he took control of nearly every aspect of the campaign. Mountains of house rules, including higher than normal stats and an insistence at starting at 16th level; custom paragon paths; altered racial stats; even including aspects from FATE. He even created the monsters we were to fight, removing a certain level of surprise and, truth be told, I never quite trusted his ability to be unbiased with that. It wasn't just the rules he'd keep an iron grip on, either. The original DM left before we even got a single session in, and the next one we got was a wet napkin who basically bowed to Satori at every turn. He was also the only other American aside from myself; Satori and the monk were both from the Philippines, and Koishi was from Italy or Greece or somewhere thereabouts. Scheduling, as you can imagine, was a total nightmare, forcing some people to stay up well past their bedtimes to get a game in. When we did get a game in, it was tightly regimented, with Satori demanding scenes to be switched at certain times and the plot to be moved along at his pace, rather than that of the DM. Now, I'm not one to think that the DM = God and should be in control 100%, but when one of the players is backseat DMing it quickly gets tiresome. This isn't to say it was all bad. There were moments where things shined, when our characters all got along well and we had some excellent roleplaying. It was quickly established that, despite being what was basically a robot, I was the most human and compassionate of the group--so much so that Satori in-character thought Book to be 'pure.' Koishi was second behind Book in terms of humanity, and though as flighty as a bird on cocaine she was kind to everyone, believing the best in people. Satori was cold, calculating, but barely a person--she bordered on being a monster and knew it, deeming the ends justifying the means for the Greater Good. Our goal was to force the wheel to turn and bring Eberron into a new age, forcing the evil Quori to die and be reborn and purge them of their taint. An epic goal, and would have been an epic game had things panned out. As is so common with such things, though, it didn't; things began to unravel on my end. Satori's control issues were getting to me, the weird schedules were taking their toll on my ability to sleep, and it began to feel more like a chore than a game. In the end I didn't have to do anything--my laptop fried itself one night, and for a while I was without proper internet. The group moved on without me and erased Book from history, pretending he never existed, which was all well and good given that I no longer truly cared. I stopped coming to the IRC room, and lost touch with the lot of'em. I'm told that Adslahnit went on to create yet more drama, this time involving a shota catboy, but that's not my tale to tell.
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Jan 6, 2013 21:07
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I don't think you quite get the point of this thread.
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Jan 6, 2013 22:05
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Gilgameshback posted:I don't think you quite get the point of this thread. It's a notable gaming encounter. It's more of a "lovely complain about someone else" thing, but it's still a story with a beginning, middle and end, and it even has a moral (don't try to 'cure' other roleplayers!) I ran a Paranoia game before Christmas. The objective was to learn the True meaning of 'ChrismahYule' (which turned into 'NewYule', which turned into 'ChriskaNoel'), as well as buy Friend Computer a present from MALL sector. If you give the players good secret missions, a game of Paranoia runs itself. Each player was designed to kill and protect two other players, as well as either Learn the True Meaning of ChrismaTime or Steal all the Presents Yourself. A few things jumped out: *The troubleshooters were more obsessed with killing each other than driving, leading almost the entire car to die several times. What I meant to be a little speedbump led to nearly 2 full TPKs. *The team got into their head that they had to find Christ and put him in Christmas. They identified the following things as Christ: *A shopping mall *Santa *The Grinch (who they killed). *The team rigged a hover sweater to kill The T-1000, who chased down their flying sled for a Turboman Doll. It ended with a big speech on the mall's stage: each person explained what the meaning of ChrisNolan was, in ways that were violent, idiotic, and/or disgusting. In a magical holiday twist, killing the Grinch allowed Friend Computer to take over MALL sector! Santa was turned into a Cyborg, as was everyone there. All assembled sang a happy song, or else.
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Jan 6, 2013 22:50
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Slimnoid posted:I'm told that Adslahnit went on to create yet more drama, this time involving a shota catboy, but that's not my tale to tell. Gilgameshback posted:I don't think you quite get the point of this thread.
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Jan 7, 2013 00:02
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Slimnoid posted:I should start with Adslahnit himself. Some of you may be familiar with that name, primarily with his Charop shenanigans on the WotC board; he is also known as Touhoufag on /tg/, and would often post weird builds and offer advice on D&D while posting pictures of Touhou characters. I have to admit I did a double take when I read that because that made me realize I've browsed /tg/ for so long that I recall the fuzz that got kicked up when he got banned from it. Not so sure what to think of that realization to be honest. Slimnoid posted:I'm told that Adslahnit went on to create yet more drama, this time involving a shota catboy, but that's not my tale to tell. Wait a second, this isn't the shota catboy in FATE thing that I know I've read about? If so I can only say "It's a small world." And I have to second what Colon V said on the matter if we're going to talk about it further. Speaking of horrible stories I really don't actually have that much offer since most of my playing has been with a bunch of decent sensible people. Closest I've got is a short note on my first 3.5 campaign I played in my early teens with a gaming group which was pretty okay back then and still kinda think it was even if one of the players was a bit of an rear end at times and then there was the guy in another group who played a half-vampire that looked far too much like Bloodrayne. But that's about it. Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jan 7, 2013 |
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Jan 7, 2013 00:09
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Colon V posted:As Golden Bee said, it's a notable gaming story- this thread's title is inspired by Cat Piss Man, you can't say "I played a game with someone kinda weird" isn't within its purview. People getting shot? What's that got to do with gaming?!
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Jan 7, 2013 06:13
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...Whoops, thought he was quoting Slimnoid's post.
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Jan 7, 2013 06:37
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Word on the wire in my group is that a new player wants to join. He's the friend of a friend who originally wanted to be the President of Arkalon , but settled for a Drow Antipaladin after learning our party was trapped in the Underdark at the end of our last session. Normally, I'd be opposed to a chaotic evil character in our mostly good party, but the player insists he won't be antagonistic since they all share common goals. Enemy of my enemy type situation. Hopefully it doesn't go too sour. Has anyone had widely conflicting alignments in a party work out?
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Jan 8, 2013 22:57
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JAssassin posted:Word on the wire in my group is that a new player wants to join. He's the friend of a friend who originally wanted to be the President of Arkalon The 4e group I was in was about as mixed-alignment as it got (lawful good, good, two unaligneds, and a chaotic evil) and we got through two tiers of gameplay swimmingly. It's important that everybody OOC-understands that the group needs to stay together and works to fit their in-character actions to that framework; having characters argue over moral approaches now and then is fine but if it becomes a central element of the group then you might have to take a step back and say "Guys, remember what we said about solidarity." Basically everybody has a right to say "but that's what my character would doooo" only until it starts to disrupt everybody else's gameplay without permission. It also helps if you make sure not to reduce people to just their alignment - characters are three-dimensional and have friends, family, etc. beyond the scope of their alignments, after all. Ironically, in my group, the lawful good paladin and the chaotic evil wizard were closer than any two other characters. They were constantly trying to convert each other, always framing the current situation as a demonstration of why their ideology was superior, and there was none of the PVP violence or backstabbing that usually marks inter-party conflict because their players thought it'd be more fun if each viewed the other as more valuable converted than dead. Kind of like very antagonistic best friends.
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Jan 8, 2013 23:56
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Slimnoid posted:
And thus we make progress, although honestly it does bug me when cool or otherwise interesting stories get buried in grogs.txt. Doc Hawkins posted:People getting shot? What's that got to do with gaming?! I once had a player miss a session because he was in jail for beating a man unconscious with a pool ball. He still made it to the session, he came right from jail. Good man, he was.
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Jan 9, 2013 02:18
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Solomonic posted:Kind of like very antagonistic best friends.
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Jan 9, 2013 04:24
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Colon V posted:Now I'm imagining them as less-dysfunctional Batman and the Joker. (Let's not have a 'Batman's alignment' argument, please.)  Yawgmoth posted:I just go with "murderhobo" for my alignment. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Jan 9, 2013 |
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Jan 9, 2013 04:44
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The White Dragon posted:As far as I'm concerned, Batman is an alignment. But if you want to write that on your character sheet in one of my games, you better do your best Christian Bale impression
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Jan 9, 2013 05:09
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Colon V posted:Now I'm imagining them as less-dysfunctional Batman and the Joker. (Let's not have a 'Batman's alignment' argument, please.) He's not the alignment that we want, but perhaps he's the alignment that we deserve.
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Jan 9, 2013 05:59
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The biggest reason why I label him as "Chaotic Evil Drow" is because that's all he's given me so far to expect. I'm sure I'll find out more once we hit the actual session.
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Jan 9, 2013 07:46
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JAssassin posted:The biggest reason why I label him as "Chaotic Evil Drow" is because that's all he's given me so far to expect. I'm sure I'll find out more once we hit the actual session. Oh, I know, I didn't mean you. I meant that a player shouldn't reduce his own character to their alignment in terms of how to play them - the alignment should be an aftereffect of the character, not the other way around. So hopefully, when the game starts, he'll play it less "chaotic evil anti-paladin" and more, I don't know, "dude who sought out evil power after the campaign villain killed his wife, and now seeks bloody revenge against your mutual adversary so he works with you guys." Argh, I don't think I'm phrasing this as well as I could. Either way, good luck! The great thing about this kind of situation is that within one session you'll probably be immediately aware of whether he's going to be a total pain in the rear end to play with, and you can quietly forget to invite him back if so.
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Jan 9, 2013 10:13
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Solomonic posted:Oh, I know, I didn't mean you. I meant that a player shouldn't reduce his own character to their alignment in terms of how to play them - the alignment should be an aftereffect of the character, not the other way around. So hopefully, when the game starts, he'll play it less "chaotic evil anti-paladin" and more, I don't know, "dude who sought out evil power after the campaign villain killed his wife, and now seeks bloody revenge against your mutual adversary so he works with you guys." I get what you're saying. This is the same player who ran an incredibly racist luchador wrestler character named "El Tigre" in a medieval fantasy setting, but that was years ago. I'm hoping he's changed, but we'll see. Like you said, worse come to worse, he just doesn't show up next week.
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Jan 9, 2013 18:15
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JAssassin posted:I get what you're saying. This is the same player who ran an incredibly racist luchador wrestler character named "El Tigre" in a medieval fantasy setting, but that was years ago. I'm hoping he's changed, but we'll see. Like you said, worse come to worse, he just doesn't show up next week. Chaltab fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Jan 9, 2013 |
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Jan 9, 2013 21:00
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Chaltab posted:So was El Tigre racist in the sense that he hated dwarves or black people, or whatever... or was he racist in the sense that he was a stereotype of Mexicans? Either way sounds like it could be a story for this thread. El Tigre was a Mexican stereotype and it wasn't that interesting. He tried (and failed) to grapple people while calling people putas, and that was about it.
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Jan 10, 2013 01:58
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Some of you may remember the story I told in one of the previous threads about my buddy who's a tremendous world-builder and decent DM but a few times got really angry about his character not performing to the absolute optimum. I recently played a game with him again and this time he actually got into a bona fide screaming-and-then-crying fit that forced us to abandon a marathon session we'd all been planning for a month and made the chillest man in the world yell at him, when, and this really is the entire reason, he felt he had no decent options left during the last fight. Partly, as he later said, because it was late and he'd been having a backache and job worries, but mostly, as I avoided saying later, because homeboy has huge glaring psychological issues that make him unable to bear the thought of disappointing anyone and therefore rendered him unable to say either "sorry guys, can't make the game" or "I think I'm getting too tired to carry on, can we call it a day, or else you'll have to play on without me" or even "hey I know I said I was okay earlier on but I'm more tired than I thought" at any point. I suppose I'm putting this here as a cautionary tale because I'm planning a new campaign and prior to this I'd thought, dude seems to have his poo poo together these days and always has good ideas, I should invite him. He apologized about 500 times and was his usual self the next day (in case you're wondering, yes, those two things are closely correlated) but nonetheless I am now not inviting him. Nice guy, no fun at all to play D&D with. Remember my tale if you know someone like that and you probably do. Serious scorpion/frog poo poo going on there.
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Jan 10, 2013 18:56
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Today, while DMing I uttered the following sentence. "Sir Isaac Newton spends an Action Point to gain a move action and then leaps from Pinkie Pie's face to the Statue of Liberty's armpit." I'm not sure if this counts as The Good, the Bad, or the Cat Piss, but it did make me question what I'm doing with my life.
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Jan 13, 2013 05:43
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Chaltab posted:Today, while DMing I uttered the following sentence.
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Jan 13, 2013 06:27
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Today my group played our first ever session of Scion, and we're really enjoying the system a lot. Our characters all seem to have barely concealed personality disorders simmering away below the surface, and we spent most of our introductions sniping at each other, which OOC was a lot of fun. We're all looking forward to seeing how they finally manage to get over their dickishness and work as a team. Not a very exciting story, but some of the most fun our group has had roleplaying in a long time.
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Jan 13, 2013 08:08
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Ah hell, why not another tale or two? Why It Pays To Know The Rules Part 1 Every GM, ever, has been in this situation, at one time or another. I had the bad luck (or bad planning) to be caught in one twice. The first time, I was running the Eye of the Beholder CRPG as a 3.5E campaign. This is the same campaign an earlier story dealt with, where the fighter had been outwitted by, of all things, kobolds. But nonetheless, the party had moved on within level one of the dungeon, and had found the Prison. In the CRPG, this is a 30x15 room, with jail cells filled with skeleton warriors in it. They wouldn't be able to attack unless the party opened each jail cell door, but it was going to be a long fight if they decided to do so. Or so I thought. What actually happened? I lovingly described the dark room, with it's rusted iron cage doors, and, as the cleric of the party moved toward one door, I also lovingly described how one of the skeleton warriors leapt out of the darkness of the cell he was looking at, and attempted to smack him through the bars. He immediately freaked out (both in character and out of character!) and yelled out "TURN UNDEAD!" So I asked him to roll the HD turned. Two nat 20s. Then the rest of the roll. A further nat 20, with a high number rolled thereafter... ...Long story short, I found myself unable to decide whether to laugh or cry, as he'd successfully managed to turn every single skeleton in that prison. So I lovingly described the sounds of bones crumbling and turning to ash, the bright light from his god's power, etc, and took a smoke break. A long one. Why It Pays To Know The Rules Part 2 A later Forgotten Realms campaign involved a player we shall call John. John was one of those players a GM dreads: The guy who, like Brian Van Hoose, has encyclopaedic knowledge of the rules, is willing to call them out, and has made a full 20 level plan for both his character and his girlfriend's. I could see, from the get go, there was going to be trouble. I didn't know how much. The climactic encounter of the session was going to be a Stone Troll, or some such. They'd been fighting low level Slaadi for a little while, were a little injured, and I was expecting a lot of hair raising drama to result from this. John, it must be said, was playing a Warlock. "Ray of Stupidity". [shooka shooka] "full intelligence loss as per the spell, Jay." And so, because I hadn't planned sufficiently for my very own Brian, the climactic encounter of the session was essentially a stone troll lumbering in, roaring... while the warlock raised one finger, and the troll became brain-dead, and the party walked past its corpse to the rest of the dungeon. Thanks, John. Encounter Levels, And Why They Lie Also as many DnD GMs know, the EL tables for many a monster lie through their back teeth. And so it was with Bulettes of 3rd and 3.5E. For those who don't know, Bulettes, otherwise known as Landsharks, are burrowing, heavily armoured carnivores which have one special feature: Leap and Rake. So let's see, how did the various encounters with Bulettes go in my various games? Dark Sun 3.5 - A mated pair, who didn't use Leap and Rake, died within six rounds. Forgotten Realms - Leapt from the desert, eviscerated the cleric of the party within a single round, brought a near healthy party to the brink of death, and wrecked their caravan. Eberron - The party caused an avalanche, and went the long way round, rather than face a pair. And yet, against the advice of my own common sense, my players' desperate pleas, I occasionally put a Bulette in the encounters. I have yet to receive a result that doesn't either a) kill at least one player, or b) die without causing any damage of note. Meanwhile, single kobolds have outwitted players enough to cause more than the damage they should, and, in one particularly infamous case among the group, a goblin running away in Return to Undermountain (with the assistance of his friends) almost killed the entire group. This doesn't really come under Encounter Levels though, this comes under stupidity. The goblin was running past a trap manned by his goblin mates, deeper into his tribe's territory. This particular trap was a spikey log that would swing down, slam somebody, then swing back up into the roof, where it latched itself until the goblins pulled a lever. This is how it went down. GROUP: That goblin is taunting us, we move forward and [goblins pull lever] OW, poo poo! GROUP [Still standing under trap]: So how are we going to - [goblins pull lever] gently caress! GROUP [Still standing under trap]: - Deal with - [goblins pull lever] BASTARD! GM: Guys, you do realise you're standing, and arguing, while this trap repeatedly smacks you? GROUP [Guess]: Wait a minute, we still have to - [goblins pull lever, start falling about laughing behind the walls] JESUS! Wait, what did he say? Not their proudest moment. Definitely mine, because I was having no trouble whatsoever roleplaying the goblins, who were in hysterics. The party retreated in short order.
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Jan 13, 2013 10:08
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Do you have an egg timer for them to decide their action or did they actually role play staying in the same spot?
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Jan 13, 2013 15:52
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Volmarias posted:Do you have an egg timer for them to decide their action or did they actually role play staying in the same spot? Basically, what happened was they spent a minute discussing IC, so the trap went off again, and I hinted at them that maybe they should move. This happened about twice more (with around 25 seconds of in-character discussion inbetween each one) before they got the god-drat hint.
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Jan 13, 2013 16:18
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So you just sort of decided that their turns ended and the trap went off again?
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Jan 13, 2013 18:05
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Yawgmoth posted:I want context, but I am afraid that context would somehow lessen the absurdity. The campaign is set in the Legend of Zelda universe. One of the PCs is a character who got warped into it from a post-magipocalypse reality that was once like the real world. They've also met several NPCs who've fallen into the Zelda universe from worlds similar to the real world, all of which is part of a plot hook for Epic Tier. In the immediate context of Heroic Tier, though, they were investigating the actions of a villain called Chancellor Cole, and stumbled upon the fact that he'd captured the God of Dreams and was using his power for nefarious purposes. The party was pulled into a dream world where they were attacked by Freddy Kruger--someone 'brought' to this world's dream realm by the PC and those like him. So basically it was a dream-scape encounter in which they fought Freddy Kruger, plus dream versions of Abraham Lincoln, Isaac Newton, and Jacob Marley. Pinkie Pie and the Statue of Liberty were both parts of the background. Basically it was an elaborate excuse for me to do a session where I could just go crazy with the backdrops and enemies.
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Jan 13, 2013 18:25
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Really Pants posted:So you just sort of decided that their turns ended and the trap went off again? Turns and time have always had a tumultuous relationship in D&D. If they were actually having in-character talks, not just OOC bull-sessions, and they ignored the trap repeatedly going off in their face, it's their own drat fault. Believe me, if my group heard me say "Looks like the goblins have reloaded and are readying another volley!" they'd get the hell out of the way.
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Jan 13, 2013 18:32
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I just started a game of Scion (as GM), and we were doing character creation. I was having everyone go around the table and tell me their scion's background. The last one to go was a female scion of Loki. She gives a brief description of her character's life, and then I ask her how she met her dad. She hesitated for a few minutes, when one of the other players blurted out "OKCupid?!" and the entire table burst out laughing and decided that was totally something Loki would do. Needless to say, we went with that. Then I asked her how her character's relationship with Loki was, and she said, "Really awkward. I thought I was getting a boyfriend but I ended up getting a dad and a bunch of junk." I think I'm going to have fun with this group. Considering there are scions of Hermes, Dionysus, and Loki in one group, and our scion of Ogoun would do anything to make a buck, I forsee many oppurtunities for hilarity and chaos. My old vampire game (I was a PC, not GM for most of that one) had a lot of pretty awesome moments too. My nerdy, frail malk ended up being BFFs with the big, burly Gangrel, leading to lots of comedy gold moments.
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Jan 13, 2013 19:46
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Captain Bravo posted:Turns and time have always had a tumultuous relationship in D&D. If they were actually having in-character talks, not just OOC bull-sessions, and they ignored the trap repeatedly going off in their face, it's their own drat fault. Yeah, this is pretty much it. It definitely wasn't their first rodeo (they'd successfully completed about three campaigns by this time, and crashed and burned about nine more), and my hints were more along the lines of "Guys, you're standing under this trap while discussing your options, maybe you should move?" speaking of which... Sometimes, You Just Have To Draw A Line... Once, I made the mistake of running nVampire, set in my home county. The campaign crashed and burned, but it's sort of important to say why. You see, we had a loon in the group. Same one as my previous stories, and he was absolutely determined to Embrace the staff of the gaming shop I worked at... something that, right off, was seriously derailing the game. So, I had a little chat with the store manager on the break between sessions, we drew up a character sheet, and waited till the next session... Our little loon quite handily broke into the game shop. I described the swords on the wall, the books, the shelves, and our manager, Dick... who suddenly flitted forward, and surrounded our loon (who'd decided to do this on his own) himself. How did he do this? Time 3 or so, Space 3 or so, Mind 3 or so. Yup. Extreme measures were taken, and the store manager had been turned into a Mage of no small water. A Mage who extracted a geas out of our loon on the edge of no less than four cutlasses (one at each cardinal point). Of course, that didn't stop his desire to Embrace somebody in the slightest, and so, geas bound to serve and not harm the Magus Dick, he went after the other store member, who we shall call Chef. Now, before anyone says anything, this was the kind of player who, until he matured, couldn't be distracted from derailing for anything (but, as the story of Flail and Hammer Axenshield shows, it was worth it in the end), and extreme measures were often needed to get the game quickly on track (to the point where anytime red eyes in the dark and the words: "Puuuuuuuuurrrrr-deeeeeeee" came sepulchrally, said player hurriedly rectified his "mistake"). So, what extreme measure did we need to get everything back on track, to dissuade him from Embracing for the hell of it? Well, the player knocked on the door, fully intending to leap on the poor kine and drink him dry, when a mountain of blackened, charred flesh with red eyes opened the door... ...And I pointed out that the Demon line was technically still canon. He hurriedly rushed back to the group, and the story continued... Alas, though, it was all for naught, as it turned out the group didn't get on with nWoD's system, and the game splintered a few sessions later. But, sometimes, you just have to draw a line.
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Jan 14, 2013 07:39
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One of the characters in our sandbox-y Savage Worlds campaign is, for all intents and purposes, Daenerys Targaryen: a dethroned, exiled princess hell-bent on raising an army and storming home to retake her rightful throne. Her character is essentially a battery of leadership abilities, not all that combat-effective in and of herself but the linchpin around which a decently-sized troupe of cannon fodder revolves. The ragged beginnings of her army: twelve theoretically-reformed bandits. As they were all identical stat-wise and miniatures-wise, she numbered them from one to twelve and then assigned them all names from Star Wars. Whenever one of her underlings died or had something interesting happen to them, she'd roll a d12 to find out which one it had been. (Needless to say, when Padme died, the entire table broke out in a chorus of NOOOOOOOOOOs that essentially ended gaming for the next half an hour.) This brings me to Anakin. Purely through the luck of the dice, everything mind-scarring happened to Anakin. Always Anakin. Snatched up and nearly drowned by a water elemental? Roll: Anakin. Possessed by an evil artifact he just sort of happened to find and pick up? Roll: Anakin. Brainwashed by one side in a nasty elven faction war? Roll: Anakin. Eventually it got to be so noticeable that Anakin got a distinct miniature of his own, which was when we started noticing that--while he was just about the unluckiest son-of-a-bitch in the world when it came to encounters--he was consistently lucky in his die-rolling otherwise. He's still alive. He's getting stronger. He's also kind of mentally twisted because of all the bad poo poo that constantly happens to him and all the evil magic that's been slapping him around, and of course he hangs out with a bunch of murder hoboes. Some day we're going to sit down to play and discover that Anakin has grown a wild die--the Savage Worlds difference between 'cannon fodder' and 'named character'--and then, I suspect, we're all going to learn the true meaning of nemesis.
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Jan 14, 2013 09:19
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I love my players. I'm running a 3.5 Eberron game, and they are dropping off some spies in the Lhazaar Principalities since they helped them break into the Tower of the Twelve and want to disappear. And so of course they get into an airship battle with some pirates because it's the LP and they just bought themselves an airship, gotta fight with it! They maneuver (through the use of rebuke elemental and mind control) out of the way of the initial ram, then prepare to fire their snazzy experimental exploding artillery cannons at them. But one of my players is a warforged monk with ki blast, who has augmented his fist to be a Fist of Wonder. Y'know, like a Rod of Wonder, but triggering when he hits (1/round). Now, the RoW is a major artifact in my game because I wrote my own list for it and because I like the PCs having a powerful dangerous stick of pure gently caress Everything Randomly. So he asks if he can charge a shot and fire it in the cannon so that the RoW effect goes off when the missile hits. I say sure, because rule of cool. Missile hits, explodes, does a ton of damage to the enemy's prow and he rolls d%... ...and calls a daelkyr. A <1% chance of this happening, by the way. Now the pirates are freaking out because there's a goddamn daelkyr on the ship, whipping people to death and melting their flesh off and  . The pirate captain kills his derelict helmsman and tries to put the airship back on course for a second ramming attempt, but he gets hit by an energy push that knocks him into his cabin. Then he gets team-grappled by two lieutenants. A grapple he fails to break until the end of combat. The pseudodragon bard dimension doors his way to the helm and tries to gain control of the ship, but first he telepathically greets the daelkyr... and fails his will save vs. insanity. Our warforged monk fires at the daelkyr again, blasting the poo poo out of the ship and the daelkyr. The warforged psion energy blasts it, I give the pseudodragon a second save next turn (because permanent insanity is kinda dicks) and he passes with the aid of an action point. Then the monk yells out "hey, what'll do if I don't blast you again?" and it responds "I dunno, let's find out! I'm friendly!" and they actually have a chat with a daelkyr. They even tell him to clear out the rest of the pirates. Which he does with gusto. And they befriended him! At least for the time being, he's cooperating with them, if only for the novelty of seeing the surface world again. I need a  +  emote, because that is definitely my group.
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Jan 15, 2013 07:01
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They sound like my team. Every encounter, they steal everything that isn't nailed down. So, I threw an encounter at them with an assassin trained to respond to Orcish commands, and 4 lazylords telling him to run around and ruin everyone's poo poo. No nifty items, traps, or corporations to forcibly acquire. As soon as they figured out that he was following commands from the orcs, they cursed the fact that the orc player didn't show up for that game. "Ok, we've gotta fight this guy again, on a day when Eric is here, so we can steal him and use him ourselves."
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Jan 15, 2013 07:26
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Yeah my team picks up NPCs like freaking pokemon. They found a shadow dragon egg, and the party necromancer hatched it and took it as her familiar. They met a guy infected with a disease that was turning him into an aberration, so they forcibly cured him (he thought the changes were awesome) and when he complained that his dreams of being an adventurer were now ruined, they took him with them into Khyber. He's now the monk's cohort. They also captured an ur-priest who was leading a Xoriat worshiping cult, but she got away as soon as they left her unguarded.
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Jan 15, 2013 16:14
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Chaltab posted:Today, while DMing I uttered the following sentence. One of the players in my group had a similar reaction when we were trying out Hunter and he said "I grab the rapier and stab at the Nazi shadow ghost of Ernst Rohm."
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Jan 15, 2013 21:53
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I've been searching for a little bit now, but I can't seem to remember where or what Gaming Experiences thread it was that the poster had minstrels and actors going around raising the profile and even outright lying about how powerful the PCs were. This has come up in our game and I was trying to find out if it worked for them or not.
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Jan 15, 2013 23:34
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Picayune posted:This brings me to Anakin.
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Jan 16, 2013 00:23
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