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Dr Snofeld posted: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." EDIT: Said in my L5R. "Meat beans. We need meat beans now. And this time make sure to cook them." MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jan 17, 2013 |
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I'm DMing a Pathfinder game set in a giant, city-sized convention, and it's amazing. My group just threw the gigantic, highly opulent couch of the Furry Queen across an underground river, the party bard reclining on it all the way, whilst the Brotherhood of Steel shot up and looted the ramshackle furry town behind them. This was moments after killing said furry queen (one of the players, a guy dressed as a Street Shark, beat a dragon almost five times his size with his bare hands/jaws), the Elf LARPer cutting a bear furry in two and the bard delivering such harsh burns that surrounding enemies combusted to ash. Even earlier than that, the party witch hypnotised a Post-Apoc LARPer into telling them the location of a valuable cache of armor and weapons, and even earlier than that, they systematically blew up a rave, culminating in the alchemist/barbarian, a goddamned Ork, biting the DJ's head off. I loving love my group. I wonder how they'll do in the dance-off. They better make that loving couch into the party vehicle.
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Jan 20, 2013 16:57
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The Deleter posted:I'm DMing a Pathfinder game set in a giant, city-sized convention, and it's amazing. what in the gently caress setting is this
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Jan 20, 2013 17:50
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SpookyLizard posted:what in the gently caress setting is this This. It's mostly fluff and nerds not getting anything done, but I don't care, I'm having a blast DMing it. 
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Jan 20, 2013 18:17
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The Deleter posted:I'm DMing a Pathfinder game set in a giant, city-sized convention, and it's amazing. That is awesome more please
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Jan 20, 2013 20:32
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The Deleter posted:My group just threw the gigantic, highly opulent couch ... across an underground river, the party bard reclining on it all the way ... and the bard delivering such harsh burns that surrounding enemies combusted to ash Your bard sounds amazing. Your group sounds amazing.
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Jan 20, 2013 21:39
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:That is awesome more please Volmarias posted:Your bard sounds amazing. Your group sounds amazing. Thank ye, oh kind peoples. As per DivineCoffeeBinge's request, I shall tell all.  WARNING - REALLY LONG The setting is already in that link, but to recap, it's a giant city/convention full of nerds and with a seedy sewer full of furries. The party started as a group of LARPers. Our personages are: - John Ambrose (Gunslinger with a level in Fighter), an ODST Larper who enjoys making dry jokes about the situation at hand. - Namaranth, (Witch), an Otherkin (the character, not the IRL player) who wants to be an old-school elf. Is actually called Julia, has a bad cigarette habit. - Norril Wolfswift (Half-Elf Ranger), another Larper who INSISTS on staying in character and gets very annoyed when other people don't even try. - Waagrot Zogslag (unholy Barbarian/Alchemist/Psion combination), a 40K Ork Larper so good he might actually BE an Ork. Likes fighting, looting, drinking. - Scarth (Synthesisist Summoner/Monk), a man in a Street Shark costume. Loves being a Street Shark, hates being called a furry. Says "jawesome" a lot. Best character concept, because his Eidolon was his massive augmented costume and that was genius. - Arthur Tenenbaum (Bard), cosplaying as Sweeny Todd. Very British, slightly psychotic but usually very cheerful and funny. Pulls his loving weight. The party started in one of the many camps of Larpers in the forest in the north of InfiniCon, generally chilling and having a nice time. A wounded man stumbles into the camp, and manages to recount a story of furries attacking and destroying another Larper camp to the north. Our heroes decide not to accompany the camp's retreating population, instead going forth to combat the furry menace. They follow the clearest path northwards, but are ambushed by a group of anthro-wolf furries on the way and manage to best off. Arthur manages to interrogate one of the furries, finding out that the attack is the start of a concerted campaign against the "apes" on the surface world. The party decides to leave the main trail and take a more roundabout route to the camp. On the way, they find several goodies, including a new sword, some abandoned trinkets and money, and a large chest with a suit of fake armour and a broadsword. They accidently bump into another group of furries, but some quick bluffing from Arthur allows them to find out the camp is being converted into an outdoor rave. Arthur then uses Spark to light the dead leaf litter beneath the furries, burning the entire group. Waagrot decides to carry the large chest around, pretending to be a turtle furry in case they have to do some sneakin'. They eventually arrive at the camp as the sun sets, to see the outdoor rave in full swing and full of furries. The party decides "gently caress it, let's kill them all." A case of alcohol is purloined, and random beers are replaced with Orky explosives. John sneaks around to the back of the stage, where an anthromorphic dragon is DJing, whilst the rest of the party steals some masks and filters through the crowd, handing out beer bombs and mingling without hurling. Then Waagrot hurls the first bomb, killing dozens and causing mass panic. Norril looses arrows at the DJ, enraging him and causing him to attack, whilst John blows up the stage for giggles. The DJ, despite wielding a flaming spear, is defeated when Waagrot uses a mutagen to grow to enormous size and simply bites his head off. After using the remaining tents as a place to sleep, the party awakes to a problem. The DJ isn't in a costume, but is an actual anthro dragon. Over the course of their adventure, they vaguely learn that something is causing the imaginations of the people of InfiniCon to affect reality, and the queen of the furries, an anthro-dragon called Lapis Lazuli, is creating a cult in order to make people believe they are the animal they want to be and thus create a Furry Utopia. The party are not keen on this idea. Meeting up with Michael Deerheart (DMPC ranger/alchemist who stayed very low-key throughout the whole thing), a Link Larper who used to hang out with Lapis until she went crazy and cut out his tongue for not "staying in character," the party delves into the UnderCon. A warning about the UnderCon - it is basically the seediest, dirtiest, most awful place to be. Some people, like the furries, the juggalos and the Post-Apoc Larpers, call it home. Most see it as a hellhole, full of weird and inexplicable things. One important fact - it has Grues. So as the party proceed, they hear hisses and gurgling noises, and often glimpse lantern-like eyes and sharp teeth flashing in the gloom. The party enters the sewers, and battles a group of Furry guards who were watching the entrance. Waagrot uses Throw Anything to hurl one minotaur at another to kill them both, effectively Chaos Dunking the pair. After defeating the guards, they then proceed to a crossroads - one way leading to a huge furry rave, one to Dracopolis, the shanty town of the Furries, and a third into Post-Apoc Larper territory, guarded by a Brotherhood of Steel soldier. Namaranth charms him into revealing that the Brotherhood is planning a raid on the furry city soon, and where an important cache of armour and weapons for this raid is located within the city. Deciding that joining a bunch of greasy Mad Max fetishists won't be so cool, they party proceeds to Dracopolis, a shanty town built in a huge underground cavern with a river running through it. A parade in honour of the queen is in full swing, and all of the furries present are utterly smashed/high, so nobody bothers the party as they quickly find shops that aren't "occupied" to buy some extras. (They also meet the RE4 shopkeeper here, who sells John some guns and then runs away because gently caress this place.) They also find the cache of Brotherhood armour and weapons, giving them to John. At this point, Namaranth and Michael go missing. The latter is quickly found again when it is revealed that some more attentive furries recognised "the traitor" and captured him. Lapis has turned up in person to watch him be executed, reclining on a huge golden couch with inlaid gems on a stage for another huge rave. Michael is kneeling on the stage, an ear bitten off by Lapis and two armoured anthro dragons standing guard. The party takes up positions in the buildings and streets around the colossal rave pit, John and Norril on the roof and Waagrot staying close to the buildings as Scarth and Arthur run to aid Michael. A furious combat begins. The guards surrounding Lapis and Michael evaporate as John, Norril and Scarth murder them. Hordes of furries move to try and stop the attackers, but are blown to smithereens by Waagrot's explosives and enthusiastic hammering. Twice, Arthur lays such sick burns on Lapis that she actually takes damage, and surrounding furries combust to ashes. Lapis takes flight, breathing ice at the party and trying to get to safety, but Arthur grabs the stage's microphone and Fascinates her with a Sweeny Todd song. The DMPC staggers to his feet and begins to kill furries left and right. Two bear furries climb onto the roof, trying to stop the rooftop shooters, but Norril draws his sword and cuts the leader in two, the halves falling into a cart of ramen. The other bear decides "no gently caress this" and runs away. The combat eventually ends when John shoots Lapis and brings her down, and then Scarth climbs up the dragon's flank and rips out her throat with his jaws whilst his imagination goes wild, creating shades of the other Street Sharks to pin her down. When the dust settles, the party quickly gets to looting, just as the aforementioned Brotherhood attack begins and lays waste to a panicking furry population. They find a sapphire, hidden in a replica of the bunny from Con Air that was lying on the big gold couch. The party then steals the couch, Arthur reclining on it as the others push. John uses the stolen Brotherhood armour to bluff his way past the guards, "These-are-not-the-droids" style. They reach the river, a tunnel to the rest of the Undercon across, and instead of looking for bridges or trying to ford it, promptly chug a shitload of mutagens and potions, have Scarth swim to the other side, and then throw the couch across, before tossing the other characters across as well. That's all so far. Namaranth is going to rejoin them next session with something... off about her (otherkin and belief mechanics don't work well together, hint hint). I plan to have them reach the surface and into InfiniCon proper so they can begin to ask more questions about what is going on, but honestly, with this group, anything could happen. I can't wait.
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Jan 20, 2013 22:07
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I'm the bard in this campaign, and it's completely amazing. The best I've ever played, hands down. It's just been a perfect example that good players can make any setting work in almost any system. We are totally gonna turn that couch into a tank. I mean poo poo, why not? "Solid gold, gem-encrusted couchtank" might beat out the other achievements from when I GM'ed the same group, such as "ski half a building down an avalanche and do a backflip" or "make a reverse railgun out of a lodestone pillar and grappling hook". "Explode a flying squid by throwing the goblin at it and simultaneously invent football" was also a good one. I love this group so much.
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Jan 20, 2013 22:29
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saberwulf posted:I'm the bard in this campaign, and it's completely amazing. The best I've ever played, hands down. It's just been a perfect example that good players can make any setting work in almost any system. I am seriously jealous of you guys and your group.
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Jan 20, 2013 23:23
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saberwulf posted:I'm the bard in this campaign, and it's completely amazing. The best I've ever played, hands down. It's just been a perfect example that good players can make any setting work in almost any system. Ork from the same group here. We generally have at least one insanely awesome solution per session, and Deleter definitely helps matters by blasting theme music for us whenever we do awesomely enough. You think sailing across a river on a flying couch is awesome? Try it while being played off to the tune of We Are The Champions.
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Jan 21, 2013 00:30
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God drat that was an amazing story, I hate you all for being that awesome.
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Jan 21, 2013 01:37
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GMing a game of Pathfinder in a Forgotten Realms/Planescape setting. The party got absolutely beat down by a town guard, and a crooked cop stole most of their items when they went to jail. Kinda standard, break into the cops home to get your stuff back quest. Right? Right now the party of 5 is split into two groups, and one group is a half-mad Dwarven ranger who works as an exterminator and a Paladin of Freedom who works as a defense lawyer. So the party goes to the hall of records to learn about the crooked cop. They end up finding that he has an exotic pet license. At an exotic pet-store they make some gather information checks in conversation and the warden who runs the store tells them that the bad guy keeps a giant Praying Mantis as a pet. So the players talk their way into being given a dead giant dung beetle as long as they removed the carcass from the premisses. So the players hatched a plan. First, they ripped the head off that dead dung beetle. Then the players decided to piss on it because that would give it male pheromones to attract the mantis. Me - "All right the pet store worker leaves and get more workers, they escort you out of the building for urinating on a decapitated insect head in a fancy Pets-Mart." Dwarf Exterminator - "Alright before we fill this motherfucking beetle head with rat poison, I say, Hey Lawyer boy, you'll earn all my respect if you just take a bite of this beetle brain goo." Paladin Defense Lawyer - "Yeah, I say gently caress it and take a bite." "Roll a d20 for fortitude." "5." "You become instantly nauseous and hold your hand up to your mouth to stop vomiting. It doesn't work, now you just have two streams of projectile vomit going out both sides of your mouth. You stumble over to the gutter next to an outdoor bistro and start vomiting in front of upscale patio diners. The manager comes out to hit you with a broom." God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Jan 21, 2013 |
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Jan 21, 2013 02:47
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Last night at my LGS I ran into some guy with an assortment of cards - baseball cards, Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and Magic. I figured I'd look through his Magic cards. (He didn't have anything I wanted.) We started chatting, and idling through his YGO cards I found "The Seal of Orichalcos." and I made some small talk about how ridiculous the game was. (Click that link and read the text. Seriously.) "You know what would be cool? If you went into a graveyard and you lit a ring of candles around you." "What?" "What do you think might happen if you went and did that?" "Yeah, okay. You would have wasted an hour going into a graveyard and lighting candles." "I think it'd be cool. I believe in spirits, man... You know what'd be even better? If you got the Forbidden One, you know the five Exodia cards? I bet-" I just walked away. California is loving weird.
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Jan 21, 2013 03:28
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So our group recently gained a new player. Things started off kind of rocky, for a number of reasons. For starters, the group hates wizards, to the point where the entire running theme of the game is "Wizards are Dicks." For two, they're all pretty down with elf-racism, and at various points in their adventures have killed, humiliated, tortured, and basically hosed over every elf they've met. Third, they're all more or less experienced roleplayers, they all read this thread, and are wary of certain... let's call them stereotypical players within the role playing community. So the new guy rolls a sorcerer, who is a tiefling raised by elves, explicitly states that his character is chaotic neutral, and names him "Chaot'k". There was a lot of unvoiced skepticism the first couple games he was in, and for a while it didn't seem like he was going to fit in with the group all that well. Until this last game, where he totally redeemed himself. The party has holed up an evil, enormous wizard and his robotic minions in a burning building, and are wiping the floor with them, when the wizard casts a last-ditch desperation spell. He turns himself into a time bomb, and sets the timer for "gently caress all ya'll". So the party runs for the door, and Chaot'k runs for the wizard. Chaot'k grabs the wizard. Chaot'k casts the spell that lets him teleport. Thanks to a good roll and a little leniency from me, Chaot'k teleports the wizard 200 feet straight in the air, steals his giant wizard hat, and uses it as a parachute to escape the blast as the wizard detonates above his town and kills everyone. (except the party) I think he's going to fit in just fine. 
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Jan 21, 2013 03:33
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Ran the Falcon's Hollow level 1 adventure tonight in Pathfinder. There were three of us in the party; Myself, an Inquisitor; a Gnome Sorcerer; and a Suli Samurai. The samurai and I did not get along. When we got attacked by a hobgoblin hunter (He shot the Samurai's shoulder), I coup de grace'd him after Dazing him out of his tree. The Samurai got really mad about this because I was "killing a defenseless creature" and became my bitter enemy. We needed some mushrooms from the ruins of a monastery, and the ruins were guarded by a powerful Worg. He offered to give us the shrooms in return for cleaning a buncha monsters out of his ruins. I Detect Evil and it turns out (Shocking!) He's REALLY REALLY EVIL. "Guys, he just wants us to be worn down so he can kill us later!", I cry! The Samurai insists that we do it, because we might as well and it's the easy way out. I protest, because he is DEFINITELY EVIL, YOU GUYS. But we compromise, agree to his request, and leave the room. We leave the Worg's chamber, and discuss; I propose that we go, sleep, come back fully ready, and kill him. The Samurai says no, we'll go do the work and come back. We decide that we'll go take care of his problems, but I say that when I get back I'm going to kill the giant, evil wolf living in the ruined desecrated monastery. But the Samurai ditches us and we come back to find him chatting with the Worg (We left the room when he and the Worg talked). I shoulda done him in right then and there. We go about clearing his nuisances. At one point, we have to remove a Kobold nuisance, whom we find sleeping in his little kobold bed - I opt to start with the diplomatic option, waking him up and asking if he'd mind helping us murder the giant evil wolf. But the Gnome Sorcerer hates reptiles and (reasonably) blasts it with a magic missile. Then the Samurai cleaves the kobold (and his bed) in twain. So much for the code of honor. We get back to the Worg, and he's happy. The Gnome goes to get the mushrooms, the Samurai stands around, and I glare at the Worg waiting for him to make a wrong move. He does, and I roll lucky initiative so I react before he can murder the gnome. I pronounce a Judgment on him, charge into battle, poo poo gets real. Here's how combat goes: My turn: Judgment, "Told you so", charge in and slash the Worg. Samurai's Turn: "I'm swinging at Xaander." and he uses his draw-your-sword-real-hard ability. Nat 20. That's a crit if he confirms it. Another Nat 20. Crit confirmed. 14 damage. I have 9 HP. I'm dead. The Worg proceeds to kill the Sorcerer and then (Shocker!) kill the Samurai. Turns out, when we were out of the room, the Samurai rolled a nat 20 on his Bluff to avoid us finding out his plan with the big bad. Then he rolled two 20s in a row to oneshot kill me in the last fight (Which I totally, totally called). They both wanted to roll new characters (Already had them planned), so they got their wish. My character was rescued by the Samurai player's new character and the adventure was declared "over". Somehow I get the feeling this will be a campaign with a little bit of internal conflict and paranoia on our part. Sixto Lezcano fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Jan 21, 2013 |
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Jan 21, 2013 07:42
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I've been running a 7th Sea campaign for quite a while now, with a generally excellent group. Today they found themselves maquerading as actors in order to infiltrate a masked ball at a manor in Vodacce and assassinate a noble who had been marked for death by the Rilasciare. The director they were working with to pull this off had lost his scripts, forcing them to improvise. He was also quite drunk on the local wines and could only remember that his play was a satire about the Sun King which ended with a death and a marriage. Whilst they could have pulled off their assassination and escaped before the curtains rose they decided that dammit, no, they were going to do this play whether they strictly needed to or not. What followed was three acts of bizarre improv centering around the Sun King's depraved sexual peccadilloes and a confusion between the words peccadillo and armadillo. Thanks to some spectacular performances and an inebriated audience the play took the crowd by storm, getting them a standing ovation and plenty of time to go about their work afterwards. I love this group.
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Jan 23, 2013 06:43
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Dark Heresy: An Administratum Adventure: Fun with Paperwork A while back I handed over the DM reins to someone else (the psyker player in my previous stories) to start a new campaign. He's plopped us on a decaying, corrupt world (the politcal graft kind, not the regular 40k kind) with no credentials whatsoever. Our mission: conduct a threat assessment of the planet after both a sanctioned Inquisitorial team and the elite agent sent to retrieve them failed to do so. After a stunning display of incompetence immediately after arriving on the planet we found ourselves working for one of the three local organized crime 'families'. We'd proven ourselves able and willing protection money collectors, but there just wasn't enough money to fill the quota. Our mid-boss, Verne, is putting pressure on us to get him more money to pay to his superiors, and at my suggestion he gets us an in at the local Administratum building. The plan was to use their vast amount of paperwork to find him a source of money. That was our stated goal. Our actual goal was to find information about the Inquisitorial team who'd arrived on the world two years before us. We're signed up as employees and basically given free run of the place, which is teeming with adepts pushing paper every which way. In short order we locate the spaceport receiving logs for the time period they would have arrived in, and to our good fortune the adept in charge of the ledger had written in the margin excitedly, noting four names as Inquisitorial agents. One of which was the same name as Verne's brutal, angry, and extremely capable boss, Cain. Curious. I check some of the rest of the ledger for anything interesting, and boy do I find it. It seems the adept in charge had somehow convinced none other than the (now former) planetary governor to sign her own intake sheet. I cut this page out of the book, thinking an original of the former planetary governor's signature might come in handy. It did. Now, the thing about this planetary governor is that she stepped down. That never happens. But she did, and nobody's heard from her really since. She's not dead, she's just not around. Weird. Another thread in this little adventure is the city itself. It's a walled city, formerly a staging ground for the crusade which conquered the sector. Years later, there's not really any reason to go there, so the city has been decaying. Outside the city is a vast refuge camp. These refuges are mostly former residents of another city about 200km away that was completely evacuated a few years ago under mysterious circumstances. Now that we had an in at the Administratum, we figured we'd look into this too. We look up records pertaining to this city and find that the evacuation did not stop the flow of paperwork to and from the city. In fact, it increased. A lot. And all of the records were sealed with a security clearance higher than God, just short of not officially existing. For a city with nobody in it, there sure is a lot going on over there. Unfortunately, we did not have the clearance to read these files. Fortunately for us, the Administratum has forms for everything, including one for Lost Security Dongle. But who did we know with security clearance Higher Than God? Well, the planetary governor must, let's go with that. Since we were in possession of an original of her signature, all we had to do was transfer it to the form (using Administratum printing presses). Easy, done. Then we had to get the forms stamped by someone of Grand Magistrate or higher. None of us knew any Grand Magistrates, but we did know paperwork. We pull up the form for Replacement of Notary Stamp Due to Scheduled Asset End of Life, picked a name out of a hat, and went up to their office. With a suitable amount of bureaucratic blathering and officious form waving, we walk out of the Grand Magistrate's office, stamp in hand, and stamp our own papers. Now, it says we can submit these forms in person and be handed a new security dongle, but we were obviously not the former planetary governor. Fortunately for us, nobody really knew where she was going on a year now. We decide to go in with a straight face and file our request. This being highly irregular, we are of course questioned, but with enough bluffing and a fantastic fellowship roll (5 degrees of success), we walk away with the dongle. Somewhere, the former planetary governor's old security dongle ceases to function. From there it was a simple matter of using someone else's credentials to access the files, input the security code and transfer all of the files about this mysterious city to a dataslate for later perusal and leave the building. The guy whose credentials we used to reserve that research room and access that computer is hosed. (we had to end the session here but I've already got plans for these files)
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Jan 24, 2013 23:01
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That's both a credit to your group's patience for roleplaying, and to your GM's prep. Please keep us updated on the mystery.
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Jan 25, 2013 07:23
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Arkham Angel posted: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. The ability to make a one-off joke canon is always awesome. Happened quite a bit with Loki when I played Scion too. We'd blame him for plot holes, or throw out crazy ideas that the GM would roll with. Such as: "When you arrive in your living room, there's someone already in there..." "Santa?" "No, it's Loki, and-" "but dressed as Santa?" "...yes." "Dad? What are you doing?" "I'm stealing Christmas!" The Loki-spawn's player was new to the system, and struggled at first, until he figured out how to make illusions work for him. Naturally, he did not get on with the son of Thor in the party, who had read too many of his dad's comics, and not enough of the legends. Made up for it by being a rock star, who made every single member of his band and road crew into berserks, including the lawyer. "Damnable trickster-spawn, I know you're the reason my axe is missing, when I get my hands on you..." "You mean this axe?" "Raaargh!, and I strangle him." "Or so he thinks, but actually, it's a lamp." His illusions hit their peak when he snuck about a frost giant arms train, and used an illusion to disguise himself as one of the giant-sized rifles. His player was absent for the next few sessions, and when we next saw the character it was when a frost giant tried to shoot us, only to have his rifle kick him in the teeth.
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Jan 25, 2013 17:08
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Golden Bee posted:That's both a credit to your group's patience for roleplaying, and to your GM's prep. Please keep us updated on the mystery.
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Jan 25, 2013 17:35
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Elfface posted:His illusions hit their peak when he snuck about a frost giant arms train, and used an illusion to disguise himself as one of the giant-sized rifles. Loki is the best god.
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Jan 25, 2013 17:43
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Clanpot Shake posted:He actually gave me 50 bonus XP (half the cost of the cheapest skill increase in Dark Heresy) for thinking up a plausible scheme to walk out of a Magistrate's office with their notary seal. I really don't think he's prepared for a lot of the crazy poo poo we try. Except he will be next week because I tipped my hand for what I had planned to do with the files we'd stolen (which he and the other player there thought was brilliant). I'll be sure to write it up. Since this is Dark Heresy, if your GM doesn't somehow have loving over that random employee and deactivating the old governor's original security dongle come back to bite you in the rear end, he isn't Dark Heresy-ing hard enough. Also I'm glad you realized the Administratum is truly the greatest power in the Imperium. With the proper paperwork, you can steal a warship.
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Jan 25, 2013 18:36
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Clanpot Shake posted:Bureaucracy exploitation. Still, seeing a group that uses the full potential of a bureaucracy against itself is an amazing piece of roleplaying, on both GM and player parts.
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Jan 25, 2013 18:46
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VanSandman posted:Since this is Dark Heresy, if your GM doesn't somehow have loving over that random employee and deactivating the old governor's original security dongle come back to bite you in the rear end, he isn't Dark Heresy-ing hard enough.
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Jan 25, 2013 19:32
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Clanpot Shake posted:Dark Heresy: An Administratum Adventure: Fun with Paperwork That is completely awesome. And it reminds me that I should come up with some cool bureacracy/corruption mechanics for my "Soviet Bloc X-Files" game, it fits perfectly.
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Jan 25, 2013 19:33
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VanSandman posted:Since this is Dark Heresy, if your GM doesn't somehow have loving over that random employee and deactivating the old governor's original security dongle come back to bite you in the rear end, he isn't Dark Heresy-ing hard enough. We just started an Only War game, and most of the group kinda wants to do Rogue Trader instead. I think you just gave us our out.
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Jan 26, 2013 00:00
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So I just read this entire topic over the past two days and I foolishly feel the need to add my own worst role playing experiences to the table. 1: All aboard the plot rails. This story happened a while ago so I only remember the bare bones of the occurrence. In high school, a friend of mine asked me and a few other friends to join him in a DnD 3.5 game. Not having any experience with DnD other than some half remembered scraps from perusing my sister's AD&D books, I said sure. A generic fantasy start up occurred, meet in a bar and all. We're told to go to a nearby cave in the forest and root out whatever evil lies therein. Now the path to the cave has actually been detailed for us quite well, but it's a long winding path that would take most of the night to traverse. The ranger, looking at his character sheet sees his survival skill and states that he's going to bushwack a way to the cave and cut our travel time down to a single hour. The DM says we shouldn't do this, but the ranger argues that it's in the skill description. So we decide why not. We get about a hundred or so feet into the forest when a Half-Demon Dire Tyrannosaurus Rex pokes his head up above the canopy. We run like hell. Thankfully, the HDDTR is apparently deathly afraid of paved roads. So he stops the minute we get back to the path, however he shadows us most of the way to the cave. The cave has a large clearing in front of it, and when we get into the middle, Blue pygmies come out of the forest behind us, and throw spears at the party. The Wizard went down in the first round, I was severely injured, as were the rest of the party. Two of us dive into the underbrush, and the last person runs into the cave. He tells me and the other person who went into the underbrush that we're done. Pygmies jump out and kill us both. Even when I protested that we were going to try and make our way to the cave mouth from the relative safety of the treeline he said that no, the only correct action was to go into the cave, and we had failed. He took our character sheets away and proceeded to have a solo campaign where the rogue met the smurf king and went on wacky adventures while the rest of us played GTA3. Mind you, that was the first actual encounter we had if you don't count the HDDTR, I have no idea why he was so adverse to us cutting our own path through the forest but all things considered I think leaving to play the PS2 was the better idea. 2: My terrorist Jedi is reduced to a powerup Fast forward to the summer of my freshman year of college, I had some good experiences with role playing thanks to my roommate, and the DM from the previous game calls me up to ask if I'd be willing to join in a Star Wars d20 game. He was still a friend of mine, and was an awesome person outside of that one bad DnD Game, so I say sure. The players were Tom: A Codru-ji Jedi, note the defining feature of having four arms. He went into the game wanting to quad-wield lightsabers, and kitted his character out to do so. Ben: A human Jedi, who was more than willing to settle for dual-wielding. Eric: A mutual friend of me and the DM, and the Rogue from the first story. I can't remember what race he played but he was small and was our tech specialist. Me: I went into the game wanting to have some silly fun, so I made an Tiss'shar Jedi. I knew T and B were making combat beasts, and E was focused entirely on tech skills and piloting, and thus the highly charismatic Velociraptor Jedi was born. Once we were finished with our characters, the DM dropped a few bombs on us. 1: Unless your entry in the race guide explicitly stated that you knew Basic by default, you could not speak it, ala Wookiees. I argued that the entry for Wookiees in the race guide explicitly stated that they could only speak their own language, and every other race entry didn't, but he shot me down. I was the only person playing such a race, so it came off as a little petty, particularly for a one shot. So, the party face (and linguist) was forbidden from doing anything but screeching and hissing in a language maybe 3 people knew. Thankfully one of those people was Eric, so I could participate in party discussion with him translating. 2: Everyone only got 1 Lightsaber to start. Ben didn't really care all that much, but Tom was furious. Then Tom realized that Ben and I both had Lightsabers. You know that scene from the Grinch where he smiles and it takes up his entire face? It was basically that. 3: Unless we explicitly stated otherwise, everything we said was considered In Character. So we start out at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, being told by some Jedi Master that there's a crime lord on some Planet Of Adventure and we are to blow up his bank. Now I'm not the most knowledgeable scholar of the Star Wars universe, and I was even less of one back then, but this seemed exceedingly out of character for the Jedi, even in the NJO era. My objections were quashed with assurances that this guy was really really bad and that any collateral damage would be preferable to allowing him to continue. Also, since the bank had explosives scanners, we were given some kind of living satchel charge. Described to us as basically a rectangular teddy-bear that somehow had a time delay fuse attached. We loaded into the ship, flew to the Planet and cut to the Exterior of the bank, the following exchange occurs. DM: You and Eric make it through the scanners just fine. Tom, the guard stops you and asks, "Sir, what's in those bags of yours?" Tom: What? The Bomb? DM: ...The guard gets agitated and reaches for his stun baton. Tom: Wait, what's going on? I didn't know what he was talking about, these things are in bags? Me: Uhh, poo poo, I'm going to roll diplomacy to try and smooth this over. DM: Pfft, sure, go ahead. Me:  20, plus my diplomacy modifier is 36. I Hiss and screech at him in a soothing manner attempting to get across that he was confused and was attempting to get across that he merely believed the bag was awesome.DM: Sigh... fine, he lets you and Ben through. So fortunately there are exactly four load bearing pillars in the lobby of this bank, and we go to place our charges. DM: DC 20 demolitions checks to set the charges with the proper time delay. Me: I don't have demolitions. DM: You don't? Tom: Neither do I. Ben: Yeah, I don't either. Eric: I do. DM: Okay, Eric, make your check. Everyone else can just wait for Eric to come around and set the charges for you. Eric: 26.Tom:  5.DM: Tom? Did you wait for Eric? Tom: No. DM: Okay, your bomb starts squealing in a very odd tone. Me: I punch whatever looks like a button on my bomb and get the gently caress out of there. DM: Roll concentration to walk out without causing a panic. Tom: 1. "OH GOD! OH GOD! THE BOMB! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!" and I haul rear end out of there.So we succeeded on blowing up the bank, but were then caught by the security guards and brought before the Crime Lord we were sent to stop in the first place. We all get fitted with Shadowrun style plot-sensitive cranial bombs and the crime lord now has his own personal team of Jedi to use against his enemies, and we can't do anything about it. But, to keep up appearances, we have to fight our way out of his base of operations, he'll keep in touch with us via holonet. Now, this isn't the worst premise in the world and it could have worked, were we not Jedi. Regardless I was overruled and we proceeded to escape from the crime base. Now around this point is where things took a nosedive into absolutely horrible. Remember Tom has four hands, and wants them all to be occupied with cool laser swords, and he only had one. In the mean time he was using four blasters. I however was a generic melee Knight, as was Ben. This was Tom's chance. He started shooting at us as soon as we got into melee, and then claiming that it was an accident (50% chance to hit the wrong person when you shoot into melee or whatever). Once Ben realized what was going on, he started 'accidentally' hitting me as well. I ask them to stop it, but Tom says something about 'staying true to his character'. His entire character concept apparently being summed up as 'dude with four lightsabers', the DM didn't put a stop to it either, not being able to find fault with his argument. I barely made it back to the ship with any hit points left, and Tom started talking OOCly with the DM about which manners of death wouldn't damage my precious lightsaber. At this point Eric was looking pretty uncomfortable with the whole affair as well, so I told the DM I was done playing. I spent a force point to regain conciousness, and told the DM that since I was apparently on a ship of sociopathic sith lords I was going to cut a hole in the deck plating and do the galaxy a favor. He told me I couldn't do that since it was a dick move, even though it was in character. So instead I went into the airlock, held my lightsaber very very tightly, and embraced hard vacuum. According to Tom this made me a "Dick", and since I took one of his lightsabers away, he didn't want to play anymore. This was fine by me so I said my goodbyes and drove Eric and Myself home. Now this would have been the end of it had I not had the idea that maybe the problem was that the DM was just bad at DMing. One of the games that my friends at college introduced me to was Werewolf the Apocalypse, so I invited him, Eric, and another mutual friend of ours to try a game with me DMing. The result was El Gato Del Diablo! But since this post is getting a little long, I'll go into that later.
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Jan 26, 2013 09:47
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I'm almost impressed, your DM managed to do every terrible DM bullshit move in just two sessions. Also, I would have stopped playing with Tom entirely after that incident. People who pull the "I'm gonna kill the other PCs and take their stuff so I can be The Best" are universally poo poo.
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Jan 26, 2013 18:04
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Tom was a friend of the DM of that game, and wasn't a guy I willingly associated with even when I could. So I'm pretty sure I never saw him again after that. Anyways, 3. El Gato Del Diablo So Sam(Ex-DM) seemed pretty excited about the fact that I was playing a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game after I loaned him the books and he read through them. I figured the best way to get things started was to have a mutual char-gen session before the real game so everyone could figure out what they wanted to play and cover strengths and weaknesses. Now I opened it up to anything they wanted to play, as this wasn't really a serious thing, and I really didn't care about the W:TA verisimilitude . Eric came up with an Ajaba martial arts master from Jim had some experience from Vampire and Demon before this, so he made a Kitsune gun specialist. Sam showed up late, with his character already made, and handed it to me like he had just created a peerless work of art. I really wish I still had that character sheet. First of all, he had "EL GATO DEL DIABLO" scrawled on top of the entire top of the sheet. Gato was a cat-born were-puma with "fur as black as hell itself." He had maximum physical stats, maximum combat stats, 10 rage, 3 willpower, and 52 points worth of flaws in a game that only allows 7. The flaws that I can remember were the ones that gave him 5 less points in his knowledges and Skills, Short Fuse, Wyrm Touched, about 10 'hatred' flaws that basically boiled down to 'Hatred(Anything I have not killed yet)', and 'Inability to Frenzy while listening to classical music.' His idea, near as we could figure was that we'd basically tie him up in a straight jacket with an iPod playing Beethoven in his ears 24/7, removing them when we needed him to kill something, at which point he would immediately find something he hated and go into a rage, and then somehow getting them back onto him when finished. When we told him that he couldn't have more than 7 points worth of flaws, he kept all the flaws on his character sheet, but just removed what few actual social skills he had. So rather than just making something that was worthless in any sort of social situation, he made something that was actively harmful in everything except combat, and refused to acknowledge that this wasn't a good thing. I told him that we changed the time of our next session since Jim needed to work and just didn't tell Sam when the next time was. We had a few humorous anecdotes(like someone botching a last chance frenzy roll and turning into the worlds angriest pool of blood, and a bullet train that apparently traveled straight from Japan to Montana) but nothing that really qualifies as a 'best experience', for those I had to wait till me and my co-workers formed a DnD Group.
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Jan 26, 2013 20:40
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Oh dear, the WOD Fight-Guy. On the one hand, I'm against such things on general principles, on the other it's hilarious to watch them try and do anything other than fight. In one situation, the group's fight-guy decided to infiltrate a building site, that was in the group's territory but might be being financed by a rival. Fight-Guy himself decided he was best suited to the task, and no-one else objected, so in he went. At first, it went well. He got in by jumping from the roof of an adjacent building, over the security fence. High dex means good stealth, and he had some camouflage disciplines, so avoided the security guards and found his way to the foreman's office. This was when a problem occurred. He'd envisioned this as being a ghost, in and out unseen, but had no way to open a locked door. His options were to break the lock, break a window, or knock out a security guard and see if they had keys. He decided the latter was stealthiest, as then they wouldn't know there'd been a robbery. Luckily, the guard in question did have keys, so he got in the office and was faced with his next challenge. A computer. The solution? Steal the whole thing. Ah, but of course this meant there'd been something stolen. So he'd have to hide the evidence somehow. But how... ah, that fuel should do the trick! He luckily didn't just cover the place in petrol and drop a match, instead decided to sabotage one of the generators for power tools, so it would go off when next turned on. And finally, he used those same stolen keys to open the gate and leave, before things exploded. They never did. When one of the security guys didn't check in, the police were called and the whole site locked down. But a stealthy thief mission nearly ended in arson.
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Jan 26, 2013 21:46
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That actually sounds like he pulled off his stated purpose quite well using the tools at his disposal.
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Jan 26, 2013 22:06
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Agreed. It's like "when all you have is a hammer", meets "remembering that the back of the hammer has a claw".
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Jan 26, 2013 22:11
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Elfface posted:The ability to make a one-off joke canon is always awesome. Happened quite a bit with Loki when I played Scion too. We'd blame him for plot holes, or throw out crazy ideas that the GM would roll with. Such as: That sounds like a really fun game. Rules question: How did epic attributes work for you? I'm worried they're gonna break the game.
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Jan 27, 2013 07:55
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We did basically have to ignore or re-write large sections of the rules. It's the sort of game you have to go in to knowing that someone who dedicates themselves to combat is going to trivialise any combat encounter not designed for them, at which point the other players would be useless. If your players know this, and you're more generous with XP, they'll quickly fill out roles though.
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Jan 27, 2013 09:31
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I'm playing in a 4e game, online text-only in maptool, with a pretty good DM. He gives us enough rope to hang ourselves, then figures out how to get us out of it or rolls with it if we find a way, and surprises us enough to make things interesting. I'm playing Nebi, a halfing wild magic sorcerer who has a feat that lets him use normally ranged magic as melee. The DM describes it as "a sorcerer who thinks he's a rogue", and I play him as mister overexcited stickyfingers who lies his way out of everything. Viceak is a Shaman and the straight man of our group. And finally, Boudica, a halfling warlord, who is an extremely naive guard captain. Always tries to talk her way out of a situation, even when it's completely inappropriate. Especially when it's completely innapropriate. Also a bit of a ditz. This isn't even purely In Character either, her player always favors the talking solution, and he always is forgetting stuff like which powers he's chosen, whether he's used his action point, getting the names of his dailies mixed up, and so on. It doesn't help that he lags a little, and is a slow typer, so he's sometimes typing responses a half minute behind the action. No malice though, he's a good player, he just has foibles. There are also a handful of other players who played once or twice then dropped, unfortunately. The campaign and started around level 11, and at the time of the story we're level 14. We had been limited to the Player Handbooks for character creation, so gearing out initially was different than I was used to. My last bit of gold I had spent on a Harp of Deep Slumber, an enchanted harp that when played gives everyone nearby a -15 penalty to perception. I reasoned that a petty thief like Nebi would see the use in having something to aid his escapes. Unfortunately, the Harp of Deep Slumber only hits perception for one round, once a day, so it was pretty useless for the kind of sneaking a whole drat party does. The best you could hope with it was to run across a room from cover to cover, once. Come level 14, I had yet to use it once, and had actually Out of Character forgotten about it. On one of our jobs we had been hired to hunt down and slay a dragon. Only the three of us had shown up to the session, so it becomes a shopping, rituals and travelling session, but we're having fun anyway (this is before we fully realize we're the only regulars). On the journey there we're discussing strategies, and the one thing we all agree on is we should not fight a dragon out in the open. We travel for a few extra hours and when it comes time to pitch camp it's dark and there's a storm moving in. Shortly after lighting our fire we're accosted by overgrown magical rabbits that shoot thunder and lightning. Since it's dark and our light is limited we're getting blasted from somewhere we can't see and we're very lucky I had rolled both Lightning and Thunder on my wild magic resistance rolls that day. We had just finished cleaning up most of the "Thunder Bunnies" as we called them (to our DM's chagrin, they had some other name) and had expended our encounters and a fair number of dailies, when the last two give a frightened squeak and jumped off into the darkness, fear in their eyes. Then a huge winged shadow passing overhead is illuminated by the storm, and the DM says "three rounds". It's bedlam. Viceak and I take off into the only bushes on the map. Boudica, and I am still not sure if this was the player being his usual absent-minded self or purposely playing the fool, panics and runs in the opposite direction, assuming there will also be somewhere to hide there. We have to run out, grab her, and haul her into our bushes. We sit in the bushes, next to a rabbit hole, petrified with fear, as the dragon swoops down and snatches one of the bunnies from wherever it was hiding, walks next to our campfire not 80 feet away, and eats it in one gulp. The DM calls for stealth checks. Being the super stealthy magic thief I am I rolled a 16+22. Viceak, ever calm, rolls around a 13+8. I might be misremembering these numbers, but suffice to say they seemed adequate. Surely the DM wasn't going to force us confront the dragon when we were dead on our feet and had a few missing players. Then Boudica rolls a 2+6. The dragon sniffs the air and starts to wander in our direction. We are making GBS threads our pants both In Character and Out of Character. The dragon is now waddling in the direction of our bushes. I'm flipping through my sheet to see if I have any power I haven't used that could get us out of this mess. And then I remember the Harp of Deep Slumber. Yelling in /ooc chat for the DM to wait a sec, I dug through my pack like a mad-half-man, putting my finger to my lips at the questioning looks from Viceak and Boudica, and pulled out the magic harp. Shakily, I played a single note. The dragon stops, sniffs the air again, peers around as best he can, then lets off a mighty roar of anger. He then takes off into the night. We waited a good in-character five minutes, before looking at each other and going: "holy poo poo" Needless to say, we did not leave those bushes the entire night. TheDemon fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Jan 27, 2013 |
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Jan 27, 2013 09:35
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I wasn't actually there for this campaign, but I have heard it recounted by my friends time and time again. The game is HeroQuest, setting is vanilla Glorantha (insofar as the word "vanilla" can be used to describe that setting). Anyway, the party was made up mostly of warrior types, with one notable exception: The Shaolin. The Shaolin was basically the "stranger from a strange land" character, with an asian kung-fu theme to him. He was also, partly by virtue of unorthodox character creation and questionable player decisions, completely loving useless in every situation, ever. But the player was a very funny and nice guy, so the character became a loveable comic-relief sort of thing. However, Shaolin did have his one shining moment of glory. The party was, at one point, making its way through unfriendly territory, when they came across a bunch of trees which had dead people hanging from them. As they examined it further, they learnt that this was the doing of the local noble, who was particularly nasty and would regularly execute people and leave them on that tree as a warning to others. Most of the party decided to politely ignore this and get the gently caress out, but not Shaolin. He adamantly refused to leave without giving the dead proper burial. All ~50 of them. After a long, heated discussion, the rest of the party think "gently caress it", and start to bury each and every one of the dead. During this time they are spotted by scouts, who proceed to warn the noble. He is obviously not best pleased with this, and sets out to investigate with his trusted lieutenant and a few guards. He finds them still there, still burying the dead, the Shaolin praying his heart out for every single one. A short shouting match ensues, and a fight breaks out. The Shaolin does his usual and activates Zen Archery, a skill that required aiming during 6 (!) combat rounds before taking effect. So everyone starts hacking and slashing, while the Shaolin aims his bow. 4 rounds go by, 2 guards lay dead, one of the PC's is knocked out, the Shaolin keeps aiming. Round 5, another guard falls, the noble decides to leg it. Round 6, the noble has been riding away for 2 rounds now, and believes he is safely out of reach of the party. GM: Ok, so as he crests a hill, the noble stops his horse, and turns around to face you one last time. "You fools!" he says, as he points his finger at you, "You have made a powerful enemy this day!" Shaolin (interrupting): I shoot him. GM:... whuh? Shaolin: I've been aiming for 6 turns. I can use Zen Archery now. Note that, at this point, no combat had ever gone on long enough for Shaolin to actually get to use that power, so nobody knew what it actually did. To the group's great surprise it turned out that Zen Archery gave the character a single called shot at the marked opponent, which automatically hit and had a high critical chance, basically ensuring a one-shot kill on anything with a head. So as the noble is finishing his spiel, the Shaolin, who had previously remained immobile and completely silent, suddenly opens his eyes, and fires a single arrow off at the noble. But instead of aiming for the head, or a weak point in the noble's armour Shaolin decides to shoot the guy's finger off as he's pointing at the party. The PCs and the bad guys are left in stunned silence, and Shaolin calmly lowers his bow, and says: "It's bad manners to point at people."
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Jan 28, 2013 18:13
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Kulebri posted:The PCs and the bad guys are left in stunned silence, and Shaolin calmly lowers his bow, and says: "It's bad manners to point at people."
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Jan 28, 2013 18:24
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Greatbacon posted:I think one of my favorite things to do as a GM is to put some sort of paperwork or bureaucratic obstacle in front of my players and see how long they go with it till they get frustrated and start cutting through red tape with bullets. That is an age-old Paranoia tactic, and I love it.
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Jan 28, 2013 20:03
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Kulebri posted:and Shaolin calmly lowers his bow, and says: "It's bad manners to point at people."  This is the best kind of player.
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Jan 28, 2013 21:32
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I DM'd a bit as a teenager. I just got back into it. My players still bring up the time they random encountered horses while traveling across Toril. And instead of horses I made them stumble upon Wyld Stallions. Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, camping with Jesse James and loving Spock next to their magic phone booth. They offered the players an excellent quick adventure quest. They were asked to help save the righteous babes from a non-non heinous cult-slave camp in a magical land called San Dimas. The players said yes, and joined the two most excellent bards, with their invisible instruments, the gunslinger, and some really smart elf monk. I said gently caress it and broke out a D20 Modern manual, and had them kill their way through a Church of Mormon summer camp to rescue two heavy-metal girls. They were most triumphant in slaying the camp counselors so they were rewarded with getting to go ride the water slides. On their way back to Toril, the players made a pit stop at a playhouse to drop off Jesse James, and they failed to save President Lincoln from an assassin's bullet, which Bill and Ted thought was totally bogus. They were brought back 3 minutes into the past from where they left D&D world. Then the next session two players died, so I had Death himself come down from the sky in a phone booth to resurrect them, and tell them to "Be Excellent To Each Other."
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Jan 29, 2013 12:05
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