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TheDemon posted: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, MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Jan 29, 2013 |
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Jan 29, 2013 16:18
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MadScientistWorking posted:I really have to know what she's tried to do because I'm the say dam way. Oh, ok. I can do that. We are on the road and we come across this abandoned construction site. I had arrived a little late to the session so I had just connected. They get me caught up out of character and it turns out there was this magical-looking fountain at the back. And yes they Had Been Told it looked magical. We get going again and sure enough just as I have Nebi make my Arcana check and shout "don't look at it!", Boudica looks at her reflection and is sucked into the fountain. So Viceak and I have to go get ourselves purposely trapped inside the magical fountain to make sure she's ok, which it turns out is a gateway to some kind of mirror pocket-dimension, where the mirror-folk are berating us about poking around in their construction site and invading their pocket dimension and tell us to surrender and be incarcerated, as we try to figure out what's going on. We had been seeing signs of some kind of grand conspiracy all game. And they admit that they had an arrangement with the target of our current job. So Viceak makes his insight check, which results in a "THEY WORK FOR THE BAD GUYS" insight, and he exchanges a look with Nebi and tries to get Boudica's attention, and the two of us get primed for a fight. And then Boudica says: "I surrender". She drops her rapier, turns her back on the guys across the room, and puts her hands up against the wall. A whispered discussion follows "what?! what are you doing?" and it turns out she thinks surrendering is the only way we'll find out more, because maybe that would let her meet with whoever is in charge of these guys, so she can figure out what's really going on. She's also convinced the "we've dealt with him before" with regards to our current target means they killed our mark and that means they're really our secret friends. Viceak is all like "I think it's more likely they'll leave you to rot in a prison cell, or execute you" and I'm all like "wait, no, we had just decided OOC that we were going to fight!" which the player had literally missed or ignored, in addition to our IC play. Being the not-thief I am I slip a PM to the DM to 'palm' her rapier, Viceak pretended he didn't have any weapons because they didn't recognize what a totem was, and I hid my daggers. So we did in fact surrender. We get led to the next room and it's obvious surrendering was probably a bad idea. They're preparing to send us through another of those one-way magic portals, and in hurried conversation both IC and OOC we decide we should probably fight now before we're separated. Boudica is panicing about not having her sword, and at the same time still trying to talk down and make deals with our captors, who have zero incentive to deal diplomatically with our 'helpless' party. Just as she finally agrees to fight, she looks into the portal and is sucked into the prison. The prison on the Plane of Mirrors, and none of us have any form of planar travel.  After the session the DM admits he had just expected us to fight immediately and then find our way out, but instead we went on an awesome and completely unplanned side-adventure romp through the Plane of Mirrors, starting with a prison break, spent an 8-hour study session in the headquarters of an anarchist rebel group, and climaxed in an A-Team-style raid on a warehouse containing a portal circle, almost getting the party wiped by taking on 3 encounters at once, and a frantic battle barricaded in the portal room while the planar portal ritual is ongoing as we made our escape. TheDemon fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jan 29, 2013 |
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Jan 29, 2013 20:19
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God Of Paradise posted:Bill and Ted's Excellent sidequest
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Jan 29, 2013 22:19
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God Of Paradise posted:I DM'd a bit as a teenager. I just got back into it. This is a beautiful story and needs to happen more often. That's just awesome.
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Jan 30, 2013 01:06
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I played in Psi*Run game this weekend gone which was both amazingly bleak and also a comedy of errors. For those that don't know Psi*Run it's an indie game designed for one shots with the setup that you're all basically amnesiac psychics. At the start of the game no one knows quite what's going on (including the GM) but the players all set questions important to their pasts, and the answers to those shape the world as they come up in play. This game begins with us crashing a carriage in a cave. One of us is carrying a bottle of wine, and we know we're being chased. We flee down the only available path and end up in a huge cavern in the cave, walkways above us with obvious signs of inhabitants. One of the players has taken super speed as his psi power and uses it now to search for ways up to the walkways. He rolls just staggeringly badly. Really, statistically improbably badly (Five 1s and a 5 on 6d6). That sets the tone for the rest of the game. As a result of his roll the things pursuing us catch up. What follows is three hours of real life time for about 3 minutes of in game time as we try to end off the things that have turned up to capture us, fail, get someone killed, revive them, get caught again, etc. Along the way though we answer a bunch of our questions and define the world and plot. It's near future America and society is split in three. The middle classes live on the surface. A toxic cloud makes them all sick but they can afford to buy treatments from Pan-Europa to make their lives fairly normal. The poor, who can't afford treatment, are forced to live underground. The rich live in vast arcologies above the viral clouds. Pan-Europa is actually manufacturing the disease as well as the treatment, and suppressing the cure to ensure their profits on the treatment. That wine bottle? It's the only extant sample of the cure. Our party turns out to be the researcher who developed the cure before P-E tried to kill her, the professional thief who helped her steal back her cure from their offices, and a genetic freak immune to the disease who acted as the final ingredient to the cure. And we had a goal: to get the cure to the office of rival firm American West so they could start manufacturing it. My Psi power is to channel the major arcana of the tarot. During a breather I summon the Chariot and whisk us to the office of American West. Things go wrong (because we're still rolling terribly), the underground hell we've just left merges with the office, flaming rocks start wrecking the building, and the CEO of AW emerges. And with that we get the last memory reveal and end the game. Turns out American West and Pan-Europa are subsidiaries of the same company. And we knew that, which was why we went underground in the first place, but our memories came back in the wrong order and we just broke into the office of our enemy to hand them exactly what they sought. Oops. The CEO takes the cure from my hands, throws it out the window to shatter on a street miles below, beneath the viral cloud. The immune guy and myself are shot in the head and also dumped out the window. The researcher is lobotomized to remove her psi powers and emotions and put to work in the R&D labs. What none of them knew was that we'd accidentally disabled the treatment they were selling, psionically shut down its effectiveness. Some months later the first untreated case manifested. And then everyone on the surface died. It was just an utterly bleak game where the party succeeded in nothing and the whole world got screwed over, but also a really satisfying story to develop as we played
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Jan 30, 2013 06:30
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LordZoric fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Jan 31, 2013 19:03
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LordZoric posted:I've played with this group for almost four years. I think now's when to put that time to an end.
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Jan 31, 2013 19:32
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LordZoric posted:Now there's something I need to explain to really hit this home. Our GM doesn't like skill checks. No sir, not at all. Thinks they're just a way for players to be lazy and skip working out mysteries for themselves. Yawgmoth posted:At least with that GM because holy gently caress, skill checks are the meat and potatoes of almost every RPG out there! I love it when my players use their skills to gather clues/leads/info/etc. because it tells me they're interested in figuring out the bloody plot.I will never understand the mentality of "no, you can't use any of your in-game stuff to figure out this in-game thing". If I wanted to just use my own skills I'd buy a loving book of brain teasers and do it all by myself. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Jan 31, 2013 |
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Jan 31, 2013 19:32
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MadScientistWorking posted:Its kind of a weird thing because the GM actually has the right idea. For mysteries you generally ditch skill checks and basically lay the facts out in an accessible manner for the player to interpret. Sitting around playing mother-may-I for an hour because I don't think in the same way as the GM or because the GM can't grasp that it's not obvious to people on the other side of his skull is terrible. This is basic human understanding: other people won't assign the same level of importance to the facts, won't follow the same paths you would, and won't have the same ideas you do. Expecting them to do any of these, let alone all of them, is a great way to sit around like a  while your players do fuckall until they quit. Because it's not fun to play "guess what number string I'm thinking of in the order I'm thinking it" is a poo poo game.
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Jan 31, 2013 19:50
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Well, I was gonna put this in Secret History, but couldn't find all of the bits. So instead here's a summary of a one-shot dnd I ran. Quite silly. High level PCs learn that their country's chapion is actually a weak child without his magic sword! A magic sword now stolen by his undead arch-nemesis. They have to fight their way through his Evil Lair, and defeat his lietenants. The energy-spewing Laser-Scream. Mistress of kid-friendly dark magic Witchesca. The wildly effective or ineffectual Gamblor. The man with the strength of eight and not-too-subtle homoerotic undertones, Musclar. The extra-dimensional alien with a silly voice, Warpulon. And the cameo from another series Ninjettea. It was as silly as it sounded.
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Jan 31, 2013 20:04
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Yawgmoth posted:And if they fail the roll, you have something else interesting happen because when you give a roll (or any event where there is possible success and failure), you need to have something interesting happen either way. While I agree with almost everything you say, I have to raise a slight objection to this. In most cases, this is 100% true, but you can't just make it a guaranteed rule that something will happen every time a player throws a dice. Otherwise, you teach your players that they can do any inane thing and be rewarded for it. Making anything a hard-and-fast rule is just asking for a terrible player to exploit it, you have to use some discretion here. If one of your players, apropos of nothing, asks to make a roll for something, there's nothing wrong in taking that bad roll and just moving on with what was happening. Every time they shake a tree, you don't have to drop coconuts, sometimes you can just say "Leaves float down" and continue with the game.
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Jan 31, 2013 20:11
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Yawgmoth posted:No, he doesn't. He has the absolute antithesis of the right idea. He is the platonic ideal of wrongness in GMing. If the players want to dig through it with their own heads, let them. If the players don't want to do this or if they can't figure it out after a time, you give them a goddamn roll and be done with it. And if they fail the roll, you have something else interesting happen because when you give a roll (or any event where there is possible success and failure), you need to have something interesting happen either way. A locked door you have to pick is bad if the price of failure is just sitting around doing nothing until the lock is picked. A locked door that if not properly picked explodes is good because the explosion causes other events to happen, like guards being alerted or evidence being left behind. A) You confused the players with too much information. B) You didn't give them enough information. In theory if you keep the players engaged in a manner where they start acting upon the information in a way they shouldn't really be making dice rolls at all because that is the fun of the game. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jan 31, 2013 |
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Jan 31, 2013 20:28
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The entire point of a role-playing game is that you're playing a role. I roll up a master detective, or a charming rogue, because I am not those things but want to play as them. The entire point of a skill check is so I can lean on the accepted talents of my character, which are supposed to far outstrip mine. If the GM makes every single puzzle something I can figure out myself without ever having to utilize my character's skills, why am I even playing a master detective? Why don't I just play myself?
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Jan 31, 2013 20:34
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Captain Bravo posted:While I agree with almost everything you say, I have to raise a slight objection to this. In most cases, this is 100% true, but you can't just make it a guaranteed rule that something will happen every time a player throws a dice. quote:Otherwise, you teach your players that they can do any inane thing and be rewarded for it. B. No one said "make something good happen" or "let them be successful regardless of their actions". I said make something interesting happen regardless of the die roll, if there is a roll to be made. If success moves things along and failure doesn't do anything except make the players sit around twiddling their thumbs, don't roll. The trick to make both success and failure equally engaging. This does not mean equally effective for the PCs, or equally beneficial, or equally positive. If they attempt something insane then success should be difficult but possible and if they are successful it should be impressive, but if they fail the consequences should be dire and equally interesting to play through and deal with. quote:Making anything a hard-and-fast rule is just asking for a terrible player to exploit it quote:If one of your players, apropos of nothing, asks to make a roll for something, quote:Every time they shake a tree, you don't have to drop coconuts, sometimes you can just say "Leaves float down" and continue with the game. MadScientistWorking posted:In a game with an overarching mystery having the players roll to get themselves on track means one of two things:
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Jan 31, 2013 20:38
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The actual problem here wasn't that the GM didn't want skill checks getting in the way of the mystery, it was a clash of expectations between the players and the GM. I've both run and participated in completely freeform RPGs where the entire premise was "solve these mysteries". Solving mysteries is/can be fun. Roleplaying is/can be fun. Doing both at the same time is/can be fun. There's inherently some disconnect in that you (the player) are solving the mystery and then roleplaying your character figuring it out, rather than roleplaying your character solving the mystery, but that hasn't really been a problem in my experience. There is a difference between mystery solving and pixel-hunting though, which is what the described scenario is.
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Jan 31, 2013 20:45
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LordZoric fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Jan 31, 2013 21:00
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Yawgmoth posted:A. You shouldn't be trying to punish your players. If you do, get better players and/or be a better GM so they don't try inane poo poo in the first place. A: Nobody said anything about punishment, but the way you and your players interact with each other sets the tone for the game. A bad player can still be a good member of a group, if you're upfront about how the game is going to be played, and head off possible roads that will lead to them disrupting the group. I'd much rather try to find a way for all my players to have fun, than start kicking them off for being "bad players" and just keeping the ones that play the way I want them to.
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Jan 31, 2013 21:22
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quote:The entire point of a role-playing game is that you're playing a role. I roll up a master detective, or a charming rogue, because I am not those things but want to play as them. The entire point of a skill check is so I can lean on the accepted talents of my character, which are supposed to far outstrip mine. If the GM makes every single puzzle something I can figure out myself without ever having to utilize my character's skills, why am I even playing a master detective? Why don't I just play myself? MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Jan 31, 2013 |
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Jan 31, 2013 21:52
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Captain Bravo posted:A: Nobody said anything about punishment, but the way you and your players interact with each other sets the tone for the game. A bad player can still be a good member of a group, if you're upfront about how the game is going to be played, and head off possible roads that will lead to them disrupting the group. I'd much rather try to find a way for all my players to have fun, than start kicking them off for being "bad players" and just keeping the ones that play the way I want them to. Edit: MadScientistWorking posted:Because I'm not arguing for using player knowledge. I'm arguing against dice rolls to determine character knowledge.
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Jan 31, 2013 22:25
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It could be that, perhaps, there's a reasonable middle ground between 'You're not allowed to roll skill checks' and 'roll skill checks in lieu of RPing and decision making'.
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Jan 31, 2013 22:55
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Yawgmoth posted:Edit: Chaltab posted:It could be that, perhaps, there's a reasonable middle ground between 'You're not allowed to roll skill checks' and 'roll skill checks in lieu of RPing and decision making'. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Jan 31, 2013 |
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Jan 31, 2013 23:00
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MadScientistWorking posted:Do you actually know what the Gumshoe system actually is?
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Jan 31, 2013 23:10
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Yawgmoth posted:No. I didn't even know you were referring to a specific system because you didn't say anything until just now and an offhand mention you have apparently edited into a much previous post.
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Jan 31, 2013 23:30
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Some people are more comfortable with different levels of for lack of a better word, verisimilitude in their problem solving. For me while I like to figure stuff out as well, I also like having skill checks to help me see things. The GM is my guide, my window into the world my character exists in but he's not a television. I need to prompt him to describe things to me and sometimes describing something can be difficult. Skill checks allow the player to direct the GM's focus on the scene, but also allow the GM to skip describing some things which he may not be able to and just give me the information behind them. If you as a player, or as a GM, can get around this issue that's great but I haven't met many people who can. I don't think skills are supposed to be a crutch, but they're there to help you figure out how you interact with the world.
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Jan 31, 2013 23:39
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Sometimes, 'mysteries' that are solved too early can inspire new twists. Someone rolled a really, really good knowledge check in my last session...so I decided they knew the person they were hunting. The person they were hunting was their half brother, who they hadn't seen in decades. Instead of going to a small town barbershop, they went directly to his house...but that propelled the drama. The characters didn't want him to be guilty, based on their new knowledge.
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Feb 1, 2013 00:35
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Yawgmoth posted:No. I didn't even know you were referring to a specific system because you didn't say anything until just now and an offhand mention you have apparently edited into a much previous post. That's why I've been speaking as system-agnostic as I can; most system determine character anything via rolls. It's one of those things that rather defines the basis of the hobby. MadScientistWorking is doing an awful job of explaining. I don't think the two of you are even disagreeing much. The system-agnostic idea is that the characters advance the plot even if they fail all their rolls to notice something. If the plot is pure mystery, then sometimes you have to just hand them something. Your 'something happens even on a failure' is pretty much the same idea, but executed differently. The investigative gaming thread explains this better than I can, but the idea MSW is getting at is in a pure mystery, you can't rely on your characters making rolls to notice plot-critical evidence; if you do, they end up getting completely stuck on a failure. One way to get around this is so long as they go through the motions, make sure they receive the minimum required for your plot, and give extras on cleverness and success. In the case of the cat-piss gaming experience that started this discussion, the DM wanted the characters to do something specific, make a specific roll, or search in a specific area, and since they didn't end up doing the exact thing he wanted they were spinning their wheels for a whole session. TheDemon fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Feb 1, 2013 |
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Feb 1, 2013 08:25
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LordZoric fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2013 19:11
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LordZoric posted:What a waste. I would have quit right there and then and never looked back. That's completely stupid and I don't know why you put up with it.
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Feb 1, 2013 19:42
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LordZoric posted:Here's another session from a few months back. Same campaign. Same bad experiences. Have you read The Boys? Because that is seriously your campaign. Also, I would have left right there when he did all that. This plus all that other stuff is bullshit. Remember no gaming is better than bad gaming.
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Feb 1, 2013 21:49
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LordZoric posted:What a waste. Never play with this person again. And I'm really sorry you had to put up with that.
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Feb 1, 2013 21:55
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LordZoric fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Mar 17, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2013 22:24
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If the other players agree the GM sucks, start a new group. "Inertia" is a bad reason for a friendship. If not, oh well. There are plenty of gamers in the world. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?372312-A-List-of-Player-Finders
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Feb 1, 2013 22:36
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DMs who consider their own plot inviolable against the choices of the PCs annoy the piss out of me. If you're going to force your storyline to stick to the rails then you might as well be playing a tactical skirmish game.
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Feb 1, 2013 23:04
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Start a new campaign, invite everybody else but not the current GM. Something simple like Apocalypse/Dungeon World or Octane, maybe.
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Feb 1, 2013 23:06
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LordZoric posted:Hahahaha really? I am not at all surprised. Despite lots of talk from the GM about publishing our campaigns as a novel someday, most of the plots have usually turned out to be copied almost plot-point by plot-point from some comic he's read. I'm curious, which parts of it did he rip off? Well, the whole thing about the 'Avengers' being utter assholes and the protagonist is all about exposing them and taking them out by any means necessary. Basically, everything you described could have been a C-plot in that comic. You should check it out. It's super gory and really gets a little uncomfortable, but it's Garth Ennis, so what do you want? It just finished its run, and I know every issue is available online.
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Feb 1, 2013 23:12
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This is a story of Praise for the group i play with. Ive had in my history as a Table Top gamer a mix of bad players as a DM, bad DMs as a player, and in the past once lost my love of the hobby. But in the past 4 years, me and a close friend have been putting together an online Table Top group. In this time we have gone through a couple dozen people but some have stuck with the group, and to this day have become dear friends. Our journey started with Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. I had quit during the twilight days of 3.5, having been with a bad group for the past 2 years. Interpersonal conflicts, biggotry and just general malice. A BAD group. I have a friend online named Zolinn. Ive known him for 8 years now. He was interested in learning to play Dungeons and Dragons even though we didnt live in the same state. This is where it began. He invited a friend of his to join us, and we started diving into 4th edition. I started as DM at first but Zolinn quickly took over ( though somewhat to his chagrin later on ) as a great DM. That campaign lasted months and was one of the best experiences i ever had with RPGs. Over the course of the year after that though things didnt go so smoothly. We had players coming in and out of the group with only the core 3 ( Me Zolinn and Earthdweller ) sticking around. Then things in life started getting bad across the table for all 3 of us. We stuck with it, and kept it going but we hit some low points. About 3 years ago i started playing on the side with a new group. It had a DM i just met and some other players. One of which was this gruff southern dude named Hardbushido. Military guy, funny, very southern. That group fell apart and he ended up joining our group. Shortly after i met MadScientistWorking on Penny Arcade Forums ( where i had met the other group i played with ). He joined the group and also introduced me to Something Awful. This was the foundation of our group for the next 2 years. We had a hell of a good time off and on, even though we had drastic shifts in scheduling, but we have kept our Weekly RPG night going most weeks for the past 2 and a half years. Thanks to MadscientistWorking and Something Awful, i met KillerQueen on these here forums through a recruitment thread for our group. This would be and early preview into the group composition of our group going later into this year. KillerQueen moved in and out of the group due to life troubles and Hardbushido was sometimes gone for months at a time due to his job. But the core of the group remained. This year thanks to Killerqueen a new addition joined our group. Another goon whose SA name is TheDemon. For the past 6 months our group compostion has been Zolinn, Madscientistworking, Hardbushido, Killerqueen, and TheDemon, with Earthdweller making appearences. And now i want to tell a story of a memorable gaming experience that came out of a recent session. And why these guys are so fun to play RPGS with. Madscientistworking is running a Dungeon World campaign for our group based in Planescape lore. Recently our characters had a session set in the Realm of Dreams. In this session my character hopped from one party members dream to another. A memorable part of this session was our party arguing over what we were all doing awake in a dream world, and trying to figure out my characters motive for jumping into everyones dreams. It ended up crecsendoing with the party moving forward to help rescue the guardian of dreams, and leaving the dream world. Its the first time in my 13 years of playing RPGs, that there was major interparty conflict, without players being assholes, and for once i was with a group that understood that you can have interparty drama without being a dick as a player. Its something that stood out to me as such a great thing as in the past groups i had before this online group, were rife with being assholes to one another, and not being able to be cool dudes. This was less a story of cool things happening in the game world, and more a story of people being cool friends while playing RPGs.
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Feb 1, 2013 23:20
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LordZoric posted:lots of talk from the GM about publishing our campaigns as a novel someday
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Feb 1, 2013 23:22
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Yawgmoth posted:I avoid everyone who says this because it is a clear and obvious signal that they don't actually want to run a game; they want to write a book but suck at writing characters or dialogue and so want
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Feb 2, 2013 02:47
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Zereth posted:Start a new campaign, invite everybody else but not the current GM. Something simple like Apocalypse/Dungeon World or Octane, maybe. Do this, and cut the GM out completely. He doesn't get to play, he doesn't get to watch, he's OUT. Maybe he'll learn a lesson about consequences, or you'll be rid of an arrogant wannabe writer who wants you to jump through his hoops. If the people don't go for it, leave. The group's not worth it. Bottom line, draw a line and stop letting him GM. He's terrible and the kind of terrible who need a sledgehammer to realize it if they ever do.
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Feb 2, 2013 08:48
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Chaltab posted:Not to mention that 1) it will likely never happen, Record of the Lodoss War is an anomaly, and 2) Unless you're all on the same page and grant consent, swiping your characters for his novel is dickish and somewhat illegal. Huh, I had no idea, I would have said Dragonlance.
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Feb 2, 2013 12:52
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