|
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.
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2013 15:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 17:42 |
|
|
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? Yeah you need to  asap, and if he's just as lovely a player as a GM, then you really ought to just not game with him, period. It sounds like your only purpose is to be NPCs in his story, and he really doesn't give a poo poo if you have fun.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2013 20:50
|
|
|
MadScientistWorking posted:You know. I've always been curious as to the Replay material that gets published in Japan because even though Record of the Lodoss War is an anomaly its only an anomaly in how popular it became. According to Wikipedia RPG replays are actually more popular than novels based off of the RPGs.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2013 21:59
|
|
|
Most hilariously WTF quote of the night: our Cleric rolls for bluff, with the words, "I know my friend [the half-orc] here is not African-American, but I assure you, we are indeed criminals." I have no idea why the cleric's player decided these NPCs totally needed our cleric to act horribly racist and poo poo, but it's killing our DM, and everyone else's character's are just WTF-ing at this.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 05:21
|
|
|
Maybe your cleric thinks he's undercover at Tea Party Community.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 10:46
|
|
|
We had a pretty unexpected moment in our 13th Age game last week, one run for us by Captain Bravo. I may not have all the details exactly right, but this is the gist of it. Closer to the beginning of our campaign, we went through a portal and rescued a town on the other side. After saving it, we sort of claimed it as own our, disassembled the portal, and took it everywhere with us. Anything we found that we wanted was tossed into our pocket town. The bad guy's insectoid golems, siege weapons, people we saved or owed us, and basically anything not nailed down. At one point, after rescuing a different town from a siege by leading a naval invasion, we recruited a carpenter and his family to live in our town. I don't remember the exact series of events but it led to us making an off-hand joke about how the rogue was to be married to one of them. The joke lasted maybe 5 minutes or so and we forgot about it and moved on. Months of real time and at least a dozen or more game sessions later, its an open secret that the rogue sends our GM secret messages. We assume that he is hoarding treasure, and it is a running joke that when our adventure ends we will end up penniless or dead while the rogue sips wine in a mansion. He was the craftiest character and most often found ways to acquire all kinds of things. He wasn't antagonistic, hostile towards us, or greedy, he just had a knack for thinking outside the box to score all kinds of loot. We found out last week that, as it turns out, the secret messages were him telling the GM that he was sending presents home to his wife.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 11:37
|
|
|
These just got posted over in the comic strip thread in BSS. I think we can all relate.  I need a hat like that.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 18:10
|
|
|
--
LordZoric fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 17, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 18:54
|
|
|
My god, it's like every bad gaming stereotype in a single game.  Good to see your character at least got the up side of the Deck of Campaign Destruction. I have yet to hear of or be party to a game that saw one and continued on past that point; it always ends with someone being lost to the void or imprisoned by Asmodeus, and someone else sitting on a hoard that would make a dragon jealous.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 20:34
|
|
|
I've been in one 4e campaign where The Deck worked out ok. It was unusual though, it was basically a pure combat pick-up-game. One session we'd have 5 players, the next 7, the next only 4, and if we died we could replace ourselves fairly quickly. Also I think the DM was fairly sensible on DM-fiating the deck. For example, the guy who drew The Sun got a +4 item when the party was using +3, and when he got sent to The Void with the next card his body disappeared and all his gear dropped on the ground for his literally identical replacement character to pick up next session. The player who found it also coveted that deck like Gollum coveted the ring, we basically had to trick or steal it from him to use it. The guy who drew a poo poo ton of gold... well, in this campaign, gold was worthless except as an arbitrary indicator of wealth, and we ended up purchasing all items from a master artificer using residium. The guy who got a free castle got one, but he said he didn't have anywhere specific in mind, so the DM ruled that he didn't know where it was.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 21:04
|
|
|
--
LordZoric fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Mar 18, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 21:20
|
|
|
The thing about the Deck of Many Things seems to be that no matter how much of a bad idea it is to even think about drawing cards from it. People do anyway. While back in a PF game, I was playing a Half-Elf Magus, and upon our group finding a DoMT inside of a treasure trove I (being the designated Detect Magic/Spellcraft user) figured out what it was and basically duct taped it shut and told the entire group "no, don't draw cards, it never ends well for anyone." The person playing the groups barbarian thought I was just being paranoid and drew two cards against my warning. He earned the eternal emnity of an outsider and lost all of his magic items. He was furious since apparently his gear was all very expensive and high level and he was focused entirely around using that one very specific kind of weapon. Me, being the idiot that I was, decided to give a pittance draw of the deck hoping I could get something to help him out. I got "soul imprisoned on a lower plane". The rest of the party, after seeing all of the barbarian's clothes explode off of his body and the half elf fall over dead, declined to draw any cards. And then the barbarian's player refused to show up to any more sessions of that campaign because "it was bullshit".
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 23:15
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:
Well it is bullshit - you should never get something that can screw you over completely like that unless every player thinks it's okay and the Deck of Many Things just features in too many bad stories - positive results could have been gained by trying for them without risk of negative consequence and negative results can outright destroy characters. I don't know why GMs just don't fiat the stupid thing to never be able to ruin a character - just make every effect silly like make it rain cats on your enemy or something. It's bad GMing and bad game design to put in something like that. I mean unless the campaign is the stereotypical horror movie backstory of 'dumb teens messing around' (or Paranoia) in which case such an item should be encouraged.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2013 23:19
|
|
|
I ran Monsterhearts for some friends. It was the first time I'd run in years and the first time most of them had done any tabletop RPGs at all, and I was a little rusty, but it went well. The game is fun (but pretending to be in high school is exhausting). At one point our Ghoul lured some poor, stupid, horny boy in her class back to her house so that she could eat him but then decided that flat-out disappearing this guy would probably cause her problems down the road, so she decided to just kind of snack. She got him handcuffed to a radiator in the basement (poor dude still thinks he's getting laid), drugged him, and then drained some blood to drink later or something. At this point I guess she decided that she wanted to actually have sex with him. She asks me how long the drug will take to wear off and I tell her it will take probably eight to twelve hours but why does she care? He's not actually unconscious, he's just loopy and doesn't care about anything. She could just have sex with him now! Her response? "Well I don't want this to get rapey." We all had to take five minutes because we were laughing so hard.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2013 00:03
|
|
|
Contest Winner posted:We found out last week that, as it turns out, the secret messages were him telling the GM that he was sending presents home to his wife. That reveal actually made my day 
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2013 01:26
|
|
|
LordZoric posted:I really love the idea behind the Deck. I feel like if it were treated as a tapletop RPG equivalent of a bonus stage, with some minor nice things and either funny or inconsequential penalties to be had, it'd be a really fun idea. As is it's just too filled with the design spirit of 3.5. The things it can do pretty much no matter what irrevocably alter the game. Like you said either somebody's character is dead or worse than dead, or somebody else just became a demigod. Good concept, terrible execution. When you draw a card from the Deck of Many Things, draw a face-down card from a Tarot deck and roll +cha. On a 10+, interpret the card the way you want, standard or reversed. On a 6-, the GM interprets the card the way they want. On a 7-9, interpret the card however it's flipped face-up. In any case, take -1 forward to future attempts to draw a card.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2013 09:30
|
|
|
When I shanghai'd their portal back to thrust them into a new adventure, he got kind of mad at me. Not because of the adventure, he loves things to kill and things to steal. No, he got a little miffed because by screwing with their portal I prevented him from taking his wife a new dress he had woven out of a mysterious cloth they had found. Surprisingly enough, his training as a tailer comes up almost more often than his rogue background. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2013 09:34
|
|
|
Zoness posted:Well it is bullshit - you should never get something that can screw you over completely like that unless every player thinks it's okay and the Deck of Many Things just features in too many bad stories - positive results could have been gained by trying for them without risk of negative consequence and negative results can outright destroy characters.
|
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2013 18:15
|
|
|
Captain Bravo posted:When I shanghai'd their portal back to thrust them into a new adventure, he got kind of mad at me. Not because of the adventure, he loves things to kill and things to steal. No, he got a little miffed because by screwing with their portal I prevented him from taking his wife a new dress he had woven out of a mysterious cloth they had found. Surprisingly enough, his training as a tailer comes up almost more often than his rogue background. Was he playing Garak?
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2013 02:24
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:Was he playing Garak? Yes, I based my original character idea on Garak. To tell what I remember, the head carpenter was a gnome we had dealt with before, and when the team lead turned out to be his daughter, they started joking I should date her because my character is also a gnome. When I offered a large payment to hire the team for our town, someone decided that they should mistake it as a dowry and Bravo decided it actually happened. I just decided to roll with it, and also to keep it a secret to keep up my greedy image. It got out last week because my inventory was full and I accidentally remarked that if I had had the chance to give my gifts I would have had enough space. Bravo then explained the gifts, and after they laughed at his "joke" I had to explain that he was not joking.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2013 03:02
|
|
|
To be totally honest, it was an open secret that Ashtear had something going on on the side. I expected a sinister twist at sometime, and was keeping wary to anything he could be trying to pull over on us. Needless to say, not only did I feel like the biggest shitheel for thinking he was being sinister when he was actually being a big softy, but I'm pretty sure he showed me a thing or two about how to better play the game.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2013 08:42
|
|
|
--
LordZoric fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Mar 18, 2021 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2013 18:51
|
|
|
Started up a game of Pathfinder at the request of a couple new players to get them into a game. First time DMing, 3 of the 6 players were first time players. They're all playing pirates in a homebrew setting which is pretty much LoZ: Wind Waker. They were paid to rob the vault of a local lord of town with a bonus if they managed to murder him without getting caught. Naturally, there's another group inside the base also trying to kill the lord and rob the vault. The party's Barbarian runs into the bar immediately, gets plastered, and starts a massive bar fight summoning multiple guards away from their posts. However, the lord notices the party's witch, monk, and sorcerer trying to sneak downstairs. He heads over and gets distracted by the sorcerer, who is a changeling. He immediately starts hitting on her. The party's gunslinger takes advantage of the situation, demanding that the lord challenges him to a pistol duel. He bluffs the lord into believing the sorcerer is his wife, and the two go outside for a showdown. Most of the guards head outside as the barbarian runs outside to watch the fight, as well as the two enemy assassins. The gunslinger loses intiative to the lord. The lord rolls a 3 and misses. The gunslinger fires back, rolling a natural one and blowing the sorcerer's hat off. All of the guards start laughing wildly. The two assassins take advantage of the situation, firing off a lightning bolt for 31 damage at the lord and immediately dropping him to the negatives before fleeing. Half the party takes off after them, but the barbarian stares at the smoking body of the lord for a moment. He realizes he's still alive after a check. "EVERYONE GET THE gently caress BACK, I'M A DOCTOR!" He screams, running for the body. Both the gunslinger and the sorcerer roll natural 20s on their bluff, successfully convincing the crowd of guards that the giant screaming drunken man is a doctor. The barbarian begins pouring alcohol down the lord's throat and into his wounds, dealing a small amount of damage. The guards begin to pull him back. He makes a check to struggle his way out. I figure he's just going to break the hold and run. Instead, he repositions one of the guards in between him and the lord before declaring it's time to bullrush. Natural 20. The guard goes flying on top of the smoking bleeding covered in alcohol lord, dealing exactly enough damage to kill him. The barbarian then takes off screaming into the night. First session over. I has a good feeling about this campaign.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2013 20:55
|
|
|
Chickenfrogman posted:I has a good feeling about this campaign.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2013 23:49
|
|
|
Chaltab posted:Nothing in D&D is more fun than ridiculously improbable bluff checks. Ridiculously improbable diplomacy checks. My players started a cult in the second session. I'll give a write-up when I can write it in a way that makes sense.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2013 23:50
|
|
|
Ridiculous bluff checks, you say? I'm sure I've told this before, but not in this thread and the old ones are long archived by now, so here goes. In the very first campaign I played in, it was us, a rag-tag bunch of plucky adventurers, versus an order of religious zealots, the Iconoclasts, who always seemed to be one step ahead of us. We were both looking for the same set of artifacts, they for nefarious purposes, we, poo poo, I dunno, for cash probably. Anyway we'd gotten wind that one was hidden somewhere under a major temple in what amounts to the cultural, if not political, capital of the continent. We knew the Iconoclasts had a strong presence in that city and we therefore had to find an inconspicuous way in, which through a process of thought I cannot retrace led to us parachuting out of an airship right over the middle of the city. Strong winds meant we'd be separated and would have to regroup once on ground (we realized this after we jumped, naturally). My Arcane Trickster master thief managed to land on the roof of city hall and, waste not want not, started getting to work on the diamond-studded weather dragon they had there ("Anything valuable up there?" - "Not really. Couple of frisbees." - "Come on, surely there's something?") before joining the others, but was interrupted by a guard and had to make a daring escape. Joining the others in an alley we realized that Talar, our ranger, was missing, but having no way to contact him we decided to make for the temple, hoping he'd have the same idea and not murder anyone important on the way, or if he did, at least make it into a distraction. We threw open the doors of the temple and this is what we saw: a couple of priests and a massive congregation of believers, gathered around the very nice fountain they had for an altar, the very altar that hid the entrance to the artifact's hiding place, all staring towards the hole in the ceiling, from which Talar dangled by his parachute, struggling to get free. Clearly the next thing anyone said would decide the fate of our mission. "Good people, please make way for us simple clerics of, uh, water, that we may practice our holy sacraments. Brother Talar, how diligently you pray! Do let us help you get down." Helping our buddy down was a matter of some simple spells, and opening the secret passage a matter of a simple water-based puzzle, all while the congregation looked on dumb-founded. But just as we were getting ready to go down the high priest stepped forward with a stern look on his face. The jig was up. "Here! Who's gonna pay for that roof, then!" "Uh... we are most dreadfully sorry, just contact the Holy Order of Water, courtesy of the Iconoclasts, and you will be reimbursed fully. And now we really must be off. Very quickly indeed."
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2013 21:11
|
|
|
I remember in The Sunlit Citadel, the first adventure thing for D&D 3.0, one of my players, a Knight, with tons of Charisma successfully convinced the Goblin King to send all his subjects to kill the Big Bad of the module. The King was supposed to talk to the PCs before killing them to get them to surrender. The player pulled a natural 20 and a +10 bonus to Diplomacy out of his rear end and convinced the king that the bad druid in the basement was bad for goblins and should be killed for loots and fungus. Not wanting to make it easy, I had him pass like 4 different Bluff and Diplomacy checks throughout the dungeon and he passed all of them at level 1 by rolling 19s and 20s constantly. You were supposed to get to level 4 in there and they did the whole thing in two sessions because they never actually fought anything. Afterwards, the Knight executed the Goblin King for trespassing on the Rightful King's Land and successfully Intimidated the rest of the goblins into running away. Those guys were crazy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 01:10
|
|
|
I'm not sure what the problem is. They cleared out the dungeon, even if they didn't do it by being murder hobos.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 01:38
|
|
|
Yeah that sounds like a way more entertaining night than bog-standard D&D. On that note, two sessions is "short" for a single dungeon? Was there more plot than that post indicated, or was the intention really to stretch out such a threadbare story over 3-4 sessions?
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 01:41
|
|
|
I think even in 3e you were supposed to give out XP for alternate solutions to fights, such as that.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 01:43
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:Yeah that sounds like a way more entertaining night than bog-standard D&D. On that note, two sessions is "short" for a single dungeon? Was there more plot than that post indicated, or was the intention really to stretch out such a threadbare story over 3-4 sessions? I've never played that one, but I don't think he was talking about a single dungeon. You don't gain three levels in one dungeon. It was probably an entire adventure pack, which would involve spending a few sessions on the goblins, probably a couple other dungeons to pick up maguffins, before tackling a final dungeon and finally taking down the druid months later. Also, why would you just rule that the goblins succeed? Give him his credit, have the goblins attack and grant them xp, maybe even some magic items or a boon, and then continue on with the rest of the module. Maybe give a nod towards it later on, by having goblin allies assist when the party takes on the druid.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 01:50
|
|
|
It was the very first adventure ever for 3e, and yes it was just one dungeon. I don't remember how much XP it dropped if you murdered everything in it and looted it dry, though, but there was a lot of random rear end poo poo in it to stumble on. Like a troll hiding in a sarcophagus in a secret room. (I think it was a weaker than normal one because it was all starved so it wouldn't automatically murder the Problaby-level-1 party, but it was tough.)
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 01:54
|
|
|
Captain Bravo posted:I've never played that one, but I don't think he was talking about a single dungeon. You don't gain three levels in one dungeon.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 01:56
|
|
|
Zereth posted:It was the very first adventure ever for 3e, and yes it was just one dungeon. I don't remember how much XP it dropped if you murdered everything in it and looted it dry, though, but there was a lot of random rear end poo poo in it to stumble on. Like a troll hiding in a sarcophagus in a secret room. (I think it was a weaker than normal one because it was all starved so it wouldn't automatically murder the Problaby-level-1 party, but it was tough.) Yeah, pretty much. I actually ran the Sunless Citadel back in HS when both I and most of the rest of the party were all new to tabletop RPGs, and the results were... interesting, to say the least. Highlights included: -A barfight that was initiated about twenty seconds into the very first session, -The "Sam Fisher of Rats", which nearly killed the party's sorcerer after everyone failed to detect it (DC 26 at first level, IIRC) -An extremely long argument with the party bard about whether he could summon a French Horn and unfurl it to use as a bridge across a spike pit, -"Roll for explosive diarrhea", -A PC that was essentially an awakened Velociraptor with levels in Fighter who was doing 32 damage at minimum off of pounce attacks, -And a critical misunderstanding of the rules for Cleave and Great Cleave, which combined with the previously mentioned VelociFighter led to the party evaporating entire encounters within 2-3 turns. We never ended up finishing the campaign, but it was fun while it lasted. Ah, to be young and have no idea of how the rules actually work 
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 04:31
|
|
|
Oh I need to be clear that I wasn't complaining. I loved it. These guys waltzed through an entire dungeon in what I had planed to take like 6 sessions in 2. And you better believe they leveled all the way from 1 to 4 all at once after killing the king. It took them 3 trips to get all their loot out. I had a blast and I love alternate routes past challenges.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 05:04
|
|
|
Acebuckeye13 posted:-An extremely long argument with the party bard about whether he could summon a French Horn and unfurl it to use as a bridge across a spike pit, A French Horn wouldn't get you very far, are you sure you didn't mean a Tuba or maybe Sousaphone instead? Also as random bonus trivia: Brass instruments deform really, really easily! They wouldn't support anyone except maybe a Gnome's weight for very long and even then it'd only be a single man across if they were really quick. You'd have better luck with a string instrument.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 05:12
|
|
|
HiKaizer posted:A French Horn wouldn't get you very far, are you sure you didn't mean a Tuba or maybe Sousaphone instead?
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 05:17
|
|
|
A lot of the piping in a French Horn connects onto its valves though, there is a length of continuous piping yes, but it's not something you could actually really unravel very easily.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 06:09
|
|
|
I think everyone is ignoring the obvious solution of summoning multiple pianos to flatten the spikes
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 08:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 17:42 |
|
|
This is like Return to Zork the tabletop RPG. Where any solution to a problem that's not batshit crazy ends up in instant death. "I decide to make a running jump across the spikes." "Roll." 19. "A 19. Okay. You make a running leap across the chasm and clear the distance. But then you are immediately eaten by wolves." God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Feb 8, 2013 |
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2013 09:28
|
|