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Attempting to reduce the back-story in order to get to the good parts; A few generations ago was a huge war between a fairly standard evil empire and it's bordering kingdoms. The war involved high magics and doomsday devices, and the result of the war was ultimately the destruction of both the empire and most of the kingdoms warring with it. One of those kingdoms was a great gnomish kingdom which had legendarily high technology and magic both. The empire attacked the gnomes first, as they were the biggest threat. Many of the gnomish cities fell to their own rushed defenses. The PCs are investigating such a city (late 3.5). The group; Factotem elf Warblade half-orc It's been so long that I don't remember the rest, but there were two others. We'll call them Jim and Steve. So the group spends most of a day exploring the ruins themselves. All they really find are a bunch of gnomish skeletons (actual dead skeletons, not animated). They also got into a few fights with what appear to be metal golems made in the image of gnomes. Investigation reveals no magic was used in their creation, though, which gets the group more curious and they explore the city more fervently. They eventually find their way to a huge underground complex with a layout and armament you'd expect from a military base. However, they also found a bunch of consoles and levers and water vats, a giant, empty silo, and, the most interesting thing, a giant room with basically shelves of those metal gnome golem things. So, of course, the group heads to the consoles with all the buttons and levers and start pressing buttons, turning knobs, and pulling levers, until things happen. A few skill checks and the group starts noticing patterns (Lights going off, water vats emptying, etc). They eventually learn that the gnomes have so mastered an understanding of physical properties of the world that they can duplicate magical effects with machinery. They use some spells to understand the readouts, and pick up new words like "geosynchronous orbit", "radio waves", and "distributed intelligence". Using these as clues, they determine one of the machines is specifically for these "radio waves". So after fiddling with this machine for a few minutes, one of the readouts became an image of one of the metal gnome things, which proceeds to communicate with them in a language consisting entirely of beeps. They cast tongues real quick and try to investigate some more. They have a difficult time understanding what the thing's trying to communicate still, due simply to how alien it's thoughts are to them. After a while they let slip that they plan on stopping the metal gnomes' plans (not on purpose), and so the conversation is cut short and a loud alarm begins going off all over the complex. They play with another machine until they figure out that something's coming from that thing in "geosynchronous orbit" and is capable of destroying the entire city, so they hightail it as far from the city as they can. After they witness something the size of a grain silo slam into the city and the city explodes (and they recover from the impact of the concussive blast), they check on each other and heal up, then head back to the city. When they get there, they find a city-sized crater. After taking the sight in for a minute or so, the elven factoetem calmly asks nobody in particular "Radiowaves, huh?"
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Feb 10, 2013 02:19
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A few weeks ago my Rogue Trader group was sneaking into an abandoned AdMech complex in order to grab a chunk of cogitator storage. They run into enemy cultists on the way. After the inital flurry of fire and scrambling to cover, our Rogue Trader suddenly rolls for Deceive and gets a 01(that's the best possible result in a d100 roll under system). I ask him what he's trying to do and he answers "my character yells "FRIENDLY FIRE YOU FUCKTARDS" at the cultists". With that, they stop shooting, sheepishly apologize and take the party to the end of the dungeon, believing them to be some bigwig mercs hired by their cult leader.
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Feb 10, 2013 12:37
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Asehujiko posted:A few weeks ago my Rogue Trader group was sneaking into an abandoned AdMech complex in order to grab a chunk of cogitator storage. They run into enemy cultists on the way. After the inital flurry of fire and scrambling to cover, our Rogue Trader suddenly rolls for Deceive and gets a 01(that's the best possible result in a d100 roll under system). I ask him what he's trying to do and he answers "my character yells "FRIENDLY FIRE YOU FUCKTARDS" at the cultists". With that, they stop shooting, sheepishly apologize and take the party to the end of the dungeon, believing them to be some bigwig mercs hired by their cult leader.  Would have been even better if their leader actually WAS expecting some bigwig mercs.
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Feb 11, 2013 02:45
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Now a worst; My group back home has this one guy who's always complaining about how people don't play their characters "right", who's known for passive aggression, changing his character's plans or even making a brand new character just to ruin the fun for everyone else, and DMing in a, well, groggy manner. Well, one time he was playing a gnomish bard who was exaltedly good. This bard was traveling with what was essentially two paladins, a rogue who gave up money to charities in every city they stopped at, and a Bo9S class... Duskblade, I think? Anyway, the duskblade's whole character concept was someone walking between dark and light and dealing with anger issues, so, sure, we could say he's not entirely a good guy (even though he was struggling to BE good, but whatever)... but everyone else? This bard proclaimed he was the most good character of the group. While others were giving to charities, trying to help out the poor of large cities through direct intervention, and off chasing evil monsters at other times, the good things the bard actually did, which was good in character and not a result of going with the rest of the group were; 1) Attempting to get a small group of goblins to turn good. Okay, cool. After a few weeks into his attempt, when I was getting sick of the whole event just being some diplomacy checks with almost no context, I decided a couple of the goblins got into a fight. One goblin threatened to kill the other goblin (he didn't, it was only a threat). I figured this would be a decent opportunity to role-play the talks he was having with the goblins in order to turn them good. So he decides to send the goblin who instigated away (essentially banishing him), and proceeded to reprimand the other, and left them in their camp outside the city for the day. He basically gave up on the goblins, figuring my point was somehow that his attempts were for naught, instead of attempting to give him an opportunity to actually role-play what he was doing. 2) Later on, the group finds out about a local giant-slayer who's been keeping the giants from attacking the city by killing the ones that got too close. Well, that backfired, and more were coming to figure out what happened to their buddies. So the group suggest they patrol the area with her, to see if maybe they can find out why the giants are coming this way in the first place. They tell her some of their plan, but not the part where they planned on not killing the giants they find. I was paying special attention to see if anyone said that to her, because she's a giant-"slayer". She figures they'd just search the bodies, or do some magic, or something. She doesn't know. So when they inevitably get into a fight with a giant and she kills it, the gnome goes off on her and some of the rest of the group about how that wasn't the plan and they should all get a warning toward becoming evil for killing a giant without trying to figure out why it's even there. Instead of, I dunno, explaining the plan better and then going to find a different giant (it was known there was more than one in the area), this player decides to quit playing for a while because I wasn't allowing him to play his concept, apparently. 3) He quits the bard character and creates a half Illithid who was evil and prayed on people to eat their brains in order to show how the whole group is hypocrites and they travel with an evil dude. I'm actually kind of glad about this if only for the fact that the group could handle the passive aggression well. When they found a small port town, they tried to find someone with a live squid. They bought the squid and a barrel. They filled the barrel with water and put the squid in it, and gave it to the illithid guy to be his girlfriend. They figured he was grumpy because he was lonely. I'm kind of slow when it comes to intuiting other people's motivations, so I didn't even realize the illithid was a passive aggressive reaction until one of the other guys explained it to me. Then it clicked. Then I realized how big an rear end in a top hat the guy was, but the campaign was almost over so I just rolled with it. It didn't really matter. He was the only one who was upset, so whatever, but it was still about the worst gaming I've been part of. SpaceYeti fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Feb 11, 2013 |
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Feb 11, 2013 02:54
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Colon V posted:
Yeah, that's a perfect DM 'what-if' - because the bigwig mercs arriving 30 minutes later is gonna be hilarious.
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Feb 12, 2013 02:45
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Well I posted a bad experience for me, how about a not so great experience for me that was a great experience for the other people playing. I.E. Let me tell you about the first time I DMed D&D Like I mentioned in my previous post after the first really bad experience with D&D in high school, my college roommate introduced me to his gaming group. We played some Werewolf: The Apocalypse and eventually they invited me to roll up a character for their D&D Game, to my surprise I had fun so I wanted to share the fun by DMing a game for them. I had no idea what I was doing other than what my readings of the DMG had told me, but they didn't seem to mind and took it as an excuse to make whatever completely ridiculous characters they wanted to make. Which I didn't really have a problem with as I saw it as a way to pave over mistakes I might make in the balancing. The current DM rolled up a Half-Ogre cleric . My roommate rolled up a Tiefling Rogue/Slayer of Domiel ("I want to be an assasin but I don't want to be evil"). And our third player made a Human Fighter/Iajutsu Master . It was a pretty bog standard first campaign, they met in an inn, the requisite shadowy figure told them to go into a nearby cave and slay an evil dragon and his minions, a price was negotiated and off they went. Now my reading of the DMG wasn't entirely comprehensive, so I wasn't entirely sure how to add up CRs, I mistakenly thought that 12 level 1 Gnoll fighters would provide an adequate challenge to a party of 3 level 12 characters. The fighter was literally cutting people in half, and the Cleric was smashing in skulls with his large greatmaul. The rogue was getting annoyed because there was nothing worth death-touching. Even though he was sneak attacking things like crazy. Combat was over without them taking a single point of damage, and they proceeded to explore the cave. I did however add a CR12 trap, knowing that they had a rogue. Later we found out that said rogue didn't take disable device as "He was a holy warrior and such things were beneath him." So the party did what any party would do when you have a pile of 12 corpses and a character with 22 strength. Cleric: "I toss one of the corpses down the hallway." Me: "What?" Cleric: "If it's a pressure trap or a tripwire trap a medium creature will still set it off, won't they? I'm going to toss it down the hallway." Me:  "Alright. You toss it down the hallway and it falls into a pit trap."Cleric: "Got it! Not going that way!" And so they proceeded through the caverns, using the corpses of the slain Gnolls to lead the way. I eventually realized that any sort of combat that they'd get into would be a one sided affair so I started having the gnolls run away as soon as they heard them approaching, and had them all gather in the last room before the dragon's chamber. Me: "Alright, you hear muttering and murmuring in the room ahead of you, if any of you know Gnoll I can tell you what they're saying." Cleric: "That won't be necessary. Do we still have the guy you cut in half?" Fighter: "Yeah." Cleric: "I'm gonna toss his torso into the room then. Want me to roll intimidate?" Me:  "Uh... no... the murmuring turns into screaming and you hear a door open followed by more screaming."Cleric and Fighter:    At this point I realized that there was no way I was going to salvage this into anything serious, and decided to just leap down the rabbit hole with both feet.. The set up was that there was a dragon in the middle of the room, a gold dragon, heavily wounded and unconscious. The party just kind of stopped, knowing something was up, and proceeded to not kill the dragon. Cue shadowy cloaked figure from the bar appearing in an alcove high above them in the cave, black dragon familiar perched on his shoulder, symbol of Tiamat dangling from his neck.  "Well! Slay the dragon already! It's what I paid you for!"Cleric: "Uhh, no." "Fools! You trifle with He of the Burning Blood! Chosen of Tiamat! The chromatic queen's right claw! My power is absolute!"Fighter: "Wait wait wait wait wait, You're.... Evil, aren't you?" ".......YES! What part of He of the Burning Blood did you not understand! MINIONS! ATTACK!"So in walk the final encounter, two Gnoll geomancers and a Gnoll with the Feral template from Savage Species, advanced to huge size, basically someone for the cleric to go Kaiju on. One of the Geomancers had rolled the 'Vines for Hair' manifestation, and he was henceforth known as the 'Grassy Gnoll'. That's when things got even crazier. The Rogue goes first, and to the surprise of everyone, charges the Feral Gnoll (rather than one of the more lightly armored casters), and stabs him for an okay amount of damage. The next person on the initiative was one of the Geomancers, and I looked down his spell list to see if I could find something to use. I found Tasha's hideous laughter, and the rogue Nat 1'd his save. So the Rogue ran up to a Hyena man the size of a house with an intelligence of 3, stabbed him in the ankle, then fell over laughing. Said Giant Hyena man felt quite justified in proceeding to crit with both claw attacks, rend him down to negative hit points, then bite his head off. I wasn't using a DM's screen, and my roomate refused to let me reroll the dice because he was pissed at something and wanted to stay pissed. But we all thought it was kind of hilarious at the time. After the Cleric and Fighter killed one of the geomancers. The Cleric squared off against the Kaijugnoll. And GG took to the skies to rain down Fireballs. Fighter: "How high up is the Grassy Gnoll?" Me: "Fifty feet or so?" Fighter: "And how big is the dragon?" Me: "Uhh, twenty feet tall, but he's unconscious on the ground so maybe thirteen to fifteen?" Fighter: "Okay, I'm going to run up the dragon's tail, vault off of his back, and Iajutsu the Grassy Gnoll." Me: "Okaay..." Fighter:  "Made my jump check. Made my iajutsu check, and crit my attack roll. If he's got less than eighty health he's dead."Me:  Fighter and Cleric: After the Cleric/Kaijugnoll fight finished, I just called the game session, because there was no way we were ever going to top that.
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Feb 12, 2013 04:39
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Kurieg posted:Let me tell you about the first time I DMed D&D This is an awesome story and your players sound awesome. It's always nice when players are fine with dying when the dice don't fall their way, and it's always nice when a DM lets "broken" characters be broken, and then hits them with an actually challenging encounter that feels all the more epic because they're used to things dying by the dozen to them.
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Feb 12, 2013 09:33
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I recently played a session with one of our regular players missing. We were at a pretty critical point in the campaign and didn't want to continue with one person down, so the DM got us to roll up new characters for a one-shot adventure. It took about 2 hours to make the characters and another half hour to get our mission straightened out - kill some kobolds in a cave, a pretty usual sort of story. The night before we headed out, my character convinced the town's mayor and some hangers-on to go out drinking with the party. The DM has a set of rules for boozing where you can drop a bunch of money for a small amount of experience, but you roll on a random results table and might get into a drinking contest, get into a fight, get dared to do something ridiculous, etc. I rolled Bad Hangover, and my character failed a body save in the morning so was confined to bed for the rest of the day and couldn't go out adventuring with everyone else. Fortunately the party had a low-level rogue hireling that I was able to play as instead, but if there weren't extra characters up for grabs I would have spent 2 hours rolling up and kitting out a character then not getting to play, which would have been pretty lame. Luigi's Discount Porn Bin fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Feb 12, 2013 |
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Feb 12, 2013 14:01
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Luigi's Discount Porn Bin posted:I recently played a session with one of our regular players missing. We were at a pretty critical point in the campaign and didn't want to continue with one person down, so the DM got us to roll up new characters for a one-shot adventure. It took about 2 hours to make the characters and another half hour to get our mission straightened out - kill some kobolds in a cave, a pretty usual sort of story. The night before we headed out, my character convinced the town's mayor and some hangers-on to go out drinking with the party. Just to clarify, was the idea to have the characters go out and drink at the time your idea, or was the drinking going to happen anyway and you just invited some npcs along? If its the former, then it would've been partly your fault if you ended up not being able to play, because you knew such an outcome was a possibility. Of course either way it's at least partly the DM's fault for having that kind of thing be a possibility of a random dice roll at the beginning of the session.
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Feb 13, 2013 03:08
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I'd say that's pretty much 100% on the DM because Bad Hangover doesn't mean, "can't adventure at all today"; it means, "adventure changes to 'gently caress the village, there's an IHOP on the other side of those Kobolds, and I can't beat my hangover (i.e., temporary Light Sensitivity) without it.'"
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Feb 13, 2013 05:15
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Indigo Cephalopods posted:Just to clarify, was the idea to have the characters go out and drink at the time your idea, or was the drinking going to happen anyway and you just invited some npcs along? If its the former, then it would've been partly your fault if you ended up not being able to play, because you knew such an outcome was a possibility. Of course either way it's at least partly the DM's fault for having that kind of thing be a possibility of a random dice roll at the beginning of the session.
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Feb 13, 2013 10:10
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Well in addition you're thinking of what a hangover does to a normal person when you're playing heroic adventurers that use magic or at least murderhobos. If anything, a hangover should give you new powers like Weaponized Projectile Vomit.
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Feb 13, 2013 18:19
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This happened a few weeks ago, 3.5 D&D. Our party was tasked with going to an area that was unnaturally cold, due to a Lich doing lich stuff. We were warned that we would need to be very warmly dressed, and be prepared for a lot of ice magic to be thrown our way. We had a sorceress who was from a desert area, and didn't already have anything that would keep her warm. A while back we had killed a bear and skinned it, the Ranger/Fighter was hanging onto the pelt, and he offered to make her a cloak. My barbarian was the stoic type who was always super serious until it was time for combat, so it came as a surprise to the rest of the group when I said, completely deadpan, "Don't use the whole pelt, she might not be able to bear the weight." The sorceress picked this up immediately and said "It still needs to be thick, that cold will be unbearable for me." We ended up trading bear puns for a few minutes, until our Ranger/Fighter (who was the lawful good leader of our group) finally said "If these stupid jokes don't stop you will all meet a grisly end!" to which I immediately replied "Threatening to kill a person is the polar opposite of your normal behavior" We finally settle down from the joking and laughter and continue on, a couple of hours later, we need passage through some area, and have to go into the fortress of some really paranoid people to ask for it. They demand that we check our weapons at the gate, they'll be returned when we leave, that sort of thing. My character's weapon had been granted to him directly from his god in a dream, so naturally he considered it a holy artifact and refused to give it up. After some back and forth with my party finally convincing me to leave it with the guards, I eventually hand it over, saying as menacingly as I could muster, "If anything happens to this sword I will tear this citadel down with my bare hands." The room erupts in laughter, and I'm a little confused because I had forgotten about the bear puns from earlier. The lesson here is be careful with starting a pun derail in your sessions, karma will ruin your attempt at a badass moment later. Totally worth it though 
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Feb 13, 2013 20:59
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A barbarian should get additional uses of rage while hungover. "Not today. I am not in the mood for this poo poo." Druids, on the other hand, should be able to turn into bigger and angrier bears.
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Feb 13, 2013 21:00
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Nucular Carmul posted:This happened a few weeks ago, 3.5 D&D. Our party was tasked with going to an area that was unnaturally cold, due to a Lich doing lich stuff. We were warned that we would need to be very warmly dressed, and be prepared for a lot of ice magic to be thrown our way. We had a sorceress who was from a desert area, and didn't already have anything that would keep her warm. A while back we had killed a bear and skinned it, the Ranger/Fighter was hanging onto the pelt, and he offered to make her a cloak. My barbarian was the stoic type who was always super serious until it was time for combat, so it came as a surprise to the rest of the group when I said, completely deadpan, "Don't use the whole pelt, she might not be able to bear the weight." The sorceress picked this up immediately and said "It still needs to be thick, that cold will be unbearable for me." We ended up trading bear puns for a few minutes, until our Ranger/Fighter (who was the lawful good leader of our group) finally said "If these stupid jokes don't stop you will all meet a grisly end!" to which I immediately replied "Threatening to kill a person is the polar opposite of your normal behavior"
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Feb 13, 2013 21:27
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In Greg Stolze's REIGN setting, everyone can do magic, their skill at it being determined by the Sorcery skill. Magic is split up into schools, almost all of which have some spells which cannot be cast by just anyone - you have to perform a ritual to either temporarily or permanently attune yourself to the school. The permanent attunements come with sweet physical transformations, like growing wings or photosynthesising, but loving up the attunement ritual would leave you either dead or attuned, but horribly mutated. Aside from this, the tradeoff for attuning is that while you now have access to that particular school's most powerful spells, you lose the ability to cast spells of any other school. Normally, the attunement rituals are solo affairs, and incredibly elaborate at that (one involves reciting a nine hour text from memory) but there is one school, Fire Dancing, that has an attunement that very specificly can be cast one somebody else. It also only takes a comparitively short ten minutes. This friend of mine was a Fire Dancer who was having trouble with a rival Stormtongue, a school revolving around flying and shooting lightning. After an encounter, he turned to me and asked "Can I attune him without his consent?" I was stumped for a moment and replied "Well I guess as long as you beat his Counterspell roll, but why would you want to-ohhhhhhhh" So yeah, sneaking into the guy's house that night left him totally unable to use any of the Stormtongue spells he knew - and as a double bonus since the Stormtongue was a notorious womaniser, the Fire Dancer attunement leaves you sterile.
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Feb 14, 2013 18:22
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Doodmons posted:In Greg Stolze's REIGN setting, everyone can do magic, their skill at it being determined by the Sorcery skill. Magic is split up into schools, almost all of which have some spells which cannot be cast by just anyone - you have to perform a ritual to either temporarily or permanently attune yourself to the school. The permanent attunements come with sweet physical transformations, like growing wings or photosynthesising, but loving up the attunement ritual would leave you either dead or attuned, but horribly mutated. Aside from this, the tradeoff for attuning is that while you now have access to that particular school's most powerful spells, you lose the ability to cast spells of any other school. Man, that sounds like a really neat system! I wonder why I've never played it before... Doodmons posted:and as a double bonus since the Stormtongue was a notorious womaniser, the Fire Dancer attunement leaves you sterile. Oh, right, because nerds have to make everything weird. Why would you add that in the fluff? What possible reason would "lol it gives you dick problems!" make a roleplaying game more fun or engaging?
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Feb 14, 2013 19:09
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I think that's just nerds not understanding what sterile means. Reign is pretty much the best game.
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Feb 14, 2013 19:14
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Flame Dancers literally bleed fire, their insides are incapable of producing offspring. In a game that can easily feature complex dynasties, matters of inheritance and other familial concerns, it can be quite important.
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Feb 14, 2013 19:19
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Yeah, sterile means your spermies don't squirmy. Again, how is that in any way beneficial to the game? What purpose does that serve, other than being a weird, off-putting element to an otherwise fantastic-sounding system? Edit: goatface posted:Flame Dancers literally bleed fire, their insides are incapable of producing offspring. In a game that can easily feature complex dynasties, matters of inheritance and other familial concerns, it can be quite important. Oh, ok, in that case I guess it makes sense. Nevermind, just me being angry for no reason!
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Feb 14, 2013 19:20
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Okay, so it's not a sex thing, it's a paternity thing. That makes sense. I think.
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Feb 15, 2013 02:31
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As long as there isn't a table where you roll a percent die to check for sperm motility the game is safe I think.
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Feb 15, 2013 02:43
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Poistiant posted:As long as there isn't a table where you roll a percent die to check for sperm motility the game is safe I think. I was amused at first, but then I realized there's probably a FATAL table somewhere for this.
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Feb 15, 2013 03:00
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I vaguely remember some horrible d20 PDF that "Impregnate(Con)" as a male only skill. With enough circumstance modifiers it was possible to knock-up someone who was barren(DC 50).
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Feb 15, 2013 09:22
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I once had a group that would walk for about a week (in game) a particular direction through a heavily wooded region that was in between all the important places, just to change their mind and go a different direction and walk for another few days to a week, and change their mind and direction again. In game, they covered about a 100 mile diameter in about 3 months, traveling the entire time. I finally figured out they would remain in indecision about which place/plot to follow until I introduced deeper hooks. I did this by letting them figure out some imps had been following them for a while. Once discovered, the imps made it patently clear that it was super important not to (series of actions with artifacts leading to) let this crazy powerful daemon that destroyed kingdoms all by itself out of his prison. Knowing imps were horrendous tricksters, they immediately set out to let loose the daemon, and they were then surprised when it went and destroyed a relatively nearby kingdom. They had a conservation that went something like... Bob the Fighter; You said the imps were lying! Ed the Wizard; Generally they are liars! Bob the Fighter; You said they were lying about this! Ed the Wizard; Why would they tell us not to let a horrible daemon out? They are demons, they'd be on the same side! Bob the Fighter; Because then we'd think they were trying to trick us and do what they said not to! Ed the Wizard;... Maybe. In an entirely other group and campaign, the group had heard about a demon who was trapped in a certain forest. They traveled to a pentagram in the middle of the woods, and saw a huge demon walking back and forth in the circle around the pentagram. A discussion took place; Demon; Why are you here? Fighter; To see if you're real and what's keeping you here. Demon, motioning to the circle he was in; I am, and the curse remaining from an ancient battle. Fighter; What kind of curse can hold a demon? Demon; The kind I can only whisper. Fighter, getting closer to the circle; Okaaayy... The demon proceeds reach outside of the circle and one hit the fighter, pick him up, and teleport away to his "home" further away in the woods. Wizard, to the cleric; So... I'm betting he's trapped in the forest, not the pentagram in the forest. SpaceYeti fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Feb 15, 2013 |
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Feb 15, 2013 14:09
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14 Ogres Back almost two decades ago, when I was first playing D&D in my best friend's basement and I was DMing primarily because I had the books, we didn't know exactly what we were doing. Most of our adventures back then were just wondering around in the forest (it was always a forest. Everywhere that wasn't a city was a forest!) and beating up whatever monsters I decided to pull from the "Monsterous Manual". Well, as we gained some levels, I started wondering exactly what kinds of challenges the group could handle. As I tested, one of the groups of wondering monsters consisted of 14 ogres. Everybody except the cleric died. About five levels later, I expected the group to do much better. 14 ogres being the worst combat the group ever had, I decided to use it to guage how far they came along. Everyone died except the cleric, who ran away like a bitch. It became a thing in my group that nobody should mess with a group of 14 ogres, because they will kill you. Well, something like 12 levels and the good part of a school year later, I decided to see if those 14 ogres were still as vicious. Expecting the roles to reverse and the ogres to get slaughtered, the combat began just outside of the group's keep. Why would ogres attack the keep of high level adventurers with no tools beyond their typical clubs? I'unno. They did it, though. So the ogres are about to charge, and the wizard shouts "stand back to the group and begins casting a big evocation. The Cleric shouts the same thing, as he begins to cast his biggest attack spell, too. The Fighter shouts it, as well, preparing to use his Ring of Shooting Stars. The Bard charges. He was warned, so the casters and the ring user go ahead and blow up a bunch of ogres. The bard is almost dead, and two ogres remained. The two ogres proceed to murder the crap out of the bard before attempting to run away, since he was incidentally blocking their escape. Then they charged away from the fort, to the cleric... who they got lucky and killed with a few crits before the fighter picked them off. So... 14 ogres mean someone will die? I decide to test the taboo encounter in 3rd edition after it came out. I don't remember the level of the PCs, but I made certain to balance the encounter according to the rules in the DMG. It was a TPK. Perhaps our lack of familiarity with the rules were to blame, perhaps `14 ogres is actually some sort of curse for our group, I'm not sure, but no DM in our group has used ogres in that number since that third edition try.
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Feb 17, 2013 12:58
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Captain Bravo posted:Yeah, sterile means your spermies don't squirmy. Again, how is that in any way beneficial to the game? What purpose does that serve, other than being a weird, off-putting element to an otherwise fantastic-sounding system? Yeah, it's a combination of lineage being an important part of the game and Greg Stolze liking a bit of sex to be in his games to give it that mature feel. Not always sure I agree with it, but it doesn't really bother me. Plus yeah, Flame Dancers are sterile, not impotent. On the other hand, any man who rides a horse? They're impotent. Edit: Just to be clear, since I'm not convinced I'm doing REIGN justice, there are literally maybe four or five mentions of sex in the entire inch thick A4 tome that is the REIGN core book - and nothing skeevy either, they're on the level of the casual mention that Flame Dancers are sterile. Don't let the occasional sex reference put you off trying one of the best written fantasy settings ever. Doodmons fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Feb 17, 2013 |
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Feb 17, 2013 17:38
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SpaceYeti posted:14 ogres is actually some sort of curse for our group, I'm not sure How could they surround us? I had Mordenkainen's Magical Watchdog cast!
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Feb 17, 2013 18:06
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So my group from before took a sudden turn for the amazing. At chargen we had all got random magic weapons - the bard got a magic harmonica that improves bardy rolls, the mage got a ridiculous higher-level spell of some kind, and the fighter got a magic ring that can summon a big block of non-precious material once a day. The party's mission was to recover some cheese that had been stolen from a cheese-aging cave by kobolds. We wound our way through the caves and found that some kind of crazy fungus had taken over the whole cave complex and turned some kobolds into acid-spitting fungus zombies. Eventually we rounded a corner and bumped into a big group of living kobolds, and decapitated one before their shaman started screaming at us to stop. They had broken through into a cave containing the source of the fungus after discovering a way to destroy it: one of them had pissed on the corpse of a zombie and discovered that it started hissing and smoking, so their shaman boiled down a bunch of piss and tested it out, and found that it destroyed the fungus. So they were all equipped with jugs of highly concentrated kobold piss, and I think the idea was that we would carefully ration it out and strike a balance between using it as an anti-zombie weapon and using it to destroy fungus clusters. Anyway, we teamed up with the kobolds (who also tipped us off to a possible cheese conspiracy) and made our way through the fungus caves, dumping piss jars on the really bad fungus concentrations. Eventually we found a room with a disgusting slimy thing on the ceiling that seemed to be extruding the fungus, but when we stepped into the room a ton of kobold fungus zombies burst out of the mold-covered walls and started to lurch at us. So as you might imagine the fighter summoned up a 10' cube of frozen concentrated kobold piss to block some of them off. Then the mage cast some kind of duplication spell, creating a second kobold piss cube that walled off the rest of the room. The kobolds, who were appropriately horrified at this point, were all carrying slings, so we used a hammer and chisel to chip off little piss cubes and have them fling them at the thing on the ceiling of the cavern. It took a good couple dozen cubes, all of which it sucked up into itself and then spat out like the world's most disgusting fridge attachment, but eventually it exploded into a pile of disgusting fungus mass. We considered pushing the giant cubes out of the way to kill the zombies but decided to leave, figuring they would just melt and sweep the corruption away in a cleansing pisswave. Luigi's Discount Porn Bin fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Feb 18, 2013 |
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Feb 17, 2013 23:55
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This is your group. But without the fetish.(hopefully?) Tardcore fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Feb 18, 2013 |
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Feb 18, 2013 00:25
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Yeah, no fetishes. As this was all going on the DM kept reminding us that the kobold piss thing was from the module and not his idea at all. At any rate we couldn't stop laughing a few times and had to keep stopping play to recover. We are mature adults, clearly.
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Feb 18, 2013 01:05
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Luigi's Discount Porn Bin posted:We are mature adults, clearly. Mature adults are boring. My last session where the players just decided that a wizard NPC makes fanfiction taught me that.
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Feb 18, 2013 01:08
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That's the greatest part of gaming, I think: the moment where your players pick up on a completely trivial and offhand comment about something and run with it to the point that it become a whole new slant on an encounter. I was once in a game were we charmed a stable boy to bring us (not our) horses so we could (quietly) make good on a hasty exit from a town. Someone said something to the effect of 'well we just made an enemy of THAT stable boy'. Turns out that once the charm wore off and the lashings given out, the stable boy became a horrible thorn in our side, stalking us and feeding information about our whereabouts and activities to anyone who paid him. Several game years later he had become a rather serious information broker that was a force to be reckoned with. He sent many an assassin after us and several us had to roll up new characters because of this stable boy and the 'new enemy' comment. It turns out the GM was prepared to let the fate of the stable boy fade into obscurity until one of the players mentioned it.
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Feb 18, 2013 02:10
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In today's session we were giving a trial run for a system that one of us has been cooking up. The setting is a transparent Firefly knock-off, with space sheriffs and such. The six of us were undertaking three separate adventure threads involving either tangling with a corsair called the Pirate King or investigating something called Project Skyhammer. The cast is: Hanh Tinh, freelancer, troublemaker and devious bastard; River, pilot and surprisingly competent gunslinger; C.C., pragmatic scientist and survivalist; Wheeler, eccentric three-foot turtle-man alien mechanic, cast out from his planet for creating an immense nuclear device from household goods, propelling his home planet out of its solar system and putting it in orbit around a comet somehow; S.T.A.R., Wheeler's creation and bodyguard, the Super Telekinetic Attack Robot, humanoid, about five foot, armed with deadly boomerang energy discs and a slightly vacant personality; Flash Bastard, posterboy of the Sheriff Corps, dashing adventurer with incredible luck and a master of disguise. Spent most of the episode undercover as Hans, a scarily enthusiastic mercenary. This was my character. While each character got some ridiculously amazing moments, such as Flash's one-man battle against a ship full of raiders, and S.T.A.R.'s incredible aim with a ship's autocannon putting shots clean through a pursuing ship's cockpit, it was Hanh Tinh and River's plot thread that had the most entertaining moments, centred around the former's incredible talent for bullshitting. Their aim was to enter a highly guarded office building and steal some information before getting back into space. Going through the front door was no good and Hanh couldn't bullshit his way past the back door guard. So, they went around the side of the building, where upon Hanh punched River in the side of the head, to no lasting harm, and yelled for help. Two security officers came around and Hanh explained that a man had hit her, mugged her and run away. He was trying to get them to take her inside the office building to their first aid room, but the security men instead took her to a nearby clinic. River was still conscious, and so she was able to collaborate his story when questioned. At the clinic, one of the security men wanted to interview Hanh about the incident. Hanh asked if they could do so in private. The guard got a nurse to let them use an examination room. Hanh followed the guard in, and shot him in the head with his highly customised silenced pistol, before stealing his uniform and ID. He went back to the office building. River, having been discharged, did the same. Attempt 2 to enter. Hanh headed to the front desk and River stood watch. Hanh successfully bullshitted his way past his ID having a completely different person on it by claiming to have had extreme cosmetic surgery off-world. Finding the record room, he found his new ID did not have clearance, so he shot the lock open. But then, wary of traps, he again yelled for help and told the guards that arrived that he'd been patrolling and noticed that the door had been shot open. They should investigate, he said, and see if anything was missing. One of the guards went for help, and Hanh was left searching the room with a fat, lazy, middle-aged guard who could not give less of a poo poo. It was fairly easy to find the document they were looking for and steal them without it being seen. Although the other guard did notice they were missing later, Hanh was able to blame that on this theoretical intruder. At this point River noticed two new guards coming up to the building, so she gave the signal. They hadn't agreed on a signal ahead of time, though. So she just yelled CAW CAW CAW. Attempting to leave via the front door failed when Hanh was confronted by the new arrivals who knew he should be on patrol. He, for some reason, decided he would persuade his way past them by claiming he was on his way to see a guy about getting some of that new drug the kids in the clubs are using, the one that makes you zone out, makes the shifts go by real fast, I'll be gone five minutes and I can pick you up some. No dice. So he went back in and set off the fire alarm. All the staff were lined up to be checked by the fire warden. Hanh needed to escape before he was revealed as an imposter. Spotting River still loitering by the front door he yelled "Look, a suspsicous person! I'll apprehend her!" and ran full tilt at her. River ran like hell too, in the direction of the star port. On the way there a police cruiser saw what appeared to be an officer on foot pursuing a suspect, and the two cops got out and joined the chase. So now River was being chased by Hanh and two cops; Hanh had to keep up appearances and was yelling things like "she's getting away!" He did manage divert them by telling them that there was a shortcut down an unrelated alley. The cops gone, the two of them sprinted to the starport, past the dockmaster (who had been in this game long enough to know not to ask any inconvenient questions) and onto the ship. They blasted into space, leaving behind them one dead guard and a heap of incriminating security footage.
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Feb 18, 2013 02:34
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Revenge of the Robot My first character in a D&D game (first character in a tabletop RPG, in fact) has been We soon found a huge open cavern with the dilapidated ruins of a bridge crossing over a shallow lake, and on the far side of the cavern a massive door was framed with torches and a pair of intricate twelve foot tall metal statues. Our Dwarven Brawler Fighter Valdin (also sometimes known as Grabby McChokeSlamEverything) recognized this as indeed being a gate to Gauntlygrym, and that the statues were not ornaments; they were magic golems which would protect and respond to the commands of a true heir of Delzoun (which he just so happened to be). Actually, they might have just simply been ornaments that would also protect and respond to the commands of a true heir of Delzoun, it's hard to tell with Dwarven construction sometimes. As we crossed the bridge, however, we were ambushed by a pair of lobsterman-like Chells and a psychic fish Aboleth hiding in the water. Not a big deal; we have all these absurd new Epic powers that do ridiculous things. We can handle them pretty easily. Our team's Psion, Brandis, gets into a mental staring contest with the Aboleth, while Blade, Valdin, and our newly-liched Warlock Vyseris set about preparing the Chells for a night at Red Lobster. Then the dragon swoops in. At first, we were not tremendously concerned. After all, we've fought dragons before, and we still have these crazy Epic powers. The party IS separated, though, with the dragon close to Vyseris and Brandis while Blade and Guf are blocked off by a Chell flailing about on a chokepoint and refusing to get thrown off into the water. Vyseris quickly Shortly after, Blade had taken a couple of hits, but wasn't in bad shape. Things seemed reasonably under control, if not ideal. Then things started going very wrong, one by one. 1: Vyseris used his demon-lich form's powers to deal a particularly massive blow to the dragon, bloodying it. 2: We collectively realize that we've dealt something in the neighborhood of 200 damage to the dragon, and it's only just now finally bloodied. 3: The dragon uses its breath weapon as an automatic counterattack from being bloodied, and hits Valdin, Blade, and Brandis. 4: The dragon takes the first of its two back-to-back turns, performing another attack which hits Valdin, and crits Blade. 5: Blade is knocked unconscious, but as a Warforged he doesn't need to worry about ending up dead dead unless he keeps getting attacked. 6: The dragon takes the second of its two turns, and fires off its breath weapon again at Valdin, Blade's unconscious body, and Brandis. 7: Blade is officially dead dead. This is kind of a  moment for me, as my first ever D&D character has just been completely demolished and destroyed, in his very first Epic tier battle, in a three hit combo he had no chance to interrupt. But, the party is high level enough to be able to afford a spell of true resurrection, so I just have to hope the rest of the party can survive and escape to heal me. Still, not how I would've preferred for Blade to die.At this point, Valdin was getting fairly low on health, both stunned and dazed by the various blasts thrown at him, the party's healer was down, and the dragon was only barely below half health. I suspect he would have been at least reasonably satisfied if his tombstone could read "Died Choking a Dragon to Death with his Bare Hands," but he decided instead that he'd hold out for something bigger and more impressive. Vyseris opened a portal next to him leading halfway across the bridge, and used his demon form's power to hold back the dragon while Brandis threw its aim off to help lessen the blows it was tossing around. Valdin took off through the portal and rushed for the door, where he could activate the defenses to help the party fend off the dragon before it claimed another party member. When Blade's turn came up again, I asked the GM if we had ever settled the matter of whether or not Blade actually had a soul, and if so, whether or not his ghost could yell angry expletives at the dragon (as is proper for the ghost of a heroic and mature murderhobo). The GM stopped to think for a minute, and then stated that, yes, Blade definitely had a soul, and therefore could be a ghost. And also that, you know, Blade's chassis was currently broken and mangled and unusable, but there were two perfectly good empty robot bodies standing on either side of the door. Moments later, Vyseris and Brandis have greatly weakened the dragon, and Valdin and a robotic guardian of Gauntylgrym had flanked him from the other side of the bridge. Much to the surprise of the dragon (and probably the party as well), a terrifying roar of screeching metal echoed through the cavern as the other giant robot tore across the lake, screaming bloody murder and making a running leap onto the bridge. It landed sword-first on the dragon, slicing it through and dealing the final deathblow on the spot. TL,DR: My awesome GM turns a disappointing first-time character death into something amazing.
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Feb 18, 2013 15:32
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Priorities My Rogue Trader group pissed off somebody important and evil so they start sending the party severed heads of their dynasty members. Upon receiving the first of these packages, the Trader says: "Cool, did I inherit anything?"
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Feb 18, 2013 17:31
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Tried out Eclipse Phase with some friends last night. None of us, GM included, were familiar with the book, so, character creation took a long time. Especially because, in my opinion, the book is very user-unfriendly. The way things are spread out in the book, finding answers to certain questions, things like that that add up. To be fair, I'm really only intimately familiar with cWoD, Pathfinder/3.5 and 4e, so my knowledge is limited. My character ended up being a combat monkey, mainly because that's my comfort zone, and because I am bad at spending points. Somehow, I also ended up with latent PSI abilities that also made me a multiple-personality having schizophrenic. I ended up having 20 (it goes by d100 rolls, so I had a 20% chance to succeed in most things) in a whole lot of skills, so I dabbled, but was not very good at much besides melee, kinetic weapons, and piloting. And languages, ended up speaking 4 languages at least half fluently. The other party members were an octopus morph engineer and a dragonfly morph computer specialist. After getting rolled up, our group awakens on board the space station/long-range outpost we had been working at. We have none of the gear we just spent part of the last 3 hours trying to pick out, and we're pretty much wearing hospital gowns with nothing more than whatever implants and mods our bodies had. The last thing we remember is going to check out a ship that had come into range of us broadcasting an emergency signal. Since we ended up back on the station with no memory of what happened, we conclude that we died on the ship and woke up in our backup bodies. We hear a message over the station speakers saying something to the effect of "No matter what you do, DO NOT turn on your radios." We walk a bit, and come across some gear. A couple vacsuits, a couple hardsuits, some flex cutters and some laser guns, along with a few pistols. The dragonfly player tries to login to the computer network, to see if the station AI can fill us in on anything. While doing so, she opens herself up to some sort of infection, which causes the AI to freak the gently caress out and block itself off, and then orders a maintenance droid to attack her. Meanwhile, nowhere near her, the engineer and I are in the fabber bay. An airlock is welded open, but we find some scrapper gel (acid) to repair the door and he works on fabbing some gear. Dragonfly manages to defeat the robot, no thanks to the engineer or myself since we couldn't hear her yell for help. She comes in, fills us in on what happened, and the nature of the infection is revealed to us through some information we find while searching. I can't remember what it's called, but it's basically some techno-organic disease, and it's incurable. Once you get it, your current body is hosed. You grow weird crystalline appendages, turn into a mindless killing machine, etc etc. And Dragonfly is infected, though trying to tough it out. After a little more exploration, we hear a ship docking in our station. Surprise, it's the one we went to investigate before we died the first time. We make our way onto the ship, and it is just coated with infectious material. The end result of the virus having free-reign for too long. We get attacked by some disembodied limbs, which go down easily. The first room we explore, we find the exomorph-zombie-monster version of the engineer, the sight of which deals an automatic 10 points of mental stress to the engineer. We kill it, but not before it gets a hit on our living engineer, who is now infected. Some more exploration later, and Dragonfly's zombie-monster self is smashing up a control room alongside my zombie body self. Dragonfly, who had been suffering mental stress damage the whole time from her early infection, finally cracks at the sight of herself and goes catatonic. Octopus engineer and I put down hers and my zombie body, and I loot myself. Satisfied that we cleared the ship of any moving entities, the octopus shoots himself in the head, knowing that we backed our minds up 6 months ago when we first accepted the job, and that he'll wake up in his backup body. The dragonfly is still catatonic, but knowing she's infected, I lock her up in a secure room. Since I'm the only one still standing at this point, I take it upon myself to blow up the ship and the space station, so that no one else can get infected. Using some missiles I find, and my mediocre but cautious skills in Gunnery and Demolitions (along with the schizophrenic hallucination of the octopus engineer helping me out), I am able to set the missiles to blow on a delay, and then book rear end to the functional escape pods we found earlier and make my escape.
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Feb 18, 2013 21:28
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Now just wait for the DM to ask "Ok, did you scan yourself for infection first? No?  "
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Feb 18, 2013 22:28
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Ah yes, Continuity. One of their best adventures, and always a blast to run. Mine ended with an octomorph propelled by an improvised jet pack fending zombies away from the self-destruct button while the remaining two people fought each other tooth and nail for a space in the escape pod. Good times 
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Feb 18, 2013 22:59
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| # ? May 14, 2024 15:07 |
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Captain Bravo posted:Now just wait for the DM to ask "Ok, did you scan yourself for infection first? No? The GM was actually joking about that after the game ended. "You took PSI. Out of the 3 of you, you were the most likely to actually get infected, and you managed to avoid it somehow." Somehow being that hardsuit. Between that and my light bioweave, I was literally untouchable.
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Feb 18, 2013 23:34
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