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Flavivirus posted: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 So, what happens if you turn on the radios?
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Feb 19, 2013 00:24
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the_steve posted:I can't remember what it's called, but it's basically some techno-organic disease, and it's incurable. I would imagine if you turn on your radio, the virus broadcasts a copy of itself and infects you.
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Feb 19, 2013 01:16
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Captain Bravo posted:I would imagine if you turn on your radio, the virus broadcasts a copy of itself and infects you. Considering basilisk hacks exist, you're probably right. The exsurgent virus is some nasty poo poo.
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Feb 19, 2013 02:45
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ElegantFugue posted:Revenge of the Robot Oh hey, it's me! Yeah, that fight got dicey. I'm pretty sure it's the only time Valdin's moved AWAY from an enemy. That dragon was GNARLY. I had it under control until I got stunned. Mostly. Just to tell you the sort of character Valdin Stoneblood turned out to be, let me tell you about our previous session before the Iron Circle went on hiatus. Valdin Stoneblood and the Dread Ring Just a little bit of background here. We started out using the Neverwinter Campaign setting, eventually ending up controlling an earthmote island. This campaign has a history of us walking away from hooks for my character,mostly around finding and reclaiming the lost dwarven city of Gauntylgrym. It's fine by me, mostly because it's a ruined city and we'll get to it. The final dodge involved a lich setting up a dread ring outside of Neverwinter. It's basically a necromantic soul vacuum. Like ElegantFugue posted, we're your classic D&D party. We mostly cared about the fact that our favorite bar was there. Well, second, but the first got burned down during an... incident with some Ashmodai cultists. We get our flying island fortress, replete with griffins, and take it to the dread ring. The plan was a HALO drop from griffin-back. Sounds so simple, right? Get in, hit them hard and walk home for booze. Then the skeletal dragons flew up to meet us. The thing about Valdin is that he has a flair for the dramatic. I leap from griffin onto one of the dragons, grabbing it by the wings and riding it down to the ground. I have no idea what would have happened if I missed. He takes more damage than I do and we dispatch them fairly quickly. We do learn, however, that the aura of magic halves our healing. As the front-line melee guy, this concerns me, but I am up to my neck in healing surges, so we push on. Once inside this tower of shifting rock, we encounter several summoned angels. I charge and disarm the leader, pinning him to the ground. Once we bloody this joker, he turns into a giant pillar of fire. Fun fact about 4e grabs: they don't end when things like that happen. So after wrestling a dragon to the ground, I proceed to brawl with a literal pillar of fire. I'm somewhere around half of my healing surges at this point, the halved healing really taking its toll. We take a breather, then climb the stairs to confront the Red Wizard lich in charge of this operation. We skip the pleasantries and I get to where I want to be, right in the middle of everything. She has some really brutal bodyguards, ones that shove people back if they close to melee. Lucky (or unlucky, depending on how much you like getting punched) for me, I basically ignore forced movement as a Dwarven Defender. I tangle with the guards as I try to close with the lich. They tear through my HP and I end up using every single healing ability I have or the party can throw at me. I am down to 3 out of 15 healing surges at this point. Overall, I think my DM managed to effectively strip around 450 hp off of my hide over the course of the session. Eventually, the soldiers are removed and I am face to face with the lich, I take my sword and knock their wand that controlled the tower into my free hand and stuff it into my bag before we finish her off. And that's the story of how Valdin Stoneblood became a narcissist. Rides a dragon to the ground, pins a pillar of fire to the floor, tanks three pushy bodyguards, then disarms a lich.
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Feb 19, 2013 02:55
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ElegantFugue posted:Revenge of the Robot
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Feb 19, 2013 08:02
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Well, my group just cut off a Paladin's hand to "teach him a lesson about hate crimes", made a fashionable armor/hat set out of a flying skull monster, and claimed half of Ravenloft for the great monarchy of France (located in the Shadow Planes, not the one you're thinking of). This is by no means a great game, but we find ways to enjoy it.
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Feb 22, 2013 13:41
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OmniDesol posted:Well, my group just cut off a Paladin's hand to "teach him a lesson about hate crimes" Please say he gets an iron prosthetic and becomes a badass somehow.
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Feb 22, 2013 18:33
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I fear that's exactly what the group intends to do. To the Paladin's credit, he was literally trying to stop our Warrior from desecrating a corpse, but the Inquisitor decided this was clearly motivated out of racial tension between sentient rocks and humans.
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Feb 22, 2013 19:13
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When I was first starting as a 12 year old I played at the library. I was an Elfquest and Dragon magazine borrowing kid who saw a flier for a group an joined up. It was a 2E AD&D game set in a generic fantasy world. It was alright, the DM was decent. The most groggish thing I guess was that we all had to pick a god for the party to worship and whoever we picked became "the Forbidden God" that was illegal to worship in the setting. It's not that bad of a hook, but it was sprung on us after we had already been playing. Anyway the true horror is that one day the GM's cousin or something showed up. We were all around 12, (actually I think I had just missed the last session to attend my Bar Mitzvah and was now 13!) the GM was probably 16 if I remember correctly, and I'm guessing this guy was a bit older. I think he wore a wolf tshirt, or something similar to that. He kept using a lighter on like a Reaper or Ral Partha mini of a lich he brought. He had one of those Franklin Mint dragon knives he kept bringing out and fooling around with. We were all core PC races. He forced the DM to let him play a minotaur out of some book, probably Dragonlance. There was one plot point where we recovered a magic sword and lost it because it was intelligent and wanted to go back to the original owner and he threw a fit, which ended up with him throwing his Dragon magazine knife at the wall. I didn't go back and found another group later on. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Feb 22, 2013 |
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Feb 22, 2013 19:29
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Captain Bravo posted:Surprisingly enough, his training as a tailer comes up almost more often than his rogue background. I made rogue with Profession:tailor and a few ranks in Furrier and Tanner. It came in more handy than the rogue stuff all the time. Highlights included: -Getting everyone free healing by giving the church two huge fur rugs made from four armed albino apes. -Getting the paladin bonuses to his charisma checks by making him always look awesome. --Getting preferential protection from the pally, because I make him look awesome. -Doubling our haul of gold from some adventures by skinning and tanning everything we kill. Now I want to run a D&D game were all the characters have day jobs.
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Feb 23, 2013 09:03
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I wish I had a link to the story of the grog who tried to roll up an elf and have him use Profession: Farming for 200 years to build up a mind-boggling amount of gold.
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Feb 23, 2013 09:24
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Captain Bravo posted:I wish I had a link to the story of the grog who tried to roll up an elf and have him use Profession: Farming for 200 years to build up a mind-boggling amount of gold. Frank Trollman posted:An overhaul to the Craft rules may sound fairly unbalancing, as the current Craft rules were created to prevent characters from making a lot of money and potentially destabilizing their games with an influx of magic items. Unfortunately, like Level Allowance, the heavy nerfing to Crafting resulted in a lot of characters simply becoming unviable, a lot of very dumb things happening all around, and it still doesn't actually stop characters from breaking the game if they really want to. If the party is made out of Elves, they can simply set a single skill rank on fire and announce that they're going to spend 100 years farming, making trained Profession (Farmer) checks every week. That'll get them about 6 gp a week for the next 5,200 weeks – for a total of 31,200 gp at first level before they even start adventuring. And as elves, they can honestly just spend 200 years farming or spend some real skill ranks on that to get even more money.
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Feb 23, 2013 18:36
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Frank Trollman posted:An overhaul to the Craft rules may sound fairly unbalancing, as the current Craft rules were created to prevent characters from making a lot of money and potentially destabilizing their games with an influx of magic items. Unfortunately, like Level Allowance, the heavy nerfing to Crafting resulted in a lot of characters simply becoming unviable, a lot of very dumb things happening all around, and it still doesn't actually stop characters from breaking the game if they really want to. If the party is made out of Elves, they can simply set a single skill rank on fire and announce that they're going to spend 100 years farming, making trained Profession (Farmer) checks every week. That'll get them about 6 gp a week for the next 5,200 weeks – for a total of 31,200 gp at first level before they even start adventuring. And as elves, they can honestly just spend 200 years farming or spend some real skill ranks on that to get even more money. This is where you settle the PCs as farmhands on an idyllic farm, introduce them to their coworkers - who are all friendly, likeable people - and establish the farm as something worth protecting. Let them roll their farming skills for a couple weeks to a month, and pay them accordingly. Then you send in the band of orc marauders to burn down the farm and menace the PC's new friends. Seems an evil wizard has amassed an army of monsters and is now marching on the peaceful kingdom's capital. The heroes can either stay and defend the farm until it is overrun or abandoned, or they can travel to another farm, which will also come under attack from the ever-encroaching orc army. The attacks will keep happening, unless some brave heroes go forth and quell the invasion. Now the heroes have three options: Stay on the farm and defend it from weekly orc attacks, go on a long and perilous journey to find a land unravaged by orcs (for now), where they can run their farm in peace, or take up arms against the tyrannical wizard and become the heroes they're supposed to be. All the while, you can pay them for any weekly Profession checks they're making. Given the rate of orc attacks they're facing, it'll be a pittance compared to the treasure they can take off their slain enemies. Or you could, y'know, talk to your players like adults about how exploiting the system in order to break the game is no fun for anyone, and see if you can't figure out what kind of game you'd actually like to play.
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Feb 23, 2013 20:11
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A few nights ago, I played a couple sessions of a D&D 3.5 dungeon crawl the DM made up as we went along. No deep story or anything, just a group of people sitting around a bar when someone asks us to kill a dragon for him. He'd been chasing this white dragon for years, but it runs off when he's just about to kill it. Years of cranial trauma have rendered it nearly a vegetable, but it retreated into its heavily trapped lair where the guy can't get to it. Our group doesn't have anyone capable of handling traps, and the DM says not to worry about it. We agree, and head out. At the lair, we find two entrances: a natural cave entrance, and a manufactured service entrance or something about 50 yards away. We try the main entrance first, but it's got a very obvious, hard-to-avoid pressure plate, which our adventurer senses (the DM) tells us will drop a shitload of rocks down on us. We back out and check the side entrance. The service entrance is an unadorned path leading to a room where we find a gelatinous cube. None of us can remember exactly how tough they are (we're 3 level 6s, it's a level 3 encounter), so we devise a plan to beat it without any danger. The warlock shoots it with warlock blasts, and pulls it all the way to the main entrance, where he manages to lure it onto the pressure plate and gets it crushed by a shitload of rocks. DM applauds his ingenuity and we move on. We cut down the dragon's minions, make quick work of his half-dragon half-ogre son, and reach the final hall into the deepest part of his lair. Somehow, he managed to fill a 60-foot long hallway with 36 arrow slits per 5-foot square, all set to fire and reload when someone sets foot in the hall. The paladin jokes maybe we should have "pressured" the dragon's son into telling us about future traps. We muse about how the dragon's pretty much retarded and maybe we can lure him out somehow. The warlock again takes the spotlight by cutting off the ogre's head, sticking it on a pole, and using Warlock Powers to float over the floor and up to the dragon's room. He puts the head-on-a-stick around the corner and, quite badly imitating the ogre's voice, says "hey dad i killed some adventurers out here. you should come and help me carry all this loot. don't worry, i turned the trap off" while the rest of the party (in the same bad ogre voice) starts agreeing. "yeah check out all this stuff they had. gold and jewels and is that an ice sculpture? we're white dragons and stuff, right? we like ice sculptures." His work done, the warlock floats back to the rest of the group to wait and wonder if the dragon would notice there were 3 different voices, none of which sounded like the ogre. DM's almost laughing himself out of his seat as he describes the dragon excitedly running out of the room, headlong into the traps, where he gets pincushioned by his own inexplicable trap. Normally we try and organize these grand epic stories spanning time and space, but maybe we'll start doing more of these "hey i'm bored, pull out the mat and dice" games.
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Feb 23, 2013 22:08
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Sworder posted:make quick work of his half-dragon half-ogre son  This half-elf thing has gone too far.
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Feb 23, 2013 22:10
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sfwarlock posted:
Not until we get stats for half-warforged. Fantasy Cyborgs, hell yeah.
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Feb 23, 2013 22:13
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Went to Hell posted:This is where you settle the PCs as farmhands on an idyllic farm, introduce them to their coworkers - who are all friendly, likeable people - and establish the farm as something worth protecting. Let them roll their farming skills for a couple weeks to a month, and pay them accordingly. Then you send in the band of orc marauders to burn down the farm and menace the PC's new friends. Seems an evil wizard has amassed an army of monsters and is now marching on the peaceful kingdom's capital. The heroes can either stay and defend the farm until it is overrun or abandoned, or they can travel to another farm, which will also come under attack from the ever-encroaching orc army. The attacks will keep happening, unless some brave heroes go forth and quell the invasion. Have them roll for every week for the skill check. And roll for thieves. And for famine. And for war. And for disease. And for....
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Feb 23, 2013 23:55
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Wahad posted:Not until we get stats for half-warforged. Fantasy Cyborgs, hell yeah. There's the self-forged prestige class/path from Eberron. the Construct Graft rules from Magic of Eberron, and the half-golem template from 3.5 Monster Manual 2. Take your pick.
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Feb 24, 2013 00:12
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Sometimes this sort of thing is acceptable. Occasionally the group wants to do something silly or just have an "let's break the game" session. The rest of the time, this is a job for "Dick VonBastardGM". Let's start with business expenses. Your work animals need food each week and shelter. Upkeep on the barn, tools, house, fertilizer, offerings and sacrifices to local gods, food for yourself and your family, veterinary costs, clothes. By the way,you only get to roll for six months each year, because winter. That's being generous. Roll 6d6.That's how many years you don't get to roll at all due to drought, blights and other crop failures. Ok. Roll that up... By hand. Done? Good, because it's tax season! I just got off the phone with H&R Bloch,and I'm feeling bitter, so you can pay the same rate I did. Throw away 40% of everything you just earned. We're almost done. Now roll 1d100 for each month. Each time you roll 01 it's a level 1 random encounter I tell you what happens, you tell me how you plan to deal with the problem. You get one skill or attack check to roll and I'll tell you how much damage is depending on how well you roll. Don't worry if you go into the red, you can just go into debt to a noble. Congratulations! You may now begin the game as a level one, elvin farmer, who has turned to adventuring to escape his crippling debt.
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Feb 24, 2013 00:17
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On the other hand both "former farmboys/apprentices struggling to protect their community from the hordes of an evil wizard" and "former farmers forced off their lands due to crippling debt who must now make their way as vagabond adventurers" are actually better than the origin stories of many adventuring groups. Both have the benefit of actually providing a reason to be doing something as insanely dangerous as being an adventurer.
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Feb 24, 2013 00:23
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I've been kinda playing fast and loose with a D&D4E campaign. In order to equip the party, I give their Swordmage the chance to duel her doppelganger in a stone ring, the loser getting sealed into a longsword which becomes sentient. By a nose, the real deal wins the duel and acquires the artifact, which I customized to be as much of a greedy mercenary as she is. Take a look. quote:Pleased (16-20)
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Feb 24, 2013 00:27
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I long how both our plans made being a farmer almost more trouble than being a murderhobo.
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Feb 24, 2013 00:53
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Moto42 posted:I long how both our plans made being a farmer almost more trouble than being a murderhobo. At least murderhobos are predators. Farmers exist only to beg adventurers for help and get murdered so their children will become adventurers.
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Feb 24, 2013 01:01
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NinjaDebugger posted:At least murderhobos are predators. Farmers exist only to beg adventurers for help and get murdered so their children will become adventurers. It's things like this that make me realize that a "points of light" campaign is necessarily offset by impenetrable darkness.
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Feb 24, 2013 01:40
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Last night I introduced 4 new people to Fiasco. Nobody had a setting preference, so I tried out DC '73, the Nixon-era political scenario. It went loving CRAZY. Instead of doing an adventure summary, I'll just do a character summary: OBJECTS: A Suitcase Nuke. A stash of nazi bullion. Senator Kent Richards (myself) was a representative from the great state of Massachusetts. He was the only person not attempting a political agenda; he simply needed to PROTECT THE MOTHERLAND by FINDING INFILTRATORS. His sister, Amanda, was a communist sympathizer...who got hired by Senator Richards as a secretary to keep out of trouble...and secretly wanted to nuke Russia. Except when she had the opportunity to flee to Russia, which she nearly attempted. She was promoted to bodyguard, and ended the game in terrible straits...being "promoted" to Siberian Ambassador. Her ally in the pro-communist faction was Chris R. Fields, who wanted to GET THE TRUTH...to PREVENT NUCLEAR WAR. He was arrested after an overblown assassination attempt on the national mall, when Sam Stoneface planted a gun on him. He was bailed out of prison as a hired killer by Senator Richards, desperate to stop... Sam 'Stoneface', Senator Richards's chief of staff. He assigned hired to rough up Chris and keep him away from the senator's sister, in order for healthcare money from his daughter. He was secretly in cahoots with: James Bauer Jr, Alias Brody Large. James was perhaps the most complicated character, because he: *Allegedly wanted to help the communists *Colluded with Sam, a fellow spy *Met with the senator as campaign contributor Brody Large. (In exchange for a huge check, Brody was promised a meeting with a a crucial official in security. It turned out to by Sam Stoneface). *Tried to bribe Amanda with nazi gold for wiretapping her brother *Offered to let Chris Redfields out of prison, but left him high and dry because it didn't suit his plans. After a huge, huge fracas of conspiracies, counter-conspiracies, and endless wiretapping, everyone got to the missile defense chamber of the Pentagon. Amanda, now chief of security after Stoneface's surreptitiously taped confession, and Chris Fields, were working for the Senator. Spies James Bauer and Sam Stoneface (actually James Paul Tambourine!) had the suitcase nuke. Stoneface had it handcuffed to his arm. They threatened to blow up DC unless their demands were met. The MPs aimed guns at the two, and Amanda shot Stoneface through the temple. He was able to hit the button on his briefcase... When a stash of nazi bullion poured out. His dying words were, "so where's the bomb?" The bomb was actually acquired by Senator Kent Richards. In the last shot of the game, he handed it to Governor Ronald Reagan, who handed back a redacted file about the entire incident. "See you in the primaries", laughed Kent. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Mar 20, 2013 |
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Feb 24, 2013 03:01
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Huszsersvn posted:It's things like this that make me realize that a "points of light" campaign is necessarily offset by impenetrable darkness. (Paragon tier motivation: Turn your home town into the capital of an empire and bring peace to the world. The peace of the protection behind the shields of your legions or the peace of the grave in front of them, you will get peace either way.  )
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Feb 24, 2013 03:29
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Some day, I want to do a points of darkness campaign. Build a utopia, a world where everything is perfect and nothing is every wrong or dangerous. Stick the PC's in it long enough to drive them bugfuck crazy. (Probably ten minutes?) Laugh maniacally as they tear the whole loving thing down.
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Feb 24, 2013 03:38
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You should all feel deeply ashamed for not including the plot hook of "you can't sell poo poo and your stock begins to rot because a goblin clan in the neighbouring province started price dumping".
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Feb 24, 2013 03:38
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Captain Bravo posted:Some day, I want to do a points of darkness campaign. Build a utopia, a world where everything is perfect and nothing is every wrong or dangerous. Stick the PC's in it long enough to drive them bugfuck crazy. (Probably ten minutes?) Laugh maniacally as they tear the whole loving thing down.
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Feb 24, 2013 03:40
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Captain Bravo posted:Some day, I want to do a points of darkness campaign. Build a utopia, a world where everything is perfect and nothing is every wrong or dangerous. Stick the PC's in it long enough to drive them bugfuck crazy. (Probably ten minutes?) Laugh maniacally as they tear the whole loving thing down. From what you've posted about your group here, they wouldn't fall for this and would just calmly retire their adventurers into lucrative businesses.
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Feb 24, 2013 07:28
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Do you know someone who has lead a really sheltered life? They were spoiled as kids, coasted through college on "generous donations" from their family to the school and stepped into cushy jobs that hat been prepared for them. They've never struggled or starved. Love takes effort so they've never lost. All of the big problems in life have been handled for them. So they have no sense of scope for what a real problem is. The roast is overdone, everything is ruined! I'm five minutes late for my hair appointment, I won't shut up about this disaster for a week. Uhg. I have to pick up the dry cleaning AND the kids, I can't take this stress! Imagine an entire civilization of that. By the end of the first session the party will be planning to pull a Leslie Vernon style horror show. That could make for an awesome campaign. The team helping each other become a larger than life villain to show the world what true evil is, and give them a much needed sense of scope. Moto42 fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Feb 24, 2013 |
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Feb 24, 2013 08:47
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I stole a Jack Vance character from Dying Earth in my Pathfinder campaign. Turjan is a prototype of a greedy Thayvian wizard that crafts clones to be under his servitude. In my game, he produces "pleasure model" clones that are nerfed versions of famous d&d characters. They all have 3 wisdom and work in his brothel/combat arena, because well, in this grimey city the players are in, that's what would pay the bills and bring in the rich nobles and tourists. Last session, one my players got imprisoned by stealing a deck of many things and being dumb enough to pull 4 cards from it. Instead of rolling a new character, we decided that Turjan would lone one of his pleasure models to the party, at least until the players rescue the dumb rear end monk who got himself imprisoned. Enter the new PC. Drizzle DoHERden. It's a level 4 drow ranger that exists just to please any rich old lady, or gay man who wants to experience what it's like to sleep with Drizzt. Drizzle has two swords, Twink and Icing. One does +1 glitter damage and the other does +1 whipped cream damage. A speedo of hypnotize. And whenever he casts dancing lights horrible club music starts playing and he reveals his speedo and starts dancing. Also in his inventory is a wand of "grease," and many bottles of fine champagne. His familiar is a hot pink panther named Gunther. It was silly as hell, GMing a game with this sophomoric porn-parody version of Drizzt, but my friend Ryan started taking our joke character as seriously as he could, turning him into, basically the D&D version of Jude Law from A.I. It helped that he'd read all those silly teen-novel R.A. Salvatore books I've never been able to stomach. Tonight Drizzle accompanied the other PCs into the mists of the realm of dread, to the city of Barovia. I broke out the 1st edition Ravenloft module, because, well, I didn't plan for the Imprisonment, and figured Castle Ravenloft was a good place for this monk to be chained up in. Drizzle kept rolling 19's and 20's in his attempts to seduce Ireena Koldova, the object of Strahd the vampire's affection. After burying her father, he slept with Ireena, angering the Strahd the dark lord enough that he came out and confronted him challenging him to a duel. The Dark Powers, the gods that are in Ravenloft simply to torture the dark lords, they then rewarded the party by turning all of the towns people's faces into Drizzle's and they all started mocking or making passes at the vampire. Strahd quickly killed a couple townspeople then swore his revenge and retreated back to his castle to brood, the powers laughing at his torment.
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Feb 24, 2013 10:14
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Not so much a best experience, but when I first moved to Colorado and got a buddy into gaming, his very first character was named Bob. Because it was only three of us, and the players had a cleric and Bob the Fighter, I decided to make an NPC to travel with them and fill in the gap of too few PCs. Thus, I made Steve, Bob's loyal Dog (who I stated as a rogue, I believe). Bob and Steve got into a lot of trouble in ancient ruins together, both almost visiting Death. Steve proved a loyal and strategically valid pet, and Bob grew to love him. Bob began putting back story between how he rescued Steve from a fire when he was a pup, and how they'd hunt rabbits together, and a bunch of other stuff. Well, the group eventually got rounded out, so we didn't need Steve any more. I had Steve mysteriously disappear when the rest of the group (3-4 more PCs, depending on the night) showed up. Bob was curious where he went, but figured he probably just got hungry and he'd find them soon enough. Days passed, and Bob got sadder and sadder. He didn't know what happened to Steve, but he never gave up faith that Steve lived and would return one day. It eventually became part of his reason for adventuring, in the hopes of being reunited with Steve. This same player made his next character, and this character is the reason I love this player. I don't remember the character's name, but it's not important. He found a book on ninjitsu when he was just entering adolescence, and modeled his fighting style after it... except he never trained in sneaking. He was also really fat, he wore a giant red shinobi shōzoku, and he duel wielded a hammer and a sickle. Another character he made was the Dwarf named Chuck. He was of the Norris Clan. He was an elite dwarven shock trooper back during the Dwarf/Goblin wars His clan's favored tactic for their shock troopers was to launch them from a catapult to just behind the enemy's front lines (I told him "Sure, dwarves falling in a parachute is cool", and he said "We don't need no parachutes!"). He has a bad knee from a bad landing, and he would complain about it after the group walked all day or were otherwise busy and on their feet, and every time he had a drink (which was every time he rested) the player rolled a d12 to determine which of 12 war stories he told everyone... which were always the same 12 stories, and it was per drink. Another character he played was in a campaign I made where everyone had a legacy weapon (every noble person in the campaign had one, it was a mark of nobility, and it also gave bonuses in combat normal magical weapons wouldn't). Well, his backstory was that he came from a clan of sneaky sneak ninja assassin types, but he was a big, brutish guy, and his father disliked him. Finally he got sick of it, challenged his father, and his father disarmed him and took his weapon... which caused him to lose his honor (there were disarm rules specifically for that, but it was generally easier just to kill someone than take their honor by disarming them). He wound up in a dwarven city, a drunken mess, fighting with a lead pipe as his mechanical replacement for his Greatsword. Though he travelled with the group, he was mopy and depressed, unless he was fighting against his fathers clan, against which he would rage and shout and suddenly have the spirit of a mountain. Too bad that campaign ended before he got to fight his dad. SpaceYeti fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Feb 25, 2013 |
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Feb 24, 2013 14:45
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So one of my group's campaigns ran yesterday (and today, it was long as hell) This campaign features a chaotic evil cleric of Nerull, a vampire samurai (I don't know either), a transvestite rogue/bard, and a swashbuckler/dervish (my character, essentially a Gerudo from Ocarina of Time) We were traveling by train to one of our destinations, and of course it gets attacked by bandits. We start clearing this poo poo out, realize a couple are missing once things cool down. My dervish goes up on top of the train to survey what's going on because she has insane skills in balancing and tumbling and what not. They see the missing bandits attempting to break into the conductor car and start fighting, I join in, flipping inside the car from the our window to attempt an ambush. That's still not the cool part, although it was pretty bad rear end at the time. One bandit is left, and he gets the door open to the conductor car. The sampire makes an intimidate check to try to stop the man from going in and yells "Stop criminal scum! You have violated the law!" and rolls a natural 20 on the check. We have a house rule of sorts that a natural 20 is like the awesome button in Saint's Row the Third or something, in that a cool, unexpected thing will usually happen. Our DM is pretty creative, and it's always great. He throws up his hands and says "You know what? gently caress it. Two Oblivion guards appear out of the ether because they believe so strongly that a fellow guardsman is in trouble, and they kill him instantly and then disappear again." So later we're at a ruined keep where the samurampire was told her clan's lost wakazashi that matches her katana was rumored to be. The courtyard leading into the keep proper is guarded by a Beholder that was at first a stone gargoyle that was above the door, then came to life as we approached. It's a good twenty feet in the air, so people with bows and spells and assorted ranged poo poo start trying to hit it in the eyes. My dervish doesn't do ranged stuff, so I ask where the beholder was exactly in relation to the walls. I then ask what I need to roll to "do some Prince of Persia poo poo." So I spend the Hero Point and make my climb/balance check to run up the wall, flip over and stab down into this thing, managing to bring it to the ground where we can actually do our more potent damage, and we finish beating the poo poo out of it. Now for a small amount of background stuff for my character. She uses dual scimitars and has a shitload of dexterity, using weapon finesse and all the awesome synergy between swashbuckler and dervish. I told the DM that what I wanted to go for as far as trying to go for an ultimate weapon of sorts was basically Agni and Rudra from Devil May Cry 3. I was willing to keep spending money to enchant them up to what I want, but he was like "Nah, I'm going to actually make this an artifact that exists, but you're going to have to fight them, and probably have to reign them in, because they're going to be intelligent items." I couldn't pass this up because I was just thinking small, but these would be a great roleplaying opportunity to argue with these swords constantly. Well it turns out that encounter happened after that. We end up getting betrayed by a guy that was travelling with us, in the same room as these two statues guarding a door. I ended up getting the killing blow on this guy with a critical hit, which ended up being in the stomach, so I pretty much disembowel this dude, and the statues are impressed, and want to fight me. We end up doing a two on two duel, the vampurai was my second. We fought to a draw, so these guys offer a contest of riddles to decide it. They tell me to decipher a riddle, it ends up being one I actually know, so I answer almost immediately. They offer another riddle, because there is a mystery box, or the opportunity to see what's behind the door they're guarding. My character is chaotic evil (and drat good friends with the cleric) and also has a low wisdom score, so I went ahead and went for the second riddle to get both, knowing I'll loving regret it. I regret it, because it's actually morning in real life because we had been playing so long, and this is a riddle I don't know. The cleric sees that I'm struggling, so he says "I have to take a poo poo!" and leaves the room, rolling a bluff check. Natural 20. DM tells him that everyone, including he himself, believes that he has to take a poo poo, so he is actually taking a poo poo while he uses the Sending spell to telepathically communicate the answer to me. So I get the riddle correct and get both the mystery box and access to the treasury. The mystery box contained the spell that would bind the statues to me as the twin scimitars, Agni and Rudra. That is unfortunately where the session ended, but I am sure I'll have some tales about them once we pick that campaign back up. Nucular Carmul fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Feb 25, 2013 |
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Feb 25, 2013 05:34
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SpaceYeti posted:Not so much a best experience, but when I first moved to Colorado and got a buddy into gaming, his very first character was named Bob. Because it was only three of us, and the players had a cleric and Bob the Fighter, I decided to make an NPC to travel with them and fill in the gap of too few PCs. Thus, I made Steve, Bob's loyal Dog (who I stated as a rogue, I believe). Bob and Steve got into a lot of trouble in ancient ruins together, both almost visiting Death. Steve proved a loyal and strategically valid pet, and Bob grew to love him. Bob began putting back story between how he rescued Steve from a fire when he was a pup, and how they'd hunt rabbits together, and a bunch of other stuff. Well, the group eventually got rounded out, so we didn't need Steve any more. I had Steve mysteriously disappear when the rest of the group (3-4 more PCs, depending on the night) showed up. Bob was curious where he went, but figured he probably just got hungry and he'd find them soon enough. Days passed, and Bob got sadder and sadder. He didn't know what happened to Steve, but he never gave up faith that Steve lived and would return one day. It eventually became part of his reason for adventuring, in the hopes of being reunited with Steve. Well? So what happened to Steve?
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Feb 25, 2013 16:30
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I hope he was the end boss of the campaign, and the whole thing could be solved through the use of dog biscuits and tummy rubs.
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Feb 25, 2013 16:33
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WendyO posted:Well? So what happened to Steve? He went to a farm upstate where he could run and jump and chase rabbits. The same place my parents took our dog when I was young.
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Feb 25, 2013 17:13
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Wahad posted:Not until we get stats for half-warforged. Fantasy Cyborgs, hell yeah.
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Feb 25, 2013 18:00
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I've started playing my first DnD campaign ever, 3.5, consisting of myself, a human fighter, an elven ranger and druid and his wolf, a bard, and a gnome wizard, none of us having played before, and the DM, who's only made campaigns for two people before, and retooled her previous one for us. We start in a small village near the elven capital, where a druid of the same order of our party druid, was mauled by a talking wolf who mentioned "the master". Having little else to go on (we were told our motivations were "we all kind of failed or petered out of our previous jobs and met up, wandering"), we head into the forest where she was attacked. After the ranger fails to hunt food or track, he's attacked by a wolf, who the ranger one hit kills. At this point in the game, the ranger has failed virtually every roll except killing the one wolf, whereas the druid's wolf has succeeded and led us on the right track every other time. It has never let us down, so we start joking about replacing the ranger with the wolf permanently. We're told the ranger may or may not have killed a plot point, but we work around it, heading towards the capital. We spend a week blundering around and generally being worthless, as, it happens, talking wolves aren't uncommon in a land of wizards and magic, "the master" is vague as hell, and anyone who isn't asking can't find jobs in the socialist paradise of Elf-land, which has no mercenary work due to years of peace and prosperity, and zero crime because of the nightmarish punishments the wizards inflict. Thinking on it, Elf-land might be a dystopian hellhole in disguise. I also manage to piss off the war god by making a joke about praying to make it stop raining. Running out of leads, we head back to the village we started in, but, as we made the horrible mistake of having my fighter with zero skill in tracking take point, getting us hopelessly lost in the same forest we've spent a week in. In the middle of the night, we're attacked by a pack of remarkably powerful wolves, which can inflict some currently unknown ailment on us. I manage to hit a wolf, but it appears to somehow resist my greatsword. This doesn't matter, as I miss every single other attack, including five attacks of opportunity. The wolf, however, hits every time, along with the druid, who got three critical hits in four turns. Ultimately, we drive the wolves off without killing a single one, and collapse on the spot from fatigue. In two sessions and seven hours, we have killed a sum total of one wolf, failed nearly all rolls, all characters besides the bard, who has made 5 gold playing for the night in the capital, has had their resources dwindle to near nothing, half the characters are nearly dead, and the wolf is the only one we can consistently rely on. I don't know if it's supposed to be this rough, but we're all laughing too hard to really care. RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Feb 25, 2013 |
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Feb 25, 2013 18:42
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WendyO posted:Well? So what happened to Steve? He actually wound up working for a bad guy Druid who, though he was an antagonist for the group, he was working against the main antagonist, and I was trying to work him in as a potential untrustworthy ally. The Druid awakened him due to his obviously amazing prowess, and because he was lonely. Steve was awakened into an especially intelligent self, and realized the druid was less than honest, and never really trusted him. Steve and Bob eventually met, and Steve told Bob that he was going to stay with the Druid in order to help him dis-empower the demon that might get released if whatever whatever. That campaign never saw it's end, though, because I was deployed and most of the other players were not. That campaign was full of good moments. The group had befriended a bard who was boisterous and charming and egotistical, but ultimately good at heart. He was the leader of a group I used as good guy competition, trying to get the PCs to find a plot to follow, and then follow it, before those guys beat them to the punch. It worked, and they were competitive friends. One day, they ran into him on the way home from an adventure, except he was almost dead and missing an arm. He traveled with the group for a while, searching for a diamond of the appropriate value to regenerate his arm. There was a Macguffin the group was after which was, incidentally, a giant diamond. After a month of traveling, they find the Macguffin. I was paying attention this whole time to detecting magics and a bunch of stuff. The group never noticed the bard was acting differently and never used any of the bard powers they witnessed him use before. They managed not to discover it was the succubus who had almost killed Bob twice before in disguise! She grabbed the Macguffin and flew away with it, after a month of managing to fool some pretty experienced RPers, by that time. On a separate occasion, the gnoll wizard of the group had managed to fool some underling priests that he was doing a sermon in place of the head priest, who had to leave suddenly, and he went on to give a pretty good sermon, and got some of the rest of the group arrested for trying to point out he was up to no good (this was the only evil character in the group, the rest of the group putting up with it only because he was mysteriously helpful to them). After the sermon, he left, and nobody ever thought of him as anything besides some guest priest friend of the head priest. Incidentally, he had abducted the head priest and kept him tied up in the closet of his inn room, the same inn room the succubus snuck into for information, found the priest, and killed him to put the party in more trouble. Unfortunately, the succubus didn't find a good way to get someone up there to find the body before the group left town, so while he was wanted for murder, he was long gone by that time, even getting his friends out of jail to take them. However, this was also their hub town, and would certainly come back, had the campaign not ended first. Kidnapping and holding a priest was bad enough, but murder was far worse, and I was looking forward to seeing how the group would handle that situation (which, if they did poorly, I figure the real bard would eventually come along and talk to them and convince the King to let them go, after they were in prison for a month or so, but it never got that far) If you hadn't guessed, yet, the succubus' primary goal in all this was to slow down the party from their goals (though she also had some of her own motivations). SpaceYeti fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Feb 25, 2013 |
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Feb 25, 2013 19:39
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