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Besesoth posted:I honestly can't tell if that's supposed to be "good", "bad", or "cat piss". Why can't it be all of the above? Because it's definitely mostly bad, partially good, and reeks of cat piss. I'm glad that campaign is over and I am certainly not sorry the player quit. It was a learning experience  EDIT: In retrospect it is obvious that I should not have approved of Danny the Truck Driving Tranny to begin with, but what can I say? I'm a loving softie. I realized that it was a mistake and I punished his lovely, lazy RPing with a well deserved death. Thankfully most of the party helped facilitate it, helping to shame him from the group. I've had to deal with these kinds of lazy sociopath roleplayers a couple times before and it really bugs the poo poo out of me. Honestly, I could use some advice for how to deal with it because the best I can think to do is try to set up dire consequences for their actions. My current group is going to be better about it but still I think there will be lingering problems carrying over from that shadowrun campaign. I guess I should just grow some balls and talk to them about it? Dock XP? Zarikov fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 02:06
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You Wake Up With A Boner I played a male character in this game, and one guy played a female character, but everyone else in the group played their own gender. Or they did, until the DM decided it was body swap o'clock again. We ran into a mind-wipe-artifact-smuggling armadillo. I don't even know why, or what really happened, but he made us trade character sheets (he rolled dice to see who got whose) and then gave us absolutely no hint as to whether we were playing our own characters in other characters' bodies, or playing each others' characters, or if we had any of our original character traits or memories or stats, or if we were aware of the bodyswap or not. It was very confusing. I got assigned another male character, and the DM decided to do a little one-on-one roleplay at the table with everyone as they woke up. I roleplayed waking up and feeling very confused, and thinking I was missing something very important and I needed to find it (I thought maybe if I picked up my paladin's holy sword with immense sentimental backstory value, I could trigger some memories or whatever to solve this puzzle. Because obviously it was a puzzle that we could solve, right?). That was my agenda. The DM's agenda, however, was describing how I woke up with morning wood, and asking what I wanted to do about it. Let me explain how much I wanted to discuss or roleplay masturbation in front of my sister and six men I barely knew.  I managed to duck out of dealing with that, and rushed around looking for The Important Thing I Lost, which the DM had absolutely no interest in. Instead, he went around the table making other people roleplay their new bodies (some of which involved genderswapping or differences in body hair and such). This bodyswap continued for a session or two, and we all had to play characters whose powers we were unfamiliar with, and roleplay character traits we didn't enjoy. During this time, the DM chased us with a literally unbeatable and unavoidable monster, and railroaded somebody into losing all of his powers and getting blacklisted by his god forever because of the choices made by the person who got randomly assigned to play his character. Fun times for everyone! Next up: The Railroad That Smelled Like Farts
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Mar 4, 2013 02:51
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Kurieg posted:You can't see the difference between a deck that more or less won entirely by accident due to the inattentiveness of the other players vs one specifically designed to force a draw unless your opponent is running some kind of death protection like a CoP:Red or a Palisade Giant? Playing a deck designed to force a draw in a competitive environment is basically attempting to get your opponent to rage quit on you as you reset board position for the 4th time in a 50 minute round hoping to redraw into something you can actually win with, and is generally considered unsportsmanlike. No, I see the difference, I simply don't think it's more funny. Either way, I was basically trolling, sure. We were high school kids playing at lunch. We had something like 15 minutes to actually play, and most games ended at the bell. I made sure this one ended before the bell. It's not like it was a tournament or something. I would never play such a deck in a tournament, and in fact never played it after that one time. I still think it was funny. If you guys don't, okay. I'm not advocating it as a good idea, I'm retelling it as an exception to normal play, where one guy made a jerk move (me) which I found amusing. That's it. You guys are acting like I suggest playing this deck in tournament. I'm not. It was a one time thing. Get over it.
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Mar 4, 2013 03:50
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Minutia posted:You Wake Up With A Boner On the one hand, these are excellent stories. On the other hand, this is kind of like watching "Hoarders" thinking that it's going to be fun like other trashy reality shows, until you realize that the show is about people with real mental illnesses that aren't getting treated who aren't just mugging for the camera. Basically I'm saying that your DM stores Cat Pee and I'm glad that you've moved on to a new group.
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Mar 4, 2013 04:10
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Minutia posted:Very creepy railroading You aren't playing with this guy anymore, Right? Losing class features because of what someone else did while they just happened to be in your body is pretty dickish. So's completely ignoring your attempts at roleplay because you refused to play into his fantasies.
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Mar 4, 2013 04:13
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Adovan the Brave and The Ruined Symbol of Justice In one of the few adventures I ran in 3.5 which got epic, one of the characters was a ridiculous Cavalier who got 5 times damage on charge attacks, pretty well min/maxed. This is the player who isn't especially good at math, so he would do everything he could to get a single, solid hit with a huge number at the expense of more attacks which add up to more total damage. He even went so far as to ask for a ring with True Strike to be made for him. I figured why not? So he can get a +20 to attack, spend all that 20 on power attack, and do an extra 150 or so damage in a round. Whatever. It took him a round to activate, and was usable 5 times a day. He was already doing, typically, more than 200 damage a hit. So he had quite the crazy hit, but he only actually made attacks every other round in order to pull it off, and doing less total damage as a result. He loved it, though, so whatever. He topped that off with a feat that could push his target a number of squares equal to the amount of damage he did divided by ten, or some such thing. So the group is having the final showdown on a legendary flying ship made by the big ancient wizards of old, over a gigantic tear in reality connecting the north pole of their world to above the first layer of hell. The entire campaign was about devils trying to push the prime into hell to make it the new first layer, thus turning the blood war in their favor. The vessel is surrounded by angels, wizards, paladins, and every ally the PCs could figure out how to utilize, fighting against the hordes of hell. The big bad (a devil made from the twisted soul of the greatest swordsman who ever lived, specifically to bring about this apocalypse) and his bodyguards make it to the ship, the PCs waiting for him there. The defacto leader of the PCs immediately engages in melee combat with it, allowing the casties to 1)control the ship and 2) cast their nifty magics as necessary. Their bow ranger helps him out through pelting the BB. Adovan the Brave, the Cavalier, has his way with whichever of the BB's bodyguard he attacked that second round from last time. The BB is getting low on HPs, so tries to kill the ranger in order to suck his soul into his sword, and then eat the soul from his sword, thus replenishing his entire pool of HPs. Unfortunately for him, the ranger survives at a single, one (1) HPs. This makes up for every time the PCs get a bad guy to one HP and they end up wreaking havoc for another turn. The group has done enough information gathering to know that's what the BB just tried to do, so they know he's about to lose. It's Adovan's turn. Adovan's player looks up to me, the DM... Adovan's P; If I shove this guy off the boat, would he crash through the membrane of the magical wing that allows this ship to fly? Me; There's a good chance of it, yeah. The way you're angled, your attack would, in fact, send him at the wing, and he's certainly massive enough to rip through it, plus he's covered in spikes and has that giant sword. Adovan's P; to the defacto leader's player; Should I do it? Defacto leader's P; No! We'll crash into hell! Adovan's P to everyone else; Should I do it? Everyone; No! Adovan's P; Okay, I do it!!1 There were a few facepalms, but I ask for his attack roll. He gets a crit, sends the BB's corpse (they were technically in hell, so a dead devil stays dead) towards the wing at stupid velocity, and I roll to see if the wing can survive the damage of the giant devil hurdling towards it. Even though I was being generous in my numbers, no, it's simply not strong enough (Perhaps the BB should have used a different strategy instead of allowing his hubris to take control). So the devils are defeated and retreating, the PCs are surrounded by allies in a giant flying melee with them and who can't do anything relevant to the problem, as the giant ship begins falling into hell, with all the crew and the PCs. This ship is essentially a symbol of justice and Lawful Goodness and awesomeness... it's basically like a giant, magical dirigible made by Cadillac. And this is where it dies. The PCs already knew they couldn't teleport to safety, since they were technically inside hell at that point, and their teleports would just take them somewhere else in hell. Not good for relatively low level, hireling crew. This is where the defacto leader shows just how awesome he is. He's the strongest elf to ever live, with class features that allow him to buff up his strength, plus an epic girdle of magical strongness. He gets Fly cast on him, and jumps over the side of the ship, and ups his strongness as high as he can get it. He gets under the ship, and starts pushing up on it. The wizard is using his concentration to try to make the ship go where he needs it to be (not the ground), and the cleric is still busy clericing. In 3.5, how much you can lift with Fly cast on you is just like normal flying creatures; dependent upon your strength. This ship is just plain too massive to actually lift, even though he was super-gigastrong. However, he could slow it's decent long enough for the wizard to drive it out of the hell-hole. Each round I called for a strength check, and he was even rolling well. Just because of how awesome it is, I was probably going to let him save the ship this way regardless what he rolled, but the rolls kept tension up. A few rounds later, the hell hole closing, the world saved from Armageddon and torture and slavery at the hands of devils, the injured Super-symbol-of-awesome ship crashes down into mounds of snow, kicking up a cloud of frost miles wide. The crew and PCs took injuries, but no deaths (from the crash). The Wizard and Cleric Wish/Miracle the boat back into operation. The wizard retired to put his and the cleric's souls inside some golems, thus making them both immortal. The Defacto Leader took the kingship of a nation and had plenty of half-dragon babies with his wife. The ranger wandered around killing orcs and any lingering devils until he was granted demideity status, and Adovan also took the kingship of a nation, and they all lived happily ever after. SpaceYeti fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 04:31
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Thanks for the concern, guys. gently caress yeah, I stopped playing with that guy. In fact, the entire group managed to escape that DM. (Some of them still play in a campaign where that DM is a player, but I am living a glorious that-guy-free life.) Why did we stick around so long? The usual reasons: it was the only game in town, we kept trying to offer suggestions to make it better, we kept hoping the stopgap DM could DM the rest of the game, we were invested in our characters and wanted a happy heroic ending, he kept promising it would be over soon, our group got along really well but lived far apart so this was our main chance to see each other, I wanted to find a way to keep the mini I was borrowing from him, and if the game ended on bad terms we would lose a friend who was a great guy but closer to the DM than to us. And I guess I didn't believe that a DM would keep being so consistently bad when it was obvious his players were upset. Honestly, a big part of why he didn't ping my creepdar so hard was that he's gay and I'm female. I don't think I ever saw him wear a shirt, he had a habit of using the D&D group to recruit threesome partners, and he hit on one of the guys in the group relentlessly despite his visible discomfort, but I guess I felt like none of that sketchy poo poo could target me, so I didn't feel unsafe around him, just bullied. The "wanna roleplay masturbation?" thing really caught me off guard, especially because part of why I play a lot of male characters is to escape gross sexualization like that. We tried to find a way to leave on good terms, and eventually got him to agree to wind up the campaign in a couple sessions. Those last couple sessions were pretty terrible, and he did several vindictive things to our characters, but it ended at last, and I never gamed with him again.
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Mar 4, 2013 04:37
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The Railroad That Smelled Like Farts Eventually, we wound up on the shore of an icy lake looking for a water-themed macguffin. Before taking the next step and diving into the lake for a boss battle, we decided to sleep and recharge, and we roleplayed a bit. This really annoyed the DM, who wanted us to get on with the game. And instead of fast-forwarding to when we got down to business, he decided to steer us into the lake via brute force. He made seven ice trolls appear out of nowhere. Since we were already intending to get in the lake once we had our poo poo together, we assumed this was plot-related, and stuck around for a fight. Not only was it not plot-related, it was also unwinnable. Each ice troll in the Monster Manual was, on its own, a level-appropriate fight. But then he beefed up all their stats, and let their stench cloud stack. And there were seven of them. I quietly did the math and realized that I could only hit the trolls on a natural 20, and that's before the debilitating effects of the stench clouds. And by stench clouds, I mean wet, ripping farts that left eye-watering, choking, boiling-poo poo smells in the air, making our characters gag and puke. (This isn't the first time he's put poo poo into a game, actually. Before I played, he made a different troll poo poo diarrhea all over one of the other characters.) The stench cloud, among its many other (lovingly, graphically described) features, resulted in characters getting blinded and immobilized, and the cluster of seven trolls with incredible reach meant we were unable to escape without writing off the members with fewer hit points. The trolls were between us and the lake, so we couldn't even get railroaded into it efficiently. Our healer, one of the only two party members who was immune to drowning (and was a new player experiencing his very first battle with our party - what a lovely first impression!), threw himself into the deep and freezing lake to escape getting brutally and disgustingly ripped apart by the trolls, and the fight went downhill from there. Well, that assumes there was ever any chance of going uphill. None of the rest of us wanted to risk the DM's horrifyingly homeruled drowning rules, so we derailed the rancid, farty plot train for a couple more sessions by escaping through a portal into the Shadowfell, aimlessly sidequesting around there as he did horrible poo poo to our characters and watched us react, then going back to the exact same icy lakeside and doing what we were originally trying to do. The boss battle involved five people sitting around touching the underwater breathing apparatus so they wouldn't insta-drown and getting slowly shocked to death by ludicrously large area effect attacks while one person (literally, only one person could even get into the boss battle area) swam up the rear end in a top hat of a huge eel, then got into an argument about whether the DM would allow her to roll damage for all 26 adjacent squares of rear end in a top hat with her burst attack. I think the most insulting thing about the ice trolls encounter was that it was quite literally filler. He was building a gorgeous, huge fortress for the boss battle of the game, complete with moving doors and hand-cast and hand-painted floor tiles. And it kept taking longer than he thought to build, so he kept trying to draw out the game so we wouldn't get to the fortress yet. Thus the sudden element-themed macguffin hunt. Addendum to You Wake Up With A Boner: The person who got stripped of his powers was the blaster caster, who was playing a divine class. Because the DM made it brutally clear (one-hit eviscerations, ripped-off limbs) that the monster was either going to effortlessly destroy the party, or accept one sacrifice, and nobody wanted to loving die appeasing the random encounter forces of evil, the person who got assigned to play the blaster caster summoned an angel and sacrificed it to the creature. If the god in question had a problem with that, there was plenty of time for the DM to make the angel object. The character who had been bodyswapped into the blaster caster's body was not a religious character in any way, and would have had no problem at all with the blaster caster's god hating her. The DM described the angel's death slowly and lovingly, stretching out the graphic carnage and suffering over several rounds as our characters couldn't do anything without risking a total party wipe. There are a lot of points where I think the game should have ended in a glorious blaze of players quitting in disgust, but looking back, that was the exact point where I could have said "fine, feed my paladin to the monster, I'm going to go sit in the car until you're done playing." Next up: This Is Not Party Town Minutia fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 05:18
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Jesus Christ. I just want to... I don't know, hug you and put you in a soft room full of rabbits to pet for a while, or something. This is like the Whizzard on PCP. e: Zarikov posted:I've had to deal with these kinds of lazy sociopath roleplayers a couple times before and it really bugs the poo poo out of me. Honestly, I could use some advice for how to deal with it because the best I can think to do is try to set up dire consequences for their actions. My current group is going to be better about it but still I think there will be lingering problems carrying over from that shadowrun campaign. I didn't notice that you'd edited your post! I think it's the GM Advice thread where a common refrain is "no gaming is better than bad gaming". If you can't get these players to stop being lazy sociopaths - and I agree with you that it's annoying as gently caress - then stop playing with them until they get their act together. You're under no obligation to run games for people for whom you hate running games, even if they're your best friends in every other respect. SneezeOfTheDecade fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 05:39
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Minutia posted:The boss battle involved five people sitting around touching the underwater breathing apparatus so they wouldn't insta-drown and getting slowly shocked to death by ludicrously large area effect attacks while one person (literally, only one person could even get into the boss battle area) swam up the rear end in a top hat of a huge eel, then got into an argument about whether the DM would allow her to roll damage for all 26 adjacent squares of rear end in a top hat with her burst attack. I was going to ask if you literally meant that she swam into the creature's digestive tract the wrong way before I realized that I already knew the answer Your story reminded me of a vindictive railroady GM of mine. It was my first gaming group and actually my first game. The GM was my freshman year roommate and I saw a Werewolf: the Apocalypse book on his shelf and after reading it for a while I decided it sounded like a blast and he offered me a spot in his game. The other two members of the group were playing a Hitter and a stealthy-dude, so a charismatic hacker dude seemed like a nice fit. We had a few adventures in New York after I joined, and afterwards we were sent to LA. Upon our arrival in LA, we drove past a burning bar, and immediately upon stopping outside to see if we could help, a Were-Tiger flew out of the 2nd floor window and landed in front of us rather horribly injured and barely conscious. When I stopped to see if I could help him, or even if he was still alive, a Black spiral dancer dove out of the window, stabbed me with a fang dagger for more damage than I had health levels, then flew away into the sky with patagia. Now, my character was deathly afraid of shapeshifting in public, he literally had it beaten into him, and I had a Flaw to show for it too, also there's a rule in W:TA where you can roll to survive even from fatal damage, but you immediately shapeshift and go into a frenzy. The GM had this smug look on his face like he had just revealed his master plan. He'd force me to shapeshift in public and then I could 'get rid of' the flaw. But I opted to act in character, instead I spent a willpower point to act while incapacitated, and crawled back into the car in hopes that my death-throes wouldn't draw too much attention. The GM suddenly got really apologetic, promising that 'if I'd just spend the rage point it would all make sense later', but I said no, it was a nice poignant way for my character to die, and I didn't mind rolling up a new guy. So I sat there, looking through the books for new character ideas while the other two guys saved the were-tiger and revived him enough to figure out where they could take him. Apparently there was a local brothel that served as a kind of local shapeshifter hangout and away they went. Upon arriving there they were accosted by a lot of very well armed hookers, but once they found out that we had the were-tiger with us, they stopped and brought out their Madam to tend to his wounds. The madam turned out to be a were-dragon, and around this time the Hitter's player gave the GM a good hard look and asked. "Is the Were-dragon named Gail?" "....maybe?" "You ripped off loving Sin City?" "...maybe?" Yes, the GM's grand plan was to re-create Sin City in W:TA. This was before the movie came out (but not by much) and I hadn't read the comics so I had no idea what was going on. All the main characters were various kinds of were-beasts. The Were-Tiger was Dwight, Gail was a were-dragon. Hartigan was a Were-rat, Nancy was a Kitsune, Marv was a Were-Bear... Oh and apparently in LA Were-creatures were more or less a known thing, they just kept it on the down low... which was the GM's reasoning for trying to 'break' me of my flaw. We wrapped for the night, the other two players were still willing to play(if only to see how deep the rabbit hole went) and after getting a crash course in Sin City lore, I made a grizzled ex-cop Were-Hyena(Hey, if he was going to throw in every were-creature and the kitchen sink, why not?) and we got our next mission, Go to the 'not la-brea tar pits' and investigate some shady goings on. The tar pits turned out to be a Black Spiral Hive, and it just so happened that Zyrzhek of all people was there, (as well as a were-shark that had swallowed a Boom-box that had been fetished to play the Jaws theme on loop, I can't remember WHY he was there, other than to be dumb, it was another one of the things he seemed real proud of) AND she had the Perfect Metis with her, pre-corruption, he was probably about 5 or 6. Upon realizing this we start doing a lot of out-of-game planning, and the ST stops us and goes "No, you guys don't know that's the perfect Metis, you just know its a Metis kid." Hitter guy goes "No, but we know it's a kid, and by the way he's resisting he's probably not corrupted yet, so we should rescue him if we can." Stealth guy adds "And besides, it's what <my old character> would have wanted us to do." (Basically, the perfect-metis is a prophecised messiah character that will either drat all of reality or save it, in most canonical endings it's the 'drat' part because there's no way for the PCs to get past all of the different protectors the Wyrm has put up around the dude. The GM putting him out here in the open was basically asking us to do something stupid) Defeated, and annoyed he allowed us to continue planning, and then Hitter asked "Wait, do we still have the 30 pounds of C4?" Apparently in an earlier adventure before I joined the group, they had broken into an armory, and the GM (not knowing the weights and measures of explosives) off-handedly said there were 50 pounds of C4, which is an absolutely ludicrous amount. So we took all the C4 we had left, wrapped it around the support struts of the Hive and around all the gas and oxygen mains, created a distraction, saved the perfect metis, ran outside the building, and hit the detonator. We all started hi-fiving each other and joking about how we had just 'won the apocalypse' by killing Zyrzhek and saving the perfect metis in one go. The GM got this really REALLY annoyed look on his face and declared that our Car just blew up, since apparently the Spirals had found all our C4 and moved it back to our car, oh and now Zyrzhek and the Were-Shark were bearing down on us. We called bullshit to no avail, and just decided to stop playing at that point. Near as we were able to figure, he wanted to recreate "That Yellow Bastard" with the Metis in the place of nancy, and the Shark in the place of the titular yellow bastard. We never let him GM again.
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Mar 4, 2013 05:45
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This Is Not Party Town We floundered our way to Myth Drannor at some point. Two characters pilfered some dead-god-flesh during planewalking shenanigans, and the guy that got utterly dicked over and stripped of his powers during the boneriffic bodyswapping tried to pray for guidance during the planewalk. Did this result in him getting his powers back? No. Did it result in him getting a Wacky New Body With DM-Chosen Random Powers? Sure did! Our blaster caster turned into an orb of light, then wound up stuffed into a gingerbread-man-looking clay body. While the healer and the blaster caster were dealing with this new body poo poo, two other characters were trying to sell godflesh on the black market (not only did the harvested pounds of godflesh shrink to a teeny weeny amount, but it also turned out to be enormously volatile, and destroyed half of Myth Drannor, haha don't try to turn a profit in my world), and the illusionist  tried to start a party in a bar. Not too hard, finding people who want to drink and sing and dance in Myth Drannor, is it? When you have a very high Charisma and are buying free booze? Haha, who are you kidding, nobody in this town wants to party. Nobody. Stop trying. The illusionist got frustrated. He'd been getting railroaded by this DM for more than a year real-time, and all he wanted was "Sure, you have a great party, feel free to describe it" but the DM kept shutting him down. So the illusionist started dropping spells like Visions of Avarice to ensure that he could have a goddamn party. He got thoroughly pickled, too. Eventually, the rest of the characters wandered by to scoop his rear end up, since I think we were fleeing town to avoid the magic-eating monstrosity we had spawned (by literally tapping the godflesh with a hammer). We didn't want to attract any more notice, so we stuffed him into a portable hole. Forgetting that he had a bag of holding. Even though it was late at night, all the players were tired, and the characters knew about the bag of holding, the DM wouldn't let us take it back. He gleefully pulled out his tables and started rolling dice. The resulting explosion pulverized the illusionist, leaving a splatter of gore and a head begging for death. It also destroyed all the nonmagical objects we were storing, and sent the magical objects ricocheting through the party. He got out his favorite die to determine what body part each object embedded itself in. My paladin got a wand through his skull. He survived, paralyzed, laying on the ground as the illusionist's spellplague-tainted flesh and blood dripped from the ceiling into his mouth. The DM specifically said that my character had no choice but to swallow the infected blood, since he was paralyzed. Meanwhile, the illusionist was going insane and casting spells in his last moment of life, because the player was outraged at what the DM had done to him, and figured he might as well have a little agency and roleplay in his last moments. After he attacked the party, the healer crushed his skull between his hands. The DM should have stopped the healer, since no-PVP is one of our campaign rules, but he hushed the players trying to tell the newbie that, and watched with a smile. We fled the tavern after one player found a magical item (with huge backstory and sentimental value) that the DM tried his hardest to take away in the chaos. On the way out of town, the party stopped to fix my paladin's brain damage at a temple as the DM strongly hinted that I should abandon my spellplague-tainted body and get a nice new one with random powers. Is this horrorshow of a campaign over yet? Nope! Stay tuned for The Final gently caress You!
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Mar 4, 2013 06:30
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Minutia posted:boners and farts It's stories like these that make me feel much more confident as a GM. I may be too easy with lovely roleplayers but I wouldn't do anything like this, Jesus Christ. That sounds completely unbearable- faking an emergency phone call to suddenly leave and never return unbearable. Here is a better story of my first Shadowrun character (and probably only my third time roleplaying), who I will always cherish. Bob Lazer was an ugly, charmless, middle aged orc. He was a mediocre family man. He had a son and a daughter, 16 and 17, and a shrew wife. Bob was a corporate wage slave that had had enough. One day, Bob lost his job and joined the party through a shady contact with a fresh new set of cyber-arms and a cheap cyberdeck, ready to earn a real living and keep his children from the same dull, depressing life he had carved out for himself in the low-end corporate security world. He was a lovely combat decker build with everything to lose. After just a single session Bob's wife began to notice, beyond the obvious fact that he had new cyber-arms (they're for the new job, lots of lifting honey, I swear!) that something seriously strange was going on with her husband. After a botched etiquette check an argument turned into a fight. She pointed to the children and threatened to run off with them if Bob didn't quit whatever shady dealings he had found himself in and get a real job and punched him in the face for considerable damage. Bob stormed off, threw a cinder block through a window, grabbed a few drinks at the local ork bar, and called in a favor with the party's rigger. The rigger arrived in the van, took him home, and waited outside. Bob found the front door's maglock had been changed in the hours he'd been out getting hammered. Fine, time to use these fancy new arms! Bob forces his way in, loudly, and goes to extract his son and daughter. As he turns to leave with them, barely awake and confused, Bob and his children are blocked off by his physically imposing wife. (GM revealed later she had a higher body and unaugmented strength than Bob, which made sense, given the abusive nature of their relationship) The GM said to roll initiative, and I did. Bob went first, tried to knock her away, and failed. Her turn. She hit Bob and did significant damage. Bob snapped, letting lose two decades of marital misery and activated his cybergun shotgun. Before he realized what he had done, his wife and mother of his children lay dead in front of him. In a panic he dragged his children to the van and the rigger drove away, not yet willing to ask what happened. Fast forward a few months. Bob's son and daughter, traumatized by their mother's brutal death (she was a terrible mother, but still!) and now growing up in among a den of criminals, are beginning to get into drugs. Bill, the party's cyber-samurai and resident heroin dealer, is happy to share. While Bob is off doing some decking work, Bill is back at the base shooting heroin with Bob's kids. Bob is too afraid of Bill to confront him directly, and so when the party is offered a mission in Germany, he leaves them behind. In the process Bill, the happy-to-share heroin addict has got Bob addicted to heroin after an incident leaves Bob in massive pain, and is now charging him so much money the Germany mission money is almost all gone before they even leave. Bob and company returns to Seattle to check in on his children. He sees his son, selling drugs on the street corner. He sees his daughter, selling her body for heroin. Bill happily recruits Bob's son, now becoming street hardened, into the gang. He buys him his first handgun and gets him a smartlink 2 implant. Bill begins to trade drugs to Bob's daughter in exchange for sex. Realizing at last that everything he'd done since the beginning of the campaign had lead to his life and the lives of his children being ruined and with no real way out, Bob decided it was time to take a stand and drat the consequences. Strung out on heroin he asked Bill if he could spot him some dope, since Bob had spent the last of his money on fixing a cyberarm and shooting junk in his veins in Germany. Bill declined, but offered a trade- Bill wanted Bob to suck him off. It wasn't about sex, really, it was about making Bob, the party's bitch for all this time, submit completely to the man who had helped destroy his family. Just like his wife and her domination over Bob. Bob agreed, much to Bill's surprise, and took a bite. Blood was everywhere, needless to say. Combat ensued in the roach motel, with Bob and Bill both taking serious amounts of damage. Before they could both bleed out, Lonestar arrived. They both spent the rest of their lives in jail, forever crippled with their illegal cyberware removed. Bob's son died later in the campaign, used as a decoy by the party. Bob's daughter faded away, lost forever in the sex trade of Seattle. The Lazer clan was finally, and mercifully, put to rest. EDIT: I am noticing a penis-injury theme in my roleplaying past. Wonder how this will transfer to my new Star Trek campaign... Zarikov fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Mar 4, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 06:32
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Jebeebus Creeper, what is this DMs boner about body swapping and random powers? Did you ever get any insight into whatever insane fetishes drive this stuff?
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Mar 4, 2013 06:42
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Jesus Christ, these horror stories.
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Mar 4, 2013 06:48
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Mendrian posted:Jebeebus Creeper, what is this DMs boner about body swapping and random powers? I dunno, I never spent much time trying to grub around in his head. I don't know that it was necessarily sexual - it could very easily be a power thing. All the poo poo stuff (wow, I barely mentioned the eggs, but suffice to say there was ranged rear end-to-mouth involved) could have been something he thought was funny, and a lot of the really brutal railroading was about putting players in their place and make them respect his authority as a DM and follow his storylines. All that body-swapping poo poo was probably a favorite fiction trope of his, and his idea of character development and roleplay. He didn't like throwing in NPCs for us to interact with, just making us do things he thought were interesting. He really liked inflicting random table-and-dice effects on us and watching us react to them, and he liked it even better if it was something emotionally traumatizing like that angel stuff. As for the weird sexual stuff, like asking me to roleplay masturbation, and (in the upcoming installment) putting my character in bondage... I don't loving know. Again, this is a guy whose sexuality should theoretically exclude me.
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Mar 4, 2013 06:56
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The Final gently caress You After locating a ship (yeah, your nat 20 Streetwise gets you a leaky barrel full of pirates, but the person I am dating can secure passage at an extremely reasonable price with a little bit of roleplay), and roleplaying through the boat trip (haha, why would your paladin get a Reflex or Fort save to avoid getting injected with sleeping poison and strapped down to the bed for the entire trip?), we escaped Myth Drannor and arrived at our destination. By which I mean we wrapped up one plot thread that started at first level two years ago with an almost entirely different party lineup. But hell, closure is closure and we were doing something heroic, at least. The guy who got his character killed off mournfully rolled up a new character, and introduced him to the party without any complicated bullshit. After some more complications (yeah, I am now making draconian penalties for characters who are low on surges, and this portal you need to use eats... about forty surges) we get to the dam that we are going to fix. But oh no, bandits have stolen the special magical glue we need! We go bandit-hunting. By which I mean the entire D&D group goes to stand in another room for half an hour as the DM fiddles with the battlemap and lays out an incredibly intricate battlefield with thirty minis, tons of greenery-fluff, and individually sculpted teeny weeny barrels and flour sacks and treasure chests and wagons. Now, I really like tiny things and intricate terrain, but I don't really see why you would set that up in the middle of a game instead of gluing it down to a board or something beforehand if you've got your heart set on making it pretty. But whatever. Bandit camp. Time to be heroes! Moment of glory! Yeah, you've probably guessed what happened next. Humiliating defeat, since almost every single bandit in this massive camp was our level, heavily fortified with traps and explosives, and unreceptive to diplomacy efforts. We rallied and tried again. We captured the glue barrels. And somehow, magically, the brand-new character belonging to the guy who played the illusionist got teleport-spliced into a warg body, resulting in four new limbs, a tail, and a fang-filled, uncontrollable head attached to him at the hips. Like a centaur, except with a wolf head at your crotch, and two humanoid legs poking out of the bottom. Without the resources or time to fix it in bumfuck nowhere in our last D&D session, the player failed multiple ludicrously high checks to control the crotchmonster, and then bitterly wrote off his character. And then a portal opened up in the middle of the bandit camp. Reinforcements started pouring through, including a necromancer or whatever who seriously outclassed us. Hero time. My paladin rushed the necromancer who was picking off the other characters. Nat 20, jammed my holy sword right into the guy. And he reflected the damage back onto my paladin. And made my sword stick in his body. Remember, my holy sword with huge sentimental backstory value (but very little actual enchantment on it therefore making it mostly a roleplay item, not a gamebreaking item)? My paladin was about to die, so an ally teleported him away, and the DM ruled that I got to roll to see if I took my sword with me in the teleport. I didn't. The sword stayed stuck to the bad guy, who wasn't harmed at all, and instead of putting my sword in the loot pile with the rest of the loot, he took it through the portal. And closed it behind him. In the game we agreed would be our last game in this campaign "until the castle is done" (read: when hell freezes over) We fixed the dam. We saved the valley. I never saw that DM again.
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Mar 4, 2013 07:14
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Jesus christ, sometimes this thread makes me glad I don't do this stuff as often as I'd like at times.
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Mar 4, 2013 07:24
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Minutia posted:The Final gently caress You Your stories are depressing as heck. Does kinda make me feel better about my own recent bad gaming, though, which only amounted to "I've gotten to take one turn in the past five hours and I'm bored so I'm leaving."
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Mar 4, 2013 07:32
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I just received this email from one of my players...quote:So I'm seriously considering that I may need to quit this group. I'm giving it until the end of the month before I decide for sure. The main reason is that there is far too little genuine role-playing, and when I try to encourage it to happen, I'm penalized for it. Take tonight: I tried to get the group to role-play through the situation where they found my new character in the ship they were trying to steal. However instead of trying actual role-play where they tired to convince my character to assist them, they took my "meh" which was supposed to mean they needed to try a little better to convince me, as a "He won't help at all". Jeff actually described my attempt to introduce more role-play as an attempt to derail the mission!! I'm giving until the end of the month, but if the meta-gaming (like when Jeff decided to put a grenade on my character just because he knew I as a player would just wait for them to leave to try again to break free, when his character had no idea that my character would try that) doesn't get cut back, and the role-playing increase, I'm likely going to quit. This isn't a threat, more of me realizing that I don't fit with the current group dynamics. I'm not saying I'm a perfect player, as I know I have a tendency to argue rules, but I get bored when people spend half an hour talking about what they might do instead of role-playing through the situation. You don't help that with your obvious (to me at least) attempts to dissuade the group from certain courses of action that you don't want to happen. It's bad GMing to try and prevent players from doing something you don't want them to do, and your heavy handed retaliation in the form of various consequences only feeds the paranoia that causes the group to spend half an hour discussing instead of doing. As I said earlier this causes me to lose interest and get bored. As a result I make rash decisions in an effort to get something to happen, and then your response only kills any course of action, instead of doing what a good GM should do, and encourage more action and less discussion of plans. I understand that actions have consequences and that in the 40K Universe, those can be pretty severe, but you may want to reassess your GMing style. I understand that its not easy to be a GM, but I feel like you've lost sight of the core GM value: To help develop the story. NOT to try and kill characters. If you want to do that, I know of a really good Fantasy Flight game where that is actually the Dungeon Lord's objective, its called Descent: Journey into the Dark. Naturally you would feel bad, but he is the only one who's characters have died. His characters have tried to be the anti party , example being makings a transport pilot who threatens to kill the group when they sneak into his ship, another being they needed a simple distraction so he opens fire on a market full of civilians(with a character he made with a back story of being sent to "Babysit" the party )
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Mar 4, 2013 07:36
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My most recent one was a group that had originally started out with a schedule. Which was good for me, and necessary, since like most adults I can't just drop what I'm doing for the next three hours at the drop of a skype call. Or would've been, if anyone ever stuck to the schedule. The first session is a wash, since someone can't make it, so it mostly involves seducing local women and vomitting, usual 'eh lets gently caress around as we get to know each other kinda silliness. We eventually get started and up to speed, and while things are okay, the schedule is soon dropped. After a game is waved off for whatever reason, what ends up happening the next day is "Oh hey spooky we had a session anyway, even though you didn't answer your skype for like fifteen minutes (before we gave up) and I have no idea why you wouldn't answer on of the days you said you wouldn't be home until like ten o'clock at night." At which point no one fills me in much ("oh we just did some work for the villagers, nothing big"). Next session I'm apparently outside of a cave, having stalked two other party members to it. They had murderd some Kobolds, try to attack me despite my friendly disposition and greeting, and we set about solving a puzzle. Thirty minutes later after some clarifications, I solve their math related puzzle obfusticated by the GM confusing a radical and factorial and thinking a factorial is an exponential, a term which can be excluded from sentences all together, and the hint (5!) made me merely think they were excited about numbers. Puzzle solved, we gather up the loot (with one player very forcefully reminding us THAT HE IS IN CHARGE because he is willing to yell. Never mind he spent most of the puzzle playing with our new Kobold pet. After we meet up with everyone else and divvy up the gear, the session ends. Then I end up missing two other sessions, because the GM decided he had free time and wanted to play, and I was either sleeping/busy/not wanting to play. Afterwards, someone ends up linking me to a bunch of maps, breakdowns about the local geopolitical situation, and some vague mention of plot and tells me they'll tell me more before the next session. There never is another session.
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Mar 4, 2013 07:45
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Wow, ok I think this thread could use a little cheering up. Not that I like to toot my own horn, but it seemed like tonight was a pretty great fight, so I thought I'd share it with you. (Commentary is paraphrased, because I don't remember exactly what was said and we don't record our skype calls.) Party's airship goes down near a goblin encampment, so they hoof it over and ask for parts to repair it. The goblins are poor as poo poo and don't have anything, but they point them towards a nearby magic circle which might be able to help, warning that it contains a powerful demon. Tired of the diplomacy, the drunk dwarven ranger runs outside as fast as he can and throws himself at the circle. Cue massive, obese flab-demon erupting from the magic circle, roll initiative. So I had a special gimmick cooked up for this guy, each turn he gets an AoE physical, as well as two attacks versus Fortitude to try and grab a character with his meaty paws. Three turns worth of horrible rolls later, the ranger has loving decimated the demon, and I haven't landed a single hit on the party. Eventually I catch the tank with the Fort attack, and he's surprised as the beast swallows him whole, and a new map pops up in the corner of the screen. A giant stomach filled with skeletons.  "Are you making GBS threads me?" "Hey dude, you should climb out the back way!"While he's trying and failing to climb out the creature's gut, the boss is down to single-digit hp and I manage to nail my next two attacks and swallow the rogue and the ranger. "Wait, those technically count as attacks that connected, right? He's still marked. I get to teleport out and attack him."So tank's out, DD's are in, boss is in a bad way. "If I kill it, what will happen to the guys in his stomach? Arcana check: 20-something" "You get the feeling that the stomach's not going to just vaporize if you kill this guy" "Awesome, let's kill this thing."Party healer takes a potshot, connects, and finally kills the creature off. I describe the gory death, delete it's token, and replace it with a giant stomach inside the circle. "Awesome, ok, let's cut them out." "The stomach spits acid at you, what's your reflex defense?" "Wait... what?"Cue an even more massive battle with the demon's disembodied, floating stomach that begins spitting skeletons and acid all over the battlefield. Finally, after they've been melted half-to-death and hacked the thing into disgusting, dissolving bits, the battle was over.  "We finally done? Great, because the inside of that thing smelled horrible. My character pukes into a bush." "Yeah, why don't you all just roll endurance to see who pukes into the bushes. This whole thing was a bad decision on your parts." "gently caress this, I'm jumping in the river. I don't think my character will ever feel clean again."
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Mar 4, 2013 07:58
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Captain Bravo posted:Cue an even more massive battle with the demon's disembodied, floating stomach that begins spitting skeletons and acid all over the battlefield. I love this sentence. I can only assume they used the bones and parts of the stomach to patch up their airship.
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Mar 4, 2013 08:00
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Amazing session today. If you're following my Dungeon World Saga, I have a mere 1 person returning from my 8-person session. (Scheduling is by far the hardest part of DMing). I spent a lot of time this week coming up with things, and after everyone rolled characters, I asked the three new players why they had journeyed to the dwarven city of Duerlagg. One of them told me it was to get Lockfire Root, an expensive herb that only grew underground. Silk was following the previous adventure, and was following the kidnapping Pathmaker Trading Corp. I started with this: quote:The underground city of Duerlagg is a marvel. Four hundred years old if it’s a day, it’s hewn from the innards of the World’s Teeth mountains. Its avenues are broad, named after the city’s great leaders. None are revered greater than Morias Bronzebeard, who founded Duerlagg centuries ago. Albino lizardmen had invaded the city, and the only ones who could stop it were our heroes: Silk Keldar, Thief Extraordinaire. By his own admission, "[He's] not evil!" Watson Barrow, Inventor; tall and crazy. Oria, The Half-Elf Markswoman; and Bottle Sticks, The Halfling Shaman with a secret. The group worked together to slay a lizard patrol. The peril was constant; the lizard archers aimed their obsidian arrows at the group, the spearlizards attacked the party's weakest members, and Oria's arrows blew up in her face. Luckily, some quick thinking and use of cover, as well as Watson's Magnetic Booster, allowed them a swift and relatively bloodless victory. (Except on the Lizard's part. Silk stabbed one in the spine, and used it as a shield against the archers. Bottles tripped an opponent and Watson launched a clockwork-booted curbstomp. Oria killed two with a ricochet arrow; Silk slit the throat of one that Bottles was wrestling with.) The heroes continued into the smoky city, only to discover the Grand Embassy was on fire. A dwarven bucket brigade wasn't making much progress. With little magical or godly power, the players were stymied... Until Watson applied his superior brainpower! He looked through the market for a cartload of fertilizer and a keg of dynamite, and, using the well the bucket brigade was drawing from, created a crude rocket. He aimed at the cave ceiling... and a rain of dust descended. The soot and fertilizer snuffed the exterior flames, greatly pleasing the bucket brigade (until they discovered that the well had been truly dispoiled). They discerned from the guards that people were still trapped on the 3rd and 8th floors. As the adventurers broke into the embassy, they found a spiral staircase partially blocked by fiery timbers. Oria went up first, slipping up with half-elven grace, to find one of the doors barred from her side! On the opposite, she heard a voice, one that she'd soon recognize as Sir Lucia, Dwarven Paladin! * Sir Lucia had a group of Nobles with him. Just as he was to suggest going downward, the timber collapsed the staircase below! Lucia and Silk lowered ropes to help their companions. While Bottles was the last one up, the rope caught fire behind him...which Sir Lucia bravely put out. As the party continued up the stairs, ambassadors in tow, they were stopped by a GIGANTIC, 400 pound lizard. Sir Lucia skewered the beast with his sword, but was thrown backward onto the inventor and the Half-Elf. Silk slipped by and stabbed the beast repeatedly in the kidneys. Here, Silk had two choices: he could let the beast tumble backwards onto him, or he could let it stumble forward, down the stairs, and onto the party... The party was unhappy to see the beast ROLL forward! Oria swung onto the railing, Watson used his cowardice and his electric-buffer to avoid it, and Sir Lucia rolled backwards. A stroke of luck bounced the monster off the stairs, OVER Bottles entirely, and into the crouching Lucia, who deflected the creature down into the stairs below. Silk was unapologetic. That is, he didn't admit to wrongdoing. --- The 8th floor was the executive dining room. As Silk shook down the nobles in exchange for rescue, Lucia demanded the Sous Chef tell him where the leader was. The Sous Chef wouldn't; Lucia insisted. The Sous Chef finally took him into the kitchen, opened a large drawer, and revealed the head chef, now a collection of white attire and body parts. As the Sous Chef started a tale of woe about his wife's adultery, Sir Lucia slew him on the spot. (As was his want; Sir Lucia, it was determined, was a paladin of Krugdon, the God of Combat and Bravery. He suffered not the evil to live.) Oria found the root in the chef's pantry. Watson stumbled into Silk's scheme, and gave him a simple command: quote:Split it. The party looked to see how to get nobles down, and came up with a plan: They'd create a series of ziplines down the street, and use dishrags to tie people, two handed, onto the ropes. Of course, the dishrags didn't hold out; in a moment of caring, Oria shot a rope-arrow to a falling Half-Elf delegate, saving the woman's life, and evacuating everyone (bar one sous-chef). --- The party was beset by options at this point; Silk pawned his stolen goods to a war profiteer, Sir Lucia began his daily prayers, Watson pontificated on Morias Bronzebeard's feats as an inventor, and Bottle Sticks was visited by a vision. One of his ancestors was actually dwarf! He snuck into a side alley and talked to the man, a toymaker, about how he had one thing to pass on...buried in the depths of his toy shop, down in the Undercity. Oria watched on from the shadows as the halfling spoke to empty air. Meanwhile, Watson was stopped by Corrine Bronzebeard. She, and her men of Bronzebeard's Legion, admired his fighting prowess, and wanted his word at court. King Helkasser wanted to withdraw, seek aid, and retake the city later; Corrine wanted to stay and fight, down to the last dwarf if necessary. Watson agreed to give his word. The group decided to find the great item in the toy shop, deliberately not telling Silk what it was. On the way down, they boarded open elevator, one of two that plumbed the city's depths. The party thought quickly when attacked by carrion birds, and again Watson's genius played out; he rigged the elevator to accelerate but stop safely. It was dangerous, harrowing, and nearly killed them... But they survived the landing. At this point, Sir Lucia layed on hands for Oria and prayed for her; he absorbed her wounds himself. The store was guarded by a huge lizard patrol, who the party waited out. The lizards took the other elevator back into the city. The toy store was unguarded, except by a otyungh, safely caged and crated. What happened inside Toy Store? How would Oria betray Sir Lucia, and how would Silk be the noblest of all? Find out in part 2: Please stop booing the heroes. *Who had just arrived to the gaming session! And independently chosen the boon "Immunity to Fire" before being clued in that it was a City on Fire. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Mar 4, 2013 09:01
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Captain Bravo posted:Demon stomach filled with skeletons
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Mar 4, 2013 10:20
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Minutia posted:And somehow, magically, the brand-new character belonging to the guy who played the illusionist got teleport-spliced into a warg body, resulting in four new limbs, a tail, and a fang-filled, uncontrollable head attached to him at the hips. Like a centaur, except with a wolf head at your crotch, and two humanoid legs poking out of the bottom. Without the resources or time to fix it in bumfuck nowhere in our last D&D session, the player failed multiple ludicrously high checks to control the crotchmonster, and then bitterly wrote off his character. I'm not sure whether to laugh or run screaming very far far away.
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Mar 4, 2013 15:47
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You can join if you want,  I played in Minutia's campaign as the healer. I joined the game because I was looking for a group in a new city and I should have had alarm bells go off in my head when I was told in no uncertain terms I had to be a full time healer in the 4e game. The actual alarm bells went off in my head when I walked into play and the DM was sitting shirtless at the table while in the corner sat a framed pencil sketch of Link with his enormous semi-hard penis and squatting with his butt toward you. I, thankfully, had enough warning on his tendency to slice up characters that I just built a character who couldn't lose any of their bonuses without also dying. This did not, however, prepare me for the fart-troll encounter where no-one could hurt the foes and he purposefully separated me from the party with enough distance that I could not reach them with healing. The only way the party stayed alive was through copious bullshitting on my part and abusing the letter of the rules over the spirit of the rules. The warning also did not prepare me from him deciding that multiple personalities were inside my character and he would randomly tell me to switch personalities at any given time. It was fun in concept but rapidly he wanted them to be game play changing and malignant and hurt the other party members. It became worse when we had to remember who we are or whatever and he re-wrote my character's entire personality permanently despite mandating multiple pages of role play documentation. I was in foul spirits after only three sessions and soldiered on after the group had a talk with him while I was away one week. I figured I'd probably quit after the next one but I promised Minutia I'd show up. I basically planned to ignore everything the DM threw at us, get out, and leave never to be seen again. The problem is what I couldn't ignore was being constantly hit on in ever possible way over the course of each session.I was as cordial as I possibly could at first but after constant unabated attempts to get me to remove clothing and other lovely things I basically started to stone-wall and not respond. I figured if no wouldn't work complete silence might. Wrong, wrong wrong. The last session I showed up for the players I actually liked had decided to go to a festival first before showing up for the game. I couldn't figure out where the festival was, so I texted the DM. The response I got? "I don't know where they are. We're having a threesome, you can join if you want "At least on the positive note that was every one of the players who I actually liked last straw session as well and we escaped to play our own game. With our goddamn shirts on.
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Mar 4, 2013 16:44
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Playing without shirts on might not be so bad if it's a hot day, people are at least somewhat not obese or ugly looking and, most importantly, everyone is okay with it. But yeesh. Those games do not sound like fun at all. I don't know if I'd have gone back after session one from what you guys described.
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Mar 4, 2013 23:20
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Barudak posted:You can join if you want, Out of curiosity, not that anything would make this acceptable, but what was the gender make-up of this group? Was everyone over 18? I'm trying to wrap my brain around what kind of creep-rear end thinks his behavior isn't grounds for sexual harassment charges. Also it's technically impossible to join a threesome because your presence makes it a foursome. But that's a minor complaint.
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Mar 5, 2013 01:39
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Yes, tell us more so we can paint this clusterfuck much, much more clearly.
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Mar 5, 2013 01:53
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Goddamn, a lot of you people really need to stop getting battered wife syndrome when it comes to GMs. If someone is wierd and creepy the first time you play with them, it's reasonable assume that they are always going to be wierd and creepy and find someone else to play with.
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Mar 5, 2013 05:02
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These GMs just apply the principles of Ten-Foot Ladder Theory. Don't you know that negging lowers will defense, with a -5 to saves? Don't hate the PCs, hate the game.
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Mar 5, 2013 05:14
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So, I wanted to join a Vampire game because I figured I had been out of the loop for so long that it might be nice to take up role-playing again. I looked around my area to see what was available. I only found an old vampire game and figured I would give it a shot. I saw the smallest clan they had was Tremere. Cool. I'll fill in some gaps! ... I ended up getting denied and asked to play a Toreador so I'd have a sexier character. I politely said no thank you and stuck to working Friday nights.
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Mar 5, 2013 06:02
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Aerofallosov posted:So, I wanted to join a Vampire game because I figured I had been out of the loop for so long that it might be nice to take up role-playing again. I had a friend with a similar experience playing Tremere. In his case, rather than being asked to play a 'sexier' character, he was laughed out of clan meetings routinely... for being 'too political'. Once, he asked a Clan elder if he might pursue a role as a go between for the Tremere. He noted that the Tremere were something of a laughing stock, had no influence on the laws, and got pushed into doing dirty work a lot despite being the largest clan in the city. So when he floated the idea past the elder - who was also Storyteller - the guy breaks character and has a heart-to-heart with my friend. "Dude, you aren't playing Tremere right", he says. "We're here for magic and research. If you want to be political, maybe you should play a Ventrue." EDIT: I have to ask - Did they actually cite, "We want you to be a Toreador so you'll be sexier?" I assume they meant 'dress sexier'. That's gross. Straight up whack.
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Mar 5, 2013 06:11
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Well, my Call of Cthulhu group managed to: -Acquire the last known copy of the King in Yellow. -Lead a Champion of Hastur into a turret ambush. -Extort the most powerful family in Arkham. -Destroy a lovely theatre. -and inadvertently further the designs of Nyarlethotep. All in one session!
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Mar 5, 2013 06:57
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OmniDesol posted:Well, my Call of Cthulhu group managed to: Do you have enough sanity left for a second session?
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Mar 5, 2013 09:41
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I got an epic jump scare out of my last session. Right now I'm running a converted version of the original 1st edition Ravenloft module. The PC's are in Castle Ravenloft, on the roof. They enter a room through an unlocked window, right into Strahd's bedroom, where the magic happens. In it, they find the confused missing girl from the village of Barovia, Gertruda. She's wearing a fancy evening gown and for some reason believes she's going to be made into a real princess by the dashing count. One player intimidates her, rolls a 20, and tells her to run home and to take care of her worried grandmother Mary. After the intimadating barbarian guilt's her into fleeing the castle, he then demands she hands over her necklace. Gertruda does so, then runs out of the nearest door, scared, with no way of knowing the way out... And no knowledge of what's actually in the castle. Or what her suitor truly is (the first vampire.) I tell the players as they're searching Strahd's room, you hear footsteps and doors opening to the east. You hear the young woman scream. Then you hear her running footsteps travel past your door to the west. You hear another scream in the distance to the west. The pitter patter of feet and the creaky hinges of opening doors cease. The players dick around looking for secret rooms, and waiting for whatever monster Gertruda saw from the East to come a knocking, so each player takes a door to guard and just waits. There's a knock. The barbarian who intimidated the girl opens the door. "The door creaks as it opens revealing... Oh... It's just Gertruda." The barbarian then turns his head and starts giving orders to another player. Thats' when I lunge at him from across the table, scream-hissing like a hungry vampire ready to bite. I startle the hell out of him. He jumps out of his chair, yells, "Oh My God! What the poo poo!" and spills his drink. The table starts cracking up at him as I roll an attack for the vampire spawn he inadvertently created. I miss and say, "I think you deserve to roll a fear check after that one," while in my mind pelvic thrusting like Jim Carrey. I didn't even think a horror movie jump scare would be possible in a game of Pathfinder. It's the little victories as a DM. The little victories. For a moment, the players who've been paranoid, and hunted the past three sessions, sleeping in chapels as a priest pulls an all nighter praying, as wolves scratch at their doors and howl... Were for just one simple moment, scared shitless as not only players, but as people themselves.
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Mar 5, 2013 11:14
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The last D&D campaign that I DMed for involved a large amount of time-travelling. The PCs were attempting to ensure that an immortal Dragon, who had ruled the world as Emperor for hundreds of years, never came to power. Ultimately, the PCs discovered that the reason this had happened was because a very ancient wizard had done some misguided magic centuries ago that had fundamentally altered reality in a way that made planar travel much easier, and allowed this dragon from another plane to come into the world. Their task in the last couple sessions was to convince the wizard not to make his well-meaning, but misguided mistake. I had gone into this thinking to myself that it was probably likely that they would just go back in time, kill the wizard, and be done with it. Instead, the group surprised me by using their time-travel mcguffin to visit the wizard at a different point in the timeline, explain the problem to him, and try enlist his aid. I decided that, given the NPC's personality and what he would have been involved in at that point in time, he would give the PCs his glasses, on which he would encode a message to himself, explaining what was going on. He assured the party that if his younger self saw this message, he would certainly realize his error and history would be corrected. At this point, it was time to come up to the very final session of the campaign. I had mentioned as an aside to one player that I thought it would be hilarious if the whole thing ended up devolving into the ludicrous "Put the glasses on!" fist fight scene from the movie They Live. Now, I'm not sure if that player talked to the other players, or if it was purely coincidence, but when we started that session, the party's Warlord stormed up to the wizard NPC and demanded in no uncertain terms that he put the glasses on. We proceeded to a gloriously silly re-enactment of the They Live scene, and great times were had by all. My only regret is that nobody was there to chew bubblegum and kick rear end.
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Mar 5, 2013 12:32
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Chaltab posted:Out of curiosity, not that anything would make this acceptable, but what was the gender make-up of this group? Was everyone over 18? I'm trying to wrap my brain around what kind of creep-rear end thinks his behavior isn't grounds for sexual harassment charges. Everyone was over 18 and it consisted of 3 gay men, 2 hetero men, and 2 hetero women*. I'm not sure how the group lasted long enough for me to join it, and since it had been around as long as it had and was fairly mixed I figured something had to be going right in the group. Another fun trick that I was thankfully on the tail end of was Schlorpy. At some point long before I played the party wizard had been infected by a parasitic creature that was "affectionately" called Schlorpy. Schlorpy was basically a big slimy tendril that was slowly draining the life out of the wizard and crippling his rolls. That wasn't apparently enough for the DM though, no Schlorpy did something else. Schlorpy ate magic items. Not only did Schlorpy eat magic items, it was a magical creature itself so it could tear open bags, pull objects towards itself, you name a restriction placed on Schlorpy it would magically get around it to eat your magical items. To make matters worse, Schlorpy was ruled to be so intrinsically tied to the wizard that harming or killing Schlorpy would kill the wizard's character. So basically, for about 7 or so sessions the party literally had no magic items and could not get more of them because of a thing that was slowly killing a party member with no way ever provided to fix that problem. *pm me if I'm wrong. Barudak fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Mar 5, 2013 16:01
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I suddenly feel much better about being a DM. I mean I'm unprepared a lot, but at least I don't do things like that. For something of substance, I'll share what's happening in my campaign. So this is a first time for everyone. None of my players had played 4E before and I had never DMed before. The party was made of a Changling Warlock, a Warforged Battlemind who was shaped like a bird, a con-artist Human Empath, a Dwarf Wizard, and a Dragonborn Barbarian that can deal crazy damage. I still haven't gotten the hang of balancing fights around him yet. The very first thing to happen was that they immediately believed that their quest giver was evil and trying to betray him. The second thing that happened was that the dwarf wizard suddenly revealed that he was a king of a kingdom that got turned to stone. Of course the player didn't tell me this beforehand. Eh no problem, I can roll with it. Fast forward a bit to their first fight and they've been ambushed on the road to their destination. While they were fighting, the Wizard sets a nearby forest on fire, pissing the nearby elves off. Once they made it to town, the wizard proceeded to start changing things color using prestidigitation. That was all in the first session. The real fun started next session.
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Mar 5, 2013 16:40
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| # ? May 21, 2024 22:56 |
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Mendrian posted:So when he floated the idea past the elder - who was also Storyteller - the guy breaks character and has a heart-to-heart with my friend. "Dude, you aren't playing Tremere right", he says. "We're here for magic and research. If you want to be political, maybe you should play a Ventrue."  Barudak posted:hetero* women. 
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Mar 5, 2013 17:40
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