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During this period, the group consisted of 2 hetero women, 3 gay men, and 3 hetero men (you're forgetting the creep we later tossed out, Barudak). There was huge party turnover since for some reason players kept leaving  and the group was always on the lookout for new players. The reason there were so many of us was that morale was really low at this point, and if one person quit, everyone else would, and we had agreed to stick it out until the campaign wrapped up, because as I mentioned earlier, we were worried about losing certain things if we left on bad terms, and we still had hopes of improving things.Because of the high attrition rate, the party was also really unbalanced despite its large number of players, so that's why new players got railroaded into particular roles. Come to think of it, the players who lasted the longest played ranged spellcasters. Guess that's the only way to survive in a campaign where your limbs get ripped off and healing magic doesn't work. Barudak posted:Schlorpy You arrived right in the middle of this, so let me clear up what happened. The group had been giving the DM feedback at this point, asking for things like "level-appropriate encounters" and "no limb-removal" so he got pissy, railing about how we were still little fish in a big pond (at level 9) and shouldn't expect to win all (any) of our encounters. Since we were getting too big for our britches, he decided to cut us down to size, and make us rely on our powers and each other instead of our vast wealth of magical items (we bought level-appropriate items, and the DM kept giving us completely random and useless magical items with horrible side effects and putting us in situations where the One Right Solution involved using the random magical items in a very specific way.) So the DM decided to "teach [us] a lesson." Not joking, those are his exact words. The stopgap DM was DMing at the time, although the main DM reserved the right to dictate huge, horrible effects, and the stopgap DM apologized to us after every session. Since we had a magic-eating slug and a horrible artifact we were trying to destroy, the blaster caster put two and two together. Because obviously this was a puzzle we were supposed to solve, and not just a way to randomly gently caress over your players, right? When Schlorpy ate the artifact, it exploded like a nuclear bomb. The blaster caster only survived being at ground zero because by some stroke of luck the explosion was the type of damage he was immune to. The blaster caster crawled out of the enormous crater, and we thought our troubles were over. They were only beginning. Schlorpy wasn't dead. Schlorpy was, apparently, a plot item. Despite showing up as a random encounter, and our characters having no motivation to keep it (it ate our magic!), the DM was convinced that Schlorpy would be our only hope for surviving the castle (he was a big fan of macguffins that were the Only Solution to unwinnable situations he put us in), and wanted to force us to keep it, and also punish us for our unwise decision to try to get rid of it. So Schlorpy survived, tiny and more ravenous than ever. Schlorpy's fallout included black ash that suppressed magic. The party members with Random Magical Bodies (quite a few) were suddenly bleeding from their pores, there was a tiny Schlorpy attached to the illusionist and sucking the life out of him, none of our magical items worked, and all the local NPCs hated us. So we had to go off, equipmentless and in some cases literally naked, to find more magic to feed to Schlorpy. (This all took place between You Don't Need All Those Limbs, Right?and You Wake Up With A Boner.)
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Mar 5, 2013 17:43
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Zereth posted:... where's the other end of this footnote? Fixed its placement and note, but I wanted to make certain I wasn't forgetting anyone.
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Mar 5, 2013 17:49
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From your descriptions I believe this was a 4e Game, right? Level appropriate Magic Items are kind of vital to even hitting things as a part of the game's math. This guy sounds like a giant dick who just wanted an audience to inflict his neuroses on.
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Mar 5, 2013 18:01
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Kurieg posted:From your descriptions I believe this was a 4e Game, right? It was indeed 4e, and yes, level appropriate magic items are basically baked into the games math. I participated in all of two fights (one of which I didn't finish and never returned because of) and both times having level appropriate gear would not have helped in the least as the monsters were purposefully stated to be beyond the realm of what the party could reasonably take on.
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Mar 5, 2013 18:06
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Kurieg posted:From your descriptions I believe this was a 4e Game, right?
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Mar 5, 2013 20:03
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Kobold posted:There IS the ability to just use inherent bonuses so that you get the equivalent bonuses to hit, damage, and defenses without having to go along the loot treadmill (and thus be able to use more aesthetic items that fit your character rather than just picking up the latest, most powerful thing). But I have the hardest time imagining that a DM like that taking an option that gives more FREEDOM to his players. I know about inherent bonuses, I just figured that a DM that requires you to sacrifice 1d3 limbs to get out of combat alive wouldn't be using them. But in a 3.5e game, casters can more or less ignore most magic items that don't increase the save DCs of their spells, which would lessen his dickery (but only somewhat)
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Mar 5, 2013 20:08
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Christ, I'm surprised the DM didn't lose 1d4 limbs a session.
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Mar 5, 2013 20:23
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The whole limb removal dickery theme reminds me of a short and snappy one from my very first game. Our ragtag bunch of adventurers had found a community of highly proficient psions, friends in a hostile city. The gate to their compound had a special trick: it couldn't be opened but if you walked straight towards it you'd be teleported through at the last moment. As a rely-on-your-wits street rogue kind of character, that ranked among the ten most powerful supernatural things I'd seen in my life. First teleport ever, to boot. So it seemed natural to me to say "wow, this is awesome, I'm gonna turn around and go through another time or two." So it seemed natural to the DM to call for a Reflex save to avoid stumbling and breaking my arm on the cobblestones, and have the psions treat the broken arm with their usual methods, i.e. chop it off and make a new one grow, which happened without:
e: some time later we got into a situation where the fighter was forced to have a trap chop his own leg off to save the rest of the party from certain death, but he immediately received a cybernetic new one that functioned in every way like his original one, not worse, not better. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Mar 5, 2013 20:29
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Kurieg posted:From your descriptions I believe this was a 4e Game, right? And it was his failure to do the 4e math properly that suggested this to you, was it
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Mar 6, 2013 02:41
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No, more a "in addition to the fact that he's setting you up to fail, he's also a creepy dick."
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Mar 6, 2013 02:46
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You know Minutia, Barudak, I believe one of you mentioned you still know someone who knows this guy and is gaming with him, I would REALLY suggest you pass on the message that he get himself some help. It's one thing to railroad, it's another to power play, it's yet another to cram your (assumed) fetishes into gameplay, hell it's even another to do all of them at the same time, but when you're doing them all to this degree it reads to me as someone boiling with anger and hatred over SOMETHING in their life and taking it out on any convenient target. It's just not healthy.
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Mar 6, 2013 04:57
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Cornwind Evil posted:You know Minutia, Barudak, I believe one of you mentioned you still know someone who knows this guy and is gaming with him, I would REALLY suggest you pass on the message that he get himself some help. It's one thing to railroad, it's another to power play, it's yet another to cram your (assumed) fetishes into gameplay, hell it's even another to do all of them at the same time, but when you're doing them all to this degree it reads to me as someone boiling with anger and hatred over SOMETHING in their life and taking it out on any convenient target. It's just not healthy. Better idea: You got out. You stay out.
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Mar 6, 2013 05:22
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Best idea: Use an anonymous email address to send him a link to this thread. 
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Mar 6, 2013 05:31
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Cornwind Evil posted:You know Minutia, Barudak, I believe one of you mentioned you still know someone who knows this guy and is gaming with him, I would REALLY suggest you pass on the message that he get himself some help. Nope. This guy is 100% not my problem. He's an adult, and he's surrounded by people who care about him way more than I do. If he is/will be in therapy, good for him, but it's really none of my business. Also, I think "being hurt" and "wanting to bully others" are separate phenomena. This DM just really enjoyed having power over people, didn't believe his power ought to be questioned, and didn't care how dubiously people consented to the things he thought were fun. I think these are entitlement/bullying problems that are best solved by not letting the guy get in a position of power (and therefore letting more people call him out on his bullshit), not mental health problems that would be fixed by therapy.
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Mar 6, 2013 05:44
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My suggestion still stands. 
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Mar 6, 2013 05:54
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Well, our group just managed to break Castle Ravenloft at level 6, by inscribing a Rune of Good Health on the ribs of Count Strahd's one true love (Natural 20 Heal check), and then hitting her with a spell of Gender Reversal. Our party is a little bit unconventional, but hey, it works.
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Mar 8, 2013 03:15
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OmniDesol posted:Well, our group just managed to break Castle Ravenloft at level 6, by inscribing a Rune of Good Health on the ribs of Count Strahd's one true love (Natural 20 Heal check), and then hitting her with a spell of Gender Reversal. All right, I'm curious, how did this work?
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Mar 8, 2013 11:22
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Cornwind Evil posted:All right, I'm curious, how did this work? Extremely well, all things considered. We had just taken out the principal source of the zombie infestation in Barovia (which is the lead-in quest to the whole Castle Ravenloft thing) and had come across Ireena Kolyana, the NPC that Count Strahd is trying to enslave/make his thrall/marry, and noticed that she had vampire bite marks, but that she had not yet turned. Our original plan was to just hide her inside our warrior, a giant rock person, to protect her from becoming a full vampire. However, we later came upon a blacksmith, who had managed to survive the whole zombie thing by wearing a Pendant of Good Health. The gears started turning, and the following conversation went a little like this: Player1: So, a Pendant of Good Health uses a magical rune to prevent disease, right? DM: Yeah. Player1:Okay, cool. And, um... odd question, but is Count Strahd homosexual? DM: What? No. Player1: Right then. I'd like to roll a Heal check to safely knock her our, and open her chest cavity. Player2: And I'd like to use Spellcraft to carve a rune of Good Health on her ribs. Player3: And for good measure, I'm also casting Gender Swap on her. What followed was pretty much the entire campaign exploding.
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Mar 8, 2013 14:46
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OmniDesol posted:Extremely well, all things considered. We had just taken out the principal source of the zombie infestation in Barovia (which is the lead-in quest to the whole Castle Ravenloft thing) and had come across Ireena Kolyana, the NPC that Count Strahd is trying to enslave/make his thrall/marry, and noticed that she had vampire bite marks, but that she had not yet turned. Our original plan was to just hide her inside our warrior, a giant rock person, to protect her from becoming a full vampire. However, we later came upon a blacksmith, who had managed to survive the whole zombie thing by wearing a Pendant of Good Health. The gears started turning, and the following conversation went a little like this: Wouldn't this just make Count Strahd super angry at your party for basically cock-blocking him?
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Mar 8, 2013 15:19
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Volmarias posted:Wouldn't this just make Count Strahd super angry at your party for basically cock-blocking him? Yeah but that's probably not the sort of emotion that's going to spawn Ravenloft.
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Mar 8, 2013 16:14
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The Fall of Duerlagg part 2 Toy Stores and Oath Betrayal When we last left our heroes, they were fighting for the dwarven city of Duerlagg, investigating a series of magic items to help turn the tide. Outside the store was a large wooden cage, housing a monstrous Otyungh. The slavering mouth-beast was kept as a reserve weapon by the Pale Lizards. The party wisely avoided disrupting it. Bottle Sticks, Halfling shaman with dwarven parentage, followed his ancestor's spirit to the abandoned toystore. The place was gorgeous, filled with toys, dolls, and all series of wonderful contraptions. At the back, behind the counter, was a switch, which Bottlesticks pulled. The party groaned. The store's lights all flashed, while hidden speakers played HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LITTLE GIRL! He pulled another switch, and a staircase descended from the floor. Enter the Otyungh. The party tried to close the staircase. They found a variety of trinkets (including an Intelligent Lasso), and were all clear...except the only way out was the staircase. And then the Otyungh smashed its tendrils through the ceiling. --- Oria faked a lizard voice and told the lizard patrols above that the Otyungh had gotten loose. The patrols told her "good luck!", and left. Why risk their necks? Sir Lucia and Silk found a secret passage, buried behind bookshelves. Watson realized the creature would break through the floor if given half a chance...and positioned shelves underneath it. It worked; the Otyungh was dazed. Sir Lucia, already weary and bleeding, challenged it to one on one combat, under the auspices of his brutal God. The rest of the party was unwilling to abide this, however. Watson tried to shove merchandise onto it from above. And if that wasn't enough of a violation, Oria fired a stunning arrow directly at the creature. Although the group escaped, Sir Lucia was punished. For the first time, he felt the heat of his burning city...he was no longer immune to flames. --- The heroes made their way to the Halls of the King, where arguments were in session. The heroes tried to make themselves heard above the din. Even their weakest opinions got the cheers of half the room, and their best arguments were booed by the king's backbenchers. A series of arguments from Oria led to the King accidentally revealing he had sent away his best warriors on an errand... After which he stormed off. The players all tried to sneak into the king's private council chambers; Oria pretended to be an ambassador. Watson flubbed his social skills, lurched toward the king and was taken aside by guards. When they tried to beat him, he turned on his electric repulsor shield, stared deep in their eyes, and told them one word... quote:Split. Council was disrupted by the incursions of the lizards, and the discovery of a Giant Half-Ogre Minotaur. Silk told Oria to shoot him in the necklace, which transformed the creature back into a very angry half-ogre. As the battle raged, the players had a choice: follow the Pathmakers as they fled the burning city, or stay and fight. They stayed... and that's where their story lets off. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Mar 8, 2013 |
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Mar 8, 2013 20:56
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Just ran an improv session that went amazingly well and silly. It was about the players all being one thing. Ducks. Not any special ducks, just ducks in a park. The first challenge was competing for bread, and as this was going on the players would create the map on Roll 20, a big collaborative effort and actually kept it quite simple...save for the Robot Tank that one of the ducks intimidated. As communication went on I said something I never thought I'd say in my life: "To do this you have to communicate through the medium of Duck." After divebombing a football hooligan and staring down an elderly woman who hated ducks because they killed her husband, the ducks form a companionship with the park owner whose wive had just divorced them. The ducks ventured down towards the muddy football pitch (This was set in Yorkshire, Northern England) and there the ducks were challenged to a football match by Wayne Rooney. The players response to this was perfect. "WE'RE loving DUCKS!" Nonetheless, a large crowd gathered and the human team was trounced. The Ducks celebrated their victory with bread and the human footballers shot themselves in shame. The score was 3-0. It was fantastic. 
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Mar 9, 2013 01:53
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So I guess the grognard thread is gone now. If anyone was wondering if That Guy got any better: nope. We are all either level one or two. He made a new guy but he's still level four, so he's routinely dropping 18+ damage on like.... badgers. He said it's so he can make sure we don't all die but I don't buy it. One of the other new people brought her friend to watch/study, and he said "Okay fine but only if she doesn't talk <  >" (We all ignored this rule)He brought a gigantic jug of water, like almost as big as the kind you'd see in a water cooler, and drank straight out of it like it was normal bottle. Then there was this conversation he had right at the start of the campaign. Some messenger came to tell us that his lord had a job for us or something. He's  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- :"I say I'll go but only for 10 gold in advance."DM: "Uh... he says he doesn't have any money on him but his lord will surely reward you for your service" *rolls" :"26 to attack. I assume that hits *rolls* 17 damage."DM:"You kill him  ":"I search his body for 10 gold."DM:"He doesn't have any money on him!" :"I sell his clothes for 10 gold."Motherfucker really wanted that ten gold. Luckily there were lots of us there, so the encounters were so big that we all got to actually do poo poo. I got a dancing quarterstaff that turned me green for no reason. It was fun. Chexoid fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Mar 9, 2013 |
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Mar 9, 2013 02:41
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Chexoid posted:Motherfucker really wanted that ten gold. Luckily there were lots of us there, so the encounters were so big that we all got to actually do poo poo. I got a dancing quarterstaff that turned me green for no reason. It was fun.
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Mar 9, 2013 05:23
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Chexoid posted:Motherfucker really wanted that ten gold. To contrast that sadly traditional sociopathic murderhobo 'hero' approach, here's a Good story from my most recent 4E session. The scene: we're doing the final battle of Heroic Tier on a floating city, and the fight has unfortunately started near the edge of said city. It didn't occur to us that it could be a problem as we weren't RIGHT on the edge, until the boss' main minion used an ability to push one of our teammates, we'll call him H, onto a wooden bridge/dock that we tended to land our giant flying bird mounts on. Then one of the lesser minions goes over to stab H some. Nothing too severe, and my character, who I play as someone who does his darndest to be the Heroest Hero who ever Heroed (without being Lawful Stupid) is planning to go fight the minion who pushed H... Then the boss uses one of her abilities to blow up the minion who is stabbing H. Yes, she blew up her own minion. Why? Because this also blew up the connection of the wooden bridge to the floating city, causing it to break off and start plummeting towards the very distant ground. Oh yes, did I mention the character of H was DEATHLY scared of heights? Now, as said, we all had flying bird mounts who could be summoned with a free action whistle, so I debated meta gaming and going after the boss and her remaining minions, but I ultimately decided that that would not be in-character for my character to do. So I promptly used two move actions to run to the edge and then used one of my Swordmage teleport powers and the wonky way physics and time work in 4E (with each round taking six seconds and H still being in my three square range despite the fact that he also would have technically moved down) to switch places with him. So H is now on solid ground and I'M plummeting to my death. My bird saved me, fortunately: my logic for not just letting H's bird save him was my character is NOT mortally terrified of heights and hence would be in a better mental state to catch onto the bird as I fell. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Mar 11, 2013 |
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Mar 10, 2013 11:07
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There's a follow-up story to all the poo poo I posted. We got away from the limb-mangling DM, relocated to another player's house, and started a different campaign, but (despite my best efforts) we didn't manage to get rid of all the creeps in one fell swoop. I will refer to the remaining creep as  .I've Never Done It With A Wood Elf Before really hated 4e, to the point of complaining about it every goddamn session, and building really shoddy characters because he preferred the stat distributions and character classes of older editions. When we were looking for a new campaign to try after the limb-mangling one ended, he clamored for a 1e game. Apparently he and a buddy of his had spent a lot of time modifying 1e (the binder of modifications was thicker than the handbook, and nobody got all the way through it), and he wanted to DM a campaign. So we figured why not, it could be an interesting experience, since none of us had played 1e before.Remembering how badly my paladin had gotten beaten up in melee last campaign, I figured I'd like a break from playing the tank, so I decided to play a really nimble archery-based ranger with a Ring of Jump. And while I was playing against type, might as well play an elf, especially if that got me any bonuses. I got myself an elf archer mini and painted it really nicely. But declared that he would be making our characters for us, because he knew the system so well. When he handed me my character sheet, I realized that he had made my character the main tank of the party. Bastard sword and everything. I was disappointed, but he insisted that this made the most sense for the party, and fit the system better. Since this was his special homebrewed system, his campaign, and his house, I went along with it. After all, how could I criticize him for creating lovely characters that didn't match the system if I did the same thing? He insisted that the Ring of Jump was useless, so I traded it for fire protection.We started playing. was convinced that his system was the best thing ever, despite criticisms like "healing takes so long to cast that it's absolutely worthless in a fight" and "it really slows down combat when you have to consult a chart on your DM screen every single time we try to hit an enemy". He had a chart of body parts (what the gently caress is it with bad DMs and attacking body parts?), and rolled to see which body part each attack hit (because he had a really tedious armor system where every body part had a different AC and armor had HP). To his credit, at least both players and monsters got to use that chart for their attacks, and I did manage to behead some monsters without losing a single limb. refused to use 5-foot squares to streamline things – some characters could move 17 feet, for example, which he measured carefully with a ruler every round. Despite everyone in the group having minis, he insisted on using markers to write down initials on the map, claiming that the minis interfered with us being able to visualize the characters. He handwaved all his clunky mechanics by claiming verisimilitude, and whenever we tried to offer suggestions like "we'd like to be able to 5 foot step out of combat without getting hit because combat is turning into boring knots of fights to the death" he offered to go fetch some swords from his room to demonstrate how combat actually worked. Yes, he was entirely serious. Nobody ever took him up on his offer, because nobody wanted to risk a beating over rules lawyering. So, the mechanics were poo poo. Was the campaign any better? No. No, it wasn't. My sister and I were both playing female elves, and the DM decided this was the perfect opportunity to introduce villains who constantly used sexual insults, and then sexually assaulted our characters when we were knocked out in fights, and to introduce NPCs (read: higher-level characters who were his and his friends' former PCs ) that our characters had to sleep with to progress the plot. And he made a point of telling us that the NPCs were good in bed. Very. Good. also really, really loved wizards. And he felt that our party wizard was terribly underpowered at 1st level, so he decided to throw in a ridiculously level-inappropriate hoard of magical items that mostly benefited the wizard. We're talking items that let him cast flame walls and fireballs. And invisibility and teleport. To the point where battles were just a matter of watching the wizard kill 90% of the enemies in one round, and then mopping up the remains. And of course he tallied up XP individually, so the wizard shot up several levels before the rest of us.I'd put up with a ridiculously bad game with the previous DM because I liked hanging out with the other players, and the limb-mangling DM wasn't awful to most of the group (except Barudak) when we were just hanging out. What was like when he wasn't DMing?Creepy as gently caress. Our group had gotten to know each other fairly well at this point, and spent a lot of time bullshitting before games. At one point we were discussing relationships, and made a point of telling me and my sister that women could get sex any time they wanted. Any. Time.He also enjoyed sharing stories (and pictures, some of them featuring sex toys) of all the porn stars, strippers, and "hot crazy chicks" he knew personally, and a ton of banter that was essentially "haha Minutia, you're so hot! Just kidding! (no, really)". Then there was the constant stream of racist, sexist, and generally horrible jokes. Did I mention he's thirty years older than me? And literally old enough to be the dad of every single other person in the gaming group? Because he is. It took two more campaigns (one of which he deliberately sabotaged) for the group to toss this guy out. And even then, they only agreed to do it because I hit the breaking point and told them it was him or me. The group was shocked.
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Mar 12, 2013 01:15
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Jay-zus. I really, really like my players. Maybe because they're all new to the game, and I knew them as real life people outside of gaming. Anyway, this week, the players had to stop the Lizardman Invasion of the Dwarven Stronghold Duerlagg. They ended up with the aid of three opposing factions: Bronzebeard's warrior Legion, The Mages of the Stonetower (who knew a powerful rock moving spell that would threaten the dwarven economy), and the Spymasters, who would help in exchange for the scroll. Highlights: The ranger using wild empathy to talk to the royal Cockatoo The Artificer using his clockwork jumping boots to stomp an enemy's skull, and rolling so much damage he ended up in their armor, The Markswoman freezing, then shattering, a roiling ball of dire rats. Interesting encounters: The party is assaulted by dire rats in a dwarven whiskey-running tunnel, with the ranger's cat taking point; The party faces dwarven mining robots, and tag-teams them to knock the majority of them over; In the volcanic forge of the dwarven mines, the party faces off against the entire lizardman rear guard. The group use a magnetic attraction trinket to distract all the arrows, tells the dwarven spies to flank, then creates a wall of steam and molten iron to separate the lizards from the mines. The mages then solidified it. By doing this, the party also separated the spies from the mines. A complete and utter success, and shorthanded too. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2013 01:32
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quote:He had a chart of body parts (what the gently caress is it with bad DMs and attacking body parts?), and rolled to see which body part each attack hit (because he had a really tedious armor system where every body part had a different AC and armor had HP). To his credit, at least both players and monsters got to use that chart for their attacks, and I did manage to behead some monsters without losing a single limb. That sounds just like 1e Runequest - you tracked hp and armour separately for each body part. We found that almost invariably a combat would end when someone's left leg got lopped off, so we'd up-armour that leg with bronze plate and laugh, and laugh.
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Mar 12, 2013 04:27
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Minutia posted:We got away from the limb-mangling DM, relocated to another player's house, and started a different campaign, but (despite my best efforts) we didn't manage to get rid of all the creeps in one fell swoop. Well. You may have gotten down to just one creep, but I think you managed to retain a fair number of idiots. Seriously? They were shocked you wouldn't want to play with this guy?
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Mar 12, 2013 05:17
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So, we were playing Deathwatch, one of the 40k RPGs about being a Space Marine, meaning if you aren't bringing in double or triple digit killscores per mission something is wrong. The players have split up and decided to attack an outpost with mechanized support from normal, human troops as a distraction, and sent their heavy weapons guy to ride along with them and help the normal guys serve as a good diversion. Now, their heavy weapons guy, he has a history of making extremely poor decisions. These decisions lead to him not firing a single shot all mission, as the others mop up and even the normal humans, under the squad's sergeant, are kicking the hell out of the opposition. I mention he's going to lose some Renown for somehow managing to bring back a full belt of heavy weapons ammo and not a single kill on the entire operation, and he gets desperate. He picks the nearest bunker, which the other players have scouted but haven't cleared because it wasn't important and it was full of murderous plasma cannon robots, because some enemy troops had fallen back to take cover and cower in there. He is aware of the robots, but decides 'I've gotta get one kill! I can redeem myself if I run up and knife one of these guys!'. He reaches one of the enemy troopers, tries to knife him, hits, and the little guy blocks the attack. Then falls back. He realizes why they're falling back; then comes the plasma. He goes down, stunned, but still okay, and starts demanding the others rescue him. Before they can, the little humans he'd been trying to knife manage to do a couple more points of damage and he catches on fire and starts to melt, taking serious, permanent stat damage. Now, at this point, the sergeant, realizing they aren't going to get to him in time, calls on their human allies to try to save him, desperately, and with a couple good rolls, they manage to pull the one ton mass of flaming power armor out of the fire, put him out, drag him aboard a transport, and rescue him. The squad sent this immortal supersoldier to make sure the regulars would be a serious threat, and he ended up causing no damage and being heroically rescued by the guys he was supposed to back up, because he charged into the teeth of an enemy heavy weapons position to try to get a face-saving knife kill. They decided his character was fired and he rolled up something else once they got back to base, once we stopped laughing. His ammo belt was still full, after all that. How the hell do you gently caress up 'I shoot my heavy bolter at the enemy' that badly? You do all that. The rest of the players also made sure their human buddies got medals and battle-honors all round for their bravery in saving the now-crippled battle-brother, and I ended up getting a good source of extra NPC buddies for the party out of the whole affair, too. This same guy does the same kinds of things in every game he's been in. He's almost the group mascot by now, the guy we can rely on to spice things up by making incredibly poor tactical decisions and creating amusing stories of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. It's weird, but it's actually more fun with one terrible player around, because he's not offensive or a creep or anything, he just makes awful decisions and tends to think he's incredibly clever, leading to wonderful tales of hubris gone awry until he decides to make a new PC to wipe the slate clean and make a new set of stories of 'accidents' and mishaps. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Mar 12, 2013 |
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Mar 12, 2013 08:42
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So only bad GM's use called shots to specific body parts? "I shoot the cyclops in the eye." "I'm sorry you can't do that, for I am a good GM." I don't get it.
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Mar 12, 2013 08:53
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No, not called shots; it sounds like this guy was rolling every attack on a random hit table. The kind of thing that just slows combat down when all the GM has to do is say, "Oh, you hit him in the arm," or wherever. But no that doesn't offer enough  immersion.
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Mar 12, 2013 09:32
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God Of Paradise posted:So only bad GM's use called shots to specific body parts? I don't think that is what he meant. If you do a normal attack and don't target anything, bad DM's will use your result to calculate which body part you hit and in the worst cases even have separate AC and HP per location. It is bad because instead of quickly saying "your axe bites deep into his leg, 5 damage" or something and getting ready for the next roll combat grinds to a halt because you have to check every hit. Even if you know the stuff by heart it is still very time-consuming to write down damage per body part and if you calculate HP armour per location it becomes bookkeeping instead of gaming. When they bring in penalties per limb and stuff like that you might as well be in an Excel sheet. I don't know about the new version, but the old Warhammer RPG had this. The last digit of your roll on a D100 was what you hit. I think 1-2 was right leg, 3-4 was left leg, 5-7 torso, 8 and 9 the arms and 0 head. So if you rolled 19 the 9 indicated you hit the left arm. It wasn't bad at all and I think armour and HP was combined so if you could remember the table things would not really have a delay, but it didn't add anything if you had a DM who could just mention a body part. Just curious about the Cyclops thing though, if a 100 HP Cyclops gets hit in the eye once you blind him for the rest of the combat? Does he need 100 eye damage to go down? Why wouldn't your party begin every combat by targeting the eyes or their enemies to get bonuses while they are blind? This is also something in World of Darkness. Taking a headshot gives you -3, but no advantage. You still need the same amount of damage to kill your target, so unless he is wearing crazy armour and no helmet it doesn't help. I once tried a houserule that damage over Size or Sta with a headhot was an instakill, but that just turned everyone into snipers. Guess that was my worst campaign, just 5 Vampires pumping Blood into headshots every session.
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Mar 12, 2013 09:34
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God Of Paradise posted:So only bad GM's use called shots to specific body parts? No, only bad GMs have an over-reliance on called shot rules or on hit location tables. Yes, that's an oversimplification and a massive generalization, but hear me out. Complex called-shot mechanics and random hit location tables both have the same effect - they mechanize a narrative aspect of the game (namely 'where your attack hits'). They take an aspect of the game that could and ideally should be handled by a GM's sense of narrative and flavor and interpretation, and instead shift that narrative power to the dice. The GM doesn't have to say 'hey, it would be interesting for the game if this guy got wounded in the shoulder' or 'well, normally it would be hard for the PCs to knock the artifact out of the villain's hand but this is a climactic battle scene and plus it would be seriously cool, so I'll make it easier on them.' And in my experience, when the dice are the sole determiner of events in an RPG (as opposed to a tool used by the GM to aid his interpretation of the game world) then the GM is pretty lousy. EDIT: The only time I've seen a Random Hit Location Table make the game more fun was when the GM gave players some limited control over it; the degree of success on your attack roll let you shift the result of a hit location roll one way or another. And even then it wasn't so much fun that it was worth the effort. DivineCoffeeBinge fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Mar 12, 2013 |
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Mar 12, 2013 09:35
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God Of Paradise posted:So only bad GM's use called shots to specific body parts? It's not called shots they're complaining about, it's this exchange:  "Every single attack must be assigned to a limb and/or organ at all times and you have roll on three different tables to determine if the bone fractures, if the wounds get infected, and whether or not the limb is crippled. Everytime. Even if the damage already killed them. For every enemy. Also I will also do all of the rolling and no you can't see my tables or the math behind them." "But-" "VERISIMILITUDE."e;fb, darn you DivineCoffeeBinge for putting it in better words!
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Mar 12, 2013 09:39
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Called shot stuff Semi-unrelated, but has your group done any more of that star wars campaign. I love those stories!
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Mar 12, 2013 09:40
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Error 404 posted:Semi-unrelated, but has your group done any more of that star wars campaign. I love those stories! Working on getting everyone together for a game again. It has been a pain in the rear end. I promise, soon as there is a game with awesome stories to tell, I'll come back and tell them, because they're fun as hell.
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Mar 12, 2013 09:48
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I got you. Sorry I misunderstood. That sounds horrible, and pointless, to make every shot a called shot whether meant to be one or not.
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Mar 12, 2013 09:51
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You have the worst luck with Sperg-types, Minutia. Him being an enormous creep is just a huge dollop of poo poo cream on the crap sundae.
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Mar 12, 2013 10:23
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FredMSloniker posted:Well. You may have gotten down to just one creep, but I think you managed to retain a fair number of idiots. Seriously? They were shocked you wouldn't want to play with this guy? Yep. We have some serious Geek Social Fallacies going on in my group, and everyone was aghast that I wanted to be a mean bitch and kick out a member of the group. Most of the group is seriously conflict-averse (see: how long we gamed with the limb-mangling DM). When I finally reached the end of my rope, they all acted like I developed a sudden allergy to the guy for no reason at all, and insisted on a couple of "probation" sessions to see if he could improve. (Spoiler: no, he didn't.) Every time I told other group members how creepy I think is, their reactions ranged from lukewarm sympathy to lectures on how he's just attracted to me and I'm super uptight, how has sad things in his life right now so of course we need to keep gaming with him, how s will be s and I can't expect him to change his nature, and how I'm petty for getting fed up with the constant stream of awfulness (the 52,006th butt joke wasn't that bad, come on, are you gonna kick him out for one bad joke?).Cornwind Evil posted:You have the worst luck with Sperg-types, Minutia. Him being an enormous creep is just a huge dollop of poo poo cream on the crap sundae. Thanks. Fortunately, it's all uphill from these stories, and I now have veto power over incoming players so I can prevent this from happening again.
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Mar 12, 2013 16:42
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