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Tonight, five brave troubleshooters went to USA sector to celebrate July 5th. During that time, there were 3 different party leaders/presidents, with an average term lasting 20 minutes, sometimes as low as 10 seconds. The players: *Blew up R&D repeatedly, while in it *Stole R&D products even after they're proven worthless (including a 50 pound weight labeled a "Gravity Enhancer") *Stole aerosol glue, getting one character's hand stuck in the party president's pocket. *Ran through a wall because they "didn't trust" the person holding the door *Shot the mission briefer, invited the next Troubleshooter into the room, and snitched that he had killed the mission briefer. This was before the mission. They were given an ice cream truck ferrari and sent to USA sector. While trying to bring patriotism to USA sector, they: *Blew up a barbeque the size of a tramopoline (by dropping grenades in it). In response, one of the nearly dead troubleshooters used ice control to save himself; was promptly shot in the back of the head. The killer took a "kill the cook" apron. *Blew up apple pies (one player got his hand shot for trying to use granny smiths, which were above his clearance; interestingly, multiple people tried to put grenades in pies. One player hit another with the grenaded pie, blowing them both to smithereens. *Fed the crowd with exploded bacon, earning their allegiance to Patriotism *Started playing patriotic marches on the ice cream truck; one mutant turned the music into the Communist National Anthem, and the players began shooting each other. Then they tried to run each other over. Then the ice cream truck exploded. During the parade, they: ^Sped, alerting the police ^Turned the police sirens into communist propaganda, leading the crowd to attack the police. When two troubleshooters fought over the steering wheel, the current president shot BOTH OF THEM IN THE HEAD. This caused the vehicle to, by random roll: --Spin --Twist and --Careen into a group of cloned girl scouts. After the parade, while setting up the fireworks display, they: --Vastly overused fireworks beyond all bounds of safety --Spend 6 perversity points (on a 6 point scale) to increase yield --Confiscated illegal fireworks to add to the parade --Hid stockpiles of fireworks around town -->Secretly changed the fireworks so they'd have a nuclear payload and display the hammer and sickle. This led to USA sector's: *complete and utter destruction.
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Jul 6, 2013 08:30
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JustJeff88 posted:I cannot accept this as cannon due to the fact that nobody was the closest without going over. They were actually. We have 6 players. Only 3 went onto solo games. Others lost. One refused to bid, and simply started pleading to Bob thinking he was an avatar of dark powers. He started rambling to him about how they needed time to find and bring back Vecna, and that to please not send him back to Ravenloft for more torture. They cut his mic and whisked him to a backstage room where a security guard gave him some coffee and told him he'd be released through the parking-lot exit once he sobers up. I pulled prices for random things around my duplex, seeing how much they sold for in stores on a laptop, which also was used heavily for sound fx. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Jul 6, 2013 |
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Jul 6, 2013 11:04
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Arivia posted:why I did that because, believe it or not, it fits the "plane-hopping, colossal mind-fuckery" tone of our game. We played one game, simply so they could have a chance of winning an El Camino to drive around D&D land in. Once they won that, not by winning but by tricking Bob through a magic spell, I started to send them back, but the players wanted to stay and get a chance to play the ridiculous Price Is Right games. On how I ran the games, The Dice Game can be ran with six sided dice. Plinko can be ran through writing numbers on a sheet of paper and then a pachinko flash game. The hill-climber game is ran by yelling out simple addition. On the security officers tasers, after they decided to attack the winning guests on the Price Is Right, I used a touch attack, high-level lightening bolt spell that did sub-dual damage with a fort save of 17 not to be incapacitated for 1d4 rounds. Later, the bard teleported the car onto the head of a pit fiend. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Jul 6, 2013 |
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Jul 6, 2013 11:08
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God Of Paradise posted:Later, the bard teleported the car onto the head of a pit fiend. Clearly the next logical step is that the pit fiend lost its head and now they have Megas in the form of an El Camino as the head of the Pit Fiend.
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Jul 6, 2013 13:52
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In an old D&D 3.5 game I played in, I was playing a Marshal, a sort of proto-warlord that wasn't really very good (still had fun, mind), we once caused a massive flood in the campaign setting's biggest and most important city for perfectly acceptable reasons. You see, the city was currently suffering a major attack by a house of vampires who'd just decided to start turning everyone they could get their hands on, creating a more Dracula-filled version of a zombie apocalypse. Further, in our valiant attempts to recruit the gnomish population to help us fight them, the gnomes had set significant portions of the city on fire. We consulted a bit to try to find what we could do, and our cleric suggested if we could simply get enough water, then a coalition of the city's most powerful clerics could bless it and use it against both the fire and the vampires. Our wizard then suggested a ritual to contact a Water Elemental lord. This was an immense longshot, these things being inhuman creatures with no conception of our struggles or problems. I, however, have a really loving high Diplomacy as it's one of the things Marshals are actually good at. We hatch a plan: I'm going to get Tongues and try to convince the water lord we need a poo poo-ton of water right now while the clerics bless the torrent as it comes in. We contact the water lord, and I roll the dice, hitting a Nat 20. I describe how I manage to put it in terms he'll understand, that these vampire-creatures are taking our precious FLUIDS and we're harried by fire and you know what, gently caress fire. Then it starts to rain, from a portal in the sky, as the Clerics bless it. The rain puts out the fire, and liquefies the vampires, but pretty much causes the worst flooding in the city's history and destroys huge amounts of property (and probably kills quite a few people). Now, the city's leaders agree that things had gotten desperate and we didn't have much other choice, but at the same time, we could never, ever go back to that town. Ever. That was a great campaign. One of the best I've ever been in.
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Jul 6, 2013 16:26
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I figure I've poured enough horror into this thread, so I might as well share some good news. I played a couple of sessions with a new gaming group, which is really nice and blissfully free of the reek of cat piss. Gaming with them made me realize how little I was getting out of my cat-piss-stained D&D group. So I quit my old D&D group. Even though the old group (eventually) did get rid of the limb-amputation DM and the Creeper DM, I just really didn't feel okay anymore around people who not only tolerated that poo poo for a long time, but made it really hard for me to speak up about it, and really waffled about getting rid of creeps when it came down to the line. And, honestly, a lot of my friendships there got eroded by the bullshit they put me through when I tried to get Creeper kicked out. So: on to greener, less awful pastures!
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Jul 7, 2013 21:16
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Minutia posted:So I quit my old D&D group. quote:Even though the old group (eventually) did get rid of the limb-amputation DM and the Creeper DM, I just really didn't feel okay anymore around people who not only tolerated that poo poo for a long time, but made it really hard for me to speak up about it, and really waffled about getting rid of creeps when it came down to the line. And, honestly, a lot of my friendships there got eroded by the bullshit they put me through when I tried to get Creeper kicked out. I think you've made the right call.
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Jul 8, 2013 00:32
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So, my Call of Cthulhu group recently finished their second "case" (basically how I'm dividing up the major plotlines/level-up sessions) with pretty great results. The private investigators, consisting right now of an ex-insane asylum patient posing as ex-circus ringleader(real name: Peter Krempt, going by Maximillion von Millionson), an ex-journalist who moonlights as an occult-themed erotic novelist (Connie Cooper), and ex-marine biologist skinned Indiana Jones (Xena) had teamed up with the not-quite-human Chief of Police/Head Detective of the Arkham Police Force (John Goodman) to stop a team of cultists that, until the team had sabotaged a magic circle, had been repeatedly killing and reviving the Miskatonic University's head librarian, Dr. Schrodinger. The motive appeared to be related to calling upon Yog'Sothoth's power to destroy Arkham. After the majority of the team had set up an ambush in the park, Xena disguised herself as a cultist and waited for other members to show up. To their surprise, only one cultist showed up. Upon being ambushed, he immediately surrendered, dropping his knife and putting his hands behind his head. He was revealed to be a sixteen year old kid, who claimed his motive for trying to summon Yog'Sothoth was "because no one understood him" and "to make them all pay". He then used a readied action to pull off a spell, which caused the entire team to fall asleep. Xena resisted enough to pull a gun on the boy, but fell asleep before managing to make a shot. The entire group awoke to find themselves on a dull, gray beach. Thick gray clouds covered the sky, save for one hole where the sun shone atop a tall mountain. The only person they saw, besides the other members of their team, was an old man in a rocking chair, outside a decrepit house. Upon trying to communicate with him, they were informed that he was blind, and only spoke Braille. Anyone who claimed to speak Braille (and yes, most of them checked their character sheets) could talk to him. From this point on, the only way to proceed was through dream logic. A few highlights were: -A talking ape, the size of a baboon, who had a PHD in Physics. -An unseen money who existed for the sole purpose of yelling "HEY-O!" after the utterance of any sick burn. -The discussion of whether eating a king crab would cause crab revolution, and would ultimately lead to bloody crab warfare. -A monk in a cave who knew everything, literally everything. -The creation of a flying boat because "it only stood to reason" that boats on deserted islands can secretly fly. At last, the private investigators managed to make it to the top of the mountain, thus breaking the curse, and awoke to the arrest of the 16 year old cultist by the lead detective/chief of police. They went back to their employers, who threw them a party and paid them.
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Jul 8, 2013 21:44
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Mission the Second: In which The Late Eddie Vedder Calls A Street Shaman A Pussy, and The Face Realises That Ghosts Don't Like Her Vewwy Much. Even though not a whole lot happened in the last Shadowrun game (some Ancients gang members died, and a Crimson Crush leader was kidnapped), there were some hilarious happenings. Mostly to do with the street shaman of the group, now called Molotov Maddie (her favourite spell is Ignite... Vrrrrrmmmmm... DINGAAAAAAGH!  .) and the face of the group, Marisa Drew.So, to give a little context to this little incident, the runners decide to visit the aforementioned gang leader's house to try and find clues, only to find a small gang of elves, complete with dandelion chomping street shaman of their own and a physical adept, are already there. Cue the following relatively unimportant (but amusing things): - Molotov Maddie goes astral, is immediately spotted by the street shaman, and he runs the gently caress back to his body... Why? Well, guess who doesn't have any points in Astral Combat?  - Uguu the troll technomancer once again trashes his van by ramming it into poo poo. I fear (and love) that this is becoming a pattern... - The two physical adepts face off. As you'd expect when two blokes with 3 initiative passes fight, it lasts all of 10 seconds. And it was mostly misses. So picture a ten second DBZ slapfight between an ork and an elf. Then Marisa does something which quite literally haunts her for the rest of the fight. See, she's outside the building, and finally gets a bead on an elf with her hunting rifle (with hi-ex rounds). One metric fuckton of damage later, and the elf... drops the grenade he'd primed and was about to throw. In turn, that murders said elf, damages two of his buddies, and utterly destroys the body of the street shaman who'd been astral the whole time. Now, for those who don't know, mages of all stripes ca, theoretically, survive the death of their body, and they turn into Spirits (of Man.) So the street shaman's spirit immediately freaks the hell out, and goes gunning for Marisa. Now, even though the biggest (in fact, only) threat to this spirit is Molotov Maddie, elf-lady gives no fucks, for two reasons. 1) This is the fucker that fragged her meat! 2) Marisa has a fun little flaw called "Spirit Bane". It means that spirits, specifically Spirits of Man, are permanently aggroed to this runner, and, if they're badass, like said elf-lady, they'll focus fire Marisa over anyone else. You've already got the basic idea, but picture this: Marisa, leaping backwards further and further from the group, as the spirit tries her best to roast Marisa alive. And Maddie, being a power-obsessed pyro, wants a new bound spirit. Problem is, she doesn't have any ritual materials, no ritual focus, and her plan is to Mana-Bind (basically, tie up with magic rope) the spirit until she can get some (an extremely risky proposition. Now, this had the potential to go south quick, so I decided to throw Maddie's player (DeafMute) a bone: He could spend a point of Edge, and Maddie's mentor spirit would appear. Keep in mind that DeafMute hadn't defined it any more than the basic archetype, the Adversary (anti-authoritarian). He goes for it, for obvious reasons. ...And the ghost of Eddie Vedder appears to him standing in front of a laughing nazi skull, and tells him to man the gently caress up, because he shouldn't need materials. Mechanically, I basically fudged it so he had all the chance in the world (9 dice, after assistance) to bind this spirit. He only needed one net success to do it, and he could do it without assistance for the rest of the scene. Needless to say, he fucks it up, and the spirit carries on trying to kill Marisa with fire. Eddie Vedder calls Maddie a pussy, and leaves. The spirit was eventually bound that scene, but not without ritual materials, and the amazing success wasn't really Maddie's. It was Uguu's, as he gets most of his dice pool (something like 9 or 10) in successes on a Data Search roll to find a Talismonger who a) can quickly deliver ritual materials, and b) lives nearby. So picture the following scene: The house the fight's been in has most of its front windows shattered, and there's a pickup truck embedded in the front door. There's a soot-stained Face with a massive hunting rifle freaking out, and there's a street shaman trying to hold on to an elf spirit that's screaming blue murder at the Face. Inside, you have an ork in among several dead bodies (two dead by having bits of them literally punched through their bodies), and all of a sudden, the next door neighbour walks out, cheerily tells them in a valley girl accent that she's answering Uguu's ad, rips them off shamelessly after the Face gets in her grill (because she was freaked), and then calmly tells them to keep the noise down, and watches them bind a dead elven street shaman into their service. Nobody can say Seattle doesn't have its interesting times!
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Jul 9, 2013 06:55
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JamieTheD posted:Mission the Second: In which The Late Eddie Vedder Calls A Street Shaman A Pussy, and The Face Realises That Ghosts Don't Like Her Vewwy Much. If you really want to see the devolution into madness, I was streaming the session and saved the footage here.
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Jul 9, 2013 07:19
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So I had this roommate who wanted to get in on our pathfinder game because the group he was in's game just ended. He had a reputation for playing a pretty bad game of pathfinder. I sat in on one of there games once and it was incredibly boring. Entirely walk down a straight hallway kill bad guys get loot rinse repeat. Think path finder the rogue-like. He was also walking into a crazy Willi Wonka themed campaign. So you can get a feel for how this is gonna go. Well he shows up with a beautifully crafted minmaxed half orc samurai. (He said he took half orc for the racial trait that lets him get a really strong flail made from shackles and knew since it wasn't earth persay he wouldn't face the prisoner/half orc social stigma) when he was pressed to roleplay he threw a fit about how his character acts exactly like him. Then as the campaign goes on things get worse . I was playing a character who's Gimmick was he couldn't kill an intelligent creature. We even worked out a deal with the gm that every creature I incapacitated to the point it couldn't do anything he'd give us exp. Well I convince a creature to leave us alone it does. Then the dude makes plans to go back and kill it telling everyone in character. My guy overhears this and decides to hold a gun ( I was a gunslinger) to his mounts head. He throws a fit and gets mad. Stands up and tries to square up against me. Face red yelling about how unfair I am being. I just start laughing. The game ends with him trying to attack my character over and over and failing. The very next day he posts on Facebook saying if I try that poo poo again he's gonna kick my rear end. The group sees it and suggests maybe he shouldn't come back. He starts freaking saying it was a joke and that we can't take a joke. Last I heard he threw someone's ascension set up to the ground when he lost and tried to petition the group to ban ascension because he doesn't wanna play it.
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Jul 14, 2013 14:57
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Planarch Heroes AAR Been meaning to write this up for a while. Can't believe it took a power outage to actually motivate me, but there you have it. When I heard this year's Origins theme was "Heroes", I decided to hack a bunch of Dungeon World playbooks to make them more heroic-sounding (the playtest documents are available here), and sketched out an adventure outline set in Dis after the pattern of this post. Executive summary: there's another dimension swallowing yours, you've been tasked with sailing inside it to figure out what's going on and put a stop to it. I only got to run one game of it at Indie Games on Demand, for a mix of newbies and people who'd at least read the book. This is that story. I use these terms throughout the AAR: "miss" for a 2d6 roll of 6-, which lets me make up consequences as I please, "partial hit" for a roll of 7-9, which is success at a cost, "clean hit" for 10+, and "crit" for 12+, which comes into play for certain moves. Character Creation The playbooks that wound up getting chosen after I gave my intro were The Brute, The Showboat, The Field Marshal, The Wallcrawler, and The Wonderworker (cosmic focus: The Clock). This is how I'll be referring to the players from now on. I was excited to bring in the flavor items the Showboat and Wallcrawler start with, so naturally they both missed their setup moves. The Brute also missed his, which promised to be a lot more entertaining, giving me basically two swords of Damocles to drop on him. The Wonderworker got a partial hit, as did the Field Marshal. His question: does this seem like the product of some sort of technological device? I told him the researchers were confident it wasn't; there wasn't enough periodicity in the signal of the tear for it to be purely technological. I asked for volunteers to be communications officer and roll +wis; the Wallcrawler volunteered, and I told her about the system of warning buoys that had been set up in space outside the tear, and to mark six boxes on her character sheet, representing the countdown to a point of no return. She got a partial hit on the player setup roll, so their situation was middling: safely in a traveler's hotel for now, with some basic information about the city (a mishmash of planes and places administered by the Sultana and her Road Wardens), but no obvious way to proceed. Hitting the Streets The Sultana hears all her people's petitions, if they're willing to wait. The line was currently four parishes long, and that countdown timer was pressing, so they went looking for ways around it. The Wallcrawler, investigating, noted a pile of trash on a wagon, knuckling its way along the line and speaking to those petitioners who looked particularly armed or martially inclined. None of them wanted much to do with it, so she approached it. The trash heap (named Marjorie because I can be very uncreative at times) laid things out for them: it knew a back way into the Sultana's palace, an old portal gate, which nobody had a key to anymore. It also knew where the key was - down in the old sewers. And this is why everyone was turning it away. The old sewers were run by automated machinery which had gone homicidally insane some time back, and nobody went down there anymore - the Road Wardens were keeping the place sealed off for everyone's safety. The Wonderworker decided he'd look through time to see how this was going to pan out, and got a partial hit; he'd taken enough moves for this to only have one downside, and he chose to draw attention. So I gave him a flash-forward: everyone standing in what looked to be a room of the palace, talking to the Sultana, a bit chewed-on-looking but otherwise okay. And then the Sultana looked directly at him. Not future-him. Present-him. And smiled, and said, "Well, this explains much." He also exposited on the nature of portals, and with a clean hit was able to create a little tracking spell that would point the way to the key once they'd gotten below the streets. Now there was just the matter of getting down there past the Road Wardens to begin with. The Brute's heritage moves actually channeled the power of his inner milksop, and he decided to spend one to rig up some kind of distraction. A partial hit drained him of energy, but jammed the Road Wardens' lines of communication just long enough for them to look elsewhere. The Wonderworker tweaked the cosmic clock to turn that into easily enough time to pry open a sewer grating, and with a clean hit they were down into the undercity. A Series Of Tubes Large wire mesh tubes, easily big enough to walk inside, with rail tracks running all around them. These were the sewers of Dis that I dropped them into, lit by moving headlamps in the distance. (I gave the dungeon three themes: clockwork mayhem, preserved algorithm, and biological remnants, and introduced a fourth track for the portkey. That probably doesn't mean a lot if you're not familiar with how the Planarch Codex builds dungeons, but they're basically seeds that can be present in varying amounts as the PCs move through the place.) And, of course, two heading for the new trash that just dropped in. The Brute charged them and got a heat-ray in the chest for his troubles. The Wallcrawler ran up the mesh and speared one of them - a little round drone crawling along the guiderail, with a headlamp/heatray and two poking claws. The Brute jumped up and grabbed the other guiderail, looking to rip it down, and I gave him his first move of Damocles: Bend Bars, Lift Gates (which I called Eye For Destruction on the Weaponmaster's playbook). He got a clean hit on it and chose "make a lot of noise", and I turned that up to eleven, ripping out the guiderail but sending the tube whacking against others in a cascade reaction that was terribly unpleasant to be inside. After the party dealt with that (helped by the Wonderworker aging a lower tube to throw off the cascade) they moved on, the Wallcrawler heading through the hole the Brute had ripped to do a little scouting. She came across a large cubic room, with a large four-armed mechanoid sorting through piles of apparent trash: gears, tubing, biological yuck, and construction materials. She went up to the ceiling to prep for some death from above, but missed her investigation roll, and I revealed an unwelcome truth: these rooms were apparently modular, and she was standing on top of a disused top connector screened by a wire grate, which wasn't rated to hold her weight. She went plummeting down toward a vat full of gears, saved only by a judicious Hangman's Noose to hook a rope around the mesh, but the grate still made enough noise to attract the sorter. Everyone else charged to the rescue, only to realize the sorter was creating little soldiers out of the vats of trash. This slowed them down, but they made enough commotion to distract the sorter, giving the Wallcrawler the chance to drop down on it and slice its body open like a tin can. Less damaging than on a biological creature, but still painful - the thing's innards looked like a full clockwork conversion of biological systems. The Showboat grabbed the Wonderworker and swung the both of them away from the soldiers to setup somewhere clear. The Wonderworker tried to slow down the sorter to stem the tide of smaller things to fight, but missed the roll. The Brute's player, who'd actually run Dungeon World before, said that he'd make that just slow time for everyone, and I grinned, telling the Wallcrawler to mark off one countdown box. The Brute leapt at the sorter, damaging it pretty greatly but getting attacked in return, and it started converting him into a weapon under its control. The Field Marshal healed him up and gave him bonus damage forward, but drew the sorter's attention, sending the Brute down at him like a punch on a stick. The Wallcrawler, still hanging out in front of the hole she'd ripped in the thing, asked me if she could stop it somehow. I told her to roll for it, and with the partial hit gave her a tough choice - she could either divert the blow slightly, or reach her arm deeper into some moving gears and make it miss entirely. She hadn't been hit yet and opted to get mauled. The Showboat concocted a Plan of Action, asking me if there was some mesh netting full of stuff he could try and drop on the sorter, and I told him to roll. The miss saw him ripping it open just fine, but what dropped onto the sorter were some prefabricated combat arms, plugging up the hole the Wallcrawler ripped open and trapping her inside. She asked what she could to do get out, and I asked her for the range tags on her weapon - the spear was Close and Reach, so she at least had some leverage - but then she looked down at the Wire-Fu move she took with the miss at character creation. Any length of wire in her hands was a lethal weapon, and I'd just sealed her inside something full of wires. Forget Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch, this was Poison Ivy in the briar patch. Her attack was a clean hit, and the damage roll was ridiculous, cutting through pretty much all of this thing's motive systems and leaving it and the trash soldiers all just hunks of junk again. While everybody investigated the room, the Brute decided to tear apart the sorter for some catharsis, and I decided to activate his second Move of Damocles, giving him I'm Gonna Wreck It (a hack of the Augury move that had just been added to the Barbarian playbook the day before). The partial hit sent blade-arms flying at everyone else in a destructive fugue, but revealed something important to the little science man inside the Brute - the robots didn't start crazy. They were proving very capable at handling all the waste that Dis produced, so the Sultana gave them a different problem to solve, but it proved impossible and sent them 'round the bend to boot. The Field Marshal finally tapped his Rolodex, recounting some time spend together with an old codebreaker from the Great War who had been the key to deciphering the communications of the self-replicating mechanical lifeforms that descended on the planet way back in Issue #25, and deciphering the robot's logs, tracking the port key deeper down into some master processing room. He got a clean hit and asked a question - how could they stop the robots from going mad? I told him to find the master runtime and work from there. Down they went, following the Wonderworker's guide spell. To the Master Runtime, and What Heroes Did There I rolled an absolutely crazy number of sixes putting the next location together, thought about it, said to hell with it and made it a grand finale. The heroes descended through scenes of chaos in parallel wire tubes, robots hunting each other down and carving each other up for parts, and came out on a catwalk overlooking an absolutely huge room, on something like the bedrock of Dis. A great computing spire grew out of the center of it all, and at opposite ends were two sorters, digging into bins of parts and building a never-ending stream of soldiers to try and take control of the center spire. And at the far end of the room from them, in a currently unused bin, sat the portkey. The Wallcrawler had taken Shadow Step as a heritage move, and decided to just skip the looming fight and nab the key. I told her that was kind of a dicey proposition in a room where robots with headlamps were just wheeling around all over the place, and asked her to roll Investigate to find a stable pool of shadow. The Wonderworker chimed in, saying he'd try to create one. It wasn't in the Clock's bailiwick, but you can try to improvise magic at -1 so I let him roll for it. He missed. I asked him the name of the guy he'd fought a few issues back who liked animating people's shadows and siccing them on civilians (Boccob, he said), and then told him that was inappropriate to think about when trying to create shadow, because you get the wrong kind. A little darkling formed out of a pool of shadow, grabbed the portkey, stuffed it in its gaping mouth, and ambled toward the massive melee, unconcerned. The Field Marshal decided he was going to use Sow Confusion to get one of the robots to whack the darkling before it got too far. I asked him how. He told me he was whistling modem noises. And if he hadn't missed, it would have been crazy enough to work. As it was, with a cry of "UNRECOGNIZED OPCODE. HACKING ATTEMPT DETECTED" the entire swarm of robots now had a different target. The Wallcrawler decided hell with it, she was going to grab the key anyway so they could run, but missed the Investigate roll and ported over just in time for a stray spotlight-robot to fetch up against the bins in just such a way as to erase her way back. The Wonderworker rusted out part of the ceiling to drop into a barricade to buy them some time, and it worked fairly well but the little heat-ray robots started melting the base of it, to turn it into a ramp up to the catwalk. The Brute gives the Showboat a boost over to the central spire, setting him up to grab the Wallcrawler and take her back over, with the Field Marshal coordinating. The Wallcrawler used a wire lasso to yank the key out of the darkling, but a partial hit meant she got a blob of negamatter along with it. ("Negamatter?" she asks. "It's like regular matter, but nega," I say.) And the Showboat swings over to grab her… but a partial hit means he draws attention on the way back, attention in the form of every ranged unit in the robot army filling the air with a cloud of razor slivers. The Brute has had all he can stands, and he can't stands no more. He leaps off the catwalk, descending to create a massive shockwave to knock all the shards out, and he crits the roll, sending all the little robots flying and buying them a decent amount of time, but he also gets a twist from his anger which I decide means getting stuck in the ground. So things aren't looking too good. Then the Field Marshal gets a brainwave. Maybe, he says, they can connect to the master runtime with that computing spire and get all the robots back to sanity again. I tell them good luck doing it with the sorters building another army. The Wonderworker creates another differential time sphere, getting a clean hit on the attempt. And I tell them, okay, they can all head inside and try to get the robots sane again, but when it comes back down they may have a huge army to deal with. The Wallcrawler tries shaking off her little negamatter guest, but manages the exact opposite, and it absorbs into her for a bit of damage but no apparent ill effects. And then the all go inside. The Brute pries himself free (rolling Eye for Destruction, getting a partial hit, which he decides will make a lot of noise and not leave it reparable, and I tearfully describe the perfect Zen arrangement of the rubble which he callously proceeds to ruin) and everyone goes to set him up for another heritage move to let the science man inside of him fix everything. But the Field Marshal draws attention, and I decide that means the darkling was squished by the shockwave but that didn't really do a whole lot to damage it, and it lunges at him. The Showboat grabs it, to hold it off, and the Wallcrawler unleashes a Brutal Strike on it while the Showboat's grappling with it. Her partial hit leaves her choosing just to frighten the thing off, which I describe as her cutting it in quarters with the wire lasso, spooking it the hell out when it reassembles and scrambles away, out of the time sphere. The Brute has to tap himself for energy again to finish reprogramming the spire (I'm running this as the Artificer's Jury-Rig move, causing damage instead of using up a charge) but it's done, and he's in, and they see the question the Sultana put to them, the one that drove them mad: how can I stop my son from killing any more people? How can I stop my city from killing any more people? They delete the question, debate for a bit on whether to pose a new question to the robots (a Defy Danger +int turns up a partial hit, which I say will mean I can tell them whether the robots can answer a question or whether it will drive them mad again, not both) and decide just to leave things be. And the time sphere drops, revealing… a bunch of robots, going about what apparently are normal trash collection procedures, not paying them much mind. A couple of the little spotlight robots are running the darkling off with heat rays. Meeting the Sultana Of course, even if they can get back up to the surface unmolested, they still have to get out again, past the Road Wardens. The Wallcrawler pokes her head up to see if she can spot Marjorie, but a partial hit on the roll means she'll attract attention if she stays up long enough, and decides not to. The Showboat concocts another Plan of Action: is there an easily spooked herd of livestock up another sewer grate? Why, yes, I tell him. Camel spiders. Not actual camel spiders, camels with eight jointed legs. His roll to send them stampeding off to draw attention is a partial hit, and they certainly do grab attention, but gosh, where are they headed? Wouldn't you know it's directly to the portal? The Field Marshal pulls out his Rolodex, talking about an old xenobiologist friend of his who studied creatures just like these extensively. To get them to calm down, she used a particular mix of easy-to-obtain chemicals which mimicked their herding pheromones. A quick concoction later, the Wallcrawler free-runs to get ahead of the stampede and drops the scent-bomb perfectly, pacifying them again and leaving the passage to the portal clear. The key activates it, and they step into basically the Sultana's break room - they can see the court through an open door, and the Sultana leaves off holding court to come back and refresh herself. I tell the Wonderworker he gets a little preja vu - the sensation you are about to experience something you have seen before - as the Sultana looks them over, and then up at a point in space, and smiles. "Well, this explains much," she says. The heroes lay out their case, and the Sultana, regretful, says she cannot stop what her city, her son, is doing. But for calming the chaos beneath her city, she is prepared to make them all Road Wardens, and with her power they may be able to save many more people from their home dimension that Dis, in its hunger, would devour. As long as they do something about that other person from their dimension, who is trying to poison Dis and consequently kill all its people, in an attempt to save said home dimension. The Wallcrawler wonders if they have time for all this, given that they're only five buoys away from the inevitable ("Four," I tell her. "FOUR," she says.) but it seems to be the best option currently in front of them, so they take it, and the Sultana opens a portal to that natural environment of heroes, an abandoned warehouse. Finally, a Boss Fight I ask the heroes who that guy was they all fought about a dozen issues back, who they thought they saw the last of when they threw him into his own Dimension Ray. "Dr. Flatland," says the Wallcrawler, and I roll with that, whipping up a mad scientist ordering a bunch of multi-colored aliens to pour a tank of explosive deadly cancer poison into some kind of injector. Then he spots them, and starts expositing, as you do: the explosion actually landed him here, and may have connected Dis to their home dimension in the first place, but never fear, he found this cyst full of material Dis couldn't absorb so he decided to kill the whole place because dammit, it's his universe to conquer. And if everyone will just step back, he'll finish murdering it in plenty of time for everyone to get back to the rip home and the victory parade. The Showboat, of course, stands up and starts counter-posturing. As he does so, I turn to one of the other heroes, and say, still in-character as the mad doctor: "You know, after all this time alone, I actually thought I would miss his speeches? But it turns out I don't!" And the Showboat, having taken the move that lets him challenge people who have offended his honor to a duel they cannot refuse, decides that his honor has been impugned, leaving the doctor his selection of weapons. This is actually a pretty brilliant move, because the doctor's choice of weapons is "EVERYTHING! Minions, ATTACK!" and that leaves the tank of poison unattended. The Brute uses Strongest One There Is to grab the attention of the minions, and a clean hit gets him the doctor's attention to. He mostly shrugs off the handheld dimension ray, being only a little bit flattened-out. At the Wonderworker's request, the Showboat picks him up and runs on top the aliens' heads over to the poison tank, getting a bit fire-breathed on because of the partial hit, but otherwise okay. The Wonderworker tries to use time magic to amplify the effects of the antitoxin he started the game with, neutralizing the poison somewhat. He misses, wasting one vial. The Field Marshal tries to Sow Confusion, getting the doctor mauled by his own minions, as you do, and manages a partial hit, which I decide means that one of the bulkier minions actually picks the doctor up and flings him at the Field Marshal. He misses an attempt to dodge and winds up pinned underneath the doctor. The Wallcrawler goes to change that, lashing out with a wire whip, but a miss leaves her stumbling trying to catch the doctor's Flatlander Glove for leverage. It's only two-dimensional after all, and drat if it doesn't sting on the counterattack. The Brute gets ready for some clobbering, and he crits the roll, procing Smash!, which sees him just bodily pick up one of the aliens and knock the others down like bowling pins. The Wonderworker tries again to neutralize the poison, and misses again. There go the other two vials. The Wallcrawler tries to whip the doctor off the Field Marshal again, and the clean hit picks him up and tosses him, she decides, at the Brute. The Brute's immediate followup attack is another crit, and the physical thing he decides Smash! will remove is the doctor's lack of presence in a vat of explosive deadly cancer poison. He was out of hit points anyway, so I decide what the hell. In he goes, his electronics blink out, and the aliens get their bearings and scatter. The Moment of Truth A Road Warden enters the warehouse, opening up another portal back to the Sultana. It's getting down to the end of the session, so I lay the options out for the heroes: use Dr. Flatland's poison anyway to kill Dis and save their home dimension, or take the Sultana up on her offer to become Road Wardens and save as much of their home dimension as they can from the inevitability of Dis. They don't like either of these options. The Wonderworker looks at the vat of poison and thinks: what if we could inject this into our dimension? It might not kill us, and Dis would spit us out. Opening a connection to your native space-time through yourself? I ask. Sounds interesting, but with the Road Warden here you've only got one shot. Roll for it. The Field Marshal coordinates the aid roll, and drat if he doesn't need to. The Wonderworker gets a 3, +2 from his Int bonus, +2 from the improved aid, which is barely enough for a partial hit, and with a bit of brain pain, the Wonderworker pulls it off. It feels like the entire universe is throwing up, I say, and the heroes are spit back out into space where they entered the rift (and they're heroes, so they can breathe in space). Dis has stopped eating their universe, but it's also suffused on a metaphysical level with an explosive deadly cancer poison from a different reality, and the dissolved remains of Dr. Flatland. So, you know, typical Thursday. And they've got a universe of heroes to deal with the fallout. And that is where we wrapped the session. We had a 4-hour block to use, and used up all of it, save for a snack break and a denouement. I found out after the fact I was running for a bunch of other Origins GMs, taking a break after a con of running games for other people, so I don't know how representative this experience would be of running the hack. They definitely were willing to improvise, and the Dungeon World system certainly helped with that. I suppose time and future cons will tell.
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Jul 17, 2013 13:08
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Upon getting a look at the maps for the Temple of Elemental Evil: "What kind of  -ridden gnome designed this place?""Gary Gygax."
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Jul 21, 2013 03:37
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Planescape session. Morpheus on Mt. Olympus - "I shall offer you any ally you want, any dream that exists, I will make flesh, and send them down to aid you." The Players - "We want The Rock, with a hawk, in the Dr. Who box." ... much laughter... Done.
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Jul 21, 2013 10:26
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taiyoko posted:Upon getting a look at the maps for the Temple of Elemental Evil: To be fair, that's not an inaccurate description, especially going by the ToEE maps.
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Jul 24, 2013 23:43
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Keiya posted:To be fair, that's not an inaccurate description, especially going by the ToEE maps. Also, I love how a good 80% of the encounters say "you should award (anywhere from 20-50%) additional XP if your players beat this encounter because they are likely walking right into an ambush and/or the enemies are well-fortified and/or have planned specifically for the PCs."
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Jul 25, 2013 00:12
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...Many people wouldn't bother with awarding extra EXP for much of anything, especially if they had 'prepared for the PCs'.
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Jul 25, 2013 18:29
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So our DnD group is trapped in not-Silent Hill and in between fighting off giant bug robots and floating cages that shoot lightning we stumbled upon a church. We headed in and immediately spot a man at the far end kneeling in prayer or something. Our swordsage, normally a "kick in the front door and punch everyone's heads off"-kind of guy, decides to roll sneak and creep up on the guy. Discerning that the guy was probably harmless, the swordsage reaches out and grabs the guy's shoulder with the intention of getting his attention and asking him some questions about a cult that's in town. The guy responds by jump up in fright, shouting out "g-g-ghosts!?" and without missing a beat the swordsage throws out his arms shouting that yes, indeed, he is a ghost. Speaking in his best booming voice he goes on about how the spirits of the dead are restless and that it's [the praying dude's] fault. At the same time the party wizard works her magic to make the swordsage appear ghostly and the mess with the lights while the bard played creepy music on their guitar. The whole act worked absolutely beautifully. The poor dude is making GBS threads himself while being scared into becoming a slave for the party and to give over all of his belongings (including a magic macguffin the party was looking for). What's even better was that the entire performance was absolutely hammy as hell and it worked so well. The swordsage finished off the performance by jumping and doing a 20 foot backflip through the stained glass window with his hands on fire via magic while screeching. e: Kinda like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7UjF8R_-B0 Proletarian Mango fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Jul 25, 2013 |
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Jul 25, 2013 20:00
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We spent about five minutes straight laughing at our latest abomination in the Temple of Elemental Evil... We come into a room full of statues of monsters, and figure they're probably petrified captures of a beholder. Since the fire giant would be the one most likely to be negotiated with, we decide to use our staff of stone-to-flesh. Turns out, no, that statue (at least) was simply a statue. So now we have a vaguely-fire-giant-shaped blob of flesh that falls over onto the floor due to not having any bones or other support structure. We agree to leave that room and pretend this abomination never happened.
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Jul 28, 2013 03:40
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taiyoko posted:We spent about five minutes straight laughing at our latest abomination in the Temple of Elemental Evil... Why not set up a smokehouse and sell giant jerky to the ToEE denizens?
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Jul 28, 2013 04:47
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taiyoko posted:We spent about five minutes straight laughing at our latest abomination in the Temple of Elemental Evil... Well I hope you at least sealed the door behind you so that you didn't stink up the rest of the temple. I mean, ugh, that's going to smell AWFUL after a couple of days, you could have cast flesh-to-stone or something and reverted your mistake. Gross.
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Jul 28, 2013 05:49
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Or at least Flesh to Salt, it's a good way to get some extra cash out of unwanted dungeon features.
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Jul 28, 2013 07:06
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Wasn't one of the solutions to one of the "puzzles" in the original tomb of horrors to cast stone to flesh on a locked stone door and then hack through it?
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Jul 28, 2013 07:17
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Kurieg posted:Wasn't one of the solutions to one of the "puzzles" in the original tomb of horrors to cast stone to flesh on a locked stone door and then hack through it? No, that was one way to avoid being entombed forever by a trap in the second false entranceway. I unironically love Tomb of Horrors, it's quite doable if you have the right attitude and a few (a lot of) spare characters.
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Jul 29, 2013 10:37
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Recently my 4e party came across a lich trying to resurrect his childhood friend so he could turn him into a lich and both could go off and do evil things together forever. We killed the lich before he could fully animate his childhood friend, yet there was enough magic left to leave his friend's corpse gurgling and foaming in the mouth. Before his final death throes, our sorcerer came up with the idea of casting a ritual on the body so we could enter his dreams and memories and help get a better idea of what the lich’s plan was. We cast the ritual and entered his dreams, following his memories through school and the magic academy with his friend. We managed to convince him to take a nap during a particular boring class, only to cast the ritual again and delve even further deeper into his dreams and continue exploring his memories. You can probably guess what movie’s theme song was playing on the DM’s computer the entire time this was going on.
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Jul 30, 2013 06:43
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After my time playing Deathwatch, I had broken off with that group only keeping in contact with one of the players, but I still wanted to play. Starting this last November I have been part of a new group with only my friends from the army, or rather, two of my friends and one of their friends. The game was Dark Heresy and the players were, Andrew, who plays a hive Scum known only by the name of Biggs, Jeff, Andrews friend who plays a support Tech Priest called Ferrus, Myles, who plays a "Loose Cannon" Arbitrator called Joseph Dredd (I was wearing a Judge Dredd shirt at character creation), And one session behind the group was Séan, who played an ultimate badass tech priest who shot first, and never asked questions. One guess to who this is about. The week prior the group started in the first part of the Apostasy Gambit Trilogy and given the amount of time and skill that we had collectively, it had taken about an hour to get through the first combat primarily due to the fact that I completely forgot all about range bonuses and they only fired single shots. But they knew I was trying and they gave me the approval that I needed to press hard and get better. It was a few weeks until the next session but when it rolled around I got a text from Séan saying that he could make it due to his Iron Kingdoms group only running on certain Sundays. When Jeff and Andrew came over I told them the look of sheer terror that washed over them was as if I told them that I wanted to ruin every Sunday that they ever had. Jeff: woah you mean HE is coming over? Andrew: you know Rahns we have gamed with him before... it's not a good experience. Me: well, what's wrong with him? *the doorbell rings* My dad let him in and then through this session I saw... horror... Now I knew he played tabletop rpgs before so I knew he was used to chargen, and he brought a shoebox literally half full of various die, but during creation he insisted on writing his sheets in pen and that he would "Put it on a writeable pdf when it was over" he rolled his stats little bit fast, and I wasn't sure about it at the time, but I thought I saw him double roll. Then we were ready to go once again they got to the next room, the menagerie, for the encounter against the next guy. The room is a torrent of feathers and in the thick of fighting is Séans character who was the last surviving member of an attached guard unit, as he refused with a burning passion to the point of a near fit. All three of the other acolytes sneak in through the other door and when they take up positions they start their assault, Jeff shoots and scores almost a one hit kill on the boss, Biggs was fighting one of the minions in melee and myles was grappled in the jaws of a beast. Myles: what can I do? How do I get out! Can I just hit him with my knife? Me : well you got to pass your strength check to.... Séan: woah woah woah he can totally attack it. Me : uh what? Séan: when I was fighting SGT Doogs in the mess, he grabbed me and I could still hit him. Me: where you getting full power into your swings? And did they hit everywhere you intended while being manhandled by tha him? ( the sgt he is referring to has roughly 300lbs on Séan) Séan licks his lips, which is a sign that he is getting agitated, and he struggles to get the next words out. Séan: well... yeah... of course I did. Myles rolled by this point and had passed, the next turn was Séan who was very vocal that all the feathers and birds in the room were giving him a -10 to hit and that he was displeased a every round he made it known by nearly yelling "BOOOOOOORRRING". Combat ends and the bad guy is lying on the floor holding a bloody stump that Jeff was dying to give him, when they moved in to question and stabilise him as per their mission Séan puts two rounds into his head. After some time the other three loot the gear off the guardsmen including armor and Séan found this insulting to the point of ordering the guard captain to execute the thieves, and some deceive checks that the Emperor himself must have guided wound up with Séans character getting a strip torn off him for wasting the time of an officer. They get back to the ship and they get debriefed by their inquisitor. Séan : will you be joining us on missions? Me: with all my acolytes if I were to join them on every mission then I would have no time to take on the missions that have been given to me. Séan  : I'm sorry but BULLLLLLLLLLLLLSHIT, all inquisitors have small groups, Eisenhorn is a perfect example of this!  Me: have you heard of Inquisitor Coteaz? Séan licks his lips twice before slowly chirping out "I'm not familiar with him, which literature is he from?" That basically concluded that session and I want to say that was his last one with us, but that would be making everyone's life easy. sorry for the text wall. TL;DR regretted inviting a sperg to the group after so much "BULLLLLLLLLLLLLSHIT." Edit for ominous phrasing, part 2 to follow after work. Rahns fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jul 31, 2013 |
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Jul 31, 2013 17:38
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The fact that Eisenhorn has satellite bases and delegated operations is the basis for a plot point in one book of the trilogy. Dude doesn't even know the character he's trying to smug about. 
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Jul 31, 2013 17:53
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Finally caught up on this thread again, time to post some of the crap my group has gotten up to. I really need to make stairs a focal point for more of my games, as they always end up being interesting. In a pathfinder game, the team was assaulting some enemy castle and one large tower had an open staircase running up the inside wall. The group got distracted by something, so the ranger decided to head up the stairs first. Note that this is the horribly underpowered ranger due to poor stats, bad rolls, the player not knowing much about the game, and pathfinder rangers being crap. He reaches the top of the stairs, rolls perception and crit fails, which means he doesn't notice the summoned rhino hanging out on this floor. The rhino noticed him. After getting knocked into negative hitpoints by the charging rhino (it managed to critical hit him), he falls to the ground at the top of the stairs. The rest of the party charges up, the massively armoured paladin leading up but unfortunately the barely conscious ranger is blocking the top of the stairs, making it impossible for the paladin to get by him. So he gets the brilliant idea to use his tiny amount of movement that someone in negative HP gets to roll down and off the staircase. After taking fall damage he is one hitpoint away from death, but the party was successfully able to hack the rhino to pieces. Later in that same adventure, at the top of that tower, the party kills the big bad guy which causes the castle to start falling apart. They quickly start grabbing all the loot they can see, which includes a very large mirror that the wizard had sensed was magic. This mirror was what the bad guy was using to dominate the area, as it was capable of casting spells far beyond the capabilities of anyone in the area. So the wizard, being far too weak to carry it himself asks the party's
Fashionable Jorts fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Aug 1, 2013 |
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Aug 1, 2013 09:19
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I think I might have made one of my players cry by killing off a PC. One of the big bads of the setting wants to kidnap the team's resident mad scientist. She's also after the same crown mcguffin that the team want, and sent a strike force of (a) a reanimated revenant of a former player (b) the ghost of the previous Emperor (c) a couple of smallfry flying undead minions as backup. They turned up at the top of the tower where the crown was kept at the same time as the players, the revenant being carried by the others since she can't fly on her own. The players start fighting, with the scientist running in to the centre of the fight to try and keep any of the undead from escaping with the crown. She's the party's healer and buffer, and is not built for melee, and takes a hammering while the rest of the party fight their way to her. They hold the undead off for a while, and the revenant realises they're not winning this one -- so she grabs the scientist (who by now is down on the ground, bleeding out) and leaps out of the window, shouting to her minions to catch her. The rogue leaps after her and grapples on as she falls. Unfortunately without the revenant's backup, the party manage to wipe the floor with the flying undead minions before any can get out. The revenant, scientist and rogue fall fourty feet: the rogue is taken down from the falling damage and starts to bleed out, while the other two die on impact. The party manage to catch up to the rogue in time to save her, and I ended the session there, because we were all pretty shell-shocked -- the rogue's player absolutely nailed it with how he played his character's reaction to her friend dying, and I'm pretty sure another player was close to tears. Definitely an intense session, I can't wait to see what they do next (or whether the dwarf is going to listen to his familiar's advice on necromancy 101)
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Aug 1, 2013 16:17
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So, first session with a new group with me at the helm as a DM. I tend to play a bit more on the humorous side, if it makes me laugh or sounds awesome enough, it works. And holy poo poo did it ever work. In the first session alone: -Our smooth-talker bard used Diplomacy to try and keep some zombies from rising up from their graves and joining the group's first battle. Natural 20. A particularly polite few of them went along with it. -One of the zombies rolled two 1s during the battle. One of its arms fell off, and then the other. -The pixie wizard grabbed a tombstone with Mage Hand (I called for an Arcana roll to see if she could yank it out the ground, again, nat 20.) and dropped it on a mud elemental, drat near killing it. -The changeling rogue, a first-time player, subverted an entire encounter with some incredible RP and Bluff rolls (and hilariously bad Insight ones on my end) by transforming into the enemy cultist and bluffing his way into getting the hired-muscle torturer to kill the real cultist and then sent him on some meaningless task. The entire group broke out laughing for about ten minutes afterwards. drat straight he got some incredible bonuses for that. -The pixie picked up the corpse of said cultist and stuffed it into her bag to burn for ritual components. Again, it was hilarious, and it only helped that she rolled great on her Strength check for it. -The bard dared the bar that it couldn't grow a second floor, which it promptly did after a great Bluff roll. It will without a doubt serve as the group's sentient, traveling base of operations. -Cameos from the PCs of a previous, long-abandoned game got spectacularly lost and arrived in the bar via the new second floor. And the after-session loving around included our characters making drunken bluff checks to declare that they were the moon. God I can't wait for the next session. 
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Aug 3, 2013 09:16
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Volatile Penguin posted:-The bard dared the bar that it couldn't grow a second floor, which it promptly did after a great Bluff roll. I have absolutely no context for this, but the great thing is I don't really need any.
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Aug 3, 2013 09:23
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I was at a party tonight with some other old D&D nerds, and as old D&D nerds do, we talked about old D&D. One friend was relating a story about another friend's 1st edition era game, back when you could hit dragons with the flat of your sword for a while, and they'd magically realize that you could have killed them instead, and thus submit to you as your slave, instead of magically realizing that you're idiots who should have killed them instead, and finish the job. Apparently this campaign had a lot of dragon encounters in it, and so the party did this 'subdual damage' thing a lot too. Eventually they ended up with a whole city where every pack animal was a subdued dragon, glad enough to not have been killed by marauding adventurers that they're all drawing wagons and omnibuses. And at first I'm thinking, 'Goddamn it, Gygax', but then more recent nerd culture intervened and I thought, 'God drat it. It's Dungeons and Dragons: Subdual is Magic.'
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Aug 4, 2013 06:13
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Did anyone else learn the concept of 'subdual' before the word 'subdue'? I figured that it meant you were doing less than two types of damage and somehow that knocked people out.
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Aug 4, 2013 07:09
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Did anyone else learn the concept of 'subdual' before the word 'subdue'? I figured that it meant you were doing less than two types of damage and somehow that knocked people out. gently caress, I never thought of that before.
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Aug 4, 2013 08:57
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Bieeardo posted:Subduing dragons This was one of the rules that was houseruled away in our group, because really. I was in one game with a different group where a player tried to argue that fireballs could do subdual damage because magic. The guy had a point though: If you are creating magical fire out of the air in the first place, why can't you make it do the same damage as beating on a dragon (and only a dragon, mind you) with the flat of your sword?
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Aug 6, 2013 22:30
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Less a discussion on actual tabletop antics and more about the mentality of it. Somehow I got into a discussion on how the children in Icewind Dale were rendered immortal that cheat-kills won't even work on them. We ended up discussing how a bunch of typical murderhobos would've exploited that. -Pay a kid 50 gold to retrieve super plot item, some form of magicked communication and do something else in the mean time -Kidnap children and force-marched them ahead to act as trap detectors and to bait enemies to waste their spells/SU abilities/limited use items -Orphan armor: grab some kids, strapped them on. and realized quickly that dungeons and dragons brings out the Humorously Sociopath out in everyone.
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Aug 7, 2013 03:10
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Agrikk posted:This was one of the rules that was houseruled away in our group, because really.
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Aug 8, 2013 02:46
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If you define "knock out" loosely it can be very realistic. Goblin takes a fireball to the face and drops to 0 HP, he will spend the next five minutes rolling on the floor, enough time to mop up his buddies. You just have to communicate that to your players clearly so they don't waste time trying to coup de grace him because "he's not literally dead or unconscious, that means he could get back up any second".
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Aug 8, 2013 11:23
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In the continuing saga of the Special Projects Group of the Department of Sanitation Department: So my group has turned its accidental takeover of the Sanitation Guild into a major thing these days, and spend the last session basically ignoring the main plot and instead went around establishing contacts. They first promoted one of the most popular pooper-scoopers to become the new Now they have an alliance with the rat catchers guild, are at war with the rival Street Sweepers Guild and are using maps that the rat catchers make to provide information to one of the upcoming Guild of Thieves called the "Legitimate Businessmen's Club" in hopes that backing a guild that comes out on top will be beneficial in the long term. I tell you: Vito Corleone has nothing on these guys for grass roots organizing of a power base. We are playing a session tonight. Part of me wants to lead them back on track towards advancing the campaign, but the other part of me wants to let it get more sandbox-y to see what they'll do next.
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Aug 8, 2013 23:07
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| # ? May 14, 2024 15:54 |
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Speaking personally what they're doing right now sounds hells of cool and I think you should let'em run with it as long as they and you are having fun with it.
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Aug 8, 2013 23:16
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