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Comic shops and cat piss are the chocolate and peanut butter of gamer hell. So, our local shop has its very own cat-piss guy. It actually has a few cat-piss guys now, so there’s that. Mr. Piss was the kind of CPG who would derail games with threats of burning down the inn because it offends his neutrality or some poo poo. He reeked, never bathed or washed his clothes, and was morbidly obese. The usual CPG stuff. He and I ended up playing with this rather nice fellow who was in the store. The Nice Guy ran a sadly brief game for us, as CPG guy ruined it with some outlandish bigotry. We were at an inn, and for some reason I still don’t understand, he poured the contents of a filled chamberpot on the handle of someone’s room door. Obviously he wanted to play Dungeons & Doodoo, but aside from a stupid prank, it made no sense. The DM asked him what he was doing. CPG: It’s for Passover! Everyone Else: What…? CPG: You see, I’m passing it over the handle! Nice Guy DM: You know I’m Jewish right? CPG: Aaaaaaaand? I don’t care!  This was just the last in a long string of offenses. We all tried to help him, but it never worked. However, this was the first time that he tried to actually be hurtful with his antics, and was subsequently was the very last time I played anything with him, ever. Even the old Mortal Kombat machine in the back of the store. gently caress that guy.
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Sep 25, 2013 16:49
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| # ? May 15, 2024 15:40 |
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Lets get some good in here! I’m lucky enough to run for three different groups of people. This tale involves my weekday group, composed of one veteran player, two very new players, and my wife who’s somewhere in between. After a little Q&A time, I decided to run a 4e Eberron game for everyone, as the new players were both into the non-traditional fantasy look and feel of the world, and I hadn’t gotten to run it before, so that was a treat for me. Our cast: Varus: Unaligned male changeling, (posing as a half-elf) Wizard, played by the veteran Lia: Good female Cleric of the undying court, played by my wife Bowie: Unaligned female half-elf rogue of House Medani, played by one of the new players Charra: Unaligned female human Fighter, veteran of the Last War, played by another new player. Varus spent a lot of his time trying to subvert Lia’s guidance of the group in playful, trickster-y ways (he and my wife have this funny sibling rivalry thing going most of the time). Like the time he said “Hey Charra, we should get these dead guys off the deck of the airship, they’ll just slide around and make the place a danger. Give a hand?” Lia comes topside to see Charra tossing dead terrorists off an in-motion skyship. Over farmland. Varus is nowhere to be seen. Of course, he gets blamed anyway. However, my favorite session was one that Varus-sadly-missed. My wife had to step away from the table for a phone call, and decided that her character would be doing some research for a few hours since they had free time. This left Bowie and Charra to their own devices for the very first time as roleplayers. Me: Anything you two want to do while Lia’s nose-deep in books? Bowie: You know, I’d like to get some poisons, but I don’t want my House to know about them. Me: Okay, you can try to find those. B: (To Charra) Wanna come with me? Charra: Sure! Maybe we can find a good tavern, too. Me: Well, you’re in the Brelish capital, there are plenty of good tav- C: I said a good tavern, not a nice, expensive tavern. Me: Noted! It’s late morning, so it’ll require a little effort to find someone selling this kind of stuff, since they mostly ply their trade at night. Keep in mind, these are bad people you’re looking for. Maybe the type to get into slaving, or try and cut your throats and sell your stuff. Just an FYI... B: Eehhhhh…. It’s me and Charra, I don’t think we’re too concerned about some thugs. C: Nope! I call for a few quick checks that the pair passes easily, and they find an unscrupulous barkeep who takes them to a poison and drug supplier. They basically end up in a meth lab in the slums. An alchemist and his two guards are there. The barkeep goes inside with them, and the guards move to block the door. B & C exchange a quick glance, and start negotiating. This is about the time my wife returns, and watches all of this laughing about how Varus is missing everything he wanted to see. The alchemist shows them a plethora of drugs and poisons, lethal types for food or blades, and even a memory-erasing elixir claimed to be the distilled essence of illithid brains. He tries to charge the pair thousands of gold, which they don’t have, nor do they wish to pay. The pair exchange another covert glance, and smirk. I remind them that these are really bad people and the following exchange occurs: Me: Ok, this guy’s pretty clearly a scumbag. He not-so-subtly implies that you could do ‘other things’ for the poisons. I’m sorry guys, but he’s a dirtbag. B & C: (Laughing) No chance! Me: (nervously) I hope that wasn’t hosed up thing to do, but I wanted to get across how bad this dude is… C: (shakes her head) Nah, he’s a scumbag, that’s what scumbags do. B: Exactly. Ok, what does he do while we laugh at him?? C: Oh, and I put my hand on my hilt. I’m pretty sure poo poo’s going down. B: Yes!! Me too!! Me: Ok, cool. The alchemist takes a half step back and snarls “I don’t care if you’re cops or competition, you’re both loving dead!” and motions for his guards to attack you. Roll initiative. Charra goes first, Bowie second and the rest don’t matter, as they proceed to wreck shop on the three minions in the room with them, as well as the alchemist. The barkeep is KO’d but left alive, the other three are turned to a fine mist, with the alch eating two dailies on round one. Bowie and Charra proceed to search the room, and steal everything that wasn’t nailed down or on fire, except the lab equipment, which they deliberately left alone. I later discovered that they were afraid of being suspected of making the stuff themselves, and mutually, silently, agreed to walk away from it, regardless of value. They then poured half a bottle of the “Illithid Juice”(™) down the barkeep’s throat to cover their tracks, and fled, with the meth lab still a-cooking. The next day they left via teleporter to Sharn, Lia & Varus none the wiser, until they started acting squirrely about a newspaper covering the Great Slum Fires that burned down 15% of the capital. No, the huge plume of smoke and news of a “big fire” all day didn’t tip them off, but a copy of the Sharn Inquisitive did. Varus’ only response was “See, Lia? I leave them alone with you for a single day and they burn down the capital! You are such a bad influence!” I was really worried about being the cat-piss when we did that, but we talked about the scene at length, and they were fine with it, since it wasn’t lurid or creepy, just a dirtbag being himself. This is the same group that wrecked the intro Rogue Trader adventure from the core book on the first night, and plays a full Chaotic Neutral group that chooses what jobs to take based on coin tosses in our 3.5 FR game.
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Sep 25, 2013 16:59
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Dr_Amazing posted:I liked the old thread better too. The bad stories are always more interesting. Most interesting stories about good sessions made their way in anyway. Now I'm just skipping any really long posts unless it catches be in the first few sentences. I too prefer stories that are more about grognards and weird cat-piss players; some of the good ones have been pretty fun and given me interesting ideas, but I'd prefer separate threads again. For content, here's one that was overall a good session, but the most interesting parts are where both DM and players were being Chaotic Stupid. We had a game on Monday night that was giving off major warning signs in the first few minutes. It was the first session I'd had with these players, in a brand new Pathfinder game run via Google Hangouts. We were plopped down around a table in an inn and after a 10-second briefing from a nobleman ("people are going missing in this village, figure out what's up") we were left to just sit there. The very first thing that happens? The cleric starts roaring for wine. When none is forthcoming, he stomps out. Great, we've got one of those. After some really awkward in-character conversations (I was not having any of that poo poo, I just say "so my character explains such-and-such") we decide to go to the north and check out what's going on... and then it turns out that I was the only person who bothered to buy any rations when outfitting my character. In fact, the other wizard was completely naked, having failed to list any clothing. So we walk to the nearby village, having wrapped the naked wizard in a blanket. My (true neutral) wizard character ends up as a de facto face for the group simply because I was the only one willing to stop acting like a murderhobo for 2 seconds. The cleric may or may not have burned down an old abandoned smithy while we all slept and he was supposed to be on guard. Seriously may or may not, we don't know, it could have been the shifty farmer in whose shed we were sleeping, but our wine-demanding cleric had already exhibited signs of pyromania from the get-go so he was a likely suspect. He blamed the farmer, then blamed the naked wizard, then ran off down the road when the villagers got pissed. I tried to retcon the wizard's nudity as "some highwaymen stole his clothes" but the DM made me roll Bluff, apparently preferring the backstory to be "a wizard wandered all the way to the northern lands, in December, wearing no clothes". Now, despite the early warning signs (DM getting groggy over naked wizards, cleric demands wine everywhere, cleric starts fires) the group eventually started to come together and I think we all had fun during the battle which ended the session; the DM used a Google spreadsheet for the battle grid which worked out very nicely. But drunk pyro cleric will be closely observed in future sessions. I've got nothing against wreaking some mayhem, hell in the first 10 minutes I even suggested stealing and slaughtering a horse from the inn's stable because we were almost totally foodless and the December temperatures would preserve the meat... but your default action shouldn't be "I start a fire!"
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Sep 25, 2013 18:14
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So Monday was my first campaign in my own Star Wars d20 revised. It's doing the classic "What if the Empire won" type of deal and so far my players are liking it. Why is it notable? Because I was scarred a long time ago from DMing after some 25-30 year old (Why was he playing with a group of 15 year olds I have no idea) decided to make a Jedi who had Thermal Detonators. Now I didn't know much about the game, never even read the book, but they basically did it to take the piss out of me. But yesterday we had a group of Two Duros and one Trandoshan. Anyways what was notable for me was how the skills guy who did repair and all this stuff kept botching his rolls. He destroyed the Corillian Corvette "Stellar Damsel"'s Engine and he could not hit a single Mynock or Spacetrooper. It was sad and funny at the same time. Eventually he retired that d20 he was rolling and used a different one and actually started to hit. Senior Scarybagels fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 21:12
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Senior Scarybagels posted:decided to make a Jedi who had thermos
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Sep 25, 2013 21:53
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Lorak posted:So he could keep his soup hot, or are we talking a different sort of thermos? Probably thermo detonators?
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Sep 25, 2013 21:53
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Myrmidongs posted:Probably thermo detonators? Bingo, I just use thermos for a shortened name, mostly that's what the group called it and that's kind of what stuck with me.
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Sep 25, 2013 21:55
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It's thermal.
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Sep 25, 2013 22:02
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VanSandman posted:It's thermal. My bad. I edited it.
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Sep 25, 2013 22:03
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Sep 25, 2013 22:04
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Lorak posted:So he could keep his soup hot, or are we talking a different sort of thermos? I read it this way as well. Why people would go ballistic over a thermos of space campbell's soup was a little beyond me. But a guy with a bunch of bombs will use said bombs and always at awkward or inopportune times.
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Sep 25, 2013 22:07
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Agrikk posted:I read it this way as well. Why people would go ballistic over a thermos of space campbell's soup was a little beyond me. Yeah but this was only my third or fourth ever time playing D&D and they force me to run Star Wars.
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Sep 25, 2013 22:09
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Agrikk posted:I read it this way as well. Why people would go ballistic over a thermos of space campbell's soup was a little beyond me. Could just be really gimmicky, but also decently amusing.
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Sep 26, 2013 00:30
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Kobold posted:I'm oddly inspired to have a character who carries around a variety of different soups to deal with all sorts of situations. Would probably be the group healer, since that makes the most sense in my mind. One soup for acid burns, another soup for stat drain, a third soup for petrification wherein it's never explained how said recipient partakes of it... I've actually played that character, once. It was in a game of Exalted; I took a large helping of Medicine Charms and comboed them into Craftsman Needs No Tools and the Craft Excellency so I could make magical healing soup on the fly. That was the same game the party used me as an air to ground projectile. Good Times.
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Sep 26, 2013 00:54
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Kobold posted:I'm oddly inspired to have a character who carries around a variety of different soups to deal with all sorts of situations. Would probably be the group healer, since that makes the most sense in my mind. One soup for acid burns, another soup for stat drain, a third soup for petrification wherein it's never explained how said recipient partakes of it... It could actually be pretty fun if fleshed out a bit. He could be constantly hunting for herbs, roots and leaves and whatnot and be an excellent cook. Instead of burning down the inn, your group could have supper clubs. A friend of mine once played a Runemaster character in a rolemaster campaign we once had and all of his runes were demon names. Instead of "I cast sleep" he'd come out with "I speak the 77th name of <random made up demon>, demon lord from the plane of <random made up demon plane>, the utterance of which causes unconsciousness." It did nothing mechanically but certainly added a bit of flair to the act.
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Sep 26, 2013 01:01
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One time I played a cleric who cast his various spells through the magical power of sugary sports drinks. The rogue had me summon a thunderstorm of magical grape flavor, filled a hollow dagger with it, and used it to destroy a dragon which was allergic to magic. I only got to play that cleric once, but it was a pretty fun game. 
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Sep 26, 2013 01:05
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Kobold posted:I'm oddly inspired to have a character who carries around a variety of different soups to deal with all sorts of situations. Would probably be the group healer, since that makes the most sense in my mind. One soup for acid burns, another soup for stat drain, a third soup for petrification wherein it's never explained how said recipient partakes of it... There's actually a spell for that in 3.5: Estanna's Stew. Creates several servings of healing soup, which naturally damages undead if you throw the soup on them. Requires a special expensive stew pot. I only know this because I ran a cleric with a cooking gimmick.
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Sep 26, 2013 01:16
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Kobold posted:a third soup for petrification wherein it's never explained how said recipient partakes of it... All you need in your kit is a chisel and a funnel.
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Sep 26, 2013 01:23
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Senior Scarybagels posted:Why is it notable? Because I was scarred a long time ago from DMing after some 25-30 year old (Why was he playing with a group of 15 year olds I have no idea) decided to make a Jedi who had Thermal Detonators. Now I didn't know much about the game, never even read the book, but they basically did it to take the piss out of me. Ow. Thermal detonators and force powers are involve in a lot of the most notable stories for a reason. Honestly, I'd probably just bar Jedi from carrying their own. (Playing with those the enemy throws at you though? Heck yeah.)
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Sep 26, 2013 03:19
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Keiya posted:Ow. Thermal detonators and force powers are involve in a lot of the most notable stories for a reason. Honestly, I'd probably just bar Jedi from carrying their own. (Playing with those the enemy throws at you though? Heck yeah.) I think one of the books actually specifically says the Jedi cannot carry Thermal Detonators, its like a restricted item or something.
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Sep 26, 2013 03:35
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They're a nuclear hand grenade that atomizes everything in a sphere of 5+ meters radius, according to Wookieepedia. I can see the Council frowning on individual Jedi toting borderline WMDs around.
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Sep 26, 2013 03:51
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Things Escalate or 'Are we playing Dungeon World right?' Tonight was the entire group's first session of Dungeon World, after a very political 2 year D&D 4e campaign where we struggled against an Evil Empire. Naturally, we're all after a change of pace, something a bit more relaxing. The idea was to have CharGen, and then maybe a quick bit of play to get a feel for the system. Having seen the DW thread, most of us are playing custom classes: We have The Fae, The Artificer, The Brute, The Mastermind, and The Mage. Because 'party balance' is for losers. Making our characters and working out the background takes an hour or two, but we've still got time for some real game. We started mid-scene, fleeing from an angry mob. We figured out that it was because out ambulant tower had stepped in their wise woman. We out-ran most of the mob, but a few of their hunters were pegging us with arrows. Enter the mage: "I'll slow down time around the arrows! Bullet time!" Which solved that problem. Except, the mastermind was caught in the spell and also slowed to bullet-time. The Fae decides that what he needs to speed him up is some magical coffee, that'll perk him up! Which, amazingly, works and fails to kill him. But then she decides to finish off the rest of the brew. About this time, we realise that the wise woman had a pet imp, who was now free and screwing with our castle. Coming down from an insane caffeine high, the Fae decides she's hungry. What's that over there? The Imp-trap, baited with fresh toast, it turns out, and she ends up caught in said trap together with a very pissed off imp. But not to worry! She can curse things and change their form. Into a cow. Which proceeeds to stampede around the engine room until the Brute wrestles it to the ground. At which point, the Artificer discovers that our engines are dangeously low on the Fire Gems they use for fuel. If only we had some sort of infernal beast to lead us to more... The imp, naturally, knows where to find these gems. The only problem being, it's now a cow, and can't really answer questions. So we switch to the 'one moo for yes, two for no' method of questioning. Leading to the session-ending line of "The cow is going to lead us to the Gems. Or it doesn't understand us. One of the two." TL;DR - Arrows, magic, coffee, imp trap, cow. Obviously.
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Sep 26, 2013 04:10
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One time I was showing my now ex-gal where I get my dark heresy stuff from, but as soon as we walked in we shot each other a glance, and I could see the sour look of pure disgust on her face as she looked at the gathering of nerds, trying to figure out which one had poo poo his pants and stopped showering in 2005, there was no cat piss man here, only Nurgle.
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Sep 26, 2013 08:43
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Senior Scarybagels posted:
Is this wrong to you guys? I don't see anything weird about sharing the hobby with younger dudes. Sure it might be a little juvenile if they're not specifically mature 15 year-olds, but most of the time RPG campaing are a little immature anyway. I played with some 30+ dudes back when I started playing in a club, and while it was terrible, creepy, and overall everything this thread has seen combined, it wasn't because of their age (and, in fact, some of them were cool).
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Sep 26, 2013 10:59
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Hugoon Chavez posted:Is this wrong to you guys? I don't see anything weird about sharing the hobby with younger dudes. Sure it might be a little juvenile if they're not specifically mature 15 year-olds, but most of the time RPG campaing are a little immature anyway. I dunno, it just felt weird that this guy who as far as I knew lived all the way on the east side of the city traveled about 30 minutes outside of the suburbs to a house in the middle of nowhere to play D&D. We didn't play it at a comic shop or anything, but a house in the middle of nowhere. But I was the newest member of that group so I was just going on my personal feelings and said nothing as I didn't want to cause any sort of trouble. The guys my age that I played with were for the most part fairly cool people.
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Sep 26, 2013 16:37
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Most of my good experiences with D&D came from my very first campaign. I was the DM for it (Since there was only one guy in our group who had ever played before, and he didn't like DMing). The campaign took place in a city called Cardinalis, where a cold war between the city's four criminal groups suddenly turned hot thanks to a fifth group that came to the city (Later revealed to be part of a larger conspiracy). The party were dropped into the middle of this with a mission to find a missing Paladin, and told to do whatever they wanted so long as they didn't leave the city (Since I didn't have anything of interest outside of the walls). The first really interesting bit was when the group decided to go to the Assassin's Guild and ask the assassin's if they had been hired to kill the Paladin. To be fair, they didn't just out and out say "hey did you kill this guy," but they did end up asking a question that was a lot more important than they realized. End result: The butler locked the doors on them, and they got attacked by the serving staff (Who had levels in Bard) and some Rangers who were hiding in the rafters. They won, naturally, and the wizard managed to One-Hit KO the Butler with his quarterstaff when he opened the doors again to check if the party was dead. So they were in the main headquarters of the Assassins, and for the time being none of the assassins knew they were alive and in the building. So they came to a decision: since the Assassins had tried to kill them, they would get revenge by assassinating the head of the Assassin's Guild. Before I go any further, I should state that this was a low-level campaign, and the players were all still level one (And so were most of their enemies). Anyway, they sent the Rogue ahead, and he managed to ace most of his stealth rolls and snuck past the guards to the room where the guild head was having lunch. The guy was surrounded by about ten guards, but none of them had noticed the Rogue. The Rogue cracks open the door, lines up a shot with his crossbow and sneak attacks the leader, at which point I point out the obvious: The Guild head was level 2 (Something that I had casually pointed out a few times earlier), and 1d8+1d6 isn't enough to put a level 2 character to negative ten unless you get a critical hit (Which he didn't). The guy gets reduced to about four health and sends his guards after the rogue. The party lights the stairs on fire to cover their escape (And also because for some reason they had decided that they would end every session in a burning building), but the serving staff put them out with Create Water. All in all, a complete failure. So they decided to stop looking for the missing Paladin and focus all of their efforts on killing the head of the Assassin's Guild. Said Guild Leader had a front as a legitimate noble, and they found out that he was attending a formal party the next night. The bard managed to get a job as a musician at the ball, while the rest managed to get in as serving staff/bodyguards for a Noble they had become allies with earlier in the campaign. The wizard bought a scroll of True Strike, and they cast it on the Rogue once they were in the party, the idea being that he would use it to sneak attack the Guild Leader. As you may have guessed from my use of "the idea being," that's not what he did. Instead, the Rogue walked up to the Guild Leader and introduced himself as the guy who had tried to kill him the day before. The Guild Leader talked with him just long enough to confirm that it was indeed the same person (He didn't get a good look during the attack), then cast ray of enfeeblement on him before sicking his bodyguards on him. I'm honestly not sure what he expected to happen when he did that.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:04
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Did you give him a chance to not gently caress up? I know you were new at DMing so you probably just went with it, but in a situation like that it's probably better to warn them that their course of action will probably end with their character dead or worse, or maybe play it out and then after somebody does you say 'ok so you've thought through that plan, and it doesn't work. What will you try instead?' Then reset the scenario.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:14
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Yeah, if I ran that campaign now, I would have played things very differently. But like you said, I was new. I did do the whole "are you sure you want to do that" bit, and for the first assassination attempt I assumed that he had a plan (Given their stated intention to end every session in a burning building, I'd thought that he was planning to use the sizable amount of Alchemist's Fire they had acquired the previous session to do something clever with it). For the latter part... yeah, that was a mistake on my part. I asked him if he was sure that time as well, but he said he was, so I being an inexperienced DM I went with it. They came out of it alright anyway, since even with the Rogue out of the picture they had the Guild Leader outmatched (He was the leader due to being the founder/guy who pays for everything, rather than due to being the most badass of the assassins, so he actually went down rather quickly when they had more than one shot at him). But ultimately you're right; if I had run it today, I would have done something like what you said. I still think it's a fairly amusing story, though.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:42
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Senior Scarybagels posted:I dunno, it just felt weird that this guy who as far as I knew lived all the way on the east side of the city traveled about 30 minutes outside of the suburbs to a house in the middle of nowhere to play D&D. We didn't play it at a comic shop or anything, but a house in the middle of nowhere. Speaking personally, I picked up the basics more or less by myself when I was ten, with the old Basic Set. Some time later, 2nd Edition came out and my traditional GM and I decided to get in on that, having kind of cargo-culted AD&D from the Gold Box Pool of Radiance, which shouldn't be confused with the much later, much shittier game of the same name. He learned a lot from playing with his older sister's boyfriend (who had about ten years on us) and his crew. I sat in on a few games too, but things didn't work out and we went back to muddling through ourselves. These days there's another guy at the Friday night group who has about ten years on the next-oldest, and drives in from out of town to play. Quality of game isn't spectacular, but it's probably better than he could do at one of the local comic shops, assuming he could get inside. Dude's got mobility problems.  Anyway. Impossible to say what was up with that group. Might have been older dude was part of a related mixed-age bunch with them. Could be he was screwed up somehow. Always possible that he was the victim of some awful, awful groups and the young'uns were the only ones who were sane.
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Sep 26, 2013 22:18
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I dunno, just felt like he was sort of like an rear end in a top hat to me, but whatever, it was the past. Now I got a good group that I am running for and a good group I am playing in, maybe one day I shall tell the tale of Roriko, the Penguin Paladin who rode another penguin to save the New Kingdom.
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Sep 26, 2013 22:30
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So we had another session of Rogue Trader today, and it was a good one, even if the bulk of it was warp travel shenanigans that honestly took too much time. The PCs present were my Genetor, the Weirdboy, the False Man Seneschal and the Missionary. The session started with our good friend Kaptin Silvork causing trouble in our vessel bay. He was really excited about something: an Ork Waaaaaaargh is starting somewhere around Koronus Expanse. Our Weirdboy wanted to go with him (and teleported into Silvork's SpiderKan), up until we managed to persuade him to come with us instead since we argued that we'd fight against better opponents. After some mutual threats and promises of facing each other on the battlefield again we said goodbye to Silvork... for now. Our contact in the Adeptus Mechanicus secret base near Footfall sent us a message to meet him, and he ended up giving us a mission to find a lost Explorator fleet, find out what happened to them and help them if at all possible. We also got a warning from them that Adeptus Mechanicus's version of secret police was coming to Footfall and we should probably lay low since, you know, our group is sort of a bunch of heretics. The contact was also slightly weirded out since I for once had taken my official Magos Biologis robes with me instead of pretending to be a random person with a weird helmet and a robe like I'd done during every single other meeting. Our False Man wanted a new implant, and he was about to get it, however our contact wanted to install a 'software upgrade' on one of his other implants. And he was really, really insistent about it, being threatening and waving his ballistic mechadendrite around. Finally the False Man agreed even if the whole thing seemed fishy, and he got a SECRET PERSONAL MISSION related to our mission. When we left the base a villainous Rogue Trader hailed us! He did the generic villainic gloating and said he was finally going to have his vengeance - which confused most of us quite a bit since he was actually mad at the very first generation of PCs of our Rogue Trader dynasty, and none of us had ever heard of him. He also stated he wanted to give us a 'warning' which he did by sending two attack vessels against our guncutter - both of which had horribly powerful long range weaponry. His 'warning' almost blew up our guncutter and we barely made it out alive out of that mess. Mostly thanks to the fact that the other attacker ran into an asteroid. Apparantely our incompetence is infectious. Still we got away back to Footfall and back to our ship eventually, but not before both the Missionary and Genetor received SECRET PERSONAL MISSIONS! Missionary got his from the Eclessiarchy and I got mine from my old friend - a radical inquisitor of Ordo Xenos. He seems to want to start the project to control Tyranids up again! Yaaaay! Maybe this time it won't go horribly wrong and end with death and despair. Our missions are somewhat at cross purposes, I know OOC the Missionary wants to kill someone and the Seneschal is on a 'diplomatic' mission, whatever that means, and I'm supposed to find the Inquisitor's old acolyte somewhere around the Explorator fleet. Still, that's something that's going to come relevant when we finally find our quarry. The bulk of the session is taken up by warp travel shenanigans, at first we let our Weirdboy navigate, but after we spend a month loving around in the warp before coming out of it just slightly away from where we set off everyone else tells him to stop mucking about with Navigating and let our NPC Navigator do his job. We spent a month in the warp and travelled like three days worth in real space. Oh well, poo poo happens. We got back on the way and during a stop in real space we were hailed by the Eldar of all things. The warlock hailing us was being vague and threatening like Eldar tend to be, telling us to steer clear of the Explorator fleet because of ancient buried threats and so on. He also blamed our group of working with Chaos heretics, Orks and even Tyranids. No one else figured out IC what the gently caress he meant by the Tyranid comment, even if he was looking at my Genetor when he said that. After some more vague threats and warnings he stopped hailing and we figured out the hail was coming from a nearby Eldar probe. We took it on to our ship and examined it and figured out we'd been talking to a recording. Bloody Eldars had predicted the whole conversation. Entire group immediately shouted "loving ELDAR". We had some more warp travel shenanigans soon and at one point noticed there was something following us through the warp. The Weirdboy knew this One Weird Old Trick (TM) through which we could go and fight whatever was following us, and so we trusted our pet Ork and off we went into a specially constructed fighting arena in the Warp! When we arrived it was very soon clear this was going to be really weird. We were surrounded by dancers in an obviously heretical disco, complete with flashy lights and bad music. There was a small balcony on the other end of the room where there stood a heretical Psyker who accused us of killing her daughter! It was the father of the leader of the Hex Girls! Yet another dude who wants us dead! The dancers revealed themselves to be daemonettes and the battle began. It was sort of a dance battle to be honest, the first thing the nearest daemonettes did was choose the closest PC and 'dance' with them, separating the group from the little clump we entered as. Meanwhile, the main bad guy was moonwalking on the balcony. The weirdboy thought that maybe the big bad should be taken out first and teleported himself, his cronies and our heavily armed and armored Missionary to face the main villain. This was sort of a good idea except that it left me and the Seneschal to deal with 7 daemonettes. Now the big bad got krumped good and proper in two turns by massive damage from the Thunder Hammer while me and the Seneschal tried to desperately survive the onslaught of Daemonettes. Now I was completely useless through the whole fight while the Seneschal and his Battle Servitor at least managed to kill (or to be precise banish) a couple of the daemons. I on the other hand missed like three times in a row and when I finally hit, the Daemonette blocked it. I was depressed by the whole fight IC and when finally our Missionary managed to rejoin the fight on the dance floor I was badly injured and our Ork and his retinue had gotten thrown out of the fight - we couldn't actually die in that fight, but when crit damage killed someone they got thrown out back into the real world, with some corruption, insanity points and temporary stat damage. Missionary pulped a daemonette a turn while I was getting more and more hurt and depressed - and the daemonette I was fighting against showed sympathy towards me and took it easy since she saw I was not having a good day and not really feeling the whole duel to the death thing. Good girl Daemon, she even offered to give me her 'phone number'. It was encouraging me near the end of the fight and congratulated my Genetor when finally she hit the daemon. I didn't manage to finish it since Missionary had ran out of other Daemonettes and bashed my opponent too, and it was miffed at the Missionary when he interrupted the fight. We won and only our Ork really suffered, although the Genetor was depressed for a while. Our Luxury Passenger quarters got possessed, and it was the same group of daemons and the psyker, although in an ethereal form - still spooking most of the crew and so on, but mostly harmless. I visited the area and the Daemon I'd fought earlier tried to flirt with me - apparantely my Genetor has befriended a Daemonette of all things, despite not being corrupted at all. She is unsure about how to react to this new development. We quickly visited Breaking Yards to repair our ship, after which we had a short combat against a couple of Ork ships - we did take some damage but nothing too bad. The Orks did a "Taktikal manuuver" when we turned their main ship into a hulk through the judicious use of heavy fire power - in other words, the rest of the Orks ran like hell. We called them pansies but they didn't stop retreating. Also, their hulked main ship vanished in a green explosion - despite being depowered their Weirdboy threw 'em into the warp, a really smart thing to do with no power, Gellar fields, life support system and so on. Kaptin Kataklysm is still probably going to come to haunt us later though, Orks are pretty tough. Our Rogue Trader nemesis was apparantely watching the fight and we exchanged some gloating and threats again, but didn't end up fighting him. Next session is going to be a plot heavy one apparantely as we are going to find the Explorator fleet, and we are going to have our personal missions of course... To recap: there is an Ork Waaaargh building up, we have yet another nemesis, we are on a mission to investigate the disappearance of an Explorator fleet and the Eldar are involved in that, ancient evil is probably rising or something and we all have our secret missions and we are probably going to have some interesting confrontations regarding them. Next session poo poo is probably going to start hitting the fan. More so than usual I mean.
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Sep 26, 2013 23:38
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All that and what weirds me out is the friendly daemonette. What is her deal?
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Sep 26, 2013 23:46
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VanSandman posted:All that and what weirds me out is the friendly daemonette. What is her deal? She just felt sympathetic towards the Genetor after I'd spent like six turns trying to hit her without hitting even once thanks to horrible dice, that's the way DM presented it. Maybe she was slightly impressed as well since the Genetor managed to parry all but three of her many, many hits, being a good sport about the whole dance battle. It is not very likely that she's going to come up again any time soon unless we face the heretic psyker again especially since the Missionary managed to exorcise our Luxury Passenger Quarters. Either that or every single time we face Daemonettes from now on that particular one is going to be there as some sort of weird stalker.
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Sep 27, 2013 00:00
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A while ago in the middle of a long string of campaigns about superheroes and/or vampires -- not that I'm complaining -- I felt like I wanted some good ol' D&D-style fantasy just for a bit, so I decided to go to my local game shop's RPGA night. When I got there I felt pretty out of place, as I'd never really been to the game shop to actually game, and thus didn't know anybody there except the owner (and I didn't really like the guy). So I show up with my Transmuter -- I like being a supportive 'buffer' kind of guy -- and two people in two separate instances hear what I'm playing they tell me something along the lines of "you can't do nearly as much broken stuff with Polymorph in RPGA," not as a warning, but as some kind of empathetic gripe to me as if I would be disappointed that I couldn't exploit my way to free levels or flight or something. You know, like Polymorph shenanigans is the only reason I would possibly ever focus a Wizard in the Transmutation school. Well, whatever, there's grognards everywhere, nothing new, no big deal. After some shuffling about by the people vetted to run the adventure, I was placed in a table with a bunch of level 3 adventurers to run through a "levels 3-4" adventure. I was a just a level one Wizard, but sure, whatever. A crossbow's a crossbow I guess, don't get myself killed and I'll do fine. My DM for the adventure was a utterly loving corpulent woman (seriously threatening the integrity of her sweatpants) with frizzy blonde hair who seemed upset that she was forced to be a DM instead of getting to play her level 13 elf Rogue or something, which I learned from fifteen minutes of griping. Her husband, a beanpole with a ponytail, who didn't say a word until sitting at the table, was playing an elf Sorceress, and made sure to talk in-character in high, squeaky voice I think he intended to sound breathy and feminine. Their screaming toddler was running this way and that, babbling and squeaking, with no-one making any effort at all to keep an eye on her, which was weird as hell, but the owner had stepped out, so maybe nobody was there who gave a poo poo? As an aside, I think kids are rad, especially when they're just learning what play is and are super hype about everything, but a little spaghetti-stained pinball bouncing around a store unwatched doesn't seem like a natural state. The game starts and it's clear everyone's in a hurry. Decisions are made split-second and first person to say anything seems to call the shots, which in our case is the token drunken dwarf who makes every effort to mention when he belches, and he talks in-character in the hammy accent you'd expect from a character whose depth starts and ends at "I'm a dwarf," and he's certainly in a rush too, as he boisterously talks over everyone at the table. Sure, that's cool. People have jobs and some want to be home not long after dinner. It's 4pm, RPGA apparently shoots for four hours, so maybe they just try to make sure they don't go over. We're looking to find some kind of book belonging to a sacred order, and for some reason this takes us through a combat with incorporeal creatures in a tomb and then to a gnome Illusionist's tower. Every so often, while narrating from the adventure the DM just says "gray box" a couple times and then resumes, and it takes me a while to figure out that a 'gray box' is an area in a RPGA module where descriptions are. As in, the actual picture of where we are, what we see, and what we're doing. At one point she turns the page she says "You arrive inside the tower ... okay ... gray box, gray box, gray box ... There's a gnome. He's holding a staff," and turns the page again. She skipped a loving page of actual detail on where the gently caress we are as irrelevant and a waste of time, which leads to us being lost for twenty minutes because we missed the fact that there were bookcases in the room, and in a later area, we manage to somehow fail to notice a gated door. I ask if it'd be cool with everyone at the table if we slowed down for the details, and before anyone responds she insists that she's telling us what we need to know. So we go through a few empty, featureless rooms devoid of anything save relevant inhabitants to kill, disbelieving illusions easily because they're the only things we see in this bizarro world while Bad Brian Blessed and Worse Liv Tyler argue about which way to go through the vaguely navigable nothingness. At the end of the adventure the guy running the night hands me my little character advancement record sheet and printed out proof that this sacred order likes me because I retrieved their nondescript book from a vague place. He tells me I can buy Ghost Touch weapons at cost now! You know, if I can afford the thousand gold at level 1. My Wizard gets a few to start, and I rolled some dice to end up earning more than the adventure's reward just for using his ranks in Profession (Tailor) for a day job in the downtime. My DM mutters to the guy supervising that she's not going to bother running anymore unless they stop doing 'this bullshit,' the bullshit being having newer players? I didn't really ask, and as of today I have no idea where any of those very official papers are that confirmed that yes, my Transmuter showed up and fired a crossbow bolt at a ghost and two dogs before going home, and was thus a hero, because I never went back to RPGA. ellbent fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Sep 27, 2013 |
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Sep 27, 2013 06:31
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ellbent posted:...I never went back to RPGA. I can't blame you there. That sounds terrible. I watched some Pathfinder Society types playing and it was almost that bad. I can't say I see the draw to the idea at all. Stricter rules for what kinds of characters you can make, what games you can play. All so that you can go play with total strangers the next time. The group I watched the last time had apparently played the module before and were just doing it again for the experience or something.
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Sep 27, 2013 06:44
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Lallander posted:I can't blame you there. That sounds terrible. I watched some Pathfinder Society types playing and it was almost that bad. I can't say I see the draw to the idea at all. Stricter rules for what kinds of characters you can make, what games you can play. All so that you can go play with total strangers the next time. The group I watched the last time had apparently played the module before and were just doing it again for the experience or something.
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Sep 27, 2013 07:09
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ellbent posted:Every so often, while narrating from the adventure the DM just says "gray box" a couple times and then resumes... My stomach dropped when I got to this point. I've heard bad official, organized play stories, but that takes the cake and doesn't mention it was there in the first place.
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Sep 27, 2013 12:35
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Here's some bad, probably my worst story, thankfully. Realms Best Left Forgotten I’m a big Forgotten Realms fan. Two of my three groups are currently playing FR games, one 3.5, the other, Pathfinder. This game actually soured me on FR for nearly a year afterwards. It was run by a (now former) friend that we’ll call “The Wizard” since he was, and I presume still is, deeply into the occult. I can’t really explain much without outing myself, but I don’t think he’s a goon, so it’s probably fine. We were really good friends for a long time (at least, I thought so, he was the best man at my wedding), and wanted to run D&D after I finished up my 18 month 1-30, now you’re gods! game. They had a full Faerun-sized sandbox to play in for a year and a half, and it was the first time that they hadn’t played a game on rails in a loooong time. Everyone talked about how much they enjoyed this freedom, The Wizard included. Warning bells should have gone off when he told me that he was getting advice on how to run “from the internet” (he hadn’t run a game in a decade or more) and that I was “too soft” on the group. Now, I’ll admit, I ran mainly equal-level encounters for a group ranging from 6 to 8 players. And yes, they usually stomped them hard, but we had seven or so deaths over that time (including both rezzes and permadeaths.) For the tone I set (Big drat Heroes) it seemed fine, and everyone had fun. Now, out of nowhere, he began calling my game “easy-mode” and saying that he had to “make things challenging.” I was totally on board for this. A genuine challenge can be fun, but 3.5 is tough to balance at times, and I told him I’d be happy to answer any questions he had about the system, no matter how vague. I rolled a cleric of Lathander, based on heavy healing, anti-undead, and divine metamagic. I think we started at fifth. The game was set in Sembia, and he told us that we just had to have a financial backer, who could make decisions about who was allowed in the party, and (could, would, and did) set terms for division of treasure. Ok, it’s different but we go with it, albeit hesitantly. For those of you unfamiliar with FR, Sembia is the “gold-loving merchant kingdom” right next door to Cormyr, a traditional fantasy kingdom. Sembia is FR’s Not!Renaissance Italy, with merchants and corruption galore, where the coin rules all. Now, the whole group consists of people who are (were) friends. We’d known each other for 10+ years each at this point, and this is how we would spend time together. In this case, at The Wizard’s place. The first adventure began with our DM targeting a specific player for constant abuse (much of which is petty BS.) Granted, this player would do silly stuff, but The Wizard made it worse. Let’s call the player Bullseye. Now, we were sent out to a Lathander-friendly monastery to investigate some undead sightings in the area. The party is “encouraged” by The Wizard to leave our horses with them. Actually the horses had some high-power attraction to the drat place, and he basically told us “Horses go here, and you walk, because reasons.” Alright, I tell the group we’ll have to leave the horses in the care of the monks. However, the monks charge us for stabling the horses. My character gets the group to agree, and we pay up. Yes, I’m already enabling his shenanigans, albeit unwittingly. Now Bullseye was getting pissed about this in-character. OOC, he doesn’t care, it’s just an elfgame, but his character (who’s basically homeless in bloody Sembia) isn’t cool with being forced into paying to stable his horse. He argues with the monk, at which point The Wizard has the monks grapple him into helplessness and physically throw him out of the monastery. My cleric has to apologize to the monks “Because it’s he shouldn’t be arguing, and it looks bad on your church” and I pay for his horse. Whatever, all of us were looking for a chance to actually get the game moving. We finally head into the dungeon. So, we begin fighting undead. Mind you, my cleric was built for maximum anti-undeadness. I think (as this was years ago) he had somewhere in the neighborhood of +5 or +6 effective levels on Turn checks. He was kind of a beast against them, but alas, no turns would work. The very first room: quote:Me: Ok, Turn Undead. Rolled a 19… Plus- The fights drag out, the party needing to roll anywhere from 15+ to 18+ to hit anything, while the bads drop crits on us, and I start to burn through heals. No one’s feats are applicable in any situation, and they have DR we can’t bypass, regardless of weapon types. quote:Me: Okay, guys. I’m gonna try for one last Turn, I need a nat 20 to even have a shot. Roll: 8 Welp. Feel free to re-read the above text several times, because that’s what the entire campaign was like. We’d get trounced by buffed enemies until their stats magically went down, their ACs dropped, and their rolls all started to suck. However, the first dungeon still holds a story! We finally flee the dungeon to sleep outside, after being dropped to single-digit HP and run utterly out of spells. We collapse part of the tunnel behind us, set up an order of watches, and try to rest. Bullseye takes a pre-dawn watch, but it won’t matter for me, since my Cleric has to pray at dawn... quote:The Wizard (DM) to Bullseye: Okay, you see shadows moving in the distance. Group rolls, and lo and behold, loses to all the monsters. Yes, even the zombies. Yes, even the zombies 40 some-odd feet from us, right where Bullseye saw movement. Yes, even the zombies 40 some-odd feet from us, right where Bullseye saw movement, and were right where I had been scanning with Detect Undead up to the moment they simply appeared. No description of a teleport, nothing. They just arrive. Fine, we roll with it. The first combat is basically what you get here too, except for this little gem. quote:Bullseye: I’m so loving useless against these things, even if I do hit, no sneak or crit… Ok, I’ll move to the back and sling the skeleton-y ones, maybe that’ll bypass their DR. (He hasn’t even hit this entire fight, because rolling 17’s is still a failure) Once again, I got a “miracle Turn” on a poo poo roll (a 6, I think) and everything went boom. Yay. I tried to talk to him about, you know, us having fun, too. I was told that I’m a bad DM and I should feel bad. Yeah, that was pretty much what he said to me. That’s aside from him poo poo-talking every single player to every single behind their backs. This came out well after the fact, but there you go. I proceeded to blame all this on his rocky marriage, and stuck around to “be there for him.” Yes. I’m a sucker. This pattern continued for a while. We had a Paladin of Nobanion (a human raised by Wemics) who fell to a Werewolf Barbarian around level…. 7, I think? The exchange went like this: quote:The Wizard (DM) Neither Bullseye, nor the Paladin came back. Time went by, and another friend who was playing a druid missed a few sessions. The Wizard had Vampire Monks level drain him to death with multiple Flurries of Blows, then had the druid’s wolf leap into a fire just because. I told our druid player about it later that night. He laughed, then laughed harder at me for sticking around, but I told him that I felt bad ditching out, made some excuses about being there for The Wizard, etc. After we got off the phone, I had come to realize that I needed to just quit the game, since it was actually causing people real stress. Over an elfgame. Utter bullshit. We missed a week or two after this, I think, but I ended up going to the next session. After all of this, only three of us were left. We were just at 9th level. We were also stuck at the bottom of a deep cave, facing forces we can’t possibly take down. I prepped a Plane Shift, and told the group to join me in prayer after we broke camp and loaded our gear. quote:The Wizard (DM): Ok… Nothing happens. Now that that was out of the way, we continued. I only played another session or two, involving a city’s sewer where the entire system was teleport and scry-warded, as well as Unhallowed. And some other crap, I don’t even remember what, but it was the same story over, and over again. Get kicked to the brink of death, then hidden roll magic happens and you barely survive, thanks to your benevolent overlord. I told him that I wasn’t having fun, and that I was busy with family stuff, so I’d have to drop. I was accused of being a bad player, and too weak for his uber-leet-hardcore game, I tried one last time to advise him on making the game fun, and was met with complaints about how terrible, and childish, and meaningless my games are. Yeah. My elfgame lacked the depth of Citizen Kane, or 9 ½. I’m the monster here. The other two guys stayed on for months, determined to see the game “to its conclusion” which never came, as he eventually dropped it. I still spoke to him until he tried to cast a spell on my wife, like for real, in real life, but that’s another tale.
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Sep 27, 2013 16:01
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to Bullseye: I can’t detect anything, sorry, man.
: *roll, roll, roll* Bullseye, how many HPs do you have left.
: No one else was in range.
IT DOESN’T WORK.
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I got to the bit about the financial backer, and braced myself for an asshat no-saling PCs that had already been rolled. That would have been bad enough. I've been in a few bullshit campaigns, with cheating GMs and ridiculous odds, but none of them misunderstood the concept of difficulty that badly. Profoundly, even.
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Sep 27, 2013 16:42
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It seems like he'd been told that the purpose of a combat was to deprive the party of resources, and so planned each encounter to last exactly long enough to force those resources to be used no matter what the party did. Mixed with a bit of standard dickishness.
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Sep 27, 2013 16:48
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