|
I remember my first WoD game. We were probably the same age that FourmyleCircus was. The guy who was to be our ST took me aside and tried to 'explain' that, since it was explicitly called the Storyteller system, he was required to railroad us even more than he usually did. Guy's usual games were typically a cavalcade of pet NPCs, which were usually one stereotype or Final Fantasy character or another, shoved into the rotting sausage casing of a lovely fantasy novel. Worse than that? I laughed in his face. I played a Malkavian. I'm so, so sorry. One friend played a Gangrel, embraced during the Vietnam war-- this was apparently his go-to Vampire character. ST's younger brother went through several characters (I remember a Tremere, which was dropped because we couldn't figure out the blood magic rules, and a cop named Stimpy), and I can't remember exactly what our last guy made. All I know is he had a herd of several female librarians, and made tea with their used tampons. Game started with a Blood Hunt! Not us, thank god, but we got involved. Turns out the ST's prince was a stickler for the RAW, which included not embracing people without permission. The violator got ashed and for whatever reason we got tapped by someone to hide and protect his progeny (a pretty young woman). This took several IC days, which included two fight scenes, the first with one player in order to show him how slow the system is, so he shouldn't be picking fights, and the second because the ST wanted to play with even more fiddly rules. Neither worked well. Eventually we got caught for Reasons, and NPCs argued and poo poo while we sat with our thumbs up our asses, and finally someone stepped forward to take this poor unclanned gamine under their wing. That someone was a loving Salubri. Yes! The clan that has something like a dozen members in existence and is public enemy number one among both big camps of vampires. One of them just happened to be in the area, and have an in with the local Primogen Council, and swept this NPC off to special snowflakedom. There was more later on, but it was just regular-strength dumb and boring.
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2013 19:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 23:38 |
|
|
Kurieg posted:Was this new or old world of darkness. If it was old, were-butterflies and rabbits didn't exist and the storyteller was just messing with the players, or bad, or both. I don't remember... Probably new? I mean, they could have hosed around with fan books and stuff from Changling, according to my White Wolf loving roommate. But those were the players. In my brief time in the game, the rabbit and butterfly got into a body count competition while the Hyena In A Dress(explained by the fact that they were basically the "party leader" and female hyenas are in charge of the packs) and the Large Black Were-Elephant tried to do social stuff. The bear just patched everyone up afterward. I joined for one session because I was determined not to let the Vampire Experience totally scare me off of a company. It uh... didn't work. The session itself was just some captain planet plot. With jokes about pants.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2013 19:23
|
|
|
The "Pants" thing tells me they were at least oWoD players at some point(Don't ask, I don't even really understand it). That doesn't change the fact that that's a really horrible way to introduce someone to the setting.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2013 19:48
|
|
|
FourmyleCircus posted:The session itself was just some captain planet plot. Also, I encourage you to not write off the entire system because of a few lovely people. If we all did that, this hobby wouldn't be around now, or even 10 years ago.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2013 23:13
|
|
|
Holy poo poo. I never really understood why the WoD games were that hated, and I admit I have run into a few of the people who seemed to have cherry-picked the bad bits in the books to help their own particular issues shine (and as a national member of the Camarilla for a while got to see a whole lot more of this), but if those were people's first experiences I think I can begin to understand. Although, now that I think about it, I know a few balanced and intelligent people who enjoyed the WoD games and hated D&D for pretty much the same reason. Their first experiences were with the most grognardy of railroady antagonist GMs, so what for me was "fantasy heroes quest for adventure and laughs" was "get told for four hours how stupid you were for dying."
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2013 23:59
|
|
|
All games are bad when shitlords are involved.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 00:02
|
|
|
FourmyleCircus posted:Hyena In A Dress(explained by the fact that they were basically the "party leader" and female hyenas are in charge of the packs) Female hyenas also have dicks (well technically not but look 'em up and you'll agree it's an apt term), so not AS weird as it would be if they had been a transvestite wolf or something I guess? That's not exactly praise though is it. Anyway I've never played WoD but the video games based on it present an interesting enough setting. I guess people take it to creepy extremes though. (I'd talk about the time I was in a game of some homebrew thing where one of the players took up BDSM as a hobby, but that was actually hilarious so...) Keiya fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Oct 1, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 00:08
|
|
|
The VtM game I've been playing in is starting to lose its momentum. The problem is, most of our party is specialized to be a very brutal pack of murderhobos. Our assamite has all of the dots in Firearms, and dual-wields 2 fully-automatic assault rifles, so he ends up rolling 30 dice when he attacks. My gangrel has specializations in claw fighting, to help capitalize on my Protean. The ST only ever sends weakass shovelheads after us, and then wonders why all of our combats end with my guy pureeing anyone that the assamite doesn't destroy with explosive rounds. And I mean weak shovelheads. Freshly dug up, Maybe 2 dots in firearms and 1 dot in Dex. She had 10 of them open fire on me, 2 of them hit, and between my stamina/fortitude/armored clothing, none of that even did any damage to me. We've all suggested she send stronger enemies after us, give the shovelheads some more dots or put us up against some actually strong vampires (the Sabbat is supposed to be launching this full-scale war in Baltimore, surely they have some generals or even lieutenants somewhere), but, she just keeps sending dozens of low-level shovelheads into our vampiric meat grinder. As a result, she's getting bored with the game, and we're getting unhappy because we haven't had any challenges. Odds are, it will either get concluded or dropped within the next few sessions.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 00:21
|
|
|
Coward posted:Holy poo poo. There's a less "personal fetish" side to why people hate WoD, too. I was 14 or 15 the first WoD game I played, and I was told to play a gangrel because they didn't have one, then was left out of everything all the players were doing because I was a gangrel and they had no reason to include me. Eventually the Ravnos (who was working with the "bad guys" of the plot, a group of mortal hunters who didn't know he was a vampire yet) threw me a bone and I helped him burn down this derelict building that happened to be, unbeknownst to me, the Ventrue players haven. I was bored the entire time and wasn't asked back, although I did steal two of the players about a month later for a regular D&D game. Didn't bother with WoD again for another like 4 years, even though I played pretty much everything else.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 00:30
|
|
|
Keiya posted:(I'd talk about the time I was in a game of some homebrew thing where one of the players took up BDSM as a hobby, but that was actually hilarious so...) This is a thread for notable gaming experiences, not just bad ones. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 00:51
|
|
|
TheAnomaly posted:There's a less "personal fetish" side to why people hate WoD, too. I was 14 or 15 the first WoD game I played, and I was told to play a gangrel because they didn't have one, then was left out of everything all the players were doing because I was a gangrel and they had no reason to include me. Eventually the Ravnos (who was working with the "bad guys" of the plot, a group of mortal hunters who didn't know he was a vampire yet) threw me a bone and I helped him burn down this derelict building that happened to be, unbeknownst to me, the Ventrue players haven. I was bored the entire time and wasn't asked back, although I did steal two of the players about a month later for a regular D&D game. Like Mr Maltose said, all games are bad when shitlords are involved. I don't think there's anything in that that couldn't have happened during Call of Cthulhu, D&D or Shadowrun. Sometimes RPGs can just bring out the odd badness in people. I do wonder if there are people who are otherwise ordinary and great and have no problems playing various different games as sensible humans who pick up a particular RPG and just glean all the worst things out of it, perhaps calling to their own particular vices or issues. "Aha, Star Wars is about the rebels fighting the Empire, so OBVIOUSLY I have to have ridiculously difficult sieges, interminable space fight sequences, an Imperial traitor in the party, and the Jedi solves everything for everybody because they are the best!" "Aha, Vampire is about superpowered bastards controlling everything, so OBVIOUSLY I have to have constant PC conflict, uber NPCs that dictate everything to everyone and show off how uber they are, constant reliance on using powers to solve every single problem, intrigue that boils down to either killing someone or blowing something up, and dark and gritty things that happen all the time dressed up in flowery language to prove how edgy the game is!" It's just I've come across people like that, who can completely understand the goals of having fun and get into a setting in a few different games, but then completely go off the rails when trying to run a different one. I think there's even been examples in these threads. Although, my experiences where when I was in my late teens and early twenties, so I could just be talking out of my arse.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 02:43
|
|
|
Coward posted:Although, now that I think about it, I know a few balanced and intelligent people who enjoyed the WoD games and hated D&D for pretty much the same reason. Their first experiences were with the most grognardy of railroady antagonist GMs, so what for me was "fantasy heroes quest for adventure and laughs" was "get told for four hours how stupid you were for dying." Sadly, that game only lasted about one session because the ST was super flighty at the time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 02:50
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:My first vampire character was a Tremere who was embraced because he played way too much D&D and always played pure spellcasters. His sire wanted to see if he would/could apply his encyclopedic knowledge of D&D spellcasting to blood sorcery and become a prodigy/innovator or if it would hinder his ability to process the concept of "real magic". I honestly would've been curious to see how that's turned out (or embracing a computer programmer for much the same reason.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 03:02
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:I honestly would've been curious to see how that's turned out (or embracing a computer programmer for much the same reason. If you like that idea, I recommend Ra, which is basically 'magic is a subdiscipline of quantum mechanics discovered in the late 60s'.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 03:05
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:The "Pants" thing tells me they were at least oWoD players at some point(Don't ask, I don't even really understand it). That doesn't change the fact that that's a really horrible way to introduce someone to the setting. I'm probably missing chunks of it, but what I remember from lurking rec.games.white-wolf back in the day, 'pants' was a field on the Nuwisha character sheet. Nuwisha were coyote shifters, tricksters in the obnoxious vein of old WoD tricksters of every other stripe. This may be totally irrelevant because... 'Pants' was mentioned nowhere else in the Nuwisha splatbook, or anywhere else for that matter. Did it mean the character pants? Did it mean the character may or may not wear pants of a specific or broad styles? No one knew. Everyone loving loved to theorize though, and that endless 'pants!'  was emblematic of how monkey-cheesy WoD 'humour' could be, and how prone the fanbase was to chasing its collective rear end....or it could be the writers channeling the Nuwisha to do just that. Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Oct 1, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 03:12
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:I'm probably missing chunks of it, but what I remember from lurking rec.games.white-wolf back in the day, 'pants' was a field on the Nuwisha character sheet. So it literally started and stopped with the character sheet? Okay then I guess I wasn't missing anything.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 04:02
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:So it literally started and stopped with the character sheet? Okay then I guess I wasn't missing anything. The SO, who played a lot of oWoD says it has something to do with Rite of the Talisman, which allows you to keep certain stuff with you when you transform. Thus it was commonly known as the Rite of the Pants. Which explains why the butterfly made comments that the chainsaw was their pants. And yeah, normally I wouldn't let a single bad experience, or even two or three bad experiences sour me on something. But being locked in someone's house, with no way to get home, while being badgered by a crazy... Well, it kinda sits in your head, especially if it's the first. And they could have been using the NWoD system and OWoD setting for all I know. I just know that they had the "any color you'd like, so long as it's black" mentality as I was writing up my character for their game. Oblig: The +5 seeking dagger of babyslaying Whether this is awful or awesome depends on you, but... I was playing in a Ravenloft campaign not too long ago. And the party assassin had gotten their hands on a pair of magic gloves that allowed them to conjure daggers in exchange for it's daily charges. One charge got you a dagger, three got you a seeking dagger, and all five got you a +5 Seeking Dagger of Foo-Bane. Then the GM throws us into a time travel plot. We're looking for something called the Jewel of St Something. There are alien invaders. This stuff happens in Ravenloft. As we're ascending the big bad evil guys tower, I realize that the jewel is metaphorical, and we were looking for his kid. This is when things went off the rails. The GM expected the Evil Cleric to be the first one there and figure things out. I... Well, I figured it out and the assassin decided to just run up the drat wall. If the evil ritual completed, things would suddenly get very bad, as aliens would start coming in by the hundreds, not to mention the fact that they'd be more powerful than ever. What they needed was The Perfect Host. Which happened to be a newborn baby of a Favored Soul. I was the wizard. I could have shut the whole thing down. The problem was, I was a halfling and had the worst movement speed, even if I could fly. I was literally one turn behind the Assassin. He studied for his Death Attack... and then expended all five charges and asked the GM the question that caused everyone to shut up. "What's the AC on the baby?" And thus, the future dark lord of this freshly minted Ravenloft realm managed to splatter the baby all over the shocked evil priests. And then the inter-planar portal blew up. After the game, we just kinda stared at him... even he wasn't sure why he decided to create and use a +5 Homing Dagger of Babyslaying. It took him two weeks to fully rationalize it away with "Well, I'm a neutral Assassin, and it was in everyone's best interests. We may not have had that round." It's been three months, and it still doesn't sit well with him that he decided to do it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 05:36
|
|
|
Well. The fact that it weighs on his conscience is a good sign, I think. Depending on how you guys play its a hell of an opportunity for character development.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 05:49
|
|
|
Was in session of Monster Hearts so good I bought game. The setting was basically Santa Barbara, CA. (For those not in the know, Monster Hearts is (Vampire Diaries + Buffy) * Dungeon World. I'll put Mechanics in spoilers so that if you don't give a gently caress about the system, you can ignore them.) Mara was a GHOUL who fed on fear. Monsterhearts is roll 2d6+stats, and her stats were +0 hot, +1 cold, +1 violent/volatile, and -1 dark/mystic. She fed on FEAR, and whenever she fed on fear, she became more powerful. Monster Hearts has Strings, which represent emotional leverage. She started with two strings on Crow, the Fae, and 1 on Logan, the other player. Crow had a ton of strings on her; the Fae are very, very good at promising things and even better at manipulating other's promises. Mara got Hot and Volatile as her marked stats; the first time she tried to seduce or manipulate someone in a scene, run away, or be violent, she'd mark XP. --- Mara Calver died last Friday. Which made her appearance in art class Monday shocking. No one was more shocked than Elise, because Elise tried to kill her. (Well, even if Elise didn't mean to, she poured vodka into Mara's beers). The art teacher demanded everyone close their eyes for ten minutes and then draw their dreams. Mara shook dust out of her hair. Elise said something bitchy (probably about her rich boyfriend, Felix, or about Mara's lack of hygiene). In response, Mara smashed Elise's head into the art table. And it satisfied something deep down in Mara. Mara liked seeing someone deeply, deeply afraid of her. Mara rolls 10 to lash out physically. Instead of dealing 2 harm (and potentially killing Elise!, she gains a string on her, and gets TWO points of experience. Crow, a fae lad, was a few tables over. He was busy drawing dozens of dozens of pictures of the Valedictorian, Stella. Crow sassed the teacher, and got sent to the principal's office. But before he did, he dropped a single picture off for Mara. It was her getting hit by a bus. --- Meanwhile, Mara's churchy friend Logan was ecstatic. His prayers had worked! An angel had answered him... Unfortunately, the angel wanted something in exchange. It wanted people brought to the town cemetery, tonight. Crow also had a test: he needed to find a special soul to deliver, willingly, to King Oberon's faery court. The sooner the better. --- Mara, feeling the best she had in days, decided to get men under her thumb. She treated her ex-boyfriend Crispin as a warmup, finding him in the library and throwing her tongue down his throat. He agreed to see her after school. Maybe they broke up hastily. A simple "Turn someone on" role to get a string. Mara's dice were hot at this point. With a few saucy texts, she had Felix all hooked up for Halloween weekend. Of course, things had to go loving sideways. Ashley somebody had had a stroke during class and everyone was gathered around the ambulance. Crow found out it was a mental assault, by purple-eyed seagulls only Ashley could see. Mara sent Crispin to take a cell phone pic and text it to her. (He did). M immediately USED her string to Manipulate an NPC. It was messed up, but what could you do? They were all set to go home, getting into Mara's car, when Crow showed up and started talking poo poo. Mara was flabbergasted, and accidentally showed Crispin the picture Crow drew. Crispin took this really, really badly, thinking it was a photo of his girlfriend being murdered. He tried to punch Crow, who dodged. Instead, he dented the glass of Mara's back passenger window. Crow embraced the man, and asked him simply...who do you want? Mara, Ashley, or Crow? A sexually confused and extremely hurt Crispin dumped Mara on the spot. "I was only using you for sex anyway." He yelled, storming off. "That's bullshit! You can't dump me, I was using YOU for sex!" This public breakup happened in front of the entire school parking lot. Here M rolled three failures in a row to diffuse the situation, get Crispin to leave with her, and maintain her dignity. --- A scorned Mara met Logan for burgers after school, where she learned that he had prayed to God to bring her back to life. Felix and Elisa showed up, somewhat together, somewhat not. Logan invited the pair, as well as their jock friend Drake, to the cemetery that night. They reluctantly agreed. Mara slipped Felix her number. Logan gives Elise a charming look, and it's reciprocated. This allowed Elise to lose her condition "Scorned", which she'd gotten from being publicly dumped. -- Back at home, the "poor little dead girl" (as Crow called her) had a problem: her dad was home and would notice the huge smashed in car window. Mara covered up the damage to her car the only way possible: aggressively rewriting history. The following things WERE technically true: *She had gotten back together with Crispin *He had punched the window of her car *He had then said he was using her for sex. That tactic worked really, really well. Of course, the former-corpse girl wanted more, so she said that Felix, rich Felix, was coming over. Her dad was ecstatic. He'd even forgotten about the car. In her excitement, Mara forgot: she hadn't invited Felix yet. --- quote:"C'mon, Felix. It's not Halloween, but we could play dress-up." quote:"my dad's going all out making dinner." There was a pause. "I don't want it to be weird. I just want it to be...you know, sexual. I want to use you for sex. You're weird." Felix responded, logging off of Skype. (Five minutes later, the entire high school was emailed a pic of Mara, labeled in bold impact font: "SEXY NURSE? SEXY MORTICIAN? MY DAD'S MAKING DINNER.") At this point, Mr. Calver yelled from downstairs. Why was there a drawing of Mara being hit by a truck? gently caress. Mara didn't have any strings on Felix, which left her at the mercy of the dice. Mara blamed Crispin. Dad threatened to call the police, and Mara said that the police couldn't protect her. Besides, she was still daddy's girl. (And if the cops arrested Crispin, how would she feed on his fear?) A mildly successful "Shut Someone Down" roll here: The Drinker and her Dad gave each other conditions. Mara gave her dad "Overly Protective", which would lead him to kill Crispin if the two ever met. Mara took "Daddy's Girl." --- Crow was in a spot. Stella had asked him a major favor: find out why Ashley was still in the hospital. If he did it, he'd have the leverage to take her to the Faerie Realm and make her his bride. Of course, his plan had backfired, and after a very, very awkward moment of putting his head on the comatose Ashley's chest (and finding the dream face of a purple-eyed woman), he had fled through a 2nd story window. Through the reinforced glass. So when he showed up at Mara's window, he was half dead and desperate. Mara could use desperate. --- Mara told her dad what Felix had said, declaring that she'd "become a lesbian at this rate." Crow (sewn up and wearing one of Mara's brothers old shirts) rang the doorbell, and, posing as the conciliatory gay friend, enjoyed the Calver's dinner party.* --- Meanwhile, Logan had invited Drake and Felix over for some football. Drake, concerned about Ashley, asked Logan to lead the group in prayer. Logan, aware that asking the Angel for anything could go very, very badly, pretended to pray. --- Mara arrived at the Cemetery a little late, and found Drake and Felix freaking out. Logan had allegedly murdered the night watchman. Drake fled into her car, and they bolted. Unfortunately, Crow landed on the roof of Mara's shitbox car. She hit a rather large tombstone (rattling her) but feasted off of Drake's utter fear. Crow pulled a string on her: there was no way she wanted to miss meeting whatever brought her back to life, was there? Crow used one of his strings in an interesting way: Mara could do what he said and earn an XP. Why not? --- When Felix and Elise showed up, an angry, bitter Mara took out the middleman, making out with Elise. The two, potential murderer and fear-sucking ghoul, grabbed some 40s and slipped off into the bushes. (This changed Mara's appetites: where previously she only enjoyed fear, she now found herself addicted to fear AND being with Elise ). Meanwhile, The Angel revealed itself to Logan. It had glowing purple eyes. It thanked him for its bounty. Luckily, Logan had brought plenty of targets: but which three should it take? Elsewhere, Crow was bewitched. He found himself asleep in Mab's domain, Stella bound in golden chains. Oberon berated him for his inadequacy, and gave him an ultimatum: give the girl up for the faeries to eat, or lose his place in Court forever! Despite his struggles, he was lashed by Oberon's words. Stella screamed and fell into a stupor, a pawn instead of a queen. At this point, Crow couldn't roll to save his life. Where before he had done well, he rolled 4 failures in a row, dooming his plans of a loving, Valedictorian queen. --- Meanwhile, the dark presence made itself known to Mara. quote:"Why didn't you tell me that a fallen angel brought me back?" yelled Mara. She punched Logan in the face and broke his nose. The indecisive Logan couldn't decide who to sacrifice: Felix looked up to him, Drake was in his church group... So he decided to fight the Dark Power. UNFORTUNATELY, as he struck it, it made contact with his bare skin. His eyes glowed purple...and it made him a better bargain. As much power as he wanted. In exchange, he gives everyone's soul. Instead of taking damage when the Dark Power kicked his rear end, he entered his DARKEST SELF. All of the monstrous teens tried to negotiate. The Fallen Angel promised Mara she'd get Logan's contract if she killed him. And to upset the still frigid Crow, it snapped Stella's neck. Mara told Elise to hide and started scratching at Logan's eyes. He smashed her head into a mausoleum, and she s l o w l y removed a shard of stone that was jutting out of her neck. Crow tried to send Mara go to sleep and fall to the Fae. It only made her madder. Mara succeeded well on her Hold Steady roll, and got a +1 to her next one. Logan, panicked, demanded for more power. He got it: as the moon appeared behind the clouds, he hurled Mara into an open grave. And that was the worst decision in a long night of bad decisions. A furious, unhinged Undead Girl clambered her way out of the Earth for the second time that week. She lurched up with a shovel and, finding the Dark Angel between her and Logan's fear, decapitated it with a single swing. Thanks, Crow! Mara was able to heal all her damage by entering her darkest self, a place of unrelenting feeding on whatever's nearest. Logan fled, only barely escaping her wrath. And as he ran, the Undead Girl everyone wanted stumbled over Elise. Beautiful, horrible, frightened Elise. Elise who had killed her, Elise who had made her this way. And as Logan tried to duck past the police sirens, the two kissed. Whatever Mara was now, she was alive. --- *Scene truncated. The cool thing about Mara's relationship with her family was how normal it was. She played up the waterworks and the family goofyness with her father, and when little sister Marjorie threatened to snitch that Crow was in Mara's room, Mara dug her fingers into her sisters arms and fed off her fear, which allowed Mara feast and gain XP. Over this session, Mara gained 13 XP. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Oct 1, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 08:31
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:Twilight fanfic No sir I don't like it 
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 08:56
|
|
|
You have to have the right group for Monsterhearts, but it's awesome if you can pull it off. By the sounds of it, you did.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 10:55
|
|
|
Doodmons posted:You have to have the right group for Monsterhearts, but it's awesome if you can pull it off. By the sounds of it, you did. Yep. I don't like Monster Hearts any more than I like Buffy (and I really don't like Buffy), but that was pretty goddamn impressive.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 12:33
|
|
|
yaoi prophet posted:If you like that idea, I recommend Ra, which is basically 'magic is a subdiscipline of quantum mechanics discovered in the late 60s'. You may also wish to read Charlie Stross's "Laundry" series of stories, where magic is actually applied mathematics, and spells are really just performing proofs in a way that resounds with the aether.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 13:07
|
|
|
Yeah, I mean what he did was awful but justifiable. Would you murder an innocent child to stop something much much worse from happening? Questions of morality and conscience! Definitely take that as an exciting roleplaying opportunity.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 13:08
|
|
|
FourmyleCircus posted:It's been three months, and it still doesn't sit well with him that he decided to do it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 14:50
|
|
|
I think my favorite moment is from Shadowrun 4. I was running a seat of the pants solo game for my cousin to introduce him to the game. He's just rescued a lady from the Halloweeners street gang and was fleeing in his motorcycle with them in hot pursuit. Up ahead was a bunch of Spikes (troll biker gang) and a broken part of the highway. He rolled so well for driving that I declared that he pulled a sick wheelie, ramped off a burned out car, and did mad flips through the air over the road. Everyone pulled to a stop and briefly applauded. Then the Spikes whipped out shotguns and started blasting the Halloweeners as he drive off. He apparently had enough fun that he stayed running Shadowrun when he got back home. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 16:52
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:You may also wish to read Charlie Stross's "Laundry" series of stories, where magic is actually applied mathematics, and spells are really just performing proofs in a way that resounds with the aether. There's also a CoC-based Laundry RPG. I bought the book and while I haven't had a chance to play it yet, it looks pretty good. I'm still a little confused about how the casting actually works, maybe it's something that would make sense once you start playing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 17:03
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:Yep. I don't like Monster Hearts any more than I like Buffy (and I really don't like Buffy), but that was pretty goddamn impressive. Honestly I got the impression of monster high school, that really crappy doll series that for some reason is popular.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 18:37
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:Was in session of Monster Hearts so good I bought game. The setting was basically Santa Barbara, CA. Yeah, MH games tend to take on this kind of amazing runaway train-wreck quality. Everyone's competing petty agendas kind of collide and all the characters egg each other on until things are just out of control for everyone involved. It doesn't look like it at first glance, but it's a surprisingly chaotic PVP game that's really good at getting players to make highly questionable, self destructive decisions. Which seems to be what happened here! I feel like a recap is going to be kind of lost on people who aren't familiar with the rules, though. Like, I could tell what was going on in your post and appreciate it on a mechanical level, but that's because I understand how the game works. People who haven't played a session or even read the book are probably not going to follow the trail of cause and effect very well without some more explanation, though; it's not going to be as intuitive as a more traditional RPG is to a lot of the people who frequent this topic. (An Infernal who thinks his Dark Power is an angel is kind of great as a character concept, by the way)
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 19:11
|
|
|
Yeah, that write-up was great but assumes some familiarity with Powered by Apocalypse if not Monsterhearts in specific. Also that infernal owns. (The only thing better would be an Infernal who thought his Dark Power was an Angel, and was right.)
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 19:18
|
|
|
That baby-stabbing thing is prettymuch the most Ravenloft thing I've ever heard. It definitely seems like you friend 'gets' the setting. It'a also probably one of the better sources for character development I've seen in a while. You can go a lot of ways with it, since 'do the ends justify the means?' is a really drat compelling question a lot of the time. I also may have to work 'what's the AC on the baby?' into a game sometime soon.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 19:32
|
|
|
I'll go back and add mechanics in spoilers so they don't mess up the flow of the story. "The right group of players" was right. I was nervous when we had 3 male players but the female GM was amazing at pulling off basically 20-30 non-player characters and keeping them simple but consistent. (Monster Hearts says to use NPCs like stolen cars - use'em fast, use'em hard, then get rid of them). VVVVVV It takes a lot of work, and a mature group, to be able to handle any game, but especially a genre game about showing vulnerability. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Oct 1, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 19:42
|
|
|
Gazetteer posted:Yeah, MH games tend to take on this kind of amazing runaway train-wreck quality. Everyone's competing petty agendas kind of collide and all the characters egg each other on until things are just out of control for everyone involved. It doesn't look like it at first glance, but it's a surprisingly chaotic PVP game that's really good at getting players to make highly questionable, self destructive decisions. Which seems to be what happened here! I read a backgrounder on it once and pushed it away slowly; between the sex moves and what I misapprehended as emergent PVP, it definitely wasn't my cup of tea. Had I realized the PVP was pretty much explicit, I'd have run faster. Admittedly, the closest I had to supernatural romance growing up was the Vampire Chronicles (and... no), and the post-apocalyptic sex I was exposed to was merely mechanical and misogynistic. Regardless, goddamn. That was impressive.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2013 20:07
|
|
|
FourmyleCircus posted:
Anyone else read this as a +5 seeking dagger of babysitting? No? Just me? Well, it made me read the post anyways because I wanted to know how a dagger that added a bonus to a babysitting would actually be worked into a game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2013 00:21
|
|
|
I've only been playing DnD for a short while and it's my first PnP ever but we've already got a couple good stories from the handful of sessions my group has played. My favorite comes from the most recent game. Our group of four was sent out to investigate strange lights and sounds from a run-down tower outside of town. Turned out that the inner floors had all collapsed ages ago, but there were fresh passageways leading down into the earth. So we started to descend and ran into a couple of groups of goblins to fight. In each encounter my poor cleric rolled terribly on every attack and basically whiffed drat near everything. Having contributed nothing, I led the group downward still until we found a bunch of barrels of booze with a crazy high alcohol content that reeked to high heaven. I broke open one of the barrels and soaked a rag in it, in case we ran into something that tracks scents or whatever, and let the rest of it run down the tunnels. The group could hear more goblins farther down and they sounded agitated about this random booze puddling around their ankles. We could hear them getting closer so I rolled my only natural 20 of the night to fake some goblin sounds to make it seem like their buddies (that we had already killed) were getting into the alcohol in an attempt to delay them long enough to get back and have our wizard to set the booze on fire. Having burned that group to death, we jumped down to the next area and found in a sewer with filthy stankwater running through the center of the tunnel and bladed pendulums swinging across the passageway. My dwarf covered his nose and mouth with his booze-soaked rag to kill the smell and the DM ruled that the concentrated fumes were basically getting me high. The elf and eladrin were able to make it through the traps fine using acrobatics and feystep, respectively, and the goliath just charged the gently caress on through. That left my cross-eyed dwarf to stagger back and forth through the area, barely being hit by the pendulum blades due to the drunken sort of weaving I was doing across the tunnel. Since otherwise I have poo poo-all for an acrobatics score that makes twice now that alcohol helped keep me alive. The last encounter of the night ended up being against a weak type of beholder, I forget what kind exactly, but it was still rough going for our group of level three characters. I continued to whiff every loving attack roll and was basically useless on that front, despite fulfilling my purpose as a cleric and keeping our fighter alive. I started feeling kind of crappy, though, since even spending an action point to reroll for my daily just fizzled out so my dwarf started getting surly. I had managed to end my turn directly in front of the beholder but since i had yet to land an attack on it I was basically ignored in favor of the more dangerous party members and didn't take much in the way of damage. The beholder didn't move on its turn so when it came back around to me again I decided to be spiteful and slap my booze-rag into its drat eye, the big front one, to blind it while cussing at it in Dwarven. I didn't really have a plan beyond being a dick to the monster trying to kill us all but the wizard pointed out that next to the beholder, adjacent to me, was her summoned fireball from her daily.  In one throw I lit the rag on the fireball and flung it dead square in the beholder's eye, setting the drat thing ablaze and stopping it from using the immobilizing powers associated with that eye. That freed up the fighter, who had been the main target of the immobilization ray, to charge in and paste the fucker. It was fantastic, the DM was taken by surprise but she rolled with it and allowed me to be awesome even though my attacks had been missing all evening and totally redeemed the cleric in the eyes of his party. So that's how alcohol saved my character's life three times in one night without even drinking any.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2013 03:03
|
|
|
Traxus IV posted:So that's how alcohol saved my character's life three times in one night without even drinking any. That is probably the most interesting booze related gaming tale I've heard so far. Bravo.
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2013 03:56
|
|
|
We played a game of Pathfinders, in the "we be goblins 2" adventure for free RPG day. As the name implies, we were all goblins. I don't really remember the classes/names of the other characters (I think two were clerics, who were actually copies of the same character and had toad familiars), and sadly since this was months ago, I'm pretty hazy on the details. I played as Mugmurch, a bomb throwing alchemist with 15 Int, which I'm pretty sure was the smartest one there. The adventure started with being recruited by another goblin clan to help them kill a mean orc who I think killed their leader, but first we had to go through some trials to show we were worthy, and give one of us the chance to earn the position of new king. The first trial was shooting birds. while blindfolded. Some of us missed, killing bystanders, but strangely got points. Some, cheated, and used fireballs, which also killed audience goblins and gained points. Another tried tripping a goblin as he shot. The second trial was stirg stomping. Stirgs (giant insects were tied to posts in a swamp with long bridges. We were told we'd be disqualified if we fell in the swamp. Again, there was much cheating, including using fireballs. I used a bomb, which ended up only really injuring the stirgs and giving other players points. Another player used a powerful fireball, wiping out most of the stirges, but his points was taken away and given to another one, because he was warned about cheating. The third trial we were all baked in a pie. No, really. We had to kill birds also in the pie, and then get out (getting bonus points for getting out earlier). I weakly tried but failed to kill birds, not having any weapons besides my bombs. I did managed to be the first to get out, but I didn't get that many points from that. At the end, one of the other goblins was named goblin king. So, now proving our worth, we headed off to kill the orc. We came to a farm with an overturned boat, and a long fence around. We fought a female orc, and as we fought started burning stuff, lighting the fence on fire, and even hitting the bridge way behind her. She got KOed, and was next to her, without any weapons. So I coup de grace curb stomp her to death. Then we saw that there was something in the stable. A large boar, and we could hear another boar noise, which one of the PCs recognized as his pet boar which had been apparently lost. So we shoot the bad boar blocking the way and get the pet boar out, and burn the boat-barn down. At one point in the adventure, the goblin king said about me "he smart, listen to him". I didn't really try to be a leader, but I tried to use this later when a goblin wanted to torch a small shed and I wanted to search it first. Me: "no, me smart, listen to me. we should search it, then burn" Pyro goblin: "Yes, search, then burn." Me: ... "Fine" I decided to not go, and I think was pretty justified with my Int score (yes, maybe I was meta gaming a little too) in not wanting to die getting burned to death by my ally, so I decided to just let him go ahead. Another goblin (my brother's character) decided to go anyway, and predictably the Pyro goblin lit it on fire while he was inside. It was established earlier that goblins hate writing, they see it as a curse, and dangerous to read. They think that when someone writes something down, they lose it from their memory. So when we found a pair of fairly good scrolls, of course our natural reaction is to burn them. :P I think the GM was surprised at this (at least, that's what my brother said afterwards), even though he was the one that set up the whole goblin writing superstition thing. Eventually we made it to the house, where a very angry orc poked his head out the window and started attacking us. For some reason it didn't seem this house had a door, so he had no real way of getting to us. We managed to also block the window with a bead of force, so there <b>really</b> was nothing he could do. After killing him, and a random monster added in (I think it was a bugbear or a troll), who couldn't get to us because of a small river in the way we were victorious, and continued to burn the farm to the ground. It was a really fun adventure over all. :P Foolster41 fucked around with this message at 10:40 on Oct 3, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2013 22:11
|
|
|
For once our entire crew was present in a Rogue Trader session, both the Psyker and Genetor Explorators, Tau Loyalist Missionary, Weirdboy and False Man Seneschal. Shame the session was sort of a standard session for the most part, the first half of it mostly spent with routine warp travel and inspecting a couple of derelict vessels. Still, we found the Explorator fleet we'd been searching for (as well as a mysterious planet) and when we boarded the main vessel things started to get interesting... We all did some Investigation rolls and one of these came up with two random survivors! Hooray! Except... something about them bothered my character greatly. They told us how they'd survived aboard the ship for who knows how long, they were healthy if malnourished and they seemed friendly. Still... So I threw a Forbidden Lore Xenos test and realized that they were most likely Genestealer cultists - that is, humans infected with alien DNA. There was just one problem: something was making it hard for me to actually say this to the rest of the group: turns out stuffing Tyranid genes into you is bad for you if you want to be loyal to the Imperium! Who knew. Good thing smashing my head against the wall a lot let me make my willpower test to tell the others that "hey they are infected by Genestealers kill them maybe?". Of course we still debated the matter a little since our Seneschal was just confused that what does that even mean, but after some arguments we killed both of them. Evaporised actually, so high was the overkill. I was a bit sad that I couldn't confirm it besides the super good 'hunch' I got about them, especially since the Seneschal was questioning the decision a bit. Still that got me wary that there were genestealers aboard the ship, even if most of the others were not very worried about this since they had very little idea as to what the gently caress these were besides "bad things". Especially since my warnings about Genestealers consisted of "they are really bad and they have sharp claws yo", something that did not seem to worry our Missionary since he was in power armour - which, as anyone who actually knows anything about Genestealers knows, does not protect very well against them. Genestealers are sort of horrifying opponents. I led everyone to an intersection of hallways, one hallway I sensed was infested with Genestealers and one which was the safe route to the ship's bridge. I warily asked anyone whether they thought we should go and deal with the Genestealers now or not, something our Seneschal obviously did not want to do because his MO is trying to avoid that poo poo and constantly trying to split the party. We argued a bit, especially as the others were sort of weirded out by how exactly did I know where there were Genestealers, are they really so dangerous etc. Then our Missionary mentioned he'd read about them in Infantryman's Uplifting Primer and that they were pathetically weak. Unfortunately he didn't have one with him so I couldn't correct him immediately by pointing out all the errors, but helpfully one of our random goons did have it! I of course started fixing the image drawn there and unfortunately the random goon ran away screaming after I'd scribbled for a few minutes. Perhaps the image was a bit too realistic... Eventually our Missionary got bored of the argument and started walking towards the hallway I'd indicated had "too many air ducts" - the rest of us ran after him pretty quickly since, you know, he was going to die there if he went alone. After we stopped our Seneschal from doing stupid solo poo poo away from the rest of us we headed towards the Genestealers. Once we entered the hallways we noted some 'blips' on Auspex - the battle was very Alien-y. Well, except for the point where our Weirdboy accidentally summoned the Wrath of Gork (or Mork) in a 50 meter radius, ethereal green hands punching the poo poo our of every single creature in a 50 meter radius. It didn't kill anyone, but it did hurt a couple of Genestealers a bit and our other random goon we had with us panicked a bit after getting punched by a green hand out of nowhere. We slowly proceeded for the first turn (except for me since I took combat drugs instead), and the early rounds of combat had a whole lot of nothing happening. Well, except for the fact that a Genestealer took our Seneschal's combat servitor to -16 in one round - usually -9 or -8 is ready to kill someone outright. Thankfully the servitor had a fate point because it had slain bosses! So it burned that, just to survive though because it was a selfish servitor. The combat proceeded a bit slowly thanks to the Genestealers having utterly retarded dodge chance, but proceed it did with me and the Missionary killing four of 'em while the Weirdboy and his retinue, the other Explorator and the Seneschal blundered inefficiently against just two. I also got to finally use my weird horrible teeth against an opponent in a way that someone noticed! And what a goddamn roll was that, I hit a genestealer for over 30 damage in one hit, mini-critted it and generally speaking tore off its leg with my teeth. Needless to say a hilarious amount of blood was shed, enough so that a Genestealer slipped on it in slap stick fashion a little later on in the combat. The Missionary was somewhat confused by the fact that the Genetor ate a Genestealer's leg, usually Tech Priests aren't known for tearing Genestealers into tiny little pieces with their teeth. Also the whole "weird-shaped helmet is actually necessary instead of an aesthetic thing apparantely". The Genestealers were also confused about this and they did not appreciate something that appeared to be something akin to a race traitor ripping one of them to pieces with her teeth - flipping the bird at them didn't help either. Nobody ended up dying or even going to -health somehow, even if our Missionary ate 4 hits from one Genestealer in one round. Thankfully it rolled super low damage for two of its attacks, neither of which went through, otherwise our Missionary could have gone the way of our Servitor. I was certain that this was all of the Genestealers (but I failed my Willpower check so I didn't realize that "oh hey there should be a Broodlord around here somewhere too, wonder where that thing is..."). Still we thought we'd dealt with the threat and so we headed to the command bridge and found the surviving tech priests. Unfortunately the dude we were actually looking for was not there, and neither were any of our SECRET MISSION OBJECTIVES (although I'd bagged myself a collection of genestealer parts because those could be useful to aid my Inquisitor friend in his anti-Tyranid research - or just in my quest for creating the perfect minion, a quest that is not at all insane or heretical). The genestealer-encounter was honestly the meat of the session, we also had some minor stuff after that like meeting the surviving Tech Priests aboard the star ship, from whom we bought a tank and some flying bomber. Then there was a bit of secret taunting inside the group - everyone agreed that our False Man was the most shady since nobody knew his secret. Despite the fact that one Explorator is sort of a Tyranid monster, the other is almost a Chaos Psyker and the Missionary is a Tau Loyalist... That's not important, the guy who hasn't revealed his secrets is obviously the most suspicious. There was also a bit of catcalling between the Missionary and the Genetor, the Missionary grinning and using a toothpick to clean his teeth constantly and with discreetly referring to Tau as an answer. While everyone else was suspecting each other, the Ork was just confused as he had no idea what was the problem between the humans. The Psyker Explorator TRIED to buy an implant, but unfortunately she found out that actions have consequences! The guy installing the implant noticed a weird heretical artifact inside of her and insisted that he would not install anything until it would be removed. Naturally, the Psyker disagreed and eventually she failed to get her implant, although at least the other Tech Priest promised not to tattle since they'd been doing stupid poo poo too (the Genestealers had been their test subjects and they'd accidentally let them loose). The leading Tech Priest was interestingly shady, on the other hand he disapproved of my disturbingly accurate research on Tyranids, on the other hand... he was really fascinated by it. Same thing with our Weirdboy, it seemed like a weird thing worthy of disapproval, but he was utterly fascinated by it (the Ork actually got Peer bonuses with that dude because the Ork was just so interesting!). We explored the planet a bit but didn't find the leader's of the Explorator fleet just yet, mostly just some weird alien natives we sort of befriended - Weirdboy teleported twice and convinced them he was a god and they gave us a local guide, and that was that. We got our XP with me and the Ork getting some bonus XP - me for Hive Mind shenanigans in finding the Genestealers, Ork for managing to set himself up as a god for the natives. This session got a bit overhyped as the SECRET MISSION session, but that's gonna be the next session instead I guess - we chose to explore the ships before the planet where all our objectives are. I am also going to totally kidnap one of the xeno natives and nab traits from it to my minion. edit: hope I'm not being too wordy, I'm bad at condensing things 
SpiritOfLenin fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Oct 4, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2013 23:55
|
|
|
Just how many alien natives is the Weirdboy now God of? If there's enough of them, wouldn't the Ork start getting some godlike powers?
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2013 00:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 13, 2024 23:38 |
|
|
nimby posted:Just how many alien natives is the Weirdboy now God of? If there's enough of them, wouldn't the Ork start getting some godlike powers? Considering how man y sentient beings there are in the 40k world and how some xenos are completely disconnected from the warp (all tau are, for example. Their ships don't even use warp travel) it could be handwaved away to keep the game balanced. On the other hand, that player seems to play a pretty convinving ork so a session with him having godlik e pow ers might make for some great comedy.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2013 03:42
|
|
