|
Just thought you guys would like to know there's a Cat Piss Guy: The Movie that's actually kind of entertaining. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2013 16:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 17:18 |
|
|
MizPiz posted:Just thought you guys would like to know there's a I QUOTE PEOPLE WHO POST FILEZ LINKS WITHOUT EDITING THEM MYSELF that's actually kind of entertaining. Umm not sure if I'm being an old git who doesn't know about new fangled things, but that looks pretty  to me.Might wanna edit that link out champ. Somebody fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Oct 14, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2013 23:47
|
|
|
MizPiz posted:Just thought you guys would like to know there's a Cat Piss Guy: The Movie that's actually kind of entertaining. For clarity, the movie is called Zero Charisma. It took me a few moments to figure that out.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2013 09:31
|
|
|
I played a session of Cthulhu Dark a few days ago - a very rules-light way of playing horror/lovecraft style games. It uses a normal 1d6 die and Character Gen is Name + Profession and off you go. Synposis: It's After WWI, and Family Matriarch Sophia Jermaine call her family to her manor in Derry, Maine for an early reading of the will, but by the time they came, she passed on, but things quickly get out of control. PCs: Maxwell Sharp - the butler who had been serving in the house for the last ten years, has been unnerved by strange noises in the house but didn't let it scare him out of the job and is on good terms with the rest of the staff. (Played by me) Caroline Robinson: Sophia's niece, she served as a nurse, and is no nonsense, stubborn, and doesn't gently caress around. William Jermaine: Sophia's Grandson, a College professor who gotten badly into debt and absolutely needs whatever he could get. He has little emotional attachment to Sophia and generally looks out for himself. While Sharp and staff makes the house presentable, the family, including NPCs Todd and Maria arrived, only to be told by the lawyer Mr. Briggs that Sophia had passed away the previous night, which didn't affect any of the family, though it's clear several maids were taken by surprise by the news. After some complaining from William, the family are taken to her rooms by Olga the headmaid, while their chauffer Tom tells Maxwell to make coffee while he goes outside to change the limo's oil. First: Maxwell was awake because he's a night owl when he heard what he thinks is a muffled scream out on the front lawn. He runs to a window, and finds a thick, impregnable fog. While this happened, Caroline and William are both woken up - Caroline by a thump against her wall, for William, scratches on the window. Caroline noted the bump is from Brigg's room, she went to check on him, got no answer, and went back to bed. William wasn't so lucky, he turned on the light and discovered the window was completely covered with rats. He rolls his Insanity check (you roll, trying to get a number that's the same or lower then your current sanity score which goes from 1 which is default, to 6 - being irrepairably insane). He fails the row, and has panic attack, waking up Todd which tells him to gently caress off and let him sleep. Meanwhile Maxwell was too unnerved by the scream and did a headcount of the servants, and noticed that the chauffer Tom, head maid Olga, and Groundskeeper Douglas are missing, and woke up Mimi and Olivia to ask about it. They say they know nothing, but are clearly scared, but as the house spooks everyone and they have a high maid turnover due to superstition, Maxwell just tells them to stay in their room, and to ring the servant bells if something happens while he checks on their guests. Then when Caroline went back to bed, someone attacks her, she succeeded several rolls, boasting her skills at subduing uncooperative patients during the war to gain an additional 1d6 dice to subdue her attack. Unfortunately for Maxwell, he was peering through her keyhold to see if she's there when she physically threw her attack - breaking the door, and sending him to the ground. Caroline fumbles her attempt to tie up the attacker, who ran to a balcony overlooking the entryway, Maxwell gets up to chase him, but the balcony collapses under the man and he falls, breaking his neck. Maxwell then recognizes the attacker as Jerry Cann, a very gentle goofball who worked as a footman. By now, the commotion woke everyone up. Maxwell tries to control the situation, but William and Todd demand to know their wills now since two people are now dead, so he goes to wake up Briggs. He gets the door open when Briggs fails to respond, and discovers why: The man is dead, chewed on by rats - with one burrowing itself into Brigg's throat. Maxwell managed to succeed in his insanity check, and managed to suppress what he saw and yells at the others to call the police, and chose to omit the fact he saw the rat to keep things from going too crazy. That's when everyone heard dragging noises from downstairs. The NPC relatives had enough and locked themselves in the room until police would arrive. William bolts down to see what's going on, with Maxwell and Caroline running after. When everyone got downstairs, they discovered the dragging sound was... a misshapen creature dragging Cann's body. Caroline passed her insanity check, while Maxwell and William fail bringing it up to 1/2/2. The creature starts approaching them. William wanted to leave, but Maxwell wanted to head to the east wing where the maids are, and immediately ran there, anticipating that would force the others to follow. It worked. They bolted the door, and checked on the maids - Mimi is gone, while Olivia's a hysterical wreck, they eventually calmed her down, and discovered that the chauffer rammed into the window but was "Clearly not Tom", and Mimi said she was going to talk to "Lady Sophia" and ran upstairs. Tried as they might, they couldn't convince Olivia to leave with them, so Maxwell hands her the master key to the servants quarter so she can lock the doors and leave if need be. After that they went to the kitchen to grab some knives, Maxwell noticed some are missing, and informed the others, William naturally didn't take the news well, and started to show more paranoia, especially thinking that Maxwell had something to do with the murders. Maxwell denies it, but Caroline tells them to cut it out so they can get out alive. After some discussion, the party decided to head up the servant's stairs, cross over, then down to the west wing to take the late Alfred Jermaine's guns to arm themselves with. Needless to say, things didn't go according to plan. --- Needless to say, things didn't go as planned, but as this post was gettng long, I'll typed up the rest later.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2013 20:42
|
|
|
Haha, man, finally read this entire thread... I guess I have some stories of my own to share. My FIRST experience with roleplaying (not counting some online freeform) was 3.0, and it took place in a bookstore, at the time the only place you could get any games in this city (Bogota) that I knew of. I find out that people gather to play there, and I -really- want to give D&D a try, so I join up. This place was noisy. There were a lot of groups playing simultaneously. The one I ended up joining was a table of 10+ people (as you can guess, DMs were in short order). They give me the charsheet of somebody that didn't arrive so I could get a feel for the game. I -think- I got a troll... something or other. There were other monsters in the table too. I think I remember a minotaur. Mind you, this was way before Savage Species. Yeah. 3.0 was still fairly new, or at least it was around here, so I dunno if some of the rules were just unclear... but the DM declared that every attack that was above a 20 was a critical hit, and he had a body-part chart. The -good- thing, I suppose, was that it also applied to us, so the game was pretty gory in a silly way. Of course, it had... more problems. The biggest one I can remember? A group of goblins... wearing amulets of True Strike. Which of course means that every one of their attacks was a critical hit. When we finally took them down, and went to loot the amulets, we were informed that the amulets didn't work anymore. Sigh. In my naivety, I joined a new campaign under the same ST, again with an unwieldily number of people. It ended in disaster after just a few sessions... the reason? Out (admittedly large) group of level 1-3 characters faced off against a gang of satyrs... and a Barguest. Barguests have damage reduction. I believe it was something like 15/+2 in 3.0. Guess how many of us had a +2 weapon at levels 1-3. Needless to say, we go destroyed (and got to hear exactly what the satyrs did with the bodies). It was only by the very end when the sole surviving dude in the party (I think a level 2 paladin) reached for the objective in the room, a gem, and grabbed it, that the barguest lost all his powers... but it was a wounded level 2 paladin against a horde of enemies, so he died. TPK. Did I mention he was the kind of DM that enjoyed burning character sheets? When we made characters again (because of masochism, or something), and we found the place with the barguest AGAIN, we bum-rushed for the gem. DM: That's metagaming! Everybody else: gently caress YOU. ... so we killed the barguest and carried on. I wish I could say the game got better, but...
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2013 17:08
|
|
|
This is just a short anecdote. I went to my first session of D&D encounters at a mom-owned game shop in DC. I didn't have a sheet but they basically just said "grab one of the character cards and level it fast", albeit in a nice tone. The DM was nice, albeit they definitely were too by the book for me to want to come back. That said, I got a Cavalier, my first experience as a Defender. The rest of the party was also essentials, as a sorcerer, Druid, and I believe a Rogue. Anyway, the only real highlight was my character being the only one to charge into battle besides the druid's pet wolf. This was actually just fine, as I was tanking quite well! But then the dog needed to move away to get healed and move into another position, and was about to take an Opportunity Attack. Cue my cavalier leaping in front of the dog to intercept the blow and being a big hero.  That made the whole trip there worth it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2013 18:00
|
|
|
I have a very... unique player in my ongoing 13th Age/Call of Cthulhu campaign. For some context, she's playing a Deep One Ranger named Xena Marsh. Her story's pretty interesting; she's the future queen of Innsmouth, sent back in time to Cold War-era Arkham to prevent a horrible tragedy from befalling her people. For those unfamiliar with the Ranger class, it's very bare-bones class; a multitude of options, with strong encouragement to specialize in shooting or slashing. It's a common complaint that the Ranger isn't incredibly interesting, and those complaints have some merits. So, naturally, a lot of Ranger players tend to get bored of the pattern "roll, check to see if you get two attacks, do damage", and seek interesting alternatives. This boredom is what I feel causes a lot of Xena's more interesting choices. Xena's player is very new to RPGs, which is good and fine, and she's really picked up on the whole "creativity is encouraged and rewarded" vibe that the game has, which is great. That being said, she's essentially taken said vibe, and made it her battle standard. Whether it's boredom, enthusiasm, or simply a running joke that may be reaching its thresholds, Xena absolutely refuses to fall back on "Do the thing with your magic swords that you're really good at" as a plan. Instead, whenever Xena makes a move, the rest of the party braces for Macgyver poo poo, and with good reason. Now, this is awesome at times; some of the most memorable moments in the campaign were the result of a Xena plan reaching fruition. The downside? Some of the most mockable moments in the campaign also tend to be the result of said plans. With that out of the way, I'd like to bring up some examples, in ascending order of quality. THE BAD -Deciding to throw pebbles at flying skulls, instead of using her perfectly serviceable gun. I decide to flavor it as doing minuscule damage, but allowing her to hit a few targets instead of being a simple single target attack. Combat halts for an obscene amount of time as she slowly chooses how to dish out her minimal damage between the foes, and I immediately regret my decision. The party makes jokes about throwing rocks at enemies for several sessions until the joke is mercifully run into the ground. -Cutting down several trees "in case she needed them" and building an elaborate mechanism to move the tree trunks. Attempts to overcome a spike pit obstacle by building a bridge, proudly bringing up the fact that she had taken a book out on Carpentry from the library several sessions ago to apply a bonus to her roll. Meanwhile, the rest of the party overcomes the pit trap via a variety of interesting methods including flight, mad Frog-Human based jumps, cheating reality with a Hastur Icon Success, and "simply walking over the spikes like a badass" in the Monk's case. -Trying to make spiders slip on their webs with oil somehow? This plan was never fully realized, because as soon as Xena tried to explain it, the rest of the party collectively sighed. -Literally resorting to jabbing an enemy with a sharpened stick rather than use her swords. Her rationale? "Well, I saw this thing on the History Channel about how the Celts would totally use sharp sticks to remove the organs of their enemies during battle, so..." At this point, I just told her to roll her melee attack without her magic weapon bonus, and planned some flavor text about stealing the enemy clown's appendix if she crit (which she didn't). THE WEIRD -Alright. The set-up here is incredible, so I'm going to roll into it. Through Icon relationship fun and oddly correlated events, Xena manages to find the remains of the Queen Anne's Revenge, Blackbeard's ship. With the help of the party, some Innsmouth day laborers, and a pinch of elbow grease, the party repairs the ship, even getting a few cannons in working order. Xena then announces that she wants to set sail for South America to acquire some venomous frogs. Rolling with it, I tell her that such frogs are considered a protected species, and that she may face some form of blowback from various habitat protection agencies, unless she has a legitimate reason. She skirts the issue, but the message gets across: "Yes, you can get your frogs, but there's the threat of some consequence". She proceeds to acquire a license by threatening a clerk at cutlass-point, legally acquire her boat registration, and set sail for South America. I take the time to introduce some various plot hooks for the rest of the party involving some ancient cult figure who calls himself the Frog King, and hint at some treasure he's guarding, ect. All in all, we get some successful plot encounters out of it, set the stage for some more rising action, and it's all good. Xena gets her frogs. So, what about these frogs was so important that she needed to lead the party through a hydra encounter, a scuffle between Interpol and another character's former gang, lots of traps, and a face-off with a semi-important cult figure? "Well, I was tired of getting poisoned in those fights with the snake cult guys earlier, so I decided to dish out some poison of my own." I believe that's the only time I've ever had a major campaign arc be motivated by something that literally could have been solved with about $10 in a shady back alley, $20 if you want the really good stuff. Not that I'm complaining; all in all, that was a very successful part of the campaign. But if this trend continues, the party may end up fighting a final boss encounter that escalated from Xena's weekend grocery list. THE GOOD -Remember those trees from earlier? As soon as Xena gets the hint that this encounter with the Frog King is coming up, the first words out of her mouth are "So, how much damage would I do with a battering ram?" The answer? A very decent amount. -One of Xena's magic items is a powerful shovel from a lost civilization, which receives more powers via gems that are conveniently scattered all over the world/behind whatever plot-line everyone in the party but Xena cares about. One of the fairly innocuous seeming powers I gave her is some magnetic force power that she has to channel to maintain. The number of times she's used this for dumb reasons is high, but the first time she did it was pretty amazing. During a gladiatorial arena fight with some Ogre-based pit fighters, Xena saves the Cleric's life by intercepting the Ogre's battle-axe, forcing the ogre to engage Xena rather than murder our Cleric, known as the Faceless. It was pretty quick-witted, and ended up being a very table-turning moment in the encounter. THE BEST The party's in a multi-wing dungeon, the Lair of the Spider Queen. It's a goofy sort of dungeon, with each wing vastly different from the last. The idea's to capture the chaotic nature of the boss, and as to how well it achieved that design goal is an entirely different matter. The vital context is, one of the wings is known as the Kennel. The Kennel is, supposedly, where the Spider Queen's mighty guard dog is located. Xena has been harping on this Kennel for weeks now, and as a result, the party decided to take on the Kennel last. It should be noted that Xena is essentially the least-likable member in the party, which is saying something in a group that contains a malicious demon mafia member who would absolutely sell his grandmother for more power. Her plans are interesting, and her story's okay, but Xena's player portrays her as self-interested to the highest fault (when asked for aide in ending the people of Innsmouth's reign of slavery over another race, Xena replied "What's in it for me?"), misanthropic (after the sorcerer, Gertz Gentile, died and was miraculously resurrected, her response was "So, can we move on or what?"), and devoid of empathy. But moving along. Finally, the party is nearing the end of the dungeon, and Xena tries a different approach. She suddenly drops the matter of wanting to go to the Kennel entirely. She instead insists they put the Kennel off for later. She also purchases a few fresh apples, and a potion of invisibility from a few merchants who have taken up residence in the dungeon. At this point the party, myself included, are extremely leery that we're in for another crazy plan... but we also want to see where this is going. So, the party reaches the Kennel, and begin their fight with a giant beastly monstrosity that can barely be called a dog, and two powerful keepers who have a tendency to engage people in psychic duels. And then Xena's plan goes into action. She immediately darts for a nearby tree, takes out her Rope of Entanglement (a completely innocuous magic item that can bind things at its owner's command), and coats it in the potion of invisibility. Then she lures the beast over with the apples, appealing to the part of the abomination that I described as "horse-like", and catches it off guard with her invisible rope snare trap, and rendering the beast helpless. The party wails on it with coup de grace galore, and the fight becomes a lot less threatening very quickly. So if anyone has a 13th Age compatible "Sierra Game Protagonist" class in the works, please let me know. Meanwhile, I'll let you know if any of my players manage to banish Dagon with a rubber chicken, a pulley, and one-thousand marble ball bearings.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2013 19:41
|
|
|
OmniDesol posted:So if anyone has a 13th Age compatible "Sierra Game Protagonist" class in the works, please let me know.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2013 20:32
|
|
|
Part Two of Cthulhu Dark --- So everyone ran upstairs, and noticed something running down the dark, spooky halls. Maxwell gets a flashback to the rat crawling down the lawyer's throat and freezes, but William bolts after, and discovers it's the groundskeeper with one of the missing knives. The groundskeeper attacks, but Caroline and Maxwell intervenes. Groundskeeper accuses Maxwell of being involved with the killings of the maids, which not only does he deny it, he had no idea the maids didn't really quit. William rounds on Maxwell, but before any fights could break out - what little light was left went out, and everyone heard skittering sounds. William runs first, Caroline follows. Maxwell ended up throwing up from the realization he living on top of a murder hole, and got delayed, so he and the groundskeeper ends up being close to the oncoming rat horde. Maxwell takes a change to try to dive through a door in the wall. I rolled and it ended up being locked, and given a maximun of four seconds to unlock it since as butler he has the master keys. I ended up rolling a four, so he just barely makes it in - along with five rats, he ends up stomping them to death. Outside he could hear the groundkeeper scream as the rats eat him alive. Everyone fails their insanity check. Once the rats had their fill and left, everyone regrouped, though it's clear that neither Caroline or William trusts Maxwell, but being thoroughly spooked and close by, they decided to follow Olivia's lead about Mimi going to talk to the dead Matriarch, and finds the door locked. Caroline evaesdrop, and overhears Mimi and the headmaid arguing, Mimi being upset that everyone was dying while Olga coldly tells her it's just a nessecary compotent and orders her to go find William and Caroline to kill them. Everyone gets ready, William's player risks Insanity (roll 2d6, keep best roll, then roll for insanity) to tackle Mimi, crits the tackle roll, and fails his insanity so Mimi ends up falling in a way she accidentally stabs herself with a knife, and he keeps beating on her. Caroline rushes in and tackles the headmaid, while Maxwell holds a knife to her, demanding answers. After some back and forth, a creaky voice tells the headmaid to explain. Basically five years ago the Jermaines found a spooky forbidden book of immortality, they tried the ritual with Alfred Jermaine, but it failed, but Sophia decided to try again and since it required the blood of relatives, she invited her family over under false pretenses, and calls the deaths the players encountered as mistakes. Of course the creaky voice was Sophia, who was actually not dead. Maxwell flips out, and starts yelling about how evil and cold Sophia was. She and the headmaid then turn on him, reciting that he was a servant, he should obey, and if he helps, he becomes immortal. He steadfastly refuses and continued to rail on the, Caroline has heard enough and kills the maid, while William sneaks towards Sophia's bed. Just then she lights her candle, revealing her withered body and the NPC relatives Todd and Maria with their throats cut (Note OOCly the players, including myself completely forgot about their wellfare). Everyone fails madness check (3/4/4 - William and Maxwell two left from going completely mad), and Maxwell ends up beating William to the punch and stabbed Sophia, who cryptically warns killing her wasn't enough. She finally falls silent, and William then sets her bed on fire. The three quickly decided to search the house for the book and destroy it, though Maxwell wants to swing by the servant's quarters and get Olivia even if it means he cans to carry her out. As they searched the house starts bleeding, and walls take on a fleshy hue, the relatives went to the basement reasoning something that forbidden wold be hidden someplace like that, while Maxwell ran to where Olivia was. The servant's quarters was quiet, and not getting a response, Maxwell breaks the door down, spraining his arm in the process. As William and Caroline went down, they discovered bodies of the maids in various states of decay, their mouths moving as if speaking - both barely passed their madness check. Maxwell goes in and discovers that Olivia had hung herself at some point, he passes the madness check, too grief-stricken to see the horror, then he hears someone whispering 'max' over and over again, as he looks up, Olivia's body swings, revealing Sophia's insane grin on her lips. He fails this madness check, and completely trashes the room in a fit of rage, while Sophia's spirit mocks him. He's a bad roll away from going completely mad. He runs to the kitchen, grabbing matches and bottles of wine, rushing to the basement, too determined to be affected by the dead maids and quickly catches up to the relatives. They found the book allright, as well as Alfred. Caroline goes to distract him with gratitous stabbings, while William tries to sneak past. Coming in late, Maxwell resorts to tossing a bottle at the creature, which breaks. Unfortunately William fumbles, and the creature whacks him, injuring him, but he manages to crawl to the book and starts stabbing it, and the book starts bleeding. Caroline starts getting overwhelmed by the creature when Maxwell lights his match, risking madness in order to set it on fire. He somehow manages to succeed both rolls. So now, they have a powerful monster flailing around while on fire. William realizes stabbing wasn't doing it as the book was healing, so he grabs the book - get imparted some ghastly knowledge including the cryptic "You will awaken here once more" then throws it at alfred, setting it on fire. Eventually the creature dies, and the fire starts spreading. William refuses to move, Maxwell tries to force him, but he tells them it's not safe for them for him to leave alive, and in an act of mercy, Caroline slits his throat as so he won't suffer in the flames, and they fled the house. Maxwell looks back in time to see the smoke forming a black hand and yanking something out of William's body. So now the butler and the niece are alive, on the brink of insanity (5 and 4) respectively as the Jermaine estate burn to the ground.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2013 20:47
|
|
|
Just want you to know I'm interested in what you're writing, Robindaybird. I've got this thread bookmarked so I read everybody's stuff.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2013 20:54
|
|
|
Kerzoro posted:The biggest one I can remember? A group of goblins... wearing amulets of True Strike. Which of course means that every one of their attacks was a critical hit. When we finally took them down, and went to loot the amulets, we were informed that the amulets didn't work anymore. To me this is the hallmark of the worst sort of DM and the complete lack of forethought and planning that this type of pukey session implies. Give the baddies a macgiffin to make them invincible and make it stop working as soon as the players get one! What I've never understood is: Was the DM hoping/planning on killing every player during that encounter? If so, gently caress that. If not, than it is inevitable that the players will get the macguffin and turn it around. The biggest crime in my opinion is how easy an encounter like that can be turned around. Why not give the goblins the exact same ability, but make it spell-based (indicated by a sinister, glowy light or some poo poo to indicate these are not "normal" goblins) that fades upon death (and requiring a natural 20 to dispell). The reason for the glow? These are the minions of a super high level baddie mage guy so suddenly has given the campaign a point, as the players will certainly want to learn this magic for themselves. Spend a bunch of levels making this mage elusive and working from the shadows until the magic ability is appropriate for the players' level and then let them fight it out, at which point the mage dies and the knowledge goes with him or they players get their hands on a musty old tome with the notes for the spell within. OmniDesol posted:
Players like this can be hit and miss, with moments of genius and moments of horrible tedium. My gaming group has a phrase that we use when the game gets bogged down in minutia "...and Im-a gonna buy my Aunt Gussy A dress" that gets bandied about when a shopping spree goes on too long, or a meticulously crafted plan goes too deep into what color the disguise should be. As a GM I have a hard time reigning this in sometimes because two of my players insist on being stoned when we game, so they can easily get distracted as they lovingly describe what the hilt of a newly purchased dagger looks like. But those same stoned players have moments of brilliant roleplaying when the foppish rogue pulls out a handkerchief and dabs some previously purchased perfume on it before tying it around his face to descend into the city sewers...
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2013 21:59
|
|
|
Agrikk posted:To me this is the hallmark of the worst sort of DM and the complete lack of forethought and planning that this type of pukey session implies. Give the baddies a macgiffin to make them invincible and make it stop working as soon as the players get one! What I've never understood is: Was the DM hoping/planning on killing every player during that encounter? If so, gently caress that. If not, than it is inevitable that the players will get the macguffin and turn it around. Yeah it doesn't help that, you know, rolling over a 20 meant that body parts began to fly around. Lets see, other things from that adventure... We didn't have clerics, but we had druids, meaning that on death, being had to get reincarnated. The 3.0 table for reincarnation was goddamned terrible, and it was a goddamned miracle we managed to talk the DM down to letting us, you know, reincarnate into USEFUL RACES instead of a bird or something. Evil Monks that threw around Beads of Force. I don't know if its a valid strategy or not but it was a BORING ONE, sine it effectively put people out of a fight. DMNPC that sent us to fight against an army of orcs, without an army to backup. We spent a session making plans based on what we knew (orcs had FLAMETHROWERS, so we thought that hey, because we could make their tanks blow the hell up). I wasn't in the next session but we were informed that our plans pretty much never worked (tanks could not be pierced/exploded). I think that was the last session, actually. ... before that... an evil guy that, on death, possessed a random PC member with no save. It happened to be me. I didn't die, since it left when I was under half-health, but I don't know if that was actually the plan or because I was glaring murder at him from across the table. This wasn't the first time I glared him at that. The FIRST time I glared at him like that was in a similar loss-control-of-our-character moment, when we stayed in a temple to a goddess of "love". Which meant that, during the night, every party member had a visit to have sex. Those that refused were force into it (I was one of the ones that refused). And to add insult to injury, people that went along with it got a stat bonus and those that didn't got level drained or something... oh wait, yeah, our total HP was permanently halved. I straight up told the DM that if he didn't reverse that, I would start killing everybody in the goddamned temple, and the other affected were with me. He didn't exactly reverse it, but he did give everybody scrolls of restoration. It was probably less the temple thing and more than we looked royally pissed off. I was -still- angry after that, but I still wanted to play, so... ... of course, I think that was the party that got eaten by the barguest. So yeah, those were my first game experiences.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 14:23
|
|
|
Kerzoro posted:So yeah, those were my first game experiences. And you stuck around? Why? Seriously, I think if those had been my first experiences I'd have walked out and not come back.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 14:48
|
|
|
My first D&D game was similarly awful but really just dull. It was 2e and the DM made a wizard for me, but since he sucked at making characters, my character was pretty crap. We started in a colosseum to fight random stuff for some reason, then moved to killing random things in the woods which never ended. He also had a houserule that you could take a -4 to go for a headshot and kill anything instantly, so we all just made rangers after that and took headshots until he decided he didn't like D&D anymore (about 3 sessions).
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 15:42
|
|
|
neonchameleon posted:And you stuck around? Why? Seriously, I think if those had been my first experiences I'd have walked out and not come back. Because, beneath all the horribleness, there was something fun. I tried DMing afterwards, and did somewhat OK, made mistakes, and burned out because holy poo poo, DMing for 10 people. But hell, it calls to my storytelling itch. I had fun experiences with some online RP, including a -fantastical- game based on Resident Evil using the d10 system. I would also have some fun experiences with other groups (and some meh ones), but nothing quite as bad as that first experience, so I guess... it went ok?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 16:48
|
|
|
I think I just dodged a bullet on a worst game experience. I was talking with a couple guys after board game night at the FLGS, and the subject of role-playing games came up. I got excited and volunteered to DM something, only to have one of the prospective players
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 16:53
|
|
|
I always try to remember that when you're starting out with RPGs, the lure of having a game, even a bad one, is more attractive than avoiding the poo poo. I've endured a whole lot of crap for my great experiences. Luckily I found a group that was more consistently good than bad, although we still had bizarre things like the Nezumi thief using snake pheromones to mask his scent to sneak into a naga's lair (and then apparently seducing and sleeping with her, although mercifully nobody wanted to hear the description. I still wonder why the GM even brought it up as a possibility, though. Maybe was trying to be a dick to the nezumi's player and went too far.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 16:54
|
|
|
On the subject of WoD from a few pages ago: It really makes me sad that people have introductions to WoD that are either fetishy or exclusionary in an OOC sort of way. I think this can happen with any random shitlord but it's exacerbated by the fact that WoD players tend to be cliquish and somewhat marginalized. And when they congregate in LARPs it can get even more confusing. Anyhow: Rahns posted:Séan and Risk Legacy, Oh man, Risk Legacy. Names have been changed to protect identities. Spoilers ahead. Do not read spoilers if you ever have any intention of playing Risk Legacy. Seriously don't. So my friend Aaron and I decided to pick up Legacy because it looked pretty fun. We weren't huge Risk fans but we agreed the basic premise was fun on paper. Adding in the permanent board changes and relatively quick victories was bound to improve things. Right? No. Wrong. We had some sort of gentleman's agreement where you couldn't change factions. I know that was wrong, but after two games it was so entrenched that two of the other players - Ben and Bill - threatened to walk away from the table if we changed back to the official rules. I've had people tell me that not-changing factions can lead to problems but for the most part it only impacted a few very minor aspects of play (we'll get to that in a moment). I've never had a game's promise ruined so spectacularly. To those of you who don't know, Legacy tries to fight the very parts of Risk that make it insufferable. Victory tends to make a given player stronger, because they get home bases and poo poo, but massive, permanent, affects-all-future-games style changes help break that up. For instance Ben had won three times and was becoming very entrenched in North America. There was some envelope that said you could only open it when like 5 or 10 missiles (missiles were a currency used to add bonuses or penalties to dice rolls) were used on the same attack. Hang on. Spoilers. Don't read if you don't want to know what happens. Ben and Aaron were fighting over the Florida region of North America and the two of them decide they want to force this envelope to open because they're curious. I think this is game 5 or so. Anyway, they open it, and it informs them that most of North America is now irradiated, black is now white, and everything sucks there now. Ben threatened to stop playing right there - after all, this was his region, he had spent so much time fortifying it, and now all of his carefully selected bonuses had become liabilities! Luckily the same envelope introduced the Mutant faction, who benefit from irradiation, and he justified that his whole faction had become Mutants and that seemed to keep things stable for a while. But it got really heated. So with that little problem solved, we pushed on to game seven and eight. I think we were all just starting to have fun again. But then there was Bill. Bill had, as is always predictable, decided that Australia was the place to be. Keep in mind this is a game where you get to select your starting area and this sort of thing isn't even supposed to happen. Both Ben and Bill would take it personally when you tried to claim 'their' preferred regions of the map. Bill however, wasn't just annoyed - he would frequently take it as a slight against him and fancied himself a kingmaker, always trying to sabotage or deal with players who troubled or pleased him. He had systematically made it impossible through a series of board changes for anyone to start in Australia but him; and even though he would frequently build up his forces to absurd numbers, became personally offended when anybody chose to attack him, even after he demonstrated that he would arbitrarily decide it would be funny to steamroll Asia. He had become unassailable. By game 8, he was starting to gain ground more and more consistently and most of us became concerned he had already 'won' the game. More spoilers ahead. There is another envelope, whose conditions I forget (it might even be the 'don't open this envelop' envelop') that introduces some sort of UFO faction. The important part is that it creates a new landmass in the ocean and creates at least 2 new sea paths between continents. We decided that Bill had become too entrenched and placed a path from Africa to Australia so he had more than one front. He instantly quit the game. After 8 games, he just said that was it, he wouldn't play under these conditions. With him gone, the whole campaign fell apart. I had a similar experience with the Spartacus boardgame but that's a story for another day.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 19:31
|
|
|
I think the lesson we can take away here is, 'switch factions between games of Risk Legacy, because the designers know you won't, and will gently caress you over it.' Interesting way to deal with degenerate games. Pity about the degenerate players, though.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 19:54
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:I think the lesson we can take away here is, 'switch factions between games of Risk Legacy, because the designers know you won't, and will gently caress you over it.' Some of the problem with that is the some Legacy board-states give bonuses to founding players, father than founding factions, which is problematic. For instance, cities belong to players, not factions. If it had been factions, it would have been much, much easier. In fact the only thing that faction really gets you - aside from their various abilities and upgrades - is the 'home' continent, which grants a bonus so small I don't even remember what it is.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2013 20:57
|
|
|
Not mine but I think it fits here.quote:I was DM for a game and sent my players to explore a dungeon. Inside the dungeon were "tests" based on the Gods their characters worshiped. When they passed one of these tests, they were given a Magic Flying Carpet.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 02:48
|
|
|
That DM sounds like a horrible jerk. If I was the wizard's player I'd just quit after that. ***** So last night we had our backstab-session of Rogue Trader, and things went into interesting places. Group was the standard group of miscreants, Weirdboy, both Explorators, Tau Loyalist priest and the False man. At the end of the last session we'd had some minor exploration challenges after landing on a mysterious planet where we were supposed to find the head Magos of the Explorator fleet, get his report, and get him out if at all possible. The early parts of the session were a bit bland, although we soon figured out that a small bunch of Eldar were stalking us. At this point they were merely observers, spying on us to figure out if we would hinder or help them in preventing whatever catastrophe the Eldar were trying to stop. We also saw our confusing nemesis Hadark Fel crash land his lander somewhere further on from where we were traveling by ground vehicles - the very smart not at all complete moron Hadark Fel had ordered his lander to fly through a mystical storm loving up vox communications. It went about as well as one could expect. The only other notable thing that happened was me and the Missionary making a deal, that he'd help me convince my old friend Magos Biologis Noradi to go and help my Inquisition friend with his project. He only wanted to make sure that it was not gonna involve any deals with Xenos, which I stated was not gonna happen. We found the base camp of the Explorators, although only some of their bodyguard were there. We made a deal with them and got most of them to come with us to look for the Magos and his inner circle he'd took further on ahead to the center of the storm, where there was an old long abandoned xeno city. We also quickly visited the crash site of Fel's dropship, fought with some of his troops that had stayed behind and confirmed that Fel had survived and had left in a Rhino with some more household troops of his and his inner circle. Pretty unfortunate that we could not gently caress up Fel himself, especially since there was a real chance that we would end up in a situation where there was going to be some random problem from the city, us, Fel and co. plus the Eldar in a free for all. (Spoiler: this exact situation happens) We start exploring the city and identify some points of interest (and that the city belongs to an ancient long dead Xeno race called the Yu'vath, which were really bad business, and their artifacts are still causing problems), the most interesting of which is a loving gigantic tower in the middle of the city (more than a ten kilometres tall). Unfortunately, it is covered in something called Warpvine and we have zero idea how to get through, but we identify some hotspots providing psychichal energy to it. As well as a couple of other points of interest, including likely place as to where Fel went, where the Eldar are and where there's a servo-skull flying around. False-Man and the Mechanicus soldiers went towards the Eldar and Fel (after our Missionary managed to piss them off by loving up his Command roll super badly by throwing the worst possible result), the rest went with the vehicles towards where the servo-skull had been flying around. We resolved the servo-skull spot first and found Noradi - unfortunately she was under siege from native xenos beasts. We still ended up beating the poo poo out of them and rescued her from the makeshift fortress she'd put herself in. She pointed us towards a warehouseish place where the Explorators had stashed interesting stuff they'd found, so we of course headed there as soon as possible. Meanwhile our idiot of a Seneschal tried to make contact with the Eldar through some pretty stupid ways - including, but not limited to, asking the Mechanicus troops to accompany him, leaving poorly worded messages in Eldar around (taken from Low Gothic to Eldar phrasebook, including such phrases as "Don't kill me", "Hello", "One drink, please" and so on - not very useful, and Eldar don't particularily like it when someone mangles their language), leaving poorly phrased messages in Low Gothic around, shouting at them with a loudhailer and other genius decisions. He also openly used the loud hailer to suggest deals to the Eldar while the Mechanicus troops were next to him, something the Mechanicus troops did not like very much. They asked him whether this was supposed to be an ambush, even though he had not mentioned this earlier. The Seneschal sort of hosed up this whole thing and ended up using a fate to get the Mechanicus troops to leave. He finally managed to get in contact with the Eldar, a squad of five, uh, Swooping Hawks I think? Eldar with jetpacks basically though, if you count mechanical wings as jetpacks. Unfortunately, our Seneschal has no idea how to speak with Eldar and accidentally insulted them a lot, tried to bribe them with stuff he didn't have and he was generally handling the situation as badly as he could. It was a small miracle the Eldar didn't just kill him on the spot when he phrased one sentence in a really stupid way, asking the Eldar how could they serve our group if we did what they wanted. Eldar don't serve non-Eldar. He somewhow managed to convince them to go negotiate with the whole group, at which point they, uh, just sort of grabbed him without any warning and they started to fly towards the rest of the group. You sort of could've writtten a guidebook of "How Not To Deal With The Eldar" from the way the Seneschal handled the whole thing, he did probably every single possible mistake there is. When the Eldar asked why wouldn't they just kidnap him and use him as a negotiation tool with the rest, he smartly responded that the rest did not care about him at all (which is somewhat true, none of the humam members of the group give a drat about him because he somehow has kept his secrets completely secret, something our group of people with dangerous secrets does not appreciate). The group joked that despite having a super high Intelligence, the Seneschal had super low wisdom, a stat that does not exist in Rogue Trader. Would explain why everyone in our team keeps making incredibly stupid decisions which bite them in the rear end later. This is getting kinda long so I'll stop and write the rest later, but there's going to be the end of session massive fight, some marveling at loot, infighting, attempted destruction of the galaxy through carelesness (well okay maybe just Koronus Expanse, in the best case scenario just everything in the star system), Hadark Fel being a pompous idiot and other fun things. SpiritOfLenin fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Oct 18, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 13:32
|
|
|
Dr_Amazing posted:Carpet shenegians I'm of two minds: -Yes, DM's kind of a dick, and understand why the Wizard's pissed -When a DM says "Do you really want to do that?" is a big hint that the plan may have serious flaws (did no one consider how thin carpets are?)
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 18:12
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:I'm of two minds: The DM took a dying character and removed him from the rest of the party, and was actively working against the other players' plans to get the carpet down. Otherwise he'd have let them roleplay talking the carpet down, or something. It sounds like they started shooting out of desperation. DM's a dick. Byers2142 fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Oct 18, 2013 |
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 18:56
|
|
|
DM is a dick but shooting down the flying carpet is a bit of a poo poo plan, too. It's a magic item, its capacity to act as an airfoil isn't the issue here.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 19:17
|
|
|
The GM should have played out the carpet's death scene like it was straight out of Old Yeller. That'd teach his players not to gently caress with him.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 19:40
|
|
|
Green Intern posted:The GM should have played out the carpet's death scene like it was straight out of Old Yeller. That'd teach his players not to gently caress with him. Did the carpet even die? Sounds like it would have just gotten a few small holes put into it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 19:45
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:-When a DM says "Do you really want to do that?" is a big hint that the plan may have serious flaws (did no one consider how thin carpets are?) If we're going to go this route then the DM should've improvised some kind of roll to see whether the wizard was hit (I'm assuming that even a prone human is small in comparison to any meaningfully large magic carpet) as opposed to going 'well you automatically hit your friend, good job'.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 19:48
|
|
|
Okay - yeah I missed the "Failure to coax", and that moves it directly to "DM is dick". I just skipped over it and assumed the players started shooting first without trying anything else.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 20:08
|
|
|
yaoi prophet posted:If we're going to go this route then the DM should've improvised some kind of roll to see whether the wizard was hit (I'm assuming that even a prone human is small in comparison to any meaningfully large magic carpet) as opposed to going 'well you automatically hit your friend, good job'. Yeah, especially when we're talking about trained archers/crossbowmen here; it's not like they have no capacity to aim, and a prone human is most likely going to be in the center of the carpet, especially if the carpet is partially sentient and at all cares for its cargo.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 20:08
|
|
|
Sounds like the DM just didn't like the wizard. He's literally dangling a dying PC over the heads of the rest of the party. "Oh no, Wizard needs healing badly, but the magic carpet just won't come down. Guess you'll just have to watch him bleed to death. Oh, you want to shoot the carpet down since it can't be persuaded? Looks like you killed the wizard anyways." 
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 20:40
|
|
|
They should have used flaming arrows.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 21:17
|
|
|
Could you please not destroy Koronus Expanse, thanks in advance, part deux So while our Seneschal was loving up his negotiations with the Eldar, the rest of us were busy looting a warehouse filled with curious artifacts that the official Ad Mech Explorators had found. We found a few pretty good items, a decent flamer for our Missionary, a couple of Eldar weapons (one of which I think was a Dark Eldar weapon), a cloak with a prototype Force Field in it and... a Necron plasma drive. It took up most of the space in the warehouse, and Magos Noradi was sorta confused about it, she wasn't sure how they'd even found it, got it there or what had made it or so on (something both of our Explorators figured out despite the utterly ridiculous -50 Forbidden Lore check). Quite understandably, we did not grab the Necron Plasma Drive yet since carrying it around would be somewhat difficult. Instead we moved on to our next point of interest, the source of the effect that hosed up all vox communication near the city. We quickly decided to leave it alone since blowing it up would help our nemesis Hadark Fel as much as it would help us, so dealing with him would be done first. Also we had little idea as to how we could gently caress up the crystal thing without causing a minor warp explosion, which would be very bad. Also we didn't actually have enough explosives, so that kinda made it difficult as well. So we headed towards one of the energy sources to figure out a way to perhaps shut it off. We soon realized that it was a Yu'vath device that was siphoning warp energy into the big tower in the middle, causing the Warpvine to be a problem. There was unsurprisingly another Yu'vath device there, a large crystal surrounded by small crystal pylons. We figured out that the pylons directed the warp energy towards the structure in the middle of the city, and that without them the energy would just gather in the crystal until it overloads and Things Become Bad. So we started to try and figure out a way to stop the output of energy towards the structure, preferably in a way that would not involve warp explosions. Our Missionary ended up getting bored while the Explorators and the Weirdboy were trying to figure out how to solve this conundrum - eventually he hopped on our land speeder and told our elite pilot to drive towards the other structure. The Psyker Explorator and the Weirdboy ended up having rather... interesting suggestions on how to stop the warp energy from going to the middle pylon, things such as "let's just gently caress up one pylon, so not as much power goes to the structure and when the explosion happens later it's gonna be WORSE - but don't worry, I'm sure we figure out a way to safely dismantle it before that, certainly" or the genius idea by the Weirdboy, "let's set up a loop - let's put this device to feed energy to the other device, and make it feed power to this one, and most of the energy is constantly in motion in air! Foolproof, can't fail!". Needless to say both ideas were very bad - the GM laughed out loud at the Weirdboy's plan, its effects would have been unbelieavably horrible. My character figured out that all of this was probably what the Eldar had warned us about when they'd left us the prerecorded conversation, loving around with warp energy was probably what was going to cause whatever they were afraid about. Since my Genetor knew enough about Eldar and warp-stuff to realize that she kept trying to stop the other two dolts from causing the apocalypse by vetoing every plan as "loving stupid and probably going to cause the apocalypse". Thankfully the Eldar arrived in the nick of time before someone broke something, unceremoniously dropping the Seneschal on top of our Ork - our Missionary also noticed their arrival and turned back, hoping to get there in time to do something about the Eldar. The Eldar immediately started chastising us and told us to stop loving with the Yu'vath device while I gave a quick debrief to the Seneschal:  : "What are you doing here?" : "These two dolts almost blew up the galaxy." : "Uh, that's pretty bad. Good thing they didn't"The Eldar mentioned that they'd been negotiating with our Seneschal, and that they thought we were bloody idiots. I also mentioned that I'd give 'em an an Eldar artifact later after this whole poo poo blows down since I didn't want to keep worrying about Eldar coming after me to retrieve it (and selling it would probably have the same effect) - after which they promptly told me our Seneschal had already promised them that. They were not very amused when I told them that the Seneschal had no loving idea where I'd stashed it, and that he wouldn't have been able to get it to them, but at least they regarded my Genetor neutrally, even if our Seneschal had hosed up their first impression of us. They were even less amused when our Missionary arrived and started shouting at them and us, cursing the Eldar and seeming suspiciously hostile to them all things considered, what with him fist bumping . It's not like he was usually that hostile towards Xenos... The Seneschal and the Missionary shouted at each other, at the rest of us, at the Eldar and generally speaking everyone was shouting at each other for different reasons. After we'd been yelling at everyone for a while the GM started drawing a combat map... SUDDENLY A LOUD BLARING VOICE COMING FROM AN IDIOT WITH A LOUDHAILER:  : THIS PLANET BELONGS TO HADARK FEL NOW! YOU ARE ALL TRESPASSING IN FELOPOLIS! STAND DOWN AND SURRENDER! OR DIE!   : gently caress YOU FEL!Hadark Fel had arrived with his horde of household troops, officers and a loving Rhino from where he was shouting, loudhailer in one hand and a bolt pistol in another, and he was going to ruin everything by sheer incompetence. We'd help though. I'll write up the final combat encounter later because it got really silly and had a shitload of stuff happening in it, and it was a three way battle with the added problem of the Xenos device being in the middle of the whole goddamn combat. Fourway if you count some infighting and death threats within the party because our secret missions started to conflict...
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2013 23:06
|
|
|
I finally had a game session that I think qualified for best experiences tonight. For those who don't know, noted excellent game Feng Shui is coming back to life. Atlas is planning a second edition, and as a result is running player test sessions in the old first edition. Tonight was one of the very first ones, and I was there! IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THAT ADVENTURE AND WANT TO PARTAKE IN ONE OF THESE PLAYTESTS, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T READ THIS POST. Six people makes for hell of chaos. My attention was divided between the book and the table towards the start so I don't remember everything. We had: -Hua Pang, the Ninja, easily our most competent member despite having some of the WORST rolls; -The Private Investigator, whose name I don't remember and who played more like an Everyman Hero; -The Gambler, whose name I also don't remember, but who was also quite competent; -Ray Sherman, the Journalist, played by myself as a sort of Hunter Thompson sendup with the group's biggest pistol; -Old Man Fu, the Old Master, who was easily the most colorful player; -and Sam, the Killer, and the token Brit, who was also by far the most merciless. If I can get names off my fellow players I'll fill those in. We ran through the default adventure, opening in the Eating Counter with Happy Cheng and a busload of Poison Thorn mooks rolling in to wreck the place. They went after the Killer and the Old Master first, which was not a wise decision. Fu managed to kill and/or disable three mooks with chopsticks and a bowl of noodles, while admonishing them for "DISRESPECTING THE NOODLE!" The P.I. opened up on the mooks, who returned a hail of fire and managed to wing me in the shoulder. I then proceeded to drop behind the table and return random fire while "screaming incoherently about fascists". One of the mooks turned out to be intelligent ("he even has most of his teeth still"), and returned this with equally incoherent yelling about communists. The Gambler managed to sneak out with his girlfriend and then back in while the rest of us were getting shot up. Happy Cheng managed to soak up a shot from the P.I., a knife through the hand from the Ninja, and two hits of a Flying Windmill Kick from the Old Master before the mooks took the old lady hostage (having had the Killer take out about six of them). The P.I. and I then BOTH managed to miss aimed shots (including one with a fortune die), and were forced to let them run. At least they didn't kill her. We then took notes, patched ourselves up, compared accounts, and tried to interrogate the surviving mook. Failing at this, the Killer just dispatches him, which I wasn't really thrilled about. We then proceeded to Fast Eddie Lo to inform him that maybe he needed to step up here. I went in with the Old Master, who proceeded to be extremely crotchety but in all the right ways. It was at about this point that some kind of gospel group started up in the room next door to us and proceeded to be EXTREMELY loud for most of the rest of the game, which we eventually agreed was some kind of horrible radio station that everyone in Yamantai was listening to for some reason. I had a great time playing grift to the hilt, and we got a favor out of Eddie (never called in, at least not yet) and learned that the Poison Thorn’s boss was called Sneezy Tang, in exchange for going to gently caress up some idiots at a construction site. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew drank really lovely alcohol, the Gambler nearly picked a fight with the Aussie bartender, and the P.I. ducked into the bathroom at the Bun Festival to reload for some reason, which we agreed meant his gun now was loaded with "gonorrhea bullets". Off to the construction site! Most of the crew attempted to sneak in while I stood guard by the cars, since I had no Intrusion score and didn't want to risk it. The sneaking went well until the P.I. ran into a huge load of pipe, which alerted everyone. Cue a mook coming out of one of the shacks and staring wordlessly at the P.I. "...We're lost!" Aaaand now we're fighting ten mooks. This time we kick their faces in without taking any damage I can remember. We also save a barrister, who they brought down to fill out a contract for some reason! Turns out, it's for transfer of the Eating Counter to some guy called Tai Yu (which I made my best roll of the session to decipher, with a 20 Journalism. It’s not a game layout that features a ton of non-combat so I felt very happy!). Additionally, there were some maps in the shack that pointed out that the Eating Counter was very important, in ways none of us could understand (guess what? No-one in the party had Info: Magic!). We make tracks back to the Eating Counter, to find old Chan nearly hysterical—the Thorns have kidnapped his niece! Heinous, and now all six of us are fully in. We devise an intricate plan that includes securing the hostage and disguising the Old Master as Chan—which sadly necessitates the sacrifice of his magnificent mustache. Finally, we arrive at the tenement where this transfer is supposed to go down. The Ninja goes up the side of the building first, climbs in the window, snaps the guard’s neck, and lowers the niece back down to the ground with NO-ONE noticing. Then he climbs back up, we send Chan and his niece off, and we go in. The Old Master fools the sentry at the front desk before poleaxing him out, and we all go up. He makes it to the door of the apartment before we collectively decide “gently caress it, no risk anymore. Guns blazing!” The P.I. rolls highest initiative for the third time that night, steps around the corner. quote:Mook 1: “WHAAAAT THE FUUUUCK IS THIS!” Cue the GM launching into the most screechy-voiced, melodramatic character ever coming from inside the apartment. He orders the girl shot—the Ninja kills the guy who goes to do it and fakes the shooting. We proceed to destroy all the mooks in the hallway, which included my first kill of the session when I climbed up to the landing and DESTROYED a fool by swinging my portable typewriter at his head. This Machine Kills Fascists! Having achieved that, we bash through into the apartment. Sure enough, there’s Happy, a weasely-looking rear end in a top hat who immediately pegs himself as Sneezy, and a guy who is described as “ageless” with a voice like an air raid siren who we immediately proceed to annoy as much as we can by referring to him as “old” and “annoying”. THAT’S Tai Yu, and he’s wearing what appear to be integrated flamethrowers. Priority one, apart from dismantling the other mooks and putting a ton of bullets into Sneezy, was for the Ninja to cut the flamethrower tubes. Guess what? That didn’t stop him! He just starts conjuring fire from his loving hands. Guess who’s a magician! We dismantle the mooks, and between me finally rolling shots that hit and the Killer being as efficient as ever, we tear Sneezy Tang apart. While this is going on, Happy Cheng juggernauts out of the apartment into the hall and whiffs like three times against the Old Master. The real problem is Tai Yu. Nobody can hit him, he burns bullets out of midair, and every time someone DOES hit him, he gets more screechy and annoying. Eventually the P.I. just starts tearing crap out of the apartment kitchen to throw at him, while the Ninja hits a run of incredible bad luck with rolls and whiffs about four times. Between the Gambler, the P.I., and the Killer throwing everything including bits of the kitchen sink at him, we finally manage to force him to blow out the window, whereupon he jetpacks the gently caress out on two jets of flame, screeches at us about how this isn’t over, and flies off. While this has been going on, the rest of us have been slowly chipping away at Happy Cheng. Finally, he decides he’s had enough, and bull-rushes the Ninja. Straight out the side of the apartment. Which is ten floors up. Bear in mind, the Ninja has no fortune dice. “Gamblers have fortune. Ninja have SKILL!” Mercifully, the Ninja’s dice finally come back around to him, and he rolls TWO boxcars in a row and then succeeds. This means that he flips Happy Cheng around in midair, kicks off him, and lands in a dumpster, taking 13 damage out of the THIRTY-FIVE from the drop, which combines with the fifteen from Tai Yu setting his head on fire earlier to just barely not kill him. Cheng hit the pavement like the mountain he was and made about as big of a crater. Then we wrapped, the session ended, and we wrote down impressions for the playtesting. It KICKED rear end. Hopefully the Lost Ones will meet again for another adventure.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2013 06:41
|
|
|
I chronicled this a bit in #badwrongfun, but I'm told it's worth putting in here. So, I just moved to town for grad school. Not only did I move, I didn't know a single person here when I moved, save for a single phone conversation with my adviser. I made friends with my roommates, and a couple other grad students, but I had that itch. You know the one, or you wouldn't be here. I needed some D&D, and I needed it bad. I had taken a year off after graduating, and thus hadn't played with my (incredible, amazing, responsible-for-all-my-stories-in-this-thread) undergrad group in something like 16 months. After a couple attempts to find folks through online sources and meeting some very nice people who unfortunately couldn't meet very consistently, I decided to try a shot at an actual, dedicated RPG group. I had never been a member before, my old undergrad group was a collection of non-RPG friends and Greek system people I'd met through charity work and the like. Anyway, long story short I found out that there were precisely two groups in town: a Pathfinder group (ugh) and a group at the university. The university group had a forum with threads for a variety of systems (that I would later realize were spaced years apart and inactive), but their weekly meetings were D&D 3.5 and only 3.5. But, what the hell, I figured I'd take a shot at it. The first red flag was the 60-page .pdf of backstory and homebrew classes for their campaign world. It wasn't great but hell, I'm guilty of terribly embarrassing nerdy endeavors like that myself, so who am I to judge? Making it mandatory and cutting out other classes/prestige classes in favor for their poorly-balanced homebrew ones was weird, but alright. The second red flag was that you were randomly assigned a DM during the meeting. Oookay, that's a bit strange but hey, maybe it's conducive to meeting new people. Except it meant that parties were disparate levels. Like, level 1s with level 4s disparate. That level 1 barbarian I was playing looked *considerably* more useless alongside the level 4 wizard. To top it off, the module began with a 20-minute exposition dump from the bartender that managed to hint at cool things and then immediately snatch them away ("You're currently in the city of Nomad, an ancient citadel that literally moves around on eldritch machinery." "Oh that's cool, so we-" "Oh it's currently stuck though and hasn't moved in years." "Oh.") over and over again. I'm vaguely-ashamed to admit that I made an excuse and left. Then got hammered and went to a party. I went back the next week, hoping to find some people to snipe into making a new group. I had some nibbles that first meeting ("We'd like to start our own group, but don't have a DM.") but got interrupted by random-game-time starting. Got dumped into another party where I was the only level 1. I had gotten a text about a party going on back at my place, immediately made another excuse and left. But this week... this week I was determined. I was going to finish a whole game. A whole game of 3.5. I hadn't done it in high school, but I'm gonna do it dammit! I had a brand new Cleric of Kord, dedicated to Personal Fitness, that is I'm all about lookin' good and feelin' good, my brothers. His name was Jacques (  ), and I thought he was a pretty neat concept for a one-off and I was excited to play him. Anyway, 5:30pm, we get started. Our DM, in a sullen monotone, describes how we were all in a tavern looking at the adventure board. "You see there are several notices on the board, mostly your run-of-the-mill stuff like a farmer having wolf problems, but one catches your eye. A rich collector is interested in a <I don't remember the actual name but a velociraptor, basically.>""Sweet, I vote we go check out those wolves because doggies " "Nah, that'd be too boring."Um, alright, a bit railroad-y, but I suppose that's the nature of the beast here. Maybe we can- "Are there any other notices?" another player asks. "Yeah, there's one more. A guy wants you to go hunt one of these. <points to the MM picture of the Terrasque>" "gently caress yeah, let's go do that. I vote we go in through the eyes." "No, it's massive, there's no way you'd be able to beat it." "Pffft, just means it's easier to get the drop on it! C'mon guys let's go-" "No, it's impossible."Okay, well, that's alright. Let's go charter a ship out to Dinosaur Island or whatever then. "It requires a Gather Information check."To find a boat? In a city? A port city? Alright, we shall persevere. After several tries, we finally manage to track down a captain who's passing that way. "He says 'Well, I'd be willing to take you, but you'd have to clear it with the Guild first, of course.' They're over by-" "I'm gonna try and convince him to take us anyway." "You can't-" "27! For diplomacy." "*Hems and haws* Well, alright, he offers to take you for twice the normal amount of gold." ! A concession to expediency and player agency! Hooray! Maybe this will be fun now that we're under way. (I made a recording around this point, if you hate yourself and have time to kill. This actually covers ~30 minutes, but the recording keeps dropping out because there'd be several long, soul-crushing moments of silence that the app cuts out)The ship leaves, and we all have to make a fortitude save. Only the fighter saves. He is now Sickened (-2 to all rolls) for the remainder of the session. From seasickness. The hardy fighter has crippling seasickness for several hours after getting back on land. Alright, that's... kinda dumb, but whatever. We arrive on the beach to find... nothing. Just empty beach. Any villages? No. Any creatures visible from here? No. Smoke, ruins, anything? No. Ranger searches for tracks. Fails. I figure maybe this is a could time to give the DM some ideas for mixing it up a bit, maybe. "Hmmm, are we sure these are mundane animals? If they're evil, or maybe agents of chaos, I could help track them down. Oh, or maybe they're shapeshifters or something like that? I can look for their aura that way." "Nope, just normal monsters."Ranger looks for tracks again. Fails. Checks one more time, fails. Remembers that taking 20 is a thing. Success! Turns out there were tracks all along! Tracks from the wrong kind of dinosaur. This one's an herbivore, we're looking for a carnivore. After several IRL minutes of arguing about what to do, I and the fighter decide to follow them anyway. Then we're told we can't follow them, only the ranger can. Finally he elects to follow them, and we find a group of herbivores in the clearing. The herbivores are <giant Ankylosaurus that we could never in a million years beat>, but they're being stalked by a group of <thing we have to find>. We're informed that there's no way we'd survive against the pack of carnivores (bullllshit, I know how 3.5 works, between me and the monk I'm pretty sure we could take down a dragon). We have another discussion about how best to capture one of the carnivores. For 60. Minutes. I counted. Sixty minutes we discussed how to best capture one of these things. Everything from building a rudimentary deer stand to leaving and trying to find a lone one. The fight-or-flight responses of herbivores was discussed, and whether that applied to dinosaurs, going back and hiring an NPC, various elaborate traps and ruses... finally I came up with a plan. "Alright, we wait until the carnivores attack, I'll drop an Obscuring Mist, put one of them in a headlock, and we're golden. Oh wait, I don't have Obscuring Mist prepped. Alright, same plan, but gently caress hiding. Hiding's against my religion anyway."Finally the ranger (with DM prompting) remembers that he has Animal Empathy. For 35 minutes we lure one of the things over, and the Ranger repeatedly empathizes with it, finally managing to get it to the point of not actively wanting to eat him. There's more discussion about relating DCs of Handle Animal and how long Animal Empathy takes to work before I'm fed up and say: "gently caress it, I'm putting it in a head lock." I was kind of hoping the DM would, like any good DM when faced when 3.5 grapple rules, just sigh and let me do it, but no, he has all the grapple rules memorized. So I fail the grapple. The thing comes just shy of one-shotting the fighter (who's two levels higher than me), I say forget it to head-locking it again and dejectedly decide to just cleave it in half with my greatsword. So I do so. It gets knocked unconscious.We tie it up, then drag it back to the boat. End of module. That's it. No denouement, no anti-poaching paladins trying to stop us, no nothing. The DM puts his books away and finishes up a pre-gen character he had been working on, everyone is asking about whether there's another game after this one ( "Normally there would be, but I'm going to <local LARP> tonight."). I tear my sheet in half and toss it in the recycling. "Oh, are you going to make a new character next time? Your guy was pretty unoptimized." "Oh, no. I gave it a shot, but I just hate 3.5 too much. Sorry."And thus ends my involvement with the university RPG club  .tl;dr: Went to the university D&D club. Made me pick complete and utter loneliness over actually playing RPGs.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2013 09:25
|
|
|
You had the right opinion when you left the first two times, but the fact you got pushed around for hours instead of discussing play expectations...kind of mega-lame.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2013 10:01
|
|
|
Which University, out of interest (for those of us who have been vaguely considering our clubs and may wish now to avoid them).
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2013 10:06
|
|
|
I'm continually surprised by how many DMs have no capability of noticing when their players are bored. I play in IRC these days but when no one says anything for a couple of minutes I ask what is up, is this boring, what can I do to make this more fun for you? And my players, being good players, will say "just not feeling this whole survival thing, can we monologue the trek across the demon wastes and get to the good bit?" or "sorry, roommate came home and I had to talk to him" or whatever. I guess it just seems silly to me to sit around for hours waiting for something to happen when the first hour is just sitting around being told that you can't get ye flask.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2013 17:35
|
|
|
Hadark Fel hits the fan or why secret personal missions are not always a good idea So the final encounter of the session was about to start with the arrival of Hadark Fel and after a few short moments of insults, everyone drew their weapons and got ready to murderize each other. On the one side was Fel with his Navigator, Arch-Militant, Missionary, Rhino and horde, in the middle the Eldar, a Yu'vath crystal device, the Genetor, Weirdboy with his retinue and our Seneschal, a bit to the side was the Psyker Explorator with his ridiculous giant servoskull as well as Magos Noradi and her servitors, and finally to the north was our Missionary and our Landspeeder. Missionary acted first and did the dumbest possible thing: He shot at the Eldar with the Landspeeder's heavy bolter. There was a reason for this, his secret mission had something to do with not doing any deals with the Eldar so the best way to do this would be to kill them of course. This action still prompted some face palms from both the Genetor and Seneschal who had been hoping for a peaceful resolution with the Eldar, and this meant that our whole combat was going to be a convoluted mess now. The first turn had a lot of posturing but not much results, I convinced the Eldar that I would try to resolve this peacefully (so they didn't shoot at me), Fel was an idiot and didn't understand that accidentally shooting at the Yu'vath device was a bad idea, Orks teleported after Fel's sniper Arch-Militant (and grabbed the Seneschal in tow) and in what was to become a trend, the Horde got a debilitating status effect from a Scare grenade. Oh right, the Psyker Explorator tried to murder Magos Noradi. She'd taken cover in the mouth of the giant servoskull, after which the Psyker Explorator activated the Melta-Cutter installed in the skull's mouth, wounding her quite badly. Everyone saw and heard this happen, and my Genetor got somewhat angry at the fact that her fellow Tech-Priest attempted to murder someone crucial to her only hope of retaining her humanity. There was some angry screeching, threats of destruction, exposure as a heretek and other things thrown around. Fel's Arch-Militant at some point charged me and afterwards left me alone after I convinced him that right now I wanted to murder our other Explorator far more than I wanted to murder him - as a fellow lunatic he agreed to the peace and went off to do other stuff. I spent most of the rest of the fight shouting angrily at our other Explorator, and she did cease her murder attempts - mostly because she was a bit nervous about the prospect of my character just coming and murdering her, something she would be more than capable of (and if the murder attempt would not work, she had more than enough evidence to give to the closest Inquisitor/Ad Mech representative to have the Psyker burn). Apparantely the Psyker Explorator had got a secret mission to ensure that Magos Noradi would not report to Ad Mech higher ups; she had info from a 'reliable source' that Noradi was a spy. The Psyker had actually gotten her secret mission from a not-at-all-suspicious ethereal fire in which there was a note. She did end up realizing that killing Noradi was not actually necessary, and that she would not be talking to anyone but a radical Inquisitor who wouldn't give a gently caress if I would have my way, so in the end the Psyker agreed to spare Noradi - she still kept her distance from the Genetor since she was standing below the Servo Skull and looking a bit unhinged. It was a bit of a worrying moment OOC actually, there was no way my character would not attempt to kill the other Explorator if Noradi died - and it was also frustrating when he started his murder attempt that I did not really have any way of stopping him from killing the NPC if he wanted, besides IC shouting. There were similar frustrations with the Missionary's player, his secret mission against the Eldar ended up forcing him to go against the wishes of the majority of the party and there was some frustration all around. Thankfully we somewhat resolved the issues (although with the Missionary's case IC his character just had to suffer the consequences of hating on the Eldar), and our GM isn't probably going to give more missions that are so counter productive as these. This whole conflict is also gonna be a good motivation for an IC "gently caress secrets"-talk between the characters. While the Paranoiaish dynamic our group has had has been fun, it's starting to be an issue IC so someone is going to do something - probably my Genetor to be honest, last session she was pretty open with her secrets when she was yelling about them to the other Explorator. Time to have everyone admit that they aren't kosher in the eyes of the Imperium. But enough about the bad parts of the encounter (even if I had fun threatening the other Explorator with death, Inquisition, Lathes and all manner of things), let's get back to other parts of it. Now, I mentioned that Fel had a Horde of household troops. Now, normally hordes in 40k rpgs are a mean thing to go against, they do more damage, have more attacks and so on depending on their size. They also get bonuses to their tests based on their size and other fun things. So on paper this horde would have been a pretty terrible thing. Unfortunately for them they spent most of the fight pissing themselves from Scare grenades, being blind from flashy Force Fields and dying in droves to Eldar grenades. The Horde spawned and died in the same spot. I think they did less than six damage total during the fight after armor and toughness. It was not a very good day to be a House Fel trooper. Nor was it a good day to be any Fel supporter really, their Navigator used one special power at the very start of the fight before panicking from a Scare grenade and being sidelined for ages until a bunch of Orks scared her off. The Arch-Militant got his head taken off by an Ork Minder (and his body was completely looted by the Weirdboy, something that annoyed the Seneschal since he'd wanted the guy's Jet-boots and sniper rifle). Nobody looted their Missionary since he melted from getting Lascannoned by the Psyker-Explorator's servoskull. Hadark Fel himself was pretty much the only one in his crew that did anything substantial, he suddenly drew up a missle launcher at one point and almost blew up our landspeeder! What a jerk! Eventually his Rhino exploded, his troops were dying left and right, his only surviving officer (the Navigator) was running away as fast as she could and he ate a final dramatic shot from an Archeo-tech Laspistol which did him in and he fell behind the burning Rhino, out of sight. In other words, the bastard escaped! There were some comments about how since Fel was out of sight "a rat like him has probably squirmed into some sewer or something". There was an open manhole cover behind the wreck of the Rhino when we checked later. The Eldar spent most of the fight shooting at people rather discriminately, they shot at both our Missionary and other Explorator as well as Fel's troops, and they threw some grenades at both as well. They left the Orks alone out of 'respect for the Elder races' (what) and me and the Seneschal had apparantely managed to convince them that we would be more useful not riddled with holes. They also did the worst atrocity of all during the fight! One of them killed our elite pilot in our Landspeeder! The Missionary got extra mad about this since he'd befriended that guy. He took the Eldar that shot the pilot as a personal enemy unsurprisingly. Fel's troops were finally dead and dying, but there was some minor confict between (mostly Eldar taking potshots at the Missionary and Psyker Explorator), and so my Genetor took it up to herself to enforce peace. She did this by screeching horribly loudly and calling everyone a bunch of idiots. It worked eventually and the combat - and the session - came to an end after the Seneschal agreed with my suggestions of cease fire (although a bit more diplomatically of course). All in all the extra long session was a mixed bag, the big fight at the end was mostly fun, but we certainly found out the secret missions were more fun in theory than in practice since it was entirely possible that one PC could completely gently caress another PC's mission without there being much to prevent that. Fel was amazing as always, he's the sort of villain you love to hate - an unrepentant rear end in a top hat, incompetent buffoon and the master of inconvenvient timing. Hopefully the GM uses him later as well, even if he is defeated for now. There were also some problems with the fact that some characters got sidelined at points (like when our Missionary could not do anything about the Yu'vath device since he had zero relevant skills), but it's pretty hard to always ensure everyone can do something. Investigating a warp energy device is such a specific event that it is not surprising that a Missionary with no access to relevant skills even is capable of doing anything to it. Neither can our Explorators and Ork do well in social challenges.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2013 17:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 17:18 |
|
|
UNR Dragon Club is the club. I'd kind of considered starting my own club, but all my time is taken up by grad school, and the Dragon club already meets at the best time (Friday afternoons). I offered to DM a new system, and got this response on their forum after making a post that said "Hey, I love teaching new systems! If anyone's interested in <long list of systems>, I'd be more than happy to run a couple games of it!":Official Dragon Club Forum posted:We've already run Dungeon World, Fate, 4e, and Dark Heresy for club. Personally, I've dabbled in everything else besides 13th world as well.  Golden Bee posted:You had the right opinion when you left the first two times, but the fact you got pushed around for hours instead of discussing play expectations...kind of mega-lame. I know, but I just wanted to rescue them, okay? I just wanted to take a few under my wing and show them the sacred ways of Funhaving, like I used to in undergrad. I dunno, perhaps I've grown too old, maybe I'm not the savior D&D 3.5 needs anymore  The first time I showed up I was psyched, because I was actually waved over by a girl who is a student in the class I TA for. We were talking about D&D, she said she was just starting out but thought it was fun, etc. She introduced me to her friends and the girl that brought her. Eventually the subject of starting a new splinter group got broached, and she got as far as saying "Well, we'd like to start a new group, but don't have a DM." I was mulling over how creepy it would be to offer to DM considering A) We had just officially met and B) I'm her teacher. Before I reached a decision, I got cut off by them announcing the random groups. Cue the 20-minute exposition dump by the bartender and me bailing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2013 17:42
|
|