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Coward
Sep 10, 2009

I say we take off and surrender unconditionally from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure



.

Emerald Rogue posted:

Man, watching you guys post about playing L5R is awful. I feel like I'm running the risk of turning into one of these walking horrors by continuing my weekly game - but I haven't done any of these awful things, and everyone seems to be having fun, so maybe I'm safe? :smith: I wish I had the time to run a PbP or something for you guys to prove that it need not be awful.

My reading of the honor bonuses/penalties in the book isn't anything like that punitive - nothing says, for example, that a Mantis archer loses Honor for standing back from the front line or using hit and run tactics. Especially if it means they win. Chatting with peasants or making kids laugh isn't a dishonorable act - hell, you get honor for being compassionate to your social inferiors! Nothing I can find seems to indicate that most characters get any particular penalties for being dishonorable, anyway, beyond being considered less trustworthy by total squares like the Lions and Cranes. Scorpions, Crabs and Mantises are more fun anyway.

Turbo-nerds are so weird.

I probably would've enjoyed that Con game if grognard-san hadn't been there. I should make it clear that I didn't get any Honour penalties from the GM at all for what I was doing, it was just that guy was convinced that I was somehow behaving dishonourably, most likely because my character's attitude wasn't his idea of how Samurai should behave. And I was kind of showing him up by being the character NPCs wanted to talk to due to being a friendly person rather than some sort of compulsively bowing tea ceremony robot.

And the first game was nothing really to do with the game and more who I was playing it with - otherwise lovely guys whose company I enjoyed.

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girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

goatface posted:

It really depends. If nobody playing cares about that poo poo, then it only ever matters when someone wants it to matter.

I found L5R most fun at low levels, when people weren't overly attached to their characters and honour was less cultural and more personal.
What was really fun was an L5R game here, where I was playing a Crane Duelist with a Dark Fate. Everything he did, all his attempts at succeeding, and honoring his family and clan, made him look more and more foolish. He was just trying so hard to be a good samurai and it never worked the way he wanted. (He wasn't especially bright, either.)

Lemony
Jul 27, 2010

Now With Fresh Citrus Scent!
I'm not super familiar with the setting for L5R, but the concept of anyone thinking that your samurai analogue was being dishonorable by using a bow is hilarious to me. How does someone get to the point where they think that Samurai are totally cool and not know that archery was a super important skill for Samurai? Hell, they fought duels with bows and there were whole rituals built around it.

On the subject of metaplot, that's always been my issue with White Wolf games. The people I know who want to play those games are always more interested in all the overworld stuff and the little historical details that I find completely turn off new players. I just want to play some angsty vampires guys, I don't want to spend the next hour discussing why vampires from this one clan all behave in a certain way and what happened to some big plot NPC that none of our characters should rightly even know exists. L5R sounds like it has a lot of cool things if played with the right group, but I hate dealing with all that story baggage.

BryanChavez
Sep 13, 2007

Custom: Heroic
Having A Life: Fair

Lemony posted:

I'm not super familiar with the setting for L5R, but the concept of anyone thinking that your samurai analogue was being dishonorable by using a bow is hilarious to me. How does someone get to the point where they think that Samurai are totally cool and not know that archery was a super important skill for Samurai? Hell, they fought duels with bows and there were whole rituals built around it.

I don't know about in the most recent editions, but at least in the editions I'm familiar with, every single bushi has a starting 'outfit' that includes a bow of their choice and twenty arrows of their choice. From the most despicable Scorpion to the most noble Crane. It takes a profound misreading of the book to decide that archery is considered dishonorable. L5R does get a bit much with the deification of the katana in the setting, but that's just the nineties for you.

But whatever weirdness is in the books has always been amplified by the worst and loudest of the fanbase. One of my players got shouted down on the official forum, when he was talking about the campaign I ran where he played the youngest son of a Crane (Kakita) daimyo. This was apparently completely at odds with what L5R was meant to be, for reasons still unknown to me. Metaplot and the ideal of starting as the most Nonsue Mudpeasant of samurai, I guess.

BryanChavez fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Mar 14, 2014

Fur20
Nov 14, 2007

すご▞い!
君は働か░い
フ▙▓ズなんだね!

Yawgmoth posted:

Edit: Also yes, gently caress metaplot in general. The PCs are the stars (all of them!), not writer mary sues.
Yeah, I hear that. I once ran the first module in Pathfinder's Jade Regent campaign except I cut out every party NPC. Obviously you're supposed to kill the Tengu lord of the castle, but my players found his poetry and the plays he was working on and they asked me, "Hey can we just like diplomacy this fight?"

I was like "... Uhhh sure why the gently caress not, how do you wanna handle this?" At first I thought they were just gonna roll and I quickly decided on a DC25 Diplomacy--it was of course low-level and I wasn't entirely ready to let them fake their way out of one of the book's major boss fights that easily--but then they brought up his writing and told me they wanted to shoot the poo poo over that with him. Their winging it like that was so brilliant that I just had to give it to 'em for free. They ended up walking away from the castle with the XP and treasure they would've gotten for killing him, and then got to go murderhobo on some villagers who were really angry that they didn't kill the Tengu to make up the deficit for not getting to kill his underlings.

Fur20 fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Mar 14, 2014

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

BryanChavez posted:

Metaplot and the ideal of starting as the most Nonsue Mudpeasant of samurai, I guess.
I've noticed this with both oWoD and L5R both so I'm wondering if it's caused by having a metaplot or just comorbid for other reasons, but a oddly large number of people seem to have this idea that PCs should never be people of note, ever. Like you should start out as the most bland, boring, inconsequential character and end on the "high note" of getting to watch a bunch of NPCs way cooler than you could ever hope to be finish the plot that they also started. It doesn't make a lick of sense to me, but I guess that makes me a dirty funhaver. v:shobon:v

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
I think the presence of a metaplot exacerbates an attitude that's been floating around since D&D was a peasant hero meat grinder. An anxiety, really, that the PCs will get out of control. Metaplot makes it worse by imposing a big, ugly framework that threatens to fly apart the moment PCs achieve any degree of agency.

Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Mar 14, 2014

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


As far as I remember, the Vampire: Masquerade metaplot is:

1. Every clan hates every other clan.

2. You can enter vampire politics, in which case you will be hosed over by someone more powerful than you.

3. You can choose not to enter vampire politics, in which case you will be hosed over because you have no political connections.

Knowing the actual metaplot of why you are hosed over is a feat in and of itself that requires you to read splatbooks in chronological order, but suffice it to say that most clans are defined largely by their political traits and the political traits dictate that someone hates you before you even roll up your stats.

Of course it's possible to just do something cool with the game, but the world they set up is "You are in the Mafia, except vampires."

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Yawgmoth posted:

I've noticed this with both oWoD and L5R both so I'm wondering if it's caused by having a metaplot or just comorbid for other reasons, but a oddly large number of people seem to have this idea that PCs should never be people of note, ever. Like you should start out as the most bland, boring, inconsequential character and end on the "high note" of getting to watch a bunch of NPCs way cooler than you could ever hope to be finish the plot that they also started. It doesn't make a lick of sense to me, but I guess that makes me a dirty funhaver. v:shobon:v

It can be really fun to start as a relatively unassuming character and by repeated successes and increasing stakes become one of the great heroes or movers of your setting, but most of these games that have a strong Metaplot kinda omit that second part. Like, starting out as an Ordinary But Talented Guy with lots of potential to be a hero and ending up as one? Good. Watching two NPCs fight it out because the game's advancement rules and milieu are designed to never let your PCs actually achieve anything? Bad.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
I'll be honest, I think the basic idea of L5R is pretty cool sounding (let's do to samurai-era Japan what D&D does for medieval western Europe) but the actual execution of it always makes me kind of skip over it.

NutritiousSnack
Jul 12, 2011

Coward posted:

I probably would've enjoyed that Con game if grognard-san hadn't been there. I should make it clear that I didn't get any Honour penalties from the GM at all for what I was doing, it was just that guy was convinced that I was somehow behaving dishonourably, most likely because my character's attitude wasn't his idea of how Samurai should behave. And I was kind of showing him up by being the character NPCs wanted to talk to due to being a friendly person rather than some sort of compulsively bowing tea ceremony robot.

And the first game was nothing really to do with the game and more who I was playing it with - otherwise lovely guys whose company I enjoyed.

Hilariously you were acting totally in character and he wasn't like at all most likely. Mantis are meant to be the common people's link to the samurai. It's part of the reason they got elevated to a Great Clan. It's their loving ethos that people can move up in social caste even life, meaning there is no reason that dirt farmer can't be a bad rear end samurai one day, and even if he doesn't what he does is super important so why be a dick to him? You could have even sperged back about Duty and Compassion, key tenants of Bushido. Was Akodo somehow wrong?

Bieeardo posted:

I think the presence of a metaplot exacerbates an attitude that's been floating around since D&D was a peasant hero meat grinder. An anxiety, really, that the PCs will get out of control. Metaplot makes it worse by imposing a big, ugly framework that threatens to fly apart the moment PCs achieve any degree of agency.

It's easier to run a campaign if it's heavily railroaded, plus some people want to act out their fantasy novel!

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!
I have a good RP story to balance out the really bad one I told earlier! :woop:

I've been running a 3.5 Eberron game for almost two years now. The party is Moxy, a pseudodragon bard and consummate adventurer; Malous, a psiforged telepath looking for the cause of the Day of Mourning; Aicanique, a human dread necromancer who was raised by Silver Flame paladins; and Punchy, a former warforged monk//fighter who became a sapphire dragon through Weird poo poo Happening.

The basic plot of the game is that Atropus, the 13th moon, is returning and the PCs have to stop it. They've been going around collecting macguffins for an epic ritual to reverse its course, and they are at 18th level. They are in Argonnessen now, looking for a relic of the demon/dragon war as a capstone to the whole thing and are in a Xoriat manifest zone full of all sorts of things, like the Altar of Blood! Surrounded by black trees that have fruits that look oddly like humanoid hearts. They figured out (through history, arcana, and bardic lore) that you can eat one of these fruits to get a Heal effect and a permanent +2 con, and at the altar you can sacrifice a loved one to gain assorted massive (but temporary) bonuses. So Moxy, without saying anything, telekinetically grabs a heart fruit and "sacrifices" it on the altar. He rolls Use Magic Device and gets over 50. It bleeds and absorbs into the altar, and the rest turns to silt and blows away. Now he can maximize any three rolls per day that he wants, and Aicanique is pissed.

What followed was a good half session of highly in-character soul searching from everyone involved, along with a fantastic debate about what really happened, how much sacrifice was actually involved in the act, and how tainted by dark powers Moxy was (or wasn't). Aic doesn't trust Moxy anymore, but they have agreed to continue working to save the world.

Later on in the session, they get to the "boss encounter" I had planned: a Hellfire Wyrm. It manages to charm the one target I thought would for sure make the save (the telepath), but Punchy decided to beat it to unconscious with nonlethal damage. It never even got an attack off thanks to a savage thrashing by a sapphire dragon monk and it failing a save to avoid being stunned.

The party is now 19th level and I'm going to get 19 questions of Mind Probe to answer over the week. I love my players.

Chaotic Neutral
Aug 29, 2011
I find that the best way to play L5R is to treat it like Sengoku Basara. Any remotely task-focused character starts doing ridiculous things pretty quickly, so why not play it to the amped-up flaming/exploding hilt?

MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

Yawgmoth posted:

Probably. He seemed to have a knack for reading things in the most godawful ways and made huge sweeping alterations on the fly.
It was you. I particularly remember a large group of us telling you to stop playing. Did you listen to our advice?

AceClown
Sep 11, 2005

Slantedfloors posted:

They ended up feeding it to a captive Gungan hitman while he and a pair of completely innocent kidnapped dockworkers were locked in their ship's bathroom. They eventually dumped them all out in the middle of nowhere on a completely different planet from where they were taken.

As the game progressed, they made sure to implicate the Gungan in all of their crimes.

So they introduced an alien plant form on a planet, that can't go wrong, right?

Glagha
Oct 13, 2008

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAaaAAAaaAAaAA
AAAAAAAaAAAAAaaAAA
AAAA
AaAAaaA
AAaaAAAAaaaAAAAAAA
AaaAaaAAAaaaaaAA

Captain Bravo posted:

Oh, so I have told the story of how my players once stole a ghost, then?

My players stole a dungeon once. Thinking about it though, I have to think that this is a fairly common occurrence. It was a 4e D&D game, which I'd never run before, so I decided to pick up the Monster Vault and run Cairn of the Winter King out of it. It's a pretty basic little dungeon about killing a giant evil dude who is freezing the area for miles around in eternal winter in the middle of June. Everything goes pretty normally, but the party keeps running into and fighting various servants of the Winter King who just thawed out of a frozen stasis of a few hundred years. A lot of these bad guys are not terribly committed to serving their king and are still dealing with the shock of coming back to life from the ice. So my players had a habit of sparing the lives of many of the NPCs. After killing the Winter King and saving everyone, they decided to just take over and hire on the NPCs there and use the cairn as their base of operations.

It ended up working out really well because the composition of the enemies from the dungeon actually made for good NPCs to live in your home base. There's a wizard there who can conveniently deliver plot hooks through knowledge of centuries old treasures and legends, a blacksmith who can make gear for them, and so on. We took a break from this game for a while to play other things, but if we ever come back to it I have a feeling they'd probably continue conscripting useful bad guys to do stuff for them.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Plus, it's always nice to hear stories of players actually being merciful instead of total murderhobos.

Glagha
Oct 13, 2008

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAaaAAAaaAAaAA
AAAAAAAaAAAAAaaAAA
AAAA
AaAAaaA
AAaaAAAAaaaAAAAAAA
AaaAaaAAAaaaaaAA

Night10194 posted:

Plus, it's always nice to hear stories of players actually being merciful instead of total murderhobos.

It is nice, though I think it was mostly because many of the NPCs were described in the adventure as being pretty "meh" about their service to the Winter King. A lot of them worked for him because he was the biggest, scariest guy around back in his heyday before his curse or whatever made him and all his followers freeze into ice statues. So they all kind of thaw out about the time the players show up, and put up a defense against the invaders, but a lot of them were more concerned about being cold, hungry, and disoriented. The wizard specifically I remember being specifically stated to give up if things go south for him, and I think that got them started on it.

It was quite a contrast from the Dark Sun game we played. (There's no story to this. It's just Dark Sun, so everyone's a dick and everything sucks forever.)

koreban
Apr 4, 2008

I guess we all learned that trying to get along is way better than p. . .player hatin'.
Fun Shoe

Kai Tave posted:

I'll be honest, I think the basic idea of L5R is pretty cool sounding (let's do to samurai-era Japan what D&D does for medieval western Europe) but the actual execution of it always makes me kind of skip over it.

Tangentially related: I used to play the L5R card game, and I hung out at Alderac offices in SoCal growing up. I used to shoot the poo poo with people there and then play in the local tournament scene, especially for the big world event tournaments. One year around the time Hidden Emperor: Heroes of Rokugan or Spirit Bound came out I was running a Phoenix deck that was super heavy on honor manipulation with the mafioso sensei that used to be a lion, but now was a kolat ninja lord or some such. Basically it was a completely infiltrated phoenix clan that ran subterfuge harder than Scorpions.

During one tournament I managed an honor victory against a reigning Crane deck and the turbonerd flowed. The guy threw a massive fit, argued that my deck was against the spirit of the game, that I was ruining a noble house with my corruption, etc. The judges at the game shop declared that the deck was legal and it was my perogative to play it. Turbonerd started massively sperging out, throwing his cards, slamming the table and knocking over stuff from the store displays.

The Alderac guys laughed at the deck with the sort of head shaking that conveyed "holy poo poo, we're not going down *that* road." I stopped playing shortly after due to college but some buddies who stuck around with it and played the RPG warned me that the local players were even worse than the CCG ones. I used to really enjoy the setting and story of the universe, but holy poo poo the players were the worst.

I still have two signed copies of the original Phoenix Clan RPG books that were given to me by Ree Soesbee back when she was writing for L5R.

sansuki
May 17, 2003

Night10194 posted:

Your players are great sports and Crab Out Of Place are always fantastic.

I played a Badger guy that hit things to death with one hit, and court was always hilarious.

"Ok everyone, Gimmie a roll for courtly graces and based on your rolls, you can just sort of intimate what you want to say......Badger, you rolled a 3, so whatever you say from here on out is completely in character, including your body language."

Jumping off a building to behead a demon made of crows? No sweat. Tanking 3 samurai at once barehanded? Please, I could do that sleeping. Make it through drinking tea and civil conversation? I still have night terrors.

Nissir
Apr 23, 2007
Man with no Title
My only experience in L5R was a very long running campaign where I had the misfortune to be a half-breed Unicorn Shugenja. My character had lived outside the realm for his whole life, knew very little about the intrigues of honor, and to top it off...was a merchant. All the characters hated me besides the Crab, who only liked me because I could out drink him and light demons on fire from time to time. In combat, I tended to ride a horse as far as possible when the swords came out, in social situations; I tended to stick my whole foot in my mouth. I think I left my diasho at the inn once, and once used it "fix" some hedges in a Crane's zen garden. I also bought one of the players a new tea set and tossed out his old set because it was so old, I honestly didn't know it was his great great great grandfathers reward for saving the empire or whatever...

B.B. Rodriguez
Aug 8, 2005

Bender: "I was God once." God: "Yes, I saw. You were doing well until everyone died."

What do the Japanese think of all this? Do they think we're nuts?

Asehujiko
Apr 6, 2011

goatface posted:

I once mentioned that the office of the factory they were in had a really comfy chair behind the desk.

They carried that chair for about four sessions until I turned it into a particularly shy mimic.
My rogue trader group was sneaking through a cultist hideout when they encountered a cultist going up a ladder. The senechal immediately declares "I steal the ladder". At 90+ PF, that Senechal could order an entire planet deforested to be made into ladders. The cultist comes back, calls his fellow cultists assholes for taking the ladder without asking, jumped down and made a stack of boxes. The senechal ended up holding on to that ladder until the campaign ended.

Writer Cath
Apr 1, 2007

Box. Flipped.
Plaster Town Cop

Glagha posted:

My players stole a dungeon once. Thinking about it though, I have to think that this is a fairly common occurrence. It was a 4e D&D game, which I'd never run before, so I decided to pick up the Monster Vault and run Cairn of the Winter King out of it. It's a pretty basic little dungeon about killing a giant evil dude who is freezing the area for miles around in eternal winter in the middle of June.

Too bad, you didn't run it recently; the Winter King could have busted into a moving rendition of Let It Go :haw:

Nissir
Apr 23, 2007
Man with no Title
Once my players found out how much a good lock can cost in DnD they went back to previously "cleared" dungeons and stole all the locks. My wizard had a bag of holding and every time we encountered a "vast library" in some BBEG's lair he about peed his robes and stuffed every book in the place into it.

masam
May 27, 2010
I'm glad i'm not the only GM that takes Disney movies and turns them into campaigns by just filing off the serial numbers. Including the musical numbers

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

MadScientistWorking posted:

It was you. I particularly remember a large group of us telling you to stop playing. Did you listen to our advice?
As previously stated, yes. I quit the game and as the bushi pair seemed to be looking for a reason to quit, I'm pretty certain the game died that night.

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

sansuki posted:

Jumping off a building to behead a demon made of crows? No sweat. Tanking 3 samurai at once barehanded? Please, I could do that sleeping. Make it through drinking tea and civil conversation? I still have night terrors.

Personally, I think L5R is the most fun in this mode. We had a one-shot with a bunch of non-Crabs sent out to go do something ridiculously dangerous on the outside of the Wall, and while we were resting up between horrible things happening to us, one of our character's Scorpion fiance showed up and was really nice to us. She even gave us gifts. Our bunch of uncivil murder hobos smiled and nodded all through this absolutely terrifying event, and then came up with an excuse to get back out on the safe side of the wall were the worst thing that can happen to you is ogres and having your soul rot off.

masam
May 27, 2010
I'm only know a little about L5R. I know scorpions are the scary deceptive ones, but why was a friends fiancé treating you kindly something to be frightened of?

Nissir
Apr 23, 2007
Man with no Title
Because the one with the brighest smile, holds the sharpest blade.

Kenlon
Jun 27, 2003

Digitus Impudicus

masam posted:

I'm only know a little about L5R. I know scorpions are the scary deceptive ones, but why was a friends fiancé treating you kindly something to be frightened of?

If a Scorpion is smiling at you, you're hosed.

sansuki
May 17, 2003

Scorpion Courtiers are like, Sith lawyer faerie polititians. Anything can be twisted to suit exactly what they need.

A famous story involves a Scorpion framing another samurai for murder by luring him into a room alone in a castle. He explains exactly what he is doing and why(there is a good reason). When the samurai asks him why he is telling him all this, the Scorpion says "Because no one will belive you. GUARDS!!". And the Scorpion pulls out the samurais sword, and stabs himself in the chest, straight to the hilt.

sansuki fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Mar 15, 2014

Cardiovorax
Jun 5, 2011

I mean, if you're a successful actress and you go out of the house in a skirt and without underwear, knowing that paparazzi are just waiting for opportunities like this and that it has happened many times before, then there's really nobody you can blame for it but yourself.
The writer, Wick, has the biggest boner for Scorpions, so they always win at everything ever. Might as well not bother.

darthbob88
Oct 13, 2011

YOSPOS
Of course, contrariwise, the Scorpions are very big on loyalty, and their service to the Emperor. As the Lion are the Right Hand of the Emperor, protecting against military threats, and the Crane are the Left Hand, defending against political threats, the Scorpion are the Underhand, protecting against threats unseen, unknowable, and totally deniable.

On the other hand, "protecting the Empire and Emperor against threats they shouldn't know about" allows for a lot of leeway, up to and including framing another samurai for murder. So yes, if you're dealing with a Scorpion, tread very drat carefully, else you'll be dead before you know it.

Ablative
Nov 9, 2012

Someone is getting this as an avatar. I don't know who, but it's gonna happen.

darthbob88 posted:

Of course, contrariwise, the Scorpions are very big on loyalty, and their service to the Emperor. As the Lion are the Right Hand of the Emperor, protecting against military threats, and the Crane are the Left Hand, defending against political threats, the Scorpion are the Underhand, protecting against threats unseen, unknowable, and totally deniable.

On the other hand, "protecting the Empire and Emperor against threats they shouldn't know about" allows for a lot of leeway, up to and including framing another samurai for murder. So yes, if you're dealing with a Scorpion, tread very drat carefully, else you'll be dead before you know it.

So, literally the Japanese Inquisition.

Daetrin
Mar 21, 2013
In tonight's session, our muscle, Odrak, decided that he would just use brute force to pull Umbra out of the dimensional rift her body was generating.

The player rolled well, and Odrak literally punched physics in the face, then hauled Umbra out of the rift.

Edit: Umbra decided to keep the dimensional rifting to eventually turn it into a sort of teleporty type effect.

We suddenly realized that Odrak the Breaker = Wreck-It-Ralph
Umbra, teleporting troublemaker = Penelope
Lawton the Mad Engineer = Fix-It Felix.

Daetrin fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Mar 15, 2014

Daetrin
Mar 21, 2013
Quote is not edit.

Nucular Carmul
Jan 26, 2005

Melongenidae incantatrix
So there's a fan made Halo tabletop that my group decided to try out, and we had a ton of fun last night. It's a percentile system like Dark Heresy, with d100 and d10. We rolled out with an AI named Decker, an Irish Hornet pilot named Seamus McFinnegan, and my hard punching, shotgun wielding Mexican ODST, called Sebastian Alvarez (we made a pretty racially diverse team completely on accident, there was no discussion on what we were each doing beforehand).

We're basically in the Fall of Reach time period, just before the Covenant show up to Tribute, the planet we're on. So we've been tasked with taking out some Insurrectionist leaders, firstly, a bomb maker named David Jackson, who went by the code name Jackal. We did some things to locate his hideout/bomb making facility, and moved in on it for the assault. We're short a couple of people for a full fireteam, so we decide to try to do things quietly, at least at first. There are a bunch of patrols outside the building, including two rooftop snipers. Our friendly neighborhood AI taps into their communications so we can figure out their patrol routes. We lay out a plan to take out two of the single patrol guys within a minute of each other as they cross into view of one of the snipers, which we will drop right as the first guy is hit. McFinnegan has a silenced SMG and a climbing harness, what I have is a very loud shotgun and an unsuppressed Assault Rifle, and my fists, so it's decided that I'm ground team, so McFinnegan climbs the roof, easily making his check to sneak up on the sniper. I did not build a stealthy character. Alvarez is brash and loud, but I was going to give it my best shot. I actually succeed on my first roll, grabbing the first guy in a choke hold to knock him out. (Halo has a pretty cool melee system, more on this later) Surprisingly enough, I'm able to get the drop on the second guy as he comes around. Meanwhile, McFinnegan shoots the hell out of the sniper, somehow managing to blow his nose off from behind.

Based on that rousing success, we figured we could pull it off again. The other two patrol guys are together, so I decided I would sneak up on them with my shotgun out and just try to capture them while McFinnegan ices the other sniper. He makes it look easy again and gets into position. I roll my check to move in quietly behind them, and it finally happens, I gently caress it up terribly. One of the insurrectionists turns around with his gun drawn, and I'm getting ready to fight. Out of character, Decker's players says "Hey, I'm still in there communications, right? Can I send a blast of feedback through the radio at max volume to try to gently caress with them?" Our DM's eyes go wide for a second. "Uh yeah, that's a really good idea actually. gently caress you." He makes his check easily, and suddenly they're screaming in pain, staggering around like drunken idiots. One of them rips his helmet off, and his ears are bleeding a little. I now have a short amount of time to knock them out before they recover.

This system has a ton of melee maneuvers that you can use, you have a certain number of points you can spend per round, and everything costs various amounts, and has a variety of uses. There are choke holds, strikes, throws, whatever you can think of. Since I have one helmeted and one unhelmeted dude, I give them the old Three Stooges classic, almost cracking the skull of one guy on his buddy's helmet, then I leg sweep him to knock him down so I can focus on one target. I'm looking at the list of maneuvers, getting acquainted with things, when I notice that there is a Knee Strike, which does a lot of damage, but costs almost a whole turn to pull off. I decide to yank the standing dude's helmet off, then punch him in the stomach to double him over, then I tell the DM I'm going to take a few steps back and do a Shining Wizard. I roll extremely well on the attack roll, then even better on the damage, getting critical damage on one of the dice, and doing enough to kill him outright. My armored kneepad on unarmored head caves in this dude's skull.

Just then, as I'm finishing the dude on the ground, McFinnegan notices two other patrols we didn't know about, one person coming from each of two different directions. I tell him to take out one guy if he can, and scramble into position to get the other. McFinnegan, having a perfectly good sniper rifle on the recently deceased guy he just took out, opts to continue using his SMG, from the rooftop, to shoot a guy on the ground, because the rifle didn't have a suppressor. He figures he can just spray the guy down with bullets and SOMETHING was bound to hit, right? Just as a note, each firearm has a rate of fire, meaning the number of bullets you can fire per turn. You roll each bullet separately, and it seems to be a pretty good way of determining spread, as the roll to hit is built into the location damage roll (the system is percentile based, so you reverse the numbers on the attack to determine where you hit. an attack roll of 14 becomes hit location of 41, which is an arm I think) At any rate, he starts rolling his attacks. First die roll is a 03. In this system a roll of 01-03 is an automatic success, and attacks deal double damage. So this one bullet hits the guy in the stomach, and does so much damage it just rips his torso open and it loving falls out.

I don't know what's going on, but the AI, Decker, does. He has our helmet camera feeds and is watching both of ours at once because he's an AI, gently caress you, he does what he wants, and he's probably playing chess with himself and writing the code for a sexy female version of himself to go out with while he's doing it. By the way, he's still in the insurrectionist communications network, so he tells me to sit tight, edits a small clips of what just happened, and sends it to the other patrol who's about to come up on me. Then he tells me I can probably do whatever I want. I hear the guy say "Jesus Christ, what the gently caress?" and so I step out from the corner with my shotgun and introduce myself. He immediately surrenders without me rolling a die.

We did more that, but that was the absolute highlight of the night. The AI managed to be useful and awesome the whole time despite not being able to interact with the physical world in any meaningful way, and we got to be badasses in the Halo universe. I am both excited for and apprehensive of the eventual Covenant invasion, should be a blast. The great thing is we're all massive nerds and most of us have read some of the books, so nothing really needs to be explained, we can just ride forth and have fun.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I'd like to see this game and its melee system. It sounds like fun, or at least like something that might possibly be cannibalized for other systems.

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Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
A snippet from tonight's 13th Age Game.

OK, our group is closing in on saving the world. Last week, we fought an Artifical God on the top of an elementally ravaged volcano. Unfortunately, our ship had crash landed...so we teleported across the world to get the Archmage's help.

My character (Ex-Lawyer, now Elven Spy, dressed in a Lana Kane sweater dress) helps convince everyone to work together and put a 1st Age Icon in control of the volcano. One problem solved.

As we went down the volcano to rescue our ship, we saw it floating in water...and "pretty much" on fire. Despite our haste, though, we took on a new threat... four elemental skeleton siblings. They slowed us down, but didn't stop us...

But they didn't have to. On board the ship was an invading force of undead, including a 14 foot tall champion of the Lich King and a Revivalist Preacher. Between them, recovery-stealing ghosts, and a warrior so intimidating you had to pass a will save to fight him*, our backs were to the wall.

Within two rounds, our Skald had been Converted (and was battling our Cleric), our Paladin had his guts hanging out of his stomach, and the Sorcerer was trying to keep her soul on this side of the divide.

The Barbarian had 80 HP left, and the Death Knight was dealing in the 115 range. He charged toward the barbarian.

"That's 115 damage." The DM said.

"What level is this guy?" I asked.

"He's 13."

"I intercept."

"You only have 100 HP."

"Yeah, but I use my Roll With It. Once per day...I take (enemy level) damage."

The fight turned our way after that.

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Sep 4, 2015

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