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Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


So I am GMing a post-apoc game about three weeks ago. The characters are fighting some evil goatmen (pretty much Diablo clanfolk, more or less), and amidst the heads spiked on spears around their lair in downtown Seattle, they have a summoning circle. So I go to draw the summoning circle with a pentagram in the middle.

That's when I absent-mindedly draw it with six points. Which is a Star of David.

What follows is three weeks of in-jokes about fighting the evil jew goat conspiracy, which I deserve every bit of.

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SpookyLizard
Feb 17, 2009
Im picturing the devil staring at the pile of corpses , tracking the party down and going:

"When you came through that portal, did you see a sign on my lawn that says 'Dead rear end in a top hat Storage?'"
"Well mister devil.."
"Did you see a sign that says Dead rear end in a top hat Storage?"
"No"
"Do you know why? Because storing dead assholes aint my loving business!"

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

OneThousandMonkeys posted:

What follows is three weeks of in-jokes about fighting the evil jew goat conspiracy, which I deserve every bit of.
I really hope you just ran with it and made them evil jew goats because I can't imagine not doing so at that point.

Whybird
Aug 2, 2009

Phaiston have long avoided the tightly competetive defence sector, but the IRDA Act 2052 has given us the freedom we need to bring out something really special.

https://team-robostar.itch.io/robostar


Nap Ghost
You're in good company, at least. The British children's TV show, Chorlton And The Wheelies, was supposed to have a pentagram on the cover of the evil witch's spellbook. Unfortunately the team didn't know how to draw a pentagram and welp.

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

Turns out the goatmen weren't preparing to summon devils but to create golems.

Punting
Sep 9, 2007
I am very witty: nit-witty, dim-witty, and half-witty.

My Lovely Horse posted:

Turns out the goatmen weren't preparing to summon devils but to create golems.

It would have the advantage of definitely not being expected, if nothing else!

Fuego Fish
Dec 5, 2004

By tooth and claw!
Actually, a six-pointed star within a circle can be used to control demons :jewish:

Dog Kisser
Mar 30, 2005

But People have fears that beasts do not. Questions, too.

Fuego Fish posted:

Actually, a six-pointed star within a circle can be used to control demons :jewish:

Yeah I was going to say that the Seal of Solomon is a pretty well known demon summoning/control thing so I wouldn't feel too bad.

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.
Plus the demons you can control with the seal of solomon are things like this adorable dude:



FURFUR, DEMONIC EARL.

So it's pretty great all on all.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Me: Hey guys, I accidentally implied that my gaming group was fighting demonic Jews.

TG: Well, obviously.

HebrewMagic
Jul 19, 2012

Police Assault In Progress
I think, given my username, it's only right I be the final boss of the campaign.

Coward
Sep 10, 2009

I say we take off and surrender unconditionally from orbit.

It's the only way to be sure



.

Rulebook Heavily posted:

The Amber story needs more revving up, and has to go session by session. And it involves the game spilling over into real life, in a "GM comes to the cash register at my summer job and expects me to be in character" way. I still need to come to terms with half of it myself.

...I know this was two months ago, but seriously Rulebook if you're still around, I'm really hanging on for hearing these stories.

Ambi
Dec 30, 2011

Leave it to me
Holy poo poo, just learned I retroactively dodged some Catpiss;
When I first joined my Uni's gaming society, there were two nWoD vampire games running. One of them is a bunch of loud but nice enough people, and I've played at a few events with their GM. The other was a ten-man group of fedoras, straggly beards, and odour - Bad Nerds. I decided not to give them the benefit of the doubt and started my own game.

This week, a guy trying to start up a nWoD Mortals game comes to try and recruit me/ask for advice, since o/nWoD similarity. Mostly I could only tell him to advertise on the facebook page, maybe grab the Tabletop Rep, and if all else fails, approach people and try and sell them on the game with a Sentence and a Paragraph of talking.

He is from the aforementioned Bad Nerds group, and confirmed my suspicions by telling his story; The only non-combat character in the party, he was the designated chew-toy/abuse-target of the group, being routinely humiliated or injured for fun. Highlights included being sold into Slavery to the Fae of Arcadia for 20 years (in a vampire game?), and being used as a meat-shield in every combat. After hitting Humanity 3 and being taken away by GM for no apparent reason, the next two characters he proposed - investigative journalist, and Social Wizard - were shot down for "not being violent enough" he quit the group.
I wish him the best, and hope he finds better as GM, or joins my game because I need a good Social player.

Samizdata
May 14, 2007
I will say one thing re: college gaming groups. Back when I attended Illinois Central College, the group was awesome. I made several good friends and the worst thing that generally happened was fry poaching (When I solved when I switched to 75% ketchup/25% hot sauce). They also launched a successful local minicon, Spring Offensive. Which leads me to a story about a game itself, if not the play thereof. God Wants Me To Have Chainsaw Warrior For Reals. Should I mention more? (The story also involves a house fire.)

My prior game group back in California at Palomar College, however, tended to be the home of drunken gaming. More than one 32 ounce somethingsomething and cola showed up at more than one session. Fun was had by all.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Samizdata posted:

Should I mention more?
:justpost: The answer to this will never not be yes! :justpost:

Samizdata
May 14, 2007
Mkay then. Same Illinois game period as above. My dad, who has a DPhil from Oxford, has to head back overseas to take care of some business and asks me if I want a memento. Being a huge fan of White Dwarf (one of the guys I game with has a subscription he doesn't mind loaning around), I mention I want a copy of the newly released game Chainsaw Warrior from GW. I am interested in how the description of the solo play would work out.

He goes, and finds the one copy they have in the stores there. So, the prophecy is spoken.

Time passes. Games are played (CW and others). White Dwarf has CW bonus cards printed in White Dwarf. They are printed on cardstock that is dull on both sides, not matching the game cards at all. Samizdata, in his brilliance, goes to his local game store, argues with them for a while (there's another story in a bit) and has the cards copied to sturdy cardstock and the colored backs to glossy color copies. Ever overestimating my craft skills, I cut up the card stock and color copy and paste them together.

More time and games pass. I am working as a teacher at a private business school when I get a call from my (now) ex-girlfriend. She knows she is NOT to call me on class nights. The teacher that came to get me covers me for a few minutes while I go take the call.

I hear her weepily saying "The apartment's on fire. It's on fire." I am figuring a little smoke damage, some bad smells, and everything is okay.

I go to my boss and beg off work, explaining about the call. She lets me leave. Luckily work is within convenient walking distance of the apartment. I am initially confident, but, as I walk up the hill, time begins to slow down as I see multiple fire trucks and what happened begins to sink in.

As I get there, I see all the damage. The apartment is pretty much gutted. My clothes would have been fine, had the apartment not been a converted old house, making the firemen have to come through the back of my closet in order to get access from the unused back door. The living room is horrendous, and the boxes and bookshelves holding all the accumulated gaming gear of our group are black and soaked.

I end up spending the night at the ex-girlfriend's family's house in a nearby suburb. The next day I go to work for the best news ever - I will be out of work!

At that time, the government was penalizing schools with a high student loan default rate (like we could do anything about it) with the withdrawal of financial aid. My boss says that if we get unemployment, she will cover the difference between it and our standard rate of pay. All good, right? Not so much, as I had only been there 2.5 months.

The ex-girlfriend's parents find out about me being unemployed and boot me out (even though neither the homelessness nor unemployment were in any way my fault). So I end up moving three hours away with nothing about a couple of smoke-reeking garbage bags of clothes.

More time passes (a couple of years). I am living downstate in a reasonably happy relationship when the phone rings one day. It's Paul, my buddy from the upstate gaming group (the one that made the PUUUUPETTTS joke). We spend some time catching up, and he mentions he and Danny one of the alumni of said group would be interested in coming down to visit. I explain the situation to my live-in girlfriend and she says it sounds cool.

A week or so later, they show up. We are hanging around my apartment, and poo poo is being shot, when Paul mentions he needs to run to the car for a sec. He disappears and comes back a moment later with a box in hand. He mentions the year after the fire, he went to the local mini gaming con, Spring Offensive (like we all used to) and checked out the silent auction.

Well, hell, look at that. A copy of Chainsaw Warrior! Didn't Sam have one of those? Oh, look at the water and smoke damage to the box. Looks like the inside is fine though. Look, someone copied those special cards! Must be Sam's for sure. I'll bid a couple of bucks on it.

He wins it. Then, after tracking me down, brings it back, declining any repayment other than my thanks and my glee.

So, thus, the Ruinous Powers have decreed that I SHALL OWN A COPY OF Chainsaw Warrior UNTIL THE END OF TIME, AND THEIR WILL WILL NOT BE BROOKED!

Also, the aforementioned copy shop story....

I bought a copy of the GW vehicle combat/Car Wars minigame. The rules came in what was basically a glossy memopad, with the cover being a game screen. And, of course, drilled for ENGLISH ring binders. I go to the local Kinko's and pay to have them redrilled in standard US ring binder form. Oh, yeah, throw in one of those black binders. Hmmmm. Tell you what, I need a cover for that binder. Can you color copy the outside of the game screen on two sheets so I can use them as a cover?

No?

Excuse me? Copyrightwhat? I am not copying anything else. I just want a cover for this stuff you drilled I am putting in this binder I bought here? Seriously? I COULD go over here and just copy this on the self-serve, but I wanted a pretty cover. Yeah, a cover for all this copyrighted material I PAID LEGIT GOOD MONEY FOR BEFORE I REALIZED IT WASN'T A REAL BOOK! Look, buddy, I and my gaming group spend a fair bit of money here, as do a lot of the gamers in town. If you are going to bust my balls over this, I will take my business elsewhere, and I should warn you I have a big mouth I open A LOT....

Finally the manager overhears what is going on, comes over, apologizes for the employee's overzealousness, and makes the copies for me.

</walloftext>

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
Did your ex-girlfriend's parents keep the game after you left? or did someone snatch it from your apartment?

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

Kurieg posted:

Did your ex-girlfriend's parents keep the game after you left? or did someone snatch it from your apartment?

She salvaged it, didn't tell me, then auctioned it off.

The worst part is - The fire was 100% her fault. As the fire department investigation (and her final confession also) showed, she left a pan of grease on the stove while she ran to the store.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Oh God, I have a few stories. I used to have a regular group, most of whom knew each other from high school and/or college. It was a mix, but the majority were anti-social nerds. There was a musician and a ghost hunter and occasionally a tiny pixie of a girl with a hardcore nicotine and shoplifting addiction, but it was mostly kinda weird guys.

A quick one I can give is from my abortive attempt at a d20 Perfect Dark game. I'm a guy who likes doing hardcore realistic campaigns (I hadn't discovered GURPS at this stage), so the campaign was set up to be pretty difficult and set more firmly in reality than the games it was based on. During their second mission, they were trying to rescue some kidnapping victims from a corporation's hidden mountain base. And the PCs basically made some of the stupidest decisions around.

First off, the group's de facto leader (played by the gaming group's own de facto leader, who's downright psychotic) decided that, as a bargaining chip, he would place explosives on the giant fuel tanks in the base and threaten to detonate them if the HVTs weren't handed over. His plan for this was to cut open their surplus ammo with a hacksaw, pour all the gunpowder into a sock, and duct tape it to the fuel tank for the sniper to shoot from afar.

They had a stash of remote mines in their inventory at this time.

Then he ended up basically waltzing right into the base through a hole cut in the fence and decided to just threaten everyone with explosions if they didn't hand over the people. Meanwhile, the sniper got ambushed and ended up fleeing his position all the way back to the SUV.

It inevitably ended in a massive gunfight. The only reason the duo managed to escape is because the sniper drove the SUV around the outer fence so they could all rush out the hole he cut and jump in.

Ironically, the same psychopathic player ended up having one of his own plans ruined through judicious use of explosives. We were doing an alternate history WW2 campaign (Nazi magic and super soldier experiments and cults and demons and poo poo), and on our first mission we did a raid on a chateau that was secretly home to some of the Nazi experiments. We opened a door on the first floor and found this massive purple monster (think the Incredible Hulk as a purple gorilla) on a table inside. It woke up and started charging the door for the inevitable boss fight where at least one guy gets seriously injured.

We hurled as many grenades through the door as possible and blew it into salsa before it even reached the threshold.

I have some other stories, but most of them are a bit long. One of them is only properly experienced if I recount the entire campaign, but long story short: the psychopath's creepy autistic cousin joins a Pathfinder game with rotating DMs and promptly turns everything inside-out. It's a tale of attempted player character rape, imitating tactics from The Elder Scrolls IV, a failure to properly consider the passage of time, unusual amounts of sociopathy, and plain attempts at cheating.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


chitoryu12 posted:

I have some other stories, but most of them are a bit long.

What part of :justpost: do you not understand? Unless this is just a preview, in which case nevermind.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

Kavak posted:

What part of :justpost: do you not understand? Unless this is just a preview, in which case nevermind.

Yeah, it was a preview. I didn't want to start off with too huge of a post, and I don't want to double or triple post. Also, I needed to find where I had posted the story elsewhere instead of retyping the whole drat thing. Unfortunately, I failed. So I'm retyping the entire story from memory, plus adding some detail that this board would care about more than the other.

Like I said, this is drat long. It wouldn't do it justice to only recount one or two sessions, because it's something where the crazy lasted for a whole game.

So like I mentioned before, our gaming group had a de facto leader, Scott; I say "de facto" because he was never actually an official leader of the group or decision maker, but was the guy who formed it in the first place. I'll probably end up going into detail about his craziness another time, but it's irrelevant here. But because this guy was treated as being "the boss", he was able to put some influence on the other players regarding what games to play. The zombie game I'm recruiting for? That's been sitting in the pipe for 3 years because I was going to play it with them and he decided to convince everyone to ignore it in favor of his own stuff.

His "own stuff" is what this story concerns. He was a huge Pathfinder fan, and he had his own custom game world that he actually wanted to make prominent enough to become an official gamebook. Obviously, he's failed in this endeavor. But he continuously pushed for us to play in his world. This is one of two or three games in it that I was a part of.

During this initial playthrough, Scott's cousin was over for a week. His cousin, Nathaniel, is close to your typical Cat Piss guy: probably 6'6, so horribly obese that he literally barely fit through your average door and so out of shape that climbing one flight of stairs was a tremendous feat, and probably at least a little autistic. If I remember correctly, he smelled kinda rank up close (then again, so did Scott). His seemingly harmless appearance and behavior would occasionally betray creepiness festering in his mind. For example, he once climbed that whole flight of stairs to the second floor in their house and showed up completely out of breath at the door of Scott's 15-year-old sister...just to tell her that she should take up a "provocative" lifestyle/career, like being a biker chick. Nathaniel, by the way, was probably close to 30 during this.

So the game. Nathaniel was brought in to play at Scott's insistence, since he's a big Elder Scrolls fan (Skyrim had yet to come out at this point, by the way). Typical Pathfinder game in a custom world, but with one unique aspect: DMing would rotate between Scott and the players between sessions, so everyone could participate in building the world. Anyone who's aware of who's on the player list will probably realize something that Scott did not.

Scott was the DM for the initial session to handle the opening setup. I was playing a character class that I can't remember now, but it was basically the look and skills of a Paladin with the attitude and alignment of a typical Barbarian (so a big rear end in a top hat in plate armor, basically). Casey, a scrawny and terribly awkward/assholish kid that deserves a whole drat post of his own, was playing a roguish type if I remember correctly. And Nathaniel made an elf ranger. I'm pretty sure he called him Bob, so I'm sticking with that.

The whole party is at the local tavern in the capital city of the southern province. I won't mention all the fluff, but basically the north is infested with a zombie plague that's been threatening the borders (I have no idea if this was taken at all from the White Walkers, but the Game of Thrones TV show had just aired at this point in history). The tavern is also a brothel, so the party all pays their silver to take a girl up.

For whatever reason, probably being influenced by playing a lot of Oblivion lately (this will come up again), Nathaniel decides to pickpocket his prostitute. She promptly notices and pulls a knife on him. Nathaniel spectacularly failed to talk his way out of it, and so Bob ended up being chased around the second floor by a hooker with a blade. This attracted the attention of the others, who all attacked him as well.

In a desperate attempt to avoid getting stabbed, Bob the elf decided to say "That's all well and good, but which one of you is the prettiest?" He was trying to get himself out of it by inciting a catfight between the girls. Obviously, it didn't work.

So the madame finally showed up and stopped the fight. She placed a magical necklace on him that would kill him if he didn't do her bidding, and gave him the quest hook for the group: the local baron of the town (each town is ruled independently by a baron, with little centralized government) was looking for the armor of an ancient warrior hero who ascended to godhood upon death, and is hiring adventurers to find it. In order to get the necklace off, Bob had to find the armor and give it to her instead.

He was then tossed into the back alley. The party found him wearing nothing but a loincloth with liquefied fecal matter dripping from his anus. This is how he decided to go visit the baron.

We show up to the baron's keep, where Bob is hurriedly tossed a robe by a servant. The baron is a tall, goateed man sitting on a black throne covered in spikes and weapons--okay yeah Scott definitely was ripping off Song of Ice and Fire here.

We offer our service in finding the armor, which the baron accepts. He gives us the locations of the towns where each piece can be found and sends us off. Scott pulls up the map, and we choose our first location.

Heading off to an eastern mountain town, we learned (somehow) that there's a Thieves Guild in town, and Bob and my guy meet their leader in an alleyway; the same guy later showed up in a future campaign in this setting where we did a job for him, but I digress. The guy tells us where to find the armor piece, but he promptly spins a bullshit story to Bob: the magically-controlled guards (who are part of the church that worships the guy) shut off temporarily at sundown, giving a way in. It was really obvious bullshit; my guy rolled easily to tell that it was a lie, and the guy even told my character in private that he was just loving with Bob.

Nathaniel was either truly dumb or a really dedicated roleplayer, because Bob refused to listen to me when I tried to dissuade him. So my character left him to go drink with the rest of the party. Meanwhile, Nathaniel plotted.

He decided that he needed a distraction before breaking into the temple. The nearest village is about 2 hours away, so 30 minutes before sundown (yes, he's exactly as dumb as it looks) Bob runs off to the village.....and sets a barn on fire.

As he flees, Bob hears a woman crying for help in the barn. He ignores it.

Shot at by the village militia, Bob barely manages to flee back to the forest. As expected, the Thieves Guild guy was lying: the guards just do a typical changing of the guard at sunset. Bob arrives several hours late, injured and dirty, and probably having killed an innocent person.

We ended up pulling some Mission: Impossible rappelling poo poo that night to steal the armor, which went quickly. So in the next session, we went to the next town, and this time it was Nathaniel's turn to DM.

After giving him some quick pointers, Scott's character and mine (Casey was gone this session) went to the nearby town right up at the foot of those mountains. We didn't know where to begin looking for the armor, so we split up: I would go to visit the baron and ask to take advantage of his information, while Scott would visit the tavern.

So I reach the baron's mansion. He's only referred to as the Baron of Many Appetites, and goddamn was that right. He's massively corpulent and in the process of yet another huge feast when I arrive. Strangely, he agrees immediately to my request to use his library and sends me off.

While looking through the tomes, one of his young servants arrives and offers my character a drink. I'm savvy enough to be immediately suspicious, so as a test I talk her into taking a drink first. She takes a swig, smiles.....and collapses unconscious. I book it right the gently caress out of there.

Laughter about Nathaniel's "comedic" bits becomes more nervous from then on.

Meanwhile, Scott's character pays a gold piece to a bard at the tavern and he promptly sings a song that reveals the location of the armor piece in the Crystal Caverns up the mountains.

As we leave for the mountain, the Baron of Many Eats exits his mansion and announces that a massive town-wide orgy will be commencing. I don't think two player characters have ever left a town faster than ours.

The way up the mountain is loaded with hostile goblin villages. My character was established as very racist against goblins on top of being relatively bloodthirsty in battle, so we take the opportunity to chop our way up. We massacre tons of their warriors, looting their villages as we go. Nathaniel comes from the Monty Haul school of treasure, so all the villages are mysteriously filled with every precious metal possible, as well as valuable silver weapons. We cut such a swath that the goblins begin retreating and burning their own villages down as we advance. They roll boulders studded with crystal spikes down at us, only to smash their own buildings.

Finally, we reach the peak of the mountain. A long rope bridge crosses a chasm leading to the Crystal Caverns....and a massive army of hundreds of goblins is on the other side.

Scott and I call bullshit and explain to Nathaniel that such an encounter is not only way above our level, but extremely impractical to actually try and roleplay properly. So he shrugs, smiles, and decides that we manage to kill the entire army off-screen. No, we didn't get an appropriate amount of XP from it.

Getting the armor was less eventful. There was a simple puzzle involving picking the right armor piece from one of two copies, but the trap (a rockslide and crystal spider attack) was triggered anyway because we picked right on the first try and he thought it was boring.

The next session was relatively uneventful. Nathaniel was gone for Casey's turn at the wheel, so I don't remember much about it. I do recall a way unbalanced encounter against zombies and fighting our way up a necromancer's tower. At the top, Scott recovered (among other items) a teleportation skull: smash the skull while thinking of a nearby destination and it'll teleport you there instantly. Good for quick escapes.

The session after that was my turn. I decided to take advantage of some established lore and make my town a bit deeper. I chose to control the harbor town, which was in dire straits. See, part of the world's lore is that it's possible for a mortal to ascend to godhood if enough people view them as a god. This is how the ancient hero whose armor we're stealing ascended. The baron of this town wanted to become immortal, so he ruled with an iron fist and banned any religion not based around worshiping him in a failed attempt to ascend, with his white-armored elite guard (aided through magical telepathic communication) enforcing it.

While discussing how to find the armor, Nathaniel had other ideas. Everyone figured that it must be somewhere out at sea, so Bob was going to steal a boat and go for it. His plan was literally a copy of Elder Scrolls behavior: crouch in the open on a pier and take a shot with a bow at an innocent fisherman to steal his boat.

Bob missed, and he ended up having to dive into the water and hide under the docks to avoid getting murdered by the guards.

Meanwhile, the party all agreed that the best way to find the armor would be to work for the baron; wanting to ascend to godhood, he would surely be searching for such an artifact to try and enhance his power. So what was Bob's plan for getting to the baron?

He waltzed into the tavern, stood on a table, and shouted "THE BARON IS NOT A GOD!"

There was a beat. He shouted it again into the silence.

See, Nathaniel figured that he couldn't just go and ask the baron if he could work for him. So his idea was that he could openly defy him, at which point the guards would drag him before the guy for punishment and he could offer his services.

Instead, the guards just showed up and begin kicking the poo poo out of him in front of the crowd. It was only Scott's intervention that kept me from killing off Bob right then and there, so instead he was simply booted out of town. Upon leaving, he turned and shouted "THE BARON IS NOT A GOD!" back at the walls.

I finally had it. An arrow flew from the guard on the wall and pierced his throat. Bob the elf was no more.

Well, sort of. Nathaniel promptly made another character in the interim who joined the group for their trek to sea. Meanwhile, Scott and Casey simply walked up to the gates and asked the guards for permission to offer their services, and they were peacefully allowed to walk in and make the offer.

I was pressed for time, so I had to quickly finish up my session. I quickly threw in a bullshit encounter about fighting a doppelganger of yourself to gain the armor piece.

For the final session, it was once more Nathaniel's turn. His new PC left for the second town, and the rest of us were camped out in the woods. Suddenly, a mysterious voice appeared and told us that we were ready to finish our quest. Following the voice, the forest floor opened up and a staircase leading underground appeared.

Inside, Nathaniel had prepared a labyrinth. Well, when I say "prepared" I mean....didn't prepare. He had the idea of one, but he hadn't actually bothered to map anything out and just made it up as we went along. He described a map quickly flashing on the wall before disappearing, which ended up being useless anyway because he decided when we finished.

I don't remember most of the traps. They were mostly extremely easy to complete, since outsmarting Nathaniel isn't too hard. After a few encounters, he decided that we had made it to the end of the maze.

The next challenge was one of temptation. Each of us was to be presented with a different temptation, and we were told that failing it would lock us out of the reward. The problem is that the whole thing was pretty bullshit, since we knew beforehand that we had to reject what was put in front of us to succeed in our quest and none of them were even close to valuable enough to give up everything. Like, my guy was presented with a defenseless goblin child that I had to not murder. Like, seriously? If you went up to an unabashed KKK member with several lynchings on his record and told him "You will be given $5 million for NOT murdering this black man", do you think he'd flip out and shoot him on impulse?

We finally made it to the finale. A wizard approached us, happy that we had finished the trials and willing to give us the armor....on one condition. We could not take it and use it for our own gain. If our intentions were not totally selfless, we would lose it.

Well, poo poo. Our entire mission was pretty goddamn selfish; we were all doing it for the money. We had to get this robed rear end in a top hat out of our way.

Scott had an idea. Remember that teleportation skull we got from the necromancer's tower? He envisioned the rock above the cave in his head, walked up to the wizard, and smashed that motherfucker right in the face with it.

The wizard, as expected, disappeared.....and then he walked out from behind a wall. Turns out that it was an illusory clone, and that was the REAL final test. The wizard only offered to let us go if we would let him turn Scott's character into a frog. Obviously, we refused and prepared for battle. The wizard shed his robes to reveal hidden plate armor, rose several suits of armor as soldiers, and charged in.

It went extremely easily. Nathaniel had set up his wizard in plate armor, which obviously ruined his spellcasting abilities. We told him point blank about this rule and even offered to let him retcon the armor away so the wizard could fight at full power, but he decided to just roll with it. So he ended up gimping his own encounter for pretty much no reason. The animated armor was easy to fight as well, especially since we had all gotten acquainted with the flanking rules and worked as a team.

We defeated the wizard and his minions, and went behind the wall into his lair to recover the armor. As before, Nathaniel dumped a shitload of gold, weapons, valuable scrolls, etc. on us.

Scott took over for the final encounter to finish the game. We handed over the armor to the baron as he arrived, when suddenly a massive army of zombies appeared! We went into "cutscene mode" to simply have the battle described to us, where the baron donned the armor and was revealed to be the reincarnated ancient hero.

The three of us were given our rewards by the hero, mostly money, and an offer to help him fight off the zombie invasion. Suddenly, Nathaniel announced that his new PC showed up with an army of his own! Off-screen, you see, he had secretly returned to the town where we found the first armor piece, told the church that we were stealing artifacts, and showed up to stop us.

Obviously, Scott told him to gently caress right the gently caress off with that idea. He even quickly paused the action to roleplay how the encounter really went: Nathaniel's PC bugged the church so much with his crazy claims of tomb robbers that they arrested him.

And that's how it ended. Nathaniel would play one more game with us, Scott's GURPS space campaign. He was only there for the first session before leaving permanently, and while he didn't act as crazily creepy, he did annoy everyone else that we were established as shooting his character out the airlock off-screen.

chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jun 3, 2014

Samizdata
May 14, 2007
The game was Shadowrun (I don't remember the edition, but it was an early one.

We are starting a new campaign. The party is looking seriously murderhobo, so I decided to roll up an Owl Shaman medic. Mind you, I was NO use in a fight (as we will see), but if I could find only a finger left, I could keep you alive and heal you up.

Somehow, Archie Medea managed to bumblefuck his way through several firefights, and the party is quite willing to trade his combat incompetence for his ability to be a one man Doc Wagon Platinum.

As time passes, we are dealing with toxic spirits (and for you Shadowrun people, you know how buttfuckingwithsandpaperly difficult they can be). As we progress through the campaign, we need to track down some information we can't find in the mundane world.

Hey, Archie?

Yeah?

You're a shaman right?

Yeah?

Astral quest!

Archie slips into the astral plane and is doing okay, until the ref pulls out his gently caress you card. I have to fight myself. During the several (SEVERAL) rounds of combat, neither of us manages to injure the other, and we both critically jam our sidearms.

Archie is bobbing and weaving like a marionette with a seizure trying to stay alive while realizing that gun was his only weapon, and, as useless as he is with it, he is worse in unarmed combat. (Yeah, so I minmaxed a bit.) Finally it hits him - trauma patches do bad things to people that aren't, you know, traumatised. So both he and his doppleganger strip some packaging and go to work. At this point, the ref and all the players are either busting up from the Looney Tunes nature of the fight or on the edge of their seats to see what happens next. I am flipping between the two.

We manage to keep connecting (sometimes) with each other on uncovered skin somehow. Finally one patch away from death, I get lucky with both my initiative AND to hit roll and stick the last one on him. The doppelganger drops. Archie recovers the information and returns to his body, arriving in a near comatose state, leaving the party to wonder how to heal the healer....

Beef Hardcheese
Jan 21, 2003

HOW ABOUT I LASH YOUR SHIT


My group is playing Pathfinder, working our way through the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path. A couple of sessions ago we went on a 'sidequest' where the GM is running a one-shot adventure and retooling it to fit into the overall campaign (I think he's been skimping over some less-good parts of the campaign and is trying to make up for missed loot and experience). I don't know what the name of this module is, but it's Pathfinder, and involves getting sucked into a Harrow deck and having to recover maguffins from living avatars of the people and creatures of the Harrow deck.

We find ourselves in a carnival tent, confronting a Rakshasa who says that he "almost always lies." He challenges us to a duel of wits. We get to ask him five questions, and have to catch him in a lie / prove that he is lying. If we do so, he will give us his maguffin. The 28 Intelligence elven wizard uses her familiar (an Arbiter Construct) to Commune, and we learn that even though the circus is named for the Rakshasa, he doesn't actually own it. So we decide that's where we're going to try and catch him. The elf asks the first two questions, which are 'What is your name?' and 'Who owns this place?'.

Before the elf can say anything else, the 8 Intelligence dwarf fighter (whose player has been awake for about 20 hours after a long day at work and school, and has been drifting in and out of consciousness for the last half hour) pipes up. "Wait, what were the first two questions?" "Oh, you know what they are!" the GM responds, dismissively and in character. There is a moment's pause, and the dwarf's player points his finger straight at the GM. "AH-HAH! YOU LIE!"

The Rakshasa concedes, we go on our way with his maguffin, and the elf is trying to figure out how she could have so brutally underestimated the dwarf's obviously superior intelligence.

AceClown
Sep 11, 2005

chitoryu12 posted:


Scott and I call bullshit and explain to Nathaniel that such an encounter is not only way above our level, but extremely impractical to actually try and roleplay properly.

I absolutely get what you're saying here but it makes sense given you've just pillaged and burned every village on the way up and it makes sense they'd come out in force and use a choke point to stop you.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

AceClown posted:

I absolutely get what you're saying here but it makes sense given you've just pillaged and burned every village on the way up and it makes sense they'd come out in force and use a choke point to stop you.

We actually personally killed maybe two dozen between us, and they ended up doing the vast majority of the damage; we weren't even halfway up the mountain when they started torching their own land to try and deny us the treasure.

Our point was more that we had gone from fighting three or four guys at a time to being told to fight hundreds (including some goblin leaders that were a match for us by themselves) on a narrow bridge, all at the end of the session. He had whipped a whole army out of nowhere that was disproportionate to the scale of the goblin settlement and put us in a position where the only results were:

1. We die.

2. We abandon the quest and pick it up later.

3. We win, but painstakingly roleplay the entire encounter.

4. He bullshits the encounter as "Okay, you kill them all".

5. He admits that he made a mistake and retcons it away.

He chose option 4, while also no longer acknowledging that we just accomplished what was basically a superhuman feat that would make the gods tremble in fear. He basically chose the most illogical solution when we up front told him that, as the DM, he can retcon major mistakes away like that.

AceClown
Sep 11, 2005

chitoryu12 posted:

We actually personally killed maybe two dozen between us, and they ended up doing the vast majority of the damage; we weren't even halfway up the mountain when they started torching their own land to try and deny us the treasure.

Our point was more that we had gone from fighting three or four guys at a time to being told to fight hundreds (including some goblin leaders that were a match for us by themselves) on a narrow bridge, all at the end of the session. He had whipped a whole army out of nowhere that was disproportionate to the scale of the goblin settlement and put us in a position where the only results were:

1. We die.

2. We abandon the quest and pick it up later.

3. We win, but painstakingly roleplay the entire encounter.

4. He bullshits the encounter as "Okay, you kill them all".

5. He admits that he made a mistake and retcons it away.

He chose option 4, while also no longer acknowledging that we just accomplished what was basically a superhuman feat that would make the gods tremble in fear. He basically chose the most illogical solution when we up front told him that, as the DM, he can retcon major mistakes away like that.

Yep, he's a dumbass, I would have had the Goblins block the bridge but dropped a hint about a secret side entrance and turned it in to "oh poo poo this mountain temple is now crawling with angry gobbos so we have to stealth this poo poo up"

SpookyLizard
Feb 17, 2009
You challenge the actual goblin leaders to single combat, curb stomp the poo poo out them, the rest of them flee in terror and/or swear their loyalty to their new murder hobo masters.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

AceClown posted:

Yep, he's a dumbass, I would have had the Goblins block the bridge but dropped a hint about a secret side entrance and turned it in to "oh poo poo this mountain temple is now crawling with angry gobbos so we have to stealth this poo poo up"

I think I would have left the bridge only lightly guarded (so you got a little combat on a swinging, narrow rope bridge as well), and then made the final encounter a giant crystal spider boss (as had been foreshadowed by the spider-shaped trinkets the goblins made).

petrol blue
Feb 9, 2013

sugar and spice
and
ethanol slammers
Y'know, we've had a surprising lack of Fiasco in this thread. Let me do something about that.

Last night, due to illness, only three of us made our Dungeon World game, so we decided to play some Fiasco instead. For anyone who doesn't know, Fiasco is an unrepentant storygame about cohen-brothers style idiotic-plots-gone-bad. Will Wheaton does a really good demo/explanation here. We decided on a Wild West theme, being in the mood for something lighthearted. This is very much written from my point of view, and won't cover everything - Fiasco is explicitly designed to create tangled webs of (idiotic) plans and double-crosses, but I'll do my best to tell the story.

After some dice-rolling, we had characters: Jimmy Jackson (Me) and "Doctor" Rico Starr were conmen faith healers, setting up for a show in the town we were in. Rico and Dectective Horace Haight (pronounced 'height' or 'hate' depending on the mood or appalling accent of the moment) had both lost a lot of money to the Sheriff in poker the night before - money that included Jimmy's half of the loot the conmen had stashed. Detective Haight was on the trail of Jimmy (who quickly got outed as "the baby-faced killer"), with a witness in tow - a young child named Billy (who we imagine as basically the milkybar kid with an unspecified facial 'problem'), the only one left alive who could identify him.

So we start with Rico confessing to Jimmy that he'd lost his share of the money: Jimmy responds by flat-out threatening to kill him if it isn't back in the stash in three days. He's killed men for much less, after all.

Jimmy then has the 'bright idea' of hitting the sheriff's office and taking the whole lot for himself. He's casing the joint when a small child starts annoying him - turns out it's Billy, who Detective Haight has misplaced. Jimmy doesn't know the kid's a witness, and decides to use him as a distraction (he's got a little deputy star and sheriff's hat, he's a wannabe gunslinger), taking him to the sheriff's office - at which point the kid pipes up that he knows who Jimmy is and 'what he done'. Utterly losing his cool, Jimmy legs it back to the bar where Haight has just pressured Rico into helping with the investigation, and to help find billy (in exchange for help getting back at the Sheriff).

Jimmy tries to create a distraction, so that Rico can lead Haight away, and to get the sheriff out of his office (so he can off Billy and steal back the winnings). Naturally, he does this by using two bottles of rotgut whisky to start a fire.
This being Fiasco, the fire spreads out of control, setting most of the town ablaze. At which point... Someone sets loose the circus animals that were waiting to be transported on the train out of town.

Welcome to the Tilt Table. The Tilt Table exists to make everyone's "clever plans" go wrong. It's this moment of Snatch. In this case, it was 'Dangerous animals get loose' and 'greed turns to killing'.

Jimmy arrives at the sheriff's office, to find the sheriff not helping with the fire as expected, but instead loading a bag with the cash, and preparing to hightail it out of town. Jimmy draws on him, and demands the cash. Unfortunately, he's distracted, and Billy decides to play the hero, shooting him in the leg.

Rico and Haight arrive at the sheriff's on camelback, just as Jimmy stumbles from the office with the kid as a hostage, and with a sack of cash - he demands the camel to make his getaway, and Rico gets the chance to grab either the cash or the kid. He chooses the kid, just as the ammo stores in the sheriff's office go boom.

This is where the 'main' game ends, and we switch into short flashes of epilogue

Haight grabs the kid, taking the full force of the blast, and we cut to him in head-to-toe bandages, being lectured on guns by the kid. Jimmy fakes being unconscious, getting ready to shoot Rico and grab the cash, when Rico does the unexpected: he grabs Jimmy as well as the cash, and hauls him out of town.

We end with a 'ten years later' - Jimmy and Rico have gone straight! Rico finally got his medical training, and is the town doctor, watching as Jimmy, now the town sheriff, has a showdown at high noon with Billy the Kid. We cut to black as they draw, and the credits roll.

tldr; Buy Fiasco.

petrol blue fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Jun 5, 2014

CzarChasm
Mar 14, 2009

I don't like it when you're watching me eat.
See...That's why I want to get into Fiasco. Stories like this.

Thought, that's probably the "happiest" ending I've ever heard from a Fiasco story.

petrol blue
Feb 9, 2013

sugar and spice
and
ethanol slammers
Yeah, it surprised me too!

It's the third game I've played, the first ended with my fraudulent space-pope rooting through the medical waste bin for painkillers, the second ended with my militant microsoft-faithful IT-guy installing OSx on the entire network.

Somehow we rolled +10, -10, and +5 between us. (For non-players: Fiasco end-game rolls one colour dice minus the other colour - so you want as many of one colour as possible: the further from 0 you are, the better. In this case, we had freakishly-good luck that resulted in one "you done hosed up" and two "you're mildly better than before" endings. For Fiasco, that's as good as it's ever going to get.)

Bumfluff
Jun 19, 2008

Bumfluff!
It's me, Mabel!
I'm looking at you through the av!
Right here!
This is my voice!
I'm talking to you from inside!

This pathfinder campaign I'm in is getting pretty drat good right now.

Quick boring backstory that happened in the first couple of sessions: The crew of the airship "The Ash Cardinal" mutinied against the captain, I, the Cavalier with a hippogriff mount charge and one shot him. The mutineer who orchestrated the mutiny wins the democratic vote to be new captain. Is an awakened monkey with 18 intelligence, also bloodthirsty as all poo poo. We try to capture the ship we were escorting when we weren't pirates when a goblin airship with ghouls attacks us from the other side, and a sky kraken attacks from the front. I, now the first mate, the monkey captain, helmsman elf and some other player characters escape and survive. We decide to mutiny against the monkey as he is WAY too bloodthirsty and now I am captain with no ship but a bunch of gold to buy a new one.

We get a small, maneuverable sloop with a crew of 20 including us and also get hired as privateers for the merchant lord of the free city we arrived at.

Fast forward to last week, we take a middle class bounty for a ship that is assumed to be amassing slaves to sell by taking them from ships and leaving them abandoned. We pose as bait, nothing. We see some magical fog and decide to head into it and in the middle find a clearing with a ship with no balloon to hold it afloat carrying behind it two ships with heavy amounts of blood on the decks. After we fire a few cannons at them with no response, I send over two of my finest warriors to investigate.

I will now list the characters involved.
Me (Mardin): Captain, Cavalier with hippogriff mount.
Gor (D): Quartermaster, ex-smuggler, Orc Barbarian dual wielding titan hammers.
Talon (C): Purser, ex-smuggler, has lots of black market connections.
And a bunch of named npc crew who will be mentioned if needed.

I send Gor and Bashmor, a half-orc corsair using a crossbow, to investigate. Belowdecks, they find a Cadaver Lord and a magic man who was assumed to be a necromancer. In the first round of combat the Cadaver lord summons 25 cadavers and sends them at the duo, who promptly run and get picked up by me and the newly recruited scout (who is also a cavalier with hippogriff mount, he replaced my old job on the ship) and brought back over. They have now taken notice of us and keep trying to ram us to board. We deal with them, not with ease, by mainly just pushing the cadavers off the ship via the wizard and sorceror using spells like windwall and force punch. There was also a giant crow I engaged in aerial combat with.

In the end, we win without casualties, although some of us are blind for awhile as the crow clawed at us, but we loot the ships and then take them back to the city to claim our bounty. When we get there, we claim the bounty and a gnome merchant by the name of Gunner seems very, very interested in buying the ghost ship. We eventually do sell it to him for about 20,000gp which we add to our treasure pile.

Fast forward to last session, it is Tilkoma! The festival that celebrates the re-emergence of the dwarves from their mountain home. We officers of the crew have all been invited to a special show in the town square that is being put on by Gunner and is including the ship. We tentatively go. My +1 is our resident cleric, who I make cast Detect Undead as soon as we arrive, and lo and behold, he can sense 7 undead on the ship. I try to grab the attention of Gunner but he is addressing the crowd and has no time for me so in the end I just shout about the undead. He looks at me, super pissed and says "Well you've ruined the surprise now! I was going to make you stars!" and sends his guards downstairs to kill the undead.

He carries on the show, telling the story of how crew under HIS command took down the ghost ship by HIS order. Well, that just ain't right. So at the end I heckle from the crowd saying "That's not how it went down!" and stand up to tell the real tale, with Gor and some other NPC crewman who were there acting it out. Did I mention I also took a level in Bard so I could go for the Battle Herald prestige class? Well I did, and I rolled a nat 20 on my Perform(Oratory) skill. Gunner is not impressed with how the crowd seem to now be distrusting him. The captain who was the captain in Gunners story comes out the crowd and backs up Gunners claim. Gor, being an orc barbarian, intimidates him and he runs away.

Me: Does that not prove I am the one telling the truth?
Gunner: That orc was about to kill him?
Me: Gor is an orc, orcs are simple, they do not have the intelligence or wisdom to tell lies.

Murmurs keep getting louder and louder in the crowd. I finally spot the Merchant Lord who hired us as privateers and ask him to attest that it was me and my crew and the good ship Krakens Curse that took down this ghost ship. He gives me a look and gets up and collaborates my story. Gunner gives up and tells everyone to disperse. The merchant lord gives me another look.

My crew and I spend the rest of the day in the brewers guild tavern, lots of merriment is had and ale is drunk. We become quite well known with them. The next day a man appears at the ship wishing to speak to me. He goes on at great length about Gunner, his influence, his tradings and how he his ties to an infamous group of alchemists that leave cities completely abandoned. I go to see the Merchant Lord who tells me I have made a powerful enemy in Gunner. I tell him I know and that he seems to be shady and it seems to me that you probably don't want him around any more. He agrees, and says that if we can take care of him, we will be rewarded. I accept, and we hatch a plan to take him out.

The plan is to have Gor, in disguise, infiltrate Gunners ship which has been in port for a couple of months now, with Talon (a rogue) as a stealthy stowaway so when the ship leaves we can follow and have some people on the inside. The ship is about the same speed as ours and we leave about half a day later than they do, so Talon sabotages the engine so it stops working and poisons the water supply knocking everyone but a few people out. We catch up and see no one on deck, so we move over and prepare for them to come out. Two guards, a wizard, and Gunner himself appear, we do battle, with Gor and Talon appearing halfway through after coup-de-grace-ing the crew while they sleep, and make short work of them. We loot the ship, find compartments for smuggling people and not a lot else, seems they left with a hurry.

We create two treasure maps using Gunners corpse (it's a spell) to two of his most valued possessions. Now, treasure maps is what the person most values, so it could lead to just some delicious fruit for all we know, but anyway. We find a note in a bag of holding saying "We are ready, leave the city." We quickly assume it is the alchemists, and race back to the city to warn them. After digging around we find mind controlled civilians were dumping plagued rats into the sewers, realising there is nothing we can do to stop the oncoming outbreak, we tell the Merchant Lord himself, and the Brewers guild who we became friendly with. We say we will leave, and probably won't be coming back, they don't blame us and thank us for our help, at least Gunner is dead.

We follow the first treasure map as it was super close to the city and find nothing there. We're not entirely sure, but we think what WAS there was the ship full of plague rats, it would make sense. We decide to follow the other map when the session ends.

Talon is pretty pissed that I keep making "stupid" decisions and enemies. But I will not stand for people lieing about something I did. We may end up with more enemies in the long run as we are technically the indirect cause of this city maybe being destroyed, but what pirate doesn't have enemies?

God Of Paradise
Jan 23, 2012
You know, I'd be less worried about my 16 year old daughter dating a successful 40 year old cartoonist than dating a 16 year old loser.

I mean, Jesus, kid, at least date a motherfucker with abortion money and house to have sex at where your mother and I don't have to hear it. Also, if he treats her poorly, boom, that asshole's gonna catch a statch charge.

Please, John K. Date my daughter... Save her from dating smelly dropouts who wanna-be Soundcloud rappers.
I have to ask, is this a lovely thing to do?

I joined some silly weekly Pathfinder Society game at a game shop, because I'm in-between games and in need of a cheap RPG fix. I have a first level sorcerer with nothing but Mount and Silent image, and a pet raven from the arcane bloodline. After one game, I am annoyed that our DM railroaded us into an ambush while traveling. We weren't given a chance to take precautions because it was done in narration. So I've set up a strategy for not getting ambushed by random encounters while traveling. Way I see it, who has time for that poo poo anyway?

So I have 430 gold from the first little Pathfinder for beginners module we played. First, I've purchased a Royal Outfit a couple of ten foot poles and a bunch of blankets. Cast Prestidigitation on the blankets so they look like banners bearing a distant Royal Crest. Tie them to ten foot poles. Cast mount every two hours so I ride at the tail of the party dressed as a king. Send my Raven up into the sky so it has an aerial view and can caw twice if it spots trouble. If it spots trouble, I can cast Silent Image to give the appearance of 400 feet of marching soldiers behind me.

If this works or not, is this an rear end in a top hat thing to do at some PFS game, which are basically just like convention games? Am I robbing some dork from his great experience of being told that he has been ambushed by wolves or kobolds or time-consuming-things-to-hit that don't have anything to do with the plot of whatever's written in the module?

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

If the rest of the group is into combats and random encounters you're basically going "nope, we are playing this my way, bitches, cause my character has the means" and that ranges from kind of to tremendously lovely, yeah. Imagine if you were in a game heavy on diplomacy and avoiding battle and a new guy comes in and plays a barbarian who attacks everyone. Might as well let the dorks be dorks and find a game that suits you more, or else try and get a group conversation going about random encounters vs. actually following the module's plot in the first place.

e: to be fair just saying "hey you're ambushed now" is also not unshitty

My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Jun 7, 2014

Piell
Sep 3, 2006

Grey Worm's Ken doll-like groin throbbed with the anticipatory pleasure that only a slightly warm and moist piece of lemoncake could offer


Young Orc
If you want to get the best of both worlds just do the raven thing, that way you won't have to get into arguments with the DM about the enemy's will save for disbelieving a silent army or the distance which they spotted you or whatever. A raven flying above gives you an excuse to not be surprised or to prepare a bit without ruining whatever encounter the DM is planning to use.

Doodmons
Jan 17, 2009
Relatedly also this tactic opens the GM to have a bunch of mounted men halt you, it turns out to be Royal Guards who know for a fact you're not their King and they're pissed off. And/or the local lord of the land mobilising an actual army because of all the reports of an unknown noble parading around in force through his lands without permission. You might start a war.

God Of Paradise
Jan 23, 2012
You know, I'd be less worried about my 16 year old daughter dating a successful 40 year old cartoonist than dating a 16 year old loser.

I mean, Jesus, kid, at least date a motherfucker with abortion money and house to have sex at where your mother and I don't have to hear it. Also, if he treats her poorly, boom, that asshole's gonna catch a statch charge.

Please, John K. Date my daughter... Save her from dating smelly dropouts who wanna-be Soundcloud rappers.

My Lovely Horse posted:

If the rest of the group is into combats and random encounters you're basically going "nope, we are playing this my way, bitches, cause my character has the means" and that ranges from kind of to tremendously lovely, yeah. Imagine if you were in a game heavy on diplomacy and avoiding battle and a new guy comes in and plays a barbarian who attacks everyone. Might as well let the dorks be dorks and find a game that suits you more, or else try and get a group conversation going about random encounters vs. actually following the module's plot in the first place.

e: to be fair just saying "hey you're ambushed now" is also not unshitty

The rest of the party didn't seem especially keen on having the slough through combat with snakes and wolves... It's like this... Cliche wise, at level one, someone is going to tell you to kill rats. I can't think of anyone who actually wants to go fight a basement full of rats with a sword. I've never been presented with this, and said, "yipee, killing rats!" and neither have I seen anyone else salivate for the opportunity.

Last game? I did do the sensible raven thing already. It was ignored, completely dismissed. We are traveling. I tell the DM that I send my familiar 70 feet into the air to scout for us, and alert us to upcoming danger. He ignores it completely and bam, we were ambushed by wolves and snakes on our way to a mission where wolves and snakes are irrelevant.

The fight could of been circumvented, it lasted far longer than the DM and players expected, and we were forced to rush the rest of the game, which included all the plot, character interaction and significant plot related combat encounters... The DM was a newbie, and inexperienced, so I don't fault him too much.

It should also be noted that I created a pure face-man bluff character. No offensive spells or intention to take offensive spells, just trickery. So for me to be useful, I must use ingenuity to overcome obstacles, diplomacy, misdirection and trickery. It's just in my character.

If it backfires, well, that will instantly lead to a more memorable encounter for everyone... So in further reflection, screw it... I'm going to go ahead and potentially be perceived as a dickhead. I can try anything I want, and if the other characters decide not to follow suit, and decide to fight, well, that's fine, I'll join them and help where I can. So it's not a big deal. I can try it. If other players don't want to do it, we won't. I think earlier I was just being too self conscious when I asked about it.

Splicer
Oct 16, 2006

from hell's heart I cast at thee
🧙🐀🧹🌙🪄🐸

God Of Paradise posted:

Last game? I did do the sensible raven thing already. It was ignored, completely dismissed. We are traveling. I tell the DM that I send my familiar 70 feet into the air to scout for us, and alert us to upcoming danger. He ignores it completely and bam, we were ambushed by wolves and snakes on our way to a mission where wolves and snakes are irrelevant.

The fight could of been circumvented, it lasted far longer than the DM and players expected, and we were forced to rush the rest of the game, which included all the plot, character interaction and significant plot related combat encounters... The DM was a newbie, and inexperienced, so I don't fault him too much.
This is bad.

God Of Paradise posted:

It should also be noted that I created a pure face-man bluff character. No offensive spells or intention to take offensive spells, just trickery. So for me to be useful, I must use ingenuity to overcome obstacles, diplomacy, misdirection and trickery. It's just in my character.

If it backfires, well, that will instantly lead to a more memorable encounter for everyone... So in further reflection, screw it... I'm going to go ahead and potentially be perceived as a dickhead. I can try anything I want, and if the other characters decide not to follow suit, and decide to fight, well, that's fine, I'll join them and help where I can. So it's not a big deal. I can try it. If other players don't want to do it, we won't. I think earlier I was just being too self conscious when I asked about it.
This is worse. I could go on about how you made a guy who can't fight in a murderhobo system (which might have had an impact on the length of that combat), or how you'd be turning the game into King Fake Army & Friends, but the only really important part is the bolded bit. If you go into a game deciding that your fun is more important than anyone else's then you're about to graduate Cat-Piss 101. Don't be that guy.

e: Eh, that was needlessly harsh. Basically you're reacting to the GM railroading by setting up your own competing railroad. Don't do that. Have a sit down with the GM and a couple of players and have a nice chat about why railroads are bad.

Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Jun 7, 2014

My Lovely Horse
Aug 21, 2010

See now that sounds more like you guys are on the same page as players and need to have a chat with your DM, and it doesn't sound like he's running a good-but-different-from-what-you-want game either. For that setup the raven/trickery thing sounds fine, you just need to get the DM to buy into it.

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Kobold eBooks
Mar 5, 2007

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AN OPEN PALM SLAM A CARTRIDGE IN THE SUPER FAMICOM. ITS E-ZEAO AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DOING THE MOVES ALONGSIDE THE MAIN CHARACTER, CORPORAL FALCOM.
If your DM already ignored your master plan once, then it's just escalating things to try it again only bigger.

Why not bring it up to your DM as a problem and see if he can't drop a more exciting combat on you to fill the XP quota he is so obviously setting for himself without planning properly?

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