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The thing you're all ignoring is that this is Pathfinder Society - the GM can't adjust encounters or anything like that (because he's running a specific premade adventure with arbitrated results), and the basic social contract as set out in the Field Guide thing is that you are doing standard stab monsters and take their poo poo play most of the time. God of Paradise is literally pissing in everyone else's cheerios and not interacting with the actual game they all agreed to play.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:40
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That game sounds so boring and non-interactive that I can't imagine anyone having less fun because one player decides to actually try playing instead of being narrated to.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:45
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Arivia posted:The thing you're all ignoring is that this is Pathfinder Society - the GM can't adjust encounters or anything like that (because he's running a specific premade adventure with arbitrated results), and the basic social contract as set out in the Field Guide thing is that you are doing standard stab monsters and take their poo poo play most of the time. God of Paradise is literally pissing in everyone else's cheerios and not interacting with the actual game they all agreed to play. Oh, I didn't catch that it was LITERALLY Pathfinder Society. Yeah in that case God of Paradise is the cat-piss for agreeing to join that game and then making a mostly-useless-in-combat character. Shoulda picked up Daze or Color Spray or something.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:53
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It's not like getting ambushed is a terrible thing in that genre, too. HEY LOOK YOU GOT TO KILL MORE MONSTERS AND TAKE THEIR STUFF JUST LIKE YOU WANTED.
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Jun 7, 2014 14:57
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Actually, speaking of combat-ready sorcerers, I was once the cat-piss!(At least I think I was.) Let me set the scene: R and J were there, as were... Shaun, the DM. Jason, the DM's little brother. Caleb, who was some quiet guy. I had been brought into this campaign one or two sessions prior to this by R, because I was antsy for game and this was the only game she knew was running. She'd been here a while and liked it, though she also expressed frustration lately. See, Shaun had two big flaws: A) He thought he was The Undisputed System Master of 3.5 and thus would let anyone bring whatever insane splatbook-cobbling and homebrew poo poo they could find, as long as it was something he could look up. Did I mention you basically had to play like this to survive? Nobody told me, which is why my previous character left(as he was literally useless in these fights) and what led me to this, the moment of my cat-piss inauguration. B) He rabidly quoted tier lists for classes and based his DMing entirely around that. Oh and he banned Wizards because they were 'top tier'. This was explained in-setting as you had to roll a natural 18 on your INT on character generation to be born with the Wizard gift.  So when I wanted to play a sorcerer, he said yes and I went to town. Maxing out his CHA through whatever manner I could, getting all sorts of magic nonsense going, the works. He looked at the finished sheet and approved it. Then declared we were wrapping up a major part of the campaign tonight, and Sir Edward(his DMPC and more or less the reason nobody could ever get anything done plotwise) was leading us to face down with the dread pirate Captain Nash once and for all. Shaun placed a lot of love and care into his batshit stories, especially when most of the time the party was just following Sir Edward around or befalling some 'hilarious' fate like getting a venereal disease that grants barbarian rages.  I'll glaze over the unimportant parts; we were climbing a tower, it was full of monsters and a bunch of dickbag instakill traps(because of course it was! This is D&D!) and finally the party split. The cleric(Caleb), the sorcerer(myself) and the bard(R) were the ones facing off with Nash himself, everyone else(Dwarven Defender and a spider mage) were to hold off the endless flood of mutated pirates. Then Shaun reveals that Nash is a hideously overpowered custom class, by having him anime-swordwave knocking the Cleric instantly into crit HP, and then coup-de-gracing him the next round. This happened to Caleb's characters pretty much all of the time. I got hit with the second anime swordwave, and R is setting up her buffs when I bust out what I'd built this Sorcerer for: Save or dies. Nash manages to roll pretty well at first, and it does get pretty climactic when I'm down to my last save-or-die spell slot and it's an all-or-nothing situation. So I cast Flesh to Stone. He botches. Nat 1. Shaun stops for a moment. An invisible goblin wizard on an invisible dragon manifests in the sky and teleports Nash's statue to the dragon. Then he taunts us. Shaun is using his 'don't gently caress with this character hahaha' voice and flowery dialogue. While he's talking, I lose my temper and do something I shouldn't have; I made it even more adversarial than it already was by calling an Orb of Sound* spell on Nash's statue. We have a brief argument about the range of the spell, check it, and yep, he's within range. Critical hit. I roll drat near max on the damage, and Nash is at single-digit HP. The goblin beans me with a ray of some kind that instakills me, and then R speaks up. "I cast Shatter!", and once again the range argument comes up, and once again it turns out that yes, gobbo is still within range. It's a hit, and Captain Nash, the major big bad for the campaign, the villain I was never formally introduced to, the guy they wanted to give a huge sendoff to, exploded and was lost forever to the ocean below. R and I were never invited to another of Shaun's games. It turns out Nash was meant to escape and we were going to have Yet Another Climactic Battle with him alongside Sir Edward. *For those not familiar with D&D, sound damage tends to pierce the damage reduction of structures and objects, called Hardness.
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Jun 7, 2014 15:16
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That whole campaign sounded like a GM's cat piss fantasy. Just feel glad you bailed out afterwards and don't have to look back.
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Jun 7, 2014 15:37
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Arivia posted:The thing you're all ignoring is that this is Pathfinder Society - the GM can't adjust encounters or anything like that (because he's running a specific premade adventure with arbitrated results), and the basic social contract as set out in the Field Guide thing is that you are doing standard stab monsters and take their poo poo play most of the time. God of Paradise is literally pissing in everyone else's cheerios and not interacting with the actual game they all agreed to play. Why would anyone play in this? Why would you want to GM a game where you have no freedom to rewrite or change any of it?
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Jun 7, 2014 15:58
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A tale of two cat-pisses. In a 3.5 one-shot last Halloween I played a rogue and there had been exclusively sneak attack-immune enemies in six encounters. Great. Then came one encounter with regular beasts in it. I was excited. Giant cats! Actually unironically great! I'll get to do the one thing I can do in combat! Oh no I won't because there's a witch loaded up with enchantments who just hit me with Charm Person, and now we all get to figure out mid-combat what that actually implies because it's a spell written very much for PCs to use on NPCs. So what does clever me do in a bout of frustration? Look up the exact wording of the spell while the initiative is going around, and then deliberately move away from one of the giant cats so it will opportunity attack me, because any action by the caster or their allies "that threatens the charmed person breaks the spell." There's really no in-game reason I could have mustered. It was metagaming in its purest form, playing on the fact that the DM probably wouldn't know all the details of every spell. That day, we both were the cat-piss. Though I will argue, the DM more so.
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Jun 7, 2014 16:18
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^^Having been in this situation before, you should slap that DM if he ever uses Charm Person on a player again.Night10194 posted:Why would anyone play in this? Why would you want to GM a game where you have no freedom to rewrite or change any of it? It's often used as an avenue for meeting new players/getting your bearings as a player, and then some people just really like that kind of game. I know a few people that really just like playing the combat portions of Pathfinder for some reason. Game how you want, your own personal elfgame, etc etc. 
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Jun 7, 2014 16:24
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My Lovely Horse posted:Look up the exact wording of the spell while the initiative is going around, and then deliberately move away from one of the giant cats so it will opportunity attack me, because any action by the caster or their allies "that threatens the charmed person breaks the spell." Gotta say that was a pretty elegant solution to your problem. Still, charming/mind controlling players is a poo poo move by DM's.
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Jun 7, 2014 16:43
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Deltasquid posted:Gotta say that was a pretty elegant solution to your problem. Still, charming/mind controlling players is a poo poo move by DM's.
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Jun 7, 2014 16:51
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"Well it's on her spell list so "
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Jun 7, 2014 17:16
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They probably just went down the enchantment list and put in some of everything, then used whatever caught their eye at the time.
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Jun 7, 2014 17:24
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bathroomrage posted:It's often used as an avenue for meeting new players/getting your bearings as a player, and then some people just really like that kind of game. I know a few people that really just like playing the combat portions of Pathfinder for some reason. Game how you want, your own personal elfgame, etc etc. True enough, I suppose. Just seems very alien to me. But you're right, everyone's got their own fun and it's up to them to have it, and meeting new players and people is a good enough reason anyway.
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Jun 7, 2014 17:51
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Since someone brought up DMPCs and ridiculous sudden railroading, I'll talk about my early tabletop experiences that perfectly personified this. I got into tabletop RPGs through the nerdy friend groups in high school, like the ones who did Way of the Sword after school (basically boffer combat with no roleplay, for everyone who wanted to feel like a badass swordsman around middle schoolers; our local group was the worst in the city because it was almost exclusively populated by members from one high school who wanted fun after-school play fighting and the other groups around town were college age or older and usually a lot faster, stronger, and more serious than most of us). So, like I explained in my first post, there were a few weirdos and wannabe badasses around. My very first games were in Pathfinder. The DM was Alex, a Serbian-American if I remember correctly. I rolled up a Spy class and we went into the game. The psychopath guy was playing a swordsman from a wealthy family, and a short and really weird kid who didn't bathe often was a halfling rogue. It mostly went all right for the first session. I don't remember the details beyond the game beginning with an arena battle. But either way, we got ourselves recruited as mercenaries for a war. So we all piled onto an airship (in this setting, literally a seafaring ship hull lifted up and flown through magic) and set off. Suddenly, pirates attack! I did utterly terribly thanks to a series of really unlucky rolls, to the point where all I managed to do was injure myself with a flail. After the fight went on for about 25 or 30 minutes, Alex decided to end it quickly. So he had an NPC general (who was apparently an animated suit of armor) leap onto the other ship and go belowdecks. Within seconds, the DM described literally dozens of bodies flying out of the hold. Yeah. So we get to the destination and Scott (psychopath) decides he doesn't want to simply follow every order the NPCs give him, while Alex was adamant about railroading us along his script. It got to the point where Scott literally had his guy turn invisible and jump out the window to avoid being forced to follow the general's orders against his will, which failed. After a not-very-epic battle scene, we got back on the ship. I don't recall how it all occurred, but it ended with us flying low over the water and suddenly being attacked by amphibious fishman things that leaped from the water to board us. Alex described that the water was filled with bloodsharks, which would voraciously attack and instantly devour anyone who fell into the water. I think there was a kraken-type thing attacking us as well. So of course, someone suggested just flying the ship to a higher altitude to cut off the flow of attackers. Suddenly, Alex revealed that the skies were filled with dragons. Out of nowhere. I actually managed my only kill with that character during the fight, by tackling a guy and shoving him overboard. During a later campaign with Alex while playing as a more typical rogue (wherein I learned how to take advantage of the flanking rules mercilessly), we were accompanied by a major NPC, practically a DMPC, who wanted to save his comrades from slavery in the mines. So we dressed ourselves up in disguises and infiltrated it. While Scott and I were planning out our rescue, the NPC simply smashed the locks and gave a "Brothers, you are free! To arms!" speech, blowing our cover completely. I actually got so pissed that I made a flubbed punch at the back of his head. Alex later told me that if I connected, the NPC was so insanely high level that he would have instantly killed me for it.
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Jun 7, 2014 21:01
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Deltasquid posted:Gotta say that was a pretty elegant solution to your problem. Still, charming/mind controlling players is a poo poo move by DM's. I've had good results with it a few times. You need the right player and either a social situation or an escort mission - but all you do is tell them "They've Charmed you and you can't tell anyone else. Treat it how you think you ought to." The three times I've done this have all worked out very well. (Two players rolled with it and supported the NPC, one ending up dead, and the third knew they were charmed and was helping the NPC and dropping little or sometimes flamboyant clues all over the place until the other players worked it out). Try to use mechanics and Charm Person, or a charm spell in combat and urgh, no.
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Jun 7, 2014 21:26
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I don't think mind control or brainwashing is a 100% bad thing in the game, just like I don't think that really anything is 100% bad should never be used ever. It just needs to be controlled carefully, and especially not used so the GM can bullshit their way into railroading.
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Jun 7, 2014 22:03
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chitoryu12 posted:I don't recall how it all occurred, but it ended with us flying low over the water and suddenly being attacked by amphibious fishman things that leaped from the water to board us. Alex described that the water was filled with bloodsharks, which would voraciously attack and instantly devour anyone who fell into the water. I think there was a kraken-type thing attacking us as well. But no. Dragons out of nowhere neonchameleon posted:I've had good results with it a few times. You need the right player and either a social situation or an escort mission - but all you do is tell them "They've Charmed you and you can't tell anyone else. Treat it how you think you ought to." The three times I've done this have all worked out very well. (Two players rolled with it and supported the NPC, one ending up dead, and the third knew they were charmed and was helping the NPC and dropping little or sometimes flamboyant clues all over the place until the other players worked it out). Mind control in my experience works well as long as all it does is give the player different priorities, not actually take agency away from them. Also the player has to be a good sport about it obviously. Splicer fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Jun 7, 2014 |
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Jun 7, 2014 22:04
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I'm working the counter at a FLGS right now (like literally as I type this) and the Pathfinder kids forgot their character sheets so they're trying out board games. They're trying to figure out Eldritch Horror. One of them just asked, about the clue tokens on the board, if their characters were aware of them. He needed IC/OOC knowledge to be explicitly laid out in a boardgame. Pathfinder causes brain damage.
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Jun 7, 2014 23:19
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One of Black Crusade players got a psychic power side effect roll and ended up with a Greater Demon of Tzeentch possessing him. The demon is content to sit back and let the player pilot most of the time, occasionally forcing a willpower check for seemingly inconsequential reasons, letting out a demonic chuckle inside his mind for the same and in combat the player's powers list can be swapped out by that of the demon(which is vastly more powerful), with the caveat that once the player decides to cast one of the demon's powers, the demon gets to pick the target.
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Jun 7, 2014 23:30
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Splicer posted:This is baffling. You can make a perfectly decent fight out of everyone flying away; Flying up replaces the bloodsharks with falling to your death (and then being eaten by bloodsharks) so that chunk of the combat remains intact. There's already guys on the ship, just have the last one that got on be a shaman or something to bump up the challenge or have them fight extra hard because now they really don't want to get thrown off. Maybe even have the kraken start chucking up additional reinforcements slingshot style if you don't mind a little slapstick. If you're hellbent on not letting the PCs get away that easy have the kraken latch on and now the challenge is about shaking the kraken off to get away. Alex is kinda sorta creative, I guess? Like, most of his ideas weren't bad on the surface and it could have been a successful and interesting campaign. But I don't think he's very good at thinking on his toes or creating a game world and plot without a lot of planning, so he resorted to obscene levels of railroading. There's two situations where I don't mind railroading: 1. It's laid out before gaming ever begins that you're playing a scripted adventure. 2. The players are going so stupidly off-track that you need to force them back on task. In which case, you can expect that either your game is uninteresting or your players are bad at roleplaying. Normally in my games, I try to make them at least a little freeform. The zombie apocalypse game I'm running now technically has a scripted path, but the players aren't punished for deviating or completely abandoning it for their own plans and I've written down alternate options for many different methods of completing encounters or handling conflict. My method of encouraging players to follow the script mostly involves making the scripted path look like the most desirable one for accomplishing your goals.
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Jun 8, 2014 00:50
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Might be worth letting him know that if you guys throw him a serious curveball it's OK for him to take a minute to work out how to deal with it.
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Jun 8, 2014 01:00
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Splicer posted:This is bad. Who cares? I made a face-man with illusion spells. A bluff character. They're fun, and coming up with schemes isn't forcing any other player to do anything. If other player characters don't want to try my scheme, they'll say, "No." Or "I ignore God Of Paradise's scheme and I rush at the the monster with my axe." And there you go. To quote Boris from Rocky and Bullwinkle, "Who cares? This fantasy show." Also this is an inconsequential PFS game at a game store I don't care about or frequent regularly. If I show up and take a poo poo on the table I will never lose sleep over it, be remembered by anyone in a few months, or receive any sort of comeuppance from it. I can't think of anything that matters less... But I'm not doing anything assholish to the 50 year old wretch who can't drive, or the zit faced teenaged girl with a furry tail... I'm just coming up with ridiculous schemes in an RPG to have fun, and if they get rejected, they get rejected. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 04:22
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Night10194 posted:Why would anyone play in this? Why would you want to GM a game where you have no freedom to rewrite or change any of it? I'm still trying to figure out why anyone would play it. It was new to me. I finished a 2 year campaign I ran from my house once a week. I have a friend getting ready to run a weekly game... So I did what I figured most people did if they wanted to play, but didn't have a game at the time. I looked up the shop in my city that runs RPG games. I asked the guy behind the counter what they had running, and checked the board for postings. No postings caught my attention. So the guy behind the counter asked what I'm familiar with. I told him the systems I've played, ran or know. The only thing they had going was Pathfinder. Guy just told me to make a character and show up on Thursday. I didn't ask any questions. I just figured we'd be playing, you know, an actual Role Playing Game... Thought I was being invited to sit in and play in an actual GM's actual campaign.... Not whatever the hell Pathfinder Society is... Which is a goober college kid reading narration from a sheet of paper with no inflection or interaction, punctuated with a by the numbers mini-quest. I would not recommend it to anyone. If you've never played a role playing game I'd just recommend getting some friends together and playing one, or going to a convention, looking at all the games, and figuring out which GM seems like someone you'd allow in your house, or talk to at a party, and signing up to that person's game. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 04:54
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Arivia posted:It's not like getting ambushed is a terrible thing in that genre, too. HEY LOOK YOU GOT TO KILL MORE MONSTERS AND TAKE THEIR STUFF JUST LIKE YOU WANTED. Cool. Yeah. The random encounter was very poorly ran and the kid apologized to all the players about it since it rushed the rest of the game. The random encounter should of easily been avoided by smart playing and improvisation. If the players choose to fight the random creatures, smart playing should be rewarded with a chance to plan your attack. Sure ambushes are a part of the game, but so are tactics, scouting out what's ahead, bluffing your way out of an ambush and having a chance to ambush whatever enemy you spot. What exactly is your argument? PC's shouldn't be able to use their skills, powers, ingenuity and abilities to gain an advantage? Why not just sit at home and play just the QTE sections of bad video games? Why not just jack off in a corner staring at a shiny piece of pretty foil? God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 05:05
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I finally wrote up some more of the first lovely campaign that I learned D&D from. So my very first campaign was with a guy we’ll call Jacob because that’s his name. Jacob was an overall nerdy kid who was pretty inoffensive if a little weird. He has since become a furry larper, so I guess I know how to pick them. He bought all the books and we threw together a 3rd edition campaign in under two days. So we hopped right in and started clearing an old abandoned castle. I should emphasize how little of the rules we understood back then. None of us had played before and we’d really only read through the books once. This lead to all kinds of rules fuckups . The first of which being we had no clue what sort of loot was appropriate. After killing few rooms of orcs and hobgoblins, we discovered a full set of cursed 10 magic rings. At first level. Two of which were (cursed) rings of three wishes. All were worth at least 100k gold each. The rest of the dungeon crawl was pretty inoffensive until we reached the throne room, which was actually a bedroom for some reason. Standing there, amidst everything else, was a solid gold bed. Our rogues eyes got wide and we discovered that Jacob had no ability to improvise. Basically, he had told us we had something like 1200 pounds of solid 24k gold in that bed and he never wavered from that despite clearly not having thought about us taking it with us. We conjured up a Tenser’s floating disk and made two trips. Oh, we also found an Orb of Dragonkind, you know, the major artifact kind. Not truly understanding the bluff rules, we then pawned the ten cursed rings off on the local shopkeep, who bought them at full retail price. At this time, we were blissfully unaware of the rules governing how much gold you can feasibly spend in a hamlet, so Jacob just let us get away with it. This plus the gold bed we melted down meant that between the 4 level 2 characters, we had amassed something like 4.5 million gold pieces. Which we promptly spent buying ridiculous weapons from the local blacksmith. You know something’s weird when your level 2 fighter has a +4 frost dancing greataxe. Naturally this wrecked the entire storyline Jacob had planned and things went rapidly downhill from there.
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Jun 8, 2014 05:58
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God Of Paradise posted:Cool. Yeah. The random encounter was very poorly ran and the kid apologized to all the players about it since it rushed the rest of the game. It's not your place to determine what is and is not an acceptable form of having fun. If a mindless dungeon crawl is what they wanted, what they sat down to do, that's their business.
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Jun 8, 2014 05:59
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Captain Oblivious posted:It's not your place to determine what is and is not an acceptable form of having fun. If a mindless dungeon crawl is what they wanted, what they sat down to do, that's their business. Who's this they? I am they. I was a random person who sat down at a pick-up game full of random people. I'm just playing a game based off the rules of the people who designed it. It's Pathfinder. There is more than one solution to a problem. This is a stupid loving argument. I asked if something stupid was an rear end in a top hat thing to do. Then I realized 1) No, it's a really inconsequential. 2) No, pitching a ludicrous idea isn't an rear end in a top hat thing to do as it forces nobody else to go along with it without their consent. And 3) gently caress it. Even if it was an rear end in a top hat thing to do, I don't care, which links back to reason one, because it is at the end of the day it's inconsequential. So, yeah, you'll hear no more arguing from me.
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Jun 8, 2014 07:16
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God Of Paradise posted:But I'm not doing anything assholish to the 50 year old wretch who can't drive, or the zit faced teenaged girl with a furry tail... By derailing the kind of game they specifically set out to play, you may very well be doing something assholish to them. If you really don't like this game, why not just quit? Say you're not coming to future sessions because it isn't your kind of game. If you're worried that telling the truth will lead to problems, say that something's come up and you can't make it on Thursdays anymore.
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Jun 8, 2014 07:20
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If memory serves PFS games have X number of combats that must be completed and the combats are templated with creatures tailored to the number of characters in the party, so yeah if you didn't have any combat spells at all and as you stated 'have no desire to pick any' then you're being a drag on the group when the fighting actually starts. If you make a social character in a team full of combat monkeys and then go out of your way to prevent combat and otherwise do not contribute to it in any way then yes, you are being the rear end in a top hat in this situation.
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Jun 8, 2014 07:31
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Finnankainen posted:I finally wrote up some more of the first lovely campaign that I learned D&D from... I think most people who don't learn from more experienced GMs have first games like these.  The first game I ran that wasn't pre-written was in Basic D&D, and the first room of the dungeon had enough Elven Cloaks and Elven Boots (rendering the wearer silent and invisible most of the time) for each of the party members. No monsters, no traps, just a cloakroom full of pre-identified loot. Being a bunch of over-cautious ten year olds, we skipped pretty much every encounter and skirted our way through the dungeon, picking up other treasures that I'd just assigned at random. Later on, I had to explain that the random rumours table in Keep on the Borderlands included false ones, in order to convince them that the Keep's long-lost masters hadn't necessarily returned, and weren't kicking the asses of anyone who came a-knocking. I think I got rid of the dead adventuring party at the front entrance to keep them from bolting, too.
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Jun 8, 2014 07:35
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I'm still reading through the backlog of stories (some of which are hilarious), but I have a number of tales, some half-remembered, some more recent (as I finally found a group I can have fun with). The only game of Dark Heresy where a scum is useful I basically started out by treating the scum like a rogue. Our DM knew the rules about as well as the rest of us (we knew squat) and played it off kind of like a game of Inquisitor (just get lower than the score and you succeed at whatever you do). Our characters had been sent to ~some world~ by ~some Inquisitor guy~ to check things out. Apparently a base had ~mysteriously~ gone offline and wasn't talking anymore. Or maybe it had been dead for years and there was a widget he'd forgotten while moving house. Regardless, there was an empty base with our name on it, and he'd apparently convinced some space marines to give us a lift because we arrived in a Thunderhawk (flying brick with lots of guns attached). Apparently we were in the middle of a jungle/wood/forest when we landed, so I guess worries about FOD are ignored in the future. Giant spooky base several hundred yards away. Of course it's not dangerous!  With me are a void born assassin (now named Jim), a feral world guardsman (Bob the viking!), and myself the normal human scummer from butts-knows where (I called him Jack). So Jim the Assassin went off exploring on his own, because clearly void born assassins are awesome like that. I got stuck with the giant hairy viking, and we got told to investigate a shed and a mess hall. The over sized shed was mostly empty, but apparently creepy. The mess hall was filled with corpses and blood. I guess this explains how the base got so quiet. Next thing we know, we're attacked by three muties. The feral worlder has a gun and an axe and proceeds to mutilate one of them. I have a shotgun, and turn one into chunks. The last one tried to leg it, so Bob shoots him in the back. No hono(u)r(e) among vikings I guess? We loot them but other than a few shotgun shells for the weapons they were too dumb to use (they missed a lot - plus I decided hiding behind cover was a good idea) there wasn't much. After tripping over a number of corpses, we found a doorway and stairs to some underground place. We ended up clobbering another couple of muties, and discovering it was the armory. Obviously we checked everything. I got a hand cannon (with only the ammo in the gun for use), and Bob the viking got a giant rotating cannon (I guess a heavy stubber?). Meanwhile, while I was indulging my looting tendencies and annoying Bob the wookie/viking, our assassin was moving ~silently~ through the building, and occasionally stabbing a mutie when he got bored or something. I'm not really sure as it's been a few years. Regardless after a while he finds a dead commissar. Well, his skull anyway. He calls us on our vox links (apparently we had those now), and we shamble through the building, beginning to not care that things were covered in blood like the zombie apocalypse or something. I guess insanity checks didn't exist or weren't necessary. When we arrived, my character decided to greyhawk the skull as it had gold teeth. At which point Jim the ~assassin~ decides to come over all official team leader style and stop me. Then we watched a video which apparently explained a few things. I guess it suggested that half of the base got mysteriously mutated, along with the population of whatever world we were on, while the rest of the personnel got clobbered for not being mutants now. Again, it's been a few years, but that sounds about right. This is around the time we decided to get out as apparently alarms started blaring or something. Also we got a message that the thunderhawk was under attack. I guess the space marines flying it had decided that they didn't want to kill the muties on their own, and were just sitting there shaking their heads and going "nope" a lot. So we made our way back out to the thunderhawk, discovering a giant horde of muties standing around outside it. I guess loitering is now a crime. I think a few were even hitting the dropship with pipes! Bob the wookie/viking and Jim the grand assassin (wait, what?) decided to charge down the front. I decided that frontal assaults against giant hordes were a dumb idea, and flanked right through the forest/jungle, with my trusty shotgun. At this point Jim decided that using Bob the wookie as a spring board was a good idea. So he leaped up to try to jump off the guardsman and over the heads of some muties to do some improbable death swirlie on someone. He promptly got tangled up in Bob's hair/fur they both collapsed in a heap (I'm imagining a three stooges sketch but with a pale albino assassin, and a big hairy viking-wookie) I, on the other hand, made it through the jungle and levelled a shotgun at the nearest muties, getting two exploding heads for the price of one shotgun shell. With the other two struggling to get up, the space marines took pity on us, and opened up with the heavy bolters, wiping out the remaining muties and turning them into sludge. I guess things had gotten so pathetic that even lazy space marines have to get up to do something (or else deal with the smearing and damage to the paintjob caused by muties - the horror!). That apparently ended the session, and we all got a level-up because shenanigans. Hmm, I guess I actually remembered more than I thought I did. This ended up being a one-shot because university costs more money than imaginary space games do, and those who weren't at uni all had realjobs. It was my first experience with a paper RPG though, so there's that. Anyway, the rest of my (worth typing) experiences are far more recent, going in order from most recent to I can't remember: Not the dragonborn you wanted. I choose you (to eat me), PokeThulu! Gladiator, Schmadiator Ow stop biting me! (or Everyone Needs a Janitor) Meet the (spirit) Cliches Spiders and Burials You are being watched (or Puzzles and Headaches) It's probably better to start at the beginning, so when I've got more time I'll start posting in (rough) sequence (although the Pokethulu was a one-shot so far, so I might do that next as it got kind of ridiculous).
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Jun 8, 2014 09:18
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Kurieg posted:If memory serves PFS games have X number of combats that must be completed and the combats are templated with creatures tailored to the number of characters in the party, so yeah if you didn't have any combat spells at all and as you stated 'have no desire to pick any' then you're being a drag on the group when the fighting actually starts. Yeah, great. Not what happened. Avoiding getting ambushed doesn't mean no combat, it simply means starting combat on the parties terms, with the advantage. Combat heavy does not mean that there is no space for character interaction. The whole issue I had with the game was from a very inexperienced DM, running a module he'd never even read before. That's something you just shouldn't do. You can do crowd control with illusion spells just fine, it just takes creativity. You can play a smart character who is useful in combat scenarios. You can choose to play a mage who casts magic missile every round, sure, that's fine, but it's not the only way to do it. Is your honest interpretation of the game, "cast magic missile or get the gently caress out?" You're kidding me. There are tons, tons, tons of things an illusionist can do in combat, or in preparation for combat to give the party an advantage. For example, say you're getting flanked by a monster in a forest. To delay them make them hear the roar of a bear. Summon the illusion of a roaring wildfire, and boom, it's willsave or flee. Summon the image of some level 20 death knight by your side in a dungeon full of Kobolds. Say, "This is Henry. I snap my fingers, Henry makes you dead. Leave now and you'll be spared." Roll an intimidate and watch the ranks scatter. Say you've got a minotaur charging at your wounded Cleric. That Minotaur is going to change his course of direction if he's met with an oncoming gelatinous cube. An orc opening the door your parties behind? Show him a false wall of stone in front of your party, and watch your party decimate him before he gets a chance to attack. I wasn't aware of the nature of the game. I was told to go online for a member number and show up. I wasn't openly disliked by the rest of the party. In game I made quick friends with the monk of a fire god. I crafted a molotov out of an empty vodka bottle, lamp oil, paper and twine, and I gave it to the PC as a way of saying "Hello." And when the time was right, he gave me the thumbs up and I cast spark, sending him into a swarm like a mad jihadist. Area of effect damage so goodbye swarm. Then I walked over and zapped him with a wand of healing. I seemed to be seen as useful and welcomed by the other players just fine. You guys are assuming a lot of negatives about this ordeal that simply do not apply. But no. PFS is not my cup of tea. And I'll probably try to find a different game. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 11:02
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God Of Paradise posted:A whole bunch of lovely crap God Of Paradise posted:So, yeah, you'll hear no more arguing from me.
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Jun 8, 2014 17:00
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In my early teens, my older brother introduced me to pen and paper games through a gaming club he'd been a part of for years. The people there were an incredibly eclectic mix: You had your awkward teenage nerds, of course, but also a lot of older and more experienced players, of all sorts. You could regularly see far-left activists sitting at a table with a local centre-right politician and a banker, being GMed by a primary school teacher. There are literally dozens of stories I could tell about the club, and the people in it, but the key point is that we had some absolutely amazing GMs. These were people who'd been playing for longer than I had been alive. They had seen every edition of D&D come and go, they'd seen (and often been) every type of lovely player and GM under the sun, and their GMing had improved vastly for it. We had our share of cat-piss, too, but the group of people who I regularly played with remain to this day the finest players I have ever had the pleasure to roll dice with. Being an awkward teenage nerd, the first thing I did once I left my home town and moved to the UK for university was naturally to sign up for the university gaming society. Unfortunately, having never been exposed to truly bad GMs, I was not prepared for the kind of games I was signing myself up for. Group 1: Emperor Ex Machina At the time, I was going through a WH40k phase, and so when I saw there was a Dark Heresy group I signed up for that right away. We had your usual mix, a rogue-y character, a face, a guardsman, a weird proto-inquisitor type, and a sister of battle (me). I forget exactly why, but we had been dispatched by our inquisitor boss to a Hive world, I think we were looking for traces of chaos or something. Whatever it was, the face and other socially-able characters go off to do some investigation, while the SoB and the guardsman kind of just sit back and shared stories of killing xenos. The team discover that, apparently, there'd been some suspicious activity with one of the local organised crime syndicates, so off we go to look into those guys. For whatever reason, our investigations don't really turn up much, but we manage to set up a meet with one of their underbosses. We gear up, just in case, and make our way to the meeting point. As we're heading up the elevator, it suddenly stops, and opens into a long corridor, and as we start walking down it all the lights go out and the door opens on the other side, revealing a bunch of loving Dark Eldar Harlequins who immediately charge us. Now, there's absolutely no loving way our fresh-out-of-the-academy characters can even hurt these guys, so we resign ourselves to the impending TPK when, suddenly, a bunch of Space Marines break through the walls of the corridor, start fighting the Harlequins, and evacuate us on their Thunderhawk gunship. Game goes into cutscene mode for about half an hour, at which point the Marines (after showing off how cool and awesome and powerful they are) tell us they need us to investigate some underwater ruins because they fear chaos may be lurking there. Being new to the group, I don't particularly want to be That Guy and point out how ridiculously stupid this whole thing is so I just go along with it. We make our way through the spacedungeon, fight some robots along the way, pretty standard. That is until we stumble across a loving Reaver Titan, aka a 800-ton mech designed to take on small armies by itself. Turns out it had been sitting in the underground of this city-world for centuries, and cultists had been repairing it. We find it as it's being rearmed and reactivated, and the GM says we have x turns before it comes online, clearly expecting us to run away. There is no way we're getting out of the complex in time, though, and the thing's faster than us, so hauling rear end is not really an option (metagamey deus ex machina notwithstanding). We start trying to find ways to stop the factory or deactivate the Titan, but every idea is met with straight up stonewalling. I'm getting pretty annoyed by now, and he goes on describing the rearming process:  :"You see a hatch open on top of the Titan, and missiles start being loaded in"Suddenly, I remember I have a Plasma Cannon I picked up from a robot earlier on. These things are notoriously unstable, and regularly overload and blow up. I purposefully avoid telling the GM my plans, and instead I just slowly move up the scaffolding around the Titan. He keeps putting cultists in front of me but I manage to get to a high enough platform. I try to jump onto the Titan, and despite the GM giving me a ridiculous difficulty I have a lucky roll, and make it. The GM, still trying to get us to run, continues to describe the rearming: : "The missiles are all loaded now, and the missile launcher is being lowered onto the Titan.": "Can I roll Tech to intentionally overload my Plasma Cannon?" : "Uh, sure, difficulty is <some number>" (rolls, succeeds) "Ok, I jam the overloading cannon into the missile compartment just as the launcher is being lowered, then run the gently caress away."We look it up, and the damage from the exploding cannon is more than enough to set off the missiles. It normally only takes a couple to cripple a Titan, so this should definitely take the Titan down, or at least significantly hurt it, right? Haha, no. : "Your cannon explodes and sets off the missiles. Explosions rage inside the Titan, damaging the launcher and the hull. When they stop you see that the Titan is still standing, and it starts to regenerate itself, as if it were alive."We finally give in and run away, only to be rescued (of course) halfway out by the Space Marines in their Thunderhawk. As we fly away we see the Titan come out, fully repaired, along with 2 of its brothers, and start shooting up the city. I made some excuses, and never came back to that group. Group 2: Traveller But Not Really Some time later, I decided to give the society another chance. I had wanted to try Traveller for a long time, so I signed up for a game. The first red flag came when, during a pre-game discussion on Facebook, it became apparent that out of the 6 of us, 3 were very experienced Traveller players who knew every min-max trick in the book and had played together for years, and the other 3 of us were complete newbies to the system, including the GM. The veterans seemed nice enough, though, and for the most part let us do whatever we wanted with character creation and simply gave us some advice here and there, and while the GM was a newbie to Traveller he seemed to be experienced otherwise so I overlooked it. Soon I found out that even though he was a newbie to Traveller, the GM was completely changing the background, keeping only the rules of the game. Considering Traveller is heavily background-dependent, and has a life-path creation system that makes little sense outside of that background, this seemed a bit odd to me, but what the hell, I hadn't played my elfgames in a while and needed my fix. Plus, I'd created my character already, so what's the harm in giving it a go? I showed up at the appointed place and time, and met the rest of the party. I knew 2 of them from elsewhere, and the ones I didn't seemed quite nice, if a bit odd. We made introductions and started setting up the game. Immediately, it was obvious the GM had no idea how the game worked, and the veterans basically had to take over the preparation and rounding out of character sheets. Eventually we had our characters ready to go. The other newbie rolled a combat medic, while the veterans had an engineer, a pilot and a crazy scientist. I decided to go simple and built a tank, who was an ex-space pirate boarding specialist turned private security. On insistence from the veterans, my gun gets upgraded to a minigun and called Sasha, a la the Heavy from TF2. We decide on inter-character relationships, sort out a couple details and begin. For various reasons, we're all travelling on a colony ship, and as we prepare to dock with a space station half-way to our destination, something's wrong. The DMPC chief of security rounds up all able-bodied fighters and tells us that the station has been taken over by pirates, but without the fuel from the station the colony ship is doomed. He asks us to help him with the boarding, which we all happily accept, except Professor Schizo who takes the opportunity to roleplay her character's multiple mental issues and goes off on a monologue. Eventually she calms down and we proceed with the boarding. I'm pretty excited at this point, since my guy is pretty much built for ship boarding combat, and I describe how I eagerly take point and prepare to spray with my MG as soon as the doors open. The doors open, initiatives get rolled, and I rush down the boarding corridor, spraying as I go. I hit one of the pirates squarely in the chest, making him stumble but otherwise not hampering him in the slightest. Before I get a chance to shoot again, Professor Schizo has fired a grenade in, killing a pirate and leaving the rest incapacitated, and Engineer and Pilot are already in the room finishing them off with their knives. So, ok, fine, apparently my boarding specialist is useless in boarding situations, whatever. The Prof starts monologuing again, agonising about the explosion she caused, while the rest of us start looting bodies and checking out the room. The Engineer hacks one of the sealed doors open, to find the big pirate bossman on the other side, who is running away. We immediately let loose on him, but the GM says everyone was doing other stuff so we can't shoot. After I point out I had been covering the Engineer the whole time he allows me to take a shot at a big penalty. I hit and crit, but the pirate just groans and keeps running at full speed (because apparently my gun shoots nerf darts or something). I forget why, but for some reason catching this guy was really important, so we give chase. We very quickly catch up to him, since the entire team is fitted with leg-enhancing implants, but every time a door gets locked in our face before we can get near him. We can't shoot him because he is constantly turning corners (not that it would have done much good anyway), and despite it literally taking less time for our engineer to hack open the doors than it takes for the pirate to close them, he still manages to outrun us and get to his ship. But wait! There's a fighter! Our pilot goes straight for it, and the chase resumes in space. The pirate is flying full-speed away from the station so it can warp away, but as it turns out our fighter is faster than his shuttle, and our pilot soon gets into range. After a couple rounds, it seems as though the pirate is about to get blown up... when suddenly a pirate battleship materialises out of nowhere and locks guns on our fighter. Now, in Traveller, FTL communications are impossible, and warp travel takes weeks. The vets bring this up with the GM, who agrees with these things but says that nevertheless, the battleship appears. In the meantime, the rest of us have all returned to the colony ship. The pirate ship hails us right away, and Captain Asspull orders us to let the pirate go or they will open fire on us. The Pilot is having none of this bullshit and finishes off the pirate, then rushes back to the station. As this is happening, we get hailed again, only this time, the guy we'd just blown up appears on screen, together with Captain Asspull. Again, the vets point out personal teleportation is impossible in Traveller, and the GM once again agrees but says it happened anyway, trying to play it off like the pirates just pulled some David Copperfield poo poo on us. The session ended with us using the colony ship to ram and board the pirate ship. I didn't stick around to see how that panned out, but I can hazard a guess. I felt bad for the guy, because he seemed cool, but seriously, if you're going to rely so heavily on asspulls at least make them consistent with the game you're playing. mediocre dad okay fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Jun 8, 2014 |
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Jun 8, 2014 18:26
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God Of Paradise posted:But no. PFS is not my cup of tea. And I'll probably try to find a different game. If you'd rolled on up into the thread telling the story of how you were asked to join a game of Pathfinder only to be met by a 50 year old dude, a girl with a tail, and a railroading GM, we'd have been all "Oh man that sucks!" Instead you came in asking if your sweet revenge plan would be dickish, we said yes, and you got all huffy about it.
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Jun 8, 2014 18:40
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Trying to remember any other interesting moments from my gaming history. Unfortunately, I only began recording sessions this year, so I have to rely on my fuzzy memory most of the time. * My non-combat scientist character in a semi-hard GURPS space adventure game trying to participate in a fight with pirates in a hanger with no gravity and everyone using magboots to walk on the ceiling. My only action was somehow fumbling a routine landing and spraining my ankle, which kept me from joining combat. Meanwhile, the barely competent doctor (played by Nathaniel the creepy pervert from my really long story) pulls out a .44 revolver and one-shots three different dudes. * Aforementioned non-combat character gets to fire his rifle at mutant enemies on a space station twice. Both times he crit fails. * During an alternate history World War II campaign, our special forces group has been parachuted into Berlin in 1944 for the invasion, trying to destroy AA guns. We're confronted with an entire large multi-story building bristling with machine guns firing at our building from across the square. We get the idea to load up a nearby car with explosives, weigh down the gas pedal, and ram it into the building. That's not the facepalm part. The facepalm part is when the token short weird kid suggests (to avoid leaving cover) slightly turning the wheel and fixing it in place so that it'll drift in a perfect turning radius to curve out of a garage (perpendicular to the target) and ram the building. Which is completely impossible. * Short weird kid's previous World War II character sneaking into a concentration camp on his own and trying to hide under the bed to avoid Nazis. He died. * The big Scottish guy in the World War II campaign managing to somehow bluff his way into the enemy garrison by pretending to be a collaborator, and escaping by removing his hand from his pocket in a Nazi salute, saying "Heil Hitler" while dropping a live grenade, and leaping out a window. Meanwhile, my character (also pretending to be a collaborator) casually asks a guard outside for a cigarette, and he immediately becomes suspicious and shoots me dead. The GM explained it with such stupid logic that he recanted and retconned the whole thing. * During my Perfect Dark d20 game, crazy Scott and short weird Casey are investigating a building they were sent to so they can hack a computer. Scott wants to check the building for bulletproof glass. He does this by faking a street fight with Casey (who had no clue what he was doing) and using it as a chance to fire his .357 into a window to test it, then running before the cops arrived. * In an aborted d20 post-apocalyptic horror campaign, we're all draftees in a the army of a religious nation stationed on the border of what remains of the Hell-influenced landscape from the religious Judgement Day. Casey elects to create a character who is literally mentally retarded (up to and including creating a human figure from sharp, rusty scrap metal to sleep with and making a blanket fort to hide from the commanding officer) but has superhuman strength. It was not meant to be a comedy campaign.
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Jun 9, 2014 00:29
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Warlock in my 4E game managed to take eight enemies down to exactly 0 HP over the course of the session, whether they had 5 or 18 or whatever else left. I need to make some sort of precision trophy.
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Jun 9, 2014 14:55
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I just remembered some cat-piss shenanigans in an otherwise great gaming session. We were playing Primetime Adventures, for the record. ninja e: For anyone who doesn't know, Primetime Adventures is a system where you play characters on a made up show. That's more than you need to know for this. Before the game started the player in question (let's call him Jack) decided to show us a video of himself skinning and preparing a rabbit to eat. Luckily he described the video before showing it off so I knew to avoid looking at it. Then we generally had fun. Jack decided that his character will hit on all the women all the time. We ran with it, let him fail to impress anyone ingame, he laughed it off, seemed okay. Then I went on a short toilet break, and when I return everybody's looking at Jack angrily. I ask what happened, and it turns out that at some point there was a scene where one character was meeting her younger sister who's sick in the hospital. Jack used fan-mail (I think that's what it's called? Someone can correct me on this) to show up in that scene, and started hitting on the sister. Then he's informed that she's like 9. So instead of saying 'oh, oops, my mistake, nevermind', he decides to roll with it and hit on her anyway. Apparently he couldn't understand why that might be a bad thing. In the end he did relent and hit on all the nurses instead. I'm so glad I never saw him again, my luck would have to run out eventually.
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Jun 9, 2014 15:22
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| # ? May 21, 2024 17:04 |
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My Lovely Horse posted:Warlock in my 4E game managed to take eight enemies down to exactly 0 HP over the course of the session, whether they had 5 or 18 or whatever else left. I need to make some sort of precision trophy. Make it a Utility Trophy, and give them a bonus Free action Daily power to render an enemy to 0 HP instead of taking them to negatives/killing them. The sort of thing that won't see much use, but could be neat if you need to KO someone with the Precision Warlock? Like an achievement that actually does something, double the fun.
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Jun 10, 2014 02:58
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