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It's my favourite merit that I will never get the chance to use, simply because I know how broken it can be to be able to flat-out ignore almost any physical threat (in exchange for half or more of your freebie points). I find it a really fun thing, and would totally allow it, since relying on only physical threats makes things kinda boring sometimes, but pretty much every GM I have talked to has said "yeah, I totally agree with you and trust you, but no I don't want the extra effort to have to work around it". It's the awkward scenario where only bad GMs will allow it, because they run with stupidly broken poo poo*, but then are unable to work with it. *I talked to a player in the in-story DM's other WtA/Changing Breeds game, they entirely soaked a 14 aggravated damage natural lightning strike, and can do 10 lethal to everything around them anytime they want for free.
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Oct 6, 2014 01:01
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Good gaming: New group, trying the Dark Heresy 2.0 rules out for the first time. The group was actually another group of my friends who play together and we recently twigged that we all play tabletop games. Great gaming: No shitlords. Beer on tap. Our girlfriends all arrived after the session wrapped up and we had a BBQ and were NORMAL people.
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Oct 6, 2014 01:06
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SpookyLizard posted:It sounds like a fantastic trait if the player isnt a shitlord and the gm isnt a shitlord. Well, in a "real life heroes" campaign (I basically played Darkman, and one guy was basically the Punisher), we had a player that had a real fun spin on invulnerabity. A suicidal immortal. We are flying in in a chopper to a potential "this is an amazingly bad idea" battle? He decides to see if jumping out in midair will help. Totally misses the battle.
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Oct 6, 2014 05:18
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If I ever play a Character who is solely concerned with his own physical well being, I would like to be punched for playing such a shithead, unless that's the entire point behind the character. Being a nigh-invulnerable coward would be fun.
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Oct 6, 2014 07:25
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SpookyLizard posted:If I ever play a Character who is solely concerned with his own physical well being, I would like to be punched for playing such a shithead, unless that's the entire point behind the character. Being a nigh-invulnerable coward would be fun. Hey, being punched still hurts man!
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Oct 6, 2014 08:54
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SpookyLizard posted:It sounds like a fantastic trait if the player isnt a shitlord and the gm isnt a shitlord. I knew a guy who once ran "Deus Ex Machina" man in a HERO game. His powers were (IIRC) a set of indirect undetectable physical and energy attacks. They manifested themselves as chandeliers falling onto people's heads, carpets suddenly wrinkling underfoot and tripping them, microwaves randomly overloading and shooting out bolts of electricity, things like that. The whole point of the character was that nobody could ever figure out that he was the one responsible for these things, so it really needed a cool player and a cool GM to work properly. (Which the player and his GM were, thankfully for all involved).
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Oct 6, 2014 15:18
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So this was way back in high school that this story happened so unfortunately I don't remember much of the details, but... I'd been playing tabletop with a group of acquaintances for a while, when one of the guys comes in with a brand new set of books: Shadowrun. We kind of immediately dumped what we were running in favor of being cybernetic badasses, with the idea that we'd all make highly-specialized people who'd only be capable of doing a job when put together. For instance, one player decided to make a decker who was also stuck in a wheelchair. This resulted in him being priority number one and us fashioning together both turrets and what amounted to a miniature armored van frame to put over the chair to protect the guy. There were other, similar people, but then there was This Guy. This Guy, who we referred to only as The Blur, was spec'd out to do two things really well and one thing average. He could run /really/ fast and could dodge virtually anything, but was just average at shooting things and crap at everything else. Considering most jobs in Shadowrun involved armed robberies or espionage, this usually resulted in him having 3 objectives: 1) Draw fire from the initial security team by sprinting directly towards and past them 2) Take the shortest route possible to a critical area of the building, like the breaker room or the security station, and disable it so everyone else is free to run about. 3) Cause chaos, because he was done after objective 2. His definition of causing chaos was stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and causing property damage. This meant we had a lot of pilfered things from offices, like CDs and notes about passwords or other such things we could try to use for immediate gain before people changed the security protocols. This also meant we had a ton of miscellaneous things objects stolen, like pens. Hundreds, no, thousands, of pens. To the point where our resident mechanic complained that we had more pens than bullets. Which lead to us, as stupid high-schoolers, to proceed to draft up sketches and ideas for a rapid-fire crossbow that would fire said pens like bolts. Suddenly the police were on the lookout for "office bandits" who killed people through shooting them full of holes with pens. Understandably this got us a reputation as complete and utter psychos, and as fewer and fewer people would give us jobs the game started to die down. I'll never forget this scene though: the initial test of the weapon was to see if our street samurai would feel as taxed parrying the pens as he would parrying bullets. With some very one-sided rolls and creative liberties, he was quickly disarmed of his weapons by the onslaught of office supplies, to which The Blur responded "The pen is mightier than the sword!"
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Oct 6, 2014 16:39
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A couple years ago, I GMed a Savage Worlds game. This story came from one of the climactic sessions of the game. I call it, "Doctor Headshot, or, How I Learned to Stop Planning and Love the Exploding Dice." Some background. First, what the players did know: the Masked Queen of the city-state of Avaal is a lich. This isn't common knowledge--history says that there's a long succession of Masked Queens--but they learned this from the old group of adventurers who were the last people to try to defeat her. That group failed because of a schism: half of the group wanted to destroy her for being an evil, life-sucking undead, while the other half recognized that she's an extremely effective and benevolent ruler who, while she extends her life through evil means, has made life awesome and safe for the citizens of Avaal. The PCs ended up falling on the latter side, partially because one of the adventurers who tried to defeat her in the past (named Jack) had earlier betrayed them, used them to start a war between Avaal and another city-state, and was now headed for her phylactery again. What they players didn't know: the Masked Queen's phylactery wasn't just hidden in a labyrinth out in the desert. It was the labyrinth. At its core was a crystal McGuffin that Jack needed in order to save the world (well-intentioned extremist, essentially, willing to start a war and endanger thousands of lives just to create a distraction to get this crystal). My intention was to put the players through an interesting, multi-session dungeon and end with a climactic confrontation with Jack, whereupon he'd explain what was really going on and the players could either fight him (deciding to find another, less destructive way to save the world) or team up with him (thus having to fight the Masked Queen and leaving Avaal without its benevolent, highly-effective ruler). If they fought him, they'd have to contend with and possibly exploit the traps in the room, and it was going to be a pretty interesting and challenging battle for them. I took a lot of time to plan it out! The dungeon part worked well. I even worked in some puzzles that the players found fun, which is pretty amazing. As for the confrontation, well... Y'see, Savage Worlds has this power called Burrow. I'd made up custom Arcane Backgrounds for some of the characters (we'd transitioned to Savage Worlds from Pathfinder) and one of the PCs, who'd been an urban ranger in Pathfinder, had Burrow as one of his available spells. He very quickly learned it was extremely powerful and allowed him to pull off some awesome sneak attacks. You can see where this is going. When they reached the bottom of the dungeon, they stopped at a corner and peeked around stealthily. Jack was in a huge chamber looking at the crystal, ready to grab it, collapsing the labyrinth and destroying the Queen's phylactery. Most of the players were ready to charge in and get their revenge, but the Ranger had another idea. He wasn't interested in talking. He decided he'd get the drop on Jack by Burrowing underground, popping up behind him, and sinking an arrow into the rear end in a top hat's head. I was disappointed, but I thought, well, the players can have the necessary conversation mid-fight. So he rolled his spellcasting roll, succeeded, Burrowed behind Jack, popped up, and did a sneak attack. Burrow gives you a bonus to sneak attacks made right after popping up. He failed the roll, though. So he spent one of his bennies (basically luck tokens in Savage Worlds) to re-roll it. He failed again. Spent another benny, failed again. Spent his last benny and succeeded with a Raise (critical success, basically). Another thing: Savage Worlds has exploding dice. If you roll the maximum result on a die, you get to roll it again and add the new roll to the result. If you roll the max again, you do it again, and you don't stop until you stop rolling the maximum result. The Ranger proceeded to roll the largest series of exploding dice I'd ever seen. In the end I think he ended up doing something like 40 damage on a called shot to Jack's head, which tore through all possible armor he had, and even if I'd used all of my GM bennies on soak rolls there was no conceivable way Jack could survive. My choices were to either bend the rules and let him live somehow, or just go with it and throw out all of my careful planning, my precious storyline, and everything I'd wanted to happen. I had my honor, so I ruled the Ranger blew his head clean off. I was pretty upset that all my planning had gone to waste so I sent everyone off to eat pizza while I figured out what we could do to salvage my ~precious campaign~. In the end, though, I'd had the foresight to make sure Jack had a journal on him with the truth written in it, so they eventually found out what was really going on. And the party also had a huge disagreement about what to do and ended up having an intra-party fight that used all the traps in the room, so I even got to exploit all of that prep, too. But this is how I learned not to have a ~precious campaign~ ever again and always, always assume that things are going to go as nuts as humanly possible. Goddamn Burrow is a powerful spell. Harrow fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 16:47
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Beef Hardcheese posted:Wizard Tree Personally, I think you missed a major opportunity by not framing this story as "Wizard destroys local tavern after answering the call of Nature"
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Oct 6, 2014 22:23
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Unknown Quantity posted:This Guy - "The pen is mightier than the sword!" This is everything I've always imagined PnP gaming to be 
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Oct 6, 2014 22:35
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I ran Deadlands (Classic, not Reloaded or Savage Worlds) last Saturday for the first time. For those unfamiliar, it's a violent horror western, tagline "A Spaghetti Western ... With Meat!" Our story opened in the capital of Oregon, Salem, in the midst of a cherry-centric seasonal festival with livestock competitions and bare knuckle brawling. While the Chinese martial artist (one of the wuxia-powered Enlightened) grumbles about being barred from the ring and the Irish huckster (card-centric gambler wizard) fleeces some of the locals with snake oil, the Navajo-but-passes shaman and the young gunslinging woman on a revenge quest hear a woman scream in agony. The gunslinger hears it so clearly that she knows exactly where the cry came from; the railyards. They arrive at a raised platform for train repairs, dark as a cave beneath the wooden slats and among the track pieces and scrap. Inside the "cave," just finishing up gobbling a surveyor, is a wendigo. A wendigo in Deadlands is pretty much an endgame threat. It is an eight foot tall killing machine with downright unfair stats, hide so thick it counts as armor, a torso that is like 90% teeth, and seeing it provokes the second highest terror check in the game, behind only enormous carnivorous beings that are a mix between Dune's sandworms and the Sarlacc pit. They usually live in the mountain passes and never venture this close to civilization, but that's of course part of the mystery. They search around and realize something huge and hairy and very still is in the darkness with them, and the shaman realizes she is standing in a slurry of human viscera that used to be a woman. At this point the martial artist shows up, and during the gunslinger and shaman's hushed worry over what to do, the wendigo sneaks behind them. The gunslinger spots it, whirls around, and the muzzle flash gives everyone a nice good look, enough to prompt terror checks. Everyone fails, obviously. The martial artists goes weak in the knees and runs, and takes a blanket penalty if he decides to come back. The gunslinger and shaman both get a major phobia and a bad case of the shakes, hurting their fine motor control for (randomly rolled) five days. The gunslinger's shot does nothing to it. At this point I expected them to run away. They were in cramped quarters in dull lamplight against an enormous terrifying killing machine that had perfect nightvison. So, being PC's, they fought it. The gunslinger's peacemakers did pretty much squat while the martial artist turned right back around and rejoined the fight. The huckster arrived soon after and miraculously made his terror check. So, the wendigo botched its Quickness roll, and the party had pretty much two turns to do as much damage as they possibly could. They did a fair bit, blowing fate chips left and right just to offset their absurd penalties. On the wendigo's first action, it missed the martial artist's ludicrous hand-to-hand target number. On the second, it hit, and slapped his leg right off. See, any one part of the body can sustain four wounds. At five, it's Maimed, considered to be uselessly mangled, mutilated, or just plain dismembered. And the wendigo did seven wounds to the martial artist's left leg in one attack. The martial artist whose chosen style was almost exclusively kicks. He was not happy. Luckily, the party together had enough fate chips left (bennies) to pool them together and reduce that to four, leaving him horribly but not permanently crippled, sprawled on the floor with blood gushing from his wounds. They managed to chip away at the wendigo enough over the next round for it to die, but if things had gone differently I might have had a very unhappy kung fu hero. Moral: Never, ever rely on your players retreating.
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Oct 8, 2014 22:08
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Maxwell Lord posted:Do they hear voices in their head? Racial enemy: tables
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Oct 8, 2014 22:23
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More crazy hijinks from my party in the spellslinger (wild west fantasy) campaign. The party "sneaks" into a underground facility (that's under a factory as a front and next to a prison, which causes them to suspect they are using prisoners as parts for making golems, like was done to the party golem.) pretending their golem party member is broken and needs repairs. So, not so much "sneak" as they were brought there to be discretely dealt with when the guy in charge saw through the plan. They beat them up and make a break for it, the Goblin tossing his stick of dynamite in a very large room full of golems and breaking the elevator at the top and taking the leader guy as hostage. Back at the train station, they realize that Mrs. whiskers the half-orc binder's displacer beast thawed out and escaped, so he makes "lost" posters everywhere. (I should have seen this coming, but when he said this, I laughed at loud). Meanwhile they decide they haven't done enough to mess with the Crimson dawn's plans so they pretend the undead Goblin was captured (this is a theme today), tied with trick ropes. The others pose as bounty hunters. He is to be executed in the middle of the night with no witnesses, no exceptions (even after the Goblin oddly insists, saying the "bounty hunters" have becomes sort sort friends." The goblin is lead past gallows to a secret door back to the lab. In the elevator again (fixed) the Goblin gets loose ("I'm not trapped in here with you, You're trapped in here with me"!, and I loose it again laughing.) He beats the guards before he could sound the alarm and the others burst in like the cool-aid man "Ooh yeaeah!" (and sounding like Randy Savage instead for some reason). They go underground and release a gnome who happens to be one of the responsible for making the party golem a golem ("nasty business, I left shortly after and was captured by these guys".). The gnome sabotages everything with the goblin on point... and the goblin locks him in a box and leaves him.   . I wasn't expecting that.The Dwarf Cleric also releases the souls of the golems to kill the sleeping workers (described as being like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark) and all of them running like hell as the factory (above and below collapses). So, new hostage from the bad guys, and destroyed at least one important part of the big bad evil plan. This was my first session not using a modified module of some sort, and it felt like it went pretty well. Foolster41 fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Oct 9, 2014 |
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Oct 9, 2014 10:00
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So update on Call of Cthulhu: One of our players got to soulbond with a giant robot after being incinerated by a dragon. (He had psychic powers from Yog-Sothoth.)
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Oct 11, 2014 03:48
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 So it turns out Nobilis is dope as gently caress. The game hasn't even started yet but aside from playing Pendragon and having a great time front to back this has just been the most wonderful rpg experience.
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Oct 11, 2014 04:44
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Under the vegetable posted:
Everyone else gains the affliction "whether you love him or hate him, you have to respect John Cena."
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Oct 11, 2014 05:30
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Performing an Attitude Adjustment on the gods themselves.
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Oct 11, 2014 06:01
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Cath's Miracle Percentile Dice, The Spit Zombies, and The Clumsy Cleric. So I wanted to have my characters in a mine, fighting zombies. I did not want regular zombies. These were cursed zombies. They touched cursed cold iron, which fused into the skin, making them much sturdier than normal. These zombies also had an extra skill. They could project a batch of cold iron from their mouths. Players could roll reflex to dodge, but if it hit, I would roll percentile to see where on their bodies the slag would hit. 90% and above was the face. The zombies could do this three times, then they were back to being normal, tougher zombies. So the zombie is shambling towards them, I make my attack, Cleric fails her reflex, and I roll the dice. 91. The cleric is out of the fight, trying to rip this stuff off her face and trying not to panic. The paladin is out of the fight as he's trying to help her. He later gets it in the chest. They eventually win the fight and continue on. Another fight comes up, two zombies, both of whom miss the first attack. The paladin botches, gets his sword stuck in the silt of the mine's roof. This part of the mine was unfinished and extremely narrow. Zombie slams the cleric into the wall, then does the projectile attack again. 94. poo poo. So, the dwarf, now thoroughly pissed off, headbutts the zombie, successfully managing to get most of the stuff off her face. The fight carries on, but by the time it's finished, the dwarven cleric has been left with the equivalent of Klingon forehead ridges made out of cold iron. I didn't mean to create Vomit Zombies.
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Oct 11, 2014 14:38
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Under the vegetable posted:
Treasure 0? What about his car collection?
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Oct 11, 2014 19:34
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I'll amass magical cars and the All-Worlds Heavyweight Championship belt eventually, I'm sure.
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Oct 11, 2014 21:46
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Not really a Cat-Piss thing in the sense of players being awesome (although my main group continues to be awesome, to the point where I literally can't choose a single incident within our Shadowrun 5E game that stands out among all the other moments), but one thing outside of the sessions that definitely qualifies is this: Why I Have Effectively Banned Explosives In Shadowrun (Or Will Wing It When It Comes To It) So, Shadowrun 5E rules are mostly alright. We wing some (Some magic, some technomancery, most matrix stuff), houserule others (Crit success, with mixed, but fun results... So overall positive), and generally get on alright. But one of our characters has a secondary skill as an explosives expert, so we decided to take a poke at the explosives rules. The Mighty Biscuit's reaction summed up the group's feeling perfectly, and that reaction was rage and disbelief. I will confirm that neither he nor I have ever encountered a rule which uses square roots as part of its resolution (Squares, sure... But not roots), but lo, the DV of an explosive is the rating... Times the square root of the KG used. Our disbelief started growing, when we realised that you could, relatively cheaply, buy one kilo of Rating 25 explosive (foam or plastique, same price) for 2,500 Nuyen. For 10,000 Nuyen (4 kilos), that would suddenly become 50 DV (Aka, enough to kill your average troll 4 times over.) [EDIT: This does not change the Availability rating, horrifyingly] Then we started exploring options, knowing full well that the "Chunky Salsa Effect" rule was still in full play in 5E (Explosions that hit a wall damage the wall. If it still has even one structure point remaining, the explosion reflects, losing only 2DV as it does so (on average.) The more we explored, the more horrified (and fascinated) we became. We realised several things at once:- - Corp buildings are pretty solidly built. - Corridors are rarely 3 meters wide, and explosions, on average, lose 2 DV/meter - We did not want this. We really did not want this. So now we have an unofficial agreement: No explosives. Not just "You definitely have to go with the slightly tedious availability rules", no explosives. Grenades, sort of a grey area. This is perhaps the first time I've encountered where everyone has agreed that a normal thing in the rulebook is definitely a no-no for our continued fun and enjoyment. And that's a hell of a thing, considering we're perfectly fine with near full-borging and physical adepts who can murder the poo poo out of people if they (easily) get within melee range. [EDIT 2: Oh, and Chaotic World. We loving love Chaotic World] JamieTheD fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Oct 12, 2014 |
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Oct 12, 2014 00:09
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I think that's a great example of something that should be houseruled like a motherfucker, assuming you, for some reason, DON'T want to become terrorists who spend half their pay on buying enough explosives to kill the nearest dragon.
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Oct 12, 2014 00:15
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I always figured that concussion wave effect is why the pages for grenades in the 2nd Edition Street Samurai Catalogue were covered with the word 'BANNED' in huge block letters.
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Oct 12, 2014 00:25
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Shady Amish Terror posted:I think that's a great example of something that should be houseruled like a motherfucker, assuming you, for some reason, DON'T want to become terrorists who spend half their pay on buying enough explosives to kill the nearest dragon. This is my main problem here: I have no idea how to safely houserule that one, and I'm known among my players for being able to either quickly understand a rule, or houseruling the poo poo out of it so it's still fun, and doesn't interrupt the flow so much. Biscuit is also bloody good with rulesystems (even when not trying to break a system, he sometimes breaks a system... His first Shadowrun troll, Uguu, was the epitome of that), and his first reaction (and current reaction, afaik) is "gently caress no", and I have to agree with him there. Basically, we don't want to touch it because a) We might need those hefty numbers for plot, and b) We definitely don't want that unbalancing poo poo even further, because as is, I have trouble challenging folks in Shadowrun (not helped by most beasties being loving useless against your average runner) Bieeardo posted:I always figured that concussion wave effect is why the pages for grenades in the 2nd Edition Street Samurai Catalogue were covered with the word 'BANNED' in huge block letters. And yet, they are not only still in RAW 3 editions later, from what I can tell, they've actually gotten nastier. EDIT: *chuckle* This is actually a reason I keep trying to get them to play something like Monsterhearts... They're very good at fighting, and I honestly have a hard time keeping them challenged sometimes. 
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Oct 12, 2014 00:29
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JamieTheD posted:Why I Have Effectively Banned Explosives In Shadowrun (Or Will Wing It When It Comes To It) The sentence "Does my phone's calculator even have a square root function?" should never be uttered in a conversation about RPGs. From now on every character who uses explosives will hail from Fudge Town.
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Oct 12, 2014 01:21
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Every single time we end up using explosives in our games, no matter what the setting, the first thing someone does is blow themselves up. Every. Single. Time.
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Oct 12, 2014 01:50
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My players blew up Boston once, but in their defense that was by accident.
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Oct 12, 2014 01:57
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One of my cousin's group had - god I wish I remember the game, wanna say it was Delta Green or something along those lines - used critical fail and success tables that the group made up (I was playing a different game but overheard it) and would use no matter the game. Someone goes to throw a grenade, and critically fumbled, where the character threw the pin instead of the grenade, and it became an in-character game of hot potato before it blew up in everyone's face.
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Oct 12, 2014 02:03
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Played a Spirit of 77 adventure today. No explosive stuff, but after passing a guy making bets 3 times despite tons of danger, we had this exchange: GUY ON PHONE BETTING: "And get the line on the Raiders, they..." WAR VET PC: Hey. Can I use that phone? Guy hangs up phone, hands it to War Vet. War Vet pantomimes taking phone, hanging it up. GUY: It was hung up. VET: Sorry. Instinct. --- Sometimes it's hard to have 1 funny thing when you're playing a constant comedy game. We had a Glam Vigilante (who solved all problems by singing his South American Hit or waving a pistol at people), and my Smart-as-Nails Dumb-as-a-tack detective, Casey "Rebel" Deveraux. DRUMMER: People forget I'm a genius. I'm a Rhodes Scholar. CASEY: Like Rand or McNally. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Jan 11, 2015 |
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Oct 12, 2014 03:55
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My players were in tip-top form today. Lawton's nemesis, Doctor Skyclaw, unleashed an Ultra-Rainbow to destroy the Ebon Ruin before they arrived, and while they were sniping it turned out the Fragment they were on had infiltrated the ultra-rainbow containment equipment. Becoming aware of the tremendous power, the fragment extended a tower of bicycles and engine blocks and pistons and chains and so forth into the sky to try and get at the rainbow. Well this was no good, and a chase round was set up to recontain the rainbow and keep the pillar from actually contacting it. Lawton worked with Skyclaw to free and reboot the containment mechanics, while Umbra dissapearified parts of the pillar and Odrak got into the ship to assault it with guns from above. After several rounds of slowly losing ground to the pillar, Odrak pulled a "drive me closer so I can hit it with my fist" and stood on the ship's bow to punch the pillar. And it worked. The roll was seven shifts (Fate system), so narratively he punched it and the entire half-mile high metal abomination, which had absorbed anti-ship guns and molten rounds, just stops and shudders from the force of the punch. The next two rolls are almost nearly as good, as Lawton gets the containment back up and running and Umbra takes a huge chunk out of the pillar's main support, winning the day in a single-round comeback from many failures. All this while in full snark mode and, in Lawton's case, technobabble mode. Not to mention quoting Faerie's Aire and Death March in-character.
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Oct 12, 2014 04:13
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JamieTheD posted:Not really a Cat-Piss thing in the sense of players being awesome (although my main group continues to be awesome, to the point where I literally can't choose a single incident within our Shadowrun 5E game that stands out among all the other moments), but one thing outside of the sessions that definitely qualifies is this: Not the time we turned a standard infiltration into actually applying for day jobs complete with "Where do you see yourself in 5 years" interview questions.
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Oct 12, 2014 14:21
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Manic_Misanthrope posted:Not the time we turned a standard infiltration into actually applying for day jobs complete with "Where do you see yourself in 5 years" interview questions. To be fair, I still have a hard time parsing that one... You started off that way, and next thing I know, you're all "WE SHOULD ROB THIS PLACE IN BROAD DAYLIGHT"... And then you didn't, and then the place literally melted to the ground. You wanna write that one up so people understand the crazy right, be my guest! 
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Oct 12, 2014 14:26
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Manic_Misanthrope posted:Not the time we turned a standard infiltration into actually applying for day jobs complete with "Where do you see yourself in 5 years" interview questions. One time we were playing the Wild Talents setting Progenitor, a superhero setting set in the real world and treated fairly seriously and realistically. There's a multinational corporation called Pushcore who specialise in hiring Gadgeteers and Hyperbrains and inventing supertech. Our group was fairly sure they were up to something shady and we spent quite some time coming up with a way to infiltrate one of their high-security buildings. Eventually I realised I was playing a superintelligent dark energy physicist who had quite a few patents in the supertech field. I applied for a job, brought some of my inventions to the interview, proved I had superintelligence, aced it and got security clearance AND a fat paycheck. That made the heist a lot easier.
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Oct 12, 2014 14:57
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Doodmons posted:One time we were playing the Wild Talents setting Progenitor, a superhero setting set in the real world and treated fairly seriously and realistically. There's a multinational corporation called Pushcore who specialise in hiring Gadgeteers and Hyperbrains and inventing supertech. Our group was fairly sure they were up to something shady and we spent quite some time coming up with a way to infiltrate one of their high-security buildings. Eventually I realised I was playing a superintelligent dark energy physicist who had quite a few patents in the supertech field. I applied for a job, brought some of my inventions to the interview, proved I had superintelligence, aced it and got security clearance AND a fat paycheck. That made the heist a lot easier. That was my thinking entirely. Why try to sneak in (when your group might as well have bells hanging around their neck for how we approach stealth), when we could just supposed to be there?
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Oct 12, 2014 15:08
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Okay well for context, I am the technomancer who made everyone's heads bleed trying to understand the explosives rules. Also: this isn't the first shadowrun campaign that Jamie has run for us, and the first time he gave us a corp infiltration mission, it quickly turned into a bloodbath with Uguu (TMB) tripping on Woad and crashing the van through the front gates and ended with us piling corpses, setting them on fire and claiming it was a Wizgang attack. There were also insect Shamans because Jamie can be a vicious bastard when he wants to be. New campaign in a new setting: Amazonia instead of Seattle and this time the crew was instructed to steal a statue from a magical research corp, but because our employers were the local law enforcement, they wanted it quiet and bloodless. None of us have stealth worth poo poo, so sneaking in and swiping the thing at night wasn't going to work. The watcher spirits alone would catch us and with a response team on call, getting caught would turn ugly fast. Thinking better of it, we decided to do a little bit of research on the company to find a way in. With a miraculous Data Search role I somehow managed to get in to their version of facebook and lifted the details of pretty much every member of the company, and also found that they had a few vacancies: a few office drones needed maternity cover and there was an opening for an Awakened Security member, and our face (who could bullshit the best) was a Shaman. What followed was me crafting 3 bullshit CVs/Resumes and tying them to our fake SINs and then Blast Pack the Elf Poser Technomancer (me), Allen the Shaman (played by Deafmute) and Dr De Vega the Street Sam troll (played by The Mighty Biscuit) who was almost turned into a cyberzombie by his former employers Aztechnology and still has enough cyberware that anyone who looks at him in Astral space just feels bad for him, applying for the positions. Complete with shopping montages as we tried to get decent clothing to look smart for the interviews. Allen turning to his drug supply to find something to knock himself out or kill him to get out of clothes shopping with Blast Pack. The interview itself was as surreal as anything, with the crew laughing pretty much the whole time while Allen Conned his way through the normal questions and called out his Force 6 water spirit to impress the head of security, me finding out that the interviewer/head of research was allergic to the Resonant Cat Jamie had gifted Blast Pack with, and De Vega almost instantly going into science talk when he was only applying to be an office drone. Then came the decision of how to actually rob the place. Which we were initially going to do in the middle of the day. Allen worked the night shift and he was the one who was going to swipe the statue (seeing as he could cast illusion magic on it to disguise it as his briefcase), he finished when Blast Pack and the good Doctor started so the plan was for there to be a slight disturbance which forced him to stay late, giving time for me to compromise security while he just walked out the front door with the statue, in broad daylight, with no-one the wiser until he was long gone. We'd only just gotten there so we had an alibi in case the corp questioned us. But the watcher spirits might have been a problem. Fortunately there was more to the group than us 3. We also had Carlos (played by Fatherwolf) the hermetic mage detective and... Freddie.  Freddie, played by Luquos, was our heavy hitter, the physical adept. A former journalist who's negative traits included Incompetent (social) and Astral Beacon. Freddie was self convinced that he was always on for the next big scoop and carried a notepad everywhere. He even bought a flying camera drone to film his own news show. The Astral Beacon bit was important for this job as it meant that the low-power watcher spirits were obsessed with him, following him around wherever they went while lying back to their corresponding mages that they were doing their jobs and not just following a Beacon as though they were dogs chasing a car. Carlos worked out what they were doing and proved it by sending Freddie to jog around the building, which he did, and the spirits followed. We had our way past both levels of security, all that was needed then was to pull it off, but the timing was still a bit off. Eventually we came to the conclusion that doing it by day miiight be a slightly silly idea, especially if it goes tits up. I had established a backdoor into the security system but being a technomancer: I didn't need to be on site to pull this off, I could just be hidden in the carpark making a night job a posibility. However if we could get Dr DeVega into the research team at night, then he could pull away the human element and allow everything to go much smoother, so flicking back through the data we had pulled much earler, I found the youngest and oldest members of the research team and plotted to take them out. Plan A) Blow up their houses. Shot down pretty quickly because of obvious reasons. Plan B) Intimidate them with the threat of blowing up their houses. Also shot down. Plan C) Spike the protein shakes of the youngest one (aparently some form of muscle wizard) with Kamikaze to get him fired. Shot down as Allen didn't have slight of hand so couldn't really spike it. Plan D) Spike the drinks of the whole research team with Emetics. One of them would be too sick to work any more. With access to their facebooks, I quickly invited most of the research team to a party at a local bar with a few others. But everyone was drinking synthol (apart from the research director who was quickly on the real stuff) and my bartending skills weren't good enough to spike them while doing some silly-looking shaking. So we needed a distraction. I called for Allen to cast Chaotic world to spice up the party but he refused on the grounds of it being too self-destructive even for someone with the Dark Lady mentor spirit. So I hacked the nearby jukebox to play the loudest, hardest, fastest metal it could while I spiked the drinks before someone switched it off. quote:"Its on Random!" JamieTheD posted:~Don't stop me nowww~ While I didn't get muscle wizard, what I did get was one of the other members of the research team puking like that one scene in Scary Movie 2, apparently 4 hits on a chemistry roll made the emetics a little too potent, and after being fast tracked via the "You're my bessht friend" talk from the Research Director, Doctor DeVega was moving up in the world. Now came the time for the Heist, and everything went well. I compromised the electronic security, Freddie was jogging around pulling the spirits away and DeVega had pulled the research team downstairs for a break in the company gardens. Allen walked in, grabbed the statue... then grabbed something else. We didn't know what it was but at the time we just assumed that grabbing a weird rod was a side effect of the Dark Lady mentor spirit making Allen do impulsive things, like stuff his pockets full of reaserch poo poo. Either way, he sufficiently disguised the statue and waltzed out the fire escape, which I had cut the alarm too. It was pretty much a perfect heist until Jamie made Allen roll Willpower. One Success. And out popped from the rod: a Force 10 Fire Spirit. A demi-god of Fire. Right outside the god drat building. And it was free. Having done next to nothing since sending Freddie running Carlos immediately starts yelling down the comlink, a mix of something about Allen pooping his pants and it being very hot and or spicy. The watcher spirits weren't paying attention to Freddie any more, they were all staring at the new on-fire guy. The research director told Doc to run while me and Allen ran for the loving hills. We all got out alive but the last thing we saw was the building covered in flames. The next day, back in the Favela, Allen is practically catatonic at what he'd accidentally done. We manage to drop off the statue and rack $40k each, our biggest payday yet but tainted with the knowledge that the last-second fuckup was one that was going to come back and bite us squarely in the rear end. The news was saying it was a thermite bombing, the top floor having just melted away. Also on the otters-on-skateboards portion of the news was something a little different. Apparently, near the scene of the fire a man had been found: passed out and taken to a local hospital. Apparently he had passed out from the exhaustion of what doctors could only guess was the exhaustion from having jogged for days at a time, but was well on the way to a full recovery. Freddie had finally finished his initiation.
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Oct 12, 2014 15:50
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Manic_Misanthrope posted:Plan A) Blow up their houses. Shot down pretty quickly because of obvious reasons. This was an entirely reasonable course of action. No one would have suspected it was related to the theft because there were already bombings going on! 
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Oct 12, 2014 16:37
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The Mighty Biscuit posted:This was an entirely reasonable course of action. No one would have suspected it was related to the theft because there were already bombings going on! The "obvious reason" being no-one knew how much rating 10 foam explosives it would take to level an apartment block. And jamie won't let me have rating 25 stuff to make sure.
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Oct 12, 2014 16:43
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Androc posted:My players blew up Boston once, but in their defense that was by accident. One of my players seems to be slowly working towards this, working with a mad bomber/saboteur vampire. Last session's damage report was five cars and two houses.
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Oct 12, 2014 17:24
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The Mighty Biscuit posted:The sentence "Does my phone's calculator even have a square root function?" should never be uttered in a conversation about RPGs. I was playing a homebrew system one time and shortly after one rule was tinkered with I pointed out that it interacted with another weird rule in such a way that figuring out the math for one particular action essentially involved solving a differential equation.
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Oct 12, 2014 17:27
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Babe Magnet posted:Every single time we end up using explosives in our games, no matter what the setting, the first thing someone does is blow themselves up. Every. Single. Time. I think there's been exactly one game in which we used explosives, the World War II alternate history/Wolfenstein-esque dark magic game in d20 Modern. Things that happened: * Had a Scottish special forces soldier pretend to be a spy to enter the SS command post in the town, then get out of it by giving a Hitler salute with a grenade hidden in his hand and leaping out a window after opening his palm. * Was faced with a massive mutant created by Nazi black magic in their castle on the outskirts of town, which we didn't even fight because our immediate response was to hurl grenades through the door until it stopped moving. * Had to destroy AA guns in Berlin and found one on the roof of a machine gun-covered building. Took it out by filling a car with TNT and driving it into the building.
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Oct 12, 2014 17:38
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