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JustJeff88
Jan 15, 2008

I AM
CONSISTENTLY
ANNOYING
...
JUST TERRIBLE


THIS BADGE OF SHAME IS WORTH 0.45 DOUBLE DRAGON ADVANCES

:dogout:
of SA-Mart forever

Kurieg posted:

She transferred her consciousness into a bear. Not a magic bear or anything, just a bear that happened to be nearby. She managed to summon the Elminster and had him dump a third of the silver fire into her and that somehow restored her powers as a god.

I seriously wish they would have kept her a bear though, because Mystra the Bear Wizard God would have been the best thing ever.

I had not heard of that, and I am now legitimately sad that the Bear God of All Magic will never be. :(

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Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

How do you set up magic bear Goddess and not realize you've achieved your peak and should run with it?

the_steve
Nov 9, 2005

We're always hiring!

Night10194 posted:

How do you set up magic bear Goddess and not realize you've achieved your peak and should run with it?

Presumably because Elminster hadn't figured out a way to have sex with it, which makes it functionally useless in his world.

Rockopolis
Dec 21, 2012

I MAKE FUN OF QUEER STORYGAMES BECAUSE I HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO WITH MY LIFE THAN MAKE OTHER PEOPLE CRY

I can't understand these kinds of games, and not getting it bugs me almost as much as me being weird
Failed their Bear Lore check to see it was cool?

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

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

Please, John K. Date my daughter... Save her from dating smelly dropouts who wanna-be Soundcloud rappers.
I used to run a game with a group of players who whined, "Why wont any of these epic level characters do this?" - Just because I entroduced a level 20 sorceror as their DMPC. The DMPC would aid them in their quests, like Q from James Bond giving him awesome gadgets to complete their missions... And they could call him to open a portal if they got into too much trouble. (Until level 10 when the DPMC was forced into hiding, and they no longer could.)

He never saved the day. He never blew up bosses by entering battle and rescuing them in the nick of time. He was just their benefactor and boss.

I thought this was how it was supposed to be.

For some reason this made a couple of the players angry. The two I now refuse to game with.

"What I wanna know is why I'm risking my rear end out there all the time and you sit here in your office? Huh? You should be out there in the thick of it." They'd tell the DMPC and the DM.

The DMPC would then tell a story about something that happened, something horrible that happened out in the planes, and bs a story about getting out alive by the skin of teeth... Then I'd tell them that was what I was doing while you were out sabotaging the mindflayers/finding the sword of Kas/ whatever their mssion was. There is too much work, if I could handle it alone I wouldn't have hired you."

To a couple of players, their resentment grew. They had an epic level boss, and he wouldn't constantly travel with the party solving all their problems for them? How dare he?

For some reason establishing a DMPC who would meet them before an after missions, who they could contact using a calling stone if they needed him, or who could open portals if they called upon him.... That wasn't what these players wanted.

Two of them argued that this epic level DPMC should travel with the party. Eventually I had to take them aside and tell them, "This is a game. A game I'm running for you. This is not a novel I'm writing. If you want to watch me play with my toys and tell you how bad rear end they are, I'd just prefer to be alone."

Eventually to curb all of this, I forced the DMPC into hiding so he could only be contacted if they went to a maze dimension he'd set up in his house.

In my last two games, I've avoided having any DMPC whatsoever.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
That's really bizarre.

I'm going to second the sentiment that the best way to incorporate NPCs into your game is to let your players recruit them. My experience is that given the opportunity, any non-awful gaming group will go out of their way to recruit practically everybody, even completely incidental characters, and will go completely apeshit livid if you do anything to threaten them.

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



Kai Tave posted:

That's really bizarre.

I'm going to second the sentiment that the best way to incorporate NPCs into your game is to let your players recruit them. My experience is that given the opportunity, any non-awful gaming group will go out of their way to recruit practically everybody, even completely incidental characters, and will go completely apeshit livid if you do anything to threaten them.

Yeah, this. Except the people I play with never try to recruit the NPCs I think they will, so instead of befriending/recruiting a healing cleric, the captain of the guard, or the security specialist, they end up recruiting the tavern's third-smartest busboy, 2 teenage goblins, and a weird old man who smells like pee and doesn't know where he is ("He's trying to pretend like he's an insane vagrant! This guy's gotta be important!")

Sneaky Fast
Apr 24, 2013

What is the most "heart wrenching" death, a character you played suffered? (losing a PC you didn't want to die) Or alternatively a death in game that was emotional impactful.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

Kai Tave posted:

That's really bizarre.

I'm going to second the sentiment that the best way to incorporate NPCs into your game is to let your players recruit them. My experience is that given the opportunity, any non-awful gaming group will go out of their way to recruit practically everybody, even completely incidental characters, and will go completely apeshit livid if you do anything to threaten them.

But that gets you awesome ways to motivate the PCs and get them engaged via the kid who stole the Arch Militant's pistol once and the RT was like 'I can respect a lad who goes right for the inferno pistol' and adopted him.

That actually happened once.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.

Kai Tave posted:

That's really bizarre.

I'm going to second the sentiment that the best way to incorporate NPCs into your game is to let your players recruit them. My experience is that given the opportunity, any non-awful gaming group will go out of their way to recruit practically everybody, even completely incidental characters, and will go completely apeshit livid if you do anything to threaten them.

My players once talked a ghost they met into journeying with them. He'd chill out and do his own ghostly thing, and about once every couple of weeks one of them would say, "Wait... don't we have a ghost? Let's get him to do x, y, and z"

The best part was I constantly forgot about that drat ghost. Note to other DMs: Don't have your bad guys planning to jump the party outside a tavern if they can get their ghost buddy to just look outside and say, "Yeah, they're right out there."

Tollymain
Jul 9, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

AlphaDog posted:

and a weird old man who smells like pee and doesn't know where he is ("He's trying to pretend like he's an insane vagrant! This guy's gotta be important!")

this is your cue to retcon that old man into being somebody important in hiding, really

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



Of course.

When something's that obvious to everyone, it's pretty much got to be true.

JackMann
Aug 11, 2010

Secure. Contain. Protect.
Fallen Rib
Sometimes, you just have to reward your players' cleverness. Even if they're wrong.

Especially if they're wrong.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.
No, that's your cue to take your determined players on a multi-session romp through the world of the homeless, fulfilling tasks such as stealing him a new shopping cart, constructing a cardboard home for him, and scaring off the sewer rats that are trying to control his mind.

Then, when you've almost convinced them that he's absolutely, positively not secretly someone awesome... you have the BBEG kidnap the homeless dude, because if the PC's are spending that much time catering to this dude's whims, he must be someone important, right?

Then once the players defeat all their enemies and rescue their waylaid bum, that's when you reveal... that he was really just a homeless guy. Nothing special at all. Sorry party, your princess is in another castle. :v:

Suleman
Sep 4, 2011

Captain Bravo posted:

No, that's your cue to take your determined players on a multi-session romp through the world of the homeless, fulfilling tasks such as stealing him a new shopping cart, constructing a cardboard home for him, and scaring off the sewer rats that are trying to control his mind.

Then, when you've almost convinced them that he's absolutely, positively not secretly someone awesome... you have the BBEG kidnap the homeless dude, because if the PC's are spending that much time catering to this dude's whims, he must be someone important, right?

Then once the players defeat all their enemies and rescue their waylaid bum, that's when you reveal... that he was really just a homeless guy. Nothing special at all. Sorry party, your princess is in another castle. :v:

Who are we to determine the worth of a person by their past deeds? Maybe they save the bum and he decides to turn his life around and becomes the (second) greatest hero in the land.

Red Alert 2 Yuris Revenge
May 8, 2006

"My brain is amazing! It's full of wrinkles, and... Uh... Wait... What am I trying to say?"

Captain Bravo posted:

My players once talked a ghost they met into journeying with them. He'd chill out and do his own ghostly thing, and about once every couple of weeks one of them would say, "Wait... don't we have a ghost? Let's get him to do x, y, and z"

The best part was I constantly forgot about that drat ghost. Note to other DMs: Don't have your bad guys planning to jump the party outside a tavern if they can get their ghost buddy to just look outside and say, "Yeah, they're right out there."

An additional point about this ghost, Adam, was that he was about the dumbest motherfucker that side of the veil. We would remember he existed and attempt to use him to our advantage and get marginally useful information at best. Basically, he ruled.

This was the same campaign in which our party had the ability to open up a portal to a town in a pocket dimension, and we just sent anyone we could hire, bully, or trick into our employ through the portal to wait until we needed them. During the campaign's last session, one of the PCs became a spell jammer and the party flew off to have dimensional adventures unknown. Never did go back to our town. Now that I think about it I am not sure any of those people could even get out.

Red Alert 2 Yuris Revenge fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Dec 26, 2014

Ichabod Sexbeast
Dec 5, 2011

Giving 'em the old razzle-dazzle
Are any of the new inhabitants wizaards? Maybe they could get a message to the players about "hey, so there's been some MAJOR poo poo going down due to a few hundred people who don't know each other being stuck together, help!"

They return, and winsome urchin #273 has declared himself overlord of all and started holding show trials.

Or maybe time works differently there and the PCs are mythic figures.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.

Contest Winner posted:

This was the same campaign in which our party had the ability to open up a portal to a town in a pocket dimension, and we just sent anyone we could hire, bully, or trick into our employ through the portal to wait until we needed them. During the campaign's last session, one of the PCs became a spell jammer and the party flew off to have dimensional adventures unknown. Never did go back to our town. Now that I think about it I am not sure any of those people could even get out.

The best part was when that dude became a spell-jammer. He was the butt of like, 60% of the jokes, and he activated a trap that dropped him to the bottom of a basement everyone else was slowly traveling down. He finds the ship, and this happens:

:rolldice: "The ship is floating in the air, seemingly by itself."
:awesomelon: "Oh my god, are you making GBS threads me? I climb onboard and start taking off."
:rolldice: "Uhh, nobody else is there yet."
:awesomelon: "I know, gently caress them, let's go!"

Cue the rest of the party barely catching up, and having to make skill rolls in order to leap onboard just as the ship flies off into the sunset :v:

Suleman
Sep 4, 2011
I run a game using a modified version of PDQ, set in fantasy metropolis. The city itself is under an impenetrable Dome, its inhabitants having no knowledge of the outside world, if there is any. The city consists of countless sprawling skyscraper-sized towers, where the ones living at the top are also at the top of the city's food chain. They are the noble families and warlords with their private armies and airship armadas. The bottom of the city, on the other hand, is taken advantage of and generally in deep poo poo. Think of it as a wedding cake from hell. The magic system and setting design is loosely based on the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender, so some people in the city are born with the ability to control one of the four classical elements (fire, earth, water, air). The noble families guard the secrets of their magic techniques viciously, and use them for economical and military gain.
Some of our favorite moments in the game actually come from when we realize how hosed up the setting is and how impossible it is. We have wasted entire sessions talking about how the city needs to work.

Where does the water come from? Giant water towers rise from which several canals distribute water to the High City, from which it passes on to the Middle City and finally to the Lower City. How do the water towers work, then? Trade secret.
Where does the food and wood come from? The side of every building is just freaking covered with vines and other plants, and gardens are planted everywhere across the city. At the city's edges, where the dome is low, there are large farms.
So how do they get light for those? Light comes through the dome sorta like there's a day/time-cycle, but don't the buildings get in the way? Giant mirrors, made from a rare sort of stone, polished till it shines.
How do they condense the airship flotation gas for transportation? Airbending.
So how do the airships work, anyway? Let's draw some diagrams!
Where do they get... anything for anything? Metal? Stone? Recycling and some mining. Earthbending helps quite a bit. Still, good metal and stone are valuable commodities.
Why don't they dig deeper for more resources? Giant monsters. Also, a risk of collapsing the entire city if overmined.
How does a centralized justice system work in a city like this? It doesn't. There is no universal justice system, all the city's militia forces and even the armies of the nobility are actually little more than overarmed gangs, guarding their territories and enforcing their rules. The entire city is in a constant state of cold gang warfare, some of the gangs are just bigger and prettier than others.
Why don't waterbenders just bend the water in people's bodies and make them explode? Look, that's bloodbending and that's a rare talent and is taboo like witchcraft in our world and gently caress you, just play the game.

langurmonkey
Oct 29, 2011

Getting healthy by posting on the Internet

Kai Tave posted:

That's really bizarre.

I'm going to second the sentiment that the best way to incorporate NPCs into your game is to let your players recruit them. My experience is that given the opportunity, any non-awful gaming group will go out of their way to recruit practically everybody, even completely incidental characters, and will go completely apeshit livid if you do anything to threaten them.

This is the best way to get a ride-along NPC as it doesn't feel forced. We recruited a half-Orc sewer cleaner to join our merry band of murderhobos during rise of the runelords and he's now a fully powered up member of the party that we rotate control of around players who are otherwise having a "quiet" session. It's a good way to keep interest in the game if you get stunned or KO'd.

Echophonic
Sep 16, 2005

ha;lp
Gun Saliva

AlphaDog posted:

Yeah, this. Except the people I play with never try to recruit the NPCs I think they will, so instead of befriending/recruiting a healing cleric, the captain of the guard, or the security specialist, they end up recruiting the tavern's third-smartest busboy, 2 teenage goblins, and a weird old man who smells like pee and doesn't know where he is ("He's trying to pretend like he's an insane vagrant! This guy's gotta be important!")

My group prefers to hang out at the second-worst bar in town. The worst bar has kobold knife fights in the basement and it's distracting.

petrol blue
Feb 9, 2013

sugar and spice
and
ethanol slammers

Captain Bravo posted:

No, that's your cue to take your determined players on a multi-session romp through the world of the homeless, fulfilling tasks such as stealing him a new shopping cart, constructing a cardboard home for him, and scaring off the sewer rats that are trying to control his mind.

Then, when you've almost convinced them that he's absolutely, positively not secretly someone awesome... you have the BBEG kidnap the homeless dude, because if the PC's are spending that much time catering to this dude's whims, he must be someone important, right?

Then once the players defeat all their enemies and rescue their waylaid bum, that's when you reveal... that he was really just a homeless guy. Nothing special at all. Sorry party, your princess is in another castle. :v:

I would play the poo poo outta bumquest. Cardboard & Carts? Bum: the Vagrancy? WinoWorld (powered by the buckfast)?

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

I remember in one of our games in high school we discovered Hobo Dave wasn't actually lying/drunk/crazy and really was king of a secret, fabulous golden city hidden beneath the sewers.

Snooze Cruise
Feb 16, 2013

hey look,
a post
It took me a few solid months to realize the random pattern in which my party would recruit NPCs wasn't random at all and had to do whether or not they had a goofy voice. Once I noticed all the followers sounded like different muppets I was able to put the pieces together.

the_steve
Nov 9, 2005

We're always hiring!

petrol blue posted:

I would play the poo poo outta bumquest. Cardboard & Carts? Bum: the Vagrancy? WinoWorld (powered by the buckfast)?

Hell, an RPG system based off of Neverwhere would be pretty interesting.
Throw in some sort of Sanity-based mechanic where you have to decide whether you're going crazy or not, ala the one test for the key.

Otherkinsey Scale
Jul 17, 2012

Just a little bit of sunshine!

the_steve posted:

Hell, an RPG system based off of Neverwhere would be pretty interesting.
Throw in some sort of Sanity-based mechanic where you have to decide whether you're going crazy or not, ala the one test for the key.

Sounds like Don't Rest Your Head.

Tollymain
Jul 9, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
sounds like Kingdom of Nothing

The Deleter
May 22, 2010

mr.capps posted:

It took me a few solid months to realize the random pattern in which my party would recruit NPCs wasn't random at all and had to do whether or not they had a goofy voice. Once I noticed all the followers sounded like different muppets I was able to put the pieces together.

Now I want to run a DnD game where everyone is also a muppet. And make the muppet flail an at-will power.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Will Kung-Fu Diva be a class?

The Deleter
May 22, 2010
Yes. Very yes.

VanSandman
Feb 16, 2011
SWAP.AVI EXCHANGER

mr.capps posted:

It took me a few solid months to realize the random pattern in which my party would recruit NPCs wasn't random at all and had to do whether or not they had a goofy voice. Once I noticed all the followers sounded like different muppets I was able to put the pieces together.

Well now I gotta play as Kermit the Frog-Monk.

ZeeToo
Feb 20, 2008

I'm a kitty!
I want to play basically all of Electric Mayhem.

petrol blue
Feb 9, 2013

sugar and spice
and
ethanol slammers

The Deleter posted:

Now I want to run a DnD game where everyone is also a muppet. And make the muppet flail an at-will power.

Have you seen Angel (the Buffy spinoff)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0tNqwNpGGQ

quote:

Kingdom of Nothing

:swoon:

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

The Deleter posted:

Now I want to run a DnD game where everyone is also a muppet. And make the muppet flail an at-will power.

I ran a game of Everway once when Muppets came up, sort of. It's beside the point here, but Everway is a diceless game that could be the source of a ton of good, bad, and goofy stories.

Anyway, one of the PCs in that game was min/maxed for physical speed, power and resilience, and at the cost of, basically, intelligence and wisdom. Because the game gives you a few picture cards to help form the basis of your character, his background, and his home world, the player had this character be a giant tiger. Not like a cartoony/furry/Disney's Robin Hood-type of tiger, though. Like a huge dude with a literal tiger's head, and about as personable. He was quick to anger and was spec'd to wreck drat near anything that wasn't a demi-god or incorporeal. All he did was murder. He had no other skills.

Everway is a world-hopping game. The title city is kind of like Sigil in D&D's Planescape. In this particular plot, he party starts noticing that al of Everway's children are all inexplicably listless. Some investigation discovers a hidden, seemingly protected world deep in the archives of Everway's planar library. This world is somehow the source of all the worlds' children's imagination, and it's completely off the map. It seems as though no one should go or is even allowed to go there. But the party wants to fix the children before things get worse (as there are now signs that the malaise is spreading to adolescents and adults), so they find the portal to the world of children's imagination and go there.

The entire world is like a Sesame Street set. Some objects and some aspects of space are oddly two-dimensional. The natives are Nooks: tiny, colorful people made of foam and yarn and googly eyes. They each seemingly have jobs, although none of them can actually do them well at all. There is a Nook dressed as a nurse, for example, but the syringe she carries around is harmless, useless, and sewn to her hand. The little guy wearing a hard hat and tool belt has a tiny foam hammer which is sewn onto his hip. All of the Nooks can talk about at length and sings songs about whatever it is them seem to do, but they are absolutely lovely at everything. Statistically, they blow at everything but singing, teaching children, and slapstick comedy routines.

They are also totally invincible.

The Nooks and their world was created as the well spring of all imagination for all people int he multiverse. So, whoever set this up made the Nooks both harmless and invincible. This is what little babies and toddlers dream of, so death and violence and real harm simply shouldn't be a part of their reality. (The creators are basically Doozers from Fraggle Rock, but that doesn't matter here).

So the PCs show up and start doing their thing for the plot. They find the culprit, fight some of his minions, etc, etc. Most of the PCs enjoy themselves and interact with the Nooks. The giant tiger man is grumpy about the whole thing because he's a humorless warrior like Worf or something (the character, not the player. The player was cool and knew exactly what he was doing). But then he discovers that all the female Nooks have a bell in their tummies. And their hair is long and made of yarn. And they flail around when they sing...

The tiger man suddenly can't resist and mauls a little schoolteacher Nook in the middle of a dialogue between the party and a few Nooks about why you should always wash your hands before you eat. He pours all of the hot death he can muster into murdering this tiny person. He uses his blade, his teeth, and his claws. He hurls her around and swipes at her in midair. He pounds her squishy, jangling body into the earth. The player is stunting combat maneuvers all over the place, and he's pulling crazy cards (how the diceless system helps resolve actions) and putting on a hell of a combat show. All the while, the Nook is just giggling and saying, "That tickles! Silly kitty!" She's made of foam, so she just squishes and bounces around harmlessly. The rest of the party calms down the Klingon tiger and they go their merry way.

I could share a few more Everway stories if people are interested in hearing about a diceless game that's pretty drat good and very weird.

Motherfucker
Jul 16, 2011

I certainly dont have deep-seated issues involving birthdays.

petrol blue posted:

I would play the poo poo outta bumquest. Cardboard & Carts? Bum: the Vagrancy? WinoWorld (powered by the buckfast)?

Dude, Bum: The Vagrancy is some gold tier poo poo.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.

Motherfucker posted:

Dude, Bum: The Vagrancy is some gold tier poo poo.

I'm typing the campaign notes with both hands.

Whybird
Aug 2, 2009

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

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


Nap Ghost
Happy Birthday, Robot!

Robot is not on fire today, but soon will be.
Robot has caused an emergency by starting that cult!
"Robot?" Controller says, but Robot isn't listening.
Robot's audio sensors are deliberately jammed -- Controller is cross.
Controller panics and presses buttons, but the chanting continues.
Robot's enjoying his surprise party -- and all his party games -- but not Controller.
Robot stops -- that smell isn't incense, maybe it's candles?
Now Robot is on fire, and so is Controller -- what fun!
Controller's so silly -- but when the grey dawn rises, he's quiet (but still moving around).
Robot is all tired out; Controller seems sleepy as well -- dead to the world.
Robot is making his cult very happy -- the sun will rise tomorrow.
The marketing department of vicar.net was right all along, except for one thing.
The product recall bankrupted the company, but the cult kept going.
Robot still visits Controller in his cage from time to time.

THE MORAL: Birthdays are overrated.

petrol blue
Feb 9, 2013

sugar and spice
and
ethanol slammers
Happy Birthday Robot is in one of the current bundles of holding - $7 for the basic for the next day. :eng101:

CovfefeCatCafe
Apr 11, 2006

A fresh attitude
brewed daily!

petrol blue posted:

Happy Birthday Robot is in one of the current bundles of holding - $7 for the basic for the next day. :eng101:

I am totally going to buy this and use this in my upper level classes. Of course, it'll probably devolve into the robot fighting creepers and kissing pigs, as that's how most stories break down in the one class, but let's see how it goes.

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Falstaff
Apr 27, 2008

I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

I'd like to share a story about the most dysfunctional 3E D&D campaign I ever played through, and my single moment of shining glory in it (though it's vaguely catpissy on my part). The DM's name is Josh, and the campaign was originally pitched to me as a sequel to a previous campaign that he ran, but after a time when magic had been essentially stamped out by an inquisition and non-human races had either gone into hiding or been exterminated (with one or two notable exceptions in pre-defined corners of the world). It would be a very low-magic campaign based on social intrigue rather than standard dungeon crawling.

I signed up enthusiastically, though I mentioned to him that the game was written and balanced (for a certain definition of "balance") with the assumption of a certain level of magic and magic item access. Would he be adjusting encounters and the like to compensate for this? Why yes, he assured me, of course he would.

So, everyone playing the game rolled up rogues and social types - I made a high-dex swashbuckling fighter/rogue named Jhavier, and we also had a straight sneaky rogue, a second straight rogue who specialized in engineering, and a bard who specialized in diplomacy. The only odd character in the line up was the DM's girlfriend, who for some reason made a wizard specialist Invoker who basically specialized in damage output. This left me scratching my head, I'll admit, but whatever.

The first few sessions of the campaign were pretty good, as the party went around doing favours for one or another political group in the capital city of Nightveil. This culminated in a masquerade ball which was rife with conspiracies, mysteries, and all that good stuff. That's when things went off the rails.

The very next session, nonhumans began popping out of the woodwork. Before long, an orcish horde attacked Nightveil and the party ended up being chased out of the city. Now homeless and being hunted by an evil overlord for reasons we didn't quite understand, we traveled from place to place looking for ways we could strike back, and we discovered that currying favours suddenly involved a lot of dungeon delving and big combats. Things that only one of our characters were really built to do.

This was the new direction of the campaign, and it stayed until the campaign's end somewhere in epic levels. To say it wasn't what we signed up for is putting it lightly; while we began leveling our characters with this new reality in mind, we still had the first five or so character levels essentially wasted because they were built for a completely different game. To make matters worse, Josh still for some reason (and despite the protests of certain players) maintained the whole "low-magic" thing so that magic items were only found rarely, but we were still fighting level-appropriate opponents. If you think D&D has balance issues, try going into 9th-level battles when your only tank is a fighter/rogue with low-ish con, and whose best weapon is a masterwork rapier. It's not too much fun.

Of course, none of this really affected his girlfriend's character, who as a wizard was a lot less dependent on magic items anyway and was built as a combat character. Funny that. :iiam: Our usual strategy for much of our characters' adventuring career was to take turns being meat shields for the party's wizard long enough for her to finish the battles with one of her various insta-kill spells (or just fireballed the opposition to death like a good evoker.)

(Why didn't you drop the game, you ask? Yeah, that's a good question. I wasn't nearly as selective in my gaming back then.)

He'd also insist on running modules as-written. The worst was a drow-centric module (Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, I think) where we literally could not get past the first major encounter. We'd attack, get nearly wiped out, retreat, and then return to find our enemies' forces restored to full strength. It got so bad, and it was so unfun for us, that most of the players one night engaged in a conspiracy to hide the module from him so he'd be forced to run something else instead.

The only up side to when he ran modules is that we'd usually get the listed treasure. They were one of our main sources of magic items - though it only helped so much, because our weapon specializations were chosen long ago and were all esoteric enough that we'd almost never find magic versions of them.

I tell you all this to give you some context - so you understand why, by the time the party was around 13th or 14th level, there had developed a somewhat adversarial approach to things between us and the DM.

Eventually, he ran us on the Bastion of Broken Souls, which was the final module in a multi-module series involving a half-demon red dragon named Ashardalon and his scheme to devour the souls of the unborn or something like that. It starts off with a solo attack, out of nowhere, by a beefed-up marilith (greater demon) who'd attack when you're at your most vulnerable, and then teleport away if you managed to turn the tables on her. It was pretty brutal, and since my character was the chosen one (Josh made Jhavier this primarily because he knows how much I hate "chosen one" plots :argh:) he'd always be the target. Things get more difficult as the module goes on.

By this point in the campaign, I'd managed to grab a selection of class levels, feats, magic items, and cohorts for my character that made him actually fairly effective in the right circumstances. The main lynchpin to the strategy involved his sister cohort, who was herself a wizard who specialized in making buffs last 24 hours or more. We were also in an odd place in the change-over from 3rd edition to 3.5 which left some of my character's Holy Liberator (a chaotic-aligned paladin) abilities a bit more effective than they probably should have been, though mostly it was the buff thing that allowed my character to manage to be the party's point man in combat. Most of the party members are similarly dependent on buffs to some extent, but my character was easily the most dependent on them.

We slogged through the module, killing or subduing various of Ashardalon's half-dragon children (including a half-dragon bear which I guess means that dragon would gently caress anything :shrug:) and we were finally closing in on the boss. Josh started getting incredibly smug, which was always an indication that we were about to go into an awful, awful grind of a combat. As we entered the final boss's room, we passed through an anti-magic field that cancelled all our buffs. Meanwhile we were standing face-to-face with the dragon, who was pretty much brimming with magical power (i.e., meaning buffs of his own.) Of course, if we tried to bring our buffs back up, that would be the signal for the dragon to attack and the combat to begin in earnest.

My heart sank. But in that moment, I came up with a plan. One thing about Josh is that he LOVES to make his bad guys talk. He's actually very good at making them seem reasonable or sympathetic without actually losing their essential bad-guy-ness. Over the years it's become something of a rule with him: When you run into one of his bad guys, kill them before they get a chance to open their mouth, since only bad things can happen if they get a chance.

This time, though...

I set my watch aside on the table and started the stopwatch function, which earned me odd looks from everyone at the table. And then Jhavier began talking with Ashardalon.

We went through the usual stuff; complimenting the dragon on his dragonliness, futilely trying to convince him to stop eating souls, him futilely attempting to tempt our party with power if only we'd serve him, and a bunch of other stuff. I think we may have even talked about the state of politics in Faerun a bit. Didn't matter, my whole goal at this point was to keep him talking as long as I could.

Finally we ran out of stuff to talk about. Josh began gathering initiatives and I stopped the stopwatch. The exchange that followed went something like this:

Josh: :haw: Roll initiative for Jhavier.
Me: :smuggo: 26. By the way, we were talking there for twenty-seven minutes. I kept track with my watch.
Josh: *narrows his eyes suspiciously* Yeah, it was a long conversation. So?
Me: :smuggo: Well, that amounts to about 270 rounds. I'd imagine that most of Ashardalon's buffs are expired at this point, so you should probably take a moment to recalculate some stuff.
Josh: *stares at me, then my watch, then his notes, then back to me again as realization dawns on him* Uh... Um. Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. :ohdear:
Me: :smuggo: :smuggo: :smuggo:

We still barely made it through the battle, brutal as it was. Every party member other than Jhavier, without exception, was dead by the time it was over. (One was decapitated three times during the combat.) I'm pretty sure that, if Ashardalon had still had his buffs up at the start, there would have been no way we would have managed it.

The game lasted for a while after that - entirely too long, imo - but that was one of the few times where my character was able to become something other than a meat shield to the party's wizard, so I still regard it as one of my best moments in an incredibly frustrating campaign even if I was being embarrassingly rules-lawyery.

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