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That's not rules lawyering, that's exploiting the hubris of your enemy, and entirely in-character for a roguish type.
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Jan 3, 2015 18:33
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If one of my players pulled that on me, I would probably stand up and openly applaud them, and then almost certainly buy them a drink later. That's genius.
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Jan 3, 2015 18:53
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I appreciate you saying so, but it was still born from an adversarial stance in what really should have (ideally) been a non-adversarial game. So I find it a little embarrassing. It was a campaign I should have given up on by level 7. To be fair, though, it had one of the best endings to any campaign I've ever played so it wasn't all bad.
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Jan 3, 2015 18:55
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Falstaff posted:I appreciate you saying so, but it was still born from an adversarial stance in what really should have (ideally) been a non-adversarial game. So I find it a little embarrassing. I'm kind of sorry that you didn't get to have the more intriguing, combat-light campaign that was promised. I recall trying to run a short, 3 sessions perhaps, campaign like that where the PCs have to somehow get invited or sneak into a posh noble party to flush out some bad dudes and dudettes. It was all about subtlety and character building, but my players were loving idiots and ruined it because all they wanted to do was beat poo poo up. We were all very young, but gently caress them anyway.
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Jan 3, 2015 19:05
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Falstaff posted:3E D&D campaign ... It would be a very low-magic campaign
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Jan 3, 2015 19:28
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Falstaff posted:To be fair, though, it had one of the best endings to any campaign I've ever played so it wasn't all bad. Well if it's as good as the dragon story 
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Jan 3, 2015 20:12
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Falstaff posted:I appreciate you saying so, but it was still born from an adversarial stance in what really should have (ideally) been a non-adversarial game. So I find it a little embarrassing. You sly dog, you got him monologuing!
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Jan 3, 2015 23:56
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JustJeff88 posted:I'm kind of sorry that you didn't get to have the more intriguing, combat-light campaign that was promised. I recall trying to run a short, 3 sessions perhaps, campaign like that where the PCs have to somehow get invited or sneak into a posh noble party to flush out some bad dudes and dudettes. It was all about subtlety and character building, but my players were loving idiots and ruined it because all they wanted to do was beat poo poo up. We were all very young, but gently caress them anyway. Yeah, it was neat while it lasted, but it was just a terrible system for that sort of thing. But we'd never heard of Burning Wheel back then (in fact it hadn't yet been published), and the most obscure game we ever really played would have been Call of Cthulhu. Sally Forth posted:Well if it's as good as the dragon story It's not, though. But I'll try to present it in an interesting way. So the whole campaign had been an exercise in frustration. We'd built characters for one campaign, only to have the DM pull a switcheroo on us after four or five levels. I once confronted him on that, suspecting that he'd just grown bored with a non-standard game or that it had proven to be too much work so he'd gone back to something more standard without getting anyone on board... Josh told me that he'd actually planned that from the beginning, and he wanted us to be playing characters thrust into a situation that left them in way over their heads.  That was not, however, the only problem with the game. I mentioned before how Josh's girlfriend *somehow* thought to build a combat-oriented wizard who was able to fit in perfectly with the campaign v2.0. Well, to say the game frequently pandered to her would be something of an understatement. For a good chunk of the campaign, over half of the adventures we'd go on would be related to some sub-plot related to her character or one of her characters important NPC family members. I recall, after a particularly difficult session where we fought against a bunch of slaad in order to rescue one of her cousins or something, after the game the player of the bard and I were walking home and he said, quite unbidden, "You know it's really nice of [Josh's girlfriend] to let us play in her game." We both had a good chuckle over that one. Personally, I don't blame the girlfriend. She was a fantastic player in the games I ran, and I don't think she really asked for the game to be centred on her, exactly... Josh just catered to her because that's the kind of nerd he was back then. Another problem was Josh's tendency to include basically everything in the campaign. What I mean by this is that if a new D20 supplement about steampunk stuff came out and he bought it, in the next session or two we'd end up dealing with some techno-wizard conspiracy trying to conquer this or that city with their army of steam golems. Or he'd buy the Manual of the Planes, and suddenly we found ourselves in possession of a spelljammer ship (crewed by a bunch of furries from yet another supplement, which was... uh. Yeah. Though I'll give him props for the octopus masseuse, that poo poo was hilarious.) All this is fine for certain types of games, of course. But we didn't want gonzo, we'd signed on for a lower-key campaign of politicking, cloak and daggers, etc. Anyway, this tendency to include everything and the kitchen sink led to the campaign becoming increasingly schizophrenic. As a group, we'd sometimes violently reject certain plot points if we found them extremely objectionable or unfun, even abandoning certain parts of the world to their dark fates because we just didn't want to deal with that poo poo. With very few exceptions, the evil overlords that were arrayed against the parts of the world we cared about only grew more powerful, and we often felt powerless to stop it. Allow me to make clear that I did not endure all this poo poo silently. Quite the opposite. While I never made scenes at the gaming table, when Josh and I were hanging out socially I'd often bring up his shenanigans and make it clear that the other players and I weren't happy about them. He'd almost always seem very understanding, take some suggestions of mine to heart, and then nothing would change (or they'd change for a single session and then go back to normal.) Eventually, Josh and his girlfriend broke up; she moved to another city and left the game pretty much simultaneously. This actually improved his game drastically, because he was no longer able to cater to her - he had to take everyone else's desires into account, and when he doesn't have his head up his rear end he's actually a fantastic DM. I know my description of him probably indicates otherwise, but you'll just have to take my word for it. There's a reason, after all, we kept showing up for game after game despite all the frustrations. The other big thing was when it became clear the game would have to end. I was going to be moving to another city to do my Master's degree, and Josh was planning on moving to the same city as well, leaving the other players behind. He grew apprehensive when he started thinking about how to end things; his last campaign had a great ending that earned him some accolades from his players, and I expect he wanted to repeat the performance this time around. On one of our walks around town, he asked me what I'd want to see out of a campaign end session. Me: "Honestly? I'm not sure. The campaign has been so dysfunctional." Josh: "Yeah, yeah. I'm terrible." Me: "It didn't start that way, though. We were all on board for the beginning. It's a shame it can't really go back to that, but it wouldn't make any sense. Things just got too epic." Josh: "It's not that epic..." Me: "Uh, we killed Ashardalon like six or seven levels ago, dude, thereby saving the unborn across the multiverse. We, as a group, browbeat the Lords of the Nine into backing down from invading our plane of existence three levels ago. This poo poo is way epic. It would be nice to go back to simpler times, but I don't think that's really possible. Not to mention there's just so many dangling plot threads that we abandoned or ignored. We haven't even been back to our home plane of existence in how many sessions?" Josh: "Hmm..." So we gathered together for what was going to be the last session of the campaign. I can't recall the exact plot hook we responded to, but I know it involved one of our old nemeses (possibly the troll wizard Master Jack) cavorting around the Abyss looking for an artifact. We managed to find him just as he found what he was looking for, which turned out to be a portal in time that led back to the early days of the campaign, where he'd kill us all back before we became thorns in his side - when we were all squishy and low-level. We beat him in what was a surprisingly easy combat - turns out Josh didn't bother updating him from the last time we'd encountered him, several levels ago. We normally played for five or six-hour sessions, and this had barely been an hour. Yet the adventure seemed complete. The villain was defeated, and we held the artifact that would allow someone to survive stepping through the time portal, which was keyed to this one particular spot (Port Nightveil) in one particular time (day -1 of campaign's timeline.) He asked us what we wanted to do. My mental gears started working. Only Master Jack knew the secrets of how to make the artifact work, but he'd already activated it. And the portal was right there. It dawned on me suddenly what Josh wanted us to do, and as he realized that I was grokking his plan he smiled. Jhavier said to his companions, "We should step through the portal." "Buh?" asked his best friend Mikhail the bard. "But didn't we come here to stop anyone from screwing up the timeline?" "Think about it, Mikhail!" Jhavier said. "Think about all the horrible things that happened to us, to our families, these past few years. All the tragedies that occurred. We could prevent all of this." Mikhail looked at him. "Wait. Jhavier... That's brilliant! We could prevent the sacking of Port Nightveil!" "That's just the tip of the iceberg! We'll know every single thing that will happen for the next several years. And with the nigh-earthshattering power now at our command, we can prevent it all." Mikhail nodded, smiling. "It's always felt like we were just a little bit too weak to face the challenges we faced, but no one else was up to the task." "And now," Jhavier said, clasping his friend's shoulders, "Those challenges will seem like child's play to us." The party took a quick vote and unanimously decided go through the portal, taking our spelljamming ship and its crew with us. One of the villains of the game was a guy by the name of Banran Binair, who ran a scorpion themed tavern in Port Nightveil and pretended to be a kindly, addle-headed old man. In truth, he was a wizard assassin (later techno-wizard assassin after Josh got a certain steampunk supplement  ) who ran a secret cabal bent on conquering our characters' homeland nation, starting with Port Nightveil - he was the first major villain we ever encountered. When our characters went back in time, he was also the first villain we visited.Josh played this perfectly. We confronted him, telling him exactly what he was up to. Thinking himself the most personally powerful figure in all of Port Nightveil, when it became clear that we were on to him he dropped the kindly old man guise and began leveling threats at us. Of course, back then he was "merely" ninth-level to our twenty-something levels, so we basically humiliated him without even trying in the ensuing battle. We sent him packing back to his homeland after showing him the fortress-obliterating magic cannons on our spelljamming ship, promising him that if he or one of his cabal ever sets foot in our country again we'll be visiting his country and teaching them a few things about war. (The irony here is that the cannons were ones we actually stole from him, years in the future.) One by one, we flew to each of the major evil overlords of the setting and repeated this process, telling them that the jig was up, we knew exactly what they were up to, and now we were around so they'd better just give themselves up and come along quietly. Some resisted, and we spanked them. Some saw the wisdom in surrendering, and those we imprisoned in an extraplanar prison. It was a power fantasy in the finest sense of the term, where we just completely stomped all over the NPCs who'd been making our characters' lives miserable for so long. When all was said and done and we'd averted every major disaster and tragedy we could remember from our notes, we left gifts of proper magical items for our past selves and then reboarded our ship and flew into the planes, to continue our planar adventures and leave our past selves to live what would hopefully be much happier, more satisfying lives without so much blood, tears, and tragedy. Part of the reason it was so incredibly satisfying as an ending is because the campaign itself had so many terrible, frustrating moments. It was a contrast thing, in a way. * * * * The next campaign he ran was also 3.5, and involved the players playing Marvel villain-expys in the Forgotten Realms. It didn't last long because after that we got into Burning Wheel (which drastically changed the way we approached our gaming), but it was pretty fun for a while playing a steampunk wizard Doctor Doom plotting to kill his arch nemesis. ("Elminster!!!"  )
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Jan 4, 2015 00:17
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You know, I'll give your GM credit for at least understanding what was going wrong and rolling with the last twist there.
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Jan 4, 2015 00:22
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Yeah, that's a pretty awesome ending, nothing like getting revenge on a nemesis. Or prevenge in this case, I guess.
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Jan 4, 2015 00:38
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Night10194 posted:You know, I'll give your GM credit for at least understanding what was going wrong and rolling with the last twist there.
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Jan 4, 2015 01:53
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I really have to thank this thread for showing me what I've been missing. The designated DM of my group started my first session at 10th level, giving us 100 gold to buy our items with, and our reward for clearing a dungeon was a magic item for his DMPC and 30 gold. But we had no frame of reference, so we just kind of rolled with it. I think we all know better than that now.
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Jan 4, 2015 03:04
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Yeah, I used to pull poo poo like that. When I was 13. GMPCs are the worst, you should look for better gaming.
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Jan 4, 2015 15:31
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I'm GMing a group of three this week, wrote up a quixotic paladin as support for an unorthodox barbarian character and for dedicated healing. Any tips on keeping my GMPC from becoming poo poo, besides the general "let the players lead"?
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Jan 4, 2015 15:53
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Leave it at home.
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Jan 4, 2015 15:58
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If you absolutely must have a GMPC, make it a Cleric instead of a Paladin. Even better, leave it and just give them more potions than you normally would.
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Jan 4, 2015 16:35
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cargohills posted:If you absolutely must have a GMPC, make it a Cleric instead of a Paladin. Even better, leave it and just give them more potions than you normally would. Your GMPC is a travelling potion merchant whose prices are so low he must be crazy! The potion merchant appears at increasingly improbable times and places in order to give the party free samples and heavily discounted healing items. Gazetteer fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jan 4, 2015 |
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Jan 4, 2015 16:39
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Every GMPC should be Crazy Al's Used Potions/Horses/etc.
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Jan 4, 2015 16:42
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I find the following guidelines useful in keeping DMPC-type NPCs where they belong:
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Jan 4, 2015 16:45
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If you have to have it, make it so that your pet npc can't help with important things. Perhaps their patron deity put a binding on their tongue as part of a holy redemption quest so they can't give away hints, or maybe give the players an item that lets them 'summon' the paladin(perhaps they're out of phase with the plane you're on and this macguffin can briefly stabilize them) for a brief amount of time. If it's an NPC that the PCs have control over, it leans more towards "this is a tool to use" instead of "this is a character that could steal our thunder." Really though, you could introduce your paladin as a quest NPC who needs the PCs more than the other way around and have them serve actual plot purposes rather than shoring up the party's weak points. That, or perhaps the party might recognize they have a weak point and want to hire the paladin on(clearly, their pay would go towards their church) to fill the role. That means the players can decide if they want the liability of having hirelings rather than having a GMPC attach itself to their party just because.
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Jan 4, 2015 16:51
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Gazetteer posted:Your GMPC is a travelling potion merchant whose prices are so low he must be crazy! The potion merchant appears at increasingly improbable times and places in order to give the party free samples and heavily discounted healing items. Nevermind, this is the only correct solution.
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Jan 4, 2015 17:01
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Let's build on this idea, someone run a Planescape game and put this guy in it. Have the players buy their portals from him.
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Jan 4, 2015 17:05
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If the PCs are short on leaders, have the ghost of a lazy warlord join the party as a set of lazy warlord actions they can choose when to use each encounter, and a sizeable bonus to attack and/or damage on action points. Said warlord should do nothing whatsoever outside of combat.
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Jan 4, 2015 18:15
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If there's 3 players, they should be able to cover everything they need. Point out anything they've obviously missed before starting, adjust difficulties down to start with, and don't have a gmpc.
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Jan 4, 2015 18:27
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If they're obviously lacking in something, throw a few low end magic items/wands/potions around until they're not.
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Jan 4, 2015 18:51
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I don't actually think it's a big deal for there to be like, a hacker dude that the PCs know who they can call up to do hacking for them, or a grumpy cleric who runs a rundown clinic in the slums who owes the party a few favours. And there's nothing wrong with that NPC having a personality or a backstory if the players want to get into it. The thing with "GMPCs" is that they're annoying when they turn the players into a captive audience in what is supposed to be their story. There's no reason why you can't avoid that while still using major NPCs as a tool to shore up a party's weaknesses as an alternative to saying "okay, one of you is going to have to play a healer instead of what you actually want to play." Other times they're not appropriate. Understanding when to use them and when not to use them is a lot more practically useful than blanket statements about how they're always a bad idea.
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Jan 4, 2015 18:55
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Gazetteer posted:Your GMPC is a travelling potion merchant whose prices are so low he must be crazy! The potion merchant appears at increasingly improbable times and places in order to give the party free samples and heavily discounted healing items. Edit: Gazetteer posted:The thing with "GMPCs" is that they're annoying when they turn the players into a captive audience in what is supposed to be their story. There's no reason why you can't avoid that while still using major NPCs as a tool to shore up a party's weaknesses as an alternative to saying "okay, one of you is going to have to play a healer instead of what you actually want to play." Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jan 4, 2015 |
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Jan 4, 2015 19:00
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Yesterday I played a pretty sweet character. Probot 2500L, "The Professional Robot", had two aspects worthy of note: "Professional Warfare Droid" and "discontinued for a reason.". While the heroic space captain had a laser-sabre duel with the head of the War X rocket, Probot...installed a critical firmware update. An enemy engineer tried to open Probot, but only managed to open an access panel before he rebooted. Probot sprang to life with a circular spin of fire. "Wait, the first thing you do after being turned on is shoot flames in every direction?" "Yup. I was discontinued for a reason."
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Jan 4, 2015 20:04
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Still better than adobe.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:21
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Gazetteer posted:Your GMPC is a travelling potion merchant whose prices are so low he must be crazy! The potion merchant appears at increasingly improbable times and places in order to give the party free samples and heavily discounted healing items. Players soon learn to be extremely anxious at the sight of Crazy Al's stall, for much the same reasons as being nervous around large ammo caches right next to save points (in the middle of a room full of chest high walls/lab stations/raised-bed planters).
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Jan 4, 2015 20:44
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Phy posted:Players soon learn to be extremely anxious at the sight of Crazy Al's stall, for much the same reasons as being nervous around large ammo caches right next to save points (in the middle of a room full of chest high walls/lab stations/raised-bed planters). The party is exploring a labyrinthine series of goblin tunnels when they notice a door in the bare stone wall. When they open it, they're greeted with a painfully loud, "WELCOME TO CRAZY AL'S USED POTIONS EMPORIUM!" This exact scene repeats multiple times, in various locations. Goblin caves, ancient castles dungeons, in the belly of a pirate ship. One time they open the door and it's just an empty storage closet, but when they turn around the hallway has been replaced with Crazy Al's room. At the end of the campaign, it turns out Crazy Al was the BBEG all along. He was using the PCs as guinea pigs in his mad scientist alchemical experiments, and now he has finally perfected the elixir that will give him untold cosmic power.
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Jan 5, 2015 00:04
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Moose King posted:The party is exploring a labyrinthine series of goblin tunnels when they notice a door in the bare stone wall. When they open it, they're greeted with a painfully loud, "WELCOME TO CRAZY AL'S USED POTIONS EMPORIUM!"  "What're ya buyin'?"
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Jan 5, 2015 00:34
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The discussion in the GM advice thread seemed to come to the conclusion that the best way to do GMPCs is just make a bunch of neat NPCs, introduce them to the players, and see who they recruit. If the only one they want is the winsome urchin that sounds like a Cockney Elmo, give him the healing powers.
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Jan 5, 2015 00:47
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Moose King posted:At the end of the campaign, it turns out Crazy Al was the BBEG all along. He was using the PCs as guinea pigs in his mad scientist alchemical experiments, and now he has finally perfected the elixir that will give him untold cosmic power. I did something like this, in a game I DM'ed back in high school. The players didn't have any way to identify magic items, so they found an NPC who would do it for cheap; an extremely old man in a very small shack who would take stuff through a slot in the door, inspect it, then pass it back out with a little scrawled instruction. For some reason, the players liked him, and went way out of their way to save him and his shack from a burning city, by stuffing it into their bag of holding. Which they also later decorated with a lawn worth of potted plants growing healing berries & fantasy weed, and an ever-growing trophy rack (horns, skulls on sticks, fangs) from notable poo poo they killed, all arranged around the shack. He watered the plants, responded with simple or rude gestures when questioned, and was very blasé about everything else. Since the team adopted him as their mascot, I made him important to the plot; they discovered elsewhere that he was a descendant of an ancient evil force. They decided to fulfill their hero party prophecy via the "bad interpretation," used their collection of powerful macabre poo poo as an altar, and used him (with his thumbs-up) as a sacrificial vessel to reincarnate The Tarrasque, (immortal, uncontrollable godzilla-like monster) near their enemies' homeland.
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Jan 5, 2015 04:21
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Alright Thread, I've read this thread religiously, and I just heard their finally opening up a game shop in a nearby town, anything I should look out for, and I'll ask honestly, what are decent prices for gaming stuff, if this is the wrong thread, somebody point me in the right direction? Edit: I'm more looking for tips on signs for when I get there if I need to run and never return to the place, it's why I figured to ask here first JackNapier fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 07:39
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JackNapier posted:Edit: I'm more looking for tips on signs for when I get there if I need to run and never return to the place, it's why I figured to ask here first Is it a damp basement or attic space with poor lighting and a funny smell? Then it's probably going to suck. Actually, any one of those is a "probably suck" indicator. On the other hand, if it looks like a regular store but with gaming stuff in it, it'll probably at least be a good place to buy stuff but might still be poo poo for gaming in, or even for listening to anyone in. I'm kind of being over the top with the first part, but if the store is literally a damp basement, you should probably run away immediately. Are the staff friendly? Great! Knowledgable? Great! Both of those things? Fantastic! Do the staff try to push their favorite X on you instead of the Y you're trying to buy? Not awesome, unless it's an upsell or "If you like this, you should try that too!" Does the guy at the counter tell you the product you're currently trying to purchase is a poo poo product designed by assholes and played by idiots? Run away! Can you play games there? That's a big one, none of the places I can reasonably get to actually have games played in the store, they're purely retail places. That doesn't mean they're bad by any means, but it seems like an indicator of staff who actually do play the games they sell (whether or not that's a good thing depends on the staff though). Does the store only let you play certain games? Fine if it's like "Tuesday night is Warhammer40K night, Wednesday night is Magic, etc" Run away if it's like "we only ever run Game X Edition Y here". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 08:10
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AlphaDog posted:Is it a damp basement or attic space with poor lighting and a funny smell? Then it's probably going to suck. Actually, any one of those is a "probably suck" indicator. On the other hand, if it looks like a regular store but with gaming stuff in it, it'll probably at least be a good place to buy stuff but might still be poo poo for gaming in, or even for listening to anyone in. I'm kind of being over the top with the first part, but if the store is literally a damp basement, you should probably run away immediately. From what I heard, it's like a chain, um, I guess their home stores are in Fort Wayne, and their branching out to surrounding states, from what my friend said, they boast open game nights on Thursdays and Saturdays, and MTG tournaments on Sunday's and Friday's, as well as a game room and open orders for requests on Merchandise, it's apparently making enough money back in Fort Wayne that they can afford to open a store almost three hundred miles away and pay to have it advertised for on five of the stations that I listen to, if that helps Edit: I'd have to check when their opening, but from the sounds of it, their opening inside the city's shopping strip, if I'm remembering my locations right, it's a pretty expensive area their leasing out, the majority of all the large retail stores are in the area, as well as five or six high end jewelry stores JackNapier fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 5, 2015 08:17
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A successful game store? I am immediately suspicious.  Just from that, though, it does sound like it'll at least be a good place to play. If they can aggressively police shitheads, so much the better.
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Jan 5, 2015 10:42
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Oh boy, bad game store chat! My small city had been starved for a good game store for years. We had a few "dank basement" game stores come and go over the years that were more like clubhouses than stores, and managed as such. Not surprisingly, none of them lasted long. But this town has a bunch of colleges nearby, including the largest university in the state, so it was just a matter of time before someone came in to fill that niche. When we did eventually get a game store that was clean, bright, and not run like someone's club house, it was like a breath of fresh air in the local game scene. I was hoping for a store like the one I left on the other side of the state where I grew up, one that was managed by friendly, knowledgeable staff, and that hosted regular events while minimizing the gross/annoying/weird poo poo that happens whenever you put 30+ gamers in one place. This new store started out great: he stocked games that people actually wanted to buy, and he had a diverse selection. He sold CCGs, RPG books, board games, minis games, old school video game cartridges, and so on. His prices were at retail, but most folks didn't mind because it was more convenient than getting poo poo a bit cheaper on Amazon (and a lot of us are godless liberals who like to support local businesses). The shop was clean and functional as a space to come and play games. The shop was in a separate room from the game tables, and there was a third, smaller room to play tabletop RPGs. Then it all went to poo poo. It's hard to tell when in started, because I think the owner was always hiding a loathsome personality. But as the months went on, his grognardness (grognardiness? grognitude?) started to show through. Such as:  The store started to open and close whenever the owner felt like it, randomly. I was in a group of tabletop players that paid to rent the side room (5 bucks for a few hours, so not too shabby if you are in a position to have to rent a quiet place to play a game every now and then). We did this a few times. The last time we did, we paid at about 6:45 and were planning on being there until the store closed at 9:30. the store owner decided he wanted to leave early that day, so he tried to kick us out at 8:00. We didn't know this, though, because instead of coming to tell us like an adult, he started blaring the shop's music at increasingly loud volume. When I came out to ask him to turn the music down a bit, he said, "you guys need to get out of here. We've been closed for ten minutes." It wasn't even 8:00 yet. When I asked for our 5 bucks back, he just said, "no." We never used that room again. We couldn't have used the room anyway, as it turns out. Shortly after that, he bought a big screen TV and PS3 to put in the side room. He had a copy of Skyrim and a few other games. This wasn't for customers to use or rent. It was for him. He started spending all of his time playing loving Skyrim while his unpaid girlfriend staffed the store. I guess he just got sick of "running a game store" and "doing his loving job." Speaking of his girlfriend, she used to be nice. My wife was acquainted with her from college and they got along well. They're both nerds with hobbies and interests in common. But this other woman started acting mean-spirited and cynical soon after she started dating the store owner. She started adopting this weird, ugly, Randian philosophy that floats around gamer circles like a loving STD. She went from being a mellow, thoughtful, generally nice person to being a Randian, "gently caress you, got mine" libertarian. My wife still thinks she was brainwashed. The game store is right next to a Subway. Unfortunately, parking is at a premium in that building's lot, so when the store would host a Magic tournament for 20, 30, or 40 players, the lot would be completely hosed. The Subway next door stopped by to ask the owner to have his customers avoid the four or so spaces in front of the Subway. He refused. The Subway put up signs in front of their storefront's parking spaces that said "Subway customer parking only." The game store guy did nothing. When one of his customer complained that he got towed after parking right in front of the Subway for five hours for a Magic tournament, the store owner went to Subway to yell at them, and then put up signs in his own shop that banned Subway sandwiches from the premises. He would seriously ask customers who walked in with a bag from Subway, even strangers who couldn't have possibly known any better, to leave his store or throw the sandwich away. Subway continues to tow cars from their spaces occasionally, but the regulars have gotten the hint, even if the owner hasn't. The store slowly slipped away from the model of "here are some games, so come buy them and play them so that other people see them and also buy them" to a model of "we just host Magic twice a week and otherwise gently caress off." First the RPG players got elbowed out. Then the other CCG players. Then the minis gamers. Then the board gamers. I don't know anyone who plays anything but Magic there, and now that's on the decline too because the patronage has been whittled down to the owner's little clubhouse of aggressively libertarian friends. The irony is that he initially had to be convinced to run Magic events, but because he sucks at management, the events strip-mined his store of all of it's customers and sales. He still has a hard core of Magic goons in his little club, but it's not enough to float the store by itself. My wife was hired to paint a mural for the store a while back. This was during some of the above stuff, but before the owner went completely off the deep end (see below). The owner paid her about half what the going rate is for a mural of that size, but she didn't expect him to be able to meet that kind of price. It was extra work for her and built up her portfolio, so she was willing to take the hit on the money without complaint. He, on the other hand, bitched endlessly. He bitched about how much he paid her (minimum wage). He bitched about how it was taking her weeks to paint a mural 20' x 6 ' on one wall, and 20' x 6 on another. He bitched that he was "paying her to stand around" whenever she did not literally have a brush on the wall, like when she went to the bathroom to wash brushes or stood back to do composition sketches. He bitched that she didn't work often enough, despite the fact that he knew he hired a full-time college student who already had another retail job to boot. (He also had no deadline for it, so he was just being impatient). He bitched at her when she took one day off that she had verbally committed to to attend her grandmother's funeral an hour away. He called her a liar and drove her to tears yelling at her about it. That last one broke the camel's back. I showed up to pick up my wife that day and found her in tears, being yelled at by this guy. There were words. I have not set foot in the store since.
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Jan 5, 2015 14:55
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Gazetteer posted:Your GMPC is a travelling potion merchant whose prices are so low he must be crazy! The potion merchant appears at increasingly improbable times and places in order to give the party free samples and heavily discounted healing items. Probably going to do exactly this in the 13th Age game I'm about to start. It's especially enticing because I just know my players will start to get incredibly suspicious of him, which is great, because eventually they'll start investigating on their own and I can turn the "who the hell is this potion-selling weirdo?" investigation into a story all its own.
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Jan 5, 2015 16:58
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