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Trilas posted:The basic gist is that they're needing to collect items to create a weapon that can kill basically a Lich. One of these items is already known to be associated with lust (the campaign is heavily themed around the seven deadly sins). The issue I'm having is that the item as written is located in a succubus's lair, which populated with her children (the products of capturing and raping men), and the items themselves are basically bejeweled dildos. The whole thing is skeeving me out, and I don't want to run it as is.  What campaign is this? Who thought that was a good idea? I mean, yeah, doing "Se7en: The RPG" will go to some dark places, but that's some dumb teenager poo poo.Trilas posted:Here's what I've been thinking: This is a really cool alternative. Make the wizard into a gross neckbeard who, instead of going outside and talking to people, sits in his tower poring over tomes and trying to create the ultimate love potion or illusion that will make him irresistible. Basically the Ice King from Adventure Time.
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Jan 7, 2015 22:01
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Can you not make it a social encounter, blagging their way into the prelude to an eyes-wide-shut-style orgy where they need to find the magic pornmag maguffin and get out before events begin to unfold and they're unmasked?
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Jan 7, 2015 22:34
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:Can you not make it a social encounter, blagging their way into the prelude to an eyes-wide-shut-style orgy where they need to find the magic pornmag maguffin and get out before events begin to unfold and they're unmasked? I kinda like this idea. Everyone gets themselves masks and costumes Hitman-style and infiltrates the event (maybe they knock out some guests and steal their clothes, or they pay exorbitant fees to have costumes made for them), trying to identify and steal the artifact (either it's been given a place of honor as a centerpiece ornament or it's being kept by the host in their private chambers) while warding off drunken advances from guests; everyone disrobes and unmasks at a certain time, so they have a strict time limit to get the goal. Make it so the party is filled with private security as well, so they can't just barge through without a fight surrounded by civilians, and have the requisite costumes be less than ideal for concealing greatswords and crossbows and even include a scene where they get frisked so they have to rely on their wits and unarmed/holdout skills. It would give the party's requisite stealth and face characters time to shine. One very good option would be to have the Master of Ceremonies or some other person attending be a past NPC the players pissed off or one who's out to get them. There's little danger of the plot advancing to an uncomfortably sex-filled place if they let the timer run down, since either they fail to disrobe and cause a scene that gets security brought in or they unmask and get recognized, resulting in a fight and mad dash for the artifact.
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Jan 7, 2015 22:52
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:Can you not make it a social encounter, blagging their way into the prelude to an eyes-wide-shut-style orgy where they need to find the magic pornmag maguffin and get out before events begin to unfold and they're unmasked? Keep the magic sword sized jeweled dildos
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Jan 7, 2015 23:29
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Guildencrantz posted:
Rise of the Runelords, I assume. One of the later dungeons is an extraplanar complex with 7 wings, one for each sin. I'm pretty sure my DM just ignored the Lust wing, thankfully.
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Jan 7, 2015 23:40
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Lucky Guy posted:Rise of the Runelords, I assume. One of the later dungeons is an extraplanar complex with 7 wings, one for each sin. I'm pretty sure my DM just ignored the Lust wing, thankfully. Whenever you hear an RPG getting into 'lust', brace for some awful poo poo, as a rule of thumb. And be ready to skip it.
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Jan 7, 2015 23:41
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It's all been a hilarious misunderstanding and the seventh deadly sin is actually Rust.
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Jan 8, 2015 00:01
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It is Rise of the Runelords. Other than that (and a couple of other super minor things), it's been a great adventure path. I thought about a cave-in sealing it away, but my players are the type who will see that kind of thing as a way to think outside the box. The last time they were blocked by something like that, they summoned an earth elemental to excavate a dungeon they weren't supposed to go to for another 3 levels.
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Jan 8, 2015 00:14
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Trilas posted:It is Rise of the Runelords. Other than that (and a couple of other super minor things), it's been a great adventure path. Skipping it worked well for us because the DM elided parts 5 and 6 together - I think 'by the book' you need to hit all 7 wings, but we only did 3 or 4 before moving on. Several of the wings are at war with one another, if I remember right - you could always say that Wrath or Pride rolled in at some point in the past and destroyed the Lust group, and once the party beats that group, they get Lust's macguffin too.
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Jan 8, 2015 02:20
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You could always replace the jeweled dicks with something like Freyja's Brísingamen or the Girdle of Aphrodite. Most old goddesses like that usually have some "makes you super hot" magic item made by goony rear end dwarves. You could even turn the encounter into some goddess/archmage/elf queen tuning the party in because she jokingly told some neckbeard Wizard that they would be married after he "Wove her a necklace from love and moonlight" only to find out that he interpreted it as "murder young couples in love to craft a Boner Phylactery".
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Jan 8, 2015 02:24
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Razorwired posted:Boner Phylactery Phallictery
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Jan 8, 2015 02:33
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Run 'lust' midway through, once they've picked up on the theme. Have it completely filled with unrelated content, play it straight, and watch the players try to figure out the fetish attached to each. Alternatively: There's a succubus who knows where the magic 'horn' (nudge-nudge) is. Except, she's really annoyed at getting summoned by every goddamn horny teenage necromancer, and will only offer up the info in exchange for the PCs finding a way to save her from being summoned every five minutes. Have her keep vanishing mid-conversation to drive the point home. Then let the PCs go hogwild with whatever ritual ideas they want to try, having to rescue the succubus from a (low-level, easy) necromancer/diabolist if they cock up (heheh), and so on. e: Bonus points if she's "too old for this poo poo" and kind of embaressed about the whole thing, especially the BEJEWELLED COCK OF SLAYING she has to guard.
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Jan 8, 2015 03:09
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Just go full on Oglaf with it.
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Jan 8, 2015 08:31
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petrol blue posted:Run 'lust' midway through, once they've picked up on the theme. Have it completely filled with unrelated content, play it straight, and watch the players try to figure out the fetish attached to each. On second thought, this is hilarious and the world needs more vaguely fed up succubi and tongue in cheek treatments of this kind of bollocks.
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Jan 8, 2015 08:58
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My Lovely Horse posted:Just go full on Oglaf with it. That could mean almost anything, to be fair.
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Jan 8, 2015 10:05
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You could also make the item some sort of apple or ring, and have the main villain be a decadent, lecherous, womanizing prince or something. Hell, he might even be a good sport and offer you the item with some dumb gimmick like "Collect as many handkerchiefs from women within 60 minutes. come back with more than ten and it's yours!"
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Jan 8, 2015 13:46
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Deltasquid posted:You could also make the item some sort of apple or ring, and have the main villain be a decadent, lecherous, womanizing prince or something. Hell, he might even be a good sport and offer you the item with some dumb gimmick like "Collect as many handkerchiefs from women within 60 minutes. come back with more than ten and it's yours!" Keys to the VIP: D&D Edition sounds like a fantastic skill challenge/social combat idea (minus all the outright PUA/MRA creepiness)
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Jan 8, 2015 13:50
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 M'lady.
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Jan 8, 2015 13:52
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I thought more along the lines of Don Juan but why not, have him give you a cursed fedora of -5 CHA as a reward for your efforts.
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Jan 8, 2015 14:02
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petrol blue posted:There's a succubus who knows where the magic 'horn' (nudge-nudge) is. Except, she's really annoyed at getting summoned by every goddamn horny teenage necromancer, and will only offer up the info in exchange for the PCs finding a way to save her from being summoned every five minutes. Have her keep vanishing mid-conversation to drive the point home. Then let the PCs go hogwild with whatever ritual ideas they want to try, having to rescue the succubus from a (low-level, easy) necromancer/diabolist if they cock up (heheh), and so on. This. This is the winning answer.
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Jan 8, 2015 14:25
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I've never gmed before and am planning on running a game of Dungeon World or something similar with friends who are pretty unfamiliar with rpgs but excited to start. I have tried getting some friends together to play shadowrun and it ended up being a nightmare with everyone confused about chargen and losing interest while I explained the rules and everything. I'm hoping the more immediately familiar setting and simplified rules will ameliorate that but is there any good way to make the intro sessions less bumpy without giving everyone homework ahead of time? Also to what extent should I pre plan the narrative? I have an idea of broad strokes, important Npcs, plot points and stuff I'm just wondering how much effort I should put into developing a vision of jow I personally want the game to go.
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Jan 8, 2015 21:07
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Sharzak posted:I've never gmed before and am planning on running a game of Dungeon World or something similar with friends who are pretty unfamiliar with rpgs but excited to start. I have tried getting some friends together to play shadowrun and it ended up being a nightmare with everyone confused about chargen and losing interest while I explained the rules and everything. I'm hoping the more immediately familiar setting and simplified rules will ameliorate that but is there any good way to make the intro sessions less bumpy without giving everyone homework ahead of time? With Dungeon World you can pretty much improv the poo poo out of everything, especially with how little statting there is to do and how elegantly everything ties back into the narrative. It's not ~the ultimate RPG~ like some on this forum would have it, but it's definitely the best introduction to them bar none. Character creation takes like five minutes and homework shouldn't be a thing at all, it's a very collaborative, in-the-moment kind of system that gives a lot of prompts to rev up the imagination. However, do remember to use the GM moves, fronts and monster moves, at the times the rules tell you to. This took me a while to get. They're not guidelines, they're rules that constrain you (in a good way which naturally flows with the way an RPG table works) just like they do the player, and the game is significantly less awesome when the GM makes the kind of arbitrary calls you're expected to do in more conventional systems. Don't plan too much: come with a couple of roughly pre-planned encounters and cool environments, leave a LOT of blanks to fill in, ask the players questions, and roll with whatever glorious insanity they come up with. Don't worry about explaining the rules, either. Shadowrun's are kind of a clusterfuck loaded down with 90's legacy design, this is the exact opposite. While GMing Dungeon World can be harder than it looks, playing comes naturally to anyone who's remotely familiar with broad fantasy tropes.
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Jan 8, 2015 21:22
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It's worth running a mock combat (you playing everything) to get the feel for the flow of combat - it's not "PCs go, then monsters, then PCs", and that mistake nearly caused a party wipe when we first started playing.
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Jan 8, 2015 21:32
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This PDF is a dead handy guide to running Dungeon World. Key things that have stuck with me as a GM: * As petrol says, the party don't take it in turns with monsters to make moves. You, as a GM, have a back-and-forth conversation with your players about what they are doing. When part of the narration triggers a move, you use the rules for that move to resolve it. * Always always always be willing to ask your players for inspiration. If a player rolls a 7-9 (the "Success at a cost" option) on a Defy Danger check and you're out of ideas, ask the player. "OK, you've broadly succeeded, but what has gone wrong?" * Don't plan ahead too hard. Create a snapshot of a world-as-is, and let it respond to the actions your players take.
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Jan 8, 2015 21:58
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Seconding the planning thing from a player's PoV - my favourite subplots have come out of 'What do you believe that's incredibly wrong?' (On a fluffed Spout Lore roll), and something that resulted in a (unplanned) fistfight with the moon.
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Jan 9, 2015 00:53
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So I think my players aren't having fun, I've talked to them about it and one says she feels rail roaded, (which is weird because I constantly ask my player what they want to do, and use the "Yes but..." strategy.) The other two seem to love it but they just don't seem super stoked like I am to play. I'd like to work on my pacing I think because I feel like I give it all to them at the very first go whether it's what's going on behind the scenes or huge aggrandizing rewards. I just have trouble trying to balance stuff for my players between "Here have it all you're all prince and princesses now," and "You get nothing, you lose, good day sir." What's the trick to finding that balance?
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Jan 11, 2015 06:11
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Would anybody happen to know anything about virtual table top programs and how to utilize them for offline play? In particular, I'm looking to arrange a setup where I can hook my PC up to my TV and use that to display the main playboard to the players, while I use my monitors as a digital DM screen. I've seen a number of robust, easy to use tools for online play but I'm not sure I'd be able to use them for this kinda action. A friend of mine showed me some software kit he was going to use for a similar idea a few years back, but for the life of me neither of us can remember the name of the program.
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Jan 13, 2015 04:19
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We've started using the TV/PC setup for cheat sheets and (static) maps, and it works great for that (also for music). Don't know enough about virtual tabletops to help beyond that.
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Jan 13, 2015 04:34
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The main thing I want to have on TV are the grid maps to track everybody's positions in combat and during dungeon crawls, maybe pull up some tables for reference. Like a fog-of-war would be COOL but as long as I don't have to draw out maps or keep track of everybody's figurines I'm golden.
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Jan 13, 2015 04:51
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I did that with Maptools a while back and it worked pretty good. Nowadays I'd probably use roll20 and two log ins, one as player to send to the screen and one as GM to run stuff.
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Jan 13, 2015 05:44
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Quick, I need Metal Gear Solid/Rising the RPG for this weekend, is there a *World game that'll work or will I have to use FATE which I'm not sure I understand? quick e: I would rather not be a slave to the memes of extreme crunch and anything that's not rules-light if possible Captain Walker fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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Jan 13, 2015 19:08
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Captain Walker posted:Quick, I need Metal Gear Solid/Rising the RPG for this weekend, is there a *World game that'll work or will I have to use FATE which I'm not sure I understand? slightly hack Death School
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Jan 14, 2015 01:49
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petrol blue posted:Run 'lust' midway through, once they've picked up on the theme. Have it completely filled with unrelated content, play it straight, and watch the players try to figure out the fetish attached to each. Model her personality on Megara from Disney's Hercules.
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Jan 14, 2015 02:39
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dragon_pamcake posted:Model her personality on Megara from Disney's Hercules. I've decided to basically skip it (the Necromancers cleaned out the place). My group moves kind of slowly, and there's plenty of other stuff going on in that dungeon anyway.
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Jan 15, 2015 02:08
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So, I've been reading stories about some games lately and a lot of them are talking about political intrigue without actually showing how such a thing might be done. I was wondering if any of you had any sorts of tips/tricks/guides for some good Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Noun of Nouns type of stuff. I guess my games tend to go for epic heroism but I'd really like to do some politicking in some, and I'm wondering how best to go about it. How many of the rivals/allies you have to stat out and back story, where to start and where to go from there, etc.
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Jan 15, 2015 08:01
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The thing to keep in mind is that politics is fundamentally about deciding how to allocate limited resources. You should always have a concrete sense of what people are contending for, why they care and what their end goal is: this could be control over some physical object, an official role/title/responsibility, learning some secret knowledge from someone who has it, etc. I ran a Changeling game that heavily featured politics and intrigue, and one thing that made it work was making it clear to the PCs who the important factions were and differentiating them. After they've spent some time meeting people and being introduced to the conflict, your players should be able to clearly say "This is the specific thing that's at stake, these are the people interested and what side of the issue they fall on, this is what needs to happen for the issue to be resolved". There should still be questions and suspicions about the details, but when a plot is more abstract than "we are killing this monster in that cave" you need to be sure that the PCs know what's going on and are following you.
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Jan 15, 2015 08:37
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My PCs are being invited to a wedding, which naturally is going to be interrupted by assassins. Is it a bad idea to force them to leave their weapons/armour at the door (my plan is to get them to come up with ways to prepare for this possibility, since it's not the first time they've been caught short, a fight previously broke out in a courtroom). Also, what kind of fun situations can adventurers get into at a wedding full of important figures?
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Jan 15, 2015 23:18
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Tesla was right posted:My PCs are being invited to a wedding, which naturally is going to be interrupted by assassins. Why not have a fun "Hey, you know they're going to ask for your weapons, do you want to try to smuggle them in? Do you want to hide them AT the wedding before anyone gets there and have them there?" makes sense narratvely and from what's fun for the players.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:24
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Telling my PCs "you can't bring weapons in here" is an infallible method to make them think about how they can bring weapons in there until they've found a way to bring all of them. The gruffest and grumpiest and dwarfest party member must be made to entertain the daintiest, most sheltered noble children "just for a minute or two."
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Jan 15, 2015 23:28
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Tesla was right posted:Also, what kind of fun situations can adventurers get into at a wedding full of important figures? A party member with noble roots meets a distant relative who embarrasses them. The group have to participate in some bizarre local wedding custom. They meet the friendly alcoholic uncle who is really insistent on getting drunk with them. The bride's crazy ex is trying to get in and pull a "DON'T MARRY THIS MAN" scene. The party are sent to deal with him but he's too high-status to just murder. They stumble into some idiot noble's petty scheme to seduce or slander someone, which turns into a security threat.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:54
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