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The Grammar Aryan posted:The adventures of grindy obviously Grindy needs to come back with a cult, Bonus points if its a scientologist style cult yet with a Lovecraft bent with Grindy being the charismatic Tom Cruise stand in. quote:While grindylows can take class levels to gain power, certain grindylows are freakish throwbacks to a primal age—these grindylows never cease growing, and in time can become massive beasts of Huge size. Unlike the typical grindylow, these giants can attack with all six of their tentacles and constrict with great effect. Giant grindylows are fortunately quite rare. Or you could claim he is one of those throwback grindys who grows real giant and now he has a definitive goal and combat experience his grindy-cred has grown exponentially along with his size. Motherfucker fucked around with this message at 16:24 on May 6, 2015 |
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May 6, 2015 16:21
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The Grammar Aryan posted:made piece HeHe
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May 6, 2015 16:32
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Last year my group wrapped up a long running d6 Star Wars campaign set in the KOTOR era. It lasted about 2 years IRL broken up into different arcs (we like to chop up our campaigns into 3 to 4 month chunks and run other stuff between arcs) and ran about 25 years in game. There were three PCs and this was the situation during the final arc: Myself: Playing a human Jedi Master My sister: Playing a human successful businessman who was a former smuggler and drug addict Our friend "B": Playing a Chev bounty hunter/mercenary type It was near the end of the story and my character was leading a Republic Navy taskforce to stop some bad guys from trying to overthrow the Republic. So battle was joined and because space battles my flagship got boarded. Now earlier in the game we had met, fought, and killed a bounty hunter named Tarkon Koda. But now ~*~mysteriously~*~ he was back and lured B's character into an isolated docking bay on the ship (I don't remember exactly how, but it's not really that important to the story). So B is in a docking bay and he's got on some power armor that allows him to see heat signs and he picked up someone crouched behind some boxes. So he rolls a grenade toward them and the blast shoots them out into outer space. Whoops! It wasn't the bad guy it was actually his hostage. A hostage that was actually a Republic Intelligence officer and who also had a brief romantic dalliance with B's character. Well that's one way to end a relationship! But wait, there's more: So B fights and kills Tarkon Koda for a second time. He finds a recording hidden in the man's armor, it reveals that Tarkon Koda is not a single person at all, but merely an identity. Whenever the current one dies another can take up the mantle! The purpose of this mantle is to terrorize the scum of the Outer Rim. As for the Republic Intelligence agent, she lived because her species can survive in vacuums for short periods of time. Although with that said, she was upset about what had happened. Now at this point in time the space battle is over so my character and my sister's character find B, learn about what had happened, and confront him about blowing people up with grenades before knowing who they are and this leads to a drawn out half IRL/half in character argument (you know the kind). With that settled (it actually wasn't) there was the question of what to do with the armor. Now most players (I think) would leap at the chance to adopt such an identity. Tarkon Koda was one of the most infamous bounty hunters in the Republic and was widely feared. B, for reason that even a year later I do not fully understand, decided instead to chop up the armor and mail the various pieces to all the major crime bosses and Hutt lords in the Rim declaring to them that the bounty hunter that had terrorized them was dead. During the epilogue we learned that crime blossomed in the Outer Rim in the aftermath of this.
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May 6, 2015 17:06
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Anticheese posted:Were there miscast tables for the casters? Not as a general rule, unless it was a wild mage type things or some such. The combat tables were adjusted for level, so high-level warriors had bonuses that made it very unlikely that they would drop a weapon unless actually hit on the arm, or the like. You would see things like someone slipping slightly on wet turf: unable to move next term and loss of dexterity to armour class, that type of thing. In order to blunt the dominance of casters, we had essentially super-specialisation. If you were an evoker, you were good at tossing around lightning bolts and magic missiles, and that was about it. Abjurers had amazing protective spells, but good luck trying to summon a loaf of bread, much less an elemental or a demon.
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May 6, 2015 17:12
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My group just ended an Apocalypse World campaign that started nuts and just kept running full-steam ahead. The setting was an isolated space station that had been cut off from Earth for decades and decades due to a wormhole collapsing. Cannibals, tribal warlords and 'proper folk' all fighting each other in a crumbling space station for dwindling resources. One of the moves players can use in AW is to 'open their brain' to the psychic maelstrom of the world. This is usually used to discern new information about things as the characters interact with the world in their own quasi-spiritual way. You can advance that move and if you do that and then roll a 12+ on 2D6+stat, something new happens. To quote the game text "You break through to whatever's on the other side". Freaky, right? One of our players did just that and simply declared: "I see the Devourer for what it truly is." This was the first mention of any such thing and cryptic enough to make everyone wonder aloud as to what it meant. The Devourer would eventually become a shadowy antagonist, the cause of all the anarchy and chaos on the station, for two characters to rail against, recruiting gangs and cults to their cause, infiltrating rival tribes and gangs, all kinds of crazy poo poo. Most of the other characters thought it was all tribal bullshit. One day, a ship came into radio range. An ark ship carrying 180,000 people in cryostasis (and all the supplies needed for such a sizable group to start a colony) was returning after not finding any habitable planets and running low on reactor mass. The ship carried its own wormhole generator for a one-time-only use when a new colony was established and the craziest characters decided that they needed to get on the ship and get the generator to finally defeat the Devourer. Queue every PC boarding a ramshackle torpedo and flying towards the ark ship as quickly as possible to beat the station gangs from tearing it apart first. Among the PCs was a psychotic cannibal by the name of Puff who really, really hated gluttonous and greedy sinners. Puff was sane enough to not tip his hand at every opportunity but at least one PC had seen him with a bloody mouth and a dead corpse at his feet. He was, in essence, an agent of the Devourer and had a psychic connection to it from spending years in cryo but no one else knew that. Another PC was an obese scientist named Dr. Raskolnikov, who kept a briefcase of wondrous inventions and oddments known only to him, and had a habit of talking down to everyone that was dumber than him (which was everyone). The party was split up multiple times as they tried to simultaneously warn the ark ship sailors of the other station gangs, find the generator, and murder (and sometimes eat) people. Things came to a head when half the party was at the generator and the other half was in sickbay. One of them had been thoroughly ventilated by cannibals from the Flycatcher gang and was getting patched up. Dr. R was hiding behind the Marines that were keeping the place secure and Puff was there because Dr. R was there. There had been a one-sided firefight between a PC cult leaders group of fanatics and the Marines. The doctor in charge had been wounded, causing lots of panic and confusion so in the interest of never wasting an opportunity, Puff fell upon Dr. R, stabbing him in the back (literally) and then proceeding to bite his face off (literally). There's blood and screaming and confusion and sheer loving chaos and then the generator gets flipped on. Fade to white. Everyone rolls+weird. 10 years go by. Dr. Raskolnikov had his face eaten and was already cooling when the generator went off. RIP. The cult leader was never seen after that moment, lost in wherever exists inside a wormhole. Probably Hell. (Failed the roll completely) The psychic-researcher that triggered the generator was on the moon, watching space and trying to start a cult around his messianic complex. (Partial success) The badass merc was teaching a women's self-defense class and keeping a low profile. (Partial success) The witch that had been shot to pieces survived somehow and became a hermit in the mountains. (Partial success) And sometimes, in London, bodies would turn up missing body parts after a man listened to the tiny, hungry voice in his head. (Complete success on the roll) It's really amazing to me that the climax of the entire campaign came from a single line spoken months beforehand and really speaks to improv GMing as none of it was planned in advance.
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May 9, 2015 10:21
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In the Skull and Shackles game I'm running, we just broke out of the super railroady section and into the sandbox section, where players need to grind Pirate Points in order to become notorious enough to try and become real pirates. The module has suggestions for things like raiding ships or coastal villages, but I wanted to have the players have a little say in things, so I broke out a giant piece of paper and we tried out the Smallville relationship map, which has always worked out great for me in the past. The players didn't quite get it at first, but we wound up with a few interesting things of note- "The Dreadful," rumored to be a gun, that is being sought by  , the party Gunslinger"The Fellhope Fish Skull," rumored to possibly be a mer-Demilich, being sought after by That Grindylow "The Red Forge," an artifact of unknown function which is located in a sea fort called Tidewater Rock  , the Barbarian, said he wanted to define a MacGuffin location called The Fountain of Grog. He described it as a pirate paradise, with things like streams of grog, plenty of fine piratical ladies, and things like that. We decided to rename it "The Big Grog Candy Mountain," and the player is now wholly into it. He is in the process of preaching about the place to the general crew of the ship. , the completely new player, has said that he wants to commune with his god, Norgorber, the NE god of thieves, assassins, secrets, and crazed axe murderers. Surely this cannot go poorly.Everyone else pretty much said that they wanted to fight things and get loot. Less descriptive than I'd like, but at least expectations have been set, and I have enough information to seed things around the Shackles for them to find while grinding out Pirate Points.
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May 11, 2015 15:41
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The Grammar Aryan posted:
He will be disappointed when it turns out its just lovely people who play tabletop games.
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May 11, 2015 15:47
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The Grammar Aryan posted:"The Dreadful," rumored to be a gun, that is being sought by I wish my GM was Brian Clevinger... 
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May 11, 2015 16:28
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Captain Bravo posted:I wish my GM was Brian Clevinger... Someone who is better at it than I am needs to come up with some rules to work at Tesladyne. That would be a most excellent game system for about anything...
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May 11, 2015 17:16
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You mean the Atomic Robo rpg doesn't do that?
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May 11, 2015 17:19
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goatface posted:You mean the Atomic Robo rpg doesn't do that? You mean there IS an Atomic Robo RPG?
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May 11, 2015 17:21
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Yes, it's FATE based. http://www.evilhat.com/home/atomic-robo/
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May 11, 2015 17:24
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Samizdata posted:You mean there IS an Atomic Robo RPG? Yep! The rulebook has a nice bonus in that there are notes from Doctor Dinosaur in the margins, and character creation walks you through the building of a science gorilla.
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May 11, 2015 17:26
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Alternatively, GURPS, which is actually kind of tempting.
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May 11, 2015 17:57
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MohawkSatan posted:Alternatively, GURPS, which is actually kind of tempting. I have to say, rules aside, the rulebook itself is really well done.
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May 11, 2015 18:11
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The Big Rock (/Grog) Candy Mountain should definitely be a feature of every roleplaying world. Even 40k, where I'm pretty sure it would just end up being an actual place that's really just a cover for a Slaanesh dungeon.
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May 11, 2015 19:34
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They say that the difference between a Great story and a Cat-Piss story is how the rest of the group felt about it. Nowhere is this more true than with Anime Campaign 2: The story of The Aspect of Death Have you ever had a character who made the whole campaign about him? Like, no matter what happened, it was actually his story, and not yours? Well, that isn't always a negative thing... Now, our party was: Kyle: A guy who viewed himself as a master Min-Maxer. He wasn't. He played a lone samurai type. He was the banker in Anime Campaign 1. Chip: A fun, laid back guy. He played an Avatar from Avatar: The Last Airbender, because this was around when that was big. He was Ed in Anime Campaign 1. Andrew: Chip's roommate, and another laid back guy. He played a wizard. I forgot who he played in Anime Campaign 1. So did he. Jessi: She was one of those who prefer the story to the actual gameplay. She's nice. She played an angel-demon hybrid, and was a ninja in Anime Campaign 1. Me: I played a Forest creature who got his powers from Nature. I forget the specifics. He could turn his arm into a sword. In Anime Campaign 1, I played the Android Battle-Maid, min-maxed for Maid. Jon: Our DM, a cool guy. He admitted he stopped planning sessions halfway through Anime Campaign 1, and instead just set up the week's hook and let whatever happen. and finally, we had Lewis: The ACTUAL min-maxer of the party. He was the Fighter in a group of diplomats and stealth users in Anime Campaign 1. In Anime Campaign 2, he created The Aspect of Death. The Aspect of Death was... a thing. Nobody, not even Lewis, knew what would happen with the character. He was an unstoppable Monster who got hurt exactly once in the entire campaign. Big Eyes Small Mouth is a broken-rear end system, but it was never so apparent as to how bad it could get to us until Lewis did his thing. I asked him, before writing this, what made the Aspect of Death so absurd: Lewis posted:Step 1: Every time he dealt damage of any sort, he absorbed that much hp and/or stats from the target. This could exceed his own max He showed me his other character sheets, and this was LESS absurd than his other characters. Anyway, the campaign started out normally, but every fight would last until the Aspect of Death's turn. Eventually we had a choice between forcing Lewis to create another character or letting him lead the party and giving us fights separate from his fights. The Aspect's antics were fun, and Lewis is an entertaining person, so we enjoyed it, and fought minions while he fought giant cheating jerks. Eventually, to balance out the Aspect of Death, Jon introduced the Aspect of Life. He introduced him during the requisite Beach Episode. The beach episode took place on a small planetoid, where we arrived at beach 1138. We walked around, and found beaches 1137, 1136, 1135, in a circular pattern. Then we realized where the beaches came from. Our GM is good like that. In the end, we had to fight the evil overlord, Chip's character from Anime Campaign 1, and in the final battle, the Angel-Demon Hybrid's power limiter came undone, and she dealt damage to the Aspect of Death, a feat that had never been done, and had not been replicated since. Ultimately, the Aspect of Death won the fight, and then he killed the Aspect of Life, which killed him too, and everyone mourned the loss of such an amusing character. That was Andrew, Kyle, Chip, and Jon's final semester, so we never continued on from that, but that, and my last post, were the stories of the two most fun tabletop campaigns I had ever participated in.
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May 11, 2015 20:28
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BlackIronHeart posted:It's really amazing to me that the climax of the entire campaign came from a single line spoken months beforehand and really speaks to improv GMing as none of it was planned in advance. Amazing story! That's the mark of a solid GM...I like the various "fates" of everyone as well.
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May 11, 2015 20:37
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I think I may have just witnessed the most wonderfully climactic derailment in my weekly Changeling the Lost campaign. The motley consisted of a patchwork bunch of courts and kiths, but all that's really important to the story is that it contained a pair of ogres. It began with them finally tracking down the Winter Court assassin at the near-center of a conspiracy to commit regicide they were unraveling. He had gone to ground in a trailer park in the hedge, which he had turned into a makeshift fortress. The way I had planned it was that the moment his security systems told him he had company he was going to take position on the roof of a trailer at the far end and, concealed by tokens and contracts, snipe and my players while they desperately searched for his hiding place. It was supposed to be a fairly tense scene where they had to scramble for cover and search through a bunch of empty buildings while trying to stay together. The party's ogres tore the security gates down with their bare hands. So far so good. One of them mentioned offhand that she would hold onto her half and try to smack "that rear end in a top hat" with it as a makeshift weapon. The fairest who clambered on top of the walls to scout out the park ate six wounds from the first shot and scrambled back down, cluing them into what they were going up against. Derailment one: one of the players had invoked a contract letting her know what direction and how far away their target was. Not too bad but it did give them a pretty important advantage. Derailment two: I had forgotten that both ogres possessed a contract that reduced the durability of anything they wanted to punch. It could be used without paying glamour cost if their intent was to bust through an obstacle, such as doors, fences or the walls of a half dozen trailers. Both ogres traced a line through the park to their target and ran headlong through the buildings, which now might as well have been aluminum foil. Derailment three: Once the players had gotten close enough to the rear end in a top hat taking potshots at them with a hunting rifle, I was planning for him to use a series of stealth-based contracts to go to ground and try picking them off. At this point, before the bastard could dissapear himself one ogre remembered that she had been dragging a ten-foot tall gate along with her. Her roll to "use it as a Frisbee" garnered no less than ten successes, which totaled to thirteen lethal once damage had been factored in, leaving the poor assassin with one arm and half a leg. Fight ends abruptly with the party trying to figure out what to do now that the man they were planning on interrogating is rapidly bleeding out. Altogether it was probably the best session of Changeling the lost I've ever run, and one of the only good combat-centric sessions of any game I've ever run. The surprise of having the cool scene I had planned out busted to pieces by player ingenuity/Ogres being the best kith was absolutely amazing for all involved.
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May 16, 2015 08:05
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Finished grading finals! Back to being a nerd on the internet. This is another post about my old D&D group. I posted "Never Split Up the Party" and "How I Met Your Mother," so now it's on to "The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour." The cast:  The DM. (I'll call him... The DM.) Played a LG human paladin. (I'll call her J.) Played a NG half dragon spell sword. (I'll call him Smaug.) Played a CG human bard. (I'll call him Megaman, which would make him the happiest man on Earth.) Played a LE elven sorceress. (I'll call him Munchkin.) Played no one and just hung around and trolled us. (I'll call him Statler.) Played a NG dwarven rogue. (This is me.)The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour "Finest" is used very loosely here. Let me go back for a second and talk about Statler for a minute. Statler is a good guy, but is often  personified. He just has goofy, grognardy opinions about things for no good reason, and he's vocal about those opinions. For example, he gave up on the idea of watching Mad Men before he watched a single episode because he assumed the show was simply "men in the 1960's were jerks." He's not an MRA. He just thought the show would oversimplify things. When people explained to him that the show is about a lot more than that, and is superb regardless of theme, he just dismissed what they said. He had formed his opinion arbitrarily, but god damnit, it was his.Now I've dug myself into a hole. I don't want Statler to sound like a jerk (despite the name I've chosen for him). He has many more positive qualities than he has grognardy ones. He's loyal, he's funny, he's smart, and he's fun to hang out with. He just picks his spots. So, when he's not being fun and funny and smart, he's being a loving douche. His "role" in the D&D campaign was to hang out and eat our snacks and play our video game consoles. He wouldn't sit at the table, or even in the same room. He said that would be too intrusive. Instead, he sat in the next room, visible through the doorway, and played video games. He would also loudly and frequently make smartass comments about our game, even though he usually wasn't paying enough attention to understand the whole context of what was going on. It was like his brain would passively scan for single sentences from the next room, and then he'd pay attention just long enough to quip about it, and then go back to ignoring us before we would yap back at him. for being a douche bag. Everyone in the group had a different reaction to him. The DM alternated between being annoyed by him and encouraging him by playing along and being nice about his quips. J was plainly but mildly annoyed at him. Smaug disliked his quips a lot more to the point that it threw off his game, but he bared it because the DM was buddies with Statler, and Smaug and the DM are BFFs. Munchkin seemed to put himself into game grognard mode such that things happening outside the narrative of the game didn't exist, so he got by just fine. I didn't care one way or the other, because I can tune him out if need be. So let me bring together Statler's lovely opinions and his role in the group. There was a week when J couldn't make it to the game. I think it was the week after she and the DM broke up (see above). They took a week between their awkward break up and her coming back to game. But the DM wanted to run the game, and we were right in the middle of a plot, so all the characters were committed. We were willing to let the DM run J's paladin for the session, since he's not the kind of spiteful rear end in a top hat that would kill his ex-girlfriend's character the very next game. But, then Statler chimed in from the next room just as we were discussing how J's paladin was going to run: Hey, can I run J's character? Do you know the system well enough? Not really. I hate D&D. Then why do you want to play? It just seems like you guys need someone to fill in.We definitely didn't, but the DM was too polite to refuse him, so off we went. Statler really doesn't know D&D to save his life, because he really does hate it. He thinks it's a stupid system and a bad game. That would be fair enough if it had any basis on experience. His opinion, though, was formed by literally one game, almost ten years before. So, he spent the whole session doing the following: Complaining constantly about the system, despite not knowing how anything works. "If taking 20 is a thing, why can't I do that all the time? Why do any of you guys even bother to roll for anything?" Complaining constantly about how J built her character, as if he knew what the gently caress he was doing. Keep in mind, that J is OG. She's been playing D&D since she was six years old. Statler has played it once. "This character doesn't do enough damage. Her spells are all healing and her feats are all for mounted poo poo." (J's character was not a beat-stick. He was a tank, and a healer. He and the bard split healing duties because we didn't have a cleric. Smaug's spell sword and my rogue did the lion's share of the damage output. Rogues doing tons of damage is pretty basic D&D strat, but Statler didn't know poo poo about anything and refused to bend to reality.) Complaining constantly about how lovely the game is and how he was doing us a favor (that was unnecessary in the first place). "I missed. Again. God, this is stupid. You guys are lucky. I wouldn't play this stupid game otherwise." Royally screwing things up for J's character and for everyone else. Because he didn't know the system, he would make tactical mistakes all over the place that J would never make. Any player passingly familiar with D&D wouldn't make them either. "What do you mean I can't use Lying on Hands at range? Why not? Jesus, you're hosed now, Megaman." (The paladin ditched Megaman's bard's side right before a wave of monsters slammed into the bard's position.)The DM had the wisdom and tact to end the session early. That may have saved Statler's life. Smaug, despite the name I've given him here, is a lover not a fighter, but I thought he was going to slap the poo poo out of Statler by the time we stopped. Statler did so much harm to the party in two loving hours that the DM retconned pretty much the entire session, in which he blew a big plot twist. Everyone was miserable at the end of the session, so much so that between that and the recent break up between J and the DM, I thought the campaign might end right then and there. I said in my first post about this group that it is a wonder we got a single game done, let alone a good campaign. This session is one of the reasons this game had no business surviving. I don't know if it's proof that the group was dysfunctional, or proof of the opposite: that we were able to regroup and recover from all that bullcrap and negativity. This isn't even the worst thing that happened during the game, too. Munchkin is responsible for the worst of it, and I'll get to that in my next story, "Sense and Snipability."
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May 17, 2015 00:29
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drat, that post is good enough to go in the griefing thread. 
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May 17, 2015 11:32
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Captain Bravo posted:drat, that post is good enough to go in the griefing thread. The worst insult I've ever seen on SA.
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May 17, 2015 16:29
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For the life of me I cannot figure out why you would let that rear end in a top hat be in the same building as your game if that's the kind of poo poo he pulls. Like, you can hang out outside that session and he can go other places to play video games or whatever; there's zero reason to have him around during the game and zero reason to not shut the door on him if for whatever reason he does need to be there.
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May 17, 2015 19:51
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Yawgmoth posted:For the life of me I cannot figure out why you would let that rear end in a top hat be in the same building as your game if that's the kind of poo poo he pulls. Like, you can hang out outside that session and he can go other places to play video games or whatever; there's zero reason to have him around during the game and zero reason to not shut the door on him if for whatever reason he does need to be there. My thoughts exactly. The short answer is that the DM was too non-confrontational to flat-out tell him to gently caress off while we were playing D&D. And with him playing nice, no one else had the heart to step up and be the bad guy. If anyone was the bad guy to him it was me. I didn't know him as well, but it was my apartment as much as the DM's, so I took it upon myself to tell him to shut up occasionally. But I just didn't do it often enough, for reasons I just stated. I didn't feel comfortable kicking out a guy that was friends with everyone else and that I didn't know well. After that game, more of the group stepped up and told him to gently caress off. He didn't come to game as often after that, and even when he did he kept quiet and played video games or farted around on his laptop. You might be wondering why he tagged along. I still don't know why. He said it was because he like to socialize with everyone, but he just didn't like D&D. But he didn't socialize for the most part, and when he did it was in the worst way possible. It was like he wanted to give the illusion of being social, while not being social at all. 
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May 17, 2015 21:20
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Railing Kill posted:My thoughts exactly. The short answer is that the DM was too non-confrontational to flat-out tell him to gently caress off while we were playing D&D. And with him playing nice, no one else had the heart to step up and be the bad guy. If anyone was the bad guy to him it was me. I didn't know him as well, but it was my apartment as much as the DM's, so I took it upon myself to tell him to shut up occasionally. But I just didn't do it often enough, for reasons I just stated. I didn't feel comfortable kicking out a guy that was friends with everyone else and that I didn't know well. After that game, more of the group stepped up and told him to gently caress off. He didn't come to game as often after that, and even when he did he kept quiet and played video games or farted around on his laptop. He probably just wanted to be around people and lacked sufficient interpersonal skills to do it appropriately.
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May 17, 2015 21:29
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Dirk the Average posted:He probably just wanted to be around people and lacked sufficient interpersonal skills to do it appropriately. Very true. And, sadly, he was not the most socially challenged member of the group. I'll get to that soon.
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May 17, 2015 21:38
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This is another post about my old D&D group. Previously I posted "Never Split Up the Party", "How I Met Your Mother," and "The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour." The cast: The DM. (I'll call him... The DM.) Played a LG human paladin. (I'll call her J.) Played a NG half dragon spell sword. (I'll call him Smaug.) Played a CG human bard. (I'll call him Megaman, which would make him the happiest man on Earth.) Played a LE elven sorceress. (I'll call him Munchkin.) Played no one and just hung around and trolled us. (I'll call him Statler.) Played a NG dwarven rogue. (This is me.)And now, the story my wife and I both use as our personal benchmarks for goony roleplaying: Sense and Snipeability This is a story about Munchkin. He's been pretty quiet in the previous stories, but don't let that fool you. You have to imagine that in every story I tell about this group, no matter what else is going on, this guy spends the entire session making GBS threads up every plot the DM places in front of us and every character interaction the PCs try to have. I want you to imagine that on top of Statler's shenanigans. I want you to imagine this guy not missing a beat, making GBS threads up a session in the middle of an awkward breakup between the DM and J. He had no regard for other players' game or good time. He was going to do his thing, and to hell with everybody else. And "his thing" was being a loving goon. I don't know how else to put it. He's not a typical munchkin, as I understand them. Munchkins game the system and are willing and able to gently caress everyone else over for the sake of their character's gain and their own sadistic pleasure. This guy did all of the same stuff, but for virtually no reason. He played the game like a man who was absolutely sure there was no tomorrow, no justice, and no meaning to anything, in or out of the game. He was a gamer nihilist, and not the goofy kind like in The Big Lebowski. Although, playing alongside him often felt like getting my dick chopped off. So let's go back to the very beginning of this group. I didn't know anyone except the DM yet, and even him I didn't know all that well despite sharing an apartment with him. He introduced me to J, Smaug, Megaman, and Statler. They all knew each other well, and got together regularly on the nearby college campus where I was going to grad school. Then there's Munchkin. The rest of the group knew him, just not as well. He was that slightly older guy that found a bunch of fellow gamer nerds chatting at the commons and insinuated himself into their group. The bizarre thing is, he's not a bad guy outside of a game context. I actually enjoyed, and still enjoy, talking to him about other stuff as long as I'm not about to play a game with him. Because then I'd have to kill myself. When the group formed up, we all sat down to make characters at the same time. The DM told us any alignment was fair game, "within reason." In the context of how he said it, everyone understood that to mean, "Good and Neutral will work, but Evil probably won't fly," which I think is typical for most D&D games. Munchkin had other ideas. Specifically, he wanted to use a Chaos Mage from some goofy rear end third-party supplement that he brought to game. The DM had never seen it before, let alone read it, so he vetoed it. So, maybe out of spite or maybe out of his natural instinct for trolling, Munchkin chose to make an Evil character despite the DM's warning. Now, everyone was making characters at the same time, so he knew J was making a paladin. So, five minutes into the group's first meeting, he's that guy asking to talk to the DM in secret. The DM obliges, and allows him to play his LE sorceress. Meanwhile, the rest of us are at the table, and Megaman is the only one who doesn't realize there's something hosed up going on in the next room. His inability to read social cues made him blithely innocent of most of Munchkin's evil deeds, both in and out of character. You may be wondering how Munchkin got away with playing a LE character in a party with a paladin. Not immediately after returning from his meeting with Munchkin, the DM later conferred with J about her Detect Evil ability, and asked to make it an at-will active ability rather than an always-on passive ability. That would mean that J's character would have to specifically choose to use it each and every time she wanted to detect evil. The idea was that this would allow for Munchkin to at least try to get away with playing his character, at least until J's paladin noticed. I guess it was the DM's way to be diplomatic and get away with not telling either of them that they couldn't play the character they wanted because of another player's choice. Well, he already rejected Munchkin once, so he probably felt backed into a corner about him. Worse yet, Smaug is conniving enough of a player to notice chicanery when he sees it, so when the DM and Munchkin got back from their little conference, way before any of this Detect Evil stuff came up, Smaug said point-blank: So, Munchkin, making an evil character, eh? Good luck with that.It was an open secret. Everyone played along, I think because everyone was new to Munchkin so they didn't want to immediately gently caress him over. As the game began with the party fully formed and walking down a road: LG paladin, LG spell sword, CG bard, NG rogue, and LE sorceress. Megaman, in one of his more inspired moments, literally began the campaign singing (as a bard), "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong." J bent over backward to allow Munchkin's character to exist in the party, not for the character's sake but for the player's. Remember that she was playing a paladin who was paranoid of doppelgangers, so her spamming Detect Evil on her own party members should have been a thing she did all day, every day. But she throttled back on her own character concept to give Munchkin the courtesy to play his own character. Munchkin had no courtesy for us in return. He spent literally every session trying (and often succeeding) in undoing our good deeds. This would have been fun, or funny, in a different context. But the way in which he did it, and the relentlessness with which he did it, was just awful. PCs, even good ones, unwittingly loving over entire cities worth of hapless peasants is common in D&D, and the source of a ton of funny stories. It's a lot less funny when only one player is doing that and everyone else is doing something else. It just made everything weird, and pointless. Worse yet, the way in which he did evil poo poo wasn't even that creative, or funny. For example, the last straw was when he sold a dozen of his slaves (he called them "servants" in front of the other PCs) to a lich in exchange for a magic item. Nothing funny or weird or interesting about it. Just hot death, and a random item table. Munchkin thought it was hilarious. the rest of us were not impressed. But this is where character poo poo and player poo poo bleed together. In theory, if (when) the paladin noticed the evil sorceress, he would be obliged to wreck the evil character. But J isn't a munchkin that wants to spend her time PKing all the time, so she doesn't want to kill Munchkin's PC. But she pulled the trigger on Detect Evil finally, at which point Munchkin says out of character, Oh, what did I ever do to you? You guys are jerks.The paladin was well within his rights to execute the sorceress on the spot. It would have been an execution, too. We were still fairly low level, maybe 3-5, so the paladin could have wrecked her in one or two rounds. But J was too soft. She hated how goony Munchkin was, but she didn't want to be solely responsible for killing his character. I, on the other hand, have no problem with this whatsoever. And I was playing a Good-aligned rogue. So now we're back into character. The whole campaign, I had been making spot and listen checks to notice stuff the sorceress was doing. I also had 18 INT, so I was playing my rogue as much as an investigator as a crossbow sniper. He was ready to jump out on executing the sorceress, but he was just waiting on just one more character to be on the same page as him. As a rogue with 5 CHA, he wasn't the most trustworthy guy in the group, so he felt like he needed someone to back him up with the rest of the group. Out of character, this was me doing the same thing: I wanted to get Munchkin's character the gently caress out of the group, and I was willing to do it myself, but I didn't want to be alone in that decision. Now I wasn't, and both J and her character were fed up with Munchkin and his character, so I acted. The worst (best?) part was, Munchkin was the kind of player who would react to out of character goings-on, so I had to be a bit sneaky with the DM: Guys, get back in character. J, your Detect Evil just went off. What are you going to do? I'm going to at least confront him before I draw my weapon. *turns to Munchkin* "What say you, fiend?" My hand is on my sword. "You have no proof. You are mad, seeing shadows where there are none." I'm trying to talk confidently and dismissively, not with defensive anger. *To the DM, on a piece of paper under the table* I want to unobtrusively move behind Munchkin and quietly draw my crossbow. +10 Hide. +10 MS. *Quietly rolls dice for my Hide/Move Silently and Munchkin's Spot/Listen behind his screen.* "But all those people! Your servants! You gave them to that evil wizard, didn't you? If you didn't, where is your entourage?" *Nods to me* "I do not have to answer to you for anything. My servants are away making--" *To the DM* I put the crossbow to the back of her head and fire. *Rolls damage* 21 damage.She only had 16 HP. I put a knife in her throat before anyone else could start debating the moral rectitude of stabilizing her to face a proper trial or some such LG nonsense. Neutral Good: the get poo poo done alignment.  Unfortunately, The DM did not bounce Munchkin from the game. Worse yet, the PK made the DM feel bad, so he let Munchkin use that mysterious third-party supplement he asked about in the first place to make a new character...
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May 21, 2015 13:43
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How the hell did your disfunctional group not start throwing the table snacks at each other around the second or third session?
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May 21, 2015 19:39
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Railing Kill posted:
This post made me so mad it ruined my morning with thought of how I would violently deal with this man if he were part of my group. it's like a loop of bad day dreams I can't escape. your group rear end in a top hat pissed me off so much that he ruined my PAY DAY. Slap him for me.
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May 21, 2015 19:47
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So, our main tank/leader cleric got both her legs shattered in combat during an extremely unwise charge against a group of bandits. I even died in that encounter, but got better. In search of a qualified cleric who can cast Regeneration and heal the injuries, the party sets out to a nearby town which was also apparently beset by an unknown threat in the forest. Along the way, we encountered an ancient statue/shrine which enthralls creatures and is apparently a focus for an imprisoned primitive nature goddess that was usurped by the present gods. Neat, we chat with it for a bit and carry on through the forest, but not before a certain party member antagonises that goddess enough that a pack of werewolves comes after us and carries him off to be turned into a werewolf (he managed to negotiate up from merely being torn to shreds). The party shrugs, hands the character over and continues on. He was an rear end anyway. Around this point, we realise that the newly-awakened forest goddess with the army of werewolves and other creatures is probably the thing threatening the town. Once in town, we get the full report on the situation (and pick up a new player character). Since the past few months the crops are bad, the weather is bad, the fishing is bad, monsters are more aggressive, etc. We nod helpfully and promise to look into it, then look for a cleric. Success! A priest of Umberlee (evil sea goddess) has a cottage outside town and after a little ritual on the lake shore our most valuable player can walk around once more. In exchange, the priest insists that we recover a sunken chest from the lake floor for him, with water-breathing enchantments supplied by him. Around this point, all the players stopped paying attention to the DM because we didn't follow the careful instructions on where the loot was. Instead, we hosed around on the lake, found the deepest section and wandered around a bit on the floor until we antagonised a pack of Merrow (large, evil merfolk). Later that day we returned to shore after almost dying, and the priest 'reminded' us on where we were supposed to go. So, on day 2 we set out and almost instantly find the shipwreck, and a large, fancy chest inside. Naturally this is extremely suspicious and we look everywhere to make sure there aren't any traps, enemies, or other hazards. Nothing is found, so our valiant leader grabs the chest, fails a Charisma save, and is possessed by a ghost. The ghost plays it cool, but is unusually polite and reserved which makes everyone a little bit suspicious, but not suspicious enough to not leave her in the boat while the party goes back down to look for more treasure. Once in the clear, the ghost almost kills both our henchmen and dives into the water, swimming away at incredible speed despite wearing full plate mail. The party regrouped (carrying sacks of loot from the wreck) and followed our leader back to shore. We find the priest's cottage busted open, the priest dead with a harpoon through the brain, and the ghost glaring at us. It tells us to put the chest back where we found it, or else, and disappears, leaving our leader confused and covered in blood. Naturally we loot the priest, loot the cottage, throw the priest in the lake, and open the chest. Now the crossbow fighter has a magical crystal hand of Umberlee that ate her old hand, and gives her Aquaman powers. Now we're heading off into the forest to see whether we should work for, or fight against the goddess trying to destroy the town. The entire party is chaotic neutral. And I got an Immovable Rod!
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May 22, 2015 09:20
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Finally got through all these stories so, think I should add a few of my own. The first is a tale of classic railroading. The DM at hand is known for basically writing a story and having the players enact it. This meant you were going on a linear plot and no matter how how clever you were, you were never going to outsmart the DMPCs. I even went out on a limb to veer off course to a small hamlet that my church help run, threaten/intimidate a priest to not tell anyone else and to deliver a message through pigeon to the capital city so we can get one over on the mage sending us on a "very important secret" mission. But, somehow the mage who was too busy to teleport and do the task himself, was able to intercept this pigeon. meh. Well after that character died because a paladin would not let his best friend die to an undead fiend and run away(and thus died), I made a witch. Throughout the campaign, we were offered to join the other side. This was added "out of character" after a session if we complained about lack of choice that "You can always switch sides". An illusion of choice if you will. Of course, we knew it wasn't true but, after the third time I passed a note "gently caress it, I will join him". It did fit in with my character who was on the pursuit of power/knowledge of the other planes to join a living god. We step aside and he tells me that he brings me to a dark room, and my head is filled with all sort of knowledge and basically looks like a fast forward on a VCR but then it hits pause, then reverse until there is nothing but black. "Hand me your character sheet". You know, instead of letting my character be an agent to help the living god that would have to make him choose between turning his back on his friends or suffering- nope just abandon your character. It was obvious that our character's stories or motivations were null so, I rolled Orson the Orc. A fighter/brawler that worked at a bar and whose big dream was to one day own that bar. With the first mission he had plenty of enough to buy the bar and a bunch of stat items and enough left over to send his kids to a good school. He basically had to ask his wife before he would do anything and loved to garden. That was it. Oh and he was a total bad rear end. The group I played in was under the distinction that grapple fighters were weak. So when rolling the character the DM gave me bonuses ( and I guess he felt bad ). So along with this and min/maxing(which I never did) he was a monster. The first boss battle involved about 3 fighters, 3 paladins and a boss cleric/paladin. My character basically kep the boss and two paladins pinned the whole time with them unable to do anything. That and I was rolling well. So the others picked off the trash and I kept throwing the guys on their face. I didnt do much damage but, they couldnt hurt me much and they couldnt get away. Orson lasted two sessions before with some magic time device plot, my witch character was restored to me. When I deliberated between playing Orson or the Witch he strongly suggested the witch.
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May 22, 2015 14:28
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Just a quick one: we have a fire mage who doesn't really pay attention at the table (often on their phone, etc) so whenever it's their turn they just sorta reflexively roll a d20. In order to discourage this, the GM now runs with the idea that they're just randomly throwing fireballs whenever excited/startled/done shopping in town/wake up in the morning. This didn't fix the inattentiveness, but did set a lot of things on fire that did not need to be on fire.
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May 22, 2015 17:12
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Evilreaver posted:but did set a lot of things on fire that did not need to be on fire.
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May 22, 2015 20:29
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Okay, Mage time. This is probably the first time I've ever told this story in its entirety. It comes from a very strange chapter in my teenage life. For reference, I was about 16. I had been introduced to a girl by my best friend. She's actually not that important to the story except as a go-between. She and I had dated for maybe a month before I broke it off. We just weren't really compatible. After we broke up, we were still talking, and I told her I was into gaming. She was ecstatic. She introduced me to her friends Brian and Leslie (not their real names) and wanted me to play in their Mage: the Ascension game. I had never played Ascension before but I was tangentially aware it; I was big into Vampire: the Masquerade back then so the systems weren't totally incompatible. When I got to the place I realized her 'friends' were both incredible grogs in their mid-30's. He was an amateur occultist (in real life); she was a Gardinian Wiccan (also in real life). This wouldn't actually be anything worth complaining about but... It took like three hours to make a character because Brian insisted on explaining literally every concept to me in excruciating detail. Like what 'Strength' means. Or what a 'Tradition' is (in Ascension, a 'Tradition' is basically what flavor of wizard you are.) I was quite capable of reading it on my own, of course, but every time I tried to get a minute alone with the book he would keep pulling it out of my hands to explain it to me. Meanwhile Leslie kept rolling dice in the background and occasionally calling everybody in the room over to look at them. We weren't actually playing yet. She just wanted to show how awesome her rolls were. We got about halfway through the explanation of what a wizard is. I just kind of kept repeating what Brian was saying to let him know I understood it and that we could move on. We got to the part about how magic is supposed to work. In Mage, Magic works because your idea of how reality is supposed to work overcomes how everybody believes reality is supposed to work, and can vary from culture to culture. This is a concept called 'consensual reality.' I paraphrased him after he explained it to me and the whole room goes uncomfortably quiet. "What did you say?", he says to me. "I said it's like things are the way they are because everybody believes it right?" I'm literally repeating him at this point. "That's some third-level Initiative stuff" he says. Images of Blackleaf flutter before my eyes. "No not yet!", says Leslie. She's scolding him. "Later." Brian gives her a sage nod, and we move on. The game itself was stupid as poo poo. All I remember was that Leslie had literally every Sphere at level 4 at least, and had some ability to not only ignore the game's primary downside to magic (called Paradox) but actually turn it into a resource. She could turn into an angel and we were apparently supposed to fight the horsemen of the apocalypse or something. I had a gun and was pretty good at shooting it. This was something Brian had been very leery about me 'getting away with' despite the fact that this girlfriend kept literally cheating with her character (who statistically had no reason to cheat). I remember at one point she rolled like 11 dice and claimed to get 15 successes and nobody once looked at her dice. "She can control her dice", one of the other players explained. Like me, they were about 15 or 16 years old. "She's psychic", the kid added. "In real life." After the game was over there was a lot of loitering and talk of pizza that never actually arrived. Brian asked me somewhat pointedly if I had enjoyed the game. "It's neat", I said. "But I think I'd rather start with a less uh, experienced group." He nodded. "I know what you mean. But there's a lot you can learn from a game like this. It's got a lot of hidden meanings, you know?" "That's how I learned to control my dice", explained Leslie. "And read minds." I never, ever went back. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 22:04 on May 22, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 22:02
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You know, thinking back on my previous story, I didn't even really mind the eunuch thing too much. I mean, it was a party where being evil was accepted. I was basically being given an open invitation to be Littlefinger. And that would have been pretty cool.
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May 22, 2015 22:11
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Deltasquid posted:How the hell did your disfunctional group not start throwing the table snacks at each other around the second or third session? I really don't know. That's part of why I'm posting these stories. It's a wonder we got through a single game. We played for almost a year, once a week, just about every week. It's a wonder any of us still game/are still sane/are still alive. To be honest, though, I haven't gamed with Munchkin since. Everyone else I have played alongside since then, by choice no less. I just can't bring myself to play with him, which is a shame because he is a surprisingly nice guy and a good conversationalist when he's not gaming. I chat with him on Facebook all the time, but I'd rather slam my dick in a door than game with him ever again. Shadeoses posted:The entire party is chaotic neutral. Awesome. I haven't played D&D in a long time, but the next time I play I kind of want it to be a "gently caress it, let's all make conniving, selfish, lying, looting scumbags" game. Every game has moments when the players fantasize about saying "gently caress it all" and just going how-wild with the system. I kind of want to do that with D&D, just for a short campaign. If the DM really wanted to run wild with it, they could set specific "achievements" for each session, based on whatever was planned that day. Keep the "achievements" secret, and just see if anyone can bungle into them. That would keep the players doing reckless, silly poo poo constantly in pursuit of IRL loot. "And with that last casting of Fireball, you just finished burning down a whole village and somehow only killed the children and infirm. You won today's prize! Here's the bag of Sour Patch Kids I bought for today's prize. Oh, and you're a terrible person." Mendrian posted:Mage time. I love both old and new White Wolf games, but hooooly poo poo are there some goofy people playing those games. I have some hosed up LARP stories from years ago, mostly having to do with WW players that lose sight of where their character ends and they begin. Any game could have such a player, but WW games just seem to attract that particular flavor of crazy.
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May 23, 2015 00:13
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Railing Kill posted:I love both old and new White Wolf games, but hooooly poo poo are there some goofy people playing those games. I have some hosed up LARP stories from years ago, mostly having to do with WW players that lose sight of where their character ends and they begin. Any game could have such a player, but WW games just seem to attract that particular flavor of crazy. World of Darkness games attract the crazies so well that White Wolf even hired a few of them. Phil "Satyros" Brucato and at least one other guy kind of thought Mage was actually loving real on some level.
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May 23, 2015 00:38
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Railing Kill posted:Awesome. I haven't played D&D in a long time, but the next time I play I kind of want it to be a "gently caress it, let's all make conniving, selfish, lying, looting scumbags" game. Every game has moments when the players fantasize about saying "gently caress it all" and just going how-wild with the system. I kind of want to do that with D&D, just for a short campaign. If the DM really wanted to run wild with it, they could set specific "achievements" for each session, based on whatever was planned that day. Keep the "achievements" secret, and just see if anyone can bungle into them. That would keep the players doing reckless, silly poo poo constantly in pursuit of IRL loot. The 'best' part is that when we started, it was a perfectly normal neutral/good party, and I was the token chaotic neutral insane warlock with 5 intelligence. Now through attrition and experience I'm the most moral, conscientious, cautious character. In any case, my current mission is to raise enough money to resurrect an evil Thayan wizard that we found. Her soul is trapped in a ring I'm wearing.
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May 23, 2015 01:01
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Railing Kill posted:I love both old and new White Wolf games, but hooooly poo poo are there some goofy people playing those games. I have some hosed up LARP stories from years ago, mostly having to do with WW players that lose sight of where their character ends and they begin. Any game could have such a player, but WW games just seem to attract that particular flavor of crazy. You got some good story-telling mojo, 
StringOfLetters fucked around with this message at 05:25 on May 25, 2015 |
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May 25, 2015 05:22
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Railing Kill posted:I love both old and new White Wolf games, but hooooly poo poo are there some goofy people playing those games. I have some hosed up LARP stories from years ago, mostly having to do with WW players that lose sight of where their character ends and they begin. Any game could have such a player, but WW games just seem to attract that particular flavor of crazy. That was always my experience with the Camarilla. A huge number of people inordinately emotionally invested in their characters where it became clear that dressing up and affecting an air of superiority as someone completely different was vitally important to their self-esteem. It made enjoying faux drama or danger really hard, because so many people refused to be vulnerable in any way except on their own ludicrous terms. It made me glad I ended up running the Changeling game, since most of the people playing that were incredibly relaxed about things and were there to have fun. Well, very shortly after the first game I ran all the creeps left the game (hopefully because they scented the change in the way the game was going to be run) thus leaving me with funhavers.
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May 25, 2015 06:15
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