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Mairn posted:As far as what happens when the commoner hit's 5: He crafts slightly faster.
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Jun 25, 2015 09:25
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My Lovely Horse posted:You're all missing an important aspect: what, for the love of god, happens once he hits level 5? My immediate first thought was "brothel." "MORTAL SLAVE! I, YOUR BENEFICENT YET TERRIBLE MASTER, HAVE LEARNED OF THIS HUMAN CREATION KNOWN AS 'HEN-TIE.' I WISH TO PARTAKE." E: Warlock hears the spelling, takes him literally. "ARE YOU SURE CHICKEN-BINDING IS WHAT WAS MEANT?" "Yes, yes, this is very pleasurable. And sometimes they pay us for the pleasure."
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Jun 25, 2015 09:47
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Shadeoses posted:A skilled blacksmith, let alone a skilled weaponsmith, would not be earning the same wages as a dirt-scrabbling shitserf. They would also probably be tied to a guild, noble, or other entity like the city guard or army that will take a regular order of weapons or other tools, and ensure they can get the materials they need to do their job and don't starve to death between orders. Hey now Content: Posts about the crafting system in 3.5/PF are both incredibly fascinating to read and a huge reason why I would never run those systems. Like it's fun to see how they obviously put very little thought into the math but at the same time so many people gnash their teeth at other systems that lack "realism" and "verisimilitude."
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Jun 25, 2015 13:06
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Dareon posted:My immediate first thought was "brothel."
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Jun 25, 2015 13:13
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I hope my warlock don't get forced into a brothel or whatever because that would be probably be really creepy. Anyway that reminded me of when my dad wandered in and gave me a serious look and said "Shadeoses, do you know what hen-it-tay is?" THE STORY OF THE WARLOCK'S RING So there we were, in Icewind Dale, loving around outside Brynn Shandar with our baby Frost Wolf pup which was chasing birds and stuff. Then we noticed it was now chasing a pseudodragon and everyone started paying close attention. We followed the pseudodragon and it led us to... The half-buried, frozen, burned corpse of a female tiefling wizard, with no tracks in the snow leading to it. So we started looting the corpse as fast as we could, finding some gold and gems, a magic necklace of poison resistance and a weird looking ring. Since I'm the resident magic expert (routinely getting low, and negative numbers on rolls to identify common and magical objects) and ring expert (up to just before this point, I had been wearing a magic unidentified ring looted off a cultist which the cult had been using to track the party for the entire campaign (I later looted a cult-ring-tracking-ring and because I had both of them on, they cancelled out and nobody could figure out what they did)) I was told to put it on. It was a Ring of Mind Shielding! It protects against all forms of mental intrusion, and as an added bonus catches your soul if you die, letting you telepathically communicate with the new wearer in the event of your death. So now there was a very angry witch from Thay who had just blown herself up and teleported to Icewind Dale, screaming at my brain about the injustice of being looted by that loving drow cleric of Talos. Now the thing about my tiefling warlock, is that they are not very good at many things. Besides being illiterate and almost innumerate, afraid of baths, scrawny, and being utterly beholden to an alien outsider god that only rarely bothers to give vague commands, she is also highly suggestible in certain situations. When a commanding voice in her head starts yelling obscenities and orders, she gets confused does what the voice says. So I'm suddenly yelling at the party to put the loot back on the corpse and get it to a priest, which just makes them confused and suspicious, since the last time I was like this I tried to punch the cleric to death. It culminates in me giving the pseudodragon familiar a command word to make it sting the cleric with paralysing poison, which was ineffective due to the dead witch's necklace they had just put on. They responded by casting Hold Person on me and taking the ring off, since they suspected it was possessing or mind controlling me. Nope, just a very angry dead person. Ultimately I learned that not all voices in your head are trustworthy, and I was given the ring again. Fortunately I decided against putting it back on right away, as soon after I was killed by bandits and raised. If I had been wearing the ring at the time, the ring soul could have ridden the spell in and hijacked my body, leaving my own soul in the very uncomfortable, unpleasant afterlife with my patron. So we continued adventuring with this dead person, keeping the body fresh with a Gentle Repose but not raising it. The cleric was entirely set against helping this rude, hostile person, and I couldn't afford it on my own. I felt really bad about that. Finally, after one or two months, I convinced the cleric to buy a raise dead spell for the poor Thayvian witch, mostly by pressing the 'they will be grateful and help us' angle. They were happy to be alive, but very upset at the delay. She didn't seem upset with me in particular, I gave her back her ring, and now I have a new friend(?). The moral of the story is, always put magic rings on.
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Jun 25, 2015 15:56
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Serf posted:Hey now Yeah the crafting system is such a badly written mess in every ruleset they release for it that I just scrap it completely when I DM it now. As written, it's nearly unusable for PC's since the length of time it takes to craft any reasonably expensive mundane items (i.e. the only mundane items you want to craft) is so long that most campaigns will be over before that character finishes the item they want to craft.
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Jun 26, 2015 00:20
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The problem is that most adventurers should be relatively wealthy by the time they go adventuring. They have weapons and armour, their history includes significant training and they have marketable skills. They're not the people who should be worrying about purchase costs of things counted in low denomination coinage. Abstract style "You have a wealth level of [X]. You also possess one individual treasure in tier [X-1] and two in [X-3]" systems like the one in Reign and numerous others would probably be more appropriate. Doesn't provide the spiralling numbers in the gp box that some people enjoy though.
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Jun 26, 2015 00:35
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goatface posted:The problem is that most adventurers should be relatively wealthy by the time they go adventuring. They have weapons and armour, their history includes significant training and they have marketable skills. They're not the people who should be worrying about purchase costs of things counted in low denomination coinage. The problem is when mundane weapons that start costing 30x most characters starting wealth comes up (any adamantine weapon) or even over 100x their starting wealth (adamantine heavy armor). These items are really expensive, even for seasoned adventurers and a lot of people want to craft them themselves to save money. Adamantine Full Plate's crafted cost is only 5500gp, versus it's purchase cost of 16500gp for example. The problem is that even for a really good smith (let's say a 20th level fighter, 20 ranks in the skill, +5 bonus from int + misc) that armor still takes almost 6 years to craft. An 11th level wizard can make that same suit of armor in less than a minute with the use of a 5th level and 1st level spell. Since Craft is an int skill, and Int is the wizards main stat, they only really need to invest a single rank in the craft skill to do it as well. Oh, but magic items only take 1 day to craft per 1000gp. 
Mairn fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Jun 26, 2015 |
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Jun 26, 2015 01:34
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Mairn posted:The problem is when mundane weapons that start costing 30x most characters starting wealth comes up (any adamantine weapon) or even over 100x their starting wealth (adamantine heavy armor). These items are really expensive, even for seasoned adventurers and a lot of people want to craft them themselves to save money. Adamantine Full Plate's crafted cost is only 5500gp, versus it's purchase cost of 16500gp for example. The problem is that even for a really good smith (let's say a 20th level fighter, 20 ranks in the skill, +5 bonus from int + misc) that armor still takes almost 6 years to craft.
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Jun 26, 2015 02:28
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The Infernal in Monsterhearts is powerful. By giving your Dark Power strings on you, you can automatically access amazing super powers! (Which is useful if you, like me, fail five of your first eight rolls). What's also good is the sex move: when you're intimate with someone, you can shift a dark power string from you to them. Originally, the plan was to get the Emissary to appear physically, and beat the strings out of him. But it didn't need to come to that. The moral: Faust would've been fine if he was a hussy. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Mar 8, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2015 09:17
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Yawgmoth posted:The other thing is that some people (myself included) really get a lot of enjoyment out of having their character make something and have it be unique to that character. Saving money's great, but I like being able to have my character say "this is the sword I made for myself and it acts exactly the way I want it to in my hands". But D&D's crafting rules are so godawful that they're borderline unusable, and that's sad. Yeah, I ran a crafting-focused Artificer once, and the fiddly item creation math was terrible, especially with the feats that let you knock percentages of the components (gp, time, or xp) off the cost. It was a cool character and I enjoyed playing him, the math wasn't onerous at the time because I was only aware of other systems that had higher math requirements, and I actually had a plot point planned around forging a new sword for the psychotic ex-paladin in the party. But if asked to play him again now, I'd have to decline, because I don't want to do that whole rigamarole of crafting again.
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Jun 26, 2015 21:59
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Dareon posted:Yeah, I ran a crafting-focused Artificer once, and the fiddly item creation math was terrible, especially with the feats that let you knock percentages of the components (gp, time, or xp) off the cost. It was a cool character and I enjoyed playing him, the math wasn't onerous at the time because I was only aware of other systems that had higher math requirements, and I actually had a plot point planned around forging a new sword for the psychotic ex-paladin in the party. But if asked to play him again now, I'd have to decline, because I don't want to do that whole rigamarole of crafting again. Same with me. The GM I had was a huge stickler for the rules - despite as a player being very narrative and character focused as a GM he was very much of the opinion that drama came from how the story becomes influenced by dice rolls. We had something like ten sessions that directly followed each other chronologically, so there was no downtime as we hurried across the land chasing after Orc kidnappers. This meant, rules as written, my Artificer actually had no time to craft anything. I think I leveled about four times without any possibility of using my craft reserve or making a single item, mundane or otherwise. And I was not permitted any way of getting any of that craft reserve back.
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Jun 27, 2015 01:04
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Dareon posted:Yeah, I ran a crafting-focused Artificer once, and the fiddly item creation math was terrible, especially with the feats that let you knock percentages of the components (gp, time, or xp) off the cost. It was a cool character and I enjoyed playing him, the math wasn't onerous at the time because I was only aware of other systems that had higher math requirements, and I actually had a plot point planned around forging a new sword for the psychotic ex-paladin in the party. But if asked to play him again now, I'd have to decline, because I don't want to do that whole rigamarole of crafting again. I did something like this in Warcraft d20 with a potion doc and after doing a lot of algebra it ended up being something like "20 gp to make a potion of [literally anything]" when they could have saved us both some time and went "you get [x potions] for free per day."
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Jun 27, 2015 01:26
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I'll post the full story later when I have time to do a full write-up, but for now, a preview of a story that came out of tonight's awesome game session. We played The Quiet Year, an indie story game in which the players cooperatively run a post-apocalyptic community over the course of a year in the community's existence. We put our village on the top of a dam, and started out with an Abundance of fresh water and Scarcities of food, shelter, and security. We ended the game with Abundances of fresh water, intelligent rats, medieval weaponry, and, quote, 'revolutionary fervor', and a Scarcity of corn. Things got weird. The game ended with us preparing sentient-rat-launching ballistae to attack the filthy profiteers in a nearby merchant community, and spreading infiltrators and informants throughout the surrounding communities in the name of the Committee For the Defense of the Rat Revolution after establishing an alliance between the humans on the surface of the dam and the race of sentient hive-mind rats living inside the dam itself.
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Jun 27, 2015 08:02
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Dareon posted:Yeah, I ran a crafting-focused Artificer once, and the fiddly item creation math was terrible, especially with the feats that let you knock percentages of the components (gp, time, or xp) off the cost. Artificer is absolutely insane as a cohort class, in case anyone didn't already know. Even better if your DM lets you pick their feats since there's multiple "-X% to gold/xp/time" feats (assuming they don't also allow the stacking of [superlative] Artisan feats).
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Jun 27, 2015 14:40
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If I remember right, with the exact right combination of feats, couldn't you reduce all their costs to 0% of each?
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Jun 27, 2015 19:17
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Neopie posted:If I remember right, with the exact right combination of feats, couldn't you reduce all their costs to 0% of each? Mind you that if you're allowed this you'd have to burn every normal feat plus every bonus artificer feat to get free instant magic items, at which point you're level 20 and have the wealth of a moderately-sized country at your disposal.
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Jun 27, 2015 19:30
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Played a Spirit of 77 one shot; the Wrath of Cons! (They're going to run it soon in Lousiana, so watch out if you're at a con down there). Basically, the stars of 1963-1966's "Space Pioneers" are reunited to announce a motion picture, and a complication leads them to scour the entire Convention. Over the course of the game, I, the heroic captain: --Denied an allegation with "Nope", rolling a 12 and calming a raging crowd; --Failed to flirt with my agent's secretary; --Signed an autograph to "Autograph Ryan, a low down creep who doesn't appreciate the art of television, your pal Douglas Flacone". --Failed to apologize for making a film in Esperanto; since I thought that was a small town in California. --Wore a disguise that was, by area, mostly socks. --Apologized to my stunt double for "The Incident" that ruined three perfectly good marriages; --Ran cover for my midget-droid costar, who was as violent as he was condescended to.
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Jun 28, 2015 07:08
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So was playing D&D 4e last night and there was this big spooky boss lady who was almost dead but was also super rad and the last player to get a turn before the boss went twice in a row was Xena, a warlock who was currently bobbing up and down in a lake because she cannot swim. I'm playing a Psion so naturally I'm terrified of a boss getting anywhere near me and the boss's saves against a lot of warlock attacks were really good, plus Xena was kind of spent with powers- all she had was her two at-wills- so I was fretting up a storm over "oh god I'm gonna die" Then I remembered "oh wait, she rolled a 9- Chromatic Bolt's set to Cold-elemental" and shouted "FLY OUT OF THE WATER LIKE ICEMAN AND IMPALE HER WITH AN ICICLE" After a bewildered moment of bemusement Xena's player was like "great idea" and the DM just sort of let it happen, didn't even roll damage, battle over. It was cool
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Jun 29, 2015 23:02
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My local group's two 7th Sea games are ending soon, and it looks like I'll be running a Pathfinder game to replace one of them. I want to get pumped to run D&D again for the first time ina few years, so I've been reading back through the thread looking for D&D stories. If anyone has any good or funny ones, I'm all ears. In the meantime, I'll share one from the last time I ran Pathfinder: I was running an open-ended, player-driven campaign, start from level 1 and all the way up. I think we ended at level 14 or so. I planned the game to make generous use of random encounter/treasure tables, and most of the plots were optional. I wrote note cards for each plot that were like the mission log in Fallout. Basically, the party would talkt o someone and hear of A Thing That Needed Doing, and I would give them a card for that. They could add notes to the back of the card when they got more leads, and we would tear up the cards when the plot got resolved. Most of them were dungeon crawls or other one-off plots that were designed to be resolved in a single session. The game was also written to be light-hearted, so all of the missions had punny names like "Girl, Interregned" and "Where Did You Come From, Where Are You Goblin?" The PCs were...  Mad Tom, a Chaotic Neutral Human Witch. He was a nutty hobo with a bit of a megalomania problem. The player left his familiar to me, so I designed her to be a dead magic goddess trapped in the body of a sarcastic fox that was the Fool to his King Lear (i.e. the only one able to give him poo poo without him going ape poo poo on them). Glibbons, a Neutral Good Gnome Alchemist. Basically a mad scientist, but more like The Nutty Professor than Victor Frankenstein. He always had good intentions, but often his schemes would outstrip his good intentions. Also, he chucked grenades around like they were rice at a wedding, and with about as much good cheer. Maj, a Chaotic Good Elf Rogue. His background was that of a "dungeon fixer," someone whom you would hire to "test" security measures in a castle or dungeon or whatever. He considered himself a legitimate businessman, and did act as a consummate professional. Less of a thief and more of a secret agent, but just as effective with a sneak attack. Lawrence, a Neutral Good Human Fighter. His concept was that of a mean mercenary with a heart of gold. He was a mercenary by trade, but he would do charity work in secret and otherwise act like a big mean thug. He would save a building full of poor little orphans, but he would take great pains to appear to be paid for it. But if you weren't a helpless child or damsel, you were definitely going to pay up for his services. Thok, a Lawful Neutral Half Ork Druid/Fighter/Monk. Thok's philosophy was simple: the wilderness is law, and you had better get the gently caress out of its way. He served nature in the most brutal, amoral way possible. He also turned into dinosaurs and took Fighter levels to get bonus feats to let him get the most out of combining Monk poo poo and shapeshifting. Definitely less of a spell caster and more of a beat-stick.Since I'm trying to get pumped to run Pathfinder, I'm going to share a  story.The group was pursuing a quest about a notorious Half Ork warlord. This guy had shown up at the tail-end of another plot they resolved earlier, and had been wreaking havok in a wide area ever since. By the time they finally decided to deal with him, he had amassed a small army and was holed-up in a ruined castle in a forest. The warlord was worth a small fortune to several local lords and barons, and the party stood to basically gain a keep by killing this guy. The thing is, I designed this particular quest to get the PCs to bite on chasing this guy around, but not actually eliminate him yet. I figured I'd introduce him in one mission (done), show how dangerous he is in this mission (now), and give them a better chance to beat him in a third and final mission (later). At present, the PCs were level 7 or 8, and the warlord was level 13. Between that disparity and his warband, it should have been functionally impossible to beat him. This mission was supposed to be about getting some info about him, showing him as a danger, and getting some loot for the PCs to use against him (and other quests) later. Well, they loving killed him instead.  When it got right down to it, the PCs tracked him down to his ruined castle, which was crawling with his minions. Most of them were out on patrol or with lieutenants ravaging the countryside, but he still had about 100 dudes in the castle with him. Worse yet, the danger that I wanted to show about the warlord only becomes clear to the PCs as they enter the area and see him: the guy is possessed. He was a dangerous warlord before, but now he's using black magic and poo poo. He's atop a shattered tower (like you do), chanting over some magic crystal (like you do). The part had prepared to fight a beat-stick, but now they had sorcery to deal with. Glibbons, Maj, and Lawrence moved to deal with the minions, while Mad Tom and Thok moved toward the tower. The battles with the minions went well for the PCs, and they managed the movements of the warlord's troops well. They were able to carve a path for Tom and Thok toward the tower, and were able to hold the line to give them time to get the job done. But inside the tower, the extent of the warlord's magic power becomes clear. He's been throwing up heinous spells in anticipation of the PCs, and they don't have the HP or saves to realistically make it through enough to survive a fight with him. As Tom signals a retreat to regroup, the result of a nat-20 stealth check kicks in: one of the warlord's lieutenants has been sneaking his contingent through the woods toward the castle the whole time. The PCs are now almost trapped inside the castle, between the warlord behind them and the new army of minions between them and safety. The PCs manage to find a building that at the edge of the castle grounds that is intact enough to shelter them form the fireballs the warlord is now hurling down at them from the tower. It is also far enough from the largest group of minions that they get a few rounds to regroup before they are beset again. The party weighs their options, but it looks bleak. Maj pinpoints a spot in the minions' formation that looks weakest, and the party prepares to assault there to punch a hole int he lines to escape. The party runs out to engage the enemy in one last, desperate, TPK attack like "Charge of the Light Brigade." It comes around to Mad Tom's turn and his action is needed to finish off a wounded minion, or else Lawrence will die on that minion's next action, and likely with him the rest of the party will die as the line collapses. Instead, Mad Tom turns the gently caress around. *Mutters incoherently to his familiar* What are you doing, Tom?! We need you up here! We need all the help we can get to escape! *Suddenly snaps* I will kill him or I will die in this place. What the gently caress are you talking about? This is a bug hunt, man. The battle is lost. Let's get the hell out of here! He is an affront to magic. He must die. Noooooooooooo!If you're not familiar with Pathfinder's Witch, let me give you the TL;DR version: the Witch is a support caster. It is designed to have very few direct damage options, and is much more about indirect effects, buffs, and debuffs. It's more about Enchantment and Illusion than Evocation and Alteration. As such, Mad Tom had already exhausted what few options to hurt the warlord from the range he was at that moment. All except one. Phantasmal Killer. The thing allows for two saves: Will to disbelieve as per normal Illusion rules, and Fort to survive it if Will fails. The possessed warlord failed the Will save by 1, and failed the Fort save with a nat-1. The melee on the ground halted on both sides when the warlord let out a supernatural wail from atop the tower and plummeted to the ground 80 feet below. The sound and sight stunned both sides, and the minions fled in terror as Mad Tom turned back around at them, petting his fox familiar and cooing, There, there. The bad man is gone now. He's all gone now.Craziest Hail Mary I have ever seen myself in a game. I don't mind that a future quest was prematurely solved by this, because that was way cooler than anything I could have contrived. Sometimes, you just have to let PCs be badasses. And by "sometimes" I mean "always."
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Jul 2, 2015 20:16
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I really love your idea for a "sandbox" campaign. I've been using note cards as "item cards" for a while now--I love being able to hand a player a card with a description and flavor text when they find a cool item--but using them as a quest log is brilliant. Also, your story reminds me of a Savage Worlds game I ran (that started as a Pathfinder game, which is relevant only because one of the PCs' races is a Pathfinder race). Here's the cast:  Me, the GM. I'm an okay GM, not terrible but probably not patient enough to be great. James Ambrose, human former detective in the city-state of Brightcrest who is being pursued by the undead remains of his father, animated by a horrible death cult (in a setting where necromancy is considered Super Evil) Odile, half-elf witch from the eastern swamps who specializes in vaguely gross magic and talking about what her momma always told her Fane, human monk from the southern kingdom; her most notable achievement in the campaign was solving a very difficult battle on the top of a speeding train by grappling the boss and just throwing her off the edge And finally Unbru, wayang urban ranger with a nearly insatiable blood lust, and the star of our taleFirst, you need to know a few things about Savage Worlds. Savage Worlds doesn't use HP; instead, characters have Toughness and Wounds. Wild Cards (player characters and important NPCs) have three Wounds, while minor characters have one. If your damage roll is higher than the target's Toughness, you deal a Wound. For each "raise" (essentially, a super-success achieved by rolling a certain amount above the target number), you deal another wound. Savage Worlds also uses exploding dice. If you roll the maximum result on a die, like a 12 on a d12, you get to roll the die again and add that to your result. You get to keep going as long as you keep rolling the maximum result. It can get nuts, but that's part of the fun of Savage Worlds. This is a story about how I learned not to plan too much around a specific villain, also known as The Burrow Spell in Savage Worlds is Overpowered. The party had been manipulated by a man they considered their mentor, named Jack Fennel. He was a former adventurer, and friend to a gnome named Guffin whom the party really liked, and he had manipulated the party into starting a war between Brightcrest and the desert nation of Avaal. He did this so that he could steal a magical rune called a Sign of Shaping, essentially an echo of the spell that created the universe, hereafter known as "the MacGuffin." This particular MacGuffin was serving as the phylactery for the Masked Queen of Avaal, who is secretly a lich who has been allowed to keep living because yeah, she's evil, but she's been a great queen to the people of Avaal and killing her would cause more suffering than letting her live. Jack wanted the MacGuffin that was her phylactery for reasons unknown to the party (actually reasonably heroic reasons, despite his evil methods, because he was a ~*~complex character~*~), and the party had to stop him because a) this would kill the Masked Queen and throw Avaal into chaos, and b) who knows what he could do with something that powerful? So they went down into the ruin in the desert where the Masked Queen's phylactery was hidden, pursuing Jack. They'd promised the gnome Guffin, Jack's friend, that they wouldn't kill Jack, but had no intention of really holding that promise. So because of that, I planned a really complex boss encounter with Jack, while still working within the rules of Savage Worlds (which is to say, he still had three Wounds and a high-but-achievable Toughness; he was built as a very high level player character) where the party would probably be able to defeat him, but he'd end up escaping. There were all these traps that Jack would use against the party and which they could use against him. It was going to be awesome. In the conversation before and during the fight, Jack would also reveal his motivations and the greater threat facing their world that he was willing to do evil things to solve, thus propelling the group into a bigger, more awesome act 2 of the story. The party reached the bottom of the ruins. Looking around the corner, they saw Jack facing the stone that bore the rune, which was floating in the middle of some complex contraption. He was facing the direction the party would be coming from, but Unbru succeeded on his stealth check to peek around the corner without being seen. He announced to the group that he'd had about enough of Jack, had no interest in what he had to say, and wanted to start the battle off with a sneak attack. I was a little annoyed--Unbru had always been a loose cannon--but saw no reason to overrule it, so I waited to see what would happen.Being based on a Pathfinder ranger, Unbru had a few spells, and one of them was Burrow (which he'd called Street Shark to go with his urban background). Burrow lets you tunnel underground, move a relatively far distance, and pop back up to do a surprise attack. Unbru had already used this to great effect to do things like burrow under locked doors. It's a really good spell. So, Unbru decides he's going to burrow underground, pop up behind Jack, and shoot him in the back with his bow. Badass, right? Detective Ambrose and Fane were cool with it, but Odile thought maybe we should talk it out, because she really liked their gnome friend Guffin and didn't want to lie to him. She was outvoted, and Unbru cast his Burrow spell successfully.He popped up behind Jack and announced that he was going to do a called shot to his head. That was unfortunate, because I'd already described what Jack was wearing and he didn't have any armor on his head, so he didn't get his armor bonus to Toughness. Anyway, Unbru failed his roll. Another note: Savage Worlds has little "luck tokens" called Bennies. Players get a certain number at the start of the session and get more as rewards for doing cool poo poo. The GM also gets some to spend on behalf of the NPCs. Bennies can be used to reroll any roll that isn't a damage roll, or roll to soak some of the damage of an attack made against them. So: I'm using a Benny to reroll. Yeah, okay. Go for it.He fails again. And then: gently caress it, I've got two more Bennies. Let's try again.And he fails again. One more try!This time he nails it. Succeeds with a raise, which means he'll get a bonus on the damage roll he's about to do. I'm feeling a bit worried right now, but I tell him okay, roll that damage up. And so began the longest series of exploding dice I had ever seen, and I've still yet to see its equal. It was loving insane. He just kept maxing out his roll and just kept going. In the end, he did enough damage over Jack's Toughness score to do the equivalent of about 14 Wounds worth of damage, all on a called shot to the back of his unprotected head. Remember: even the most badass creature, PC or NPC, only has three Wounds. Even with some amazing Benny-fueled soak rolls on Jack's part, I could not have possibly kept him alive via any method beyond GM fiat. So I said that he took Jack's head clean the gently caress off and was very  about the whole thing. We took a break to eat pizza. Unbru's player even offered to retcon the whole thing because he felt bad that he'd hosed up what I'd planned, but I eventually calmed down (thanks, pizza!) and said nope, we're rolling with it.It all turned out way better. Jack was carrying a journal (I'd at least planned that part ahead of time) that outlined some of what the players would've learned if he'd stayed alive, and in the end, Detective Ambrose and Unbru disagreed pretty violently on the right thing to do with that information, to the degree that they ended up having an actual battle and using all those traps I'd planned against each other. This was after Unbru grabbed the rune (and learned that the rune wasn't the phylactery--the whole ruin was the phylactery), causing the ruin to start collapsing around them, and Odile and Fane tried to talk them out of killing each other in this deathtrap. In the end, nobody died, even though Ambrose almost killed Unbru, and the campaign continued.But that's how I learned not to ever plan around my players not killing an NPC, especially in a system as lethal as Savage Worlds. Also, I miss playing Savage Worlds. Real good system, that. Harrow fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jul 2, 2015 |
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Jul 2, 2015 21:17
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I'm in a weekly Scion game with some friends. It's fun as hell, we're all on the same page in terms of horrible, inappropriate humor, and we are unashamedly all Chaotic Stupid in character. It's basically just us sitting around, coming up with the most over the top dumbshit we can think of. We've got a group chat thing going on too, so we can coordinate stuff in case people can't make it or whatever, and one of the players was reading up on how the Scooby Doo gang are all Scions, which led to this exchange: 
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Jul 3, 2015 21:55
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"Legendarily irresponsible." What a great phrase.
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Jul 4, 2015 08:08
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Agrikk posted:"Legendarily irresponsible."
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Jul 4, 2015 18:52
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Some of my favorite campaigns were the smash and burn variety. Sometime a
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Jul 4, 2015 19:36
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One of my favourite campaigns is my drop-in Dungeon World adventure called Skylanders, about groups of horribly irresponsible badasses who are grotesquely cavalier with the awesome stats and powers they possess. It's set in some weird anachronistic pastiche of other settings and includes such stellar features as Reliable Ali, the dimension distorting information broker who runs Fantasy Football But With Pirates, his brother Crazy Al who runs an interdimensional potion shop whose plate glass automatic doors appear out of nowhere near those who are about to need to buy a potion (Crazy Al has sold such items as jet fuel and six packs of Tizer), Meb the owner of Meb's Bar who totally isn't a Fae Queen or a pirate and please ignore all the treasure and magic powers I happen to have, Gobbledegook the Murder Turkey, Abraxas Lord Of All Destruction who has had his Wrath stolen by the party Witch and used as a bazooka and The Tome Of Ultimate Power which is literally just a gold plated Desert Eagle. Members of the Skylanders party include such stalwart citizens as Hawke, the guy who once ate a minotaur to get super strength and regularly eats entire bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale to punctuate sentences; Albatross, a thirty foot tall man eating ogre who smells so bad it's classed as a chemical weapon; Robin the Witch, who is a drow in a pinstripe suit who rides a hovering surfboard at all times and uses the Wrath of Abraxas to atomise people he takes a dislike to; Lark, a psychotic dwarf who uses a shiv and his own molten piss as a weapon and can focus his intense hatred of other living beings into a potent psionic weapon; The Luchador Golem, a golem which became a Luchador after defeating Meteor, the Lichadore Supreme; Nightingale, the wannabe Pirate Queen and all around megalomaniac and obsessive pearl collector; Owl, literally a demon from hell who divides his time equally between indiscriminate murder and using demonic sorcery to turn people into insane demon cultists; Parrot, an anachronistic Russian engineering graduate whose sole aim in life is to become a government contractor and design weapons of mass destruction, and is filling his time by being Russian Iron Man in a battlesuit that he spends most of his time trying to sell to people he's killing with it; and many more sociopathic assholes with way too many character levels. Sessions of the Skylanders usually start with something along the lines of "So you guys are loving broke again and find yourselves in..." and usually devolve into no-holds-barred murderfests within a few minutes as the party scam people, take suspiciously high paying jobs from people like Literally Satan (is literally satan, but those are also his first and last names), find out that other people have money and try to take it or get offended by someone and spend the rest of the session destroying everything they know and love. Sometimes we open a session with them having screwed someone over and needing to rectify the situation, like the time that I started a session by telling them that Meb is super unhappy with how instead of sourcing her some barrels of spiced rum, they presented her with a dozen barrels of scorpions and the Annual Pirate Conference is tonight. They usually kidnap innocent bystanders to use as disposable interns as well. There's a couple of vague ongoing storylines like the party's continuing attempts to become Pirate King or Queen by getting to the top of the Fantasy Pirate League tables through vast thefts of pearls, or the ongoing mystery of where the gently caress all these armed clones of Danny Trejo in cheap suits are coming from, or just what the Interdimensional Alions (misspelling intentional, as they are just shaved caputchin monkeys with laser guns) are doing with the people they abduct. Skylanders is probably my most successful attempt to run an ongoing campaign and is way more popular with the people I game with than any of my attempts to run serious campaigns. What I have learned from this is that I and all my friends are nutters and it's amazing.
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Jul 4, 2015 23:35
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These sessions sound sideways, incomprehensible, non-linear and random. Where do I sign up? 
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Jul 5, 2015 00:43
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this post sucked and now its gone, I'll find something better to put here.
Motherfucker fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 05:36
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I don't have any stories yet but my players seem to be creating a party that'll blow my socks off. My jaw is dropping a bit more every time they add something. http://i.cubeupload.com/6edvFy.png Very slightly NSFW if artistic nudity counts. Also, look up "Tomas de Torquemada" if you must. Mott Rimney's backstory is that he's running for president of this noble Republic. Ded Cruz is his barbarian running mate.
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Jul 12, 2015 23:49
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I wanted to play some DnD but I had no one to play with so I applied to some groups through roll20's Looking for Group feature. Got in a group with some 44yo dude who linked me some weird pictures of naked elves and dwarves but I figured it was a joke thing. Session starts, some 16yo autistic kid was playing a knight or something. I have no idea actually because it took an actual 20 minutes to describe his character. "He has uhhh, uhhh, red hair and uhhhhh beard?" It ended up with us asking him questions like "what is he holding?" "He is holding uhhhhh I think probably an axe?" Anyways, session moves along after I ask the DM to turn off the goddamn TV in the background because I can't hear poo poo beyond whatever the gently caress TBS is playing on a Sunday afternoon. We are playing the Mines of Phandelver module, which by the way the DM legit cannot pronounce. We walk into a cave and come across some goblins with their backs turned to us. Autism knight takes the initiative by trying to sneak up to the goblins and backstab one. With disadvantage in chainmail he rolls a 4 with his impressive 11 DEX. The goblins surround him and take him down to 3 hp. I, as a warlock, cast sleep which takes out the autism knight first in hopes that the goblins would put him out of his misery, and mine. Anyways we defeat the goblins really quickly, and i tie up the sleeping goblins. I attempt to interrogate the goblins about whereabouts of other goblins and what they are doing there etc. I can hear the DM furiously flipping pages trying to figure out in the module where it will tell him they answers to my questions. "What do you want to ask?" It's like holy hell please pay attention to the game DM. Anyways, around this time autism knight has to leave the library or wherever he's using the computer because his mom said so. I bust out laughing as this 44yo dude berates the 16yo autism kid on game integrity and some other bullshit. We continue down the cave for a few more squares before I just get fed up and just turn off skype without a word. Defeating 5 goblins took 2 hours by the way. What in the hell.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:37
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Welcome to the exciting world of pick-up gaming, a never-ending fountain of stories for this thread.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:40
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Yawgmoth posted:Welcome to the exciting world of pick-up gaming, a never-ending fountain of stories for this thread. Thanks dude. Where do you suggest I find a group that's only slightly spectrum.
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Jul 13, 2015 02:46
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In Pathfinder, our group seems to be getting tangled up in divine struggles. The GM keeps giving us magical items of incredible power and keeps laughing at us about how we'll need them. We're on our way to fight a giant mechanical turtle man which has kidnapped a princess. My character is an Aberrant Sorceror who has been 'favoured' by Lamashtu, which translates as a poor gnome who keeps getting hosed over by 'random' 'blessings' and really wishes they were just ignored. Except for that one time I got drunk and summoned a demon which gave me a cursed artifact. The paladin is a superstitious and snooty elf who is a follower of Abadar, god of civilisation, and is desperately trying to keep things together, which is the equivalent of herding cats which are on fire. The rogue is a larcenous atheist who stole divine relics from the temple of Torag, dwarf god of honour and stuff. Later on he was punched in the face by Torag, but passed it of as an unusually huge magical dwarf being a dick for no reason. We just picked up a 13 year old wizard who was a monk at the temple of Torag. He's amazed at all the things adventurers are apparently allowed to do. A goblin barbarian who can best be described as Stitch, from Lilo and Stitch. And there's the half-orc ranger who doesn't say that much.
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Jul 13, 2015 05:44
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Typical Monsterhearts again. So the high school is hosed; the basketball team is a mix of werewolves and maniacs, recruiting anyone over 5'4 and siphoning off ghost-energy from one of their star players. The nurse flirts with the students before treating them. There seems to be no remedial education, short of giving confused characters (like the Selkie or the Hollow) coloring books. Vampire covens are gallivanting during school hours. Almost every class is interrupted by an argument or a fight, and someone punches the Vice Principal and flees the school into the woods. Yet somehow MY character (who made a deal with the dark power: I give you a string, you make my journalism go viral) is the bad guy, because she lied to the fae about someone having a girlfriend who didn't. You can't win sometimes.
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Jul 13, 2015 06:25
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KyloWinter posted:Thanks dude. Where do you suggest I find a group that's only slightly spectrum. Unfortunately, the best way is usually to keep trying and looking in my experience. For every garbage group I've had, I've probably had a good enough group as well. I think I lucked out though, as none of the poo poo I ran into was worth a big post here. There was one where some guy kept talking over everyone, not paying attention to anything and was making dick jokes with or towards the GM. But that's just generic "We don't know how to act around people" issues, nothing interesting.
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Jul 13, 2015 06:27
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KyloWinter posted:Thanks dude. Where do you suggest I find a group that's only slightly spectrum. Look for groups on Role 20. Find a game description that hooks you. Make sure it uses proper sentences and isn't a bunch of cliche horsepussy. You can tell a lot about the attitude and aptitude of the players based off the description, and even just their player avatar. Read the player and DM's profile. If they ramble incoherantly, paragraph after paragraph, full of mispellings, bad ideas and lack of grammar, avoid them. If they are terse, witty, or intriguing give them a shot. You're looking for the DM's personality to shine through their game description. Find one that interests you. Don't play pre-written modules. Don't play league games. Don't play pick up games with strangers. God Of Paradise fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jul 13, 2015 |
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Jul 13, 2015 07:00
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thelazyblank posted:Unfortunately, the best way is usually to keep trying and looking in my experience. For every garbage group I've had, I've probably had a good enough group as well. I think I lucked out though, as none of the poo poo I ran into was worth a big post here. Tell them about LONE PULSAAAR, Blank. My memory is bad... Blank already told you all about LOOONNE PUUULSARRR! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3460258&userid=208026#post425647519 (I'm the goonfriend who played Susan Emma Welle) Angrymog fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jul 13, 2015 |
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Jul 13, 2015 09:18
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I'm part of a Japanese TRPG club (Japanese both in the sense that all the other members are Japanese and all the games we play are Japanese) and I'd like to share with you what was probably the awesomest game of Golden Sky Stories I will ever experience. So the scenario revolved around a group of kids trying to cheer up another kid that was in the hospital. The outlook wasn't great for the sick kid, but with a little magic (in Golden Sky Stories you play as magical animals that can turn into humans and have a few magical talents they can use to help people out) we were sure things would turn out alright. One of the players at the table was the guy who runs the TRPG club. He has a lot of charisma and loves to grandstand whenever he joins a game as a player. But not in a bad way. He never steals anyone's thunder or tries to one-up anyone, he just loves adding bits and pieces of flavor to scenes and characters. So when the GM introduced the NPC of the doctor who was taking care of the sick kid, the club-leader and I, both fans of ER, decided that he was, in fact, George Clooney (we couldn't remember his character's name in ER so we just called him 'Dr. Clooney'.) And whenever there was a lull in what we were doing as characters, club-leader guy would give us a little vignette about what Dr. Clooney was up to. Stuff like 'While we're doing that, Clooney is in the bathroom gripping the sink. He splashes some water on his face and looks at himself in the mirror. 'You can do this. Pull yourself together. You've got to save that child!' The club-leader was playing a dog character who was good at being silently supportive and empathetic, so every once in a while he would randomly say 'And my character goes over and puts his hand on Clooney's shoulder, and gives him a reassuring nod'. In the end the climax of the session split us all up, with each of us doing our part to bring about the good ending. Club-leader ran back and forth giving moral support to Clooney, the sick kid, and the sick kid's family. Two of the other guys playing had to confront a dark spirit thing and chase it out of the hospital because it was making things worse, and I used two of my cat powers to summon a bunch of cats from the city and turn them all into humans for the night so they could help me fold 1000 paper cranes. As the happy end was wrapping up, the club-leader's description of how Clooney, with tears in his eyes, murmured "It's a miracle. A miracle" was pretty much the cherry on top of the awesome sundae. Golden Sky Stories is a game that really requires players with exactly the right kind of mindset (you essentially play Carebears), but if you can get a good group together it has just as much potential for amazing experiences as any other RPG. I definitely suggest trying it out at least once if your group can stomach it.
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Jul 17, 2015 04:23
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Wait, an RPG that caters to people's inner kindness and innocence? That feels... Wrong, somehow.
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Jul 17, 2015 18:25
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Guildencrantz posted:Wait, an RPG that caters to people's inner kindness and innocence? That feels... Wrong, somehow. Golden Sky Stories is basically Studio Ghibli: The RPG, and it is loving fantastic. Also, translated by known goon Ewen Cluney and available for sale NOW NOW NOW.
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Jul 17, 2015 18:49
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