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Samizdata posted:Sometimes you ended up wanting to tell a DM "Look, buddy, this is my character that I am playing. You want me to leave so you can play with yourself?" I had a ref in DC Heroes who pretty much determined that whatever we did, we were following his exact plot. It went beyond railroading straight to being down the barrel of a railgun. I had a player in one of my games in college who we didn't know anything about at the time. He was a freshman and the rest of us were in our third or fourth years. He asked me somewhat bashfully at character creation if he could play a female character. I said, "Sure, go for it. I do it all the time." He seemed relieved, so I asked him if anyone ever game his poo poo about it. He said his DM in high school went out of his way to get his character raped when he played a female character in one campaign, and he wanted to make sure no one in our group was "like that." 
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Oct 28, 2015 20:03
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Samizdata posted:A lawful bumpkin, even better. Not just generic murderhobo #19. Nice. funny enough the particular DM tends to play murderhobo character like having 10k gold but trying to pick pocket some stranger for his meager wallet. Then forgetting what city he is wanted for murder in and complains that "his character would know" when he doesnt do a disguise check before entering back into said city.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:05
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Railing Kill posted:I had a player in one of my games in college who we didn't know anything about at the time. He was a freshman and the rest of us were in our third or fourth years. He asked me somewhat bashfully at character creation if he could play a female character. I said, "Sure, go for it. I do it all the time." He seemed relieved, so I asked him if anyone ever game his poo poo about it. He said his DM in high school went out of his way to get his character raped when he played a female character in one campaign, and he wanted to make sure no one in our group was "like that." thats a bummer. People who like to include rape to "flavor" the world are usually walking a thin line.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:10
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Smash it Smash hit posted:thats a bummer. People who like to include rape to "flavor" the world are usually walking a thin line. I guess I have been lucky then. Never been in a game with rape before. Torture, yes, rape no.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:17
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JustJeff88 posted:Incorrect. I submit to you Edwin "Edwina" Odesseiron. Mystra transformed the Elminster into a woman so that s/he could "Learn magic as only a woman could" according to the FR wiki.
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Oct 28, 2015 21:15
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Kurieg posted:Mystra transformed the Elminster into a woman so that s/he could "Learn magic as only a woman could" according to the FR wiki. Please tell me this consisted entirely of male wizards constantly interrupting girl Elminster's spellcasting to help her do it properly.
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Oct 28, 2015 21:18
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ScaryJen posted:Please tell me this consisted entirely of male wizards constantly interrupting girl Elminster's spellcasting to help her do it properly. "No, no, not like that." <steps behind Elminstra, pressing himself up against her> "Hold the wand like THIS. That's right..."
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Oct 28, 2015 21:22
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Kurieg posted:Mystra transformed the Elminster into a woman so that s/he could "Learn magic as only a woman could" according to the FR wiki. I read the book this happened in, and can confirm. It was basically explaining why he had so many multiclasses at the time, since he used to be Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard or something nuts like that. He gets turned into a woman, goes around as a Cleric of Mystra, travels woth a couple adventuring parties, and gets in touch with his feminine side before eventually getting turned back into a man. It's as dumb as it sounds, in the way that only old-school d&d could be dumb.
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Oct 28, 2015 21:26
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He then goes on to have sex with Mystra and most of the Female members amongst the Chosen. Ed Greenwood is a creepy man
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Oct 28, 2015 21:30
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Smash it Smash hit posted:funny enough the particular DM tends to play murderhobo character like having 10k gold but trying to pick pocket some stranger for his meager wallet. Then forgetting what city he is wanted for murder in and complains that "his character would know" when he doesnt do a disguise check before entering back into said city. Your DM is a turd who can't stop playing out vicarious power fantasies, up to and including dominating your characters.
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Oct 28, 2015 22:06
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the_steve posted:I read the book this happened in, and can confirm. Kurieg posted:He then goes on to have sex with Mystra and most of the Female members amongst the Chosen. Way to crap where you eat, Mr. Wizard.  The weirdest magical sex thing we ever had in a game was a Dragon Orb that would make you horny if you used it to charm a dragon because a. that's what we rolled on the artifact table, b. it kiiiinda made sense since it was came up for charm specficially and dragons are traditionally a symbol of virility to boot, and c. we were like 15 and it was funny. I think we used the orb like twice and then the character just hooked up with some random nearby npc offscreen at the next convenient opportunity.
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Oct 28, 2015 22:24
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I had to stop trying to find pickup games at a Local Gaming Store because of more than one occasion I'd have a character getting groped or threaten with rape because I happen to possess a pair of tits. Between that, and the "Geek Tests" some of those guys would subject girls to is why certain hobbies continue to be a cesspool of neckbeards.
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Oct 29, 2015 02:11
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Why is it always the people who like to sprinkle rape into their games that always seem to complain about other people politicizing their games? As if the world being a terrible place isn't a choice they make as creator?
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Oct 31, 2015 02:27
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Smash it Smash hit posted:Not the worst but thematically and combat wise he has slowly been morphing each character into what he thinks is better. He calls them "rewards" but it ends up being just changes. Ugh GMs who do this are the worst Railing Kill posted:He said his DM in high school went out of his way to get his character raped when he played a female character in one campaign, and he wanted to make sure no one in our group was "like that." Okay never mind
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Oct 31, 2015 08:32
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Mendrian posted:Why is it always the people who like to sprinkle rape into their games that always seem to complain about other people politicizing their games? As if the world being a terrible place isn't a choice they make as creator? Because people who won't ever shut up about rape hate it when people try to get them to shut up about rape, and the only way they can get "making creepy weirdos shut up about rape" to sound like a bad thing is if they claim they're doing it because of a political agenda.
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Oct 31, 2015 19:58
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Whybird posted:Because people who won't ever shut up about rape hate it when people try to get them to shut up about rape, and the only way they can get "making creepy weirdos shut up about rape" to sound like a bad thing is if they claim they're doing it because of a political agenda. The sense that I got from that poor guy who joined our college game was that his old group gave him poo poo about being a dude playing a female character. God only knows what the grognards would have done if a flesh-and-blood woman were to play in their group. Having his character get raped is obviously all kinds of tasteless, creepy, and evil, but I have a problem in general with people who can't get beyond someone playing a character so different from their real selves. The way I see it, the characters are fiction, and fiction writers have to write characters that aren't themselves all the time. Being able to represent other points-of-view is one mark of a good writer. Besides, one of the reasons I'm gaming is to escape my boring rear end life for an evening every week or so. I go out of my way to make characters that are nothing like me. But a lot of people either suck at characterization or are the type of person that can't resist self-insert fan fiction-y type stuff. That's ok I guess, but it can produce this mindset in some groups that people should automatically play their gender, race, age, and so on.
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Oct 31, 2015 20:50
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I have a hard time playing a character with a significantly different moral code than my own. I don't know why. Different gender, race, age, etc. I have no problem with.
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Oct 31, 2015 23:07
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Kibner posted:I have a hard time playing a character with a significantly different moral code than my own. I don't know why. Different gender, race, age, etc. I have no problem with. I have a hard time with different moral codes too. I'll try it sometimes, but I don't like it as much. That's probably normal, but of course I would think that.  Speaking of which, I ran a Battlestar Galactica game using that goofy Margaret Weiss System that's ported to a million sci fi licenses. It's not a bad system, but it's not great either. But I had a big group that wanted to play a BSG game at the time, so off we went. I devised a system to generate characters, just to spice things up (and to gently caress with the players). I had sixteen pre-gen characters to hand out to the seven players. Each one had some build points left unspent, so people could do some customization after they got their character, but the core of the character was set. The way they got their character was to answer a series of questions, the answers to which moved them around a sort of morality grid. Think like the beginning of Ogre Battle, where a wizard asks you multiple choice questions that test your morality. Some of the players deliberately trolled it and answered questions in the most dickish ways possible, trying to get the most Gaius Baltar-y character. One guy succeeded at that. (His story is hilarious in its own right, and I can tell it later). Another guy answered questions trying to get a jerk, and boy did he get it. This player is pretty far to the left politically, and is pretty much a pot-smoking, capitalist-hating, socialist. By trying to get a ruthless character out of the grid, he got a literal fascist. Every session was brutal for him, although he had a good time. Every session ended with him saying something like, "I can't believe I'm going to have to have all of those workers killed. It turns my stomach, but my character pretty much gets off on the idea of killing commies." I sympathized with him, because I'd have a hard time with that too, but he did a great job at playing the character. Near the climax of the campaign, he set off a plot he had been weaving for almost the entire campaign, which was a coup d'etat. Along the way, his plot involved some deals with various devils, some double-crosses, the murder of another PC to cover his tracks in a pinch, and nearly selling out the fleet to the Cylons more than once. He almost puled it off in the end, but two other PCs and and NPC union leader with a lot of dead friends managed to flush him into space just as his coup began. Had they failed, he probably would have been President For Life by the end of the day. It was awesome. When his character was flushed into space, the player stood up, took a sarcastic bow, and the other players clapped. (I know, I know, it sounds like the punchline in a STDH story). He attended but sat out the last two sessions, and he told me he had no regrets. That story is always what I think of what good stories can come out of players challenging their own moral codes.
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Nov 1, 2015 02:30
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Inability to try different moral perspectives usually comes down to difficulty compartmentalizing. Unless we're talking about psychopaths which is a whole other kettle of fish. To whit; a character who is okay with stealing doesn't see himself as evil. He sees himself as a rebel, or a downtrodden victim, or the hero of a story who needs what he's taking. Justification is the name of the game for me.
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Nov 1, 2015 02:35
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Mendrian posted:Inability to try different moral perspectives usually comes down to difficulty compartmentalizing. Unless we're talking about psychopaths which is a whole other kettle of fish. To whit; a character who is okay with stealing doesn't see himself as evil. He sees himself as a rebel, or a downtrodden victim, or the hero of a story who needs what he's taking. Justification is the name of the game for me. Yeah. That's how the BSG player approached it. He was able to compartmentalize some pretty heinous crimes in the name of his character's way to save the human race. Out of character, he wouldn't do it, but the dire circumstances around the character (and the tone of the game) helped him settle into that role. It was pretty interesting.
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Nov 1, 2015 03:44
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My AD&D character is a Lawful Evil duergar in a good-to-neutral party and it's a lot of fun doing things like 'endorsing slavery' and 'advocating germ warfare'.
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Nov 1, 2015 18:17
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Ixjuvin posted:My AD&D character is a Lawful Evil duergar in a good-to-neutral party and it's a lot of fun doing things like 'endorsing slavery' and 'advocating germ warfare'. Years ago when I was playing my svirfneblin illusionist (the only character I ever had who reached apotheosis), one of my mates played a female Neutral Good duergar cleric of Lathander who adored bright sunshine and was so insufferably cheerful that you alternated between wanting to hug her and wanting to kick her down a flight of stairs. Basically, she wanted to play a duergar that was the polar opposite of the typical duergar in every aspect, so a relentlessly chipper and optimistic cleric of the Morninglord was about as breaking with stereotypes as could be managed.
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Nov 1, 2015 20:28
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Ixjuvin posted:My AD&D character is a Lawful Evil duergar in a good-to-neutral party and it's a lot of fun doing things like 'endorsing slavery' and 'advocating germ warfare'. In the best campaign I was ever in, I was a LG wizard from one of the five Slaver Cities and I would frequently have uncomfortable confrontations with the rest of my party over my endorsement of indentured servitude and slavery as criminal penalties for misconduct and serious debt. It was great, especially because some of the other party members had spent time enslaved in their long lives.
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Nov 1, 2015 20:31
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Mendrian posted:Inability to try different moral perspectives usually comes down to difficulty compartmentalizing. Unless we're talking about psychopaths which is a whole other kettle of fish. To whit; a character who is okay with stealing doesn't see himself as evil. He sees himself as a rebel, or a downtrodden victim, or the hero of a story who needs what he's taking. Justification is the name of the game for me. I always thought that villains with a legitimate backstory were the most interesting. Psycho killers who have no motivation but chaos and killing can be fun in the right way, but a villain who has some sort of justification is a lot more fun to play with.
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Nov 2, 2015 05:51
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Or do both and explicate out "No, this guy is seriously hosed in the head, part nurture, but mostly just nature here"
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Nov 2, 2015 07:00
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I never have problems with general moralities, and have played both recklessly self-sacrificing heroes and manipulative maniacal jerks. I always find it really hard to go against my nature in very specific moral quandaries, though. Whenever the party takes a hostile character captive, players in the group with characters of all alignments will start insisting that the captive be summarily executed, while I'm always strongly against it. Even when I DM campaigns, it just feels too gross to execute anyone, even if it's a fiend or something.
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Nov 2, 2015 08:07
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Yeah, for me its torture. Way too many people instantly go Prison Experiment in their elf games.
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Nov 2, 2015 08:12
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Ronwayne posted:Yeah, for me its torture. Way too many people instantly go Prison Experiment in their elf games. My Star Wars group captured a Sith inquisitor recently, and I was super happy about how everybody didn't want to resort to torture. We even tried to give her humane treatment while transporting her to a rebel prison, although after the inevitable escape/murder attempt we basically sealed her in a crate with some MREs.
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Nov 2, 2015 08:18
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My group has been playing Way of the Wicked (a Pathfinder module that goes from 1 to 20, with you as the villains) and so far, it's been an absolute blast. No one's gone cat piss yet. We've got a bit of a megalomaniac antipaladin who was betrayed by his comrades and country, and went waaaay overboard in attaining vengeance. He's a seven foot tall monster who uses a two handed sword and axe alternatingly. Our second party member is a Tiefling slave trader, who is highly aristocratic and noble despite her previous occupation. She wields a scythe explicitly because she likes fostering the "demon who will eat your soul" image, because it amuses her. And I'm the last party member, a former assassin who was part of a team of assassins who got betrayed by her master and was left standing above a duke with a blade in hand while the guards busted in. Now her subplot is her reenacting Kill Bill. I'll give a more detailed writeup when I'm feeling less lovely if anyone wants it. I think we're doing a pretty good job of playing justified villains (well, the Tiefling not so much, but she's honestly the nicest of the group too).
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Nov 2, 2015 15:20
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Galick posted:My group has been playing Way of the Wicked (a Pathfinder module that goes from 1 to 20, with you as the villains) and so far, it's been an absolute blast. No one's gone cat piss yet. We've got a bit of a megalomaniac antipaladin who was betrayed by his comrades and country, and went waaaay overboard in attaining vengeance. He's a seven foot tall monster who uses a two handed sword and axe alternatingly. Our second party member is a Tiefling slave trader, who is highly aristocratic and noble despite her previous occupation. She wields a scythe explicitly because she likes fostering the "demon who will eat your soul" image, because it amuses her. And I'm the last party member, a former assassin who was part of a team of assassins who got betrayed by her master and was left standing above a duke with a blade in hand while the guards busted in. Now her subplot is her reenacting Kill Bill. That sounds like fun. Evil characters can make for a fun game, but without good justification like the ones you describe, I have a hard time sticking with it. I've played in a few evil games and they usually just degenerate into bloodbath after bloodbath for literally no reason. It just kind of gets.... boring. It sounds like the players in your game actually put effort into their backgrounds, which is more than I can say for most of the evil games I've played or heard of.
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Nov 2, 2015 15:56
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Galick posted:I'll give a more detailed writeup when I'm feeling less lovely if anyone wants it. 
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Nov 2, 2015 15:59
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The trick about pretending to be an evil person is that evil is not a motivation. Evil isn't a reason to do things, it's a removal of reasons not to do a thing.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:29
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Mr. Maltose posted:The trick about pretending to be an evil person is that evil is not a motivation. Evil isn't a reason to do things, it's a removal of reasons not to do a thing. Yeah, I've played a bunch of evil characters, but none of them were evil for evil's sake. Only one of them would murder innocent people regularly and that's mostly because she had to feed on people. And even then if there were enough actual living enemies, she wouldn't even have to do that.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:47
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Mr. Maltose posted:The trick about pretending to be an evil person is that evil is not a motivation. Evil isn't a reason to do things, it's a removal of reasons not to do a thing. Exactly. A good example is one of the major NPCs in 7th Sea: Esteban Verdugo. He's the head of the Inquisition, and he literally tortures people to death for a living. But in his own mind he's justified for the sake of good. He genuinely believes he is doing good by punishing sorcerers. He even believes he is helping them, by sacrificing their bodies to save their souls. He doesn't do evil to do evil. He does evil to do good, because that's more understandable and more interesting.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:48
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djw175 posted:Yeah, I've played a bunch of evil characters, but none of them were evil for evil's sake. Only one of them would murder innocent people regularly and that's mostly because she had to feed on people. And even then if there were enough actual living enemies, she wouldn't even have to do that. It's been fun playing through the descent into monstrousness in the Vampire game I'm in. My PC started out as a relatively normal guy who was just starting to come to terms with the fact that he had to drink human blood to survive. Two real years of games later, during a discussion about minimising the amount of blood we burned through to reduce the amount of feeding we were doing, I found myself saying "Or we could just eat more humans. They're food, gently caress em" in complete seriousness. A couple of sessions later I was arguing vociferously in favour of helping an NPC sorcerer cripple the God-Machine at the cost of potentially millions of human lives and calling the other PCs out on their hypocrisy: "If you really cared about human lives, you'd walk out into the sun tomorrow - you've killed more people by accident than most serial killers. At least these people will die because of something worthwhile"
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Nov 2, 2015 17:56
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Way of the wicked is probably the best evil campaign because it gives you a whole lot of poo poo to do. It also has a major 20 to 25% campaign based on a misunderstanding of contract law but by that point you can improvise around it.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:58
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Vanguard Warden posted:I never have problems with general moralities, and have played both recklessly self-sacrificing heroes and manipulative maniacal jerks. I always find it really hard to go against my nature in very specific moral quandaries, though. See, this makes me happy about a scenario that happened in my Pathfinder game. We got assassins sent after us, and because of poor rolls on my part, and that the party was split up so I didn't really have backup immediately, my Paladin went down to negative hitpoints but not enough to be outright dead. We were able to capture one of the assassins for questioning, and after I'm up again, I'm using my ridiculous Diplomacy to try to find out who sent him. Turns out, he doesn't really know, just that he was desperate for some money and someone offered him a job. He wasn't really fond of the idea of murdering people, but (and I don't remember/know enough of the Greyhawk lore for specifics) he had fled to Cauldron to avoid becoming a slave, thus why he needed the money so badly. In the end, my paladin converted him to Hieroneous and sent him to the local shrine for a place to stay. She's been basically the primary financial support of said shrine over the campaign as well, tithing from whatever she has left after upgrading her own equipment. Our DM is pretty generous with loot, like Monty Haul generous because I'm pretty sure her random loot roller is hosed up. Thus the paladin gives the shrine a ton of money. Like "oh here, take 10,000 gp, no big deal." In other things related to the same campaign: I've had a lot of fun playing a paladin. Lots of Diplomacy, but she can also smite a motherfucker if needed. Aasimar's +2 CHA, the Ease of Faith trait +1 diplomacy, 20 base Charisma, Headband of Mental Superiority +6, and maxing out Diplomacy skill ranks means my level 17 paladin has a +32 diplomacy. Sometimes things need killing, but sometimes they just need a little push to stop being evil. 
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Nov 3, 2015 00:32
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In any good alignment discussion, you can effectively replace "evil" with "being an rear end in a top hat". "They're goblins, they're always Chaotic Assholes." "Usually Chaotic Assholes. How do you know some of them aren't Chaotic Kind Of An rear end in a top hat that have been peer pressured into acting like an rear end in a top hat? What about the wizard? He's an rear end in a top hat, do you want to kill him?" "He's a Lawful rear end in a top hat, that's different."
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Nov 3, 2015 07:09
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"What do you think about the dragon, Smith?" "I don't think anyone can be 100% chaotic rear end in a top hat sir."
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Nov 3, 2015 15:44
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Isn't the sarcastic term for Good "Stupid? As in, "He's a paladin so of course he's Lawful Stupid." I usually hear it applied to LG (because, really, gently caress those sanctimonious prigs), but I guess it could apply to NG and CG as well. We just need a sarcastic, pithy term for Neutral and we can complete the set.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:53
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