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I usually hear CN as Chaotic Stupid as well.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:03
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CN is basically the "lol im so random" alignment, anyway.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:07
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Yeah, Lawful Stupid falls somewhere inbetween LG and LN, chaotic Stupid falls somewhere between CN and CE. It's the "Slavish adherence to alignment for the explicit purposes of dicking over the other players" part that makes it "Stupid"
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Nov 3, 2015 17:08
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IPlayVideoGames posted:CN is basically the "lol im so random" alignment, anyway. I know it's possible, but I've never actually played with anyone using CN any other way. I hate it like I hate Malkavians in V:tM. I hate it because of what bad players do with it.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:11
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Railing Kill posted:I know it's possible, but I've never actually played with anyone using CN any other way. I hate it like I hate Malkavians in V:tM. I hate it because of what bad players do with it. "In theory, Han Solo! In practice, Deadpool." They should put that on a billboard.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:35
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Poison Mushroom posted:Chaotic Neutral Oh my god. I just figured out exactly why I hate Deadpool so much. I mean, the monkey cheese-ness of Deadpool is a bit grating, .but I think the experience dealing with CN characters as a DM and as a player make it so much worse for me. I have a hard time thinking of Han Solo as CN because the end of the first movie is so deeply ingrained in the collective nerd consciousness, and it cements him as CG. But he really is CN for 95% of that movie.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:54
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Railing Kill posted:Oh my god. I just figured out exactly why I hate Deadpool so much. I mean, the monkey cheese-ness of Deadpool is a bit grating, .but I think the experience dealing with CN characters as a DM and as a player make it so much worse for me. The Expanded Universe makes him out to basically be Chaotic Good from start to finish and just in denial. He's always helping out people and taking risks to save lives even as a scoundrel. It's just not until the Battle of Yavin that he goes all the way to joining the Rebellion. Most people use Captain Jack Sparrow as their example of CN, because he really isn't in any fight for anyone but himself and will betray everyone (to varying degrees of damage) if he thinks it'll get him what he wants. Unfortunately, that opens the can of worms of players trying to pretend that they're Johnny Depp and going for staggering comedy characters.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:04
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Railing Kill posted:We just need a sarcastic, pithy term for Neutral and we can complete the set.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:09
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Railing Kill posted:We just need a sarcastic, pithy term for Neutral and we can complete the set.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:10
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chitoryu12 posted:Most people use Captain Jack Sparrow as their example of CN, because he really isn't in any fight for anyone but himself and will betray everyone (to varying degrees of damage) if he thinks it'll get him what he wants. Unfortunately, that opens the can of worms of players trying to pretend that they're Johnny Depp and going for staggering comedy characters. And even then the EU and Deleted Scenes show that the reason Jack is branded as a pirate is that he freed a bunch of slaves that he was paid to ship. The East India company burned his ship to the ground and branded him a traitor, he made a deal with Davy Jones to get his ship back, his payment was supposed to be 100 souls, one for each slave he freed. This is why I'm glad 4e simplified the alignment axis to a single line from "Lawful Good" to "Chaotic Evil", it fits a lot better with peoples actual mindsets. If you're all about slavish adherence to the law regardless of peoples actual suffering, then you're probably actually evil. If you're aggressively self interested, you're just neutral. If you're doing chaos for chaos's sake then congratulations you're actually evil if not chaotic evil depending on how rampant your depredations are.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:12
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Railing Kill posted: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. Boring.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:14
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Wanker, because it describes an insufferable LN and CN character equally well.
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Nov 3, 2015 18:26
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I like playing Paladins, but between the type of players that can't do nuance so they end up rear end in a top hat Fundamentalists and GMs that actively go out of their way to put them into no-win situations that I feel like I can only play this class with a select group of people.
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Nov 3, 2015 19:18
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Robindaybird posted:I like playing Paladins, but between the type of players that can't do nuance so they end up rear end in a top hat Fundamentalists and GMs that actively go out of their way to put them into no-win situations that I feel like I can only play this class with a select group of people. I let a player play a "secular paladin" once. He was basically a knight in shining armor, doing good for good's sake, rather than for he sake of a god. There wasn't anything that changed the mechanics, and he had all the same rules and restrictions. His ethos was just about humanism and community, rather than that of a specific god. It worked pretty well, even if it struck a different tone than a typical D&D character. Some of his moral codes and political philosophy was a bit of out genre, but I didn't mind it.
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Nov 3, 2015 19:32
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He better have wielded a Hammer and Sickle as his primary/secondary weapons and holy symbol.
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Nov 3, 2015 19:38
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karmicknight posted:He better have wielded a Hammer and Sickle as his primary/secondary weapons and holy symbol. If I was his player he would have. There were plenty of commie jokes about him, though. There was one scene where he had been disarmed and reached out for the closest weapon to him to fight off an ogre in close quarters. After a random item generation from the item stash he reached into blindly, he fished out a war pick and buried it into the ogre's skull. That ogre was forever named Trotsky. 
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Nov 3, 2015 21:27
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Railing Kill posted:I know it's possible, but I've never actually played with anyone using CN any other way. I hate it like I hate Malkavians in V:tM. I hate it because of what bad players do with it. Maybe it's just because we started playing on Planescape, and the books have a massive bias towards Chaotic factions > Lawful factions, but my group is aggressively Chaos-oriented in alignment and we only really had one lolrandom character, and even that was more due to them being a Sensate and all that entails. Personally, I played a CN Gnoll mad alchemist, and stayed there despite my best attempts. Trying to do good ran afoul of mad science, and doing evil was tempered by being regarded as a cute fluffy puppy by the rest of the party. A 6ft tall bone-crunching puppy that mutated wings onto itself, and kept corpses as rations/raw materials under an extremely utilitarian philosophy, but I digress. When not bugging the captured harpy to let me vivisect her, I stitched up the wounded and persuaded the fighter to eat a bomb once. The fighter was a small town blacksmith's son - NG, the sensate psion and Arborean music/fire sorceress CG, the tiefling rogue CN, and Inquisitor of Furies and Paladin of Chronepsis were LN and proud. We never really had a problem with alignment being anything other than a descriptor or representation of broad philosophical leanings/beliefs, especially since Planescape has places and beings that are literal incarnations of belief. The GM was also The Nicest Guy, so that may have helped a bit.
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Nov 3, 2015 21:55
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Oh man, I've got one sorta related to the "GMs trying to change your character" topic that y'all were on a few pages ago. A few years ago when I was in college, I was playing a game in an obscure indie system about magical goings-on in Renaissance Italy. I signed on for the second of two one-shots, having heard that the first one-shot was a fun slapstick romp where the players were a couple of hired thugs with loose Borgia connections trying to save Venice from a curse of sleep placed by a wicked elven French count and his black unicorn. I made a character based on that general setting and tone - an over-the-hill Russian-born orc named Gregor who was still strong as hell in his old age, who had picked up some minor trickster magic from the Roma during his travels, and who liked playing up his old age, non-native Italian speech, and orcishness in order to get folks to underestimate him. The one-shot was definitely fun, and ended with the party loving up their mission to permanently dispose of the body of one of the Borgias who turned out to be possessed or an Antichrist or whatnot. Bad Borgia came back to life and assumed we'd been hired by his family to make contact with him and protect him while he was between worlds, so we were like "uhhh yeah definitely", and in doing so we established a campaign hook around trying to negotiate the dangerous situation of accidentally coming into the employ of a maybe Antichrist. The first few sessions of the campaign got more serious, but things were still largely light-hearted and interesting - mainly just that the Antichrist guy was this constant looming presence over our hijinks who was liable to have torture or rape sequences every so often. But as if that wasn't uneasy enough already, everything quickly began to move from the low-key goofiness of the one-shots, where the party was kinda everymen thrown into a ridiculous set of fantasy politics. The bratty half-pint girl in the party turned out to be a lost faerie princess or something, and formed an unhealthy relationship with the French elf noble from the first one-shot. The comic relief henchman from said one-shot, who had shown up in the second one-shot as a cowardly reluctant hero, became a brooding badass with angel wings. Gregor started to feel completely out of place, well past the point of "okay well everything's crazy but he can still work as a straight man to ground everything around him" and I started to lose whatever enjoyment I was still getting out of the sessions. Noticing that I was out of it during sessions and not volunteering for between-sessions content anymore, the GMs took me aside, asked me if I was alright, and promised to make some tweaks to help me enjoy playing Gregor more again. And I don't want to lay all the blame on them here - I definitely should have left the game, or at least raised my concerns more vocally and pointedly, long before it got to that point. But now that they were promising to help me get back into the spirit of it, I figured I'd at least hear them out. I assumed it'd be something like at least partially rolling back the eternal angst and cosmic scales, or otherwise letting my smartass brawler grandpa with a ridiculous accent be more at home in the game. What ended up happening is they ran a little one-on-one session for me where they declared Gregor the chosen one of the nature goddess, after becoming the first person since Charlemagne to stand in the presence of all five gods. He now had a destiny to raise an unstoppable army of orcs and defend nature from the coming war between heaven and hell. I kinda just stammered out some apologies and quit the game.
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Nov 3, 2015 21:57
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It's weird hearing about lolrandom senseless chaotic neutral players because in my last campaign, the whole party was chaotic neutral. Well, at least it was once we accidentally turned the paladin into a vampire and he killed himself in horror. But in general a party consisting of a criminal, a free-willed sorcerer, a murderhobo warlock, and a disillusioned cleric worked well. Amoral, irresponsible, and dangerous, but neither good nor evil.
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Nov 3, 2015 22:48
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Jenny Angel posted:Oh man, I've got one sorta related to the "GMs trying to change your character" topic that y'all were on a few pages ago. Some games have built-in hooks for the kind of stuff your GM pulled. World of Darkness had Dark Fate, 7th SEa had all sorts of open-ended backgrounds like Amnesia, and you could plug in an amnesiac character into any game for that matter. I don't mind this kind of thing if the player has used stuff like that to deliberately write a giant blank space on their character for the GM to fill in. What happened in your game isn't that, though, and that sucks. As a player, I'm a weird mix of player types: I can be an alpha gamer (I'll keep it leashed unless the group just needs someone to take initiative), but I personally don't like transcendent, god-like characters. I like my characters like Frodo or any number of other protagonists: a small dude or lady in a big world and a big plot. That's more interesting to me, personally. It's too bad your GM didn't let you keep being just a dude, trying to deal with all sorts of cosmic bullcrap.
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Nov 3, 2015 22:52
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Railing Kill posted:Some games have built-in hooks for the kind of stuff your GM pulled. World of Darkness had Dark Fate, 7th SEa had all sorts of open-ended backgrounds like Amnesia, and you could plug in an amnesiac character into any game for that matter. I don't mind this kind of thing if the player has used stuff like that to deliberately write a giant blank space on their character for the GM to fill in. What happened in your game isn't that, though, and that sucks. As a player, I'm a weird mix of player types: I can be an alpha gamer (I'll keep it leashed unless the group just needs someone to take initiative), but I personally don't like transcendent, god-like characters. I like my characters like Frodo or any number of other protagonists: a small dude or lady in a big world and a big plot. That's more interesting to me, personally. It's too bad your GM didn't let you keep being just a dude, trying to deal with all sorts of cosmic bullcrap. It's not the dark fate thing. It's that the DM interpreted the players lack of interest in the game as lack of interest in his character, therefore he had to force his character to become more interesting.
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Nov 3, 2015 23:02
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Kurieg posted:It's not the dark fate thing. It's that the DM interpreted the players lack of interest in the game as lack of interest in his character, therefore he had to force his character to become more interesting. Well yeah, but GMs changing people's characters out from under them for any reason makes me mad. Dark Fate is just an example, albeit in a different situation, of a thing that you can have on your character sheet that gives the GM license to do that.
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Nov 3, 2015 23:11
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Kurieg posted:It's not the dark fate thing. It's that the DM interpreted the players lack of interest in the game as lack of interest in his character, therefore he had to force his character to become more interesting. This is pretty much correct, other than I'm not a he. The main frustrating thing was the game gradually undergoing a complete shift in tone from lighthearted capers to incredibly dark fate of the world stuff without the GMs ever telling any of us explicitly "Guys, the game's going to be going in a different direction, so let's figure out if your current character still works for what we're transitioning to". By the time they suggested making my character a nature messiah, it was already too far gone - that specific event was more of a bleak punchline than anything. I think the gradual and implicit way it happened is a big part of why I didn't speak up (again, I totally should've spoken up or peaced out much earlier, I'm far from blameless in how it went down). It just felt like since I'd signed on to the goofy version of the game and nobody ever confirmed the goofy version was being phased out, anything particularly dour was probably just a temporary shift I could ride out.
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Nov 3, 2015 23:30
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Jenny Angel posted:Oh man, I've got one sorta related to the "GMs trying to change your character" topic that y'all were on a few pages ago. Sounds like the GM was doing the Supernatural thing. "What's that you want in the horror-comedy road trip show? Deciding the fate of all the universe over the course of a decade and killing archangels regularly? Sure!"
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Nov 3, 2015 23:58
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I've got a paladin and a chaotic neutral sorceress in my party and everything's fine. The paladin is the party face while the sorceress is chaotic neutral in the "Do whatever sounds fun and take nothing seriously" sense, but it's really working because the players are being decent to each other and I'm not being too strenuous with the Paladin code.
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Nov 4, 2015 00:52
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I played a chaotic neutral Oracle ages ago. Planar and attuned to Limbo/Proteans specifically. She was incredibly selfish and had no care beyond knowledge and her friends - that was the main thing that kept her from going evil. She generally wanted her friends to be happy and her friends were happy when they were helping people. So she helped. She wasn't lolrandom either, she was genuinely a bit mad from hearing whispers from extraplanar beings her entire life, but she had a very obvious method in her madness. I hated the DM in that game (he's a nice guy but an awful DM) but I'm thankful for it cause it introduced me to my current group (which are the antipaladin and tiefling I mentioned earlier!) I'll do a writeup on both games sometime later when I can actually focus decently, cause the first game was weird as hell. My character was designed with grand things in mind cause that's what the DM told me to do, but I didn't think that meant he was going to make her literal divinity later. Or that the Paladin in the party was a descendant of Bahamut. Yes, the party included an Oracle of Limbo - pure Chaos - and a scion of the Lawful Good dragon. It was a weird loving game. 
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Nov 4, 2015 02:24
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Had a pretty good experience in my D&D group last session. A couple of people in my group are new to roleplaying, I've only played a little before and the others are generally experienced. We get to a circular room, the door closes/locks behinds us. The lovely weapons we had picked up on the way (our regular gear had been stripped from us earlier when we got captured) gets vaporized... we find that our magic is being suppressed somehow. So of course we are then confronted by a couple of enemies that we know are quite a bit more powerful than us. We're all level 2, so it's not like we can do much anyway. Runes light up on the walls, spaced equally around the room. Everybody is sort of waiting to see what happens next. The DM opens a pack of Magic cards from Dragons of Tarkir, tosses the land, shuffles and lays them out face down in a circle, each corresponding to one of the runes. He didn't look at the cards before hand and doesn't know what went where. One of the enemies touches a rune. It disappears. DM picks up the corresponding card and then this enemy is able to summon the creature that was on this card. Everybody gets the idea and immediately runs to other runes to gather up the cards. Most were creatures, which let us set up big battles between monsters without too much danger to our characters. I think what sort of worked out best that it wasn't just somebody going "Okay in MtG, the stack evaluates like this, so in the end X damage is done and this monster dies". The DM basically let us interpret the cards how we wanted to, if we could make an argument for it. The text on the card gave a starting point and power/toughness was certainly taken into account, but it was up to us to explain what First Strike meant, or how I was going to use my creature (and not a wall) with Defender. I know I couldn't use it to flat out attack, so I used it to taunt the enemy monsters and to get in the way of their summons that were moving across the room to fight my other part members. If it had been a wall, I'm sure have used to close off one of the enemy summons for a while. There were also a few sorceries/instants floating around which let us help each other out in other ways other than just "My kirin started kicking that guy as well". I know that my creature was going to lose a fight until one of the others gave it +2/+0 and first strike. I wouldn't be surprised if other DMs have done something similar, but I found it to be a cool way to let us fight a battle with non standard mechanics that everybody got to give input for as we went. With the players that were new, they didn't have to go look up how their spell worked in the PH. They could argue that based on the name, or the picture, or the subtype, something specific would happen. As long as your argument satisfied the DM, that's what the card meant. I know this isn't the best description, but it was great how it worked out. Both the experienced and the new players had fun. The ones who knew MtG thought it was cool and may have sparked an interest in Magic for the ones who don't.
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Nov 4, 2015 05:04
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Jenny Angel posted:~*nature orc god*~ This is almost exactly what my DM was doing, my character is even a grappler! Except instead of orc-nature lord its human to giant prince. Our next session went pretty alright besides a bit of player issues. It was running late and we had to decide how to run the recently freed city. This ends up being politics and such but, is the paramount of one our characters character development. This player is probably the kindest and most lighthearted of the group. Well, the player that tends to be on his phone too much/too high sometimes, had work in the morning or wanted to play witcher 3 or something. Even though, I work 2 hours earlier than him, he decides to freak out and yell, paraphrased " Just make up your mind, its not that hard, just give the people what they want or dont, throw a festival or something, it doesnt need to be discussed that much " and started cleaning up which involved slamming plates into the sink and shutting doors real loud. Which, I get a bit, people weighing down ever variable is annoying but, the guy making the decision is notoriously fickle but not in a bad way just that he takes a bit of weight in what he determines politically in game. But other than that, we had a combat in where the DM employed ~*theater of the mind*~ in which we dispatch foes without rolls and just tell them what we do. I hate this because there is absolutely no strategy and no chance which equates to us having a jerk off session of our super sick characters doing super sick moves with out any risk of losing or failing. meh. could have just left my character sheet at home.
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Nov 4, 2015 14:35
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Playing a game of 3.5 some years ago. We had a character who was a human son of a high noble wandering around on his pilgrimage because he happened to be a cleric. His father was basically "go out and find yourself so you can come home and be a good ruler or whatever, don’t bother me." Part of that characters thing was his father had vanished in his young adulthood for 15 some years, and then come back as an expert swordsman and took control of his lands. He wouldn’t talk about it and the cleric wanted to find out what had gone on back then. Enter my character, the Half-Elf swordsman who had always just been at the castle and the lord had always made him watch over his young heir. No surprise, I was the lords son from when he had run off to learn swordplay from the elves, had a dalliance and was made to take the result of that home. This was supposed to be a big reveal and only I and the GM knew this part of the story. Que the GM deciding he was bored of that part, and the moment we stepped on elven land some elf was all "oh good the brothers are here, now go fight this big bad." Nothing like a gm just tossing 2 backstory’s to the wind and deciding his bad guy is way cooler than a pair of characters coming to terms with their relationship. The whole plot just got dropped like a rock and I don’t think we even ever went home again in that campaign so the father thing got thrown out the window as well. At least the cleric turned out to be the true chosen of his god. I got a +5 sword. It was very disappointing for both of us.
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Nov 5, 2015 16:49
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TyrsHTML posted:Playing a game of 3.5 some years ago. We had a character who was a human son of a high noble wandering around on his pilgrimage because he happened to be a cleric. His father was basically "go out and find yourself so you can come home and be a good ruler or whatever, don’t bother me." Part of that characters thing was his father had vanished in his young adulthood for 15 some years, and then come back as an expert swordsman and took control of his lands. He wouldn’t talk about it and the cleric wanted to find out what had gone on back then. Enter my character, the Half-Elf swordsman who had always just been at the castle and the lord had always made him watch over his young heir. No surprise, I was the lords son from when he had run off to learn swordplay from the elves, had a dalliance and was made to take the result of that home. This was supposed to be a big reveal and only I and the GM knew this part of the story. Yeah I love how it seems DMs thinking characters finding out they are some super power special snowflake is way more interesting than them working on a story arc of more of a personal self discovery and fleshing it out in the world. Nope, super powerful demigod is way more fulfilling
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Nov 6, 2015 00:27
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It's just easier on the DM.
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Nov 6, 2015 05:08
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Smash it Smash hit posted:Yeah I love how it seems DMs thinking characters finding out they are some super power special snowflake is way more interesting than them working on a story arc of more of a personal self discovery and fleshing it out in the world. Nope, super powerful demigod is way more fulfilling Super powerful demigod campaigns are okay, if you remember the keyword is "campaign", not adventure. I once had a mage character in a long running campaign eventually become a shopkeeper with a line of extradimensional shop locations. His store, Gill's Mystic Archives, "If you can cast it, we carry it!" was THE household name among adventurers, and, frankly, Gill prolly could have dropkicked Elminster if he could have been bothered. This was after well over 5 years of regular and frequent play as well as innumerable plans so cunning you could brush your teeth with them, more innumerable lucky dice rolls, and not being an insufferable prick, as well as a DM that was willing to let me keep playing him that much. (In fact, the character was so notoriously helpful and goodnatured, he became an emergency deus ex machina in later adventures. If we were stuck way beyond where we should have been, there was a small chance Gill might wander by on one of his acquisition trips and get involved, as he still had fond memories of his adventurer days and never took arrows anywhere important.) His trademark, due to his advanced age and subsequent bad physical attributes, was a pair of hald-sized, sumptously decorated wood golems with upholstered hands that followed a half-step behind him everywhere he went. (They were there to catch him and prop him back up after the backlash from his hideously powerful spells went off. They had no other utility at all.) Point being, is that I got rewarded for hours and hours and hours (wash, rinse, repeat) of regular play, paying attention, and using my noggin. Yes, he was stupendously over powered, but I had to earn it.
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Nov 6, 2015 05:38
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yea that GM loved dragonlance and wanted to basically run not dragonlance everytime so it was basically a given after a bit that the cleric would be the savior of the world no matter what was happening. I stopped going to his games.
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Nov 6, 2015 16:23
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I only had one character ever reach apotheosis, and that was a svirfneblin thief/illusionist. He was a rules-faithful dual-class character until he was about 9 thief/7 illusionist, and I asked the DM if I could stop earning thief exp, and he said sure. I ran that toon for a good four years and when he "ascended" he was level 9/28 or so. The series of campaigns over the years culminated with our group thwarting a plot by Cyric and Shar to destroy Mystra (this was before the 4e transition/Spellplague and was a huge coincidence). Shar had to flee the Realms and, while Cyric got away, he lost the portion of his portfolio devoted to illusion that he absorbed when he killed Leira during the Time of Troubles. So, my character became a demigod with the eternal gratitude of Mystra (as well as being a servitor of her) and the profound hatred of Cyric for obvious reasons. It really felt like a proper ending to a truly epic arc that lasted years of real time and decades of game time.
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Nov 6, 2015 17:32
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See, that sounds like fun though. And like you said, it was the culmination of several years of playing. It wasn't just: "Welcome to level 1, here's your Vorpal Sword and Robe of the Archmage."
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Nov 6, 2015 18:00
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Well all that is great and the time is pretty good variable to take into consideration as well. But, I think the important thing is that it was something you were in favor of, was gradual and made sense character/narrative wise. If something like that happens it is rad but to hamfist force it, it stinks. Also what i don't see a lot of DMs do is change the DC based on role playing. I think how a character approaches/says/does something should lower or raise it
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Nov 7, 2015 17:56
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That's a key mechanic in Masters of Umdaar. There are mental challenges and puzzles that you can solve with your mind, juryrig or smash the entire mechanism, or try to sprint past as they reset. Some challenges require you to use 4+ different approaches to succeed with increased or decreased difficulty depending on prior success.
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Nov 7, 2015 18:18
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Smash it Smash hit posted:Also what i don't see a lot of DMs do is change the DC based on role playing. I think how a character approaches/says/does something should lower or raise it
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Nov 7, 2015 20:20
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TyrsHTML posted:Que the GM deciding he was bored of that part, and the moment we stepped on elven land some elf was all "oh good the brothers are here, now go fight this big bad." Nothing like a gm just tossing 2 backstory’s to the wind and deciding his bad guy is way cooler than a pair of characters coming to terms with their relationship. The whole plot just got dropped like a rock and I don’t think we even ever went home again in that campaign so the father thing got thrown out the window as well. At least the cleric turned out to be the true chosen of his god. I got a +5 sword. It was very disappointing for both of us. Smash it Smash hit posted:Yeah I love how it seems DMs thinking characters finding out they are some super power special snowflake is way more interesting than them working on a story arc of more of a personal self discovery and fleshing it out in the world. Nope, super powerful demigod is way more fulfilling The problem here isn't one of "developing backstory" is better than "super powerful special snowflake", but rather the game changed in mid-stream. Both of these campaigns can be awesome but only if that's what you sign up for. I had a campaign where my guy turned out to be the lost king of three kingdoms and ended up reuniting them under one banner to fight Super Evil Chaos that threatened to be a complete ripoff of the Wheel of Time. Ten PC levels into the campaign I was perfectly content with the story arc, but then the GM started getting burnt out so he let one of us players take over, which changed the tone and flavor of the arc as well as getting a bit railroady. I was pretty pissed off and got really disenchanted with the whole thing because I hadn't signed up for a Paranoia game or a Call of Cthulu game to play this character. If this was a new campaign, it wouldn't have mattered as much because I would have know what I was getting into. Also, Samizdata posted:Super powerful demigod campaigns are okay, if you remember the keyword is "campaign", not adventure. I once had a mage character in a long running campaign eventually become a shopkeeper with a line of extradimensional shop locations. His store, Gill's Mystic Archives, "If you can cast it, we carry it!" was THE household name among adventurers, and, frankly, Gill prolly could have dropkicked Elminster if he could have been bothered. It doesn't sound like he was over-powered. It sounds like he was appropriately powered for the game you were playing. Again, there's nothing wrong with a vorpal sword and a robe of the Archmagi at first level if there was an understanding among the players and GM that this was going to be an epic campaign with characters zooming up the level charts. Alternately, there's room for a vorpal sword at first level is there's backstory to go with it, suggesting some massive curse or other bad guys who want to take it from him or some awesome responsibility that comes with it. (I'm thinking Lan Mandraagoran getting a sword hilt placed in his hand as a newborn because he was the Lord of the Seven Towers). It's all about context and the agreement between players and a DM for the type of campaign to be played. I'm currently playing a character who has come about due entirely to a mixup in communication between me and the DM: The DM said that he had a great city setting that he wanted me to paly in, and due to our past "city campaigns" I was picturing a grey, northern, walled, medieval city that was falling into decay from a past glory, because that is what we play. In light of that, I created a female drow sneaky/stabby thing. It turned out that the city was Freeport - City of Adventure which is a swashbuckling freebooter town located in the not-Mediterranean at the edges of an encroaching jungle and rife with shapechanging serpentfolk cultists. Woops. If I'd known it was going to be that kind of a party, I would have made some kind of over-the top Halfling swashbuckler or gnome cannibal or something. Instead I'm playing a character in the tropics who hates sunlight and open spaces. Welp.
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Nov 7, 2015 20:48
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Ilor posted:I used to do this quite a bit, actually. The biggest issue with it though is that it is straight up GM fiat. "Yeah, sure, your song-and-dance story sounds believable to the guard based on X, have a +2 to your attempt to fast-talk him." Why +2? Because I feel like it? While it is a reward to the player for good RP, it ultimately feels kind of arbitrary and hollow. Ultimately, my solution was to move away from games where applying modifiers was actually a thing. I sometimes benefited from this sort of thing but I never quite thought it was fair. It often gets applied to the benefit of charismatic people being charismatic, but rarely to horribly unlikeable neckbeards being horribly unlikeable, and of course it can't be applied to combat. In the end, people who the GM thinks are socially adept and play to that end up getting a lot of positive modifiers not available to people who the GM decides are annoying or tedious. In principle I think an annoying player whose character has high social skills/traits/attributes ought to have exactly the same chances of charming the NPC as the charming player with the same character, and a better chance than the charming player whose character has poor social skills. On a deeply uncharitable note, I think the genuinely likeable players get all the bonuses they need thanks to superior ability to sway the GM with their rules lawyering.
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Nov 7, 2015 21:59
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