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Splicer posted:Not uplifted. They don't have smart gibbon brains, they have robo brains you can download your regular human cyberconciousness into. hypergibbons are pods, part mechanical. and there are neo-pig uplifts. but i think you might be looking for neo-gorilla uplifts. In a suit.
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Nov 14, 2015 23:58
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smart gibbons are smart gibbons, whether their minds are human-equivalent or just human and xavier hung out with some gorillas too, plus i think the repair-monkey squad had an orangutan foreman
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Nov 15, 2015 00:27
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I think it's telling about Eclipse Phase how the very first character I ever created for the game was a huge workaholic who accidentally died on an orbital salvage ship, was resleeved in a cheapo synth by his buddies, adjusted a bit before going 'You know what? Eating, making GBS threads, sleeping and breathing actually are for sissies' and put the money he'd stored up for cloning himself a copy of his original body instead towards turning himself into a plasma-making GBS threads, multi-tasking unholy lovechild of R2D2 and a Tachikoma. As a freshly-created, standard-1000-point character. With a backup dragonfly chassis for where it's not practical to be a nightmarish robot spider. And with an eye out for a swarmanoid he could've stored up in the primary chassis' body cavities for a backup-backup plan.
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Nov 15, 2015 01:05
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My first EP character was someone who had literally been the brains of an entire space station before anarchists stole a backup brain scan of him and stuck it in a body. His morph was covered in cameras, he had small flying drones, and he would be constantly accessing the nearby cameras on the habitats he found himself in, simply because he was used to having that much of an expanded sensorium. There are many things that can be done in Eclipse Phase. Unfortunately the system itself is not great. All these cool things with bodies and drones? That's all gear, and one of the primary concepts of the setting is that death will happen, it will happen often, it will happen unexpectedly, and there's a very good chance you will lose all your poo poo. You yourself will be fine, for given definitions of "fine" (and for "you"), but that expensive body of yours with the radar-defeating chameleon skin, the tailored gland pumping combat drugs into your blood, and the prehensile nipples? That's toast, buddy, hope you got the cash to buy another.
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Nov 16, 2015 07:27
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I've had the bad luck of playing Eclipse Phase in the stock Sci-Fi, "You're in an abandoned space hulk" setting. It's the save-the-farmers-pigs-from-goblins of the genre, and only seems to establish "oh, this setting has a techno virus/sentient AI!"
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Nov 16, 2015 08:03
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One time we were surveilling the evil conspiracy as the committed to a vaguely ominous cargo transfer at a cargo shipping yard, and we realized there were too many of them to fight or safely sneak into their operation. So we called the space-cops and in a few minutes the police, a PMC outfit, a Naval ground detachment and a local gang were eyeing each other over the smoking ruins of their former operation. I was streaming the whole thing as it happened, so on top of wrecking them and managing to steal a synth's hard drive in the confusion, I got e-cred for filming it. A truck got split in half by an anti-tank gun!
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Nov 16, 2015 08:14
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and there were drone delivery hot dogs everywhere too. great game. I think you should get bigger cash rewards in EP than I have in the past to make the easy come easy go nature of post scarcity life easier. and players should be encouraged to recycle their gear instead of carrying 25 smgs because nothing stopped them from printing them all.
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Nov 16, 2015 14:42
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I'm really enjoying "losing" as a DM. I conjure up some monsters, and watch as they get blown up, crushed, skewered and destroyed in all sorts of novel fashions. It gets tripped and takes three opportunity attacks trying to get up (one of which would re-trip it), or it can't do anything without being reacted to with an attack that hits harder as a reaction than as a proactive attack, or it gets critted for more than its max HP, or any damage it takes gets healed back anyway.
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Nov 16, 2015 14:50
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Alright, let's talk about Danny. The previous post about this game, setting up overall context, is here. So, Danny was a friend of ours who had been traveling in the same college geek circle. He was an alum when I met him, maybe 8 years older than me, living on the opposite side of the country but flying over occasionally for holiday parties, weddings, reunions, etc. Danny seemed like a pleasant guy for the most part, and was typically very solicitous and happy to be a person to lean on, but you'd hear scattered stories here and there about how he got shut down after flirting with an undergrad girl or that he made another guy an anxious wreck at a party by stealing and hiding his $1,000 Magic deck. When confronted about why these were lovely things to do, he seemed genuinely oblivious. He had apparently been explaining his social philosophy to one of the GMs shortly before the game, which involved some poo poo around "I understand complex social dynamics for the sham they are, see through them, and encourage others to do the same." The GM thought that was kinda weird but decided to try and roll with it, suggesting he play Miyamoto Musashi in this game, as Musashi was famous for taking advantage of social dynamics in assholish ways during his duels. For example, he allegedly showed up to a duel several hours late once, both enraging his opponent via disrespect and setting up the fight with the sun in a more favorable position. Danny seemed very excited by the idea of playing a master swordsman / master troll, and agreed to give Musashi a shot. Like I mentioned last post, the first time our characters met, he called her a whore. He later told me how impressed he was that my character didn't fly into a rage in response, and seemed to have a model of "upsetting social expectations to gain advantages" that consisted of lobbing gross insults at other characters and expecting them to lose all composure and strategy. When that didn't pay immediate dividends, he instead decided to play a broader social game. He contacted the other two Heroes who were playing "Knight" classes and proposed they form a compact based on dueling each other honorably, and hunting down anyone who didn't agree to their demands for honorable duels. On the face of it, this made some sense as a strategy. His character was built to be pretty unstoppable in one-on-one pre-arranged duels, and he didn't have many abilities that lent themselves to subterfuge. But the game had, up to that point, largely been a 7-team free-for-all, and he'd just formed an alliance of 3. So in an incrthedibly obvious response, the other 4 teams banded together on the grounds of "let's not let these smug assholes hunt us down one by one". I was even able to get one of the other Knights to break ranks with Danny's plan, pointing out that this was not the kind of guy you wanted to be associated with. Danny might have had a chance of turning the tide back in his favor, but he'd also decided for some reason to make his character incredibly difficult to reach in-game, so while everyone else was meeting about this tricky diplomatic issue, he was sitting off in a corner and throwing tantrums about how everybody saw him as the bad guy because he saw through the sham of social dynamics. Note that all this diplomatic posturing also meant that we were significantly delayed in terms of, y'know, making actual fights happen. Rachel, one of the other players playing a Hero, was particularly itching to just have the chance to play out a fight scene, so she challenged my character to a duel. I had literally no reason to accept in-character, but figured there'd be no harm in having a fun fight scene with someone who really wanted one. Since Rachel wanted to fight rather than to win, and since there was no way I was beating her character in a fair fight, I decided to set up some sketchy poo poo - while we were dueling for control of my magical leyline, another Hero that I'd previously manipulated would launch an attack on her leyline, forcing the duel to get called off and giving me the opportunity to teleport us to Rachel's leyline to defend it from this dastardly attack and come across as a big honorable hero. So obviously there's a huge selfish component to this planning I'm doing, but wanting to let Rachel have the dramatic fight scene she's been angling for is still the core of it. And then Danny demands that his character be present at the duel between Rachel and me, to act as an impartial observer. We try to demur but it becomes obvious pretty quickly that he's going to throw another tantrum if we don't let him watch, so we say fine. Now we have to work around his schedule too (remember that this game doesn't have regularly scheduled sessions!), in addition to the GMs' schedule, mine, Rachel's, our teammates', and the Hero's who's launching the false flag attack on Rachel's leyline. To the surprise of nobody, Danny's particularly finicky about his schedule, and we eventually agree to start the duel at 11 PM on a Wednesday. About an hour into it, Rachel and I are having great fun with some theatrical yes-and type of combat, and the false flag attack gets triggered. So I open a portal over to Rachel's leyline, and at that moment Danny tells us he has to leave, that he'll be back in half an hour, and that we should wait for him. Forty five minutes pass, it's a quarter to 1, and we say "gently caress it" and decide to plow through the rest of the scene rather than making folks stay up to ungodly hours on a weeknight. Danny comes back a little after 1 AM and is incredibly angry that we went on without him, despite the scene consisting of little beyond "the Hero, seeing that the leyline is now defended, fucks off on a magic motorbike". Some of his anger is directed at me, but for some reason he's mainly targeting Rachel, telling her all sorts of abusive poo poo about how she only ever thinks of herself, how she was planning to cut him out of this scene from the get-go, etc. Rachel, having considered Danny a good friend for a long time, is devastated and reduced to tears. A few days later, while trying to deal with the fallout, the GMs confront Danny and try to tell him he was being unfair to Rachel. He seems surprised and explains that while he was maybe a little angry, what he was doing was upsetting social dynamics in order to gain an advantage over his enemies. Isn't that what the GMs wanted him to do, what with suggesting he play Musashi and all? Surely they can't blame him. He went on to confirm that, yeah, pretty much the entire reason he demanded to be at that duel was to create a Catch-22 where he could flip out at somebody for something and - hopefully! - reduce them to tears. tl;dr the GMs suggested this guy play a master trickster in-game, he interprets that as license to emotionally abuse fellow players out-of-character as a game tactic. Jenny Angel fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Nov 17, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 16:59
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Jenny Angel posted:Alright, let's talk about Danny. The previous post about this game, setting up overall context, is here. A few thoughts: 1)  2) If someone in a tabletop game leaves for more than five minutes, then their character is officially AFK and at the mercy of the group's good judgment. That's the way every game I've played in for fifteen years has been, and it's worked just fine. No one should ditch in the middle of things and expect everyone else to sit on their hands for very long. His complaint reeks of a self-absorbed lack of consideration for other people's time. If I ever have to change my baby's diaper in the middle of a game or if I have to pick up my wife at work and I'm gone for 20 minutes, I trust that the group doesn't immediately run my character off a cliff, but I also expect them to carry on without me. 3) The GMs might have made a misstep by encouraging Danny's philosophy, rather than working around it. His "social philosophy" is clearly not really a philosophy, and is more of a crutch or excuse for why he doesn't put the effort into getting along with people and being empathetic. It would be one thing, for example, if a GM talked to a player who said, "I've been reading about Taoism and it sounds really interesting," so the GM finds something along those lines in the concept of mechanics to play into that interest. Danny's just.... a dink. I don't know how else to say it. But it shouldn't be encouraged, in or out of character. 4) Speaking of which, Danny combines all of that with the kind of player that can't seem to separate themselves form their character. That's come up a bunch ITT, particularly about LARPs, but tabletop games have those players too. Normally it just means you have one player who takes things too personally and suffers a character's losses too harshly, but with Danny all of that get launched at the other players because of his abrasive "social philosophy." Sounds like a rough situation. 
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Nov 17, 2015 17:47
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So exactly what happened to Danny after that?
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Nov 17, 2015 17:52
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Danny sounds like the first two parts of an after-school special.
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Nov 17, 2015 17:52
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Don't do what Danny Don't does.
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Nov 17, 2015 18:08
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Railing Kill posted:2) If someone in a tabletop game leaves for more than five minutes, then their character is officially AFK and at the mercy of the group's good judgment. That's the way every game I've played in for fifteen years has been, and it's worked just fine. No one should ditch in the middle of things and expect everyone else to sit on their hands for very long. His complaint reeks of a self-absorbed lack of consideration for other people's time. If I ever have to change my baby's diaper in the middle of a game or if I have to pick up my wife at work and I'm gone for 20 minutes, I trust that the group doesn't immediately run my character off a cliff, but I also expect them to carry on without me. Oh for sure. The GMs gave him more time than they should've, on account of not wanting to cause a big incident, but we definitely should've just kept on with the scene. He wouldn't have been able to affect its outcome if he was present anyway, though of course he insisted that if he were there, Musashi would've killed the false flag Hero instantly. This is gonna surprise nobody, but he definitely had a broader hangup around "a scene isn't worthwhile unless Musashi comes out of it looking like a total badass". At another point in the game, the same Hero involved in the false flag attack, along with her mage, accidentally stumbled on Musashi's leyline. There was a monster guarding it, summoned by Musashi's mage, and the other Hero starts fighting it. Musashi shows up, the other Hero realizes this is more than she's bargained for and books it. Danny says, "Hey, wait a minute, they showed up here and beat on my monster, I should be able to get at least a minor hit on them." The GM agrees and is like "Okay, sure, narrate the cosmetic damage your attack does", and he says "I break the mage's arm." At that point the GM and the non-Danny team immediately go "Whoa, let's take a few steps back here" quote:3) The GMs might have made a misstep by encouraging Danny's philosophy, rather than working around it. His "social philosophy" is clearly not really a philosophy, and is more of a crutch or excuse for why he doesn't put the effort into getting along with people and being empathetic. It would be one thing, for example, if a GM talked to a player who said, "I've been reading about Taoism and it sounds really interesting," so the GM finds something along those lines in the concept of mechanics to play into that interest. Danny's just.... a dink. I don't know how else to say it. But it shouldn't be encouraged, in or out of character. Again, for sure. The GMs for this game are actually really cool and sweet folks who have a lot of interesting thoughts about game design, they just have a tendency to be both overly ambitious and overly crowd-pleasing with their games. I think the idea behind funneling Danny into this kind of role came from hearing second-hand that Danny kinda liked to play these kinds of assholes no matter what was on the character sheet, so they might as well point him toward a character that's explicitly in that mold. At least that way, everyone else will be prepared to deal with the character as such. Obviously it turned out to be a huge mistake, and they've learned their lesson in regards to how to incorporate players with assholish OOC tendencies into games (don't let them play). quote:4) Speaking of which, Danny combines all of that with the kind of player that can't seem to separate themselves form their character. That's come up a bunch ITT, particularly about LARPs, but tabletop games have those players too. Normally it just means you have one player who takes things too personally and suffers a character's losses too harshly, but with Danny all of that get launched at the other players because of his abrasive "social philosophy." Once again, for sure. The RPG community we were all involved in at the time had a tendency to write characters in LARPs with a specific person in mind, but that was less of "I think Jenny would really enjoy playing this character and be good at it" and more of "I'm basing this character on Jenny, and on what I think she would be like in this fantasy / sci-fi / horror setting". Which can be helpful for newer players, I suppose, in that it can let them enjoy a LARP without getting too cerebral about the character. But it also encourages that kind of breakdown of player/character separation, in addition to a host of other problems. Sidebar: why yes, I have received a number of incredibly insulting interpretations of myself based on this character-writing method chitoryu12 posted:So exactly what happened to Danny after that? He got himself banned from the yearly geek convention that we all run. I don't wanna get into details because it's pretty drat uncomfortable stuff, but suffice to say it's exactly what you think it is.
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Nov 17, 2015 18:17
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Golden Bee posted:I've had the bad luck of playing Eclipse Phase in the stock Sci-Fi, "You're in an abandoned space hulk" setting. It's the save-the-farmers-pigs-from-goblins of the genre, and only seems to establish "oh, this setting has a techno virus/sentient AI!"
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Nov 17, 2015 18:22
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I've run a FSN-inspired game before as well and I absolutely cannot imagine trying to tackle the enormity of what you're describing. I had four players, who I forced to team up into pairs at least until the endgame just to make the logistics easier. They controlled both Master and Servant, and there were a number of NPC pairs as well (I upped the total number from 7 to 10). Trying to find 14 players you actually want to have at your table, work with all their schedules, and try to run a PvP game on top of that (PvP with player elimination to boot) sounds utterly hellacious.
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Nov 17, 2015 22:08
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Poison Mushroom posted:...now I really want to run a one-off tongue-in-cheek game where the premise is spoonerisms of old adventure cliches. "You all meet at a nun(nery)", "save the goblin's pigs from farmers", etc. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Nov 18, 2015 |
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Nov 17, 2015 22:14
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cheetah7071 posted:I've run a FSN-inspired game before as well and I absolutely cannot imagine trying to tackle the enormity of what you're describing. I had four players, who I forced to team up into pairs at least until the endgame just to make the logistics easier. They controlled both Master and Servant, and there were a number of NPC pairs as well (I upped the total number from 7 to 10). Trying to find 14 players you actually want to have at your table, work with all their schedules, and try to run a PvP game on top of that (PvP with player elimination to boot) sounds utterly hellacious. On the plus side, we never had to deal with player elimination because the game collapsed before anyone got eliminated! That whole concept was obviously a huge hornet's nest, since a lot of the players had an understandable attitude of "I'm totally fine with not winning if it makes for a cool story, but I'd be really disappointed if I came in last place". So everyone was really tense and nervous and "Hey, don't look at me, go murder that person over there". I think the originally planned scope was a lot closer to what you're describing. The GMs had NPC teams planned for all 7 classes if they didn't get players for them, but it turned out that 14 people wanted to play the game, and then a whole bunch of other people wanted to play the game, and then congratulations you have 20 people across half a dozen time zones in the game now, and because it's competitive they all want to think of themselves as the main character to some extent. To be clear, a lot of the folks involved in the game were really talented roleplayers, and I had a lot of fun with several scenes. But those fun moments were always at the mercy of a lovely player interfacing with a game structure that could never really support its own weight.
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Nov 17, 2015 22:41
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Poison Mushroom posted:...now I really want to run a one-off tongue-in-cheek game where the premise is spoonerisms of old adventure cliches. "You all meet at a nun(nery)", "save the goblin's pigs from farmers", etc. That sounds fun. "Ghosts hire the party to get rid of the living people who moved into their home", "The party is a group of fishers from an uncharted island, who are caught in a storm, and are rescued by a ship", "This sword is cursed, and must be embedded deep in the earth to seal it away"
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Nov 17, 2015 22:42
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FicusArt posted:That sounds fun. "Ghosts hire the party to get rid of the living people who moved into their home", "The party is a group of fishers from an uncharted island, who are caught in a storm, and are rescued by a ship", "This sword is cursed, and must be embedded deep in the earth to seal it away"
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Nov 17, 2015 23:05
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FicusArt posted:"This sword is cursed, and must be embedded deep in the earth to seal it away" Especially if you make it tempting to use the cursed sword.
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Nov 18, 2015 09:02
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I guess I'll go ahead and post the vague outline of the FSN game I ran since it had a lot of neat things. The system was homebrew (and a very wonky homebrew at that). As I said above, the PCs were forced into two teams to make it easier to manage. Sessions would alternate between the two teams, with occasional crossover sessions when they met. I was also originally intending to run the game through two "loops"--one PvP, where the setting is established, and one PvE, where the conflicts in the PvP loop are resolved. The PvE run never ended up happening (though it became a running joke in our group for a while to try to run it in gimmicky ways, so the setting has a bunch of cruft on it from all the mini-PvE sessions run). First off, the setup wasn't fighting over the holy grail. It was fighting over a portal to pseudo-heaven (our recurring multiverse has some weird cosmology I won't go into in this post; it's neat though so maybe later). The idea is that the inhabitants of pseudo-heaven were stretched thin and didn't want to devote full resources to defending the gate from incursions. The inhabitants of the world don't want to make them angry and get their world glassed, but also want access to the portal. The compromise was to have a FSN contest every so often, where the winner would be given safe passage into pseudo-heaven. That way, the humans got a hope of getting through, and the portal defenders didn't have to devote a lot of resources to stop hordes of people trying to get in. Of course, the plot twist was that the safe passage only applied to entering pseudo-heaven. All previous winners had been executed as soon as they reached the other side. Some highlights from the game: -Saber's master ignores all of his obviously broken combat powers and instead almost exclusively uses his power to talk to birds. -Saber's master (who has phylacteries)sets one of his phylacteries in a flying jumbo jet, in order to respawn there and then crash into the combat. This gets his servant killed when it crashes into the tower surrounding the portal, pissing off the gate guardian who decides to remove him from the contest -Rogue leaves notes and gifts to both PC teams in an attempt to get them to kill each other. Ending letters with "-XOXO Rogue" remains an injoke with us four years later. -Archer's master (who both Caster and Saber's masters know) commits suicide when Archer dies. Both of them find his corpse, and then completely fail to ask any followup questions or even check for a suicide note, which I had prepared. -The combat system is so wonky that nothing would have been affected if Rider had literally taken no actions besides stopping time, and attacking while time is stopped. -Lancer's player misreads Lancer's ultimate, concludes it sucks, and then decides to never use it. Here's the cast, as well, since there's some interesting powers at work here. Lyra (PC) and Caster (Nicholas Flamel)--Lyra was a mage specialized in illusions. Flamel could make one dose of elixir of immortality every 24 hours, and had moderately competent stats. The elixir could cure anything short of death. Eventually, Lyra devised a kill-switch device to dispense elixir, which was especially effective because this homebrew system has everyone reduced to 0 hp and unconcious before finally dying. Friedrich (PC) and Saber (Sigurd)--Friedrich was essentially a non-undead lich, in that he had phylacteries scattered about town. This player was mostly in it to have a good time, not to win. Sigurd was immune to non-AoE attacks except called shots to the back of his shoulder, and could summon a dragon made out of shards of his sword. Lyra and Friedrich were on a team. Friedrich ended up betraying Lyra during the climactic battle, though, before dying by breaking one of the rules of the game. Haya (PC) and Lancer (Hodur)--Haya was a mage specialized in setting traps, though ultimately this proved pretty useless somehow. Lancer had a really cool ultimate--he would throw his mistletoe spear at the target, and I'd ask them if they thought they'd survive it. If they answer "yes" then it does double damage. Celestia (PC) and Rider (Santa Claus)--Celestia was specialized in dispelling other magic, and had delusions of grandeur. Rider could stop time briefly (around the world in a single night!) and could pull out whatever a single person most wants from his sack. Rider was probably the second-most powerful servant after Saber, but Saber's player wasn't really playing to win, so Rider was the one to beat. Javed (PC)--Due to some weirdness, a fifth player wanted to join, but I ended up giving him a role outside of the master/servant dynamic. Javed was a disgraced inhabitant of pseudo-heaven who was hoping to reclaim his place as the guardian of the portal. Javed's melee attack could sever the bond between a master and servant. Haya, Celestia, and Javed were on a team, though naturally Javed's interests only aligned with theirs so far. Unnamed officer (NPC) and Rogue (Raven)--Rogue's master was an unnamed member of the national guard, sent in in an attempt to maintain the peace during the fighting. Rogue had several gimmicks--she could shapeshift, she could remove all sources of light from an area, and she could use the weapons and item-based powers of defeated servants. Unknown master (NPC) and Berserker (Yamato Takeru)--Berserker's sword reached out infinitely when swung, cutting through objects at all ranges, and sends out blasts of wind. In addition, he could go berserk to increase his stats to absurd levels. He was the first enemy faced by both teams working together. Friedrich's butler (NPC) and Archer (Annie Oakley)--Archer could declare a duel between herself and her target, preventing anyone else from interfering. Archer allied with Friedrich and Lyra in an attempt to balance out the two teams. Unknown master (NPC) and Ranger (Atalanta)--Ranger was killed by another NPC, off-screen. She could turn into a lion and summon a boar. Roland (NPC) and Assassin (Giulia Tofana)--Assassin could create an extremely deadly poison, and could blend into a crowd, becoming completely unidentifiable when she's with two other people. Her master possessed a servant-grade weapon, which bisected anyone it cleanly hit. Augustine (NPC) and Messiah (Jesus of Nazareth)--Augustine was a witch instead of a mage (again, our shared multiverse structure approaches byzantine at times), who had the ultimate goal of throwing the portal wide open. Messiah's main power was rising from the dead three days later, as long as the fight was still going at that time. The only way to prevent this was to win (by killing all the other opponents) while he was still down. Valentina (NPC)--The current guardian of the portal.
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Nov 18, 2015 11:02
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cheetah7071 posted:-Saber's master ignores all of his obviously broken combat powers and instead almost exclusively uses his power to talk to birds. I love it when this sort of thing happens. e: Also that bit about signing notes "-XOXO Rogue" got me thinking about my own group's in-jokes, and recounting them might be an amusing way to spend a page or so. -One of the first games we played together was a BESM d20 game where we had me as, among other things, the driver of the group. At two points in one session, a passenger failed a Spot check and the DM replied "You're too busy staring into the footwell." Well on ten years later, and we still use "footwell" as the catch-all for failed spot checks, especially when we're in a feudal setting with no footwells in logical evidence. -Any enemy that flees combat continues to plot against the party and will, in our table banter, be encountered later, regardless of whether or not it's in the same campaign or even the same system. So far the count is a ninja, a giant skeleton, a Fleaman from Castlevania, a clone of one of the PCs, and a space pirate. -Any excessively dangerous trap or ridiculously powerful and weird monster is entirely the fault of a previous PC, a mad scientist with a very Aperture Science approach to morality. Dareon fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Nov 18, 2015 |
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Nov 18, 2015 17:10
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You've got secret runaway villains for them to pilot a Megazord. There's a potential boss encounter in the future.
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Nov 18, 2015 17:34
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shitty poker hand fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Apr 11, 2023 |
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Nov 18, 2015 19:36
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cheetah7071 posted:I guess I'll go ahead and post the vague outline of the FSN game I ran since it had a lot of neat things. This sounds really cool! For the record, I had a lot of fun with my character when I was allowed to actually do things. She had a mansion in a pocket dimension from which she maintained a city-wide magical surveillance network, and some of the most fun I've ever had in an RPG is selectively leaking inaccurate information about how my surveillance network functioned and watching the other PCs tie themselves into knots with completely pointless attempts to evade it.
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Nov 18, 2015 19:54
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cheetah7071 posted:I guess I'll go ahead and post the vague outline of the FSN game I ran since it had a lot of neat things. The system was homebrew (and a very wonky homebrew at that). As I said above, the PCs were forced into two teams to make it easier to manage. Sessions would alternate between the two teams, with occasional crossover sessions when they met. I was also originally intending to run the game through two "loops"--one PvP, where the setting is established, and one PvE, where the conflicts in the PvP loop are resolved. The PvE run never ended up happening (though it became a running joke in our group for a while to try to run it in gimmicky ways, so the setting has a bunch of cruft on it from all the mini-PvE sessions run). So, a large FSN war has always been one of the things I've wanted to run but never could get off the ground. If you don't mind, could you share some experiences you had here and any advice/things you'd do differently?
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Nov 18, 2015 20:19
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e: whoops wrong thread
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Nov 18, 2015 20:39
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Kaza42 posted:So, a large FSN war has always been one of the things I've wanted to run but never could get off the ground. If you don't mind, could you share some experiences you had here and any advice/things you'd do differently? Sure! 1) Don't make it large! I think the two teams against the NPCs, who you force to remain in teams until near the end, worked well. 3v3 could also work fine. 2) Make your rules system airtight. One thing about PvP is that whenever you rule in favor of one player, you have to rule against another. Try to minimize the number of times you even have to make rulings. Homebrew might not be the way to go--existing systems might not encompass FSN perfectly, but they've all put a lot more thought into their rules than your homebrew will. 3) Either don't have player elimination, or somehow allow eliminated players to continue to interact with the game. 4) Make sure everyone feels broken in some way. That's part of the fun. My original plan (which I drifted from, but I think it's a good plan) was to have each team have a separate "big bad" NPC, with other NPC servants dying like chumps at the start, and another set being powerful enough to draw the teams together temporarily. It seems like there's a lot of interest in this game, so I'll try to dig up my logs (we did it on IRC) tonight and write up a summary of what happened.
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Nov 18, 2015 20:48
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cheetah7071 posted:-Saber's master ignores all of his obviously broken combat powers and instead almost exclusively uses his power to talk to birds. In the game I just bounced from, I was a druid who could Speak with Animals. Or, at least that's what my sheet said, because there were strangely enough no animals to ever loving talk to.  - There's no people in town? I cast Speak with Animals and ask the local creatures what's going on. - There are no local creatures. The area is completely deserted, there's nothing for you to talk to.... - You hear something big crashing through the forest, coming towards you. Various animals are fleeing from it. - I cast Speak with Animals, and ask them what's coming. - Too late, they're already gone, you can't talk with any of them.... - (speaking to the Sorceror) The witch offers you a deal, to heal your paralyzed comrades. - Dude, the cleric can cast Cleanse and heal us all in two days. - You can't tell him that, you're paralyzed. - Fine, I'll cast Speak with Animals, with my metamagic feats Still and Silent spell, then tell his familiar not to take the deal. - Nope, you're paralyzed, you can't do a goddamned thing, just sit back and watch this.... I finally managed to trick him into letting me use it once, when he thought he'd be smart and have me arrested for trying to speak with rats in a town. - The town guard says, "We found him talking with rats, so we locked him up because we thought he was crazy." - Wait a minute, they said that I was talking with rats? - Yeah - So then, I actually managed to speak with them, using my spell? I was able to ask them where our bard is? - Uhh... poo poo. Ok, sure, whatever. The rats told you she's passed out in a creek just outside of town. - Let's go get the bard, guys.(Additional note, we needed to know where the bard was, because the GM started swiping our miniatures and just told us we were missing, without telling the players where we were or what we were doing. The rogue disappeared, then the bard, then me when I tried to find the rogue and the bard. Cue a solid loving hour of three players sitting around with nothing to do, while he exposits backstory about his dragon heritage to the sorceror.)
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Nov 18, 2015 21:53
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Captain Bravo posted:In the game I just bounced from, I was a druid who could Speak with Animals. Or, at least that's what my sheet said, because there were strangely enough no animals to ever loving talk to. Why did he have such a hard-on for not letting you talk to animals? Because he couldn't handle not having suspense?
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Nov 18, 2015 21:56
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Lots of GMs can't handle people trying something unexpected, and just default to saying "no" rather than adapting.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:10
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cheetah7071 posted:Lots of GMs can't handle people trying something unexpected, and just default to saying "no" rather than adapting. That's such a dick thing to do. If they players catch you, let them catch you.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:16
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Sounds like an easy fix to come up with a good reason. Druid: "I use Speak to Animals to ask them why they're running away." DM: "All you get are a few panicked words about 'big' and 'teeth'. None of them really want to pause for a chat."
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Nov 18, 2015 22:17
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The ultimate solution is to never expect anything. You can come up with a hundred possibilities for what the players might do, and they'll find option 101 instead every single time.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:20
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In that instance, the GM didn't want us to know what was coming because it was a Spider Eater and he was planning to paralyze most of the party for months so his sorceror buddy could make a deal with some forest witch. He got pissy when we killed it too early, and so loving declared that me and a rogue tripped and fell on top of it, paralyzing ourselves. Then he got mad when I pointed out that the cleric could heal paralysis, and declared that I couldn't tell anyone that, and nobody's characters could loving know that because it would be out-of-character knowledge. Yep, that's right. The cleric couldn't know that the spell he had which could heal paralysis would be able to heal the party member's paralysis. Because he wanted to give the sorceror a moment with this loving forest witch.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:54
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cheetah7071 posted:The ultimate solution is to never expect anything. You can come up with a hundred possibilities for what the players might do, and they'll find option 101 instead every single time.
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Nov 18, 2015 22:58
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Kaza42 posted:So, a large FSN war has always been one of the things I've wanted to run but never could get off the ground. If you don't mind, could you share some experiences you had here and any advice/things you'd do differently? I pretty much agree with everything that Cheetah said, and want to reiterate a few things for emphasis: 1) I think you can definitely manage having 2 players per team if your players prefer that, but definitely include some NPC teams. Nobody wants to feel like a chump whose contribution to the Grail War was getting knocked out or otherwise immediately, so having some colorful NPC teams for your players to beat up will go a long way to making folks feel satisfied even if they don't win 2) Cheetah's 'airtight rules' point is critical. It can be something as crunchy and robust as a D&D 4e, or it can be something as simple as an opposed die roll, but it has to be something that's unimpeachable. You absolutely cannot afford to get bogged down in discussions of whether I can use this ability in this context, or if your ability cancels out my ability, or who wins this situation where our abilities sorta talk past each other I'd also recommend going against what both the game I was in and Cheetah's game did in terms of expanding the scope past 7 teams of 2. You can have them, you can have maybe 1 to 3 other key NPCs, but let me tell you, it is loving tiresome when you have to account not only for all the other teams this one secret team and this other ancient Hero and this mysterious mage who's not in the war but has their own designs. I'd also keep the game free-for-all in terms of inter-team alliances - with the caveat that if you're controlling half the Grail war through your NPCs, use them to react naturally to any moves that PC teams are making in terms of grouping up, such that you're not ending up with one coalition stomping through everyone else effortlessly.
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Nov 18, 2015 23:03
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It didn't occur to him that he could tell you "Giant winged bug thing?" It's not like a squirrel has encyclopedic knowledge of everything in every Monster Manual.
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Nov 18, 2015 23:04
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Was the sorcerer played by his girlfriend or something?
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Nov 18, 2015 23:17
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