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the_steve posted:drat, all these Fate stories really make me want to play it. Is it an actual published system? Or homebrewed? Or what's it play off of? Fate/Stay Night is a Visual Novel/Anime with a very game-y premise that people like to adapt into TRPGs.
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Dec 1, 2015 06:16
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There is an RPG book of it that I reviewed for FATAL & friends. It is horrible and you should hack a system that you like better. Incidentally, there was interest among my gaming group to do a Fate/ campaign, but we only knew the book I linked and realized it was hot garbage.
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Dec 1, 2015 06:23
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Yawgmoth posted:I like the idea of summoning from the Elemental Plane of Geese better, though. I once reflavored a Necromancer Mage as a cat summoner with a connection to the Elemental Plane of Cats for someone who wanted to be a cat wizard. When they unlocked their second spell school and selected Pyromancy they happened to stumble upon the intersection to the Fire Elemental plane. Thus entered the Paraelemental plane of Cats-That-Are-Also-On-Fire.
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Dec 1, 2015 06:24
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Well, that fight had... everything in it, or at least it felt like it. Allow me to set the stage, D&D 3.5.... Sparrowcaller, a female draconic golaith barbarian. Raan: A male gnome illusionist Dink: a male knobold artificer. (named because I think that's all he's done with his mace: Dink harmlessly against armor.  )Draazhin: male kobold sorcerer Biggs: male griffon totemist. Yes, griffon, yes Biggs(I didn't name him, the party took him along when he was really young) Worships Ayailla, capable of talking due to a pearl of speech. My character. Two other characters I don't remember the names of yet due to being really new, but both of them are frontline fighter types, so to save time I'll just list them as fighter 1 and 2 for now. We were tasked to go in posing as under the control of a friendly NPC that was turning traitor against a vampire sorcerer, with the intent of us being sacrifices for some terrible ritual. Said vampire was working with a mohrg, and had a set of zombies under her control, a few bugbears and one minotaur. Our friendly NPC had things to do away (as the vampire and mohrg knew and expected. Once our NPC friend had left, all hell broke loose. Sparrowcaller swung and sadly missed, but managed to slam her warhammer into the magic circle thing, breaking a big chunk of it, so that accomplished something at least. Fighter 1 ended up fighting 3 bugbears at once, and slowly managed to beat them all back. Draazhin and Dink ended up fighting zombies in the middle of the room(Which was seperated into left, center and right portions by scaffolding turned into storage shelves), and fighter 2 ended up taking the minotaur solo. Biggs: caught in the middle between zombies, the mohrg and sorcerer. He ended up helping take out the vampire *really* early on, and Raan managed to throw down a web right after the start to trap the mohrg. It only partly worked, and Sparrowcaller sadly got paralyzed by him for pretty much the rest of the fight. As the fight progressed, we slowly managed to wear down the zombies, although it came *really* close for two characters, one of which (Draazhin) nearly bled out, but got saved at the last moment. Then, toward the later end of the fight, fighter 1 ended up forcibly pushing over the scaffolding and pinning down the mohrg. Who was still stuck in the web. Biggs had the fortune of getting some tindertwigs eariler on. (he's got int of 10. He's kind of bright, as far as griffons go). A few turns later, the mohrg was in full  mode, stuck under the scaffolding, on fire and as a bonus, Raan found time in there to cast grease, keeping him from getting enough of a handhold on anything to pull himself out or push the whole thing away from him. He did *somehow* managed to wriggle his way out, and after a few unsuccessful attacks on fighter 1, Biggs ended up nailing a pair of nat 20's with the manticore tail he had bound to his totem chakra. Since the fight was dragging on a bit long, the GM ruled "You nailed him between the eyes. Between that and the burning and general damage earlier, he's done."So yeah. Offensive use of a tindertwig, double nat 20's to end a fight, hilariously timed grease spell, and nobody on our side died dispite this very clearly being a boss battle type of thing. I think this was a good session.
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Dec 1, 2015 07:17
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Railing Kill posted:Conjurers: history's greatest monsters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfF5QD2JL-o
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Dec 1, 2015 14:03
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Kurieg posted:Necromancer Mage cat summoner A nekomancer?
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Dec 1, 2015 20:23
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Skellybones posted:I like the idea of a wizard summoning fictional characters onto the battlefield using a book or DVD. The Pagemaster? 
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Dec 1, 2015 22:24
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Skyscraper posted:A nekomancer? i must insist on your death
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Dec 1, 2015 23:05
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Had to cut off a promising game of Star Wars Fiasco tonight at the halfway point due to time constraints. A human and a clone stormtrooper were (secretly on the clone's part) small-time deathstick dealers. In an attempt to join Jabba's gang they promised to steal the Death Star for him. Meanwhile, the human's father was one of the two survivors of a dance troupe that was killed after a poor performance at Jabba's palace. They had just gotten caught kidnapping his little monkey friend/pet as an act of revenge. The other survivor of the dance troupe was secretly an imperial spy who was hooking up with a second clone who was an agent of the rebellion after the two clones became disillusioned with the empire after witnessing the horror of the death star. We just reached the tilt when we had to call it, hopefully we'll find the time for the second half eventually.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:03
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Roach Warehouse posted:Had to cut off a promising game of Star Wars Fiasco tonight at the halfway point due to time constraints. Stealing the Death Star is the kind of scheme that only PCs can think of, let alone pull off. That's some Oceans 11 poo poo right there.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:13
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Railing Kill posted:Stealing the Death Star is the kind of scheme that only PCs can think of, let alone pull off. That's some Oceans 11 poo poo right there. Tell me someone had the idea to pretend to be Darth Vader.
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Dec 3, 2015 18:01
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chitoryu12 posted:Tell me someone had the idea to pretend to be Darth Vader. We hadn't got that far unfortunately, but if we ever get back to it that's definitely happening.
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Dec 3, 2015 18:39
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After my group ended up destroying time (long story), they ended up at what is essentially the end of time, where the God of Time and the fates hang out. After getting yelled at and essentially being damned for their 'hard work', they eventually call upon their various gods (4 gods among 6 players, plus Time) and soul-summoned them in, then played them against each other so that they all wanted control of the very fabric of space and time. As I was panicking for how to try to deal with a God Mosh Pit combat, they (long story short) broke off a piece of time and looted time and space for religious artifacts while the Gods were busy at the end of time having their apocalyptic deathmatch. One player then revealed that his plan all along since ending time was to set all this in motion, acquire these random powerful artifacts, slay the Gods who didn't die in the apocalypse he started, and become a God himself. He would have gotten away with it too, except he made the mistake of trusting the party's Paladin to think this was a good idea and thus shared some of the power/artifacts with them. PCs 
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Dec 4, 2015 23:48
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That's bigger than the scheme my players did. They were a bunch of 11 year olds who ended up trying to prank the school's winter assembly and ended up creating a tomatoey, vinegary biological Incident.
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Dec 4, 2015 23:53
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TheAbominableSnow posted:I go to an art college which boasts a pretty huge and pretty good tabletop club. It was my first exposure to tabletop, and I was spoiled by great DMs my first two quarters attending. The third game I played, though—gently caress. It was bad. It was REALLY bad. Okay, so I wrote way earlier in the thread about the Worst Vampire Fanfiction saga, a spiraling vortex of a VTM game that had the single least satisfying game ending I have ever experienced. I wrote out some of the horrible highlights of the main game, but left out the finale—something I will now purge from myself in the final step towards closure. My original post goes into more detail, but the basics are thus: the game started out as a very informal, very goofy take on Vampire the Masquerade, with lots of joke characters and dumb missions. After a whole school year of this, a second Storyteller came on board and the game morphed into a grimdark apocalyptic epic where our characters were the chosen ones who had to kill Cain or whatever. And Markiplier makes an appearance in-game! Yes, I’m loving serious! I wish I wasn’t! Important details: -Our characters were literally unable to die. Aside from depriving me a way out of the game, this also meant that there was almost no tension or stakes to anything. If we DID manage to get incapacitated, our mega-powerful sires were quick to rescue us from any consequence (because if we died, the ~prophecy~ wouldn’t come true!!!!!!) -The NPCs were, for lack of a better phrase, Mary-Sues. Every time the STs would roleplay NPC interactions you could tell they had spent an enormous amount of time privately rping and they cared about the NPCs and their fanfiction-y relationships WAY more than the actual game. -Canon (while admittedly pretty goofy and lovely in the original VTM lore) was replaced with an atrocious bastardization that had several of the ST’s favorite NPCs feature as the original vampires/clan sires. Theoretically could be good, but trust me, it was horrible. -EVERYTHING was railroaded in the main plot. We had almost no agency regarding the main game and most attempts to build character/cause interesting conflicts were usually steamrolled over. So the final game rolls around. I’ll admit, I was hopeful; as boring as the last few sessions had been, a big battle with Cain—while seeming totally stupid, given the ineptitude of our characters—would be kind of hard to make unfun, right? Plus, the last session had ended with a cliffhanger: a vampire prince resurrected Cain via dark ritual, and immediately after all of our characters had been knocked out (while captured by the prince’s forces, I should add). Since we were supposedly the only ones who could kill Cain, I figured the next session would pick up with our characters in the middle of their own trial + execution or something similarly interesting. Nope! We all woke up in different locations around the city. For reasons that make zero sense, the prince had apparently decided to drop the only people capable of stopping his world domination, who he had helpless and captive, at random-rear end places around town. There was never any explanation for this. We rolled with it. Vampires all over the city were going apeshit and breaking the masquerade to take over the world or whatever, chaos, etc. Some of us decide to try and sneak through the chaos. “Well, if you do that, you’ll miss out on the grinding,” said Carly (ST #1). “That’s why I’ve got all these guys out in the first place.” Uh. Hang on. This is the last session. Encounters, sure, but are you…seriously having us GRIND FOR EXP before the final boss? Did you stat him wrong and not feel like correcting it or something? There were three sessions before this where we accomplished jack poo poo, and you’re doing this now? Apparently, yes! This took three hours. Not plot specific battles or anything, just actual, self-proclaimed grinding, done one-at-a-time because the party was split up. It reached a point where my character was at the bottom of building and wanted to go up top to get a helicopter; I was informed the building was full of enemies. “…So he just bounces through the building and kills everyone,” says Carly. “Assign 3 points to your strength.” No need to roll at all, apparently! Note: 3 points in a stat in VTM is like half of the max points a normal vampire can put in a stat, ever. Our characters were INSANELY game-breaky at this point, but apparently not enough to get out of grinding. So my character steals the helicopter to reunite the whole party and we head off to fight Cain. Few of us actually want to, in character, but the NPCs are riding our asses about it (did I mention the STs both had NPC/PC characters that were in the party for the whole game, and also part of the ~prophecy~? They did!). Cain is just floating above a sky scraper as a six-winged seraphim arisen from hell, chillin and doing nothing in particular. He says we can’t die because we are his chosen ones, and offers us positions as evil vampire general overlords. My character is super into it, as are several other PCs; hey, we’re vampires, being lovely and evil is our way of life. Predictably, the ST sockpuppet PCs object. As they make up half of the entire loving party at this point, that kind of swings the vote a little! I will be honest again: I was an idiot. Hoping against hope that the reasons we were railroaded so strongly to fighting Cain was because the STs had a super cool ending that would be hosed up if we deviated, my character agreed to put up his dukes. Thus ensued a long, impossibly dissapointing fight with Cain. Why impossibly disappointing? For starters, he wasn’t taking any damage. Our characters were doing incredibly dumb, game-breaking stuff (one guy summoned an entire legion of demons, the Brujah was doing 60 damage per puch, etc. etc.) and it wasn’t having any affect at all on Cain. “Just keep at it!” advised the STs. “There isn’t a trick to it or anything. He’s just really tough.” Ok, so we keep fighting for like 45 minutes against a stationary target, doing huge damage with zero effect. A couple times our characters die, but it doesn’t actually matter, because we are still immortal. You would THINK that running out of blood points would also be a problem, but the STs had thought of that too! Along the way through the city earlier, some of the party had also picked up Markiplier. The youtuber Markiplier. This was important because Markiplier was, we found out, an ‘infinite bloodbag’, in that he never ran out of blood. Yes, this actually happened, and it was because of this we were able to continue doing jack poo poo until Cain got bored and pulled his trump card: turning our characters back into humans. Yep! Apparently he has the power to do that! To reverse the curse handed down to him from God himself, just because he feels like it! Right! But don’t worry—our characters were still in the fight, no matter how much we all wished for the sweetness of death.  You’re all doing double damage now.  What? Humans are like vampire kryptonite—you can do double damage against Cain now even though you’re mortal. You still have all your powers.We keep fighting for another 15 minutes. Ok, so you guys keep pounding on Cain, and eventually you manage to beat him to the ground, and then beneath the ground, and eventually into the core of the earth where he burns. He’s dead. Now that he’s gone your characters are permanently human.So. Even when you ignore the logic of a bunch a mortals beating a cursed demigod into the center of the earth with their bare fists. Ignoring the fact that the STs railroaded us into an ending that lead to the PCs ending up human and miserable (for the record, everyone except one player was irritated by this). The fact that this game—a game that had gone on for NEARLY TWO YEARS—ended with the ST handwaving the entire last half of the boss fight, AFTER making us grind for three hours and fruitlessly ‘fight’ for another, remains the single biggest gently caress you I have ever experienced. Markiplier brought one PC who had ‘died for real’ back from the grave because apparently he was fae or something (and I guess they can bring back the dead in lazyass-ST-land?), thus removing the only remotely emotional or interesting thing that had happened the whole night. And that was IT—the campaign ended with that. We disbanded into the night. I caught a ride home with another player and one of the STs, and the player and I shared a silent, dead-eyed look, both unwilling to destroy our friendship with the ST by commiserating over the horseshit we’d just sat through. I don’t know if I’m a very good player, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t deserve to endure a campaign like that—or maybe I did, since any smart person would have bailed months ago. At least I have an amazing example of what NOT to do when DMing my own games from now on. Side note: I am actually roommates with one of the STs from this game now and have confirmed what I suspected all along. He and the other ST skype roleplay romance between their VTM NPCs nonstop and constantly reskin the characters for new settings. It's a little embarrassing and that lovely in-joke anime romance bullshit is definitely what I was picking up from them in-game. TheAbominableSnow fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Dec 5, 2015 |
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Dec 5, 2015 05:13
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I'm sorry but how did you not just say "gently caress this bullshit I'm out?" and apart from that how in the gently caress did the ST or GM or whatever not realise that people weren't having fun? Christ on a crutch.
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Dec 5, 2015 09:28
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Josef bugman posted:I'm sorry but how did you not just say "gently caress this bullshit I'm out?" and apart from that how in the gently caress did the ST or GM or whatever not realise that people weren't having fun? Christ on a crutch. Well since nobody said "gently caress this bullshit I'm out" the GM probably assumed everyone was having fun. The way it sounds there was never any accurate and regular feedback from the players involved about what they liked and didn't.
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Dec 5, 2015 10:11
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BabyFur Denny posted:Well since nobody said "gently caress this bullshit I'm out" the GM probably assumed everyone was having fun. The way it sounds there was never any accurate and regular feedback from the players involved about what they liked and didn't. True, but I mean surely you would notice. I began to ask when it looked as if people weren't enjoying themselves. Its just part of the normal human interaction when gaming if you can sort of pick up basic body language and so on.
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Dec 5, 2015 12:19
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 I lost it at "assign 3 points to strength." Holy poo poo. Not only is 3 attribute points in VtM game-breaking, but it somehow still manages to deprive you of agency. I mean, making the players grind for XP/advancement is one thing (and an incredibly stupid thing in a tabletop RPG), but then to take the choices away from them in character development is inexcusable. I don't understand why bad GMs drag players through their fan fictions. I mean, if there's so much railroading, no player agency, and so much importance put on their precious NPCs, then why are the players even there? Just write a goddamned novel. I'm normally a GM's player and I try to shepherd the other PCs into doing stuff at least vaguely in line with what I think the GM has in mind for the plot. But if I'm railroaded this bad, I'll dig my heels in hard. I'll take the lead in helping the GM engage with the players, but when the GM isn't interested in cooperating with the players at all, then all bets are off and the contrarian in me kicks in.
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Dec 5, 2015 13:19
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Josef bugman posted:I'm sorry but how did you not just say "gently caress this bullshit I'm out?" and apart from that how in the gently caress did the ST or GM or whatever not realise that people weren't having fun? Christ on a crutch. BabyFur Denny posted:Well since nobody said "gently caress this bullshit I'm out" the GM probably assumed everyone was having fun. The way it sounds there was never any accurate and regular feedback from the players involved about what they liked and didn't. Josef bugman posted:True, but I mean surely you would notice. I began to ask when it looked as if people weren't enjoying themselves. Its just part of the normal human interaction when gaming if you can sort of pick up basic body language and so on. I touched on this a bit in my original post, but the reason the players (myself included) stuck around is because the first whole year of the campaign was REALLY fun. It was a bunch of goofy informal horseshit that was entertaining enough to make up for any railroading, of which there was little since we didn't have a plot at that point. When the second ST came on board and introduced the new plot, things started to get shaky, and even that took a little while to pick up on. I'd say that while there were occasional helpings of bullshit throughout the campaign, it only got legitimately awful during the last two or three months; dealing with the Mary-Sue characters and weird ST rapport was irritating, and being immortal took a lot out of the game, but we still had enough freedom to enjoy ourselves. Most of the really mind-bending plot garbage (like that the super powerful Toreador sire was actually the FIRST Toreador, and the Lasombra he was in yaois with was like...a demon general for Satan himself) also happened around the last few months. There was a lot of stuff that I left out for sake of brevity, including how the other players took all this, but people definitely bailed. We lost like a third of the group in the last downward spiral of the campaign. Half the reason I kept going was because the finale was promised to happen soon (and I'd already sunk a ton of time into the game when it was good so why not), and half because I knew that if another person bailed the whole game would grind to a halt. I felt guilty. What if some of the other players were still having fun? I couldn't ask them if they thought the game was poo poo since the remaining ones were real close with the STs. Sticking out a month or two of crappy game sessions didn't seem so bad at the start. And no--the STs did not appear to notice when people were bored. But, as I mentioned in my first post, two players were basically ignored out of the game, so maybe they just didn't give a poo poo. It might also bear mentioning that I felt uncomfortable talking to them about how poo poo the game was because the STs were (and are) in my small department at school and I knew them quite well. I see them almost every day and I'm roommates with Kent. So you'd think this would make it easier to critique them, but we're all visual arts/storytelling people (i.e. comics), and I could tell that they took their NPCs and plot very personally. As I got to know them, it became apparent that the main characters from their personal comic stories were actually serving as NPCs in the game. They were therefor extremely attached to them and invested in the NPC romances and dramas. They were also very, very attached to what they were doing as Storytellers; Carly and Kent were both extremely serious roleplayers and Kent is one of those guys who fancies himself a master DM because he's run games since middle school. Never plays games, just runs them. While they are both nice people I could tell that critiquing the plot or characters would be friendship-enders. Railing Kill posted:
In retrospect, I REALLY wish I had hosed with them just to see how they would have managed to stop me--my character was immortal! I had loving crazy powers! What on earth would they have done at that point? But they had been hinting the whole time about the super cool finale and the neat battle in store for us, so I stuck it out like an idiot. And here's a fun fact: they ARE writing a novel. A visual novel. A dating sim, if you will, featuring--you guessed it--all the lovely anime NPCs from the game! Apparently it is a "gay magical war romance" where you are the (sexy, mysterious, emotionally damaged) Lasombra guy (who is not a vampire this time around, but still a COMPLETE self-insert from Kent) trying to like...gently caress every magical creature ever or something. I don't actually know what the plot is since Kent only talks about shipping the main character with all the other characters and how most of the dialogue is based on him RPing with Carlie. EDIT: I forgot to mention this in the last post, but fun fact, apparently the reason none of our characters could hurt Cain in the finale was because he was statted with 3000 HP. In a VTM game. TheAbominableSnow fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Dec 5, 2015 |
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Dec 5, 2015 15:50
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TheAbominableSnow posted:I touched on this a bit in my original post, but the reason the players (myself included) stuck around is because the first whole year of the campaign was REALLY fun. It was a bunch of goofy informal horseshit that was entertaining enough to make up for any railroading, of which there was little since we didn't have a plot at that point. When the second ST came on board and introduced the new plot, things started to get shaky, and even that took a little while to pick up on. I'd say that while there were occasional helpings of bullshit throughout the campaign, it only got legitimately awful during the last two or three months; dealing with the Mary-Sue characters and weird ST rapport was irritating, and being immortal took a lot out of the game, but we still had enough freedom to enjoy ourselves. Most of the really mind-bending plot garbage (like that the super powerful Toreador sire was actually the FIRST Toreador, and the Lasombra he was in yaois with was like...a demon general for Satan himself) also happened around the last few months. My guess is the NPC jerkoff character is a Lassombra solely for the ability to produce shadow tentacles.  Also: HAHAHAHA. 3,000 health boxes. Why not just say, "You can't kill Cain," if that's clearly the intent? (then again, why have the PCs face an NPC in actual combat that they literally can't beat?) 3,000 health levels theoretically isn't impossible to reach, but it would take twelve hours of old WoD combat (which is just more sluggish than new WoD) with insanely buffed characters to do that much damage. That many health levels doesn't make him invincible. It makes the combat dull as hell. It would be like giving a creature in D&D, well, 3,000 HP. Gross. Dumb. Then again, a player with enough resourcefulness, and enough gall, could probably find some obscure nonsense in oWoD to roll Cain in one action, regardless of his health boxes. That would have been funny, and totally justified. I'm imagining it play out something like Indy's fight with that sword guy in Raider of the Lost Ark where the guy makes a big show of waving swords around all over the place, and Indy just shots him. An anticlimax is the only appropriate way to end such a goofy, overwrought plot. I played in a Dark Ages V:tM game for a couple years, and it was awesome. The ST gave out way too much XP, but it worked out alright because he knew when combat was beneficial to the game, and when it would be tedious. There were points later int he campaign when we got into fights with poo poo-heels that just couldn't put up much of a fight, so the ST just said, "ok, how do you guys kill these idiots?" The combat monsters in the group didn't feel cheated, because freeing up that time let us get onto more plot stuff, and more meaningful combats down the line. It also let us act like badasses every now and then, and just describe how awesome we were. 
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Dec 5, 2015 17:07
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Yeah, I don't know why they just didn't say he was invincible and encourage us to try alternate routes. I think it all boils down to laziness on their parts. I would have loved to get him on some goofy exploit! But for the record, I'd done some research on some obscure WoD mechanics before to take down another enemy once, and it didn't work because the Storytellers didn't feel like implementing the mechanic. So I dunno--maybe I would have given it a shot if I'd known ahead of time that Cain was untouchable, but given their propensity for house ruling things to oblivion, I'm not sure it would have been worth the effort. Like, to clarify on how this game was run, they did not refer to health as health levels, it was HP a la DnD style. We rolled d6s and a single d10 for actions, even though I'm pretty sure WoD games are rolled with multiple d10s, right? There was no stat cap based on generation even before it was revealed we were 'the chosen ones'. Humanity was a useless stat (in my first post, I mentioned that my character got to actual negative humanity with zero impact on playability) that the STs talked up a lot, but added/subtracted arbitrarily and had no effect on gameplay. Same thing with Will, Stealth, and basically any stat that wasn't strength-based. Blood heal could either restore a tiny bit of health or all of it in a single turn depending on what imaginary set of rules existed that day. At one point they couldn't decide whether Animalism allowed you to control animals, talk to animals, take the shape of an animal, or adopt some of a creature's traits--so that changed game to game too. I think you're actually allowed to do multiple things with Disciplines based on how many points you have in it, but this was never implemented either. Most of the stuff I know about VTM was through independent reading to try and make sense of the changing rules, and while they would sometimes listen to what I had to say, usually they went in favor of the broken mechanics they'd invented to keep things moving along. Things were sort of internally consistent by the time we had the last session, but it was so incredibly far from the source material in both gameplay rules and overall lore...yeah. I don't think they would have allowed any esoteric mechanic exploitation if it threatened their fanfiction ending. You're right that an anitclimax would have been the only good way to end things. And you're making me jealous! I would love to be involved in a well-run VTM game in the future because of how fun the setting is. It sounds like you had a sweet game--give your ST a pat on the back next time you see him. I hear so many VTM horror stories that I feel the occasional good Storyteller deserves to be lauded.
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Dec 5, 2015 17:48
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TheAbominableSnow posted:At one point they couldn't decide whether Animalism allowed you to control animals, talk to animals, take the shape of an animal, or adopt some of a creature's traits--so that changed game to game too. I think you're actually allowed to do multiple things with Disciplines based on how many points you have in it, but this was never implemented either. This is pretty telling. That's one of the most core systems in VtM. Not implementing Disciplines as-written is like not implementing swords or spells in DnD. I have to assume they didn't even read the book which tells me that they were really not interested in running a VtM game. Did somebody describe Masquerade to this guy through a megaphone from across a football field? To be honest with you these people seem too far gone to help. But (full disclosure, I'm a writer) it really irks me when people refuse to criticize fragile creative types. If somebody wants to make a career out of being creative, then they need loving criticism. Way more than people with no investment in their creations. I'm not saying it's your job (it's not) but I am saying if you got the vibe that criticism wouldn't be welcome, then that's a big problem for these people and their theoretical careers. These people suck at telling stories and I want them to know about it as fast as humanly possible.
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Dec 5, 2015 17:58
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TheAbominableSnow posted:You would THINK that running out of blood points would also be a problem, but the STs had thought of that too! Along the way through the city earlier, some of the party had also picked up Markiplier. The youtuber Markiplier. This was important because Markiplier was, we found out, an ‘infinite bloodbag’, in that he never ran out of blood. Yes, this actually happened, and it was because of this we were able to continue doing jack poo poo until Cain got bored and pulled his trump card: turning our characters back into humans. Haha what? Did he expect you to become just like his favorite Youtuber by drinking his blood and gaining his monetization powers? TheAbominableSnow posted:Most of the stuff I know about VTM was through independent reading to try and make sense of the changing rules, and while they would sometimes listen to what I had to say, usually they went in favor of the broken mechanics they'd invented to keep things moving along. Things were sort of internally consistent by the time we had the last session, but it was so incredibly far from the source material in both gameplay rules and overall lore...yeah. I don't think they would have allowed any esoteric mechanic exploitation if it threatened their fanfiction ending. You're right that an anitclimax would have been the only good way to end things. Uhh
So add "The Mechanics" to the list of things they were sacrificing upon the altar of their fanfiction.
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Dec 5, 2015 18:25
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Mendrian posted:To be honest with you these people seem too far gone to help. But (full disclosure, I'm a writer) it really irks me when people refuse to criticize fragile creative types. If somebody wants to make a career out of being creative, then they need loving criticism. Way more than people with no investment in their creations. I'm not saying it's your job (it's not) but I am saying if you got the vibe that criticism wouldn't be welcome, then that's a big problem for these people and their theoretical careers. Keep in mind that I have to live with one of these people. If he read anything that I've written here, or even heard a sugercoated version of my true opinion, I am positive it would end the weak friendship and make the rest of the school year a HUGE pain in the rear end. Selfish as it is, I am not going to start a dorm room cold war during the 20-odd weeks I still have to house with the guy. I get that creatives need criticism--I love getting it, I dispense it, etc.--but neither of of these two have ever had the attitude that indicates...receptiveness. They aren't hostile about crit, but they do not at all seem to absorb it from professors or peers, and dismiss the opinions of those who offer it. They don't get mad, they're just like "Well, that person doesn't know what they're talking about," and move on. They've never asked me for any form of feedback on either game stuff or their personal work, preferring to circle jerk it with each other. I try to ask questions and give feedback when Kent tells me about his ~visual novel~, but he is clearly telling me about it so I can appreciate his super cute homo self insert, and kind of blows off other conversation on the subject. While I do think they need to know, I get a really strong feeling that they are in a safe bubble of positive reinforcement together and critiquing their work at this point would only serve to alienate them. I'd rather preserve the friendship/networking opportunity and give them critique a few years down the road when they're out of school and realize they actually need feedback from other people. I've considered emailing Kent about critting/helping edit his novel after I graduate, but I dunno. Also, Carlie and Kent were very active in the LARP and tabletop communities respectively, to my knowledge, so I have no idea why they hosed up that bad. I'm all for changing lore to make it more fun but it's like they never even touched a book before. Kurieg posted:Uhh Kurieg posted:Yes, you roll one d10 for each point in your attribute+skill each number over a certain threshold counts as a success... wait.. were they just having you roll dice and add them together? That's not how the system works at all, no wonder your brujah was doing 60 damage a turn. Kurieg posted:I'm betting they had only played the Redemption videogame, where Humanity was a 100 point stat scale and could go negative if only because it wasn't coded exceptionally well. Kurieg posted:Animalism is about talking to animals, summoning animals, and messing with other Vampire's Beasts, PROTEAN is about shapeshifting, and yes you're supposed to get a new power for each dot in the discipline outside of the purely physical ones. TheAbominableSnow fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Dec 5, 2015 |
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Dec 5, 2015 19:03
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Feeding does nothing to your hit points beyond giving you blood that you can spend to heal yourself. And bullets are specifically *very* ineffective against vampires, dealing only bashing damage. They deal lethal damage to mortals, werewolves, mages, and basically everyone else. But to a Vampire an organ is an organ is an organ, so what do they care if their heart gets a hole in it. ... Let me guess, they didn't use the different types of damage either?
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Dec 5, 2015 19:43
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TheAbominableSnow posted:(The biggest pile of bullshit I can recall seeing in a long, long time) Nothing you've said about them makes it sound like they have even a hint of redeeming value as people, and in fact sound actively harmful to your long-term prospects. If they act this way towards the critique of their professors and such, then I can't even fathom a way for them to actually graduate; and even if they do, them getting and keeping a position in anything that involves any sort of art would be next to impossible.
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Dec 5, 2015 20:50
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I'm sorry but at this point the only thing you need to do is bring your room mate to Something Awful so that we can rip into him for his terribleness. Because at this point I am fairly certain one or other of us wants to give this guy a brand new rear end in a top hat.
Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Dec 5, 2015 |
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Dec 5, 2015 20:53
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your friends sound like assholes and you sound spineless. i would also like to throw my crazed, hyperbolic reaction onto the pile
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Dec 5, 2015 20:54
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Yawgmoth posted:Jesus loving Christ I cannot imagine dealing with these people in any respect. Why do you room with them? I'm sure you could find anyone else and they would be more palatable, and emergency relocations happen from time to time; your school has to have a process for that. Also how in the hazy grey gently caress are they still in school for anything artistic if they can't accept or internalize critique? That's like prerequisite zero, the thing you need to have before you even fill out an application. And why are you friends with them if you don't feel like you can tell them "hey your game is boring and here's why"? If there's fear of retribution in your classes, you ought to just bring it to the attention of the professor/dean of students/other appropriate authority and say "I do not feel comfortable having these people having any effect on my grades because of a potential personal vendetta." I've had to do this before and it sucks but it's way better than failing a big project/class because some rear end in a top hat can't separate work and play. I also can't believe that any of these idiots would be useful for networking, given that they ignore anything that isn't a pat on the back, write absolute garbage, and are apparently so hostile towards any sort of attempt at betterment that they would retaliate. If anything they seem like the kind of dross that would be toxic to be associated with at all. Ok, I'm sorry if stuff in my posts got interpreted this way or I misspoke, but I need to clarify that they are not bad people. 'Toxic' is not a word I would use to describe them, and I don't feel like my studies/rooming situation are threatened by their inability to take critique or whatever. The game was beyond bad and lazy but I don't think it was done maliciously, or we wouldn't associate. I just think they're dorks who are taking way to long to snap out their weeaboo phase. It's a lot of second-hand embarrassment but that's about it. I do think they would react poorly to critique, but that's their problem--I am not uncomfortable with the idea of critiquing them, it's that I think it wouldn't do anything except make my roommate icy and hard to communicate with. I never said I was concerned about retaliation, because I'm not, I just don't want to deal with Kent being huffy for months. I can do that when I DON'T have to live with the guy. Also I don't actually care about their work. As for being friends with them: we're not terribly close. Acquaintances, if that makes you feel better. During the game I didn't want to gently caress over the other players during the last few months ('spineless' is pretty accurate) and after the game I was pretty much done with their bad stories. If they at any point had asked for feedback (like most DMs I've had do) I'd have been honest, but games like that don't happen if you care about what other people think, you know? Basically: I don't care enough about their work to try and talk sense to them. It's not my job. I'm not going to block them out of my life because of a lovely game though; I don't take tabletop THAT seriously. EDIT: also, Kurieg, you are totally right. I didn't even know there were different types of damage in vtm! The more you know. TheAbominableSnow fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Dec 5, 2015 |
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Dec 5, 2015 23:08
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TheAbominableSnow posted:I do think they would react poorly to critique, but that's their problem vvvv I was under the impression that those types got eaten alive in or before sophomore year and/or sacrificed to elder gods to the seniors could forgo sleep long enough to finish all of heir projects in time. Guess not! Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 00:16
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Not sure if you've ever been to an art school, dude, but trust me: there are TONS of people who get in who can't take critique and shouldn't be pursuing creative careers. These two are not unusual. Kent can actually take crit for his artwork, just not his content. He's not a bad artist, just a poor writer. Carly is less skilled artistically but still not as awful as some of the other students who make it to senior year, but that's a discussion for another thread. TheAbominableSnow fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 00:29
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:your friends sound like assholes and you sound spineless. i would also like to throw my crazed, hyperbolic reaction onto the pile
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Dec 6, 2015 01:23
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TheAbominableSnow posted:*vampire railroading nightmare* What is it about Vampire that makes this happen? Forever ago, I was one of three people who started a small vampire LARP for a group of friends. At most we had maybe 15 players. After about six months of play, my Co-GMs started doing exactly what yours were doing-their characters and their tragic doomed love rapidly became the primary focus of the game, and my plots that encouraged things that weren't the tragic doomed love story were quickly shunted to the side. So, since my main interest was always werewolf, I asked if I they minded me breaking off to run a werewolf LARP parallel to the vampire game. They said that was fine, and I promised not the break the shared world, so we agreed to let some people know about the werewolf game starting up next session. There was some mild interest, and I ended up bringing in four players. We found a separate room to hang out in at the house we were playing in, made some characters and got going-I kicked off with the PC Garou arriving to find an almost entirely destroyed caern, a small army of fomori and two critically wounded Elders. All four players had a great time from that first fight on, with lots of laughter and shouting ridiculous catchphrases at each other. By all accounts, Vampire Elysium that night was very concerned with uncovering evidence of a plot to separate the star-crossed GMPC lovers. When the game wrapped up, my Co-GMs seemed a little disgruntled, so I apologized for the amount of noise we were making and promised to keep things quieter next time. They emailed me mid-week to let me know that one of the vampire players was interested in also playing a werewolf, and could I help him make a character that he could play when his vampire wasn't needed? I agreed, emailed him back and forth and got him set up. At the next game I ran some sort of spirit plot, which the Garou also had a great time with, including the vampire player. He told my Co-GMs that he was giving up his vampire character (easy since he was playing a belligerent Gangrel, so he said his character just walked off into the wilderness) and switching to werewolf full time. Two other players asked to make part-time werewolves between that game and the next one. It went on like this for another couple of months, until half of the vampire players had quit to come play werewolf and they'd recruited another half-dozen friends. Occasionally the vampires and werewolves tangled, which generally resulted in an extended rules argument and a lot of waving of books at one another, but as far as I knew, everything out of character was moving along amicably. I helped with vampire plots, did all of the werewolf work on my own, and continued trying to keep the werewolf game from getting too rowdy and bothering the vampire game. My Co-GMs called me late one night to say that we needed to have an emergency meeting. I showed up expecting to hash out some new plots and instead had to deal with a couple of hours of tears and firm demands that I cancel the werewolf game and order all of the players to play vampire instead. It came out that the players the Co-GMs had spoken with about quitting werewolf and coming back to the vampire game said they were having too much fun with the werewolf plots and found the vampire game boring. Their proposed in-game explanation was going to be a ritual that would require the werewolves to be destroyed in order to turn one of the GMPCs human so he could be re-Embraced and blah blah blah. I was very upset, obviously, so I told them that I wouldn't cancel the werewolf game, but I would split it away from our shared universe. I invited both of them to make characters if they wanted to, and offered to join the vampire game with my own PC. One of them took me up on my offer, but they jointly decided it wasn't necessary that I join their game. The vampire game died three months later. The last session featuring Garou characters created in that original game (long since converted to tabletop) wrapped up after a decade of play. I really didn't mean to subvert my friends-they killed their own game.
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Dec 6, 2015 03:59
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Okay! I promised a story about my two games before, Way of the Wicked and Jade Regent, but gently caress that noise I'm gonna tell you guys about my 13th Age game. I'll talk about the other two later, but I just ran this one last night so it's still fresh in my head. So this is a game running from level 1 to (hopefully!) level 10, and the party is as follows: We have Nallon, the High Elf Wizard. He's a bit of a smug dick, who uses the polysylliablic casting or however the gently caress it's spelled. He themes his magic as calling upon the spirits of the elements via their truenames and having them bolster his spells. His One Unique Thing is that when the Lich King became the Lich King, a portion of his spirit went to create Nallon, so he has an odd connection to old magic and entropy. The character is entirely unaware of this. Evan, the Necromancer. He was a simple farm boy before, but he was killed on a hunting trip by their game tearing out his throat. His throat was sewn shut by his mother before he was laid to rest, and then a graverobbing Necromancer came to try and get him - but something happened that left Nallon with control of himself, and he asked the man's own skeletons and zombies to protect him. So they did. And then he ran away, getting picked up by a few of the Priestess' servants/soldiers, and put to work by them against the Lich King. He uses the Redeemer class talent, so he politely asks the dead to aid him in combat. His One Unique Thing is that he was killed but resurrected, and left with full control of himself and power over the dead. Radret the Wood Elf Paladin. Her village was being razed by an attack from the Ork Lord's forces where she came to her calling. She ended up rising up and killing several of the soldiers herself before stripping them of their armor and taking up a massive spiked hammer. She rallied her village against them and mostly drove them off herself, and found that she couldn't settle down after. The battle drums of war itself always sounded in her ears and she couldn't adapt to a peaceful life, so she started to adventure. Her One Unique Thing is that the very concept of war itself has chosen her as its herald. And Samiya the Occultist. She is the Prince of Shadows own living shadow, giving her a unique control over fate - not that she's aware of the first part. She's been around for a long time now, but things are a bit of a blur, so she's not sure how long. She masquerades as a bard, given that she doesn't really want the nature of her powers known. Anyway, the setup for the game is that visible to the southeast is a massive crack in the sky, like someone had hit it with a loving baseball. The Emperor has sent the call out for adventurers to go check it out since it's -really- drat far out of the way but someone has to figure this out, and he's aware that adventurers are stronger than most of his soldiers in general. The crack is above a nameless mountain that the group meets at, finding a small collection of other adventurers there already - the base has turned into a semi-permanent settlement, as this has been going on for about half a year at this point. Very few have come back alive from the mountain, and those that did were driven mad. As a side note, the area is cold but not cold enough for snow. But, there's a constant stream of snow falling from the sky. It burns like ash, and refuses to melt. There's the initial meet and greet as they get acquainted, they talk to the other adventurers in the area. They all have names and stories, and the party generally gets fond of them. And they head out later that day to climb the mountain - half of the group going before the party's part (which included a few NPCs, essentially two of the oldest adventurers in the world. An elven wizard named Varic who was an old teacher of Nallon and Sir Edward, the Lion's Roar who was one of the Empire's greatest heroes ages ago) and they met the...monsters then. The first was a creature with hugely distended arms and legs, with a single fist the size of a full size person. Its torso and head were human-shaped, but its mouth was a giant gaping hole set below two empty eye sockets. It was holding someone's corpse in its grip, and began combat by throwing it at them. And then a group of twisted soldiers approached, their bodies melded with their armor entirely. For reference on the monsters they meet, I generally used images of the mutants from Lisa: The Painful RPG for their tokens. During the scuffle (where another monster arrived to assist, and got held off by a pair of skeletons by the Necromancer) their NPCs disappeared. They tried to find them, and found a trail. The older characters were being carried on a pair of litters, and the tracks pretty quickly warped into things that were more sliding and shuffling than actually walking. They figured out really quickly what was going on then. They did really well. They had another pair of encounters against the former adventures, with the Necromancer and Wizard pulling more than their fair share of weight. The Occultist themed her abilities as augmenting other characters' spells and such like, which they blamed on the crack above them. They make camp for the night and figure out why the NPCs didn't want to stay more than another night there. All through the night, they could hear the people screaming and howling, sounding more like animals now than anything else. And at the apex of the night, they hear this particular sound, which at least silences everything else for the night. Come morning (and a full heal up, because the battles were loving rough on the party), they come to the peak where they find the remaining soldiers and the old NPCs. The soldiers were twisted into hunchbacked things with massive claws, while the two old men on the litters were...combined with the litters and those bearing them. Edward, the warrior, has twisted into a misshapen bulk that's about fifteen feet wide and ten feet tall. One arm has been entirely replaced with the blade of his sword, extended and almost broken, while his face has melted into the expression of a slack-jawed idiot staring blankly into the sky. The Wizard was twisted into a pile of writhing bodies with him at the apex, his torso melded into the back of of an almost four legged creature when you look at it as a whole. He holds his staff in both hands. The party starts combat almost immediately. The Necromancer rolls well and summons a trio of orkish skeletons which flank with the Paladin, who used her first round to cast Hammer of Faith, increasing her damage to a d12 instead of a d10 I think? Not that huge an increase. The Wizard uses his Ray of Frost to try and cut through the mooks as fast as possible, while the Occultist cheers them on in the background in suitable bard fashion (and making the Wizard do a huge amount of damage on occasion) But, the Paladin just goes on a -rampage-. She swings her hammer, crits, and kills four mooks at once, theming it as the shockwave from her blow crushing one and knocking several others off the cliffside they were fighting on. All the while this is going on, the warrior's bulk is spawning new soldiers almost as fast as the party is cutting through them. The Wizard is focusing power into his staff, but not attacking. The Warrior has channeled power into his blade. And then the escalation dice hits 2, and all hell breaks loose. Edward opens up by slashing his blade and sending out a beam of energy straight along the ground, killing the remaining skeletons (who had been guarding Radret as she cleaved through the mobs) along with severely damaging Radret herself and Evan who had been moving with her. And then Varic raises his staff to the sky, and the power he was channeling courses through it, sending a blast directly to the crack. Which shatters. There's the sound of breaking glass magnified a thousand times as bright blue shards rain down upon the mountain and the party, and a pitch black void is in the middle. The Wizard then uses his Daily. Color Spray, combined with his polysyllabic thing. He asks me if he can call upon Edward by his true name, as he does with the spirits, to help him break free of the shackles binding him. I say roll a background check and he does. A 19 total. I'll accept it. So, Color Spray, rather than a burst of colorful energy, is a blade of pure light erupting from the ground beneath the old warrior, piercing straight through him and summoning binding chains around him. They can hear Edward's voice then as he was in his prime, full of vigor and rage for his situation - and they can see his blade piercing through the misshapen bulk holding his soul. He calls out for his friend Varic constantly. And then the Necromancer steps up and uses Death's Gauntlet, but instead of skeletal limbs flailing at him, it's Edward's departed soldiers coming to see their leader through one last battle so that he can pass on in peace. Radret leads their charge upon him, and after a pitched battle, they manage to slay him. All the while, Nallon has had to move to the back and begin counterspelling Varic. While they had set up Death's Gauntlet and Radret's charge, Varic had summoned a great sun above the party, intending on incinerating them with it. And Nallon, using his High Arcana, had dispelled it and several other spells until the party had dealt with Edward - who with his last breath before fading into ash and light, called upon Varic to join him for one last adventure. This reaches Varic whose staff drops, and he begins to weep. And Nallon makes another background roll for me. He uses his Polysyllabic power with Acid Arrow, calling upon the falling shards of reality showering on the party to form into a single blade, which he wields and then thrusts into Varic's bulk. And since it made for such a good image, the blade slays him - or rather, allows him to free himself to death's embrace. He draws the blade into his bulk and his very soul wields it, cutting himself free, and with a cry to his dear friend Edward and an apology to the party (specifically Nallon), he fades to ash and light to follow. So now the party is sitting upon the peak of a mountain, beneath the raining shards of reality and a pitch black void in the sky above them. And they have no more answers than they did when they got here. They were level 1. I'm really looking forward to more from this game. E: Reading over this, the monsters do sound kind of cat pissy, but I asked the players what they wanted and they wanted weird monsterous stuff. They were kind of delighted with it. I hope it doesn't read like I'm an trying way too hard to be edgey or something. Galick fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Dec 6, 2015 |
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Dec 6, 2015 04:07
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Galick posted:E: Reading over this, the monsters do sound kind of cat pissy, but I asked the players what they wanted and they wanted weird monsterous stuff. They were kind of delighted with it. I hope it doesn't read like I'm an trying way too hard to be edgey or something.  as gently caress. WereJace posted:What is it about Vampire that makes this happen?
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Dec 6, 2015 06:59
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TheAbominableSnow posted:Ok, I'm sorry if stuff in my posts got interpreted this way or I misspoke, but I need to clarify that they are not bad people. 'Toxic' is not a word I would use to describe them, and I don't feel like my studies/rooming situation are threatened by their inability to take critique or whatever. The game was beyond bad and lazy but I don't think it was done maliciously, or we wouldn't associate. I just think they're dorks who are taking way to long to snap out their weeaboo phase. It's a lot of second-hand embarrassment but that's about it. I do think they would react poorly to critique, but that's their problem--I am not uncomfortable with the idea of critiquing them, it's that I think it wouldn't do anything except make my roommate icy and hard to communicate with. I never said I was concerned about retaliation, because I'm not, I just don't want to deal with Kent being huffy for months. I can do that when I DON'T have to live with the guy. Also I don't actually care about their work. As for being friends with them: we're not terribly close. Acquaintances, if that makes you feel better. During the game I didn't want to gently caress over the other players during the last few months ('spineless' is pretty accurate) and after the game I was pretty much done with their bad stories. If they at any point had asked for feedback (like most DMs I've had do) I'd have been honest, but games like that don't happen if you care about what other people think, you know? Yeah, they don't sound like bad people, just goofy kids* obsessing over something the way kids do. I'm sure in 5 or 10 years time they will look back on their goofy erotic roleplaying and creative writing masturbation with some embarrassment. I know I look back on my previous works from my teenage years and early 20s with a sort of fond nostalgic embarrassment. Those characters should have never seen the outside of an irc chat room. *as I get older the age that qualifies as kids slides back.
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Dec 6, 2015 08:40
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Update for the game, a new player wants to join and I love their character immediately. They're a Chaos Mage and I'm just gonna quote their One Unique Thing.Novelle posted:I'm not real, and never have been. I know this, but deny it, even to myself. They have fake memories of their life before joining the party, even if they'll only have semi-existed for maybe a day or two tops before joining the party. This is going to be so much fun to play with.  I can't wait until Thursday! 
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Dec 6, 2015 12:54
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Oh man, they're basically Seizhi from Chuubo's. That's pretty rad. Your game is rad and you're a Good GM, please continue being so.
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Dec 6, 2015 15:37
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Ran Pathfinder last Thursday and something funny happened. This game, like the last Pathfinder game, has been an experiment: I'm going to build a world and have some ideas for quests just kind of sitting around waiting to be discovered, but otherwise I'm just letting the PCs use the setting as their sandbox. They are given control of a small but developing town in the first game, and a lot of the hooks for them to interact with the setting comes from that. Otherwise, everything is random encounters, random item generation, and off-the-cuff plots. We're keeping track of plots with note cards that act much like missions in Fallout or other PC RPGs. But the other day, one of my PCs gave me a golden opportunity to gently caress with him. So in the setting there is a realm far to the east/southeast of the PC Town, "Prosperity." This other realm is a mystery to the PCs, and all that is known about it is scant, and second-hand. But apparently this mystery realm is a blasted wasteland where nothing lives. Prosperity's more immediate neighbors, bunch of libertarian wingnuts in a town called Galt, have sent some captains of industry into the mystery realm, but none of them have ever returned. So, in Thursday's game, I roll up some random items as the PCs' reward from the previous game, and one of them was a scroll of Animate Dead. No one in the group wants it, so the wizard sells the scroll to someone traveling through town. The traveler is presented to be clearly undead: he wears a tattered hooded robe, he smells of earth, he looks and sounds like Palpatine from episode six, and he doesn't laugh so much as he cackles. The wizard sells him the scroll anyway, but asks the rogue to appraise it first and to show up to bargain the sale. The rogue does, but he takes the opportunity to pick the pocket of the necromancer. Because, really, what's the worst that could happen? The rogue fails his check, in that his roll doesn't exceed the necromancer's perception roll. But the necromancer plays dumb and lets him take something anyway. The rogue then fails his own perception check to notice that the necromancer has noticed his attempt, so he's still in the dark. He ends up lifting a large gemstone from the necromancer's pocket. The rogue loves treasure and is a greedy sonofabitch, but he wisely decides that this gem is too valuable and that taking it is too risky. He palms it back into the necromancer's pocket, and succeeds at that roll. I ask for one more perception check for the rogue, who fails that one too. The rogue negotiates a nice price for the Animate Dead scroll, and it is sold. The necromancer leaves, cackling happily. He makes no more stops in Prosperity, and leaves down the eastern road out of town. Shortly after,the rogue finds the gemstone in one of his pockets, this time wrapped in a small piece of paper. He takes it out and unwraps the paper. It reads: USE IT YOU EARNED IT He fails a will save against a geas effect on the writing. It compels him to use the gem at his earliest convenience, which he does without knowing what it does. The rogue is alone in his room at the inn. He holds the gem in one hand and says he's going to use it. The gem immediately lights up, spouts spindly black tendrils, and the tendrils burrow into his hand. The gem itself also sinks into his hand so that it is flush with his palm. The veins on his arm start turning black, and the flesh of his hand and arm are turning pale and looking more desiccated by the moment. He begins to convulse. All of this is excruciating, and the rogue screams bloody murder. Several nearby party members come to his aid: the wizard, the cleric, and the inquisitor. They see what is happening and they make quick heal and spellcraft checks. They nearly chop off the rogue's arm against his will before they realize that it is too late to stop the curse physically. the rogue dies slumping into his chair, pleading for the inquisitor not to chop off his arm. His last mortal words are for vanity. After a moment, he begins to smell like a 3 day old corpse rotting in the sun. Then, after about a minute, he begins tom smell like the earth of a grave. Then to rogue wakes up. He has no pulse, and he appears to have thrown up part of his organs in the bloody ichor he coughed up right before he died. He just appears to have just acquired the undead trait. Nothing else has changed. The cleric "tests" this by trying to heal him, which hurts him. So this is obviously bad. Aside from not suffering critical hits and a few other benefits, being undead kind of blows. The cleric and inquisitor are willing to work to help cure the rogue of his curse, as opposed to putting him to the sword immediately, so that is nice of them. so the party sets off to the east, in pursuit of the necromancer, and probably toward the mystery horror land where nothing lives or comes back alive. The party has about a two week journey ahead of them, and they have an option: they can go straight along the road, which is faster and safer, but it will also take them through Galt. Galt is a libertarian hellhole and the group just fought off a raiding force from Galt last time, so they're not eager for a reunion at the moment. They'd have to sneak through Galt. Their other option is to go south of Galt, off the road, skirting along a mountain range. They decide to do that, to take it slow and overland, and that a random encounter there is preferable to trying to get through Galt. All the while, the rogue is hearing voices. They're whispers and he can't make out any specifics, but he's definitely hearing poo poo. He doesn't mention any of this for fear of the cleric and the inquisitor's righteous wrath. I roll up a random encounter, and it ends up being a young (particularly dumb and arrogant) white dragon. The party kills it in a pitched battle, but everyone is alright at the end of things. The session has run a bit long, so this is a good place to end it, but I end the game on one last note. I ask the rogue to make a perception check. He passes. He now hears the voices clearly in his head. They say: "The dragon's treasure is to the south, through that little pass under the forked tree up in the mountains." The rogue looks toward the mountains, and sees exactly that, in the distance. The gem sniffs out treasure. But it also makes him undead. The rogue suddenly suggests to the group that they take a detour into the mountains. He hasn't yet told the group that he doesn't want to fix the curse anymore. Failing to fix the curse would almost certainly mean the cleric and/or the inquisitor would have to put him down, or leave a group that tolerated a willing undead. poo poo's gonna get real.
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Dec 7, 2015 15:33
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