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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. Nah, just use clipboards and jumpsuits. PCs show up in a corporate-branded repair tug. "Yeah, I'm looking' for a Darth Vadder, Vaper... Oh yeah, Vader. Sorry to bother youse, but we're from KDY and dere's been a recall on the hyperdrive cores that were shipped to the Maw. Normally those jerks at corporate would just send out a letter, but seeing how youse are a big customer, they sent us out all courtesy-like. Give us a couple hours to look it over and we'll be outta here..."
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Dec 7, 2015 22:00
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Railing Kill posted: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.
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Dec 7, 2015 22:05
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Yawgmoth posted:This is intra-party conflict done right. Unless it's a player who's just been railroaded into a weird 'now you're a zombie' arc after failing one pickpocket & will check, (through 'it magically re-appears' fiat, after trying to put the cursed item back) gotten their character cursed out from under them, and the DM is pushing them into a party conflict. Or maybe this thread has filled me with pessimism.
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Dec 7, 2015 23:04
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StringOfLetters posted:Unless it's a player who's just been railroaded into a weird 'now you're a zombie' arc after failing one pickpocket & will check, (through 'it magically re-appears' fiat, after trying to put the cursed item back) gotten their character cursed out from under them, and the DM is pushing them into a party conflict. Or maybe this thread has filled me with pessimism. I think it's a pretty obvious case of "you tried to pickpocket a skeezy necromancer and kept it a secret", which is a flag the player wants to tell a story about loving with necromancers. But I share your cynicism.
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Dec 8, 2015 00:29
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StringOfLetters posted:Unless it's a player who's just been railroaded into a weird 'now you're a zombie' arc after failing one pickpocket & will check, (through 'it magically re-appears' fiat, after trying to put the cursed item back) gotten their character cursed out from under them, and the DM is pushing them into a party conflict. Or maybe this thread has filled me with pessimism. The rogue failed multiple perception checks from the necromancer doing the whole pickpocketing schtick back.
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Dec 8, 2015 00:34
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Dirk the Average posted:The rogue failed multiple perception checks from the necromancer doing the whole pickpocketing schtick back. That whole thing with the rogue is lame as poo poo, IMO. It's partly the fault of Pathfinder for having dumb poo poo like Geas in the system in the first place, it's partly the fault of designing a situation so that the rogue, a master of skullduggery and sleight-of-hand, gets clowned on his home turf by a loving NECROMANCER of all people. Oh you rolled bad 3 times in a row, now you're the DM's plaything. Not my kind of deal but if your player is enjoying it more power to him or her, I guess. I certainly wouldn't.
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Dec 8, 2015 01:01
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:That whole thing with the rogue is lame as poo poo, IMO. It's partly the fault of Pathfinder for having dumb poo poo like Geas in the system in the first place, it's partly the fault of designing a situation so that the rogue, a master of skullduggery and sleight-of-hand, gets clowned on his home turf by a loving NECROMANCER of all people. Oh you rolled bad 3 times in a row, now you're the DM's plaything. To me it reads more like the rogue triggered a curse the moment he/she touched the item, which fuels their greed such that they would unconsciously want the Evil Shiny Thing... but in that case the will-save would have come before they examined it and decided to put it back (to resist the curse itself) or afterward to resist the compulsion to keep it, unless it was a silent/no-save effect. That or rogues just can't resist greed-based mind control.
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Dec 8, 2015 01:11
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I suspect (given Railing Kill's previous posts in this thread) that the player knew roughly what was going on out of character, and was fine with something crazy like this happening to their character.
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Dec 8, 2015 01:52
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:That whole thing with the rogue is lame as poo poo, IMO. It's partly the fault of Pathfinder for having dumb poo poo like Geas in the system in the first place, it's partly the fault of designing a situation so that the rogue, a master of skullduggery and sleight-of-hand, gets clowned on his home turf by a loving NECROMANCER of all people. Oh you rolled bad 3 times in a row, now you're the DM's plaything. Uh, it's a fifth level rogue. He's not a master of anything yet, and his character is smart enough to fool himself into making all sorts of dumb decisions. He's also characterized as being greedy as hell. It seemed like an appropriate thing to do to him. The player should (and does) expect to get hosed over from time to time. He practically designed his charaxcter's personality to get him into trouble. Also, NGDBSS posted:I suspect (given Railing Kill's previous posts in this thread) that the player knew roughly what was going on out of character, and was fine with something crazy like this happening to their character. This. I've been running this Pathfinder game pretty tongue-in-cheek, and everyone has been hosed with at some point. The rogue isn't screwed. He is undead, and he can deal with that in whatever way he wants. The gem does literally nothing but turn him undead, and sniff out treasure. There's nothing about it that makes him my "plaything," and pretty much the whole thing is just a situation for the rogue and the other PCs to play around with.  I think part of it has to do with Pathfinder and other D&D settings being so drat violent with people's existences. Characters can die or can have the core of their being changed quickly, unpredictably, and in some cases routinely. Got killed? Whatever. Someone will bring you back to life, for a nominal fee. My point is, being turned into an undead is not as much of an existential shock in Pathfinder as it is in, say, World of Darkness or Shadowrun. The callousness with which the setting treats the characters is part of the joke in my Pathfinder game. It's very light-hearted. I think there's a lot of folks ITT that have PTSD from lovely GMs or something. I mean, I could see how that story could go on to be a nightmare with a power-mad, railroading DM. I think the ugly stories are giving people a bleak view of otherwise alright scenarios. It's ok. We're in a safe place here. Let it all out. Show me on the doll where the GM hurt you.
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Dec 8, 2015 02:12
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Railing Kill posted:Show me on the doll where the GM hurt you.
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Dec 8, 2015 02:43
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Alright I've got another story about a bloated trainwreck of a game. This is another one with the same extended roleplaying group as the Fate/Stay Night game, and it had the same structural tendency to take on huge amounts of bloat - by the time I joined, there were something like 4 GMs and 8 PCs, each of whom were in charge of multiple characters that weren't always fully aligned with each other. I joined when Liz, one of the GMs, told me that she was having trouble doing right by all the NPCs she was in charge of. She explained one of the factions she played to me and asked me if I'd be interested in taking them on, and since I was always looking for RPG opportunities and she seemed stressed out about it, I agreed to sign on. I figured I'd be helping solve an overcomplication problem, though in retrospect I was obviously contributing to it. Let's back up a bit and explain the initial premise of the game. It's billed as a sorta post-apocalyptic urban fantasy survival horror joint that takes place in a massive apartment complex that got sealed off by the future fascist government a few decades ago for ominous and vague reasons. There's something like 50,000 folks in there, and not nearly enough food to keep the population stable. Over time, most of the surviving residents have coalesced into a handful of "nations" organized around economic and defensive interests, nascent cultural ties, and shared understandings of what the hell's going on in this building. Each player starts out playing one mid-level representative of a specific nation, with an initial adventure hook of "there's a diplomatic conference that concerns all your nations, and you're the folks who are at the right nexus of responsible and expendable, so you're attending this meeting that might well be a trap". An important wrinkle, and one of the reasons I hadn't joined up with the game until Liz pitched me on taking over part of her NPCing duties, was that this game already had a pretty sordid history. This was like the fourth run of it, by my counting. It had originally been written and GMed some five years ago by Eva, a published high-concept sci-fi author who had a reputation in this RPing group as someone who ran incredibly fascinating, intense, and emotionally draining games. I don't know what happened in that first run, but I know a lot of my friends were in the second run and most seemed miserable throughout. And then the third run happened halfway across the country and apparently involved one of the PCs eating most of the others? But three of those friends in that miserable second run were now on the GM team for this fourth run, so I figured I was getting a slanted take on the game because I'd become the designated person to vent to. And besides, now that they were at the helm alongside Eva, they'd be able to steer away from the pitfalls that made them miserable before, right? As far as what actually made this game a trainwreck, the first big stumbling block is that it's fundamentally sold to the PCs on false premises. When they join up, they're essentially given the spiel I described above, with the added wrinkle of "there also appears to be at least one primitive god in this building, and you can make minor miracles happen by praying to them". But it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that these initial characters you've made are a canard and that the god powers are what really matter, because that initial diplomatic event is explicitly written to be as boring as possible in order to nudge players toward tossing around their god powers just to make something happen. See, this is really a god game all along, and you get to start playing as the nascent god of your nation as soon as your human character dies. So if you've gotten invested in the character you've been roleplaying this whole time because that's the game you signed up for, you get penalized in comparison to the guy who says "Yeah, gently caress it, I'm done with this. Gimme control over the god and the whole nation". Now, while moving to a national and divine power level definitely strips away that primal, claustrophobic, survival horror-esque feeling that serves as one of the game's big selling points, it definitely doesn't convert everything into smooth sailing. It turns out that the diplomatic tensions between the nations are even more important now that everything's at a divine scale, because one of these infant gods has to end up as "king" of the pantheon. The game's metaphysics operate on one of those "belief generates power" deals, and it turns out most of the gods played by the GM team have read the manual on how to most efficiently grind belief and devotion from their nations and thus make themselves the strongest gods around. Accordingly, a PC using their newfound divine powers to do anything too drastic tends to be tamped down by one of these stronger gods, OR the ancient full-fledged god who's been hanging around this building the whole time, OR the mysterious witch who can enslave gods. PCs are mostly encouraged to color within the lines: they should grind up their god's stats, advance national interests in small-scale ways at the expense of nations they don't like, and grovel before omnipotent NPCs whenever necessary. This is all before I even joined the game, keep in mind, and all without even mentioning the player who made Danny from the Fate Stay/Night game look like a model citizen as far as PC cooperation and reasonable roleplaying assumptions go. I can go real deep with this one, depending on thread interest, because it's a truly rich vein of structural problems and dysfunctional interpersonal interactions.
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Dec 8, 2015 02:52
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Yawgmoth posted:I can't, that would be a called shot and what if I fumble oh god the critical failure charts!!! Shhh shhh the bad man is gone now. (Hahaha)
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Dec 8, 2015 02:55
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Sounds charming. And by "charming" I mean "annoying as poo poo."
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Dec 8, 2015 02:59
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Jenny Angel posted:This is all before I even joined the game, keep in mind, and all without even mentioning the player who made Danny from the Fate Stay/Night game look like a model citizen as far as PC cooperation and reasonable roleplaying assumptions go. I can go real deep with this one, depending on thread interest, because it's a truly rich vein of structural problems and dysfunctional interpersonal interactions. We have a thing for this. 
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Dec 8, 2015 03:02
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Jenny Angel posted:This is all before I even joined the game, keep in mind, and all without even mentioning the player who made Danny from the Fate Stay/Night game look like a model citizen as far as PC cooperation and reasonable roleplaying assumptions go. I can go real deep with this one, depending on thread interest, because it's a truly rich vein of structural problems and dysfunctional interpersonal interactions. This sounds horrifying in some fascinating ways. Please share!
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Dec 8, 2015 03:02
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I'd been wanting to run Dungeon World for my group for a while, and we finally had a chance. Made a quick one-shot that could dovetail into a full game if everyone seemed to enjoy it, based around the starting area of Might and Magic 7. Essentially, rich old guy holds a scavenger hunt on a small island to find someone worthy of inheriting his lands, though in reality he's just trying to get rid of the burden of running a neutral town in the dead center of a warzone and making it into a "test." I need to work on my on-the-fly 7-9 resolutions but otherwise things went pretty well. What makes this story thread-worthy, though, is that the game contained an abandoned but working cannon, a wand of fireballs, and the Witch's exploding potions...and they didn't use any of them. I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed of my players. Granted the wand would only be given to them if they agreed to an as-yet-unnamed favor in the future and they didn't like the thought of that, but still.
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Dec 8, 2015 03:17
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VanSandman posted:We have a thing for this. StrixNebulosa posted:This sounds horrifying in some fascinating ways. Please share! Sounds good, I'll write up some more tomorrow.
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Dec 8, 2015 03:37
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Railing Kill posted:Uh, it's a fifth level rogue. He's not a master of anything yet, and his character is smart enough to fool himself into making all sorts of dumb decisions. He's also characterized as being greedy as hell. It seemed like an appropriate thing to do to him. The player should (and does) expect to get hosed over from time to time. He practically designed his charaxcter's personality to get him into trouble. Or to put it in Dungeon World parlance, the Thief rolled a 6- on his 'Tricks of The Trade' move, and the GM countered by making a 'Turn Their Move Back On Him' move, followed by 'Present Riches At A Price'. The player can choose to get his thief cured, but lose the treasure finding ability, or he can choose to keep his [Undead] tag and keep his new 'Locate Treasure' move. Some of you guys are so traumatized by lovely grognards that the mere mention of 3.x or pathfinder triggers you. Militant Lesbian fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 04:05
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Quote is not edit, even on a phone.
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Dec 8, 2015 04:06
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A current local RPG fad where I am is Iron Man D&D, something of a pisstake on the multitude of OD&D/1e/AD&D games that have been ran recently (mostly by a small groups of old but cool dudes), and the idea that you should roll your stats for purity. The idea goes, if you are rolling stats randomly, why not roll class and race as well? And since you're already kicking yourself in the dick, roll 4d6 drop highest in order for stats, resulting in poo poo like the heavily armoured Str 3 wizard who cannot actually move. Since it's mostly for one-shots and half the fun is in rolling up a bizzare and incompetent character, I cobbled together a quick and dirty system with bits from 13th age, 5e, and the hero dice/powers that yogscast use in their RPG-quest thing. Managed to get a couple of friends round for a game the other night, and ran a scenario that had been rattling around in my head for a week or two; SuperHellMax 3000 (significantly inspired by The Cube). The characters are all prisoners in the world/dimension's most inescapable prison, and have all woken up in adjacent rooms. Each room has 4 doors, excepting those at an edge, which instead have either a blank wall or a window. The party ended up being; Bassoon Dudley, a gnome rogue with 5 Con but 16 Charisma (the highest attribute in the party) with the power to summon birds. Imprisoned along with his pet pigeon Pól for ostrich rustling. Dermot the Ineffective, The Safety Sith, aka Kelgos the Danger Mage, an elven wizard with 7 Int and 7 Wis, with the power to go full palpatine. Obsessed with making sure that everyone and everything followed the Correct Safety Procedures, and imprisoned for going the full palpatine on people who didn't follow safety procedures. Gareth Jellyman, the elven high priest of Beyonce, and expert jelly/ice cream chef, able to turn anything into jelly. He was thrown into SuperHellMax3000 for public urination in a city where the local stone reacts explosively with piss, also the locations of the world's largest orphanage, with an accidental manslaughter toll of 3 million dead. Señor Esqueleto, the half-guacamole Warlock with Str 3, who was unable to actually move. He was infact, a skeleton inside a guacamole-filled rubber suit, inside a suit of armor. One player couldn't make the game, as he was at a concert, but told us to make a character for him anyway so he could be sacrificed to distract some bats. This is that character. He was in jail for either food hygeine standards violations, or for being a horrible undead avocado abomination, we couldn't decide which was funnier. I'll write up the actual game if people are interested, once I'm back home with my notebook so I can remember character names. Edit: now home with names. Ambi fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Dec 9, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 07:01
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Ambi posted:A current local RPG fad where I am is Iron Man D&D, something of a pisstake on the multitude of OD&D/1e/AD&D games that have been ran recently (mostly by a small groups of old but cool dudes), and the idea that you should roll your stats for purity. The idea goes, if you are rolling stats randomly, why not roll class and race as well? And since you're already kicking yourself in the dick, roll 4d6 drop highest in order for stats, resulting in poo poo like the heavily armoured Str 3 wizard who cannot actually move. Since it's mostly for one-shots and half the fun is in rolling up a bizzare and incompetent character, I cobbled together a quick and dirty system with bits from 13th age, 5e, and the hero dice/powers that yogscast use in their RPG-quest thing. I am down for this story.
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Dec 8, 2015 07:16
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Ambi posted:I'll write up the actual game if people are interested, once I'm back home with my notebook so I can remember character names.
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Dec 8, 2015 08:02
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Holy poo poo, you know it's a good game when it's impossible to determine who the best character is. 
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Dec 8, 2015 12:50
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Jenny Angel posted:Bait and switch poo poo I have a real problem with GMs pitching one game and then running something completely different to that without telling you. It can work really well if the GM knows the group really well and if they trust the GM not to get it wrong, but considering the GM basically starts the game by lying to all their friends it's really risky. I don't know why people do this.
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Dec 8, 2015 12:51
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I think that even if you were running a game where there's supposed to be an element of mystery, it behooves you to tell your players what the game is actually like so they can play along. I guess people think that it's cool and subtle to run something like Night's Black Agents without telling the players that they're actually fighting vampires, or having the vampire element come out in the middle of investigative play, but if I didn't know I was playing NBA and I kept emptying clips of ammo into Dracula and wasn't making any headway I'd just assume the GM was loving with me. In contrast, if I did know that the trail is supposed to lead to a confrontation with supernatural undead, I could totally play up that aspect. Examine the blood spatter with a "wait, what the gently caress?"; talk to my pastor after I see things that science just can't explain; lure the sucker into an apartment building that's rigged to collapse around the both us if things go south because C4 is the only way to make sure. That kind of thing. EDIT EDIT: Or to make a movie analogy, outside of that one time when they dropped Alan Rickman without him knowing, people who are in horror movies know that they're in a horror movie. That's why they can act scared so convincingly! gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 13:24
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Doodmons posted:I have a real problem with GMs pitching one game and then running something completely different to that without telling you. It can work really well if the GM knows the group really well and if they trust the GM not to get it wrong, but considering the GM basically starts the game by lying to all their friends it's really risky. I don't know why people do this. Yeah for real. I had always just assumed that the players were told about this shift in focus when they signed up, or that the former players from the second run had at least corrected that now that they were GMs, but apparently not. Would it be surprising if I told you that Eva was also the main writer and GM for that Renaissance game I wrote about a little bit back, where low-intensity hijinks gradually gave way to world-crushing angst? Because, uh hosed Up Hell Building: Pt II That's kinda Eva's MO in general, as far as I can tell. This game's not quite the same kind of 180 tonal shift, but it totally is the case that the early goings have the same kind of gallows humor among the post-apocalyptic setting that you might find in, say, Fallout. These folks are cut off from the modern world, so they don't know the actual terms for things, and you end up with some goofy "yes and" revisionist history. For example, the nation that maintains the building's library is pretty terrible at that job, so it's in their national character sheet that Hitler and Gargamel are both great historical villains from the outside world and probably allies. Wacky! That stuff is sorta designed to fade into the background as the game goes on, though, because all the pronouncements it actually makes about history and setting are cartoonishly bleak. For example, the reason this building's been sealed off in the first place has to do with a cataclysmic war going on between the world's two main superpowers, Oceania and Eurasia (yeah as far as I can tell there's no actual connection to 1984 beyond "this is a dystopia"). The building's in Oceania, which is a sci-fi fascist hellhole that's killed off all its gods by being overly rational scientists, and which is getting its poo poo kicked in by Eurasia, a much less technologically advanced country that contains most of the pantheons from real-world historical societies (though weirdly enough, the only ones that show up are from pantheons you learn about in grade school...?) and has priests that throw around impossibly powerful miracles on the battlefield. So the hosed Up Hell Building was created when a preposterously evil scientist on the Oceanic government's payroll suggested they cram a bunch of folks, including a bunch of Totally Dangerous Mental Patients, into the worst environment possible in the hope that these folks will devolve into a primordial societal state and eventually cry out into the void for something to save them, and that'll result in some gods. If you're thinking, "Wait, that seems like a dubious military strategy, since you have to wait for the people in the building to forget the outside world and form primitive cultures and religions", it's all good because it apparently only takes ~20 years for all of this to happen. If you're thinking, "Wait, that seems like it would only generate a specific type of god because what does, say, Hephaestus have to do with providing comfort and salvation in the face of oblivion", it's all good because every kind of god comes from that same process. Which I can deal with, I guess? They're pretty big reaches, but I can roll with some setting abstractions if the concept of the game calls for them. It's only been 20 years because there's a bunch of NPCs involved in the initial creation of the hosed Up Hell Building that Eva wanted to still be around, and there's that weird unified model for how gods are born because Eva wanted to let PCs define their gods broadly while keeping them on the same rule set. So it all makes... some kind of sense? As long as it makes the actual environment of the building a rich and compelling one to play in. Unfortunately, in practice, it mostly means that the building has an excuse to get crammed full of as much torture, rape, slavery, and cannibalism as possible. All that high-concept backstory kinda just ends up as justification for why there's a dozen torture porn movies going on in the background at any given time. It also means that, like I mentioned before, effecting any kind of positive change is a huge uphill battle against the whims of the GMs, even when you have a god on your side. There's a being in the building called the Primordium that's there to serve as an enemy to the pantheon, and it goes around rampaging and exploding poo poo throughout the building and undoing most of the gains that PCs work towards in terms of making things better. Whichever god kills the Primordium gets to be king of the pantheon, so get to work grinding belief out of your nation faster than all the other PCs are, because that's the only way you're ever actually going to be able to make things better, and because that's how Eva explicitly defines "winning the game" once she finally lays all the cards out on the table. Incidentally, the Primordium was formed after the lead scientist on the hosed Up Hell Building project subjected his son to decades of torture and abuse, because of course it was. Of course, killing the Primordium doesn't actually solve the core issue of "we are at the mercy of the GMs' ability to gently caress everything over at any time they want", because like I mentioned in my last post, there's a whole mess of uber-powerful gods out there and once they become aware of you, you're in charge of making sure they don't immediately kill you. If you've ground out your stats efficiently and become king of the pantheon, your divine stat total at this point might be somewhere around a few hundred? But Apollo is out there with a stat total "in the million", with the ability to instantly, fatally snipe you from any point in the world, and with prophetic powers that mean that literally any plan against him will get instantly discovered and foiled unless it's put together in a special prophecy-proof room. So functionally, you better be ready to spend a session or two grovelling before Apollo and his pals. This is all, I feel like, a product of Eva's very specific and very weird understanding of what power dynamics inherently involve (hint: a lot of grovelling). More on that topic in Pt III, where I finally get to the subject of the character I was assigned.
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Dec 8, 2015 17:18
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This sounds like a fascinating premise totally squandered by cramming in the wrong genre. Fortunately, the only thing I like more than big supernatural or sci-fi mysteries to unravel is trainwrecks.
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Dec 8, 2015 18:11
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Kavak posted:This sounds like a fascinating premise Yeah, definitely! There's definitely a reason that Eva keeps drawing in players for her games despite all of her previous games devolving into miserable trainwrecks. She has a lot of creative talent, she's mostly just missing all the other skills that lead to a successful RPG. From what I can tell her non-RPG writing, while still sometimes bleak to the point where I have to tap out, is much better.
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Dec 8, 2015 18:20
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I think the whole "throw the players a twist in genre" thing has to be both slow, and a shift from, say, "SWAT team taking out a hostage situation" to "SWAT team dealing with some supernatural crap" over the course of multiple sessions. Build it slowly in such a way that it's more "Wow, that guy must have had a bullet proof vest, shooting him in the chest just knocked him down and made him mad...what do you mean he didn't have one?" and less "Wow, that guy's Cthulhu!" in session one. As well as, ya know, pitching to the players that there's a twist, pitching it as "SWAT team stuff, but there's more to all this than meets the eye" or something.
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Dec 8, 2015 19:36
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Jenny Angel posted:hosed Up Hell Building: Pt II I also agree that this could be a great premise for a game, in the hands of a different GM. For one thing, making the tone less one-note could do wonders for the premise. For example: what if Oceania's scientists discovered that any sufficiently strong emotion could generate a god, and not just abject suffering. That way, in character, the different nations could have different ways to experiment in creating a god. You'd have a horror/rape/murder nation or two, for sure, but you'd also have the nation that's a giant mosh pit full of Klingons or some poo poo, and a nation that's a giant harem full of people just having a grand old time. Out of character, the game wouldn't be as monotonous as it turned out. I mean, I like a good, bleak post-apocalyptic sci fi as much as the next goon, but there's a reason people run games in the Fallout setting and not in The Road. The Road is fantastic but holy poo poo is it too bleak for players to enjoy a game in it. (Hell, even the tone of that novel varies more than this game sounded, which is saying a lot). That's all separate from the GM(s) constantly setting back PC progress. GMs need to let the players win. Occasionally in small victories, and ultimately, at the end. Players are playing to hear a good story, but they're also there to participate in it, and to affect change. GMs that don't get that need to seriously reconsider why they are running a game and not just writing a story with a downbeat ending. Edit: Also, there's too many cooks in that kitchen. 4 GMs for 8 players is too many GMs for a LARP, let alone a tabletop game. 6 players is about my limit for a tabletop game without another GM to take some of the load. 7 is a strong "maybe." I've run one game with 9 players, and that was a mistake. But why does there need to be 4 GMs? It's not like a LARP where the GMs can kind of do their own thing and literally go their separate ways. At a table, how do 4 GMs not step on each other's feet? Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8 Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Dec 8, 2015 |
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Dec 8, 2015 20:13
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Railing Kill posted:I mean, I like a good, bleak post-apocalyptic sci fi as much as the next goon, but there's a reason people run games in the Fallout setting and not in The Road. The Road is fantastic but holy poo poo is it too bleak for players to enjoy a game in it. (Hell, even the tone of that novel varies more than this game sounded, which is saying a lot). I once played a short one-shot LARP based on The Road. It was the most depressing thing ever, and ended with us huddled up in the rain, trying and failing to start a fire. It was a great experience, but if it had been more than three hours long, it would have been wayyyy too much.
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Dec 8, 2015 21:26
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cptn_dr posted:I once played a short one-shot LARP based on The Road. It was the most depressing thing ever, and ended with us huddled up in the rain, trying and failing to start a fire.  The thought of re-reading that now that I have a child is too much. Holy crap is that book affecting. It's just too nihilistic for a game setting. PC objective: live for another day. Secondary objective: don't get raped to death or succumb to the siren song of cannibalism. It makes the World of Darkness look like loving Candyland. At least you have theoretically achievable goals in WoD, even if they are usually out of reach like achieving Golconda or beating The Wyrm. It's a carrot you can chase after. The only carrot in The Road is literally a carrot. A single carrot. That you had to kill a man to get. And it is rotten. And it is seasoned only with your tears. And it has to feed the entire group. For two days.
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Dec 8, 2015 21:58
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Bleak stuff can be good in moderation. A Quiet Year game I was in ended with a third of the population being abducted by flesh eating aliens, a third being killing by an ancient giant robot, and the last third huddling in ancient bunkers with the scientist that knew how to work the machines in the bunker having been murdered earlier. Undeniably bleak, but A) it didn't start that way, but slowly transitioned there and B) we all went in knowing how the Quiet Year can end badly if things work out that way. For reference this game was about two or three hours long. Related, I really like the Quiet Year.
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Dec 8, 2015 22:07
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The only post-apocalypse game I've run was part of a series of games using 3.0/3.5 D&D. In hindsight, the system wasn't ideal for what we were doing, but it was simple and it was what all of my players knew and they were comfortable with it, so we used that. The game was intended as a prequel to two campaigns I ran in that setting throughout college. Both of those campaigns were long and took about a year and a half to complete, each. The setting for those games was a fantasy setting on the cusp of science fiction. Sword and sorcery was just starting to blend with science and technology, and all sorts of setting stuff made that relationship complicated and violent. Most of all was that modern technology was accelerated into use because it wasn't being invented naturally in what we would call the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolutions. Instead, high technology was being discovered in ruins, in far-flung places, all over the globe. So, as soon as the sword and sorcery part of the setting got to what we might recognize as the Age of Exploration (1400's-1500's), all hell broke loose as civilizations could finally stumble across these ruins and exploit them. The prequel took place over 10,000 years prior, and was meant to explain the origins of those ruins, some of the setting's details, and even magic itself. The prequel was a different setting entirely, but I tried to fulfill the players' expectations by maintaining the previous games' tone and plot writing. The setting was fantasy/sci fi with a dark edge, but I wouldn't go as far to say "dark fantasy." It was close in tone to George R.R. Martin, even though I hadn't read A Song of Ice and Fire then. I guess I would say it was a fantasy setting where lovely stuff could happen, but did not necessarily have to happen, like in most "dark fantasy." But I ran the post-apocalypse game with a group of players that had played in the previous games, so they had some expectations for the tone, if not the setting. I let them know the setting would be wildly different, and they were cool with that. The prequel took place just after the fall of some grand civilization, a utopia. The PCs were all young enough to be the first generation after the fall of that civilization, so they only knew second-hand, if at all, about how cool things used to be. But they weren't so deep into the apocalypse that they were all hard-cases about everything. The setting's economy was water. I had general ideas for what water was worth from the NPCs' perspectives, but otherwise it was up to the PCs to use it to barter. With the setting being mostly a blasted wasteland where food and fresh water were increasingly rare, water just seemed like a natural fit (and not like it hasn't been used before for similar reasons). That made for some interesting interactions, though, since the PCs had unique abilities to, say, Create Water, as per the spell. That made the druid hot poo poo most of the time, but it also put the group in danger at least once when NPCs found out about this potential resource. There's a story in there, but I'll post it separately if people are interested. It's mainly a story about a PC being an unadulterated badass and is the one of the most  stories I have in my memory.Anyway, despite the setting I tried to spare the bleakness. Things were tough and the PCs had to struggle to survive, because that's part of a post-apocalypse setting. Things were going to get bleak form time to time, but I tried to change it up a bit and keep things interesting for the players. I also tried to still have achievable, player-driven goals, and to let the players ultimately win. And they did, in the bleakest way possible. There is an NPC in the setting named Aisha. She is True Neutral, and she is the leader of a dangerous band of raiders. She is kind of a wild card to the PCs, who are trying to carve out a safe place to live while they search for a way to reverse the ecological disaster that is wrecking the planet's ability to support life. Aisha's gang (small army, really) is like a lot of the other raiders, in that they are as likely to attack the PCs for their poo poo as to trade with them. But Aisha is TN, as opposed to the Evil raiders that would just attack. So the PCs sometimes turn to her for help when need be, and she even asked them for help once or twice. But the relationship is definitely not friendly. She is kind of like Han Solo (in A New Hope, at least), but with a band of Mad Max raiders at her command. (The PCs also lost a bunch of poo poo to her in a poker game that we played IRL, with modifications to make use of character stats. They lost because one of the players was getting drunk IRL throughout the game, and royally hosed up a wager that cost the group the game. It was hilarious, and I can also post that separately as well.) The PCs have all sorts of interactions with other NPCs: evil raiders, a fascist dictator hell-bent on preserving civilized Law at the expense of Good, a secret society of post-human mutants, and other towns competing over dwindling natural resources. After it all, the PCs figure out a way to access the fallen civilization's weather control satellite system from an underground bunker they discover. The problem is, the mutants find the location at about the same time, and they want to use the weather control satellites to further gently caress up the ecosystem to wipe out the remaining non-mutant population. So it is a race to get to the bunker and the control panel there. The PCs enlist Aisha's army one last time, because she has rad motorcycles and trucks and poo poo, and traveling with her is faster and safer. No stops to fight raiders when you're trucking with your own raiders. It is in Aisha's interest to help the PCs because, well, she's human, so if someone doesn't stop the mutants, she's as dead as everyone else. Her whole character is built around the idea of survival, no matter what. She never grew a real conscience like Han Solo, and never selflessly did anything. That will become important. So the PCs barely beat the mutants to the bunker, but there is a delay. They have to do a lot of repairs and work with the system to get it back online. All the while, the mutants are getting closer. There is a bit of a dungeon crawl to clear out the bunker for teams to get to work, and the PCs handle that. Some advance scouts of mutants start showing up, and the PCs handle that too. The NPCs don't have all the skills to get the system online, so the PCs pitch in there, too. They worked tirelessly and at great expense to get this all done, and just barely before the mutant army shows up. But something goes wrong. A couple of the PCs hosed up a some of the most important rolls, and the weather control system wasn't working as planned. It starts warming the planet dangerously. So, (knowing that this is intended as the last game of the campaign, and knowing that this is a prequel game to set up a far-future setting), the PCs elected to stay outside and fight the mutant hoard while Aisha and her army and the folks from the PC's town that came along sealed themselves into the climate-controlled bunker. The PCs don't want to leave the mutants outside unchecked, for fear that they'll find a way into the bunker after it is closed. They fend off the mutants, kill their leader, and the mutants rout. The PCs are left outside a sealed bunker, with the heat slowly rising. They are also far from civilization, and bereft of resources. They are badly wounded, exhausted, and just about out of water. They have no way to contact Aisha through the shielded bunker, but they knew that going into the plan. The PCs all died of exposure outside the bunker, together, having saved the world. At the risk of this sounding like some kind of horrible, Randian parable, Aisha's selfishness pays off, and shapes the future. She never had that moment like Han Solo at the end of A New Hope and went back to help the PCs. But her selfishness made her the best fit to shepherd what was left of humanity into the future. But lacking that Good core, it says a lot about how lovely things get with civilization later in the setting's future. Then again, she and her flock of survivors know that the PCs' sacrifice made their survival possible. So it's not all bad. Maybe. I guess the experiment here was in what a hero looks like from the future's point of view. The PCs were the real heroes, and did heroic things. Who lives to tell the tale isn't necessarily (or definitely isn't) the hero. In a different game, with a different theme and tone, the PCs should be the ones in the bunker at the end. But that wasn't the point of this game. This wouldn't have worked with different players, but it worked with this group because they understood the tone (and some of them love dying heroically).
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Dec 8, 2015 23:53
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think that even if you were running a game where there's supposed to be an element of mystery, it behooves you to tell your players what the game is actually like so they can play along. I dunno. Sometimes the gimmick is not knowing and improvising, but you have to have a lot of trust in your players/DM in order to know that they have your entertainment in mind. I'm pretty lucky in that my gaming group for twenty five years was also comprised of my best friends, so when things went sideways we could (mostly) talk about it and fix it. So when one of us decided to run a game without telling us its name or what it was about, we went for it, trusting in the process. All I was told was that it was going to be set in present day Oakland, CA and to create whatever we wanted. I wasn't allowed to use a character sheet and had to use a lined piece of paper lest the title of the game give it away. And we'd all be solo gaming for a while before we all linked up. I ended up rolling a thirtysomething blue-collar tow-truck driver (a career determined by flipping through the yellow pages) who fled <midwest city> as a youth to live on the streets of Oakland as a street punk, eventually cleaning up and getting a job at a local auto body shop, working his way up to tow truck driver. The only plot device I had to work it was that I had a steady live-in girlfriend for many many years who disappeared without a traceone day. We role-played his life for a few sessions, with the DM painting a story of his life as I sorta cast about for clues into the game we were playing and why we were going through this. And then I realized that I was being stalked by my missing girlfriend. The next sessions were me going through my daily life while I tried to spot and follow my girlfriend through the streets of Oakland and San Francisco. Eventually I was at a party and I spotted her at the same party and tried to catch her but she got away from me and I slowly become obsessed about her in-game while going WTF in real life. Eventually I catch up to her with another man at a dive bar and confront them and get the poo poo kicked out of me by the man and knocked unconscious. I wake up in a locked room to listen to an argument between my girlfriend and the other man about whether or not they should kill me for "getting too close". It was at this point that I realize that I'm playing Vampire: The Masquerade RPG. And shortly thereafter I was embraced by my girlfriend into the Brujah (she herself having been embraced by her sugar-daddy-cum-mentor who was some high-power Brujah), against the wishes of her mentor and was introduced with the other players into the main campaign. It was by far one of the best introductions to a game system and a new campaign ever. I remember befriending another fledgeling Toreador vampire (another PC) who was actually still human and was pretending to be a vampire pretending to be a human with the full knowledge of his mentor-vampire who didn't have the heart to turn him. At the same time me and my girlfriend tried to maneuver to stay alive after her going against her master's wishes by embracing me. This was one of those games where the DM had to do very little once the game got rolling as the whole story was driven by our character backgrounds and the results of our solo-sessions bumping into everyone else's. Also, Railing Kill posted:The thought of re-reading that now that I have a child is too much. Holy crap is that book affecting. It's just too nihilistic for a game setting. Holy poo poo this. After having kids, suddenly all of my fantasies of post-apocalyptic survival / life-as-a-vampire came crumbling down when I realized that my newborn kids would probably die if my "fantasy" ever became reality. This book was horrible to read post-kids. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Dec 9, 2015 |
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Dec 9, 2015 01:23
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My friend's long term DnD5e game ended a few weeks ago. I would say overall I enjoyed it, but it has been a bumpy ride. The party changed a few times, we had a Barbarian, Bard, Druid, Paladin and Wizard to begin with. Eventually the Druid dropped out due to scheduling at work and the Barbarian came back as a Sorcerer. The bard was called Connor although that was not his actual name and we never found it out. His gimmick was mostly trying to impersonate people to see if he could, as he was a con artist, and tended to annoy people but avoid anything truly disastrous with his character. On the other hand, the paladin served the goddess of death and to see he was zealous in fighting the undead would be an understatement. Both he and the bard were humans, while the sorcerer was a half-elf. As for the sorcerer, he was a wild mage who took every opportunity to flirt with a female character, with authority, and with danger. I was a dwarven wizard with a practical view on law, regulating magic, and who maintained a mostly friendly ongoing argument with the sorcerer over the importance of the laws of basics and following the fundamentals of spellcasting instead of just winging it. Everyone except the bard who mostly tagged along for mischief had a personal quest as well. The paladin wanted to recover the armour and weapon of an ancient paladin of his order who had betrayed by his brother. The paladin's brother had then become an extremely powerful undead and he and his followers were barely locked away by the church definitely never to be seen again. The sorcerer railed against the laws of magic and wanted to find a source of primal magic from before the gods applied laws to it. My dwarf had a pirate flag with a dragon skull and crossbones on it as a trinket, so I came up with a backstory about how his family had been the royal guards and the Arkentsone (original I know) had been lost on their watch 70 years ago, before he was born, causing his family and people great shame and loss of face. He was on a quest to retrieve it and stop his family from losing their nobility. Another source of antagonism between the paladin and I was a matter of difference in religion. Because most of the party was human, or mostly human, I was the only one with non-human beliefs and attitudes. So when the GM said that there was a myth that the dwarf gods stole the spark of life and used it to make the first dwarves, causing the goddess of death to take a dim view to them in general, I turned around and came up with the dwarven version. This was in part due to the ongoing antagonism with the paladin and me feeling kind of frustrated that the paladin might take it as a justification to be more of a dick to my character. So I said that to my character's people, the dwarf gods had created the first dwarf and they were pretty good, and the human gods were jealous. The goddess of death then stole all the unborn dwarven souls and this was why dwarves were so obsessed with mining gold and precious gems. Each dwarf has to pay for their way into the afterlife, because the gold and other precious treasure is tithed to the human goddess to release dwarven souls so that more dwarves can be born. Later the GM uses this to try and bring the paladin and I closer together in a well-meaning but somewhat disastrous idea. The Arkenstone became a spark of life, which was fortunately left ambiguous enough to not necessarily validate either religion's story and also came from a hold that the dwarves made on the border of human lands. It got abandoned and the border moved later, meaning that it was within the human lands at the start for us to adventure to. The stone itself had been stolen by a white dragon and its deranged dwarves who had invented a magical warp stone steam nuke, whose base we infiltrated. We stole the Arkenstone, killed the evil clan leader, hijacked his prototype airship and magic nuke and got out of dodge before the white dragon got up and killed us all. Now the paladin had been given a quest by a different god of the human pantheon to his patron, to try and reconcile our two peoples and the Arkenstone was supposed to play a part in this. Being something that could grant life to that which was not alive he considered it to be a holy artifact of his order, despite the fact that it had been dug up by dwarves, been in dwarf lands for over a thousand years and had never been used; to the dwarves it was just a really pretty and incredible rock they lauded over other races. So now the paladin kept trying to get me to give it to him, despite being the focal point of my entire character's quest since the beginning of the game, and also having only a 'my goddess told me so' to justify having it. Which while sufficient to his character, was hardly worth considering for mine. This drew to a head as the airship hurled like a fiery comet to the dwarf capital and he made threats that his paladins would invade and take it by force, or he would get elven assassins to come and steal it. As a result when he tried to brooch the idea that I could keep the stone if I had a church dedicated to his goddess built in the dwarven capital I told his character to get stuffed. In the end I handed the Arkenstone back to the kind, restored the dwarven people's honour and saved my family from becoming peasants. Oh and I got given land and a title as a reward for my deeds as well. Work has been pretty awful for the last twelve months and the game had been one of my few face to face interactions with people outside of that environment, so as a result the paladin's actions were becoming fairly toxic and making me quite unhappy with the game. However when I broached this to both him and the GM, neither seemed to understand my issues. They both talked about how his character was justified in acting how he did based on his background and religion, and that he couldn't justify suddenly changing his approach. As I was getting pretty unhappy with the game, I told the GM I would rather leave, which made sense given my character had completed his story arc and the toxic relationship with the paladin gave him little reason to continue travelling with the party. They had been rewarded by the king, and so he had no debt to them to repay. However the GM responded that he would rather end the game there, than have me drop out because he liked my character. It made me pretty frustrated and upset, because now I felt like I was holding the other two player's fun to hostage. I am friends with everyone in the game, and just wanted to get out of a situation that was making me unhappy when it should have been fun, so suddenly causing the game to die because of that felt really awful. Later I discussed it with the GM about why this made me feel really upset, which the GM had not understood but was apologetic once I explained it. The player of the paladin himself out of the game is fine and generally a nice person. He's not perfect but he had no reason to go after me personally. He has a history of playing characters with extreme moral axis, such as a monk and a druid in the past, and then arguing about very obtuse and often irrelevant points. I've played with him before without any personal issues in a lot of games. He did have an argument that lasted an hour and only ended with both the GM and I yelled at him and the other players to shut up. The argument had been about how it was unethical to betray a pack of gnolls because they had not specifically done anything wrong to us yet, even though it was just an alliance of convenience for both sides against a greater threat, yet as soon as we pointed out they were squatting on our patron's lands we were trying to reclaim it suddenly became fine to attack the now lawbreaking gnolls. He's a much better GM, as those kinds of antics are both toned down and also not nearly as bloody minded or game-disrupting. Ultimately I had to just forgive and forget, and not bring it back up. The game was in its final arc, and we only ran for 5 more weeks after that as it was but it still made me feel a little sour about his whole character. On the other hand, my character took a very personal delight at the game's finale when it turned out that almost everyone in the paladin's church had been corrupted by the order's ancient betrayers, and the church was assisting an invading army of liches and the ancient betrayer himself. Not to mention that the whole thing was actually the paladin's fault all along. Next time I'll mention how we broke the third temporal law, had to represent ourselves before the gods in a court case where we were facing retroactive erasure from existence and time, and how much later we accidentally created the god of time.
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Dec 9, 2015 01:43
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Agrikk posted:I dunno. Sometimes the gimmick is not knowing and improvising, but you have to have a lot of trust in your players/DM in order to know that they have your entertainment in mind. This is the biggest thing, hands down. Just as importantly, the GM needs to realize what is and isn't going to fly with their players at any given time. I've been burned a few times when what looks like one game suddenly reveals its unpalatable high concept like a flasher in the park. I've almost done it to players myself.
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Dec 9, 2015 04:29
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Jenny Angel posted:Of course, killing the Primordium doesn't actually solve the core issue of "we are at the mercy of the GMs' ability to gently caress everything over at any time they want", because like I mentioned in my last post, there's a whole mess of uber-powerful gods out there and once they become aware of you, you're in charge of making sure they don't immediately kill you. If you've ground out your stats efficiently and become king of the pantheon, your divine stat total at this point might be somewhere around a few hundred? But Apollo is out there with a stat total "in the million", with the ability to instantly, fatally snipe you from any point in the world, and with prophetic powers that mean that literally any plan against him will get instantly discovered and foiled unless it's put together in a special prophecy-proof room. So functionally, you better be ready to spend a session or two grovelling before Apollo and his pals. So let me get this straight. The entire point of the game is to become King God. You do this by defeating the God-Killer. But once you do, there's a shitton of other gods which completely dwarf him in power that will push your poo poo in if they think you're too uppity? So the entire point of the game is to bypass your limitations and become the master of your domain, just so you can then be sixteenth-fiddle to old money and serve them abrosia in their parlors while they laugh about the squabbling peasants you recently were one of? What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
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Dec 9, 2015 06:06
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Ambi posted:SuperHellMax 3000 with; The room would otherwise be quite nice, several comfortable-looking couches, a flower-filled vase on top of a small table, an ornate chandelier, all composed entirely of varying colored flames. Including the door handles on this side. Delicately edging their way across, Jellyman, being an especially Wise priest (4 Wisdom), checks to see if fire is hot and burns off a finger. Summoning up eldritch magics, the two wizards manage to open the door without touching the handle and losing any hands. The next room is full of bees. 100% bees. Jellyman hatches a brilliant idea of smoking the bees out, hopefully forcing them into the fire room where they will eventually die, or at least reduce in number. None of the party is willing to give up any of their clothes to be set on fire - the paralyzed Esqueleto doesn't even have any clothes they can steal. Bassoon Dudley stumbles upon the idea of summoning a flock of birds from the void, after all, birds are flammable! After a moment's laughter, someone points out that birds also eat bees, which they proceed to do, turning it into a room filled completely with very full birds (and a few cooked birds from the fire room). Bassoon, using his skills as a bird whisperer, persuades Pól the pigeon and Seamus the dove to leave the flock of birds and accompany him. The next room is full of 26 pendulum axeblades, which remove Esqueleto's left leg as he is wheeled into the room by Jellyman, who throws himself to the floor. Safety Sith comes up with the bright idea of commando-crawling across the floor to avoid the blades from the ceiling, which of course triggers more blades and removes the unsuspecting Jellyman's right arm. Rather than trying to brave the swinging axes, Dermot takes a good look at the blades, and deduces that they are made of inferior British materials! Cheap flimsy oak wood, and pig iron, and after a few more swings he is proven right (and the trap ineffective) by the blades giving way and crashing to the floor - Safety Sith managing to roll out of the way of any serious injury. The next room is extremely fancy, marble floor and walls, dim mood lighting, and contains 6 ornate pedestals, each holding a very fancy looking item; a book, two rings, a necklace, a mirror, and a mithril prosthetic arm. Jellyman of course immediately attaches the arm to his axe-stump, which he had doubled back and cauterised on the fire sofas, and the arm does not immediately go Evil Hand and start to strangle him! It just gives him and everyone else the constant suspicion that it might. Occasionally in the following hours (whenever I remembered) it would go to wrap around his neck, then instantly stop and give him a thumbs up. Safety Sith reads the book, and finds that it contains (along with helpful gilt illustrations) promises of power beyond his dreams! No catches! Well, no catches that will inconvenience him from using said power! He accepts the devil's bargain and trades away some of his sanity for power (+1 Hero Dice, goes down to 4 Intelligence). Dermot, suspecting some Roidlin' & Toidlin', attempts to recall the books true name - the Book of Intellect Devouring, and immediately grabs it and hurries it away to the fire room. The book pleads with Dermot, offering him power with no strings attached, but he sees through its lies and tosses it into the flaming chandelier. I can't really do this part justice, as it mostly involved me and the player fast-talking at each other in exaggerated Irish accents. Safety Sith, deprived of his book, puts on both magic rings and immediately finds himself invisible and mute, and being stared at by a giant flaming eye. Feeling this wasn't quite enough curses, he tried picking up the mirror and showing the other party members his invisible reflection in it. Dermot comes back, notices the floating Mirror of Reverse Alignment, and shouts at everyone to close their eyes. The Safety Sith has a stunning revelation that his whole life has been a lie. He has been a champion of safety but... he himself is dangerously and maniacally unsafe! The only true course of action is to become Kelgos the Danger Mage (goes down to 3 Wisdom). Meanwhile Bassoon Dudley nicks the necklace, and of course puts it on to see what it does, and finds himself suddenly even shorter than he was before, and seeing things though two wall-eyed perspectives. The rest of the party notices Bassoon suddenly begin flapping his arms and cooing. Figuring out what has happened, Bassoon!Pigeon tries flying up and removing the necklace from his body, but can't quite undo the latch with pigeon toes, and Pigeon!Bassoon angrily swats him away, and then tries to fry him with energy beams from its eyes - Dermot's True Name recognition registers that his is not Bassoon anymore, this is Pól the pigeon, Destroyer of worlds, and Profilic eater of Chips. Seeing the value of a pigeon-brained laser-blasting ally, Jellyman conjures up some Chip-flavoured jelly, and attempts to bribe Pigeon!Bassoon into working for them, which seems to work! Bassoon!Pigeon meanwhile, hearing this unfair appraisal of his worth compared to world-destroying eyebeams, pecks out his own eyes. Pigeon!Bassoon flails, shooting yet more blasts of magic from its hands, and putting a big hole through Esqueleto. Reasoning that he probably isn't going to work for them anymore, and that he might just kill Jellyman and take the remainder of the chip-flavoured jelly, the rest of the party dogpile Pigeon!Bassoon and remove his necklace, returning everyone to their proper bodies. Pól the pigeon immediately takes to the air, and begins peppering the party with tiny laser eye beams, but is brought down by a well-thrown pint of Guiness from Dermot and sat on by Jellyman, who proclaims that the pigeon "Had not been ready for this jelly", and prays mightily that Beyoncé heal Bassoon's eyes, which is granted. And going to cut here, because I have to do other things, but I'll write up the second half of the session in a bit. Still to come; Splitting the party, Hell  , Tony the Tiger, Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper, and the Admin Office.
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Dec 9, 2015 07:17
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I usually only laugh this hard when SS13 stories get posted here.
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Dec 9, 2015 07:34
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