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Frankly it's just short of "and then it turns out the geneticist figured out how to give himself super powers and was having a fight with the wizard in the engine room." of being a SS13 story.
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Dec 9, 2015 08:29
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Railing Kill posted: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. I can't help but be reminded of Artorias from Dark Souls.
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Dec 9, 2015 16:05
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Captain Bravo posted: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? Yeah this is a pretty depressingly accurate read, with a few small caveats. I think there IS some hope that the PCs will eventually get out from under the thumb of the old money gods, especially once they get access the entire population of Oceania as potential believers, not just the ~50k people in the building. So you can theoretically get past that if the game goes long enough, but guess how many runs of this game have gone long enough! The only paradigm I've ever seen the game have is "I'm trying my best to help these people below me that trust me and rely on me, while also worrying about the people above me who can invalidate that at a moment's notice if I don't play nice." In that way, it functions admirably as a Corporate Middle Management Hell Simulator. Now, I know I promised in my last post that I'd start talking about the actual characters I was in charge of, but after speaking to a former player I've realized there's still a lot to cover, so that'll have to wait for another installment. In the meantime, hosed Up Hell Building: Pt III I'd like to dive a little deeper into the life cycle of a PC. I've already mentioned how Eva keeps her cards close to her chest in a way that leads to fundamental bait-and-switches, but there's actually a few layers to that. Here's how the character creation process works: first, you're given a document about the overall setting, including brief overviews on all the nations in the building. You tell the GMs, "I'm interested in playing someone from this nation, this nation, or maybe this nation." Though there's a limit of one PC per nation, everything is still framed as making a single character, not taking ownership of the whole nation. You're then given what's called a "Sheet of No Return" for each nation that you expressed interest in, which rates the nations on a five-point scale across the following metrics: - How evil are you really? - How likely is it you will come into direct conflict with other players? - How much out-of-session extra time will you likely need to put in? - How high-risk is your character's arc? - How hard is it to achieve your character goals? - How much subterfuge will you be caught up in? - How many secrets will you need to keep? Now, all of these are useful things to know before making a character commitment, but we can already see some problems. First off, a question like "how hard is it to achieve your character goals?" only even makes sense if you're already assuming character goals are the same as national goals, because otherwise how could the GMs know how difficult a PC's goals are when that PC doesn't even exist yet? Moreover, questions like "How much evil?" and "How many secrets?" seem really hard to fully answer with just a five-point scale, leading to multiple examples of players who signed up for a nation without realizing just what they'd gotten themselves into. So once you've reviewed a nation's Sheet of No Return and accepted it, you're given a "Stage 1" document about that nation. It's about 12 pages long, and includes information on the history, cultural identity, capabilities, secrets, and diplomatic ties of your nation. There's also a few sample character concepts to help you brainstorm your character, and requirements for where you need to allocate (preposterously bloated homebrew system) stats if you're going to play someone from this nation. Nothing explicitly divine is mentioned yet, except some notes tucked away in your secrets and capabilities that mention that your character will be able to access some maybe-supernatural abilities and you probably don't want to let outsiders know about them. It's only once that character's died that you get a "Stage 2" document that fills you in on the backstory, initial identity, and mechanics of your new divine character. You're then generally given wholesale control over the nation, with a few limitations that vary from nation to nation. You're also encouraged to create at least one new mortal character because your infant god will need someone to act as a vessel or prophet, but at this point you're in charge of everyone. Your Stage 2 document lists a pretty specific set of political goals that you're now responsible for advancing, so whatever new mortal PC you make should probably be in a position to help advance those goals. If you signed onto a nation hoping to play a character with a complicated relationship to his or her national values, sorry. You are now required, at least initially, to stand by and advance all of the dominant values of your nation. There's also the matter of divine mechanics, which are utterly crucial to the game once Stage 2 starts but are intensely obfuscated from the PCs (with the exception of any PCs who have hotlines to NPCs involved in the creation of the hosed Up Hell Building project, who can just get that info whenever they want). You have three core stats that contribute to your overall divine strength: Belief, Domain, and Self. Belief is how many folks worship you and how intensely they worship you, Domain is how many concepts you've rolled up into your portfolio, and Self is how well-defined you are as an entity. Domain and Self can be kinda tricky to separate, but the gist is that Domain covers things like "I am a god of nature, of animals, of the hunt", and Self is more like "I manifest as a taciturn, sharp-eyed huntress with the horns of a great stag". Grinding belief is pretty straightforward once you get the gist of it, but you can work yourself into a pretty permanent hole if you don't immediately systematize it by having your clergy toss around flashy miracles and aggressively evangelize to your people. Grinding self is also pretty much of telling the GMs things about your god and getting numbers in return, though I should mention there's also a preposterous trap option where you can get a big one-time Self boost by declaring "I'm this deity from an existing religious tradition". The cost is that the GMs, from then on, get to veto any action you take if they feel it's inconsistent with [their understanding of] that deity, but thankfully nobody I know actually hosed up by taking that option. The real gently caress-ups come from attempts to grind Domain. The way it works is you give the GMs a list of 1-2 domains that you want to go for during this "round", and they either veto it (too disjointed from your existing identity, too broad/powerful, etc.) or they approve it. Once it's approved, your god reaches a god tentacle into the god sea and tries to pick up that domain. If nobody else currently has that domain, congratulations! You have acquired it, and you can slot it into a body part - e.g. you carry Fire in your eyes. But if someone else DOES already have it, you reach your god tentacle at them and attempt to rip it out. If you fail, the status quo stays intact, but if you succeed, you rip out some limb or organ from this other god and add it to yourself. Note that at this point, divine PCs likely haven't met the other gods yet, and might not even know that other gods exist at all. That's right, there's a completely secret PVP system that you might accidentally trigger by filling out a routine request from the GMs, and if you do too well at it, you're dismembering and traumatizing another PC. So knowing all of that, let's finally talk about the specific experience of one of the players. When Chris looked at the initial setting document, a nation called the Bordermen caught his eye. They're a well-respected warrior nation that lives on the lower floors of the building and sorta acts like a Night's Watch against the constant threat of "Them Below", the spooky monsters that prowl the bottom few floors and make escaping the building through the front door impossible. Chris saw their Sheet of No Return, saw that they rated pretty highly on the evil and secrets scales, but he was hyped enough about the concept of the nation that he figured he'd go through with it. After all, he could always play a naive and idealistic Borderman who didn't know the full extent of his nation's evil secrets. Spoiler: those secrets are mostly torture and slavery, and the Bordermen are selfish and bloodthirsty assholes who take advantage of the building's gratitude to them for keeping the monsters at bay. Chris wasn't too enthused about this, but since he was just playing the one character and he was already too far in to choose another nation, he figured he could roll with it. After all, surely the Bordermen needed some useful idiots at the front lines in order to keep up their heroic reputation with the other nations, right? So he kept going and had a pretty fun time until he hit Stage 2 and was told that he's now playing Shamshir, the vicious God of Damnation, and all the warmongering sadists under his control. Chris was incredibly uncomfortable with all of this, and voiced his concerns almost immediately. Lexi, the lead GM on this run, reassured him that this was just the starting point for Shamshir, and he'd be able to develop this god into different directions. Chris figured that since he had national control, he should start the long process of reshaping the Bordermen into a nation that he'd be remotely comfortable playing, and created a splinter group within the nation called the Order of Resolve. They were idealistic heretics that worshipped Shamshir as a sort of boisterous bro-paladin God of Heroes, and Chris's idea was that their vision of Shamshir would slowly influence and redeem him. Lexi thought this was a great idea and signed off on it as long as Chris understood that the change wasn't happening overnight. Eva, however, wasn't as pleased. To her, the fact that the Bordermen were secretly evil was a key component of balancing the national/divine PVP metagame. The Bordermen were militarily powerful and had strong diplomatic and trade ties across the tower due to their well-respected role, so Eva argued that there had to be a moment where everyone realized how awful they were and turned against them. Chris spent months and months working through this personally meaningful arc where the Bordermen overcame their national demons and were truly inspired to be their best selves, and even capped it off by playing out a civil war wherein the Order of Resolve overthrew the ruling Bordermen junta, putting a significant dent in their military capabilities due to the significant casualties on both sides. At every step of the way, Eva tried to block Chris and insisted that he was cheating, even as Chris cut himself off from a lot of interaction with other PCs because playing out this cultural shift within the Bordermen mattered that much to him. Thankfully, all of this DID help him steer clear of those domain-grabbing landmines, since the other PCs generally understood the idea that "Shamshir is going for every domain tied to the idea of being a dopey bro-paladin god, let's give him that room to breathe". On a broader level, Eva's attitude toward Chris's arc was pretty endemic of her thoughts on PC "balance". Because the mechanical system was such a pile of flimflam and multiple sets of two-digit numbers added to d100 rolls, she turned to largely qualitative means to ensure balance once things hit the divine/national level. Something like "your people are strong and well-fed" was balanced against "you have knowledge of what the world was like before the hosed Up Hell Building" was balanced against "you control the building's primary transportation network" was balanced against "other nations like you". In theory, I could see something like that working, but it was so heavily based on the PCs interacting exactly like Eva predicted they would. If a PC decided to share their nation's secret knowledge for the broader good of the building, or if they decided to forgive another nation when a dark secret came to light, that wasn't just a roleplaying choice to Eva. That was an attempt to subvert the carefully balanced systems she'd put in place, and it should be treated as such. Of course, since she'd handed the lead GM reins off to Lexi and was involved as a secondary GM and setting resource, it was possible to overrule her. But since she still commanded a lot of respect and admiration for having put together such a deep and rich game, even Lexi deferred to her way more often than she should have. Alright that's all for today. Stay tuned for Pt IV, where unless I come to another major realization, I promise I'll actually start talking about who I played. We'll also meet Justin, probably the single most incomprehensible and adversarial player I've ever seen in an RPG. See you dorks then!!! Jenny Angel fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 9, 2015 20:25
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Eva sounds like a one-person LARP Camarilla. And by that I mean double-plus ungood.
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Dec 9, 2015 21:42
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rejutka posted:Eva sounds like a one-person LARP Camarilla. And by that I mean double-plus ungood.
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Dec 9, 2015 22:51
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I already know the answer, but if the factions reacting to certain developments a specific way was so goddamn important for the story, why did she let the players have any control over that? I'm actually okay with being railroaded a little if the setting's interesting enough (I.E. cut out the pantheon bullshit.)
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Dec 9, 2015 23:00
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Kavak posted:I already know the answer, but if the factions reacting to certain developments a specific way was so goddamn important for the story, why did she let the players have any control over that? I'm actually okay with being railroaded a little if the setting's interesting enough (I.E. cut out the pantheon bullshit.) It's a good question. I think the answer has a lot to do with how much Eva values players getting emotionally invested in her games. She reasons that players need a sense of ownership and investment in what's happening to their characters, in order for the big dramatic and traumatic moments to actually land with impact. And in that sense, she's right! It turns out that if you've put a lot of thought and care into your character, another PC accidentally and arbitrary ripping their eyes out is going to feel awful. Hence she tries to only use those omnipotent NPCs as a last resort, because while she's very invested in the way the story is "supposed to go", she'd much rather have you make those "right choices" than have her omnipotent NPCs make those choices for you. I feel like it's a lot of why she can keep these games rolling for so long? If you do what she wants, things go relatively smoothly, and if you don't do what she wants, it just feels like "Whoops, I took a risk and got burned in this bleak post-apocalyptic setting" rather than "the GM is railroading me into her weird idea of game balance and a proper narrative arc". This also extends to how she interacted with the other GMs. It might seem kinda weird that most of this stuff is about Eva when the lead GM on this run of the game was Lexi, but throughout the entire game, Eva kept Lexi in the dark about key setting details because it was "still her setting". So that kinda tells you about the power dynamic on the GM team, huh.
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Dec 9, 2015 23:32
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Jenny Angel posted:This also extends to how she interacted with the other GMs. It might seem kinda weird that most of this stuff is about Eva when the lead GM on this run of the game was Lexi, but throughout the entire game, Eva kept Lexi in the dark about key setting details because it was "still her setting". So that kinda tells you about the power dynamic on the GM team, huh.  Ladies and gentlemen, this right here is the difference between de jure and de facto.
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Dec 9, 2015 23:47
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Jenny Angel posted:In that way, it functions admirably as a Corporate Middle Management Hell Simulator. Oh man, this is just the perfect description of what you've said so far, you nailed it! ... and now I want to play a game called Middle Management Hell Simulator 
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Dec 10, 2015 00:46
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My wife is making a Star Wars Imperial Public Relations & Communications Officer based off of Elizabeth Hasselbeck for our upcoming campaign. I'm so happy.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:40
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Captain Bravo posted:Oh man, this is just the perfect description of what you've said so far, you nailed it! Middle Management of Hell: The party are minor demons handling the administration of various aspects of Hell (in-processing, punishment, inhuman resources), when all of a sudden an infernal bureaucratic snafu threatens to destabilize Hell itself. It's up to the heroes to restore order... or to fan the flames.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:45
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So basically Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell: The RPG?
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Dec 10, 2015 02:51
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Preechr posted:Middle Management of Hell: The party are minor demons handling the administration of various aspects of Hell (in-processing, punishment, inhuman resources), when all of a sudden an infernal bureaucratic snafu threatens to destabilize Hell itself. It's up to the heroes to restore order... or to fan the flames. This reminds me a little of a Flash game series that was on Newgrounds. Can't remember the name to save my life, but the basic plot point is that Hell is hosed up when a bunch of damned souls manage to sneak out and reincarnate on Earth. You play as a little purple devil who needs to arrange "accidents" to kill them so they go back where they belong.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:52
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chitoryu12 posted:This reminds me a little of a Flash game series that was on Newgrounds. Can't remember the name to save my life, but the basic plot point is that Hell is hosed up when a bunch of damned souls manage to sneak out and reincarnate on Earth. You play as a little purple devil who needs to arrange "accidents" to kill them so they go back where they belong. drat, digging deep much? Old-rear end flash game series. Googling reveals the name is...Reincarnation.
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Dec 10, 2015 03:57
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Jenny Angel posted:I think the answer has a lot to do with how much Eva values players getting emotionally invested in her games.
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Dec 10, 2015 04:16
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Shady Amish Terror posted:drat, digging deep much? Old-rear end flash game series. Googling reveals the name is...Reincarnation. I was only really active on Newgrounds back when games like that were all the rage. It's been months since I've even looked at that site, let alone bothered playing anything.
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Dec 10, 2015 04:41
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Resuming this writeup now;Ambi posted:SuperHellMax3000 No longer wanting to visit the administration office to complain about how unsafe the prison was, Kelgos attempted to stealthily persuade the Kelgos gives up first, throws open the door to the north, and immediately steps through...and falls into a bottomless pit. Luckily he is a wizard, and rapidly Palpatine's his way to the northern door into a room identical to the fire room only with gold instead. That Palpatine himself was notoriously weak to bottomless pits was something that didn't occur to us until later. Jellyman and the rest of the party, giving a resounding "gently caress that" to traversing bottomless pits, open the door to the east and find a room full of Hell, complete with shiny demons and barbed pitchforks. While they considered how to cross a room full of Hell, Kelgos went East to a relaxing beach room with occasional acid waves, then south to a totally empty room that turned out to have reverse gravity, as he found out when he stepped through the door and cracked his head on the floor. Those of you with a good sense of spatial orientation will note that Kelgos just went in a loop, as he opened the Southern door into HellRoom. Dermot tried fast-talking one of the devils, who he sadly didn't recognise from the pub and therefore couldn't invoke the True Name of, and failed to negotiate a passage fee any lower than "your eternal soul and 2 pitchfork stabs". Seeing his 'friends' needed him, Kelgos busted out the arcane power on these devils, and keeps them stunned with electricity long enough for everyone else to run past. After this, it's sadly out of the fires of hell and into the frying pan for Bassoon Dudley's bird companions Peter and Seamus, as the next room contains a tiger, identified by Dermot as "Tony the Tiger, mauler of men, and profilic eater of birds". Jellyman, failing to gain traction with bird-flavour jelly, eventually persuades Bassoon to 'upgrade' his two birds to a tiger, which Bassoon tearfully agrees to. The next room is full of statues, and luckily everyone noticed that each statue seemed to be looking out the room's east window - they had found another edge, and apparently this one borders on a Gorgon, or some other horrible sight. Since this didn't seem to be the admin building, shouting blindly through the window didn't do anything, the northern door was picked at random, which led to a very sticky room - the entire floor and walls were coated in a sticky sap-like substance, oozing from a maple tree in the centre. Jellyman cracks his fingers, transmutes the syrup into jelly, and urges everyone to get across before it melts or more oozes out, not neglecting to pocket a few handfuls of the stuff as possible future bribes. The next room is filled with blood, which the wizards form a temporary tunnel through, not wanting to risk swimming through it. Opening up the northmost door again, they find a man in an orange prison jumpsuit, leaning over three bloody corpses with a knife in his hands. Jellyman and Dermot recognise the man as Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, or his coincidental fantasy counterpart, and the ID badges on the bodies reveal that they have finally found the Administration Office! Jellyman and Kelgos search for the correct application form to commit suicide, with Kelgos subtly lighting small fires in the filing cabinets as he goes, and Bassoon & Dermot find a telephone. After Kelgos attempts to find the way out by ordering the personnel director on the other end of the phone to deliver a cake for a staff birthday, and is told to go gently caress himself, Dermot attempts his own personal brand of Charisma, which entails talking extremely quickly and at length with many divergences. The patented Irish fastalk. As the personnel director on the other end of the phone speaks only in 1-word sentences when possible, it's a pretty one-sided conversation. Highlights include; Jellyman trying to identify whether or not the Personnel Director of SuperHellMax3000 likes big butts, so that he can then assert the will of Beyoncé and prevent him from lying: "Uncertain". Jellyman proceeds to try and describe booty, to some kind of interdimensional demonic thing, eventually just asking if it can read minds: "yes". Jellyman then proceeds to think as strongly as he can, of the best butt that he can, at the phone: silence. Jellyman, playing his cards to the hilt, then projects an image of the worst, saggiest butt that he can at the phone: silence. When asked which of the two butts it prefers; "Uncertain". Jellyman stalks off in disgust, Dermot asks the thing if it's sure it can actually read minds? Long pause, "not over phone". With some difficulty, the group gets a room reference number of 24B3000 for the exit portal, and that they are in room 106B3000, the room north of them is 107B3000 and the room south is 105B3000. Armed with this, they deduce that the exit portal is one room above where they started (I drew a lovely map as they went along). Bassoon dodges a knife-thrust from Peter Sutcliffe, who agrees not to stab anyone if they take him to the exit. When told that he can stab Esqueleto if he really must, he immediately buries a knife in the guacamole man. The trip back, other than this impromptu emergency stabbing, is uneventful - Kelgos once more Palpatine's the assorted devils of Hell room, pausing to have a brief duel with the one rubber-suited devil that survived last time, and is stabbed nonfatally with a pitchfork. In retaliation, he swaps the devil's conscious and unconscious minds, and summons a dagger to stab him in the groin for all eternity. The party flings open the door to the portal room, and finds a room full of... bats. Jellyman is suddenly hit by a prophecy from his days in the monastery of Beyoncé, that in a times of trial and tribulations, in the darkest pit with no chance of escape, the man of Guac would sacrifice himself to the winged terrors of the night, and the party of the man of jelly would be freed. And he realised that he, Gareth Jellyman, was the man of jelly the prophecy spoke of. And that Esqueleto, now rising solemnly from his wheelchair, hopping along on his one remaining leg, was the fabled Man of Guac. Jellyman sank to his knees as Esqueleto hopped inside the room, threw his arms wide in a christ-like pose, and disappeared beneath the dozens of leathery wings as the bats descended. After trying "mellon", "open sesame", the phrase "emergency exit" finally opens the portal, and the party prepares to escape. Bassoon persuades Tony the Tiger (literally just a regular tiger, Bassoon can talk to animals) to abandon the room of stuffed bee-filled birds and come with them through the portal via another summoned flocks of birds, which stream through followed by a very happy huge cat. Having a last-minute attack of morality, that they may be bastards but Peter Sutcliffe is a literal serial killer, Jellyman and Dermot knock him on his arse and leave him in the prison. As they jump to the other side, Kelgos even helps out by laying down supressive lightning as they try and turn off the portal. While fumbling with the controls, Dermot finds a small plaque saying "made in Britain", and finds within him the strength to destroy this hegemonic piece of Imperialist technology, cracking the portal frame with his shillelagh and a cry of "Tiocfaidh ár lá!", echoed by the rest of the party as "choke on my lad!". Exiting the room they found themselves in, into a bright white plastic corridor, they found the plaque "SuperHellMax3000" above the door, with signs for "SuperHellMax2900-2999", and "Drug Dimensions". And we ended the game there. Hope you enjoyed the story, sorry if it was a bit more notational and longer than you'd like, it turns out a 4 hour trek through a prison is easy to run but hard to describe. Ambi fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 06:21
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, Tony the Tiger, Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper, and the Admin Office.
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The Immolator is the best expansion class for Dungeon World. In a living DW campaign (the same one with Ranger Fizbit), I play Ka-la-ma, faux-Hawaii diplomat and fire priestess. While most fire-wielding PCs focus on the "set everything on fire" aspect, the Immolator gives you plenty of chances for emotional cruelty. To-wit: Frost-maiden spirits were ravaging the village. When she found out they were already dead (and sucking the life-force of the living at the behest of their creator), she demanded: Take me to your maker or I'll send you home in a wineskin. She hectored the mayor (to his face) for improperly introducing her at a ball, then got drunk and solved a conspiracy with dancing and intense, soul-reading eye contact. She also sent fireballs back at her attackers and chased down a trio of cut-purses without moving faster than a light jog, saving a new years celebration with a mix of counter-magic and yelling. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Oct 6, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2015 07:52
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NGDBSS posted:
Haha yeah definitely. It was slightly more complicated than that, e.g. how Lexi allowed Chris to play out his Order of Resolve arc over Eva's protests, but it was definitely a situation where Eva would keep setting details to herself until she could set up "Well, actually" moments to soft-railroad the other GMs and players onto her preferred narrative track. Alright, you guys ready to finally hear about what I was doing in all of this? Cool, because it's time to meet the charming Fishermen in today's installment of hosed Up Hell Building: Pt IV So like I mentioned way back in Pt I, Liz mentioned that she was getting overwhelmed with playing multiple NPC nations and asked if I'd like to take over one of the ones she was responsible for. These folks were the Fishermen, one of the few nations that's explicitly an NPC nation rather than just getting shoved into an NPC role if nobody picks them. There's a few legitimate diamonds in the rough with them, and I tried my best to salvage what I was handed, but they definitely dive headfirst into the bland, over-the-top evil endemic to the setting. They also serve as a great demonstration of how incredibly disorganized and adversarial the GM team could be, and how easy the game made it to assume that incredibly hosed-up interpersonal dynamics were "just the way it is". Let's begin, shall we? The Fishermen are a relatively secure and prosperous nation that draws most of their power from their status as one of the building's two main food producers. They've got four distinct but allied "kingdoms" on floors 15, 25, 35, and 45 of the building, each of which is centered around a huge pool filled with tilapia. They also control the slave trade in the building, and host gladiatorial games - they've definitely got a vibe of piecing together half-remembered reverence for great classical empires, sorta like Caesar's Legion in Fallout: New Vegas. One of the things that drew me in to them is that they've got a sort of good-cop-bad-cop vibe with their four kingdoms, wherein the lower floors are full of active and unapologetic brutality, while the upper floors put a veneer of gentility and paternalism over the whole institutional slavery thing. Behind the scenes, all of their kingdoms get along really well, and the different presentations serve primarily as a diplomatic smokescreen. If someone from 15 crosses the line with their brutality and sparks an international incident, we can depose them and have someone from 45 take over to put a nice face on it for a while, or vice versa. They also define themselves, as soon as the gods show up, as the explicitly anti-god nation. They've got spooky blasphemous weapons made of priest bones that can cut gods, and the more powerful and fervent Fishermen even have a sort of magic resistance that lets them reject miracles. So if they hadn't already alienated the PCs before with their slave-trading, sadism, and general decadence, they step into an antagonist role pretty explicitly once everyone gets gods and they're running around chanting "No gods no masters, Ron Paul 2012". It gets even worse when the PCs inevitably realize that the Fishermen have their own god like every other nation, they're just keeping her enslaved and forcing her to work miracles for them under the threat of spooky divine torture. By the time I joined, the game was already well into Stage 2 and the PCs were very familiar with the Fishermen's awful ways. Apparently Liz had been playing them in a scattershot way, treating them as either "wave after wave of evil Fishermen grunts charge at you with god-killing spears" and "a calm, respectable Fishermen queen gives you a long lecture about mortal self-determination" interchangeably. They'd already suffered major military losses against the PC nations, and the PCs were about to launch a joint operation to free their enslaved god, so I did wonder why the GMs needed a new person to take them over if their arc seemed to be coming to an end. It seems like it'd make sense to wipe them out with that operation and have them serve as A) a demonstration that the arrival of the gods meant that things finally could get better in the hosed Up Hell Building on an institutional level and B) a chilling reminder to the gods that fear-driven mortals are capable of great acts of cruelty and blasphemy. The GMs insisted that they were fully on board with me joining up and wanted the Fishermen to stay on as a major villainous player, so I said alright and got to work thinking of ways to rescue them from their imminent fate as a rump state. I decided to focus on some seeds that existed in the already-existing character of Peter Rabbit, the 15-year-old genius sociopath secret supreme ruler of the Fishermen (yeah I know), whom Liz seemed to have mostly ignored as an actual character. The two things that piqued my interest most about him were that he had a public cover identity as a sullen, rebellious bastard prince that the rest of the Fishermen nobility looked down on, and that he had conned his way into a research assistant position with one of the scientists behind the original hosed Up Hell Building project, who'd been tossed into the building with everyone else when it was sealed off. That gave Peter both a strong platform to take advantage of the aforementioned good-cop-bad-cop angle, and enough knowledge of the mechanisms of divine creation to interface with the god-level stuff in a more nuanced way than "we single-mindedly hate gods and still stab them whenever we see them". Accordingly, when he got word that the other nations were knocking on his door and breaking out his enslaved god, Peter engaged a last-ditch plan and drank a "turn you into a god, or maybe kill you?" potion that he'd pilfered from the scientist. The potion was successful, and he transferred his consciousness to the divine realm in an attempt to kill the enslaved Fishermen god (still played by Liz) before the others could free her. It was too late, though, and he had to improvise by taking the form of a cute white rabbit and pulling a "I'm scared and am only only attacking because I think you're all here to kill me" routine. The PCs were super-suspicious at first but gradually bought into the cover story: this infant rabbit god, Lightfoot, had been created and raised in secrecy and isolation by that one surly prince, Peter Rabbit. Peter had been ordered by the ruling Fishermen to steal a "god-seed" from the project scientist, but couldn't bring himself to hand over another god to a life of slavery, so he faked Lightfoot's death and raised him in secret, with the eventual goal of overthrowing the cruel slavery of the Fishermen. There were definitely still some holdouts, but most of the PCs quickly accepted the idea that this Peter kid was probably still an rear end in a top hat but at least he was a rebel with a cause, and that this Lightfoot god was naive and sheltered but had his heart in the right place and could grow into a productive member of the pantheon if they all pitched in and taught him right. Meanwhile, Peter could infiltrate and destabilize the pantheon in his divine Lightfoot identity, and could put up an effective smokescreen around the Fishermen's blatant evil in his mortal identity. After all, if there's already a faction of Fishermen who want to overthrow their terrible poo poo, maybe we should support that coup instead of just invading wholesale and carving up their territory. The broader narrative idea was to transition the Fishermen from a pack of super-obvious villains shouting "We hate the good thing!" at nobody in particular to an exploration of how toxic power structures can obfuscate in order to perpetuate themselves, e.g. American slavery transitioning into sharecropping and Jim Crow. That, I figured, would let Peter/Lightfoot survive long enough to grow into a legitimate threat and eventually get taken down in a climactic fashion before the PCs moved onto bigger threats like the Primordium, the outside gods, etc. Unfortunately, Liz was still maintaining partial control over the Fishermen as a sort of transition period, and I learned too late that she had some real weird ideas about what the Fishermen were all about. It turns out that she was really into that whole "principled, respectable anti-theists" angle, despite the fact that the Fishermen had literally zero opinions about gods until Peter learned of their existence, freaked out because his megalomania couldn't handle the idea of someone more powerful than him, and told the other nobles, "Hey, these gods are going to take your slaves away unless we enslave them first". Liz had apparently been conducting a long-term negotiation, without letting me know, where one of the Fishermen queens would agree to give up all of her kingdom's slaves if the gods agreed to leave the remaining Fishermen alone. That's... I don't even know how to react to that, that's like Tea Partiers agreeing to abolish the Second Amendment as long as Obama promises not to use all the guns he's just grabbed to infringe on their freedom. She also had apparently wildly misinterpreted the long-term plans for the Fishermen, and decided to have a letter reading "Hi, here is our entire evil plan, including the stuff where Lightfoot is secretly awful, Peter Rabbit's revolution is just a smokescreen, and the only way to solve anything is to dismantle the entire Fishermen nobility" fall into the hands of one of the other nations. When she told me she was going to do that, I was a bit concerned and asked if she was sure that this is what the other GMs wanted, and she reassured me that it definitely was and she'd confirm with them that this was all on the level before she went forward. Turns out the only thing she confirmed with the GMs was that the specific miracle that'd allow the PC to intercept the letter would work, and she failed to mention the whole "blowing open everything about the Fishermen and kneecapping Jenny's attempts to make them an actual threat" angle. Accordingly, the letter made its way into PC hands, and while Lexi, Eva, and Charlie (the last GM) confirmed that this wasn't even slightly the plan, the verdict was "welp, it happened, so let's deal with it in-character now, I guess". I was a little uneasy with that, but it made some sense, since it's hard to tell a PC, "Hey, that letter you just received in-character? Actually ignore all of it, it's not canon anymore." So I set up a plan to have Peter walk into an obvious trap from that PC with the hopes of convincing them that the letter was just him trying to keep the other Fishermen nobles from squashing his revolution before it even started. On the plus side, it worked, and Peter was no longer in danger of getting exposed! On the minus side, the PC in question was Justin. Which meant that during the course of that encounter, he decided he needed to hypnotize, torture, and sexually assault Peter, and then to try and kill him with black holes after Peter convinced his characters that he was on the level. Justin's a weird fuckin' dude. He's also the focus of the upcoming Pt V, so get ready for some weird poo poo. It's going to be a guest post by Ben, a good friend who was a PC and who had a lot more direct interaction with Justin's bullshit. Jenny Angel fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 18:46
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 This game.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:02
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Reading these posts makes me never want to run even a vaguely evil character ever again. Jesus.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:14
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Hypnosis, torture, and sexual assault. This has gone from an already unhealthy cult of personality to a seriously hosed up place.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:18
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Brainamp posted:Reading these posts makes me never want to run even a vaguely evil character ever again. Jesus.
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Dec 10, 2015 19:36
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A guarantee that a story will make it in this thread somehow: "It's an evil campaign, but..."
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Dec 10, 2015 19:53
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Senerio posted:A guarantee that a story will make it in this thread somehow: Pretty much. The only way something like that could succeed would be 'gloriously'....and it's probably not going to succeed.
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Dec 10, 2015 20:34
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Senerio posted:A guarantee that a story will make it in this thread somehow: I blame the lack of multi-character antagonistic stories! People have nothing to grasp from, only from evil supergroups who, by the nature of not being the protagonists, lose every time.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:23
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Yawgmoth posted:I enjoy playing evil (or "evil") characters but stories like Jenny's really serve as an object lesson of why so many GMs say "no evil, never ever, and I'm gonna be keeping at least one eye dedicated to you if you play something neutral" so often. Criminy. Some of my favorite characters have been evil and murderous, but surprise surprise they act like freaking people with ideas and goals beyond just killing random things. Characters and groups that are evil for the sake of being evil are super boring. Like the whole, "let's enslave a god and force it to make miracles," is actually something I kinda like. It's mean and nasty as hell but there is a purpose that could lead to a clear profit over just praying and hoping the god decides to listen.
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Dec 10, 2015 21:45
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^^^ Exactly. The key is to make a character who behaves like a person first, and then remove or warp some ethical facet to make achieving their goal easier (or to make said goal desirable at all).Shady Amish Terror posted:Pretty much. The only way something like that could succeed would be 'gloriously'....and it's probably not going to succeed. Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Dec 10, 2015 |
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Dec 10, 2015 21:58
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Yeah, the best roleplayers I played with at my college's club were awful GMs (not that they were particularly bad, but more that they tended to lose interest in running campaigns easy), and the only GM that was able to keep us all on track graduated the year after we started playing.
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Dec 10, 2015 22:04
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I ran a game for years where pretty much all of the characters lacked all but the most rudimentary of morals and scruples. They were all members of the same Thieves' Guild, and were pretty reprehensible people doing pretty reprehensible things. But they had realistic personalities and goals. The catch was that they were all family, which instantly fostered a more-or-less cooperative "us vs. them" mindset that kept them from tearing each other apart. It was like "The Sopranos" meets "Rome" and it was a blast. Maybe BlackIronHeart will wander through and regale you with high(low)lights.
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Dec 10, 2015 22:09
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Happy Friday, dorks! I'm real happy today, because I've got a nice long weekend ahead of me and also because I got to outsource today's edition of hosed Up Hell Building to Ben, the aforementioned PC who was much closer to Justin's fuckery. I should also note that I'm really happy to see the discussion around Justin centering on "here's why allowing evil PCs is so dangerous", because guess what, Justin was one of those PCs who'd write "Chaotic Good" on his sheet and then do all of that terrifying poo poo anyway. How the hell does that work? Find out in hosed Up Hell Building: Pt V Ben posted:Justin was, well, let’s start with this: Justin created a gmail account for this RPG, because he normally refused to use Google due to privacy issues. OK, I thought, that’s a little eccentric but it’s not like there aren’t privacy worries one could have. I really should have thought about what that eccentricity was going to mean to the general game. A game, to be clear, that was founded on paranoia, information asymmetry, and vicious antagonism between PCs. But, then again, I didn’t know those would be the foundation of PC interactions when I signed on. Funny how that works out. Justin would go on to be the single worst player I have ever played with in any capacity. It's a real indictment of the hosed Up Hell Building that it encouraged his pathologies let him pass as just a dedicated player for so long.
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Dec 11, 2015 16:42
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I'm wondering how bad this train-wreck can get. This is good poo poo
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Dec 11, 2015 17:09
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I am emotionally invested in this story.
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Dec 11, 2015 18:21
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This is the new DCB Star Wars stories.
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Dec 11, 2015 18:51
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I feel like these differences in nation and God development are giving us a beautiful contrast between character development and character derailment. It's kind of amazing, really.
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Dec 11, 2015 20:05
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Should've told Eva that her library nation was developing a god of war with no connections to intellectual pursuits at all. Let grog clash with grog.
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Dec 11, 2015 23:00
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Gods of wisdom and war aren't anything too weird. Take Athena for instance. But this?Ben posted:The first time I met Alexander, Justin sent me a link to a competent, but deeply uncompelling, piece of art depicting an anthropomorphic dragon in pretty bog-standard D&D-style armor. The first time I met Alexander, Justin sent me a link to a competent, but deeply uncompelling, piece of art depicting an anthropomorphic dragon in pretty bog-standard D&D-style armor. Yeah no. I really want to hope this guy just thought a dragon god would be cool but I can't see this as anything other than him wanting to bring his furry fantasy into a game and getting pissed when people wouldn't let him.
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Dec 12, 2015 00:08
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Brainamp posted:Gods of wisdom and war aren't anything too weird. Take Athena for instance. But this? I'm not an expert but I'd say he's probably an otherkin, which is a whole new level of crazy above furry. He obviously believed he had the soul of a dragon.
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Dec 12, 2015 00:40
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Sgt. Anime Pederast posted:He obviously believed he had the soul of a dragon. Conspiracy theorists will believe anything.
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Dec 12, 2015 01:04
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On the topic of PCs who are Evil without being over-the-top caricatures about it, someone early in this thread or one of the older threads mentioned their evil PC who was a nice guy. He'd joke around with you, give to charity, that sort of thing. The evil part was that if you did cross him, he'd do everything he could to destroy your life - burn your farm, salt the land, all of that. The actual post was better worded, but, I remembered liking the approach they took with it.
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Dec 12, 2015 03:57
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