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Ilor
Feb 2, 2008

That's a crit.

Sgt. Anime Pederast posted:

He obviously believed he had the soul of a dragon.
Wait, you mean you guys don't? :confused:

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Agrikk
Oct 17, 2003

Take care with that! We have not fully ascertained its function, and the ticking is accelerating.

the_steve posted:

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.

I think you might be referring to an Archmage I played using the Rolemaster rules. He was basically betrayed by the chieftan's son of his home village and sold into slavery and was later bought by a mentor who identified his latent magical talent. My sorcerer was eventually manumitted and started his adventuring career and, yeah, I played him as a easygoing and super loyal guy who would get all kinds of medieval on anyone who he thought had betrayed him or any of his friends.

He did eventually make his way back to his original town, used mass-death spells to slaughter half of the village and then raised them as zombies and other undead things to go kill the other half. He then burned the entire place to the ground, salted the earth, and left the undead magically anchored to the spot to kill anyone who entered the space.

But he was a controlled, disciplined character who enjoyed wine, good company and the fellowship of his comrades-in-arms. Just don't ever let him think you've betrayed him or he'll pull a William Munny on your poo poo.



quote:

Any man I see out there, I'm gonna kill him! Any sonofabitch takes a shot at me.. I'm not only gonna kill him, I'm gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his drat house down!

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Ilor posted:

Wait, you mean you guys don't? :confused:

I just have the heart of a small boy.

the_steve
Nov 9, 2005

We're always hiring!

Ilor posted:

Wait, you mean you guys don't? :confused:

I'm only half-dragon, thank you very much.
I'm also 1/4 elf, 1/8 demon, 1/8 angel and 3/16 Sephiroth on my mother's side, and I will thank you to respect my genealogical headcanon. :colbert:

Everything Counts
Oct 10, 2012

Don't "shhh!" me, you rich bastard!

Bieeardo posted:

I just have the heart of a small boy.

Put it in the freezer if you aren't going to cook it right away, that's just wasteful.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Just did a Spirit of 77 game where my character, a member of Religitology, rescued a Patty Hearst analogue. She explained to the PLA soldiers that they were a brainwashed group "Who did unreasonable things as part of a false mythology, and--



-




-
poo poo. I've wasted six months of my life."

She took another player's pet sloth to the back entrance of the warehouse, since she didn't want the hobos out front to see her cry.

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Oct 6, 2016

Jintor
May 19, 2014

So I GM'd my very first game yesterday (not counting character creation). It's a homebrew Cyberpunk/Shadowrun themed game based on the *World system. I had intended a game of conspiracies and screwing one another over. But I was undone by three things:

- The macguffin they were chasing was in a briefcase
- My players would not stop blasting that loving John Cena prank phone call thing from their phones and generally loving around with soundboards
- I was having a lot of trouble trying to improv a conspiracy on the fly without feeling like an incredibly bad railroad GM, especially when a player asked "Well where do you want us to go?" and I realised I was starting to railroad without realising it

So when they decided the shadowy figure at the end of the conference room table was John Cena, I rolled with it. They ended up fighting a necromancer Undertaker and his flunky, the Lichadore, in a tag-team money in the bank match. I think the single best moment was a robot detective being thrown bodily through an illusory cyber-bear, bouncing off the ropes into a flaming Undertaker doing the best to bear-hug the poo poo out of a disillusioned clown while a sociopath dwarf doctor hacked camera drones with his Linksys Wang(TM). The player who had never RPd before ended up grabbing a steel chair from under the mat, passing it to the clown, who managed to KO the Undertaker and himself.

(They decided to toss him in a Clown Car Ambulence that was smaller than he was)

Samizdata
May 14, 2007

Bieeardo posted:

I just have the heart of a small boy.

drat, I'm starved. You gonna eat that?

Half then?

Shady Amish Terror
Oct 11, 2007
I'm not Amish by choice. 8(

Jintor posted:

(They decided to toss him in a Clown Car Ambulence that was smaller than he was)

So despite the tonal dissonance between the setting and the playerbase, not bad for a first time then? :v:

As long as everyone had fun, I'd call it a success, though it sounds like your group doesn't (currently, at least) have the attention span for uncovering conspiracy.

Whybird
Aug 2, 2009

Phaiston have long avoided the tightly competetive defence sector, but the IRDA Act 2052 has given us the freedom we need to bring out something really special.

https://team-robostar.itch.io/robostar


Nap Ghost
Yeah, I would honestly say to the group 'It sounds like you want to play something more light-hearted and silly than what I had planned, is that right?' and brainstorm a bit about the kind of thing they'd be up for.

Though even in a light-hearted silly game, phones should totally be off and in pockets, that poo poo's rude as hell.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Finally kicked off a new campaign of Masks, the teen superhero RPG.

We had the muscle (Panther), the brains (Atlantean communist Citizen 1), the heart (Rook, terminally-ill, now in the body of a magical clay golem ) and the mouth (Justice, whose powers are acrobatics, karate, and convincing people they like him).

Our first fight happened at the mall, with all of us doing some holiday shopping. (Including the communist.) The workshop was attacked by an evil Elf, who brought everyone's toys to life! We won when Panther kicked the poo poo out of him and Citizen 1 hit him with a flying haymaker. And that section of the mall was only barely destroyed!

After that, we were questioned by the local mall cops, who threatened to call our parents. Justice asked them to call Panther's parents (the evil supervillains). They demurred. Panther yelled at them to try calling the giant clay guy's parents. In response to her goading, they banned us all from the mall!

Citizen 1 (Una) snuck back in after everyone left, begging them not to keep her from the mall since she hadn't even done anything wrong! They agreed, if she helped in the cleanup process.
After leaving, she realized she could just come back out of costume, and had agreed to a chore. Damnit!

Back at the base (an abandoned headquarters left by Panther's Parents), our party interrogated the Elf. He became friendly when we realized that Elves needed a name!
So Billy the Elf, who started out as a catspaw villain for the shadowy Spider Networks Inc, turned into the best friend superheroes could have.
Why? Because his magic cleaned up property damage!
Which is good, because it gave very little credibility to our nemesis, a hateful blogger who coined our team The Disasters. Probably because our origin fight blew up the warehouse was security guard for. Not that Una was happy about it, because she was using it as an apartment, but...I guess that's another story.

***
Our team used Billy's powers to teleport back to where he was brought to life, which turned out to be a downtown skyscraper. We discovered that Spidernet was watching everyone, to see if they were naughty or nice. Or more likely, to do evil corporation stuff.

Panther suggested we follow the security cameras feed by ripping the cord out of the wall and following it. In the subbasement, we got to a reinforced bunker where we saw more monitors...and were attacked by Doberman-sized spiders!

In the chaos, Billy's life-force was revoked, freaking out Rook and Una. The little guy had made a big impression.
***
The only route out of the basement was up an elevator shaft, covered in thick spider-ropes. Rook (Emet) climbed, while Citizen 1 offered to give Panther a lift up, as the prior could fly and the latter couldn't. They used their time flying up an elevator shaft to open up*, with C1 (who crushed hard on Panther) being told that if C1 wanted to be a better teammate, she could stop pissing Panther off. It got heavy.

Fifteen feet below, Justice misused a stolen gravity gun to fly upwards, woahhhh!

***
The party finally confronted the head of Spidernet, Octavia Weaver. Octavia told the group they may be special (eliciting a "Thank You!" from the Atlantean) but their investigation was for nothing. The group defeated her (with Rook squashing a giant spider in his bare hands, Justice rattling her by calling her Old and not that hot, and Panther hitting her with a crippling full nelson). Unfortunately, it wasn't her; she was projecting her life-control into a dressing doll. Ever the opportunist (and having seen "The Wizard of Oz" recently), Una stole her Jimmy Choos.

---

*Mechanics: Masks actually has moves for "When you share a triumphant celebration" and "When you open up to someone". Panther was using The Bull playbook, so her Opening Up gave influence to Una; that gave Una double influence (since Panther considered Una her rival). Una used this to move down Dangerous, Panther's biggest combat stat, and move up Savior, which she didn't use very much. In return, Panther told Una something about the world ("You piss people off!") and Una internalized it for an XP and +1 forward.

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Dec 14, 2015

the_steve
Nov 9, 2005

We're always hiring!

So how is Masks? I saw the Kickstarter for it, since the author of this one webcomic I read did the art for the game.

It looked interesting, but Kickstarter won't accept any of my cards (well, they don't accept one, and my bank blocks me from using the other because of the state they're based out of because of identity fraud concerns), so I can't back anything anymore, but I wanted to check it out.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy

Splicer posted:

I am emotionally invested in this story.

Trap sprung, idiot hellfucker.

I hope you doofuses had a good weekend! Ben will be back with the conclusion to the Justin saga tomorrow, but for now I've got plenty of my own material in the way of Justin horror stories. So get ready for

hosed Up Hell Building: Pt VI

So, how did I get involved with Justin? It started in the session where "Lightfoot" first showed up. One of the gods that Lightfoot had attacked while doing his "Get away from me, I'm scared" routine was Lily, a small and childlike NPC god that Alexander had developed a protective instinct toward. So while everyone else pretty much bought the scared kid story and started to trust Lightfoot, Alexander still wanted him to be punished and got promptly outvoted. I had an idea for how to take advantage of that dissenting opinion, but before going through with it I checked in with the GMs on how much hostility and manipulation was too much when it came to interacting with PCs, and the answer I got was pretty much "Sky's the limit, in fact this is your job. Go gently caress him up". Since I had joined so late, I assumed that meant that there was already a healthy-if-adversarial dynamic and set of assumptions in place with the PCs, and that I could take the gloves off with Justin without causing any real issues. Like Ben, I was a fool.

Lightfoot visited all the other gods one by one on an Apology Tour, acting properly guilty and embarrassed and promising to not hurt anyone again. Since he spoke and acted like a sweet and naive kid, everyone pretty much accepted the apologies and reassured him. Importantly, he also mentioned to each of the gods he visited that he'd be going to see Alexander last, since Alexander was mean and scary, but he knew he had to eventually work up the courage to do it. When Lightfoot finally did meet with Alexander, he not only apologized but offered to subject himself to a punishment that Alexander thought was appropriate, even if the other gods didn't agree. Alexander declared that a reasonable punishment would be for Lightfoot to temporarily give one of his domains to Lily as compensation - he chose the domain of Fire specifically. Lightfoot agreed, but he had a trick up his sleeve - as a newly-formed child god, he still had the ability to move domains around and have them represent different parts of his body. Accordingly, he moved Fire to his eyes, removed them, and fumbled around blindly in the divine realm calling out for Lily and telling her how sorry he was.

When the other gods found out about this, they immediately went "Holy gently caress Alexander, you made this kid rip his own eyes out?". Since I wanted to plant the seeds that Lightfoot wasn't on the level, I was banking on Alexander explaining what really happened and Lightfoot's own accounting of the exchange not quite adding up. Justin, however, had other ideas: Alexander simply snarled and scoffed and called Lightfoot an idiot and called the other gods idiots for believing him. By the time I tried to backpedal a bit and have Lightfoot tell the other gods that he offered to do it, Alexander didn't force him, etc., they were having none of it - quite understandably, they largely assumed that Alexander had browbeaten Lightfoot into doing it, and that Lightfoot was trying to take the blame off Alexander because he was still wracked with guilt and trying to be everyone's friend.

This was far from an auspicious start, but I was still willing to trust in the GM team's assurance that Justin was just a very principled player dedicated to playing an unpleasant, difficult-to-deal-with character. Things got way worse when I started interacting with him in the mortal realm - this is the torture session I mentioned a few installments ago. To give a bit more detail on the context, the Highwaymen had intercepted that letter that Liz wrote for whatever reason, and now had hard evidence that, at the very least, Peter and Lightfoot were both full of poo poo and were actively conspiring with the rest of the Fishermen to pull a fast one on the building. The Highwaymen sent an incredibly obvious trap invitation to Peter, telling him they had found a neat book on rabbits in their library and wanted to give it to him. Peter saw through it but wanted to make sure he knew what they knew and to nip any suspicions in the bud as soon as possible, so we agreed to meet them in their library. At worst, he figured he could use his divine abilities to get out of dodge if things went south.

When he arrived in Highwaymen territory, they bound him up in ropes and threw him down an elevator shaft, leaving him hanging upside down at the bottom of the shaft. A super-evil dude in parachute pants approached Peter and tried to hypnotize him, which didn't work because he was a god. Super-evil dude then asked Peter some basic questions and used his connection to Alexander to act as a divine lie detector... which again didn't work, because the GMs didn't want all of this unraveled immediately and gave me clearance to use my own divine abilities to block it. When Justin realized that he couldn't just get a 100% truth/lie reading on every statement from Peter, he flipped out both out-of-character and in-character, assaulting Peter viciously throwing around accusations like "You have lied on every question, or you have hidden your intentions - which is equivalent to a lie!" Eventually he grudgingly accepted that he'd have to have an actual conversation with Peter instead of instantly getting all the information he wanted. He insisted, however, on having his super-evil character strip Peter down and molest him with a feather while they were talking, and to tell me variants of "I just rolled an 83 on Facial Micro-Expressions - is he lying NOW?" every minute or two.

Eventually, Peter managed to convince the Highwaymen - and Justin - that the letter was full of poo poo, that it was something he'd sent in desperation to the other Fishermen after they discovered Lightfoot was a thing. When Peter told the Highwaymen about his plans to lead a revolution within the Fishermen with Lightfoot's aid, Justin started scoffing and speaking really condescendingly to Peter, telling him that there was nothing left to do, since the bad Fishermen on floors 15 and 25 were already pretty much out of power, and the pleasant friendly Fishermen on floors 35 and 45 were going to be in charge of all the fish pools now. Peter explained the whole good-cop-bad-cop con, and told the Highwaymen that they had no idea how dangerous the Fishermen really were if they thought they were almost done for. Justin was having none of it - even if everything this kid was saying was true, it made no difference that the Fishermen were as strong as ever and all the gains that the Highwaymen had made against them were illusory. The top priority was now imprisoning Peter Rabbit so that his plans for revolution wouldn't interfere with the Highwaymen's plans to ... do pretty much exactly what they'd been doing for the last several months to no actual effect.

Well, they did plan to make one change to their strategy, which was the other reason they wanted to imprison Peter even after deciding they believed his story about being a good-hearted if abrasive revolutionary. In Justin's understanding, the fact that Lightfoot had shown up after the rest of the gods meant it was possible to create as many new gods as you wanted, whenever you wanted, and that Peter knew how. This had no basis in reality, and ran completely contrary to the actual mechanics of divine creation. Still, the Highwaymen demanded that Peter tell them how to make new gods, and explained their plan to create a hundreds-strong army of super-powerful demigod soldiers and use them to crush the rest of the hosed Up Hell Building beneath their heel. Peter was horrified and disgusted by that plan - both in his principled revolutionary cover identity, and on an earnest level, since it went completely against his philosophy of Proper Methods of Rule. He told the Highwaymen that even if such a method existed, he'd never tell them, and while they weren't convinced at all, they decided to take another tack and ask him who else would know. He gave up a name (Queen Manta of floor 35) and started pleading for his release, promising to coordinate his revolution with the other nations of the building and not to ruin "what the Highwaymen were working for".

They denied his request, and instead moved to transport him to a prison. Sensing that trying to convince them was quickly becoming a losing effort, Peter started mounting a divinely-empowered escape. For their part, the Highwaymen first responded by trying to stab him and shoot him full of arrows. When that didn't work, they escalated by using divine powers to throw black holes at Peter. To reiterate: at this point, these guys think Peter is completely on the level about his noble plans, but they're still trying to murder him with black holes because he won't agree to stay in their prison and give them a demigod army. He eventually manages to escape with heavy injuries and holes up in a safe room, sending divine messages to dispatch his agents to provide urgent medical care. Justin sends me some more condescending out-of-character messages telling me about how foolish Peter was not to just give the Highwaymen everything they wanted, and we wrap that encounter up.

I figure I'm (thankfully) done interacting with Justin for a while, until he sends me an email telling me he wants to run another one-on-one scene with me. Apparently, he's going to disguise one of his men as Peter while the real Peter is recovering in his safe room, then send the fake Peter to speak with Manta and get her to tell him how to create that demigod army. I figure the risk is probably low since he's now in my territory rather than the other way around, and agree to it. As soon as he starts the scene, it becomes apparent that there's a gaping hole in Justin's plan: he's basing his entire understanding of who Peter Rabbit is off that one conversation, and Peter had been feeding him bullshit the entire time.

I figure that maybe I can work with this! When "Peter" shows up and says that Lightfoot's been corrupted so they've got to start from scratch and Manta needs to tell him the entire god-making process again, in detail, I start dropping increasingly obvious hints that Peter had fed him a pack of lies. Queen Manta at first seems oddly deferential to this supposedly-despised bastard prince, and when he keeps acting deferential to her, she moves the conversation to a more private place and surreptitiously asks if they're being watched. When he presses her for details on how to make gods, she starts nervously bullshitting in an OOC attempt to make it clear that she has no idea what she's talking about on front because Peter gave up a meaningless name. When she finally figures out that this isn't the real Peter and thus isn't her boss, she first has a long, obvious moment of realization, then completely turns her behavior around and starts acting imperious and cruel towards this fake Peter. Even then, she seems to pause and stammer a bit when saying anything particularly cruel, to indicate how much of a "You disrespect me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize" hold her king has over her.

Justin picks up on none of this. I'm trying literally every trick in my book to clue him in on the fact that something suspicious is going on, short of having Manta outright say "Greetings, your majesty Peter Rabbit, who is secretly King of All Fishermen and who pretends publicly to be an outcast revolutionary in order to take the heat off our awful slavery that we're all really really into", but this dense motherfucker is having none of it. No matter how obvious and inept I make Manta's changes in attitude and behavior, he just keeps going to the "Tell me how to make this demigod army" well again and again. Eventually I figure there's no use trying to clue him in on the larger Fishermen plot without revealing the whole thing, so I give him an out by having Manta say something in the vein of "Enough of these games - it's obvious that you're a body double that Peter sent because he was too cowardly to come himself. You're merely doing the job your master gave you, so you can go free, but the next time you see Peter, tell him he will be punished for this deception". Justin tries one last time to get her to tell him how to make a demigod army (again: this doesn't exist), and then finally leaves.

Those are the only significant interactions I had with Justin throughout the game, but it turns out they had a lot of impact. While he was already isolated from most of the other PCs due to his antagonistic and unreasonable nature, it turns out the fallout from that first incident with Lightfoot was a sort of tipping point that sent him on the irrevocable path to Final Justin Meltdown. What did that consist of? Why, you'll find out in Pt VII!

Shady Amish Terror
Oct 11, 2007
I'm not Amish by choice. 8(
Oh good, I was worried this story wouldn't find a way to get worse, more rape and IC/OOC entanglement it is

Senerio
Oct 19, 2009

Roëmænce is ælive!
Man, this is quite the exciting adventure. I'm on the edge of my seat

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.

the_steve posted:

So how is Masks?
It's Real Good. So good that I used a spare afternoon to knock out an expansion pack, apropos of nothing.


There are a few things that are finicky (Am I unleashing my powers, or provoking someone? Or am I trying to pierce the mask?) but considering it's not "out" for another 4 months it's still totally playable. The idea of other people having control of your Labels is so good that any other game that uses it will be called "Space MASKS" or something.


It feels weird posting all these good gaming stories when they're competing with saga of the worst one.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy

Golden Bee posted:

It feels weird posting all these good gaming stories when they're competing with saga of the worst one.

For what it's worth, I really appreciate the counterweights.

Mendrian
Jan 6, 2013

I will never understand the way game mechanize lie detection.

It would have been far more engaging for you and for Justin if he could simply choose whether or not to believe Peter, but no, he has to keep throwing tests against each statement so he can have proof of whether or not he's right.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.

Mendrian posted:

It would have been far more engaging for you and for Justin if he could simply choose whether or not to believe Peter, but no, he has to keep throwing tests against each statement so he can have proof of whether or not he's right.

The answer is not less mechanization, it's more obfuscation. Liar tells the GM his stats, tester tells the GM his stats, GM rolls dice behind screen, and says "You think he's lying to you" or "You're pretty sure he's telling the truth."

Edit: This also requires a GM willing to enforce IC and OOC. In other words, when Justin keeps wheedling, the GM steps up and says "You rolled, your character thinks he's telling the truth, give it a rest."

Jintor
May 19, 2014

Whybird posted:

Yeah, I would honestly say to the group 'It sounds like you want to play something more light-hearted and silly than what I had planned, is that right?' and brainstorm a bit about the kind of thing they'd be up for.

Though even in a light-hearted silly game, phones should totally be off and in pockets, that poo poo's rude as hell.

Yeah, the next session starts with them in a stolen metal gear on the run from robo john cena, so finding out how we get to that point should be good. I might just throw out all my other stuff.

Thankfully in this system making NPCs is as simple as "x HP, x Armour, a couple of thematic abilities" since it's entirely dependent on my creativity and their dice rolls

I'm definitely gonna talk to them about the phones though.

Jintor fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Dec 15, 2015

Doc Hawkins
Jun 15, 2010

Dashing? But I'm not even moving!


The only good rpg mechanics for trickery*:
  1. the fooled character gets a bonus if they act on the fooler's lies (optionally have a roll, so sometimes attempts to fool backfire horribly)
  2. human conversation between player-friends who all want to see the all characters do awesome and dramatic things because otherwise what the gently caress even is an rpg

The first I see in all the *World games. The second I have almost never seen. But it's so good!

"Of course I know that your character stole my character's magic ring, because we're all at the same table, but I was thinking it would be really cool if my character never believed it and continued to trust you like the son she never had."

"Hmmm...until some crucial moment in the middle of the heist when he has to use it in front of her, or it's knocked out of his pocket or something?"

"Ohhh poo poo hell yes friend lets see what happens!!"

:unsmith:



*: please prove this hyperbole wrong via tales of all your fantastic games where everyone Played Dirty and Dice-Lied their way to Systems Mastery

Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Dec 15, 2015

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Un-informed Non-Consent is perfect for Paranoia. Way early in this version of the thread I posted about GMing a 4th of July Paranoia session, where four of the five players all tried to put bombs in the same apple pie.

The fifth put grenades in the oven.

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Dec 15, 2015

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Mendrian posted:

I will never understand the way game mechanize lie detection.

It would have been far more engaging for you and for Justin if he could simply choose whether or not to believe Peter, but no, he has to keep throwing tests against each statement so he can have proof of whether or not he's right.

It's such a common sense solution that I'm surprised it isn't the default. If a player rolls Sense Motive and fails, I just say "You can't tell", no reroll unless something big changes. Giving them false information would render the skill useless, and I can't order a player to not be suspicious of a guy and act a certain way.

EDIT: ^^^ I couldn't breathe by the end of that story, post it again for anyone who hasn't read it.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.
Here's the original post, although if Golden Bee would like to post a more in-depth reconstruction that would be awesome too.

Golden Bee posted:

Tonight, five brave troubleshooters went to USA sector to celebrate July 5th. During that time, there were 3 different party leaders/presidents, with an average term lasting 20 minutes, sometimes as low as 10 seconds.

The players:

*Blew up R&D repeatedly, while in it
*Stole R&D products even after they're proven worthless (including a 50 pound weight labeled a "Gravity Enhancer")
*Stole aerosol glue, getting one character's hand stuck in the party president's pocket.
*Ran through a wall because they "didn't trust" the person holding the door
*Shot the mission briefer, invited the next Troubleshooter into the room, and snitched that he had killed the mission briefer.


This was before the mission. They were given an ice cream truck ferrari and sent to USA sector.
While trying to bring patriotism to USA sector, they:
*Blew up a barbeque the size of a tramopoline (by dropping grenades in it). In response, one of the nearly dead troubleshooters used ice control to save himself; was promptly shot in the back of the head. The killer took a "kill the cook" apron.
*Blew up apple pies (one player got his hand shot for trying to use granny smiths, which were above his clearance; interestingly, multiple people tried to put grenades in pies. One player hit another with the grenaded pie, blowing them both to smithereens.
*Fed the crowd with exploded bacon, earning their allegiance to Patriotism
*Started playing patriotic marches on the ice cream truck; one mutant turned the music into the Communist National Anthem, and the players began shooting each other. Then they tried to run each other over. Then the ice cream truck exploded.

During the parade, they:
^Sped, alerting the police
^Turned the police sirens into communist propaganda, leading the crowd to attack the police.

When two troubleshooters fought over the steering wheel, the current president shot BOTH OF THEM IN THE HEAD.
This caused the vehicle to, by random roll:
--Spin
--Twist
and
--Careen into a group of cloned girl scouts.

After the parade, while setting up the fireworks display, they:
--Vastly overused fireworks beyond all bounds of safety
--Spend 6 perversity points (on a 6 point scale) to increase yield
--Confiscated illegal fireworks to add to the parade
--Hid stockpiles of fireworks around town
-->Secretly changed the fireworks so they'd have a nuclear payload and display the hammer and sickle.

This led to USA sector's:
*complete and utter destruction.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
Paranoia:

Players and a Very Experimental Car
Troubleshooters misidentify the Grinch as Christ, and shoot him in his home
The Grand Marshal Story (above, oddly I couldn't find that version; I was control+F'ing for Paranoia.)

Funny to see how many people in these old posts I still game with!
The person playing Christine "Crash" Kaboom in my old Crimson Skies game is playing Justice in the latest one (and is in many of these stories). The person who played the emotionally distraught werewolf is now playing an overly angry Teen Juggernaut and Rook was formerly the goodhearted ADHD-gimmicked wrestler in one of my recent WWWRPG games. I did a Spirit of 77 playtest yesterday (long after the game came out) but my first was 2 years ago exactly!

Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Dec 15, 2015

Nuffkins
Apr 20, 2014

Doc Hawkins posted:

The only good rpg mechanics for trickery*:
  1. the fooled character gets a bonus if they act on the fooler's lies (optionally have a roll, so sometimes attempts to fool backfire horribly)
  2. human conversation between player-friends who all want to see the all characters do awesome and dramatic things because otherwise what the gently caress even is an rpg

Put yourself in a player's shoes. If you have a great plan but roll bad, it all goes up in smoke. In campaigns explicitly meant for players to gently caress with each other, rolls like that are stupidly annoying for everyone. The players should be the only ones responsible.

The best mechanics for trickery:
  1. Letting everyone know what to expect.
  2. Few dice rolls for anything outside combat. (Ditch perception, persuasion, bluff, sense motive, etc.)
  3. Situations that force people to work together sometimes.

Doc Hawkins
Jun 15, 2010

Dashing? But I'm not even moving!


Nuffkins posted:

Put yourself in a player's shoes. If you have a great plan but roll bad, it all goes up in smoke.

To paraphrase Vincent Baker, RPG rules exist to ensure that sometimes, things happen which no one wanted to. Great plans amounting to nothing is bad, great plans triggering entirely new and unanticipated troubles which demand still greater plans is good. From Burning Wheel I learned: never call for a roll without knowing how failure would make things even more interesting.

That said, for a hypothetical game of Diplomacy: The PVPening, I can certainly see there being no explicit skills for trickery, in the same way there's no "move my pieces to a good place, with strategy" skill in Warhammer, and I can see there being no cooperation to make stories about deception, because...well, you decided as a group you wanted stories of shadowy struggles and uncertain outcomes, told in pieces. I hope it turned out super-good and that you will tell us all about it!

I was exaggerating my position to get people to post good stories of full contact adversarial play, not to derail into a serious discussion of deceit mechanics. Like all mechanics, they are good when their effects on the experience fit the aims of the design and help people enjoy themselves.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy

Mendrian posted:

I will never understand the way game mechanize lie detection.

It would have been far more engaging for you and for Justin if he could simply choose whether or not to believe Peter, but no, he has to keep throwing tests against each statement so he can have proof of whether or not he's right.

I mean, I agree wholeheartedly in theory, which is why I tried to lean on actual narrative cues in that conversation he had with Queen Manta as opposed to reading out "Uhhh yeah she rolled a 71 on faking a power dynamic, see if you can beat that". But apparently, if he didn't have the ability to throw dice rolls at every line in the conversation, he was completely lost as far as picking up obvious clues.

Which, I mean, he's constantly willfully dense. You all get that by now. But I don't think you'll appreciate just how willfully dense until you read

hosed Up Hell Building: Pt VII

Ben posted:

As you have by now become well aware, Justin was a ticking time bomb. His paranoia and self-righteousness, combined with the hands-off brinksmanship of the GM team, ultimately led to a literal explosion. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Prior to Justin’s assault on Peter, he had not exactly endeared himself to anyone involved in the game. As I've said, he was duplicitous in an obvious and unenjoyable way, in and out of character, he took moral stances that gained no ground with the entire rest of the group, and his manner was abrasive. In short, he had no real support in any of his initiatives. The closest he had to an ally was me, and by this point I was becoming thoroughly sick of him. Part of that was just that talking to him was, and I quote my younger self to a GM: “Like running through steel wool” (GM reply: “Yeah, it’s like that for everyone”, which... should have implied steps were being taken, but apparently it did not), and part of it was that he had no respect for me or mine whatsoever.

A good illustration of this was when I tried to convince him to stop eating the souls of the Highwayman dead. This was sort of a rite of passage for almost all the gods: they started off eating the souls of their dead to grow, and eventually they were supposed to realize that this was hosed and let me take the souls into the afterlife. I was, after all, the assigned God of Death, I was the psychopomp, and I had the infrastructure to house dead souls. Most gods, while not immediately willing to give up such a source of power, pretty quickly saw my point re: dissolving souls into themselves as fuel.

But Alexander wasn't, which shouldn't be surprising by now. This happened shortly after the Lightfoot’s Eyes debacle, so he was on edge. He insisted that every soul that he ate was whole, independent, and happy within him as a complete person. When asked to prove this, he displayed a memory-shade of a Highwayman, which the GMs described as very explicitly a shade – I compared this to a ghost of a Highwayman I’d acquired at random earlier, taken from the Underworld. His response to these efforts to help was to cuss me out, say my loving adopted parents (the infinity-strength NPC Hermes who was hiding in the Tower from Apollo, and Circe, yes that Circe, an NPC witch who could enslave young gods - sometime I should explain how absolutely idiotic and bizarre my character sheet turned out to be) were evil and I should dump them, and explicitly declare that he knew the mechanics of death better than I did.
We weren’t on great terms at this point – and I was still the closest thing to a friend and ally he had in the pantheon.

Meanwhile, he’d also discovered that the same scientist who set his godhood in motion during the initial stages of the hosed Up Hell Building project was also the father of the Primordium. He decided that this meant the rest of the pantheon weren’t his real family, and we were all liars and evil, and he should go let the Primordium out of its box. Which would kill everyone, almost without recourse. As far as I know, the GMs told him this, and he went ahead anyways. I mean, what else was he going to do? Nobody could stand him, he’d alienated everyone but one GMNPC who had no power and was annoying to boot, and he continued to be the one to force conflict with everyone else. Apparently now was the time for bold action.

Around now he also sent an incredibly dumb letter to Circe, trying to convince her he knew her secrets and she should do what he wanted. The letter literally got the name of every involved character wrong, and all it accomplished was to enrage her. Meanwhile, OOC, the GMs had finally decided to take action. These two events were not unrelated: they decided that the best way to deal with Justin was to have Circe magically enslave Alexander to her will. Sure! Why not! That’s not going to be a massive headache, a massive GM overreach, and a massive boost to his persecution complex. How could it? It’s 100% in-setting for that to happen. And apparently, the rule of "don't intervene with the setting OOC" was more important than the most basic shreds of common sense. To my eternal shame, I assumed the GMs knew what they were doing in dealing with Justin. I was, as I have said before, a fool.

Luckily, that particular nightmare scenario never came to fruition. Before the GMs could try to corral him by applying in-game slavery, he went to rip open the Primordium’s cage. Naturally, everyone aware of what Alexander was doing – this was between actual sessions, mind, and run on text chat, unlike the main game – ran to stop this idiot dragon from ruining everything. NPCs, PCs - it was like the Yakkety Sax of high-stakes idiocy.

I should note: The GMs would have let him kill everyone. Of the various runs of this game, the only one ever held up by Eva as a success was the run where one of the PC gods went berserk and ate all the other gods, mostly before they had the time to gain names, powers, or identities of any kind. And she was still the arbiter of the setting’s basic functioning. So yes, catastrophic, pointless setting collapse was a possibility that could only be solved IC, not OOC. Honestly, I think this is one of the things that still upsets me the most: that player well-being and story were completely suborned to the GMs' feeling like they had correctly represented a setting based on a dream based on a Doctor Who episode based on a J.G. Ballard novel. The high art of the hosed Up Hell Building had to be preserved.

So. Alexander’s clawing uselessly at a cage full of screaming agonized evil incarnate. Good for him. It’s worth noting, he really is useless: All his scrabbling for Domains that he can’t hold onto and all his aggressive misinterpretation of the setting have left him woefully under-ground in stats, while the first NPC to show up is Rem: the King of Grind, my sworn bro, the NPC God of Dreams played by Charlie the GM. In a bit of setting and mechanical weirdness, I'd earlier acquired the title "Faster-Than-Dreams, so I show up slightly before that. The mechanics often worked like that: if you figure out a weird trick to abuse the dumb systems efficiently, you can become very overpowered very quickly. Accordingly, I had insane stats, and was finally ready to kill my terrible, terrible friend. For some reason, I thought that we would get to have a poignant but brutal fight in which I tore Alexander a new one for the good of the whole building, and maybe he’d learn something and we could all talk it over. I was a fool.

Instead, fast on our heels was NPC of Infinite Power Hermes, whom Alexander hated enough that he could barely speak around him. That broke down any attempts at diplomacy preemptively, and Alexander attacked. In their defense, the GMs didn’t have Hermes just wipe the floor with him using unholy numbers, as they probably could have – the reasoning being that Hermes had sworn never to commit deicide again, after killing my god as a child in the weirdest case of cradle death ever (What a crazy twist! My character sheet, it turned out, was basically a secret invitation to the Twilight Zone Random Mechanical Fuckery Power Hour).

Instead, I got a few lines to try and talk Alexander down. Since the operative verb is ‘talk’ and the object is ‘Alexander’, that sentence was doomed from the start. Alexander begins to shout that I’m a terrible traitor and a terrible friend (ouch, buddy, guess I can feel better about killing you) and that he was really the only god doing the right thing, and that he was cursed with a heart of lies. I use some divine powers to determine that no, his heart is definitely Stories, which I promise to rip out of him if he doesn’t stop being an idiot. He instead attacks by grabbing for Rem's Dream heart, in what I can only call the only reasonable Domain grab he ever made. If he wanted to win this fight, it was a smart move - and it worked! I assumed this meant I would have to kill him faster, to save my quickly-fading bro. I was a fool.

Instead, the now-dying Rem insta-kills Alexander. See, Rem had the domain of ‘portals’ that he used to get around, and (as the GMs very smugly pointed out) he was no longer the God of Dreams due to heart-ripping, so it no longer meant anything that I was Faster-Than-Dreams. So he just put a portal in Alexander’s chest and the heart of Stories fell into his hand. One shot, one use of a self-satisfied system hack invented by and confirmed by GM-team, one PC kill. I wish I were kidding that it went down like this.

Screaming about how we’d all wronged him, the dying Alexander declared that he was willing himself to join with the Primordium, because we’re not his real pantheon and he’s going to go be with his real family. Nobody cares, as the other PCs arrive just in time to witness the portal-heart-murder trick and share an angstfest about Rem's tragic death. Alexander literally explodes in a pillar of flame, joining with the enemy of the gods to empower it with all his domains, belief, and followers. Kaboom, he’s gone and for good measure sets off a chain of stupid, angsty setting dominoes (more on that in a later installment). In the wake of Alexander’s spontaneous dragon combustion, we all gather around the dying Rem, trying our hardest to keep him alive – until Infinitely Powerful NPC Hermes pulls exactly the right trick out of the bag and fixes him. Good as new! Everyone have a cookie, aren’t we glad Alexander is gone? Wasn’t that really the best way to deal with him, and his player?

The immediate aftermath was a bit confused, and a lot disordered. I later learned that Justin had been told by the GMs point-blank that if Alexander did this, he was gone forever, not coming back, never to return. So of course he immediately embarked (using his remaining mortals) on a scheme to resurrect Alexander through belief and the symbolism of a funeral pyre and a phoenix, which hadn’t been his character concept at all but really, mythological creatures of fire, they’re all the same, right? So that led to a bunch of weird conversations, and a lot of increasingly firm insistence from the GMs that no, that's not how any of this worked.

Justin also argued with me when I said that ‘Stories’ and ‘Lies’ weren’t the same thing. They certainly were, from his perspective. Being a bit of a story enthusiast myself, I asked if fiction couldn’t contain truths about human behavior, or morality, or philosophy: His answer was no. Flat no, nope, never, just doesn’t happen. That’s right, Alexander, GOD OF LIBRARIES, GOD OF FICTION didn’t believe that anything not literally true had worth. This kind of explained a bit about his total unwillingness to play to concept, at least.

Of course, it wasn’t the end of Justin. As obviously awful as he was, they were still committed to offering him a chance to create a new character and remain in the game. However, shortly thereafter, he mounted a passionate defense of his actions to the GMs. In his view, Alexander was a young god, basically a teenager. And all the other gods were bullying him. So exploding like that – wasn’t that really the same as a gay teenager taking their own life after being bullied? Shouldn't the GM team side with him instead of these homophobic bullies? And that was the end of anyone on the GM team suggesting Justin might be coming back.

That was the last I heard about Justin until about a year later, when he got kicked out and banned from a local geek convention for repeated unwanted physical contact with various women. Because of course he did. Moving on from that as quickly as possible, join me tomorrow for Pt VIII, where we learn how this sordid game finally met its end.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


I think we're going to need Ben's mini-update on character sheets and mechanics, because this game sounds utterly impossible to play and I don't want it to be over already.

Jenny Angel
Oct 24, 2010

Out of Control
Hard to Regulate
Anything Goes!
Lipstick Apathy

Kavak posted:

I think we're going to need Ben's mini-update on character sheets and mechanics, because this game sounds utterly impossible to play and I don't want it to be over already.

Yeah, that can be arranged. For the record, I think there's easily enough hosed Up Hell Building content left to last the rest of the week.

Soylent Pudding
Jun 22, 2007

We've got people!


These stories are frustrating because underneath all the terrible are these glimmers of what could have been a really cool game.

the_steve
Nov 9, 2005

We're always hiring!

Soylent Pudding posted:

These stories are frustrating because underneath all the terrible are these glimmers of what could have been a really cool game.

Agreed. It seems like a setting I really want to play, and the only thing really loving it are the folks in charge, and Justin.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Soylent Pudding posted:

These stories are frustrating because underneath all the terrible are these glimmers of what could have been a really cool game.

Yeah, there is definitely the kernel of a good idea - I really like the concept of deities carving out their people's role in the future (I really like kingdom building games generally though, despite the paucity of RPGs that have actually executed on this.. maybe the quite year, but that's not really a kingdom).

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!

Soylent Pudding posted:

These stories are frustrating because underneath all the terrible are these glimmers of what could have been a really cool game.

Ugh, agreed so much. With the right people this could be an amazing setup.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


I really don't care about the god war stuff, but I love the closed-off apartment block full of tribes idea.

Shady Amish Terror
Oct 11, 2007
I'm not Amish by choice. 8(
I have met people like Justin. I have to wonder if it's some imbalance of brain chemistry or a definable failure of upbringing or something that results in that mindset, because I could have sworn I've met at least two people just like that. Overly literal and self-righteous, leading to (or stemming from?) a tragic inability to separate their internal fiction from external reality. Which, yes, seems to eventually lead to at least minor criminal acts when they refuse to accept someone else's boundaries over their own disconnected internal monologue.

In the case of the game, at least, the Laissez-Faire GM approach certainly doesn't seem to have helped any. Maybe it's some sort of attempt to replicate the setting's mechanics in the real-world group dynamics? Sounds stupid enough to be as plausible as anything else.

Captain Bravo
Feb 16, 2011

An Emergency Shitpost
has been deployed...

...but experts warn it is
just a drop in the ocean.

Kavak posted:

I really don't care about the god war stuff, but I love the closed-off apartment block full of tribes idea.

I'd love to take the basic flavor elements, and transcribe into a Warhammer system like Dark Heresy or Deathwatch. Everyone is a low-grade psyker, certain individuals can pool their tribe's psychic energies to cast spells and poo poo, like Weirdboyz. Instead of the Primordium, you've got Nurgle or some poo poo.

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

My group had a guy like that that left (over Cho'gall's name of all loving things because he didn't know poo poo about programming and refuse to admit he didn't know), and honestly, people like that - sad as it is, it's a lot healthier to keep them at a good arm's length.

Mendrian
Jan 6, 2013

Shady Amish Terror posted:

I have met people like Justin. I have to wonder if it's some imbalance of brain chemistry or a definable failure of upbringing or something that results in that mindset, because I could have sworn I've met at least two people just like that. Overly literal and self-righteous, leading to (or stemming from?) a tragic inability to separate their internal fiction from external reality. Which, yes, seems to eventually lead to at least minor criminal acts when they refuse to accept someone else's boundaries over their own disconnected internal monologue.

In the case of the game, at least, the Laissez-Faire GM approach certainly doesn't seem to have helped any. Maybe it's some sort of attempt to replicate the setting's mechanics in the real-world group dynamics? Sounds stupid enough to be as plausible as anything else.

Well I mean not to be too blithe but aren't these literally Aspergers symptoms?

Mendrian fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Dec 16, 2015

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Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Kavak posted:

I really don't care about the god war stuff, but I love the closed-off apartment block full of tribes idea.

To be fair it's basically Necromunda on a smaller geographical scale.

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