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The Tatooine Sands
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Jan 22, 2016 23:02
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Blips and Chitz
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Jan 22, 2016 23:24
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Jar Jar Binks goes out the airlock - aka Everyone's a winner.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:01
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Cash-yyk.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:21
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Coruscan-can
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Jan 23, 2016 00:50
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The House of the Rising Black Sun.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:58
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Z
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Jan 23, 2016 01:54
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The House of Jizz
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Jan 23, 2016 02:07
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Captain_Person posted:We got back into our post-Order 66 Force & Destiny campaign last night after a break over Christmas and ran into an Inquisitor while exploring an abandoned Jedi Temple. I'm about to start playing in a game using this system. I'd be curious to hear people's opinions about it, or some more stories from the system. The custom dice intrigues me, but I haven't played it yet so I don't know if I'm going to love it or hate it. I'm optimistic, though. I'm going to be playing a betrayed and abandoned protocol droid who is trying to reinvent himself as a "man of action." That idea combines with his protocol droid programming to make him a gentlemanly secret agent type of
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Jan 23, 2016 02:08
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Fully Operational Fun Crusher Wallet Devastator Monte Calamari
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Jan 23, 2016 02:50
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Lucky's Ice Palace, sponsored by Hoth or Hoth's High Rollers Lightsabres and Loaded Dice Bacta Betting & Buffet Bobba's Bounty-ful Bet
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Jan 23, 2016 04:00
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susan posted:Hey all, odd request: I could use some help coming up with names for a dozen sci-fi Casinos for a Star Wars EotE game I'm running in a couple hours. It's been a long week, and I'm all punned out apparently :P . Throw out the best or best/worst ones you've run into in your gaming history, I'll take anything. Any help would be appreciated; thanks! The Lucky Wampa Jakk Bynyon's Taun Taun Steakhouse Mandalore Bay (Really? I'm the first on this one?) Monte Lando Post poste posted:"Greedo's Shots First!" Certainly "Greedo's Slots First", no?
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Jan 23, 2016 05:02
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This story is a bit of a doozy. There is a clear "punchline," but I think the buildup is necessary. For the record, this is a bad story. Now, we all make less than reputable friends when we're younger. Maybe you have poo poo opinions you grow out of, you ignore or never noticed these facets of their personality, or, in my case, you're aware they're kind of a shitbag, but you're tired of being alone. Needless to say, I had about a few toxic acquaintances who I forgot how bad they were over the years. When one of them expressed interest in playing Dungeons and Dragons, I decided to offer my services as GM, forgetting how they were as people given the time since I last met them. Thus begins the worst gaming experience of my life. First off, I asked them what they were looking for in a game. Afterwards, I suggests a small number of simple, newb-friendly titles like Dungeon World, FAE, and other such things. The idea was that I really, really don't like hosting chargen sessions and, them being new, it'd be best to run something pretty easy. They really just wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons and kind of made that clear. Now, on one hand, I get it: it's a brand name that people recognize. On the other hand, I don't think they realize how much work that puts on them to learn a system without any basis beforehand. Doable, obviously, but makes my life more annoying.' The chargen session took forever as they didn't all show up at once and everything little thing required explanation. I'm not saying they should have known how to do it -- though I did give them the book to look over a week in advance --, but it did lead to one player getting soured on it and quitting not too long after. After two weeks of no-shows, we finally got enough people to run to show and, well here comes the punch-line. The chaotic-neutral player spent the most of the early session trying to gently caress anything that moves while the person who initially expressed interest kept trying to do weird reverse rules lawyering (instead of relying on wording of the rules, they kept expecting the whole GM adjunct anything thing to allow them to do anything: normally, not a problem, but trying to get things like Prismatic spray at-will is pushing it). Of course, none of this was deal-breakers. Annoying and, in the former kind, got creepy and gross, but something I could probably just talk to them about later. Then, I had them encounter a baby dragon as a quest item.* The player who love house ruling, who was playing a woman, immediately got into a biotruth-y statement about how women act around babies. Like, appro of nothing. Like, his character couldn't just like babies. No, all women in the world did because science and I base this on how my girlfriend acts. This man is 23 years old and should realize how dumb and sexist he was being. Before I could even say anything -- and I was feeling a little awkward and didn't know how to civily to stop it --, another player, the chaotic-neutral, wanted to try to rape this baby dragon. Like, appro of nothing. He just got really creepy in tone and wanted to rape it. Made quite a few padephilic/rape jokes which made me and another player rather uncomfortable. I was also rather uncomfortable because he sounded borderline randy. Biotruths, msygongy, rape, bestiality, and pedophilia all in one instance was a lot to take in. Because I'm a wuss, I half-heartily ran the session until we hit time then canceled the game the next day. The player who got uncomfortable is, rightfully, kind of mad at me for not canceling the game when the rape/padeophilia jokes began. I did, for the record, tell the player sternly to "stop it", but I was too afraid of direct confrontation to just cancel the entire game then: waited till the next day to do so over a text message. It makes more sense if you knew the guy who did those jokes: after hanging out with him for a bit, I remembered how much of a controlling, argumentative person he is and didn't want to deal with that in person. Doesn't excuse my cowardice, but it does explain it. Tl;Dr: A msygonist and a person who possibly has a beastality, rape, pedophilia fetish ruined a game of D&D. *The idea was a cult wanted it for a sacrifice, a paladin wanted to destroy it to stop the cult, and the dragon itself was evil, but put up a good victim's routine and hoped it could use the party to escape.
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Jan 23, 2016 05:50
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CzarChasm posted:Certainly "Greedo's Slots First", no? No, see, it's also a bar.
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Jan 23, 2016 06:06
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You need Han's Slots and Greedo's Slots, and a bunch of NPCs arguing over which to visit first.
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Jan 23, 2016 06:21
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The Lucky 66 - Staff are dressed as clone troopers and if you enter wearing robes they do this. Tatooine Jango's Decanter - Staff wear facsimile mandalorian armor Casino Rebale - Staff dress as rebels, actually are rebels, hiding in plain sight. The Guerrerite Nugget - Contains the universe's largest platinum asteroid, Kerane's Folly (Great heist opportunity) La Bayou Dagobah - Contains the best cajun buffet in the system. Moulin Rogue - "The best Dealers, and the best Tables." The Endor - famous for it's Sky Shield, deflectors from 39 high-power emitters are focused into the strongest shield in the galaxy.
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Jan 23, 2016 07:09
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It’s A Craps! Golden Krayt Dragon Mern Grek Mern Grand
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Jan 23, 2016 07:28
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Captain Bravo posted:The Lucky 66 - Staff are dressed as clone troopers and if you enter wearing robes they do this. I like the cut of your jib, sir.
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Jan 23, 2016 08:35
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Whenever I need a casino in a game it's always called the Cashino, just to make it sound extra dodgy.
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Jan 23, 2016 16:11
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I think that's just one owned by Sean Connery.
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Jan 23, 2016 16:13
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Last Hope Slots (which is more of a dodgy gas-station in the middle of nowhere that just happens to be taking advantage of lax gambling law enforcement)Covok posted:Tl;Dr: A msygonist and a person who possibly has a beastality, rape, pedophilia fetish ruined a game of D&D. This is...quite a story, yes. I hope you've had luck finding friends that aren't MRAs and babyfurs in the meantime.
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Jan 23, 2016 18:47
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Make sure someone hands them a flier for Tushie Station
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Jan 23, 2016 19:03
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The closest things I've had to that was when a player flipped out because one of the npcs in a game was gay, and another time when a person was trying to a "subversion" of everything from the extremely cute and fine like"the princess willingly left with the orc band to become an adventurer and not get married to an old man" to increasingly lame poo poo like "killing the giant monster was bad because it kept the direwolf population under control" In college my roommate got me into PnP rpgs like DnD 4e, Deadlands, and L5R. Like we avoided the college club for various reasons (surprisingly not because they were cat piss people but it was either Pathfinder or Rifts, or on a day we'd go drink or study) so we just found various people who were interested or his personal group that got together once every other year almost weekly then took a break from RPing for awhile. His personal group was cool, he was semi local and only shared the room with me because after his first year he hated taking almost two hours to get back and then forth from school, so it included personal friends and I think his Aunt/Cousin. The other groups where mostly cool and it was only two people I could call problem people. One was the aforementioned genius who was out to wreak the tropes of rpgs, and the other was a girl I had been sorta friends with for a year and sorta dating for two weeks. Everyone in the group was a friend or a friend of a friend. One was a girl my room mate was friends with, her boyfriend, one of the guys living next to us (who at first was only with us because he was banned from a bar his friends attended because one of the bartenders had a conspiracy theory he was swiping mugs and silverware from there), my sorta of girlfriend, and me. At first things were pretty normal, my room mate volunteered to run DnD 4e for us and explained the various settings for it like Ravenloft, Forgotten Realms, and Eberron. Though not Dark Sun, as that wasn't out and would have been a pain in the rear end to convert I guess. It was between Ravenloft and Eberron, the next door guy got into the explanation of what Eberron was and lobbied for that so that was kinda the tie breaker and that's when the first warning flags raised themselves. It was a small one mind you, it was a extremely mild question of concern about whether or not we worship demons or if demons factor heavily into it. It kinda struck everyone else out of the blue, but I knew she came from a heavily evangelical background and sorta of warned my room mate about this with him brushing it off because it wasn't like he really ran R rated games even when getting drunk with a bunch of foul mouthed college students. He remembered to bring a case of diet coke not beer, reminding everyone she was uncomfortable around alcohol so if they wanted something they'd bring it themselves so whatever. He politely clarified things, kinda explained Ravenloft was way more Hammer Horror than The Exorcist, she was cool with it but preferred Eberron. Whatever wasn't a big deal. Nothing really crept up when we rolled up our characters or first few sessions. She didn't take umbrage at the fake fantasy religions or anything, and we had a few sessions of being tasked by the displaced nobility of Cyre to find ancient artifacts..and the Blood of Vol and a couple of the factions where after and it was during the pay off scene poo poo finally hit the fan. See turns out Cyre, unsurprisingly being the center of culture and progressive thought in Eberron before the Last War, was totes okay with LGBT issues. Our benefactor was in fact a man who benefited fromt that and was able to marry with in his actual sexual preferences. Que a huge argument between her and everyone, saying we were going to go to hell, me getting dumped right then and there (honestly she just beat me too it because I was going to wait until the next day to do and not in front of other people), and her storming out three minutes before the pizza guy showed up. Wrong toppings on the pizza too. NutritiousSnack fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 21:06
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NutritiousSnack posted:Wrong toppings on the pizza too.
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Jan 23, 2016 21:25
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Ilor posted:That's the cat-piss right there. Joking aside: One of them was a vegetarian so it would have been an Actual Thing had the game had actually continued from that point that night.
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Jan 23, 2016 21:44
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Shady Amish Terror posted:This is...quite a story, yes. I hope you've had luck finding friends that aren't MRAs and babyfurs in the meantime. Yes and no. Haven't made any new friends, I hope to, but I got four good friends who aren't like that. But, yeah, it was a rather shocking experience. Still not sure which is worse: the mysgongy or the babyfur thing.
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Jan 23, 2016 23:04
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Misogyny is incredibly common, especially among Young Men of A Certain Age, as are rape jokes. Kind of a tossup I'd say, they're kinda two sides of a like coin. Either way, you made the right choice in not letting the games continue with that clusterfuck of a situation going, especially if they weren't willing to knock that poo poo off after catching flak for it. Back in college (when I was slightly younger, but just as fat), I met a surprising number of people who just didn't realize they were assholes because no one had told them before. Some of them, however, remained assholes. C'est la vie. Or as the popular phrase went, sever.
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Jan 24, 2016 00:26
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My first D&D group consisted of my friend Danielle (Who got me into the group), and then some friends of hers from school. The DM was the dad of one of those friends, and we played at their house. Danielle was and is a lesbian, and this was not a secret, so, her characters were also lesbians. This apparently bothered the DM, though he at least had enough tact not to do anything about it. He did tell me one time though, while he and I were discussing an upcoming session, that he had toyed with the idea of forcing Danielle's character to get raped by orcs and make her carry the pregnancy to term. Again, this was a grown man with 3 grown daughters and a wife, wanting to pretend rape a 17 year old lesbian. Of course, I made sure to tell her about it, she decided that if it came up in game then she'd deal with it then, but for the time being she wouldn't worry about it since it hadn't actually happened. We ended up getting kicked out of the group shortly after anyways, after Danielle had a falling out with the DMs daughter and they stopped being friends.
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Jan 24, 2016 00:38
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Man, it's fascinating the weird thought processes people manage to conceive of even in adulthood. Stories like that make me worry whether I'd ever know if I was being an irrational crazy douchebag myself, because holy gently caress why would you decide to share that thought with someone
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Jan 24, 2016 00:58
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I have had a blast reading through this read after finding it a week or so ago, so I'd figure I'd toss my hat in on most memorable experiences. I'll preface this by saying sometimes when I get into PnP games, whether online or in person, I have the damnedest goddamn luck when it comes to rolling exactly what I need to exceed when dramatic effect would call for it. The reactions are usually pretty great, and the one I always got a good laugh out of was The day I got Lucky. It's not the most wide spread thing, but Pokemon Tabletop Adventues (aka PTA) was a pen and paper version of pokemon developed by some folks on IRC, based on the D20 system. The group would be made of Trainers that had their own individual stats and could pick classes that let you pull off a wide variety of things like being the stereotypical trainer really good at training pokemon, being able to get into the fray to punch pokemon yourself, be an item crafter/researcher with a bunch of bonuses to social or academic interactions, a pokemon psychic with mind powers, or being the best pokemon collector your could be. Pokemon also had their own stats that were very similiar to the actual games, with moves being slightly different or tweaked, and having actual movement speeds/strength/intelligence quantified as well. All in all it was a pretty fun system with some obvious flaws that got home ruled over sometimes, and eventually the entire thing got remade and streamlined into something much nicer that I would hands down suggest as a better option if you wanted to run a pokemon based tabletop game. This story begins whenI found it being developed early on enough that I got into a game of the first version released for it. After chatting with the GM and other folks in the game about what they already had class wise, I decided that I wanted to make a Gotta Catch'em All type of character whose goal in life was, indeed, catch them all. To do this I chose Capture Specialist as a base class, and later grabbed two advanced classes. One was called Collector which gave some ridiculous bonuses to catching pokmeon... the more unique pokemon you caught! The other was called Engineer. Engineer was kinda cool because the one of the base features of the class if you made this bitchin' rear end mechanical arm that could you modify with things like, say, a pokeball cannon. All of these classes were based on a combination of Dex and Int (yes, like the DnD attributes!) and suffered in the Str/Wis department. Keep this class and stat combination in mind for the future, particularly Collector. I was basically playing a skinny, incredibly intelligent and agile nerd with no real common sense and one burning desire: To Catch them All. Now there were actually two seperate groups, one that played on Tuesday and one that played on Thursday. I got tossed in with the Thursday group. They'd been playing together for a while when I jumped in and it took a couple of sessions to get my legs under me but it was pretty good fun once it got going. Now of course normally before when it came to capture Pokemon there was usually a scene or something for it and it got played out with a battle because you gotta wear down the Pokemon you want to catch first to even have a fight chance, right? You'd be correct, if you weren't my character the Master Catcher. Even before I had gotten either of my advanced classes, the base Capture Specialist was pretty darn good at catching Pokemon without ever having to fight them, so the GM and I would just do a bunch of rolled capture attempts per area after I searched around for some Pokemon. It was quickly done every time and we kept the game moving instead of being bogged down with it, and slowly let my character accrue a not insignificant list of different Pokemon he had captured. Fast forward many sessions I had finally leveled up enough to have both the Collector and Engineer advanced classes, as well as a number of features from each class. It's the start of the session and the group is traveling along towards its next objective, when a wild Shuppet appears in front of us that starts laughing. The rest of the group start flipping their poo poo, as apparently this Shuppet had been a thing from before I had joined, and had nearly killed them a couple of times really early on via knocking over ladders they were climbing or something. I, not being aware of this out of character and only having a vague inkling that something was wrong in character, figured the best way to neutralize it was do what my character did best: catch it. I stated my intention, and the GM stops the IC chatter for a moment and asks very seriously "Are you sure dude?". My answer of course, was "Yes." Why wouldn't it be? So he shrugs and has me do a perception roll because the Shuppet had already hosed off into invisibility after getting the reaction it had wanted to elicit, which I manage to roll a natural 20 on. The GM is surprised but shrugs it off, we used a dicebot and the RNG is as always a fickle mistress, so I get a free attack from one of my pokemon as well before I get to make my capture roll. I paralyze it with a Thunder Wave, and prepare my attempt. Capture rolls are a pretty simple 1d100 roll. Your capture roll can be modified as well by trainer abilities which of course, my character specialized in. The aim is to roll lower then the target Pokemon's capture threshold which is determined by the type of Pokemon, how many levels it, has, how healthy it is, etc. A pokemon's threshold can from from an easy 100 to very problematic 20, with some even going into the negatives! The key thing to know here is that with the combination of enough factors and correct circumstances, nearly any pokemon can have a threshold in the negatives that only a trainer who has been specifically focused on capture bonuses (or a guy with a Masterball) can have a chance at beating. Ultimately though, it comes down luck. And I roll a natural 1. Not only had I just rolled a natural 20 on a d20, I had just gotten the very best roll you can get on a d100 for a capture roll. I'm not very good at math, but those are some goddamn crazy odds in my book. Our GM just gawps for a moment as he does the math and the other players express their laughter at such a ridiculous roll. A couple of expletives later, the GM sends me the Shuppet's stats sheet with a very plain "gently caress your 1, it was literally the only roll that was going to let you capture it." We moved on with the session at that point with my character up one extremely powerful pokemon he hadn't had before, though I had a sneaking suspicion that never got confirmed that I had hosed over some of our GM's plans slightly. This is my personal most memorable moment simply because I have never been quite as lucky as that. This character did have some other great moments, including a solo adventure where he became the Lord of Metal after dueling with an entire army of heavy metal rock robots from another dimension in a power suit he created. Man that game was great.
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Jan 24, 2016 02:18
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To dip into canon locations... Hologram Fun Land. And Euro Hologram Fun. DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I like the cut of your jib, sir. By the way, speaking of star wars, did you ever manage to hijack that death star? Tunicate fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 02:19
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This is another situation where I can't remember if I told this story or not but in the interest of Just Post, here is the story. Spooky Skeletons and Old West Railroads First of all, Deadlands is a pretty cool idea for a game. If you don't know it's Wild West meets steampunk meets horror (lovecraftian and otherwise). It's cowboy zombies. A friend of mine pretty much only ran Deadlands games and his game was somewhat legendary for both running a long time and being specifically deadly. He had made a number of 'tweaks' to the game because he felt it was unfair and while he was probably right about it the resulting math cascade was usually enough to intimidate all but the most system-minded people from playing his games. However, a small group of dedicated friends - as many as 8 or 10 over the years - kept telling him how awesome his games were. He decided to run a LARP. The premise was simple: you, the players, are part of new company-run city in the spooky old-west. Everything else is basically a simulation. Money was meticulously tracked. We were assured that virtually any character concept would be useful because nothing would be handwaved. I decided to play a chemist. In matter of fact the game heavily rewarded people for playing combat characters, which I'll arrive at in a moment. Firefly was very popular that year and pretty much everybody has a couple of long dirty coats. It seemed impossible for it to fail. I was wrong. The first night I arrived at the game we spent about an hour checking in. This is because they kept every character's sheet and belongings in individually tracked plastic bags. Each person had to check each individual item. After we got into game there were basically two and a half plot things going on. On the one hand a PC was being tried for a crime they very obviously did not commit; there were rumors of a strange skeleton prowling the country side. And there was some kind of creature down at the beach that needed minding. The very first thing that happened was the sheriff rounded up a posse and sent everybody to the beach, new characters included, and we fought some kind of sea creature for like an hour. Mostly the experienced players made incredible combat checks and looked smug at each other while the rest of us tried not to die. This was a sign of things to come. After being railroaded into a combat I didn't really want to be in, I retired to the saloon and hung around meeting other characters. I eventually met a doctor who gave me a bunch of details on the upcoming trial, and we both agreed we should try to bust out the PC who was being tried. Neither of us being combat characters we came up with the ingenious idea to try and poison the falsely accused character. Not like, poison to death; consensual poisoning. The kind of thing that would make the user appear dead but not actually be. Then we could dig him up at our leisure! We consulted a GM; he said the doctor would know how to make such a thing but would need chemicals to do it. I said I happened to have a bag of chemicals on my person. The GM got very excited, and said this was going to be so cool. We spent the better part of 2 hours getting ready and making the poison. We enlisted a stealth character to sneak into the jail and give the poison to the imprisoned PC. Everything was set. During this time I was completely unable to find the three other people I had come with. This is because they were locked in an unwinnable combat somewhere on the other side of the play space. More on them later. We busted into the trial room just before the sentencing. We waited patiently to see if the poison would take effect. When it became clear that it wouldn't, I asked the GM we spoke to earlier what was going on. He also seemed confused, and asked the second GM (the one running the scene) what was going on. The GM - who was playing the judge - just said, "oh no, that wouldn't work." What followed was a confused 10 minute argument between two GMs about what was supposed to happen. Long story short - the rear end in a top hat GM said that our little Juliet plan wouldn't work because he needed that PC to hang. I found out later it's because a different NPC needed to show up at the last minute and save the PC by shooting his noose, which was just so cool they couldn't be sidetracked by pesky PCs. The judge, the savior, the trial - all of it was NPCs, and the events were not impacted by a single PC. Wheee. Even the trial itself, apparently, had a predetermined outcome. I left fuming. I felt like I had wasted my night. I was in the coat room getting ready to leave when I found my other friends. Apparently they had been sneaking around town at night and got attacked by a skeleton. They shot it, stabbed it, hit it with clubs, and the GMs made it pretty clear the skeleton was either invulnerable or so nigh-invulnerable that these particular PCs didn't stand a chance. They died. When they asked what they could have done about it, the GM just said "Deadlands!" in kind of a smug voice. Apparently they were they randomly selected victims of the spooky skeleton for that particular evening. I need to stop playing LARPs.
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Jan 24, 2016 03:25
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Tunicate posted:By the way, speaking of star wars, did you ever manage to hijack that death star? The game is still Mostly Dead, alas. In the occasional chats I've had with the GM I've been told that he will not under any circumstances let us steal the Death Star. No matter how much I pout about it. Mendrian posted:I need to stop playing LARPs. Wow, that makes some of the old World of Darkness LARPS I was in seem sane. Well, not really, but still.
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Jan 24, 2016 03:59
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Man, it's fascinating the weird thought processes people manage to conceive of even in adulthood. Stories like that make me worry whether I'd ever know if I was being an irrational crazy douchebag myself, because holy gently caress why would you decide to share that thought with someone Hell, of all the people to share that thought with, why me? Did he seriously think I was going to be on board with the idea? "Why yes, I absolutely think that forcing my best friend to roleplay a horrible and traumatic experience as some sort of punishment for an aspect of herself that you don't like is a great idea! Hell, let's roll up those orc sheets right now!"
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Jan 24, 2016 04:44
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Mendrian posted:a bunch of some god-drat railroading i tell you what As a follow-up to this: I was the dude on trial. Things were even more hosed up than this describes. During the planning stages of this game, the head dude approached me with a proposition. He wanted me to play a pseudo-NPC in this game. The idea was that to the rest of the player base I seemed to be just another PC, but I was given a general story arc to follow and certain tasks to perform. It was a pretty simple thing; I was to play a retired soldier who came west to start a new life with his blushing bride. My character would lock horns with the local mining company (which was probably some Established Horseshit in the metaplot) who wanted my land, and their goons would kill the character's wife, spurring me (and, theoretically, other PCs) to pick up the iron again and start a vigilante gang fighting against the Evil Mining Company. The entire point of the character was to provide a push that players could take up against the villainous robber barons. They'd ask me to show up for a night, give me a mandatory scene with the missus meant to establish her as a presence before her fridging, and maybe give me some other general instructions meant to propel the game along. I should also mention at this point that the staff had what you might charitably call some control issues. The most noticeable one was that, despite this being a setting with crazy poker wizards and steampunk alchemists and magic uranium and zombie cowboys, no one was allowed to make a character with any involvement with the supernatural but instead had to play a normal villager. (This probably went a long way toward making all the combats extremely challenging, incidentally.) You weren't even supposed to know those things existed. In fact, the head staff member gave me a frown and a dumb lecture when he found out that I had read the core rulebook before including the sections in the back about demons and skeletons and poo poo. This is the kind of guy who would throw a poo poo-fit if his D&D players had ever seen the Monster Manual. Things went off as planned for the most part, but it rapidly became clear that there was a severe communications breakdown within the staff. One member in particular (let's call him Justin for clarity's sake) was kind of a loose cannon and tended to disregard everything agreed upon by the staff. For example, I was told at one session that there would be an auction held for certain items, and that my character was to bid on one of them but then would lose to an NPC played by him. I think the idea was to show off this NPC's wealth and his interest in certain things. Like I said, my role was simply to help push along little things in the game like this. If you guessed that I won that auction without Justin bidding at all, you would be absolutely correct. If memory serves, he also had me show up for a few sessions in which I had no real good reason to be there. Eventually the overarching plot went as scheduled. My character's wife got killed by the goons and he went in for vengeance, killing one of the parties responsible. He got arrested and put on trial. I was taken aside before this session and told explicitly that the judge would find him not guilty on some sort of technicality or something so as to let him go off to form up his vigilante faction. I remember thinking how absurd it was that they would waste everybody's time with this, but that it was generally understood that this would give some of the PCs a chance to gently caress around with a trial (as, mentioned by Mendrian, they tried). My lawyer was a staff NPC. The prosecutor was a staff NPC. The judge was a staff NPC, and he was Justin. Keep in mind that this game only had four staff members, so anyone who wasn't either cock-deep in the already-decided trial or fighting the unkillable skeleton was poo poo out of luck. So the farce went on. At no point was I told anything about this "shooting the rope" idea or anything like that, but it did become clear partway through that the verdict was going to be "guilty" regardless of what I was told earlier. It also became clear that the staff was rapidly backpedaling to make up for Justin's decision to find the character guilty. This had been the idea all along, according to the staff. Just wait and see, said the staff. You'll forgive me if I didn't believe them. In the end, Justin's judge found the character guilty after all the poo poo Mendrian mentioned. There was no discussion with me of any last minute rescue or even any acknowledgement that the end result of the trial was different from the earlier decision even though the entire situation was a closed loop among the staff and I was supposed to be working with them to propel along this storyline. I left that night with two realizations: one, that I had sat there for a few hours while three people basically jerked off at each other and pretended that everything was fine while under the hood everything was hosed. Second, that I was never going back. Stand by Me Style Epilogue That night Mendrian and I went back to my house where there was already a party started in our absence. We joined in wholeheartedly. At some point in the evening we held an intervention for one of our friends, who we believed was an alcoholic. We held it while extremely drunk. We were super classy like that. The skeleton, it turned out, was in fact literally unkillable. The only thing that could hurt it was some type of magic. If you recall, none of the characters were allowed to have any sort of magic whatsoever. It served only to destroy characters. Justin was eventually declared persona non grata at the college where this game was held, after a very loud argument with one of the students (I want to say his ex-girlfriend) during which he threw a desk across the room at her. The fact that she was the person at the college in charge of securing the space for this game was the icing on this horrible, horrible cupcake.
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Jan 24, 2016 05:02
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Big LARP stories can be awful but some make me smile, and I remembered one from many, many moons ago. So a friend of a friend was doing oWoD Vampire: the Dark Ages LARPS at several area conventions, and would frequently enlist several of my friends as quasi-staff - that is, they weren't staff per se, but they were players who would be asked to play their characters in a way that would benefit the game and the plot rather than just being out for themselves. Beyond that, though, they had total freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, so they weren't just glorified NPCs. I only got to join in on this particular bit of fun once, but I milked it for all it was worth. The setup for the game I participated in was that the Burgomeister (read: Prince) of the city - I don't remember which city it was, Hamburg maybe? It was rarely important - up and vanished one day and everyone was trying to figure out what to do next. We were asked to play characters of different Clans, with the idea being that if any Clan or group of players seemed to be spinning their wheels we could go in and try encouraging people to try and grab power for themselves; we were meant to goad others into action rather than taking direct action ourselves. Which was cool. I decided I would play a Lasombra. Now, the Dark Ages setting predated any of Vampire's existing factions; there was no Camarilla, no Sabbat. The Lasombra, at this point, were heavily involved in the Roman Catholic Church, so I made a priest-who-was-also-a-vampire, Father Vincent, and figured I'd see what I could encourage. It turned out, however, that none of the players were playing a Lasombra; I was the only one in the city. So I went to the head Storyteller and said, in effect, "I have no Clan to goad, so I'm going to try to goad everyone into action. I'm going to be the fly in as many ointments as I can. From an in-character perspective, the more chaos I can cause, the better the chances there'll be opportunities for me down the road, right? And besides, it'll make things interesting." He agreed, and while I got no extra points to build my character or anything - we were all chargen-level PCs - he let me take some interesting Traits. Specifically, he let me take multiple personalities. On the one hand you had Father Vincent, the kindly, moral, upright man who was tormented by his need to drink blood to survive and was on the Path of Heaven (essentially, his morality was very Christian). On the other, you had Father Iago, who was a right prick and was on the Path of the Devil (essentially, he was comic-book Evil). Father Vincent was unaware of Father Iago and his actions; the reverse was emphatically not true. My thinking was that I would get up to poo poo as each personality and leave everyone guessing as to what my true motive was, and just by backing some groups as Vincent and others as Iago I would cause strife and action and keep things from stagnating. To distinguish between the two, I decided that whenever Vincent 'switched over' to Iago he would tear off his clerical collar and throw it to the floor in disgust, and calling Iago 'Vincent' would cause him to lose his poo poo; in this way, I reasoned, I could clue people in to what's going on without making it super-obvious. So! Good plan! Except no one ever called Iago 'Vincent.' Or 'Iago,' for that matter. Didn't do it to Vincent, either. No one in the entire game - a multi-day affair! - ever referred to my character as anything other than 'Father,' presumably because it was easier to remember... and no one picked up on the multiple personalities until it was far too late. So I caused trouble. I was everyone's friend and ally and confidante. I declared support, in private, for no less than four people who were angling to take over the city. And for a day and a half, no one noticed. I directly caused two separate PC-on-PC combats by Wormtongue-ing it up. I was starting to get really sort of desperate to have someone figure out the MPD so that my treachery could be uncovered, but before I got so frustrated that I just flat-out told anyone the local Gangrel decided "you know what, we need fewer wild cards in this town" and just staked me. They carried around my staked, paralyzed rear end for a few hours in-game while they argued over what to do with me. They almost came to blows about it. I almost caused another PC-on-PC combat while immobile and silent. When the game started to wrap - the Burgomeister returned and announced that he'd been in hiding essentially as a loyalty test to the Vampires of his city - and it became clear that I wasn't going anywhere save possibly the dustbin anytime soon, I explained the deal to people out of game - this necessitated explaining why one player's attempt to Dominate me into admitting that I was the one who saved a crucified player had failed even though I had in fact done it, because she was commanding Vincent to admit it and Vincent had no memory of pulling the guy down - and there was much laughter once I admitted "no, see, here's all the times he switched personality right in front of you and you never noticed" to responses of "oh, dammit!" Good times were had by all. At the wrap-up session one player asked if, even though I was quasi-staff, I was eligible for a vote for Best Player. She was the one who ended up winning said award. That was really gratifying to me. So that's my story of how I caused as much trouble as possible in a LARP and enhanced peoples' fun rather than just spoiling it.
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Jan 24, 2016 05:50
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Was Justin the railroading and uncommunicative head GM or some insane fly in the ointment ignoring the other three?
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Jan 24, 2016 06:08
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I was in a Masquerade LARP once with a group of friends and acquaintances, set in a city that had, for whatever reason, been devoid of vampires for some time. I think there may have been a Methuselah or worse hanging out, waiting for a new batch of nummies to establish themselves, and distributing weird little artifacts for the group to fight over. Between the first and second sessions, the skinny white guy who insisted on playing Assamites at every opportunity, and did himself up like The Crow when he did it, got himself ashed during some private play. I can't remember precisely how it went, but knocking over a variety store was involved somehow, and he went pants-on-head from there. I'm not sure how the Masquerade wasn't blown wide open when he got in a fight with the cops. I played an anthropologist who had been embraced by a Gangrel who figured herself a trickster figure, and inherited some of her attitudes from there. My character was on the Path of... Harmony, I think, alien under the hood but able to pass for human and humane. He was going to treat the city like a jar, and the rest of the Kindred like ants: shake it up and watch them fight. His first plan was to sow conflict among the other characters while they tried to elect a Prince, and take notes from there. ...He barely weaseled out of a unanimous vote to make him Prince instead. That game didn't last much longer, which was probably just as well. The players were mostly there for a bit of make-believe, no-one was really aware of the background plot going on, and I wasn't self-aware enough to realize that going ahead with my arc wouldn't make me a vampiric mastermind, but rather just King rear end in a top hat to some friends who just wanted to have a bit of fun.
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Jan 24, 2016 06:14
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Fly in the ointment. I got the feeling like he very much wanted to be in charge and was unhappy that he wasn't.
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Jan 24, 2016 06:15
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A lot of the catpiss stories really make me glad I GM a table in a coffee shop. So much easier to control behavior when I can just say "this is a public space so the table has a PG-13 rule. If you want to do that sort of stuff play in private."
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Jan 24, 2016 07:29
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