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moths posted:Honestly I was probably too firm on including no-win scenarios. But if they're defending a city that's going to fall, telegraph that poo poo. I think a lot of this comes down to knowing your group, too. If you know that your group would totally be on board with a hopeless boss fight followed by an escape from hell, then go for it. Otherwise, don't. I think I'd even say that if I'm not certain they'd go for it, I wouldn't even bring it up as a possible direction for the story. I want it to be a surprise or not happen at all, y'know? But also, I know my group. I know they'd probably go for something like this. I also know that if I tried to do any of the things people have suggested earlier on this page to avert an unwanted TPK--like "you all get captured instead"--they'd actually be disappointed and probably mock me for being soft. They don't want to necessarily be playing Darkest Dungeon at the tabletop or anything like that, but they do want to feel like any fight could actually kill them, and pulling back from a TPK would undercut that. (I know this because I've brought it up with them and they've wholeheartedly rejected it.) If I was GMing for a different group--maybe even the group before this one--things would be a lot different.
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Jan 28, 2016 15:39
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- It's really, really hard to give fucks about a dead character after they're "brought back."
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AlphaDog posted:Crumbling walls manned by children and the elderly was practically the first thing I described, yes. "It's obvious that..." was the exact thing I was going for. Another thing I like to do is say some variant on "you know, guys, I didn't necessarily think you would need to resort to violence in this situation..." and sometimes that redirects the scene without scolding them for punching their way through the adventure. (other times they just say "nah, I wanna sock this guy" or w/e) Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 17:33
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E:I am the worst
Sneaking fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 21:21
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Baronjutter posted:I had a friend want to do some white wolf game where we became ghosts or went to some afterlife or something. Me and my friends were extremely risk-averse and paranoid players coming from a lot of games where PC death was common. So in his quick-intro that was supposed to have us die, we flipped out at the slightest sign of danger and got the hell out of there then figured out the world seemed to want us dead. Ok great, I guess that's the game, some supernatural conspiracy is trying to kill us, maybe it's inevitable but we're going to go down planning and fighting to out last. He kept throwing worse and worse situations at us and we kept desperately avoiding them, but both sides were becoming more and more stressed. We were getting pissed his "survival" game was throwing increasingly impossible and GM-magicky bullshit at us, and he kept insinuating we were trying to sabotage the game or avoid playing.
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Jan 28, 2016 21:52
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Zereth posted:See, if you want to run a game where the players are all ghosts, maybe you should pitch that game to the players. Yeah the best part is that was none of the pitch. We were told it was some sort of white wolf thing which we knew meant "supernatural" and "vampires" or what ever. Knowing we were regular humans we sort of decided to be paranoid survivalists types. So of course the moment the police show up and start being controlled by some super natural force to shoot at us we enact our bug-out plans and go the gently caress underground. We thought this was the game, and were proud of our characters geared entirely around surviving "off the grid". We wanted to stop these forces that were trying to kill us on earth. Also it turned out the forces trying to kill us were actually the "good guys" who wanted to recruit us to help fight some stupid spirit-plane war we didn't give a poo poo about and by then we hated then for trying to kill us for days. Great job!
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Jan 28, 2016 22:11
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Baronjutter posted:Yeah the best part is that was none of the pitch. We were told it was some sort of white wolf thing which we knew meant "supernatural" and "vampires" or what ever. Knowing we were regular humans we sort of decided to be paranoid survivalists types. So of course the moment the police show up and start being controlled by some super natural force to shoot at us we enact our bug-out plans and go the gently caress underground. We thought this was the game, and were proud of our characters geared entirely around surviving "off the grid". We wanted to stop these forces that were trying to kill us on earth. Also it turned out the forces trying to kill us were actually the "good guys" who wanted to recruit us to help fight some stupid spirit-plane war we didn't give a poo poo about and by then we hated then for trying to kill us for days. Yeah, seriously. I may be generally okay with that "hopeless boss fight" scenario upthread (given the right setup, context, and follow-through), but I mean, if you want to run Geist or something, just tell your players you want to run Geist and think it would be cool to play out everyone's deaths in the first session. I'd be in for that. It's so bizarre to me that someone would base their entire campaign idea on something and then sell the players something quite different.
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Jan 28, 2016 22:29
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Speaking of games that went off the rails I wanted to share this good GM story. Dude wanted to run a WWII horror game. We were regular joe soldiers attacking some german bunker that was going to be full of all sorts of evil creepy nazi zombie horrors. Cue us, a few lovely soldiers , getting cut off and most of our unit killed finding this bunker. Knowing we had no support and realistically had no reason to try to assault a creepy bunker even though it was open and was "the only place to hide" we decided it was a death-trap and fought our way back to our lines. It was obvious that the GM wanted us to go in the bunker and that's where the game was to take place, but we seriously had no possible motivation to go in, even the GM agreed it wouldn't make sense. This basically ruined the game, or would have for a bad GM that couldn't think on their feet. Instead, he let us take the logical course of action and avoid the bunker, we got back to our unit. Fast forward 40 years. We're old and our unit is meeting up for a reunion and it comes out all of us have been having reoccurring dreams about this bunker recently and there's no records of it ever existing. Also the military slightly disgraced us, saying we made up this bunker as an excuse to fall back. Since we're all in europe for this reunion anyways, we decided to go check it out to finally put our minds at ease. We rented a little bobcat or something and dug up the entrance. Had a lovely creepy exploration/mystery solving game that was just a bunch of old men exploring a nazi bunker rather than a huge action-fest. Most all the experiments we were meant to fight had died, only a few of the worst remained. It was nice.
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Jan 29, 2016 00:12
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Baronjutter posted:good GM story. This is completely wonderful. It was 100% unplanned? Keep that GM happy.
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Jan 29, 2016 00:19
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Glukeose posted:Does anyone have any more good ambient music for a horror game? Preferably music with an industrial or "laboratory" feel to it. I want to run another game of Dread for some friends that can be pitched as "The Thing gets loose in suburbia." Lustmord. Or dark ambient. The fallout 3 radio station mod Existence 2.0 is a bunch of awesome freaky tracks with a computer talking in between, you can just grab the mp3s out if the mod iirc.
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Jan 29, 2016 00:31
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For rocking music I like red sparrowes.
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Jan 29, 2016 00:32
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I really like the sound of OGRE, particularly the 194 album. It's got a great recurring theme with variations, and has a slight John Carpenter vibe to it. Mark Morgan's Fallout OST is pretty widely available, and that's got a good industrial sound to it too.
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Jan 29, 2016 04:24
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Thanks so much for all the music suggestions. Found a lot of good stuff that I can put to use in future games. How do you guys generally handle music in your games? It's something I want to start getting better at because I think it adds to the experience my players get, but I have a little trouble implementing it at appropriate times.
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Jan 29, 2016 04:37
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I just put something on in the background and refuse to fiddle with it much further. And yeah, you miss out on some cool stuff like when you have that perfect dark sun playlist but you don't have to worry about your "random" playlist spitting out that same Sherlock Holmes Hams Zimmer song for the forth time this session. Speaking from experience.
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Jan 29, 2016 08:35
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I generally put way too much effort into music, to the degree that it is probably distracting for my players, but I can't stop. For example, for the Blades in the Dark game I'm currently running, I have four playlists: Action, Sneaking, Tense Sneaking, and Downtime. Mostly they're full of music from Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and Dishonored, so they fit the tone, but my switching playlists constantly probably causes more distraction than atmosphere. That's also a pretty low number of playlists for me. I think I used like 10 different ones in a single session of the last 13th Age game I ran, including a boss fight that got its own special boss playlist.
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Jan 29, 2016 14:12
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Glukeose posted:Does anyone have any more good ambient music for a horror game? Preferably music with an industrial or "laboratory" feel to it. I want to run another game of Dread for some friends that can be pitched as "The Thing gets loose in suburbia." Look into the group The Haxan Cloak, I also recently listened to the album Ravedeath, 1972 by Tim Hecker which is of a similar vein. I also found the album The Expanding Universe by Laurie Spiegel to be good when we were running a space based sci-fi game. It's not necessarily intentionally creepy but in the right context it'll take on those qualities (and as a bonus occasionally you'll get somewhat sudden loud noises and changes that can be kind of unsettling). The Donnie Darko soundtrack also has some good tracks on it for this kind of thing. [Edit] Just started re-listening to The Expanding Universe, and you'll definitely need to prune some of it out, but there are a fair number of tracks that I think will fit with what you're going for. DrOct fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jan 29, 2016 |
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Jan 29, 2016 17:23
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Glukeose posted:Does anyone have any more good ambient music for a horror game? Preferably music with an industrial or "laboratory" feel to it. I want to run another game of Dread for some friends that can be pitched as "The Thing gets loose in suburbia." Two Steps From Hell's Pathogen, Ashes, and Shadows & Nightmares albums for techno-horror. Their other albums will fit everything else.
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Jan 29, 2016 18:42
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All Lustmord, all the time. Also, good options could be: Mobthrow (the S/T album) Ad*Ver*Sa*Ry Nurse With Wound
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Jan 29, 2016 19:31
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90's videogame boss music is good, except each loops in under 4 minutes.
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Jan 29, 2016 23:24
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My "fantasy" playlist on SoundCloud is nothing but Undertale remixes
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Jan 30, 2016 20:35
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The great thing is now when I bust out Megalovania on my group, I can tell them it's from something cool instead of further confirming my Alpha Nerd status with them.
Rohan Kishibe fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jan 30, 2016 |
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Jan 30, 2016 21:57
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The first Resident Evil movie's soundtrack is good for some lab and industrial sounds. Not sure if the film score was ever actually released.
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Jan 31, 2016 10:12
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Buckethead has a song that would be pretty good for some horror ambiance. I once had it leak into one of my rare nightmares and this song is permanently scarred in my mind now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-7sFT9M5K0
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Feb 2, 2016 09:49
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So I'm toying with pitching an idea here for a campaign using the Atomic Robo RPG (which uses the FATE Core system) in a cyberpunk bounty hunters open world setting (think A-Team, Cowboy bebop, Ghost in the shell and Black Lagoon). The idea is I'd give the players a bunch of missions to choose from and they could kind of pick what they want to do. (Sort of like a star wars: EotE game I was in here) I've never run/played FATE before, and maybe I'm stuck on a D&D way of thinking, I can't figure out how I'd structure conflicts. Like, I know with fate it's going to be more than just shoot at each other (which, actually in 13th age which I've been running for a while now kind of works like that with it's aspects and OUT), but I defenitly picture this as being action heavy. The manual says they shouldn't be outnumbered by NPCs unless the NPC's' skills are lower, but that's somewhat vague and I feel I need a stronger rule of thumb, like the way 13th age worked, which had a very nice balanced system for figuring out encounters. Am I just thinking about this the wrong way? Like if they sneak into a compound and trip an alarm and a squad of namless NPC shoot at them, how many should there be? Equal to the number of party members? What if I want to mix in a main NPC in there as well as a commander?Should I have 1 less than. since they are stronger? What if the main NPC of the encounter (i.e. their bounty mark) is there?
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Feb 5, 2016 11:38
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I've not played FATE specifically, so this advice is somewhat general and may need to be taken with a pinch of salt Generally, "the players shouldn't be outnumbered" translates into "the GM shouldn't be taking actions/rolling for actions oftener than the players" The trick, I think, is that a single action/roll need not always map to a single actor. If you have two players pulling off a heist and their cover gets blown and they get chased by The Cops, you don't need to roll to attack for every single cop. It's just The Cops, with all the aspects and peculiarities implied therewith. Or to put it another way, if Finn and Rey are trying to escape from the First Order, you have one character for Captain Phasma, and another character for A Squad of Stormtroopers. If Finn grabs a blaster and shoots at The Squad, a successful attack isn't one blaster bolt, but a whole spray of blaster bolts that catches multiple troopers in the chest. It's the other way around when you've got a single "boss" fighting multiple characters: if you stick to the idea that the individual boss only gets an individual set of actions because they're an individual, it usually turns out badly because the players are acting so much more often than the boss is, so you give the boss multiple "turns", verisimilitude be damned.
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Feb 5, 2016 11:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:You give the boss multiple "turns", verisimilitude be damned. Multiple actions per turn? That's why they're the boss!
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Feb 9, 2016 18:20
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Okay, this question is about Prime Time Adventures. I'm thinking my players might enjoy trying this out but they don't have a lot of regular availability right now. Other than doing a pilot only game, is there some way you can think of to do sort of an ensemble cast game that doesn't require everyone to be present all the time? In addition, are there any ideas from DramaSystem that you might consider trying to include in your PTA games?
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Feb 11, 2016 01:24
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I'm introducing a macguffiny thing that the players need to retrieve. It's called Chaos Orb or something like that. Every round it'll do one of 11 things based on d100 roll. What are some interesting things I could do with it? One will be everyone is blinded for a round, no save. I want a 100 roll to be something pretty crazy. At first it'll be powering a magic machine to animate corpses, so resurrection has to be one of the things also. Once it's knocked out of the machine, it'll start doing random things. I need to know how it could be disable without destroying it also. Maybe just any magic attack turns it off?
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Feb 19, 2016 18:01
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Maybe the effects are tied into certain schools of magic and using a spell from an opposing school would shut it down.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:04
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ButtWolf posted:At first it'll be powering a magic machine to animate corpses, so resurrection has to be one of the things also. If they killed a lot of people, it's practically mandatory to tell them that one of them has come back to life, just not who.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:21
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Gildiss posted:Maybe the effects are tied into certain schools of magic and using a spell from an opposing school would shut it down. I'd suggest this; have it release ~10 random spells, depending upon the severity of the effects, party size, and the party's ability to counter/take them. No matter whether the party counters them or just weathers the Onslaught of Pure Chaos, it deactivates for a while. Either let it go dormant afterward or the mage will probably figure out some way to keep it contained. Perhaps leave an
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Feb 19, 2016 18:26
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Do the Sorrow fight from MGS3. Just have it summon the spirits of everything a party member's killed, shouting accusations at them. Give them a will save or something to avoid being shaken or frightened or whatever the equivalent would be.
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Feb 19, 2016 18:32
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ButtWolf posted:I need to know how it could be disable without destroying it also. Maybe just any magic attack turns it off? its inactive in total darkness
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Feb 19, 2016 18:39
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These are fun. Thanks
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Feb 19, 2016 19:23
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Does anyone know of a resource to make good looking handouts for players? I need to make a flyer for my D&D game and I was hoping to find a site that would let me plug in the text and get some ye olde parchment looking output I could use.
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Feb 22, 2016 03:55
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ButtWolf posted:I'm introducing a macguffiny thing that the players need to retrieve. It's called Chaos Orb or something like that. Every round it'll do one of 11 things based on d100 roll. What are some interesting things I could do with it? One will be everyone is blinded for a round, no save. I want a 100 roll to be something pretty crazy. At first it'll be powering a magic machine to animate corpses, so resurrection has to be one of the things also. Once it's knocked out of the machine, it'll start doing random things. I need to know how it could be disable without destroying it also. Maybe just any magic attack turns it off? 13th Age's 13 True Ways Book has a High Weirdness table for their Chaos Mage class, which is about making weird things happen because of ~crazy magics~. Might have some ideas you can crib or adapt.
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Feb 22, 2016 06:10
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Gerdalti posted:I need to make a flyer for my D&D game and I was hoping to find a site that would let me plug in the text and get some ye olde parchment looking output I could use. Just stick some parchment paper in your printer, you can buy it at any office supply place.
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Feb 22, 2016 06:29
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moths posted:Just stick some parchment paper in your printer, you can buy it at any office supply place. I'm actually using Roll20, so it'd be buy paper, print, then scan, then put in roll20 and throw paper away. Still might be the route I go, or maybe I'll just not have fancy handouts, I don't know.
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Feb 22, 2016 13:36
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Gerdalti posted:I'm actually using Roll20, so it'd be buy paper, print, then scan, then put in roll20 and throw paper away. Still might be the route I go, or maybe I'll just not have fancy handouts, I don't know. 1. Google image "parchment," find a good size for your document 2. Convert your document into an image file format (simplest method is to screenshot a full-scale image and crop) 3. Use Paint.net (or similar image editing tool): 3a. Make the document whitespace transparent (magic-wand-select whitespace, pick a good tolerance value that doesn't leave white flecks, delete) 3b. Put the parchment into a background layer 3c. Save as jpeg or whatever, send
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Feb 22, 2016 13:46
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Game: 13th Age The Adventuring Party: 1 Character is really bad at being good, and is a Deva (Angel Person), 1 Character is really bad at being bad and is a Tiefling (Demon Person), 1 character has 8 intelligence, 10 wisdom, and needs a moral compass in his life. He also has a magic music box that is leaking blood, and is the ONLY son of an Undead in the Universe. The Deva & Tiefling act as his moral compass. Shenanigans ensue. Problem: I made two semi-interesting NPC's who own a tavern / inn in the city. They are asking for information / want the plot to revolve around these people. I didn't do much story boarding, so I need some help figuring out cool backstory for them to pull out of these tight lipped NPC's. Mack owns the bar, and Fin works the stage. Mack is a man of few words, patient, a good listener, scarred to poo poo and scary. Fin is mute, plays instruments, and sometimes delivers food to the rooms. When Fin was asked her name, she flicked off the party. When Mack was asked Fin's name, he also flicked off the party, then shrugged, "that's all I get out of her... We call her fin, short for finger." That's the entirety I have on these people, but the PC's want something to be there, and I want something to be there, so I'm going to need help generating plot hooks.
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Feb 22, 2016 14:03
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Turtlicious posted:Game: 13th Age I had a bar that held secret meetings in the basement at midnight. It was kind of an assassins guild/cult thing. It was p. cool. They could also be important people hiding out posing as bar owners.
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Feb 22, 2016 14:23
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