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No, just amazing in a different way.
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Apr 12, 2016 04:06
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General Maximus posted:On a similar not in depth note, the feeling when you do that and then miss nine attacks in a row over the course of three rounds? Distinctly not amazing at all. Or having the highest AC in the party and still never getting missed, which had been my last few weeks of DnD. The DM's dice just hate me. On the plus side, that also meant I didn't feel bad about diving off the 200' cliff to go help a friend. It was better than another round of double attacks from eight yetis!
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Apr 12, 2016 22:58
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General Maximus posted:On a similar not in depth note, the feeling when you do that and then miss nine attacks in a row over the course of three rounds? Distinctly not amazing at all. My first ever Pathfinder game (which was also my first ever tabletop session ever) had that happen to me during a battle on a flying ship. I somehow managed to flub every single attack I made and even accidentally hit myself with my own flail while the rest of the party slaughtered the attackers. The only thing I did of any note was bum rush a dude and shoulder ram him over the side of the ship.
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Apr 12, 2016 23:03
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My first Pathfinder game I had kept missing all my attacks with my Barbarian that I got so angry that I declared I was going to attack myself. My DM wanted me to roll the attack (even though it wasn't needed; he just wanted to see the result) so I did. 1
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Apr 13, 2016 02:41
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:My first Pathfinder game I had kept missing all my attacks with my Barbarian that I got so angry that I declared I was going to attack myself. My DM wanted me to roll the attack (even though it wasn't needed; he just wanted to see the result) so I did. Would that indirectly result in a hit on an enemy? Or would the paradox of a critical failure on self-injury destroy the universe?
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Apr 13, 2016 03:00
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chitoryu12 posted:Would that indirectly result in a hit on an enemy? Or would the paradox of a critical failure on self-injury destroy the universe? He heals himself, obviously.
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Apr 13, 2016 03:08
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He accidentally stabs himself with his Health Sword. 
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Apr 13, 2016 03:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:He heals himself, obviously. Through acupuncture.
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Apr 13, 2016 03:16
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Kibner posted:Through acupuncture. Axeupuncture.
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Apr 13, 2016 07:35
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He beats his chest like tarzan and powers up like a goku.
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Apr 13, 2016 11:57
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goatface posted:He beats his chest like tarzan and powers up like a goku. There's an unofficial rule at the table I play at that anything labeled Qi, Chi, or Psionic Points are in fact pronounced 'Gokus', so you have to spend your Gokus on shooting your mind beam or fireballs.
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Apr 13, 2016 12:36
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So I'm in an ongoing D&D 3.5 campaign, playing as a Paladin. The campaign's mostly designed for the DM to test out some homebrew magic system, which means that I'm one of two front-line characters in a party of 7. The other one's a Barbarian, so I'm the tank. That would be fine - I only get hit on a 17+, have access to healing and we're only facing low-level goblins with a few orcs - except that the dice hate me. Cue multiple criticals in the same encounter and my paladin going down to negatives in the first session I'm in. But hey, he survived and I got a ruined keep out of the deal. Related story: Same campaign, everyone's hitting on the npc fox girl we have following us around. (Yes, it's a bit cat-pissy, but not nearly as much as the first campaign I was in with a different group - a campaign we've since nicknamed the "vampire sex dungeon" campaign, so I can handle it). The paladin, BARKY CROBTONA (allcaps, name stolen from the Star Citizen thread, described as "the best paladin in the world since he was a little boy" despite being level 1 in his 40s) is having none of that. He flirts with ADVENTURE instead. Everyone else has been failing miserably. Barky rolls a 20. Adventure loves Barky.
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Apr 13, 2016 13:15
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I want to hear more bad/catpiss stories. These synopses/summaries aren't cuttin' it.
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Apr 13, 2016 16:56
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VX-145 posted:(Yes, it's a bit cat-pissy, but not nearly as much as the first campaign I was in with a different group - a campaign we've since nicknamed the "vampire sex dungeon" campaign, so I can handle it). 
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Apr 13, 2016 17:24
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Yawgmoth posted:Okay so this is a story you're telling us now, rather than later. Expect to be disappointed, it's a long one but not as bad as some of the best (worst?) in this thread. It's about 10% cat-piss, 20% cool things happening, and the rest is alright. Okay, so this is a bit longer and I need to do some context first. You know what, I'm going to do a longpost on it, even though the Vampire Sex Dungeon bit is only a small portion, because it's fun to recount this. There's a tl;dr down the bottom if you're not interested. For the record, despite all the cat-piss I'm about to describe, I actually kind of enjoyed the game. I also need to clarify that no on-screen sex was involved (thank gently caress) and as far as I'm aware the Sex Dungeon was... mostly... a joke. Mostly. This was in my third year of university and also my first tabletop RPG game ever. I'd been reading the thread and so on, so I was kind of hyped, and had some ideas for how to play. It was D&D 3.5e. We had the following party members, with names redacted or plain forgotten: Me, playing a human female Sorceror. The backstory was that she was a clone experiment of P's character which went wrong and produced a normal person. He wanted a hunchback instead. True neutral, because I figured it'd cover me from any alignment shenanigans. Also had another side effect I'll talk about later. Partially responsible for some SCIENCE. Thankfully, despite playing a woman, nothing that you'd expect from a group responsible for something called a Vampire Sex Dungeon happened to me. P, playing a Cleric. An evil mad scientist. Yes, Evil. We had two evil characters in our group, which we should probably have noticed and dealt with. Also the heir to a massive stereotypical mad scientist castle, with an entire tank of my character down in the basement. Responsible for the SCIENCE shenanigans we pulled, which was good, and the aforementioned Vampire Sex Dungeon, which was... less good. W, a Chaotic Neutral Rogue. Yup. Nothing much else to say here, except they were heavily into PvP and possessed a ring of teleportation-at-will. Before 5th level. Made a point of being able to fight all the other party members, including L below. S, a monk, or Paladin, or something. He swapped characters a couple of times, once becoming a vampire. Mostly known for being a stick-in-the-mud when it was most dickish. And, last but definitely not least, L. L was a Lawful Evil Psion. L had printed out every single Psion power and rule. And, thanks to us not actually reading one particular rule, L had effectively unlimited Psion power points and could dump them all into any single power at any time. One of these powers became known as the Death Star Beam. Again, this was before 5th level. So, the campaign itself. I'm just going to tell you what happened chronologically, because it's all pretty interesting: We opened in a small town. Some actions were taken, and then a dragon with rider attacked. Not just any sort of dragon, but one infected by some sort of crystal. My instinct, at 1st level, was to run the gently caress away, but me and P ended up blocked into an alleyway by constructs spat out by the dragon. Well, L was having none of that, and promptly went "yeah I'm dumping all my points into mind control and mind controlling the dragon". Thanks to aforesaid lack of knowing the rules, the dragon became one of ours very quickly, and we dispatched the constructs with ease. So the DM goes "yeah but there's shitloads more, and you've used most of your power points", to which we respond with my quickly-becoming-standard strategy of run the gently caress away. We ended the first session with a glimpse of a gigantic floating city filled with these dragons and us going back to our new castle. I say new, despite it being old and decrepit, because we roleplayed it into existence at that very moment. The next session is spent making S's first character and doing SCIENCE on the dragon. We're invited to an abbey run by S's order so we can meet an Empress and sort out this whole "crystal dragon" thing, because the other guys (who, might I remind you, we don't even have a faction name for). My character scouts out the area with their familiar, checking out where the best defensive positions are because I know how this is going to go down (and I even have the skills for it thanks to an ambiguous interpretation of the Profession skill - I wasn't planning on abusing stuff going in, but then L happened so I went "gently caress it"). None of this matters because the night before everyone's due to arrive L lures the abbot out into a garden and sticks him with a crystal to, and I quote, "see what would happen". What happens is, very predictably, he turns into a crystal construct. L runs away screaming, both with his voice and with his mind, and I - the sorceror with 4hp and next to no armour - come running. Alone. Against a high-level monk who is also a crystal thingy, which only increases his stats. Now, having no intention to be the overpowered menace I know magic classes in 3.5 are capable of being, I hadn't picked the most optimal spells for myself. I had, in fact, picked Magic Missile and Shield as my first-level spells. I'd also wasted a feat on weapon proficiency, because I kind of like the idea of having some capability in a melee fight. So, the DM feels sorry for me and sends me some NPC monks to help out. They get crystalled. L doesn't bother coming back to help, so I do the only thing I know how to do. I use Magic Missile. Magic Missile, which I'd flavoured as a laser beam. A laser beam hitting what was essentially a giant prism. Two things happen. First, everywhere is set on fire and I do a small amount of damage to a bunch of the enemies. Second, I get inspiration for some later SCIENCE. Then, the crystal monks collectively decide that I should die. I disagree, and start digging with the Shield spell. Yes, that's not how it's supposed to work, but I'd looked at the spell description and somehow come to the conclusion that I could do it. So, I ended up underground, traumatised, but alive. The rest of the party finally decides to show up - and I mean that literally - so the monks are quickly taken care of. I might have gotten a level from the experience, I forget. Otherwise, it sets a certain tone for the rest of the adventure - that is, "try to kill the sorceror". Cut to next session. I send my familiar out to check on the crystal ambassador's carriage as it arrives, and promptly lose it. Welp, good thing neither of us had read the part about XP loss. The ambassador turns up, it's obviously a trap, and they make a black hole/portal thingy in the centre of the room. Our rogue uses the gravity assist to turn his longbow into a railgun, killing what was supposed to be the Big Bad in one round, but the portal's still there. I'm holding onto a rope, trying not to be dragged into the drat thing, when the rest of the party goes "hey let's see what's through there", followed by a collective "I don't want to be the first". I'm all for getting the gently caress out of dodge, of course, so S picks me up and deposits me very calmly into the portal (having stolen an amulet that let him ignore its effects). I'm deposited into a pocket dimension and told in no uncertain terms I had to get to the door at the other end of a long platform in a time limit. I start running, because what the hell else am I going to do, and find that the rest of the party decided to come along to see what loot they could get. Cue two giant crystal golems attacking us, which my character is having none of. We barely escape, somehow. I think the Psion missed this session, or it'd have been a lot shorter. I skip the next session because I have to actually attend lectures occasionally, but I do leave a list of what my character's up to during that time. Mostly SCIENCE, trying to lay the groundwork for making laser rifles, power armour and other fun stuff - at the very least, giving me some sort of survivability. My character, by this point, has gone from an emotionless lab assistant to a traumatised laser-obsessed coward, which was pretty neat. The next session, I find out that the DM hadn't actually read said list, to which I responded with a shrug. I hadn't expected the DM to give me any of the cool toys I'd been after that easily. This is when I find out that P and L have been mass-producing the crystal, having made it somehow loyal to each of them, and we now have crystal golems of our own. I get a cool little laser beam floaty thing to replace my familiar, so that's some consolation I guess. Then we enter a dungeon. Oh boy. This loving dungeon. The first, and prototypical, Vampire Dungeon. Not Vampire Sex Dungeon, that comes later. So, we teleport into the dungeon because this is after W gets his ring (which can do group teleportation, apparently), do some dungeony stuff including getting all magic turned off for a bit (which was supposed to gently caress over the Psion but only really got me instead) and some more gravity fun. Then, we come across a room with a very interesting gimmick. The door is iced over, but there is a mirror in the centre of the room. Said mirror, when activated, puts you in an arena with your alignment opposite. If you lose, you take over as that character who is otherwise nearly identical. S loses to his, giving us yet another evil character. P and L win to theirs. Everyone else gets some loot. So, my turn. I activate the mirror. Four other versions of me turn up - Lawful Good and Evil, and Chaotic Good and Evil. Chaotic Evil wins, but that doesn't matter because that's where the session wraps up and I have a plan. My character was a clone. Some fudging later, and assumptions of some sort of soul trap thingy, and I end up with 5 versions of myself all under my control. I'm still the weakest character, and it's ruled I can only bring one at a time to any expedition, but it's something. Thankfully, the ring of teleport was working again, so I had P rush back and get things kicked off on that front as the end to the session. Next session, we come across some vampires. We sit down for a nice meal with them - I ask for the vegetarian dish - and then proceed to bed. During the night, a vampire knocks on P's door. They seduce each other, sort of, and are about to fade to black when P sticks a crystal into the vampire and activates it. Cue said vampire being literally ripped in half as a crystal golem comes out of the crystal. The metaphors are not lost upon the group. Said vampire becomes the first member of what will later be known as the Vampire Sex Dungeon, so called because she's stuffed in a sack, chained in the basement of our castle (thankfully far away from my clone tank) and probably experimented upon or something, I made sure we never focussed on what happened afterwards. That's later, though, for now the rest of the party has encounters. S becomes a vampire and then an NPC, L nearly becomes a vampire but doesn't, and I open the door to my room just wide enough to send through a Flaming Sphere (which I had just levelled up enough to learn), close it again, lock it, bolt it, barricade it and go back to reading. It's later discovered that I had, in fact, annihilated the human butler employed by the vampires. Don't ask why there was a human butler, because I don't know. The session ends there. Again, classes force me to miss the next one, but the gist of it is that we set up a party to get all the local nobles on side so we can mount a war effort and P also took all the other vampires for the growing Vampire Sex Dungeon. This is where the story goes  for a bit. I discover gunpowder somehow, and then the party's interrupted by the big gently caress-off floating city from the first session. You remember that, right? Luckily, we're prepared - our golems fight their golems, I've mounted a giant laser crystal on the top of the castle which we use to hold off the worst of the enemy, and we try to launch a raid on the city to fight it off, because gently caress running away. Outside of manning the cannon, I don't contribute much, but then again I don't need to. The rogue uses his ring of teleport to teleport the entire castle onto the enemy city, whereupon we start an invasion. Luckily, my clone tank and all the nobles are safe in our basement, which I've made certain to have converted into a bomb shelter while I was away. Our crystals are turning their crystals, we're firing off the laser at the giant spire which may as well have had "BOSS FIGHT HERE" in giant neon letters on it, and things are going well. Half our new army gets wiped out by some ridiculous defensive guns, but L and W break into the boss fight room. They kill yet another Big Bad, and bam! We now have a floating city. One diplomacy roll later and every noble at the party is fully committed to our cause.Then it turns out that the city was the equivalent of a landing craft, and the actual invasion fleet was hanging around in orbit. Good thing I still have those old "run the gently caress away" instincts, and for once the party agrees with me. We cloak the city, land it at the bottom of the ocean with some Psion stuff, and get down to building up a counter-offensive. Which was actually pretty cool, I had plans for an entire battlefleet and commando units equipped with crystal technology and so on. But all good things must come to an end. In what turned out to be the final session because exams, we went dungeon crawling. Again. Into another Vampire Dungeon. S gets pulled into a painting and becomes a luchador, which was the highlight of the session. Then, I get turned into a cartoon on the wall and have dicks drawn on me by the party, which would have been funny if it hadn't been the CN rogue being wacky for no reason and nearly killing me, and then it's time for vampire mirrors of ourselves. First thing we do is telekinesis a the output of a fountain into a riot control hose, then rather than follow that up with any co-ordination we all split off and face our opposites. P tries to grab another vampire for the Dungeon, but nearly dies doing it, the other members are off fighting and I'm stuck alone with something that could easily kill me before having Sorceror levels. Again, I have a plan - I use mage hand to steal their spell components and get ready to enact part 2, which is where the session, and game, ends. Kind of a fitting end, really. More of a "wait, was that it?" than a "holy poo poo!". Lots of potential for the good, the bad and the cat-piss but little of it came to fruition thanks to me missing two sessions and the game ending prematurely. tl;dr: Evil cleric cuts vampires up, chains them in a dungeon and I'm thankfully not around for what happens next.
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Apr 13, 2016 20:52
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So this was all back in highschool, maybe fifteen years old or so. I'm 31 now, and I've learned a lot of the warning signs of when to ditch a group of players. The first and only role playing experience I had was with a couple guys in HS and we played for two or three years before going to college after. The players were great, but there's a lot of those warning signs from the GM that I was simply too young, inexperienced, and stupid to have caught. The GM was a very bookish kid, the stereotypical English lit nerd, who loving loved Tolkien. I'm fairly sure now that we were actually playing in middle earth with town names changed. But along with that, is that magic was exceedingly rare. So much so that my mage, who miraculously survived everything, would get run out of town over casting any sort of spell and being seen to do so by a villager. Our best gear we ever got was +1, POSSIBLY +2 but I'm doubtful we got something as fancy as a +2 anything. I couldn't even find out because he wouldn't even tell me after I cast detect magic or identify, just that it had a "magical aura" about it. The best gear anyone had for most of the time was the basic entry appropriate items for our class, maybe one or two master work swords. Being increasingly paranoid I did get silver daggers for my mage along with a silver collar. Now, loot was few and far between. We could barely afford food and replacement gear, as initially we had multiple party wipes. And I'm not talking about a boss or even story encounter. We got wiped out once by three goblins attacking the four of us in camp at night. Party wipes became so common that I remember me and one friend went to the copy place and made 50 character blanks so we'd have a few pre-made for the next session. Just fighting four or five kobolds would turn into a meat grinder of playing one character you don't even know/remember the name of, while you're making rolls on his replacements stats. It became common practice with us to be running multiple characters at a time just so we could keep playing when one or two of their three characters died. No one had any emotional attachment to their characters until 4th or 5th level when there was a glimmer of hope that they'd be able to survive. It wasn't just the difficulty however, where at the merest sign of anything being slightly out of place, we went to full battle formation. (notably, I remember the parties rogue halfling making a spot check on a pile of dirt in a field. This triggered outright panic, IC and ooc - we spent an hour of actual time approaching the dirt pit). It was also the tedium of trying to do everything "realistically". We couldn't just set up camp and fast forward to morning, we had to describe setting up the tents, tending the horses (the rare couple of times we got horses, and half the time they got loose anyways), rolling out bedrolls, starting a fire, cooking, taking watch, changing clothing, taking off/putting on armor, scouting the area, and then reverse order all of that to carry on our adventure. This would eat up easily an hour of real time (initially two hours until we got quick at it) . Forget one aspect and make checks for reduction to con or not be healed the next morning. And there was always the chance the next two hours of the session would be eaten up by an NPC sneaking past whoever got assigned watch and stealing our gear, which we invariably had to track down because we couldn't afford to replace it anyways. Or trying to track then catch our loose horses. Sometimes both. Due to being a wizard I had to also prepare my daily spells. Every. Single. Morning. The one time I didn't, the GM basically said "Well that's too bad, no prepared spells means no casting, you can throw your dagger though." This didn't apply to his own gmpc however, because I don't recall him ever mentioning his dwarf cleric preparing anything for casting each day. (Unless when he said "my cleric gets up after mumbling a few prayers" was his version of choosing his spells) We finally caught on to the "realism", and once we had the order down of what the GM wanted to hear for preparing camp or anything that you do daily, we finally made a written list in order, and told him "when we say this, these are the steps our characters follow through with, and are assumed to do on a daily basis unless otherwise stated." Why in writing? Because he'd use only verbal requests as a means to "forget", and then screw us somehow. The rogue halfling was constantly going into sneak mode and disappearing from the party while traveling on well used roads because he was so paranoid of ambushes. And rightfully so, road bandits soaked up a lot of our extra character sheets. I think the worst moment was facing a black dragon, after already wading through a horde of goblins or kobolds (we literally did not see or interact with anything other than those two races as monsters, with backwater human dirt farming peasanta being the only other intractable NPCs). Now we actually faired decently well, and our plan hadn't gone horrible wrong or been railroaded by the GM. It was a new player who was fourteen and a complete idiot that nearly wiped out the party that had BARELY managed to reach sixth or seventh level. As half the party is managing to sneak past the black dragon for our pincer surprise attack, two of the PCs whispering among themselves get interrupted by our idiot fourteen year old monk saying "what? I can't hear you!" We all look aghast at him. "What do you mean I'm in the middle of the cavern?" He exclaims, trying to say he wasn't, after he explicitly had just stated he was sneaking across the cavern floor. Dragon awakened, acid breath is sprayed liberally across the entire cavern, my mage loses his spell book, our party loses all but their most basic weapons. My character has to spend a month of in game time re-scribing his spell book from memory. Miraculously we killed the dragon and got a huge payout (our first ever big payday at level 6 or 7) that finally let us equip ourselves properly (or in some cases at all) with our desired weapons and armour. I had a blacksmith make a steel quick release case and scrollcase for my spellbook and scrolls immediately. I would never have thought otter cases were necessary in medieval times. This next section turned out to be my last session playing with them. I know they continued playing, but I wasn't invited nor did I ask to join. All that was too preface the actual story, as I learned all that was warning signs pointing to a fledgling grognard. In grade 11 or 12, in what I thought were strange additions to the random conversations our group would have over lunch at school, our GM would somehow bring up rape every so often. I thought that was a bit strange, but whatever. I figured maybe it was something he was trying to figure out from an empathy/understanding perspective. Nope. A couple of his statements still stuck out to me over these strange lunch time conversations, which was not even remotely what we had been talking about to have made it a smooth topic change. "Rape isn't that bad, there's nothing being done people don't do naturally all the time. It's really not that damaging." "Guys it's only about power, not sexual gratification; no rapist has ever done it for purely sexual motivation." When there were girls present: "actually rapists tend to be someone who the victim already knows, not some stranger you've never met before." Keep in mind all these were said with a bit of a smirk and amusement. And out of nowhere. Why he decided he was such an expert on this at 17 I don't know. I wish I were smarter, because everything up to the next portion should have been pretty telling of the kind of grog he is. Onto my last second to DND session! The party is traveling somewhere, who knows where, when we come across a carriage being chased and then caught by a giant and a party of bandits. Me and a couple others start surveying the situation from a long ways away as we haven't been noticed. We go over a couple means of approach, likelihood of success, etc. Then our paladin decides to draw his sword and charge. (OOC) Rogue: "Oh for gently caress sake are you serious?" Paladin: "Guys I have to try to save them my character can't just stand by doing nothing!" Wizard: "Doing good and running towards your obvious suicide are very different. Well whatever, we're all dead now anyways may as well go with it." At this point, and I still don't know why besides being a fledgling grog, the GM decides to go into more detail of what the bandits and specifically giant are doing. As we approach, the giant has reached into the carriage and pulls out a screaming young noble woman or princess. The driver and couple guards she had are dead, and the giant proceeds to tear off her dress, his intent obvious as "you see the massive bulge in the giants loincloth... You could say elephantine, really." Now the rogue player is mostly bewildered by the mechanics of this and asks "how would that would even work, he's a giant ffs." GM: "Well I'd imagine it's roughly donkey or horse sized, so about three feet long, I can tell you it definitely is possible from things I've seen." Keep in mind he's snickering and smiling this entire time. He starts to describe how the giant is holding her legs apart, and I realise he's about to start describing a rape scene to us. Finally my seventeen year old self has the sense to say what in the hell are you doing? This is a game for fun, I did not sign up to listen to your rape porn. He stutters and tries a responding that rape happens constantly throughout history and this is what would realistically happen if we don't intervene, etc etc, but I remember being incredibly pissed off at this. He tries to justify it for realism and whatever else again, and we argue for the next several minutes. Cue an awkward silence, and we all break for snacks and to calm down, and he finally agreed alright, that was too much, we rewind and retcon that last bit. (Something he had NEVER done before). But me and the rogue were right about the encounter, and it's a massacre for our party. All except for me, the mage. Through a little creative use of flight, feather fall, and some other stuff I manage to elude the giant. But looking back on it, the GM was out for my blood at this point through the giant. The giant is suddenly tireless and single mindedly fixated on my death. It's like a bad horror movie or one of the lower budget Jurassic parks, as the thing chases me for roughly 36 hours in game through plains, a forest and mountains, nearly an hour of actual play time. Problem is that the GM can't just murder me outright without obviously breaking the Tolkien style lack of magic or a miraculous intervention to catch me after his strict realism in every other game. He was noticeably frustrated and disappointed when I made it to the mountains, and he announced the giant finally gave up and left. But not before trying to scale several cliff faces to get to my wizard. I end up being the sole survivor, bury the rest of the party (after taking their coin and a few things to replace my lost gear), and pretty much retire, figuring my poor mage has PTSD by now after the horror show of the last two years, wanting nothing more than a cottage in a quiet forest by a creek and some books. Maybe take up enchanting or something. For some reason I've kind of missed playing DND; why, I'm not sure. I guess in my mind it still could be this amazing thing full of fantastic places and creatures and fun adventure. But I've been in enough awful gaming groups of grog and cat piss since then to be wary of drat near everyone, and very much agree no gaming is better than bad gaming. If there's any lessons in this thread (I read the entire thing over the last week), it's that you NEED to speak up and say when something is not kosher, whether from someone's behaviour ooc, or in game; whether it's a player or GM. And you are never under any obligation to remain in a game - if you're worried about keeping up appearances just say you're not able to really get into it, and everyone deserves "better" than a half hearted attempt. Because let's be honest, there's players and GMs out there that are about as sociopathic as their characters are, and the sooner you cut ties with that rather than getting sucked into their fantasy world, the better. If this wasn't an awful read, I'm full of other stories, like "Why paladin players aren't necessarily good - how I kept the GMs sister from being molested."
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Apr 14, 2016 05:18
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Start typing that one immediately
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Apr 14, 2016 06:26
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VolatileSky posted:If this wasn't an awful read, I'm full of other stories, like "Why paladin players aren't necessarily good - how I kept the GMs sister from being molested." I want to read this one too.
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Apr 14, 2016 06:30
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Golden Bee posted:Feng Shui! Yesterday's Feng Shui game was TOP SHELF. My Scrappy Kid Christina Eagles is constantly in danger of being captured by the Cult of the Rising Lotus. Li Ting, Glorious King of the Fire Pagoda, sent an envoy to bring her (and the party) to his palace in the Netherworld. He wanted to do some diplomacy. The Chancellor, Abysmal Flute, explained Christina was needed for a ritual called the Night of the 10,001 Innocents. If she was sacrificed, a major faction would win Infinite Power, Create a Zombie Army, and rule the multiverse. Unfortunately, after a big dinner, Li Ting teleported away and his chancellor revealed that if Christina died OUTSIDE the ritual, then no problem. So like 20 people were trying to gank her last night and ignored the rest of the party. (Thank the Gods for a 15 base AC and dodge bonuses, but Christina still almost got killed.) So, in order to avoid being the Girl Who Gets Kidnapped or Killed, she dressed up as the Masked Avenger's sidekick! Scrounged together from an old Halloween costume and what used to be a fancy dress, Jade Scion was joined by the Ruby Fox! Scion was baffled, just as he'd been for the last 6 sessions since he found out about the Chi War. He acquiesced to the plan, based on Christina's loyalty to him. (A little before the Li Ting meeting, she'd patched up his wounds; he was stabbed repeatedly in a Wuxia fight scene in a Netherworld forest.) But the great part is this. Christina, normally inured to the extreme violence a game of Feng Shui demands, treats Ruby Fox as a different person. Ruby is like a cocoon she can be when she doesn't want to let down or endanger anyone else. Despite the disguise being a red mask, jeans and a hoodie, everyone has treated them as two separate individuals. Which was totally emergent and even a little High Scale for a genre where people fight fire zombies with baseball bats. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Jun 19, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 07:39
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Every time I think this thread is dead, there's new stories to tell. 
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Apr 14, 2016 08:50
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There's always more and it's always _________.
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Apr 14, 2016 09:56
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ellbent posted:I want to hear more bad/catpiss stories. These synopses/summaries aren't cuttin' it. I have dozens of Camarilla LARP stories that are absolutely drenched in cat piss. I just got caught up with the thread again, but I can write up on of those later today. For now, he's a little story: Up until recently, we have a NG cleric of Sarenrae in my Pathfinder game. The player was getting bored with the concept at about the same time the party collaborated with a nation of undead, so the player took that opportunity to leave the party and come back in with a new character. He is now playing a TN Sorcerer Necromancer. I found a quick way to throw him into the party (they were traveling through new territory, and a patrol from a violently anti-magic regime found the necromancer, and the party jumped in to help him not get carried off by the thugs). So then he's in the group, more or less, but the party is a bit wary of his particular art. He doesn't hide anything, and is actually proud of trying to do non-evil things with necromancy. The character sees necromancy, and death itself, as a functional tool just like any other, magical or otherwise. The party is still no convinced (despite spending the last three sessions cozying-up to a nation full of undead). So the new guy sets about looking for an opportunity to prove that he's not some horrible monster, and that he can be an asset to a mostly Good party. Later, they run afoul of some of the locals, as Murder Hobos are wont to do. The party fends off a couple of the attackers, but they get into a jam where they need to cover an escape in the face of mounting odds. There are more and more bad guys coming out of the woodwork, and they have now summoned a dire alligator to help them capture the PCs. Even worse, they are in a dangerous swamp filled with natural hazards. There are even a few corpses here and there that were there before the PCs even showed up, to show how dangerous this place is even to the locals. The necromancer had and idea to get them out of the jam.  "I have an idea to slow them down!" "We haven't killed anyone here yet, so just don't do anything to make them totally crazy about killing us." "Sure!"The necromancer, naturally, uses Raise Dead, and gets to choose to get a skeleton or a zombie from the corpse. He chooses a skeleton pretty much arbitrarily, but he doesn't read the flavor text of the spell., which specifies some things about how, exactly, all of this looks. So one of the villagers' dead friends stands up, and all of his flesh sloughs off right in front of them. The skeleton of their friend is now standing in front of them, covered in his own blood, knee-deep in 100 pounds of putrid gore. The locals are not pleased. I'm not sure what the PC wanted to happen with that use of the spell, but he did kind of accompish what he set out to do. The skeleton (and the horror and rage) did slow down the enemies, but the rest of the session turned into Deliverance, as the PCs were chased through a swamp by deranged hillbillies wielding a dire alligator. 
Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 14:16
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When the game is bad, the thread is good
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Apr 15, 2016 00:32
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Railing Kill posted:I have dozens of Camarilla LARP stories that are absolutely drenched in cat piss. I just got caught up with the threat again, but I can write up on of those later today. For the love of God, 
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Apr 15, 2016 01:08
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Can I just take a second to brag about my NetRunner FATE players? They were on a job in the megacity of San Angeles, they needed to discredit a lawyer so they could roll back some deal he authored. Their first thought was "plant some cocaine on him and tip off SAPD," but I mentioned that as an executive on the Titan Transnational legal team, it's unlikely he'd face any consequences. Then they had the brilliant idea to plant a job application and communication between the lawyer and Haas-Bioroid's HR division on his computer. Once Titan Transnational thought he was looking for another job, then they planted the incriminating evidence and dropped a dime, and with Titan Transnational thinking that he was jumping ship anyway, they left him out to dry with the police.
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Apr 15, 2016 15:38
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Oh that is brilliant.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:16
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Everblight posted:Can I just take a second to brag about my NetRunner FATE players? They were on a job in the megacity of San Angeles, they needed to discredit a lawyer so they could roll back some deal he authored. Their first thought was "plant some cocaine on him and tip off SAPD," but I mentioned that as an executive on the Titan Transnational legal team, it's unlikely he'd face any consequences. 
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Apr 15, 2016 17:17
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Everblight posted:ISOLATE AND DISCREDIT That is machiavellian as hell and I love it.
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Apr 15, 2016 17:33
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Everblight posted:Can I just take a second to brag about my NetRunner FATE players? They were on a job in the megacity of San Angeles, they needed to discredit a lawyer so they could roll back some deal he authored. Their first thought was "plant some cocaine on him and tip off SAPD," but I mentioned that as an executive on the Titan Transnational legal team, it's unlikely he'd face any consequences. That is wonderful. I'll share a small thing that happen during my last game night. I took up DMing around the holidays last year and I've had mostly the same table of brand new players since then. They've slowly been RPing more and more. The madness effect of Rage of Demons seems to have helped it. The party was wandering into an ambush full of invisible duergar to begin the game. I had everyone do some madness rolls because they had long rested before. The bard and paladin got hit with some greed and vanity. So as I described the area where everything was about to go down the bard asks me if there is anything shiny in the area. I look at him and say "Yes, in fact this big boulder in the middle seems shiny." The following happens... Bard: I want to climb on top of the boulder because I'm the best. Me: Okay you climb on top of the boulder. Paladin: You're not the best I am the best. I am going to climb up on the boulder and push you off. Me, enjoying this now: Okay give me some strength/dex rolls to see who is king of the boulder. They roll off and the paladin pushes the bard off the boulder, causing some falling damage because he goes flat back to the floor. Bard: I cast thunderwave at the boulder. At this point I'm laughing, the dwarf cleric is cranky, and the rest of the table is laughing. I roll a couple dice and decide that one of the invisible duergars is going to start laughing out loud at the scene. The group tries to find the source of the laughter and combat begins. The paladin is fighting from the top of the boulder and I have one of the hulked out duergar go up and try to push the paladin off. The bard sees this and gets jealous so it turns into a three way brawl on top of the boulder. And that is when I had the invisible mindflayer hit its AOE mindblast attack. When the group defeats and captures the mindflayer they ask why he attacked I have the mindflayer say "I thought you all would provide a good meal," then he glances at the bard and paladin and says "well, some of you at least."
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Apr 15, 2016 21:14
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VX-145 posted:Expect to be disappointed, it's a long one but not as bad as some of the best (worst?) in this thread. It's about 10% cat-piss, 20% cool things happening, and the rest is alright. So this vampire sex dungeon never happened or?
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Apr 15, 2016 22:19
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Trast posted:When the group defeats and captures the mindflayer they ask why he attacked I have the mindflayer say "I thought you all would provide a good meal," then he glances at the bard and paladin and says "well, some of you at least." 
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Apr 15, 2016 23:31
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:So this vampire sex dungeon never happened or? Yes, and (thankfully) no. We had a coven of limbless female vampires in the basement, which is where the campaign got its name from, but we were too busy fighting (and kidnapping) more vampires to ever have the results played out. Like I said, that campaign was more a study in wasted potential than anything else, both good and bad. The overpowered psion ended up accomplishing gently caress all, the rogue for all his talk of teamkilling (he once talked at length after a session about how vulnerable my character was to his) never got the chance, and so on. Hence the "prepare for disappointment" disclaimer.
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Apr 16, 2016 00:27
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I got to explore the simple joy of lighting a room covered in webs on fire with a tindertwig, which ended up killing a bunch of giant spiders (because gently caress spiders). Sadly this came with the not-so-simple joy of fighting off Evard's Black Tentacles while in the middle of the room which was on fire. As were the tentacles. Thankfully my character had fire resistance and a +17 to grapple, so, you know, everything ended nicely. 
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Apr 19, 2016 05:15
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Which game was it that had a build you could do which was basically "Set yourself on fire, and then grapple the enemy until they burn to death"? I wanna say Pathfinder? It revolved around a monk or fighter feat which made you immune to fire.
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Apr 19, 2016 05:39
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My character is a totemist, so he has grapple and fire-attack options pretty much built in if I want those to be set on any given day.
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Apr 19, 2016 07:10
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Let me tell you about a guy I knew named Glen, Glen was in a group I ran through some 2nd edition D&D stuff with. He was a very typical nerdy looking guy, not neckbeardy, but nerdy. Like revenge of the nerds nerdy with button up shirts thick glasses and he even , I swear to god, had a pocket protector full of pens and pencils. He was also a really greasy guy who had slicked back hair and always left a small film on anything he touched. He wasn't exactly cat piss man because he didn't really stink or not take care of himself, he just used a ton of some kind of greasy hair product and was always touching his hair. He was also very christian and constantly wanted to run a game where we were all clerics or paladins of Jesus even though he knew we were not religious and preferred not to even talk about it because we were there to have fun, not debate religion. He was the kind of person who was incredibly oversensitive about everything and was prone to table flipping, taking his ball and going home etc if a game didn't go his way. He had a girlfriend who would come with him to the game, I'll call her Jill, but not play who was very shy and sort of just stayed in the background and didn't talk to anyone. He was always really incredibly rude to her as well. I couldn't tell if he was just trying to show off for us or seem cool but he really treated her like poo poo telling her to shut up if she commented on stuff or getting really jealous if she talked to any of the other guys and telling her to stop it, you know generally just making things awkward and being a total dick. The person whose house we gamed at, i'll call him Joe, was in a swampy climate so his yard tended to get muddy and suck in your feet if you stepped in the wrong place. One evening at around 10 or 11 pm (we usually played until midnight) we had decided to play illuminati instead of our normal d&d game. If you haven't played it, it is a game that heavily encourages cheating and has specific rules for cheating. It tends to be a very cutthroat kind of game. Well because most of us didn't really like him we sort of ganged up on him and completely obliterated his nice pretty power structure and made him spend all his money defending it. He totally flipped out and started calling us assholes and grabbed his girlfriend by the arm and began violently dragging her away and telling her they were leaving. He peeled out and sprayed mud all over Joe's house and his neighbors big white fence. Joe was PISSED. He called him almost instantly and asked him to come back and talk with us for a minute. So Glen decided that was fine after having had a couple minutes to cool off and drove back. I should probably mention that Joe was an Ex Marine and a firefighter and was a very big, very in shape dude with lots of guns. So long story short Glen came back to the house and Joe basically snatched the car keys and phone from his hands and intimidated him into washing off his house and the fence that he had sprayed mud all over and wouldn't give him his keys or his phone back until he cleaned it all up. Jill sat with us inside for an hour and a half while he did that and told us all the really even shittier things he did to her behind closed doors like smacking her around and being really abusive mentally. Joe ended up telling Glen to never come back for any games and to never come back into the shop we hung out at. We never saw him again but Joe's wife was a social worker and she convinced Jill to leave Glen the next day and helped her do it safely. She actually found a guy she got married to and has 2 kids now with him and she actually still hangs out and games with us on Saturdays and I have never heard from or seen Glen again. *all names were changed because reasons. That is my most interesting gaming related story, the end.
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Apr 19, 2016 07:54
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Played in a Discord game of Masks last night with some goons. I've played a decent amount of PBTA pbp but this was my first masks game. It was also my first live pnp game and i had a blast. It was a quirk in my schedule that let me play in this one, but im glad it did. The other players were very accommodating to the fact that i was picking up the specific mechanics as I was going along, and I think the game itself was pretty welcoming. I played the Bearer book which we hacked slightly on the fly and ended up with Star Knight, a high school athlete given a nanite cloud and the task by the Space CIA (called special circumstances) to prove to them that Earth shouldn't be destroyed, though he didnt know they were setting him up to fail. Ended up surprised by how much the nanite cloud pushed me to explore how unsettling and grotesque my nanite cloud powers would appear to other people. Highlight for me was fighting a communist military grenade throwing bear named Ursa Major that wanted to prove to Putin that he was worthy of wrestling match. All the interpersonal stuff works really well, and we ended by defending our school from Demonbat, the Demonbat. Anyway i had a lot of fun. xian fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Apr 21, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 23:04
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ellbent posted:I want to hear more bad/catpiss stories. These synopses/summaries aren't cuttin' it. completely 100% agreed. the terrible is the best.
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Apr 21, 2016 15:53
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CapitalistPig posted:That is my most interesting gaming related story, the end. Bless joe and joewife.
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Apr 23, 2016 09:42
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I think I kneecapped today's game. We were playtesting a goon's game about a magical college. One of his design principles was "give the assistant professors more than they can handle", so I suggested that after the game opening staff meeting (and using my knowledge of school bureaucracy to buy the new guy an office door), I was going to pick up one of my daughters. From her second stint in rehab. While there was a lot of drama to be mined from "Professor of Divination, through non-interferences implicitly allowed his progeny to make the mistakes that got her using again", the game kind of collapsed on both sides of the issue. I put the episode finale at minute 15, and while I tried to invite the other players to a family dinner, there was nothing left to say. [There WAS a subplot where I had the new guy spy on the head of my siblings department, who was actually trapping angels for extraplanar deals, which while interesting, isn't at the level of "family portrait of drug addiction and parenting.] Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 07:08 on Apr 24, 2016 |
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Apr 24, 2016 07:04
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