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The caster ones aren't even that good because they're still limited use magic items with charges.
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Jan 6, 2017 17:38
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Don't some/all of the caster ones also poo poo up your caster level too, making you demonstrably worse at everything your class does? Weapons of Legacy vs. Savage Species: which is worse at the thing it lies about trying to do? They both take a really good idea (having a storied relic as yours and growing with it & playing something other than a humanoid, respectively) and make the mechanics so miserably lovely that if you go fully by the book you are actively less useful than a "normal" character by several leaps.
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Jan 6, 2017 18:02
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Yawgmoth posted:Don't some/all of the caster ones also poo poo up your caster level too, making you demonstrably worse at everything your class does? Weapons of Legacy, 100%. Even if nothing else, the templates in Savage Species were pretty cool for DMs to use as enemies (though not worth the book price on their own). There's almost nothing worth using in Weapons of Legacy.
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Jan 6, 2017 18:06
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Weapons of legacy are amazingly OP* *As long as you found your own legacy, instead of using the premade ones.
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Jan 7, 2017 03:28
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Played Tokyo Brain Pop again. Accurate title. We set our game in Japan in the technicolor 90s; the opening scene was the high school principal declaring war on girl gangs and violent sports. It ended with my character, a wanna-be Joshi star, powerbombing him through a table. The psychic in the party took that opportunity to display her powers, causing the principal's head to explode as it hit the mat.
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Jan 7, 2017 04:15
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Tunicate posted:Weapons of legacy are amazingly OP* Yeah. I spent weeks trying to come up with the Masamune. Not the 12 foot long Sephiroth one, more like the Chrono Trigger one, but still.
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Jan 7, 2017 04:25
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Yawgmoth posted:I find the best way to do a DMPC is to just play party mascot. Don't make something useful (especially not in combat), and don't try to fill any major roles. DMPCs work really well as the people in charge of transportation. In a space game, make them the pilot. In a seafaring game, make them the helmsman. They don't call the shots for the party and they're not always around, but you can use them as a mouthpiece for helpful interjections during party discussions at "home base," and occasionally have them be the cavalry for a daring escape without actually being a combatant.
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Jan 7, 2017 05:53
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ellbent posted:DMPCs work really well as the people in charge of transportation. In a space game, make them the pilot. In a seafaring game, make them the helmsman. They don't call the shots for the party and they're not always around, but you can use them as a mouthpiece for helpful interjections during party discussions at "home base," and occasionally have them be the cavalry for a daring escape without actually being a combatant. I've got a DMPC serving as the pilot in my Age of Rebellion game, it's working pretty well and the players really enjoy the character. They're an incomprehensible tentacle-faced alien named 'B̧͟͢͏͍̤̫͉͔̟̳̱̰͓͍i̴̶͚̱͓̘̖̙͚͚͈̦̳̹͔͙̹͙̘͜ĺ̷̟̞̝͍̺͖̘̦͚̪̘̦̼̦͚̩̰̰l͈͔̪̝͙͕̙͔̬̕ͅ" (pronounced 'blblblblblblbl'), and nobody is entirely sure who they are or why they're working for the Rebellion. B̧͟͢͏͍̤̫͉͔̟̳̱̰͓͍i̴̶͚̱͓̘̖̙͚͚͈̦̳̹͔͙̹͙̘͜ĺ̷̟̞̝͍̺͖̘̦͚̪̘̦̼̦͚̩̰̰l͈͔̪̝͙͕̙͔̬̕ͅ speaks entirely in gibberish but seems to understand everybody just fine, and is a decently competent pilot. They have a backstory and motivation and a personality, but I'm not telegraphing any of that to the players unless they go specifically looking for it, and they're mostly just there to fly the ship and be the mascot. Speaking of which, finally kicked off the Age of Rebellion game I've been wanting to run. We had two players need to drop out at the last minute, so I scrapped my original first-session plan and threw together a new one in about fifteen minutes. It ended up being a fairly straightforward rescue operation in which the players were sent in to extract one of their smuggler contacts from an Imperial customs inspection team, but had a few interesting highlights. They include: -The party immediately abandoning their planned sneaky approach to instead steal the Imperials' armored personnel carrier. -The party getting into an argument over whether or not they should take any of the surviving Imperials hostage; the party's quartermaster took a leave-no-witnesses approach, lost the debate, then sneakily killed the prisoners anyway while the rest of the party was distracted. -All of the explosives the party had purchased in character creation used up to destroy a mining supply warehouse, hopefully erasing any evidence of the battle It was supposed to be a simple introductory scene, and instead ended up with the party cramming a troop transport into their ship's cargo bay, destroying a significant portion of the port district, kidnapping one of the customs inspectors the quartermaster didn't manage to 'accidentally' kill, and the beginnings of a big inter-party conflict brewing.
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Jan 8, 2017 23:45
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If you got a big heavy artillery, expect players to try to steal it - as my GM for our Feng Shui 2 game discovered - he kicked himself for not anticipating that our ragtag band of monks, ex-warlords and gamblers want to hijack the tank.
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Jan 8, 2017 23:57
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If they start with a lovely RV, you'll have to blow it up to get them to take the shiny new killbus you set out for them.
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Jan 9, 2017 00:08
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ellbent posted:DMPCs work really well as the people in charge of transportation. In a space game, make them the pilot. In a seafaring game, make them the helmsman. They don't call the shots for the party and they're not always around, but you can use them as a mouthpiece for helpful interjections during party discussions at "home base," and occasionally have them be the cavalry for a daring escape without actually being a combatant. In my mind, "DMPC" means an NPC who does the same stuff as the PCs but is controlled by the DM. A supporting-role character that would be boring for a player because it doesn't do the same stuff as the rest of the PCs, but is a great way to do in-fiction exposition and advice, is what I'd call a detailed NPC. Bieeardo posted:If they start with a lovely RV, you'll have to blow it up to get them to take the shiny new killbus you set out for them. Well yeah, you're not going to leave Serenity or HMS Surprise behind just because you found a bigger, faster ship with more guns on it.
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Jan 9, 2017 01:56
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Don't blow their ships up, just give them new ships big enough to hold their old ones
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Jan 9, 2017 02:01
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Bieeardo posted:If they start with a lovely RV, you'll have to blow it up to get them to take the shiny new killbus you set out for them. Please, even if you blow it up they'll just cannibalize the killbus to repair the RV.
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Jan 9, 2017 02:22
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AlphaDog posted:In my mind, "DMPC" means an NPC who does the same stuff as the PCs but is controlled by the DM. Seriously, you're the DM. You control every other person, place, and thing in the entirety of existence including, to an incomplete degree, the future. You don't need to be a player on top of all that. Leave the glory to the players; your place is to give them a reason to be glorious.
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Jan 9, 2017 02:33
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ArkInBlack posted:Please, even if you blow it up they'll just cannibalize the killbus to repair the RV. If you're lucky, they'll try to take the gun off the tank and staple it to the RV and feel really clever about themselves for thinking of it.
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Jan 9, 2017 02:39
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Simple solution is to streamline the cannibalism and make the new murderwagon eat the RV, as well as any other machine that gets close to it. "Uh... while everyone else was busy fighting, our sentient IFV got hungry and some joker fed it a pontoon boat and a beer truck, and now it's demanding a party on the lake. Please advise."
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Jan 9, 2017 03:00
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silentsnack posted:Simple solution is to streamline the cannibalism and make the new murderwagon eat the RV, as well as any other machine that gets close to it.
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Jan 9, 2017 03:44
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Eox posted:Don't blow their ships up, just give them new ships big enough to hold their old ones I like the cut of your jib.
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Jan 9, 2017 05:02
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Bieeardo posted:I like the cut of your jib. it only works if you blow up the most recent ship and send them scrambling onto the older one repeatedly in the final combat. like a giant spacefaring matryoshka doll.
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Jan 9, 2017 06:43
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Bieeardo posted:If they start with a lovely RV, you'll have to blow it up to get them to take the shiny new killbus you set out for them. Players will never get rid of a vehicle of any kind unless they have not given it a name. As soon as they give it a name, it is a permanent part of your game, deal with it. Once my old Star Wars group got hold of a couple of Interdictor Cruisers - ships that can pull other ships out of hyperspace - they promptly gave them names (the Speed Bump and the Rumble Strip); our GM later said that he knew, at that moment, that he was gonna need to come up with ideas for us to interdict some stuff instead of just having the ships in the background like he'd originally intended.
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Jan 9, 2017 08:16
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AlphaDog posted:Well yeah, you're not going to leave Serenity or HMS Surprise behind just because you found a bigger, faster ship with more guns on it. It's a little weird that most players have exactly the opposite mindset towards weapons. "That sword's been with you since chargen, you slew Garnok the Devourer with it and successfully talked your way into a fancy dress ball with it at your side because you didn't want to part with it!" "Eh, it's only a +1. This one's much better. Also Garnok the Devourer was an exceptionally large rat." It's also a shame that the systems I've seen to upgrade your extant weapons are universally terrible.
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Jan 9, 2017 09:18
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Dareon posted:It's a little weird that most players have exactly the opposite mindset towards weapons. It'd be neat if there were a system where the bonuses applied to your weapon stemmed from your class option. "Ok, Dareon, I see you're playing a one of the kingdom's elite Thunder Lancers. At 3rd level, you can channel Shocking Grasp through your lance as a free action..." Then you can go and get all attached to your lance, design logos for your regiment or whatever, and be heartbroken when some mountain giant snaps it in two while using it as a toothpick. Or, actually, I just remembered. In the latest Salvatore novel, Cattie-Brie manages to use this ancient dwarven forge to transfer the magical properties of one item into another item. Maybe introduce some easy way to do something like that? Then you're still attached to your weapon because it's customizable, instead of throwing away your +1 because you found a +2.
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Jan 9, 2017 09:33
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Dareon posted:It's a little weird that most players have exactly the opposite mindset towards weapons. I think there's two reasons for this. The first, as you pointed out, is that weapons in most systems don't get meaningful upgrades, and that's a drat shame. The second... well in the original Star Wars, what's Han Solo if he doesn't have the Falcon? The Falcon's not replaceable like Han's blaster or even Luke's lightsaber, it's important that it's the Falcon and not some other ship. In Firefly, look what Mal's prepared to go through for Serenity. Jayne's still Jayne without his big gun, but Mal's not Captain Reynolds without his ship, he's just some guy and that fact drives many of the episodes. Vehicles like those are almost characters in and of themselves. Add that to the "it's our home" factor (star wars, star trek, firefly, etc) and you can see why players don't want to trade it up for a better one.
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Jan 9, 2017 09:51
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the_steve posted:Or, actually, I just remembered. e: Transfer Enchantment from the Adventurers... Vault? Handbook? Whichever. Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 12:29
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Or a 2nd level Fighter ability in Dungeon World (1st level Fighters get a Signature Weapon)
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Jan 9, 2017 12:53
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There's a feat in 3.5 from the Book of Exalted Deeds that lets you do this. Ancestral Relic requires that the weapon be formerly owned by either a family member or someone of significance to you (e.g. another member of your religious order); you sacrifice magic items/gold/gems/etc equal to the difference in costs to "awaken the spirits in the weapon" and add new poo poo to the old weapon. I always really liked that and thought it should be a baseline ability, rather than requiring you to take a feat for it.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:06
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That was a class ability for one version of the Samurai in 3.x, too. It got expensive, but it was a neat mechanic. My old DM had this thing where he'd take your sheet every X levels and bump a bonus or add a new special ability. Unfortunately he'd take your sheet and not tell you what he'd added, and most of us really didn't give enough of a poo poo to track another +1 here or there.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:15
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Another 4e option for that was inherent bonuses, where you just got more pluses as you leveled no matter what gear you were using. It was the default option in Dark Sun because you know, Dark Sun.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:37
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Players will never get rid of a vehicle of any kind unless they have not given it a name. As soon as they give it a name, it is a permanent part of your game, deal with it. Yeah, I immediately realized that the party is going to be tooling around in the same 60-year-old military surplus dropship for the rest of the campaign when they christened it Wompa Stompa and then spent a smoke break in the first session collaboratively drawing nose art for it also they want to use up one of the modification slots to install a sound system and an external loudspeaker
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Jan 9, 2017 21:30
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Mister Bates posted:Yeah, I immediately realized that the party is going to be tooling around in the same 60-year-old military surplus dropship for the rest of the campaign when they christened it Wompa Stompa and then spent a smoke break in the first session collaboratively drawing nose art for it Sounds like your players have been playing MGS5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aGKA_3JXfU&t=21s
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Jan 10, 2017 02:50
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No appreciation for the classics here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6gcz4hdLA8
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Jan 10, 2017 04:18
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Mister Bates posted:Yeah, I immediately realized that the party is going to be tooling around in the same 60-year-old military surplus dropship for the rest of the campaign when they christened it Wompa Stompa and then spent a smoke break in the first session collaboratively drawing nose art for it Oh yeah. That ship is a permanent fixture now. You could give them a Star Destroyer and they'll still say "okay, the first thing we do is load the Wompa Stompa in one of the launch bays."
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Jan 10, 2017 08:44
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Sort of related to vehicle chat, but I just started a B/X D&D campaign and the first thing my players decided to purchase with the spoils of their first adventure was a wagon and a pair of mules, whom they decided to name Betsy and Bessie (or, to be truthful, the Finnish equivalents thereof). Since they gave them names I now know that those two are here to stay and I'd better not mess with them. They've also made plans to buy a ballista once they can afford one so they can prop it on the wagon, so I guess they're going for a fantasy version of a heavily modified truck with lots of firepower.
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Jan 10, 2017 10:08
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Come to think of it, cart-related shenanigans was also one of the first ploys the players did in my 4e Keep on the Shadowfell campaign. They all piled into a cart, sallied forth out of town, waited for the kobold raiders to raid, and then flipped over the tarp and began attacking.
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Jan 10, 2017 10:14
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In an older game of mine the players would refer to joint stuff as "the party x", like the party resurrection fund, the party pack mules, the party beer money, the party cooking supplies etc. They collectively bought a wagon. Someone said "we should decorate the party wagon"... So yeah, the party wagon became the party wagon. Think  but a little bit more medievalish. And they'd roll up on bad guys in it playing music and stuff and generally looking like a travelling party wagon. Then they'd leap out and murder them by surprise. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 10:45
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AlphaDog posted:In an older game of mine the players would refer to joint stuff as "the party x", like the party resurrection fund, the party pack mules, the party beer money, the party cooking supplies etc. They collectively bought a wagon. Someone said "we should decorate the party wagon"... This is a great idea and I'm going to tell my friends that they need to do this with their wagon.
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Jan 10, 2017 10:54
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Ratpick posted:Sort of related to vehicle chat, but I just started a B/X D&D campaign and the first thing my players decided to purchase with the spoils of their first adventure was a wagon and a pair of mules, whom they decided to name Betsy and Bessie (or, to be truthful, the Finnish equivalents thereof). Since they gave them names I now know that those two are here to stay and I'd better not mess with them. Ratpick posted:This is a great idea and I'm going to tell my friends that they need to do this with their wagon.
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Jan 10, 2017 11:42
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Party wagon/murder bus. I love it. My Star Wars D6 players are turning their ship into a floating casino, with the plan of getting high rollers out into deep space "beyond Imperial influence" for high-stakes games. I'm rolling with it because it's a great way to slowly get them involved with the Rebellion under the guise of settling debts and having high ranking officials involved in low profile briefings. Of course, the whole campaign started with me saying, "So the Rodian insurance adjuster looks at you (the co-captain) and says 'Explain to me again how you lost your last ship?'" It let me give them the ship I wanted without having to worry about the last ship... To which the group promptly committed insurance fraud to get a bigger payout.
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Jan 10, 2017 12:50
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Splicer posted:Have them fight a few mounted combatants and give the leader's mount one (1) set of magic barding. Watch the party tear itself apart. Splicer posted:IRL
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Jan 10, 2017 12:51
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Here's a fun one. So our DM also manages a local bar, and last Halloween invited all of our on/off players to a special Halloween one shot. Drinks were half-price, we could smoke indoors, and a table & chairs were set up on the stage so that lights and music would sync up with our spooky Halloween story.  We were all given a pile of character sheets to sort through and I settled on the half-orc barbarian with a greataxe called "The Door". I thought that meant it made openings, and didn't think too much of it. Essentially, we were all adventurers on a quest for a McGuffin, but each of us had secrets we could disclose or not disclose. My character had no giant secrets, but he did have a teleportation ring that would carry back "two souls" with it, but the McGuffin had a soul of its own. I strongly considered getting my hands on the McGuffin & teleporting back the first chance I got, leaving the rest of them behind. That might sound a bit dickish, but it was a one-shot, the characters were all not-so-vaguely sinister, and I usually play the "lone and long-suffering straight man in a party full of murderhobos," so it's nice to break out of the role. We played, smashing two-headed wolves, rotting giants, etc. and made our way into a temple with the McGuffin in sight. We kill the BBEG and wires and bits of fluff come out of him. Strange lights and a theremin come on. (Theremin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or4CALipjig) Aliens appear and begin paralyzing members of the party. I try to force a PC to drop the McGuffin, but he refuses, so I grab the guy next to him, activate my ring & teleport out of there as the aliens begin taking down the walls and loading everything and everybody onto their ship. There never was a McGuffin, it was a ruse to lure bodies for alien experimentation, but I won! The other PC and I lived the rest of our days and never spoke of it again. Turns out everyone was a take on a character in pop culture, the sorceress who vomited up acid was the girl from The Exorcist, and I was Hodor from Game of Thrones. Because I held The Door.
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Jan 11, 2017 05:29
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