|
Standard doctrine would be to send wave after wave of expendable goons to their deaths in order to secure the twenty thousand year old USB stick being held inside the haunted spaceship.
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 01:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 11:29 |
|
|
Stories about derailing the GM's Big Boss always makes me think about the time our Star Wars group encountered a fleet of Droid ships (from the prequels) bombarding a planet, apparently still acting on orders left over from the Separatist War that brought down the Republic and led to the formation of the Empire. He told us afterwards that he was expecting us to call in our own fleet and fight them. He did not expect us to say "wait a second, we have the best slicer (Star Wars hacker-equivalent) in the galaxy, let's reprogram those fuckers and make them fight for us instead." Which we did.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 01:53
|
|
|
We did a surprising amount of that kind of thing in our Castlevania game. The Belmont found a spell that effectively paralyzed the undead without using the word paralyzed, the Binder (I think she was a Belnades) kept finding ways around immunities, including using Command on a construct manifestation of the castle itself, and my warblade would occasionally just cut through an entire wall.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 04:18
|
|
|
If the thread is starved for cat-piss stories, I might be able to dredge up some more LARP stories, because holy poo poo did I game with some crazy people for years.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 04:47
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 05:01
|
|
|
Dareon posted:and my warblade would occasionally just cut through an entire wall. That just gives an AOO to the turkey.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 05:16
|
|
|
Railing Kill posted:If the thread is starved for cat-piss stories, I might be able to dredge up some more LARP stories, because holy poo poo did I game with some crazy people for years. There always needs to be evil to balance the good. And you telling cringe-inducing LARP stories might spur memories of my own experiences watching people who never really left high school try and negotiate social situations while pretending to be 200 years old in a black vinyl trenchcoat and white sneakers.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 05:21
|
|
|
Recent Big Boss moment for me was the players machine-gunning a Sith Lord at the end of a Force and Destiny game. See, the films are fairly clear - you don't shoot at Jedi, because they can deflect bullets. This is a good way, in the story, to make it make sense that Jedi get to have exciting melee battles in a world full of guns. In the game, though, they decided to throw this pretty obvious fix away. They gave deflecting bullets a cost in stamina; so if you just go full-auto, Mr Jedi might deflect a bullet or two, but then he'll be tired out and take all the rest. Meanwhile, you keep range advantage, which he can't do much about.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 09:54
|
|
|
susan posted:I've had a few lovely incidents like this before. With a Rogue Trader group, there was an incident that led to the affectionate term "firing plasma torpedoes at the plot", that stemmed from a rescue mission aboard a space hulk. The Players realized that the derelict ship was crawling with Tyranids (think Xenomorphs, only psychic and with assault cannons that shoot acid and metal-eating scarabs), and decided (much to my chagrin) that the Tyranids were scarier than the survivors aboard were important, so they vaporized the entire ship. Including a very, very plot important psyker with a vision about future events. This group also once faced some extremely scary Chaos Space Marines (think Hill Giants in Power Armor that can carry mini-rocket launcher machine guns as a standard sidearm). I thought this fight would be hard, until another Psyker in my group realized that their version of Hold Person, while only a temporary reprieve usually, was pretty dangerous when the target of the spell was flying with a jetpack over a city. Cue me looking up falling damage rules, and... Pretty sure everyone here knows what the tyranid are.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 12:52
|
|
|
Skellybones posted:Standard doctrine would be to send wave after wave of expendable goons to their deaths in order to secure the twenty thousand year old USB stick being held inside the haunted spaceship. yeah seriously, that one lone psyker and the secrets within the space hulf would have been worth the sacrifice of an entire kill team of space marines, they royally effed up by trashing a space hulk
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 12:54
|
|
|
hyphz posted:Recent Big Boss moment for me was the players machine-gunning a Sith Lord at the end of a Force and Destiny game. solid projectile weapons have always been a good ranged weapon to use against Jedi, they can't bounce the bullets back at you, and if you get cortosis weave bullets, the bullet will travel through the lightsaber and still hit your target.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 12:57
|
|
|
I'm glad to read all of these stories about players nuking your big boss and/or your entire plot from orbit. It feels like a common way to learn never to plan too rigidly--that's certainly the lesson I ended up taking from it. I do also have a story of a big boss fight actually going well that happened a couple years ago in my Spelljammer-meets-Treasure-Planet Dungeon World game. I thought I'd posted it before but turns out, no, I hadn't, or at least not with any detail. So, gently caress it, right? It's a long one, but it's the only campaign I've ever finished and the finale owned so I want to share it.So here's the background: the party was the crew of (they named the ship themselves) The Best Ship in the Galaxy, which looked like a classic pirate ship, but in space, because Treasure Planet. In the first session, they decided they were "galactic pest control," in that anything that was loving up things in the galaxy, they'd go murder the poo poo out of it. It was a pretty big group, but here are the important players for this:
Here's the plot up until now: the crew of The Best ran afoul a powerful time mage named Zaaya, an old elf with clockwork minions and a whole lot of scars. Over the course of the campaign, they discovered that Zaaya came from the planet Tepsis IV that, during a galactic war almost 200 years prior, had been, well, glassed. She'd been going around erasing people from time whom she held responsible for the atmospheric explosion that had ignited her planet's atmosphere and killed everything she ever knew, in the hopes that by erasing them all from the timeline, she could restore her planet and have her life back. A fine goal, except that the people she'd been erasing had also done good, both during the war and after, and she was undoing all of that; and, on top of that, un-destroying an entire planet would cause a massive paradox. It was unfortunate that her planet couldn't be saved, but she had to be stopped for the sake of the rest of the galaxy. (It also worked out that Tomak, the Survivor, also came from a destroyed planet, and the player enjoyed playing up how he and the villain were each other's foils.) Or, at least, that was my plan. See, a few sessions before the end, the group's Assassin shot a faerie while exploring the remains of Tepsis IV and got the whole goddamn crew cursed to remain on the blasted planet forever. The only way to break the curse was to perform "an act of selfless heroism." So I decided to gently caress with them. In the ruins of an underground library, they found young Zaaya, the version of her from just a few days before her planet's destruction. She'd hosed up her time magic and flung herself into the future. She hadn't left the library, so she had no idea that the surface had been completely annihilated, and was about to return to her own time when the party ran into her. You can see where I'm going with this: they could kill her past self, undoing all the bad Zaaya had done, and that would also undo their curse (as they'd never have had a reason to go to Tepsis IV), but who knows the consequences? Or they could let her go, which would be the act of "selfless heroism" and break their curse, allowing them to continue their quest to stop her in the present. They did neither. Instead, they forced her to take them back in time with her so they could stop Tepsis IV from being destroyed in the first place. I was stunned. I didn't expect that from them at all. I think a couple of the players thought I'd be mad at them for doing something I hadn't "planned for," but I was loving thrilled because they'd picked something so much more interesting than either of the things I thought they might do. Long story short, over the next couple sessions, they get themselves on board the giant orbiting space station that had exploded in Tepsis IV's atmosphere. Z, our Dashing Hero, delivered a "stirring" (read: extremely funny and not at all heroic) speech to distract the ship's crew while the others piloted the space station away from the planet, thus averting the events that would cause it to be destroyed. Success! Except, well, we've established that such a huge change to the timeline would have massive consequences--not only were they un-destroying a planet, but they were also un-deleting the things Zaaya had deleted. It was all massively hosed up and got everyone involved sucked into a paradox bubble for the finale. So now the crew, young Zaaya, and old villain Zaaya were drawn into this space outside of time where everything was broken and non-Euclidean for a final showdown. Along with a huge cosmic dragon that had been imprisoned in the center of the space station. Dandelion had put the thing to sleep with a Curse when they found it, with a clear time limit--but as soon as they were outside of time, that time limit didn't matter anymore and the huge fucker woke up. The party defeated it as the first big setpiece in the campaign's final session, and this is where things start to get good. I decided Kandra had waited long enough for her pet lizard to become a dragon, so I said the last component she needed was one of the scales of this massive space dragon. So she turned her lizard into an almost-as-large space dragon and they were able to ride it down the hosed-up bridge of light to the heart of the paradox. But also, here's where the Necromancer comes in. Y'see, the Necromancer playbook in Grim World has a move that lets them stuff a corpse into a canopic jar to summon as a zombie later. The move explicitly states that a corpse of any size can be stuffed in a canopic jar. So he packs away the cosmic dragon's body. Because that way you have it, right? You have it. They reach the center of the paradox and discover a massive, twisted clock tower with a portal at the top. Young Zaaya figured out that the portal was unstable--either they could make it through, or Villain Zaaya could make it through, and whoever didn't would be trapped in the paradox forever. I was all ready to improvise a frenzied rush up the tower, fighting Zaaya's clockwork minions and evading time fuckery, except, well, two of my players now had massive goddamn dragons at their disposal. They say, gently caress it, let's ride the dragons up the side of the tower. Who am I to argue? So they do that, bust in right at the top floor and confront Villain Zaaya. The fight was reasonably clever (someone suggested it in the Dungeon World thread): Zaaya split herself into a bunch of time-shifted clones and they had to be taken out in the right order, and with the right weapon, so prevent paradox. Meanwhile, they had to protect Young Zaaya, who was working to suppress Villain Zaaya's ability to rewind the damage she suffered. It was a pretty neat fight, but by the time they were down to one Zaaya clone left, the portal was about to close. This last Zaaya was putting up a hell of a fight, so the Necromancer decides, gently caress it, and has his huge cosmic dragon zombie tear the clock tower in half. The party jumps on Kandra's dragon pet to escape while Tomak heroically stays behind to fight Zaaya while the others escaped. Tomak and Zaaya tumble to the ground in the top half of the clock tower and, I swear the dice rolls actually worked out this way, fatally stabbed each other just before hitting the ground. It was glorious. Meanwhile, the group escapes through the rift, only to find themselves adrift in a void. Young Zaaya disappears. They're floating there for they-have-no-idea how long before suddenly they see a light, and a hand extending outward. It's Young Zaaya--but older, now, the same age as Villain Zaaya, because she had time to grow up, master time magic, and use it to save the crew. And that was the ending. Z took over the ship, a few party members went their separate ways, and roll credits. As a final twist, though, Tomak didn't quite get to stay dead. He'd made a deal with Death before that, after the adventure was over, he'd help Death ferry souls to the afterlife for 100 years, and Death's not about to let dying break a deal, is he? So Tomak's saved, too, even if he's locked into kind of a lovely job for 100 years. Anyway, I got some of that group back together for another game in the same setting, a couple hundred years later, that we're running in Strike. We're starting next Saturday and I'm pretty excited. The story's not related, but you better believe the time-fuckery caused by all of that poo poo is still having an effect and, like I said earlier, the Dashing Hero's player is playing her character's descendant. I've always wanted to revisit a campaign setting, so this should be a good time.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 14:49
|
|
|
Lorak posted:Clearly the only proper escalation is to have had the rogue acquire control over some sort of construct and have that jiggle all handles in the future. Especially if it makes a satisfying "plink" sound every time said dart bounced off of it. Once again, Geoffrey the Safety Skeleton steps into the breach to save lives.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 14:50
|
|
|
Doodmons posted:Once again, Geoffrey the Safety Skeleton steps into the breach to save lives. Now I picture a skeleton with a neon orange vest, hardhat and flashlight. And every time he opens a door and gets hit with a dart he just turns to camera and gives a thumbs up.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 15:40
|
|
|
 I love the thought of going back to older campaigns and seeing "what happened X years later". Though, it may just be me, but I kept thinking "Z's gonna be revealed as short for Zaaya, and she's gonna be one of Zaaya's weird paradox-y timeclones  ", except that never happened. Or is that gonna be a big plot twist for the new game? 
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 16:07
|
|
|
Aniodia posted:
Ha, that would be a pretty sweet twist. So Z's backstory was always pretty funny: she came from a long line of female heroes, all of whom were named with a single letter. I still have no idea what the naming scheme would be from Z onward, but I guess now Z's player gets to decide that, which should be fun. Her idea for her new character is that, somewhere along the line, something went wrong in that family, and her new character isn't much of a hero at all. She still takes down bad guys, but for all the wrong reasons (pretty much just money--I get the feeling if there were more money in being a bad guy, she'd flip in a second). She's also going to be the ship's captain in this new campaign and when I offered her that role she immediately suggested that the ship is one that she stole, which I think owns pretty hard. The other players don't know that, either, so when it eventually bites them in the rear end it'll be a complete surprise  I'd bet the weird time paradox poo poo had a role in twisting her legacy towards anti-heroism and I look forward to finding out.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 16:14
|
|
|
Harrow posted:Ha, that would be a pretty sweet twist. Maybe the heroic lineage ran out when they ran out of letters, and now they need to go through a full alphabet of anti-heroes for the karmic balance to right itself.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 19:07
|
|
|
I'm still all for Z being a different timeline version of Zaaya and represents all the good she could have done if her planet wasn't destroyed. And all the ramifications that brings with it.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 19:27
|
|
|
DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Maybe the heroic lineage ran out when they ran out of letters, and now they need to go through a full alphabet of anti-heroes for the karmic balance to right itself. When it reaches Z it bounces back, so her kid will be named Y and be a full villain, and it goes through the alphabet in reverse order until it hits A, who is an antihero again, and their kid will be a full hero named B
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 19:29
|
|
|
Z's heroism overflowed the buffer. She needs to get slightly less heroic and then she'll be the greatest hero ever known.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 20:33
|
|
|
I'm gonna keep all these in mind if the player decides it's up to me what happened to Z's lineage. If she has her own idea I'll report back because I bet it's going to be hilarious and great. I wish I'd recorded the "heroic speech" she gave, because she started out legitimately trying to sound heroic and then completely lost the thread and it was perfect.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 21:19
|
|
|
hyphz posted:Recent Big Boss moment for me was the players machine-gunning a Sith Lord at the end of a Force and Destiny game. In Star Wars SAGA the force user gets a cumulative penalty to their deflection rolls for each attack they block in a turn. In a long-running game we managed to kill more than a few Sith lords through the doctrine of superior numbers with superior firepower. Then there was the part of the final fight where one of the Sith didn't even have the deflection talent. Turns out some Sith are extremely vulnerable to being shot by a man-portable turbolaser 
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 22:47
|
|
|
Alternatively, Z gives way to AA, who gives way to BB, who gives way to CC, etc
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 23:04
|
|
|
Lunatic Sledge posted:Alternatively, Z gives way to AA, who gives way to BB, who gives way to CC, etc AA, AB, AC... in enough generations, you could produce the (unpunctuated) works of Shakespeare 
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 23:06
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:The non-core class was dread necromancer. This reminds me of an AD&D game I played in a loooong time ago. Back in elementary or middle school, I was looking for more RPG action since my primary gaming group met every other week and I wanted a weekly fix, so I stopped by my local gaming shop to see if anyone was hiring. I ended up with a DM and a player who were friends and were looking for more players. They were willing to have me along if I accepted that the player was playing a Death Master, which was an NPC only class that appeared in a Dragon Magazine and that I'd have to start at fist level in a continuing campaign. I didn't have any problems with that so I rolled up a bog-standard human fighter and away we went. It immediately got weird when it was revealed that the Death Master controlled a squad of zombies and skeletons that were all weirdly specific in detail, and the campaign consisted of leveling me up through disposable encounters as fast as possible. While it was fun for me to zoom up levels, there were all the sidelong giggles inside jokes that bugged me, like the DM and PC were keeping something from me. Finally I hit level 6 or so without any plot or story arc developing and the player says something like, "Just one more!" at the end of a session. I ended up asking the store manager about the two of them and he told me, "I was wondering about you. So DM and Player have been inviting people to their game, leveling up new PCs and then killing them so his character can revive them as zombies." Hence the reason why his undead army was so oddly fleshed out. I never went back. DM would call my house from time to time begging me to come and play, offering me magic items if I'd rejoin the campaign. Fattening up new PCs before slaughtering them? Yeah, no thanks.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2017 23:26
|
|
|
Lunatic Sledge posted:Alternatively, Z gives way to AA, who gives way to BB, who gives way to CC, etc "You're on thin ice with me, A-A-Ron!"
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2017 00:27
|
|
|
Mirai Medical 2: Hack and Slash, Mostly Slash Not as interesting a story as the first session, but I have to tell this story to tell the next couple, and it's during the course of future events that this became one of my favorite games. About a week has passed. Seras, The Angel That Is Also Goku, has been training extensively to fight sharks. He's also spent some time with Zelo One to perfectly blend nicotine and caffeine into smoke-a-chinos. Bitter Esper Toshiro has been helping out around the lab when the staff aren't doing various brain tests on him. Eleanor, The Relatively Civilized Savage, has been stalking the streets and brooding over buildings like she's god drat Batman. Wakamae's stumbled onto some slightly bothersome information, and wants to know more. "Toshiro. How versed are you in corporate espionage?" First time for everything! Toshiro and Seras are sent to infiltrate a rival medical company called KinetiCorp. Specifically, their goal is to plug a pre-programmed thumb drive into their servers, which will download all the information Wakamae wants. One is given to Toshiro, and one is given to Seras, because inevitably one of them is going to gently caress up and get caught or lose the thumb drive (probably Seras). While they're staking the place out, Eleanor joins them, because that's the kind of thing she does. They discover pretty quickly that the place is open 24/7; Seras can detect chi signatures, so he uses that to figure out which floor has the fewest people on it. A series of katana slashes and some liberal telekinesis later, the party infiltrates the third floor. They don't know what they're looking for. Thankfully, a wall mounted fire escape plan tells them where the server rooms are. Server rooms. Plural. Good thing they have two thumb drives! Eleanor and Toshiro take the server room in the floor above, and Seras infiltrates the basement... via the sewers. By cutting his way through the cement. With a katana. As cool as it sounds, it also takes way longer than planned, so most of the action happens with the other two. Eleanor and Toshiro sneak their way around various security guards, but are stymied by two guards standing right in front of the server room. The guards are armed with... something. Maybe tasers. Maybe flashlights. Nobody succeeds their checks to figure out which. Toshiro tries to TK start up what he assumes (OOC) to be a taser, but over does it and just ends up jerking the whole thing around in its holster. Thinking on his feet to account for this now suspicious activity that is definitely getting the guards' attention, he starts to... make spooky ghost noises. WhooOOOOOoooo. I let him roll for it, because gently caress it. He fails the check, and I'm kind of disappointed because that would have been amazing. The guards easily discover that the building is not, in fact, haunted, and that there's some rear end in a top hat hiding around the corner. When they take off to chase Toshiro like he's Scooby Doo, Eleanor breaks into the server room. She's Not So Good At Technology, but makes a good roll to figure out what the hell she's doing. She plugs the drive in, lets some poo poo download, and then takes off to save Toshiro. Toshiro is frantically dashing down the halls, using his TK to blow out lights. This helps the guards not catch him, but also leaves him totally god drat lost by the time he circles around to where he started. Eleanor can see in the dark, so she grabs him, and the two of them hide out until its safe to make a break for the elevator. They briefly muse that perhaps they shouldn't have sent Seras off by himself. Meanwhile, Seras. Have I mentioned that Seras is not good at lateral thinking? Him fight good, fight man here to fight. After carving his way into the basement floor, he strolls straight into the lower server room with no regard for cameras or motion detectors (of which this room has both). Alarms start up, he panics, and makes a roll to pick the whole drat stack of computers up and haul them out. A small squad of guards get to the bottom floor, following Seras through his Big Fuckin' Hole and into the sewers. "How much do they pay these guys?!" Seras slices up some pipes, releasing steam and water and whatever all over the place, giving him just enough hesitance from the guards for him to fly out of the sewer. He rejoins the gang in the street and they all bail, hauling one filled thumb drive and one entire rack of interconnected computers, awkwardly, back to Mirai Medical. The guards aren't paid enough to follow them any further. This was only the first ... 1/3rd or so of the second session, but the next part is meaty enough that I'm just going to type it up separately. You might also be asking some of the following questions: 1.) How did Seras slash up pipes with his Pure Jipponese Steel if he was carrying a stack of computer towers with both hands? 2.) If Seras was caught on camera, isn't KinetiCorp going to come bust some heads tomorrow morning? 3.) Why in the name of god would you send Seras by himself These are good questions. Good questions that the party didn't think about, and that I didn't address out loud at the time, because I had answers. hosed up answers. Remember these bullet points for later, because poo poo hasn't gotten weird just yet. Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 00:48 on May 27, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 27, 2017 00:45
|
|
|
Aniodia posted:I love the thought of going back to older campaigns and seeing "what happened X years later". I'm actually a little scared of doing this in my current game, because my character definitely sired a murderous river spirit, and will likely have to deal with the ramifications of having a murder river among his bastards. It was a side quest session, which started with a bounty hunter finding the party and giving us an opportunity to peacefully turn in our elven rogue who had a 5k gold price on his head. We politely refuse, and I, as the marquis of the next county over, inform him that he is outside of his jurisdiction, and get him to leave peacefully. An ancient guardian of the forest then finds us, and after helping us lose the bounty hunter's bird spies, asks us to perform a ritual to help the dead reach the afterlife safely. We perform the ritual, temporarily becoming the Wild Hunt, and gaining sweet spirit animal forms. After stomping a bunch of soul devouring spirits, we learn that to truly stop them, we have to basically go deep underground and kill the Mother of Horrors, who was spawning them. To get there, we had to cross a river deep underground, which was inhabited by a clearly homicidal spirit in the form of a beautiful woman who would only let us pass if we offered her something worth a life. We weren't keen on sacrificing a party member, or anyone, and we really did not wish to burn resources on a fight before attacking what we figured to be effectively a god, so we huddled together for a clever solution, and one was reached. The party arrived at a bargain with the spirit: we would offer seed to grant new life, in exchange for passage. Since my character was a noble and rolled the "loves carnal pleasures" flaw (DnD 5e core), we decided as a table that I was the most willing and able candidate. Thusly, I was pimped to an evil river and most definitely spawned another evil river as a result. The session concluded with us leading an army of ghost miners to use divine chains and falling stalactites to effectively nail a giant soul devouring zombie god to the ground (we were victorious but badly injured). After the game, the GM revealed that the bounty hunter was at least in part meant to be a hint for the river spirit, and he expected us to pay her 5k gold (the price of our one friend's bounty), rather than impregnate her.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2017 05:34
|
|
|
one hell of a hook though.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2017 05:46
|
|
|
You could subtitle the sequel campaign 'A River Runs (or Rampages) Through It'.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2017 07:50
|
|
|
Recently rediscovered this thread and thought I'd toss in a couple stories from my small group. I'm a first time DM and only one player has any experience so there's a lot of 'oh jeez am I loving up' but it's been going pretty well for the most part. A couple close scrapes with some cat-piss and a few decent moments though, so here goes. The party started out as a morally ambiguous paladin (the experienced player) and a wizard. The first session had them veer completely off the expected path I had for them and resulted in them flanking the bandits I'd expected them to fight head on with some NPCs as backup. Then they robbed a store while everyone was busy with the bandits. This becomes a theme. Next session we get a bard who is still with the group and a rogue who thank gently caress is not, as well as a fighter who lost interest after one session. The rogue's player, who tended to hang around and annoy the bard's player out of game, decided that her character would be the bard's stalker/anime fangirl. The good news is she moved away abruptly after one session so nobody had to deal with that poo poo anymore. They tracked the bandits to their camp and not a whole lot else happened. After that was some combat and dungeon crawling and the three PCs were rewarded with, among other things, a wagon. They then decided that they wanted to collect enough wagons to have their own caravan city. They went to see one of the local nobles for some exposition and on the way met a wizard who gave them a sidequest. On their way back from the noble's place they took some guards up into the wizard's tower, murdered him, and took his stuff. I had mentioned his experiments tended to go boom and annoy the townsfolk and that was all the justification they needed. OOC it was revealed that they mostly just wanted his stuff, since the wizard mentioned was paranoid about people stealing his things. Clearly to our murderhobos this meant he had things worth stealing. After that the tower blew up because nobody was watching the experiments anymore and when the bard went back to look for any goodies in the rubble that night I had him meet a throwaway character named Filthy Steve. The players being, well, players meant that what I had intended to be a one-off hobo stealing the dead wizard's silverware is now a notable NPC who they are terrified of because he stole a coin from under the paladin's nose. At some point they went into a cave to investigate the main plot but left before fighting the boss. They head off to the neighboring country to chase plot and there's a bit at the border where the guards ask for papers. The king of this country is a bit nuts and decided that everyone coming in has to have papers. He neglected to tell anyone what kind of papers, though, so the guards are half-assing it and saying poo poo like "Spellbook? That's paper alright. Scroll with your name on it? Sure, whatever." The party was almost ready to kill their way through because they thought they needed passports. Afterwards they decided to murder the king as a long term goal. Anyway, next session was a doozy, because another player joined, bringing the count up to 4 PCs. This was also a rogue, and the party attempted to get him to join up... by telling him if he wanted to come along, he would need to buy his own wagon, because they want a wagon city. Because he only had a small amount of money, he refused, so they offered to let him come along anyway if he killed the guards and stole one or something. I have no idea. Anyway being that the rogue was good-aligned, he promptly tried to turn the rest of the party in. The bard got a nat 20 on a diplomacy roll to defuse the situation, so they only got off with a warning. We proceeded to talk a bit out of game about how clearly we did not communicate well on certain things and everything was resolved. The rogue's player said he did not think it would be in character for him to join up with the party after that, so they met a suspiciously identical rogue on the side of the road and recruited him instead. Progress! We had another player show up for a session or two but they mostly forgot about us entirely I guess. Apparently they do that a lot. This person also owed another player money and they got into an argument about who was going to pay for the pizza in a group text. I spoke to them after and we agreed that if people had outstanding debts we shouldn't order food for the game. This player did not do a whole lot anyway, so it's not a big loss. I'm gonna stop there to break it up a bit I guess. More to come whenever I feel like -ing
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 05:27
|
|
|
Aniodia posted:
Speaking of sequels, we actually had kind of the opposite happening in a campaign recently, with pretty hilarious results. Basically, the main campaign had gone on hiatus for a while due to scheduling difficulties, so the GM ran a kind of prequel in the intermediate time. We played as a wholly separate group who went after the same objective the party was going after at the time, except some decades before. Now, the game and setting was Degenesis, which is basically future post-apocalypse (or technically ongoing apocalypse ). Imagine Fallout set in Europe and northern Africa, except all the wackiness is replaced with crushing despair. Humanity is mostly hanging on in some major cities, but the average level of technology has regressed to the early industrial era at best, many smaller outlying settlements basically operate on a medieval level, and existential threats close in from every corner.So anyway, in the prequel campaign we were all part of the Chroniclers. The Chroniclers are a major cult obsessed with artefacts and technology from before the fall, and collect them wherever they can. They are information brokers and the backers of the de-facto currency in much of Europe, being the default buyers for anyone who makes a living digging up old scrap from the ruins. They have no meaningful military presence of their own (they're all pasty nerds and make a point of recruiting actual autists) and instead ensure their safety through alliances with other more military-minded cults. However, they do have a very small contingent of spec-ops style operators, which was exactly what our party was. We were being sent out into the wild and relatively untamed country of former East Germany to confirm the presence of a potentially ludicrously important high-tech artefact. Many factions would want to get their hands on it, so the whole operation was super hushed-up. We all made our way over there in semi-civilian disguises, without any of the advanced gear, and only met up once we were well away from prying eyes. Fortunately that kind of thing was more or less standard procedure for people like us, and the Chroniclers had supply dumps stashed even this far out for just that purpose. So that was our first stop, located in a cluster of ruins called the Pillars. The problem was that the whole place was infested by a clan called the Cockroaches, tribal cannibal humans who were basically at a stone-age level. We got lucky and managed to sneak in to our cache undetected, which allowed us to get our hands on a plethora of advanced armour and modern firearms (a big deal in a setting where even a semi-automatic pistol is a rarity) and quickly arm up. Unfortunately, on the way out it turned out we had been spotted after all, and a group of several hundred Cockroaches were surrounding us on all sides. Those were bad odds even with our fancy guns, but they didn't attack quite yet, seemingly scared or confused by our presence. We almost managed to just bluff them by walking right on through, but eventually one giant warrior stepped in our way and wouldn't let us pass (all this happened wordlessly). So, a show of force was needed. As it happened, 'show of force' was the name of a 40mm grenade launcher we'd just picked up. One of us took the shot, hit the warrior dead on, and our obstacle went up in an explosion of fire and guts. At the same time the rest of us put on a show with the rest of our advanced equipment, including blinding lasers, smoke generators, and a sickening stroboscope. Obviously cowed by this display, the rest of the Cockroaches parted and let us pass. From there, we went on towards the primary objective, though what happened there isn't particularly important to this story. So, fast forward to when the main campaign picked back up. We followed the same path that our group had taken in the prequel, and actually ended up hiring exactly the same local guide to lead us there as well. When we got closer to the Pillars, we started getting a little nervous. After all, this party was no group of cutting-edge operators, the prequel characters had come here with more XP and far better equipment than what we had. We had only one guy who was legitimately good in combat, whereas the other two of us were a fast talker with minimal combat skills and a spindly phsyician who was way too old for that poo poo. Even worse, we were carting around heavy excavation equipment, so sneaking by would be difficult as well, and the terrain didn't allow us to go around entirely. Except when we got there, we were surprised to see somebody had built walls around the entire Pillars. And not just walls, but also a bunch of fairly sophisticated aboveground buildings, which was basically unheard of for the Cockroach clan. We closed in, and found a fully functioning and actually kind of normal settlement had sprung up there. It even had guards and everything, though those guys seemed a little out of their depth and new to the job. So we walked in there, and soon enough a bell rings that caused a whole bunch of people to congregate in the central square. We followed along and watched some sort of priest make an address. And the priest happened to wear very peculiar robes. In fact, the very kind of robes you usually see Chroniclers wear. And then he brought forth a bound man and started talking about sending him up to the gods. We were already expecting a sort of human sacrifice, but we weren't quite prepared for what happened next: The priest stepped close to the captive attached something to his chest, and quickly hurried away. And then the sacrifice blew up with a giant explosion in a spray of gore. tl;dr: By blowing up a guy with a grenade launcher and starting a sweet rave, we accidentally started a religion centered around human sacrifice via explosives
Perestroika fucked around with this message at 14:20 on May 28, 2017 |
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 14:09
|
|
|
Starting a religion, accidentally or otherwise, is something that should be on every party's bucket list.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 14:29
|
|
|
Grizzwold posted:We proceeded to talk a bit out of game about how clearly we did not communicate well on certain things and everything was resolved.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 14:49
|
|
|
Grizzwold posted:He neglected to tell anyone what kind of papers, though, so the guards are half-assing it and saying poo poo like "Spellbook? That's paper alright. Scroll with your name on it? Sure, whatever." This is great. Also, good on you guys for talking out player/character difficulties and not letting it become a problem. From our game last night- How the wizard started the week as a royal inquisitor and ended it in jail: So my players have recently found out that the Crown Prince of the kingdom has been replaced with a rakshasa (the bard got a nat 20 on an insight check and caught a glimpse through the fiend's illusion), and are attempting to be Politically Savvy since their spells can't touch him. The 'prince', wanting to keep an eye on the group's progress, offered the party a position to officially lead an investigation into the Red Chariot, an evil wizard cult organization that he is secretly involved with. They accept and gleefully take control of a slice of the army and a pile of the king's gold, reasonably guessing that it is a trap. On the side, they start sowing tabloid/Infowars style rumors and conspiracy theories about demonic body snatchers. The rightful king is growing sicker and more exhausted by the day, nightmares depriving him of any rest- timed from the party first meeting him and very publicly saving his life. They spend the majority of the week trying to convince him to leave the evil prince's side at the palace and go for a nice trip in the countryside, thinking he's being poisoned. The words first fall on deaf ears, and by the time they land successfully, the king is far too weak to move. The wizard eventually pieces together that a curse that has affected the king, and buys two scrolls of remove curse. (Much earlier in the campaign, he was pissed at the bard and I allowed him to use bestow curse to give him a minute of horrible nightmares a night, so it was a reasonable leap for two party members to make.) Unfortunately, in his haste to save the king, he completely failed to consider how a wizard marching into a crowded room and casting an unknown spell on the nearly comatose king looked. The 'prince' controlled him to halt his casting (a valiant effort to save his father, of course) and had the guards arrest the wizard, who is now in jail as we head into a month of in-game downtime. It was unexpected, but it'll tie in very well to the player's choice to train for the Lucky feat. The druid ended up saving the king's life with the second scroll through a very high-stakes solo stealth mission, though, so the bad guy's plans were foiled in the eleventh hour. Tiny spider form, excellent stealth check, hold person for an unforeseen guard, and a desperate tap to cure the king before using his last wild shape to escape the room. Pretty badass stuff. I'm excited to see how clean the group looks coming out of this, and whether they can use their leverage with the king to retain their new titles. This has been the first campaign that I've run, and it has been such fun to see how they've changed the framework I originally came up with and it just makes it so much better. The rogue still wears his tiki-bar contest souvenir hat at every opportunity.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 16:16
|
|
|
BadSamaritan posted:The rogue still wears his tiki-bar contest souvenir hat at every opportunity. Now THAT'S a satisfying payoff.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 18:54
|
|
|
BadSamaritan posted:The druid ended up saving the king's life with the second scroll through a very high-stakes solo stealth mission, though, so the bad guy's plans were foiled in the eleventh hour. Tiny spider form, excellent stealth check, hold person for an unforeseen guard, and a desperate tap to cure the king before using his last wild shape to escape the room. Pretty badass stuff. I'm really fond of "this almost went to poo poo, but then someone made a last ditch effort and everything barely turned out okay" type stories. Speaking of, Mirai Medical 2.5: You Are [Not] A Shark So Seras (the angel with a heart of kung fu), Eleanor (the polite primal who's probably not from here), and Toshiro (ex-convict, ex-family man, current psychic) drag a bunch of pilfered KinetiCorp data back to Mirai Medical. They drop it off, they discuss some things, they all go home. Well, Toshiro goes back to his lovely apartment and Eleanor goes to sleep in a tree or something, Seras pretty much lives at the lab. Everything's good and fine and done and-- Toshiro gets a phone call from Wakamae at like, 1:00 am the next night. "Get your rear end down here. Now." He lives in the same district as Mirai, so a sleepy bus ride later he's walking in on an argument between Wakamae and Dr. Kogga. "Just because it's a bad cancer treatment doesn't mean---" "No," Wakamae interrupts, "You're not listening. KinetiCorp could have made a decent cancer treatment. They didn't. They didn't on purpose. I have the research data right here--they spent years, YEARS, brewing up a drug for the SOLE PURPOSE of causing drastic side effects when it mixes with one of ours. They made Mentos for our Diet Coke and then passed it off as a legitimate drug. THEY have lawyers, WE DON'T. They're going to discredit--" it's then that Wakamae realizes Toshiro has arrived. She gives him and Seras their next mission: head to Zan Gyou Interdistrict Hospital. There's a patient there named Jomei Tsunada. Bring him to Mirai Medical, ASAP. Toshiro loses his loving mind. First he had to help out a smuggling operation, which ended with him having to snap a dude's neck. THEN he had to break into a big business and commit some potentially federal-level data theft. Now Wakamae's asking him to kidnap a cancer patient. A brief argument ensues. Seras, being a clone weapon man with no context, has no idea how illegal (or ethically unsound) this is, but tries to talk Toshiro down anyway. Toshiro finally agrees to it, but after this he wants answers. He's been helping Mirai Medical do some questionable poo poo, and they haven't moved him even an inch closer to finding out what happened to him before all this started. Wakamae agrees to fill him in on what they know, once Jomei is in Mirai Medical's hands. She also gives him a syringe full of a dark red liquid. "If you have to, inject this into Jomei's heart. ...Only if you absolutely have to." Toshiro doesn't want to ask, so he doesn't. The two of them take a quick stop to talk to Zelo One. See, they've had some consistent issues with communication, and they want some kind of device to talk with. They have cell phones, but... no. They need something that will work underground, since they end up in sewers half the time. Zelo, it turns out, already had something ready but kept forgetting about it. He brings them a box of five ear-mounted communication devices, all alien tech. Jokes are made about him having five ready, like he's just trying to get rid of them. It's Halloween! Have some headsets. The party laughs. I laugh, slightly harder, and nobody figures out why. The only catch is--and he makes this very, very clear--do not put any of these devices in a microwave. Don't do it. Don't. Everybody immediately concludes that the alien talky machine is volatile, and they make a mental note to shove one of the extras in a microwave the very second they need a bomb to go off. I laugh again. Eleanor meets up with them at the hospital--not because she's been stalking them this time, but because she's had visions. poo poo's about to go down. They give her a headset. The three of them talk to the nurse at the front desk, find out Jomei's room number, and proceed to the elevator. They're on their way to the 8th floor. They get to almost the 5th floor before the elevator grinds to a halt. The lights flicker. Blood trickles from the escape hatch above. Then something starts to press on the escape hatch. Something big. Seras and Toshiro pry the elevator door open, and the party crawls through a half-exposed entrance to the 5th floor. All hell has broken loose. Skin, meat, and pumping arteries coat the walls, covering most of the doors in the hallway. Eyeballs in weird places. Musculature stretching out and growing into fingers. Bones reach out, unable to decide if they're limbs or teeth. Horrible masses of viscera shuffle about the floor independently, terrorizing patients and nurses alike. Seras does a quick scan for chi, hoping to confirm that Jomei's still in his room... and he is. He's everywhere else, too. Jomei is slowly growing into the building, his swelling, tumorous mass currently occupying about six different floors. The party fights their way through Jomei, battling huge bone centipedes, dodging sprays of scalding blood from rupturing pustules, and saving as many people as they can from gross growth monsters. All three of them are drained, exhausted, and covered in blood and bile by the time they reach the 8th floor. They reach the top of the stairs. They turn the corner. On the opposite side of the hall, having taken a different way in, are two samebito. One of the shark men is smaller, a familiar looking shaman with a cape made of mermaid scales. The other is larger. Larger than normal. Larger than last time. He wields a huge, scarlet sword, the flowing material of it stretching across his body like armor. They can't really tell where the flowing blood armor starts and the shark man ends. "Holy poo poo, Bonebreaker's turned into Nightmare from Soul Calibur." Fleshripper, the shaman, immediately starts talking... in perfect Jipponese, a talent he didn't display the first time they fought. "Ah, of course you all are here. It is your destiny... to bear witness..." Seras has been training extensively to fight shark men. In GAG, this gives Shonin bonus points to burn on the task they trained for. He also picked up some drugs from some of the nurses he's saved on the way here, and is currently hopped up on temporary steroids. So, of course, he leads the charge--flying down the hallway at like 80 MPH. While Seras duels with both Bonebreaker AND Fleshripper, Eleanor and Toshiro make a break for Jomei's room, hoping to put a stop to this and steal him away before the sharks do... whatever the gently caress it is they're here to do. Helpfully, Fleshripper explains, because he won't shut the hell up. "I thought you'd held us back, hindered us, but no... you taught us patience. We were going to sacrifice a common, worthless criminal... but why settle? Here, this, an eternal source of blood... he will make our god stronger than any other--" Seras rolls, and succeeds, to break Fleshripper's jaw. The shark stops talking and they all keep fighting. Toshiro and Eleanor look at Jomei, who is now the shape of a cancer patient embedded in a wall of writhing flesh. There's hesitance, but no discussion. Pretty straightforward. Toshiro takes out the needle that Wakamae gave him, and jabs Jomei where his heart should be. There's a pause... and the excess mass starts to rot, and melt, and peel off the walls. In seconds, Toshiro is holding an actual human body. "I... check for a pulse. Is he still alive?" I already know the answer, but I roll a die loudly and out of sight because I'm an rear end in a top hat. I pause, like I'm pondering the results, and I take a deep breath. "Yeah. He's still alive." While this is going on, Seras is fighting sharks. It's at this point that Seras, out of character, confides a very heavy truth to me. "Matt, I'm loving scared." "Out of character, or in character?" "Yes. This guy spanked us last time." Seras in character is a genetically engineered weapon designed only for fighting. He hasn't had time to discover a plethora of emotions. This is his first time being afraid. He is genuinely convinced that he might not be able to win this fight, and is suddenly realizing how unfulfilled his existence is with the specter of death looming overhead. Out of character, Seras' player is really attached to Seras, and doesn't want him to die to shark mans in the middle of a Silent Hill level. He's made some bad rolls in this fight, and burned through his extra points. poo poo's going south, fast. Toshiro bursts out of the room with an unconscious Jomei in his arms, Eleanor right behind him. Between Toshiro's TK and Eleanor's Big Stone Hands, the two of them put Bonebreaker through the wall, getting him out of the way long enough to GTFO. Seras makes a tactical decision: he grabs Fleshripper by his broken face and drags him to the window, again at like 80 MPH. Seras leaps through the window, falling 8 stories and using the shark shaman to break his fall. He could have flown, I guess, but this was better. Toshiro follows and TK slows himself enough on descent, barely, to hit the pavement below with minimal damage. Eleanor is the last out the 8th story window, and just turns her whole body into stone before impact. Thud. Fleshripper barely survives the fall with 1 HP, which is exactly what Seras wants; he then proceeds to knock the smaller shark man straight the hell out. The party slips past a wall of police officers and reporters, carrying a passed out cancer patient and horrid little shark man, back to Mirai Medical. That was the end of the second game. Tonight I'm running the third session, where they (hopefully) discover the awful truth: I haven't been running these sessions the way they happened. I've been running them the way the party would remember them. Five headsets.
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 22:20
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
May 28, 2017 23:52
|
|
|
So fist game without our dragonborn "meat and sex" cleric still went some interesting places. so a week ago the player characters came upon a large shipment of silver, there was a werejakal bandit, you know how it goes. Anyway they take this 30lb shipment of silver and what do they decide to do with it? Sell it. no not for this group. Our charlton half-elf rouge and horder Earth Genasi barbarian devise a plan to corner the market on silvered weapons and manufacture a lycanthrope-based hysteria to boost demand. They already have a network of npc's from basically turning every mook they didn't kill into a hired informant and have managed to ally themselves with both major criminal organizations in the city too.Now i have one player in the discord chat researching the surface area of a scimitar and calculating the amount of silver needed to coat it. There is a very real chance they could cause a market fluctuation and boost the value of silver to ten times the value of gold. they're sapose to be assassins but it seems that entrepreneurship is a hard habit to break. they joke that this should be a thieves guild campaign and i kind of wish it was now. God drat DnD is amazing.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 15:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 21, 2024 11:29 |
|
|
OmanyteJackson posted:God drat DnD is amazing. Glad you're having fun and all but none of that story is something that is unique to Dungeons & Dragons.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2017 15:45
|
|
