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Drone posted:Glad you're having fun and all but none of that story is something that is unique to Dungeons & Dragons. I know, it's so dumb! I love it! It's like building a working Atari 2600 in minecraft.
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May 29, 2017 16:00
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OmanyteJackson posted:they joke that this should be a thieves guild campaign and i kind of wish it was now.
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May 29, 2017 16:08
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OmanyteJackson posted:So fist game without our dragonborn "meat and sex" cleric still went some interesting places. It's an interesting idea, given that their haul wasn't all that huge. This gives us 50gp/lb of silver, which turns into effectively 1500gp. Assuming that the coins are up to 10% debased, that still gives us a reasonable starting point for running this gimmick fresh. Of course, it's rather expensive to make metal leafing, when all you have is medieval tools (unless you've got a mage willing to do some precision work). Then, there's the cost to have smiths apply it, the hush money to make sure that they don't blab about where the glut is coming from, etc etc etc... Even if they hadn't come across that pile of silver, the low cost to get into this game makes this a pretty clever plot. Edit: Turns out making silver leaf is kind of a pain compared to making gold leaf, too, so I suspect that blacksmiths are either going to be using more silver than you expect, or they're going to charge more than you would rather they did. Given https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/5e_SRD:Silvered_Weapons, where silvering a weapon costs 100gp, I'm starting to wonder how practical this scheme is. Even if you pay a bulk discount, you're really relying on that change in the market prices, in which case I wonder if it'd just be cheaper to hang on to the silver and sell it to people directly. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 19:47 on May 29, 2017 |
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May 29, 2017 19:37
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Wouldn't ordinary silver leaf be very easily damaged through use? This isn't jewellery or tableware, you're bashing it through armour, flesh and bone. Though if you're already manufacturing a lycanthrope panic to make a quick buck, selling near-useless weapons is both entirely appropriate and not massively harmful to the populace.
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May 30, 2017 00:51
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Skellybones posted:Wouldn't ordinary silver leaf be very easily damaged through use? This isn't jewellery or tableware, you're bashing it through armour, flesh and bone.
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May 30, 2017 01:15
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Had a great ending to a long-running plot point with my rogue last night so follow along if you're inclined. Last September our DM decides we're gonna play a new game & randomly generates new D&D 5e characters. We have a table full & I pick a human rogue. The backstories are also randomly generated & the rogue is an Outlander with "I swear I will destroy the evildoers who destroyed my homeland." backstory. So I roll the DMs dice for race & class & get 'Gnome' and 'Bard'. I make a note of the Gnome Bard who destroyed my homeland. The DM is also doing this thing with World Points. Each session you get a point to spend to use to create something in world. One point will create a shop, three points a town- gives the Players a way to be creative & get personally invested in the setting. I wait to get 3 World Points & create 'Ravensfell'. The rogue's hometown now lying in ruins after a Gnome Bard visited, entertained the townsfolk, then burned the town, & poisoned the well while they slept. Afterwards people called it Ravensfell because even the ravens fell from the skies after eating the poisoned flesh of the dead. So we're murder-hoboing along & rogue is investigating the Bard, learns his name, learns his location & sets about getting to his region to get her sweet revenge. Along the way, I've begun concocting my revenge & looted two magic items to do so. So last night we just killed a dragon at the end of the last session & among all the loot is a Deck of Many Things. We talk about it extensively, ultimately deciding to not draw any cards for the time being & make our way to an evil warlord who has been on the periphery for a while, but all plot points now lead to him. I make it a point to tell the DM my PC buys a wooden box & a pound of salt before we leave town. Rogue dons a disguise & asks after the Gnome subtly & not so subtly on the way. Finds his precise location, but passes by it to meet evil warlord. Evil warlord is a dick, but has reasons & we impress him with the elf's fakakta tomfoolery & figure out our next objective. Rogue says she has a gift for the Gnome. Evil warlord is not having any of it, doesn't like Gnome but needs him for henchmanship so hands off. Rogue counters that she'll challenge him to a duel instead to first blood. Warlord replies: "You know if he kills you he's going to re-animate your body, rite?" Rogue: "I'm okay with that." Party rides off to visit the gnome who has made zombie farmers in a nearby township. Party approaches Gnome's base, Gnome comes out with zombie enterouge (zombienterouge?). Rogue says she has a gift for him. Gnome magically stops party & zombie retrieves present- Gnome opens it & finds a wooden box filled with a pound of salt. I'm going to stop for a moment to explain the two magical items rogue found in her journeys. The first was a Vorpal Edge- acts like a Vorpal sword ("snicker-snack") but is a one-shot use item. It sucks because you have to critically hit (nat. 20) to activate. The second is a Luck Stone. A stone which if charged (16+ once per short rest) makes your next attack a critical hit. The Gnome stares down in confusion at the wooden box of salt. Rogue's allies dispel the magical barrier & rogue is able to move/dash into killing range, flinging the Vorpal Edge at the Gnome's head which splits from his body & all the enraged zombies drop too. Rogue picks up Gnome's head & places it in the box, with the salt used to preserve it. Then I drew a card from the Deck of Many Things.
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May 30, 2017 02:43
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Kumo posted:A good story Did the session end on the cliffhanger card reveal too or are you just not telling us for reasons?
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May 30, 2017 03:13
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Session ended up getting ran tonight instead of last night. Was exactly as good as I anticipated. Apologies for long read, but this is the thing I've been waiting for. Mirai Medical 3: Sorry About Your Sister. Again. So, first, a quick summary on why I love the game I'm running so much. For one thing, I know the guys that are playing in it. I've ran for these people for, like, a decade at this point in various games. Seras' player in particular was there for the first game I ever ran, a D20 Call of Cthulhu campaign back in highschool. I know what makes them tick, and I know how to push their buttons. I know what kind of poo poo they care about, and that's the other key thing: they care. They invest. They make plans and form alliances and hold weird grudges. I've seen these assholes keep journals about in game stuff. And, just as importantly, they know me. They know how to get my gears turning. They made exactly the kind of characters I like to see: enough backstory to work with, but not a 10 page novel of every insipid detail with no wiggle room. Something made Toshiro kill his family; he left the details to me. Seras was a genetically engineered weapon; he left the details to me. Eleanor lived out in the wild and was raised by kodama; she left the rest to me. That gives me so, so much room to go nuts and create an overarching story that ties everyone in, and every detail of the setting, every NPC, every stupid thing I put even five minutes of thought into, they care about. There would be no pay off to this story if that weren't the case. I've had so many games where I had some big fat plot twist that went over like a wet fart because nobody gave a poo poo, they just wanted to keep murderhoboing. Not these guys. These guys were out of their loving seats by the end of this session. This never would have worked if it hadn't been players like this. Also, their attention to detail, and tendency to actually read poo poo I give them, made me fold my game sideways and tell them a bunch of stuff way sooner than I expected. For how much I know them, I still can't predict them. Toshiro brings an unconscious patient with Super Anime Cancer through the front doors of Mirai Medical. Seras is carrying an unconscious shark man, by the face. Eleanor is barely sure what the hell the plan is anymore. Toshiro and the staff of Mirai Medical (at least, what's left of them at like 3:00 am, which is mostly Wakamae, Zelo and Dr. Kogga) start loading Cancer Kid into a massive chemical splitting device, which Zelo One built in the last like, hour or so. The hope is to separate KinetiCorp's Mentos drug from Mirai's Diet Coke drug, turning the Super Anime Cancer back into Regular Cancer. Seras is in one of the backrooms, about to start going full Jack Baur on the samebito shaman. He starts by snapping the shaman's jaw back into place. "The big shark. How do I beat him?" "You can't. Why would I make him beatable?" "His power relies on you." "No. He relies on me for guidance, not power. His power is self sustaining now. Growing. I tell him who his prey is. Without me, he'll find his own prey. He smells blood. We all do. The blood of a brother," he grins, "has the strongest smell of all. He's coming. He's coming for all of you." The chemical splitter starts up. Everything goes white, all the colors getting washed out. Toshiro, Seras, and Eleanor realize that they can't hear anything, all of the sound in the room is getting quieter by the second. Seras grabs the shark man, and realizes he can't feel anything. He can't feel anything, except for the heat coming off of his headset. The chemical splitter released a surge of microwaves through the building. Alien headset, microwaves bad. Everybody whites out. I address Toshiro first because it's funnier. He's running through the dark, being chased by some vague assailants. He rolls to figure out where the gently caress he is, and he makes it; he's exactly where he was about a day or so ago, running from security guards in KinetiCorp. Eleanor is the same--hiding in the shadows, waiting for Toshiro to pass by so she can pull him aside, and then the two of them will make a break for the elevator. They have straight up time traveled, present minds leaping back into their bodies about 24 hours ago. I ask them if they want to do anything differently. "Do I still have the headset?" "No," I tell him, trying my hardest not to smile. "You haven't gotten it yet. Zelo gave it to you between this mission, and the trip to the hospital." Eleanor immediately states that she does things exactly like she did last time, because messing with time travel is Not Good. Toshiro gives it more thought. He wants to change things, but not here, not now. The two of them play out the scene exactly as they did before. Seras is where he was a day ago, as well. He's in the sewers, having just cut a hole in the basement wall of KinetiCorp. He's about to plow straight into the room, setting off alarms and poo poo and grabbing the servers, when he hears a voice behind him. A young woman. "Alright, you should be invisible to everybody but me. They won't see you on camera, and I'm not going in there, so we should be good to go." Seras's player gives me the strangest what the gently caress have you done kind of look, and then tells me he turns around to see who's talking. Standing there, with him in the sewer, yesterday, is a young woman with dyed hair and an obscure band T-shirt. "Who... are you?", he asks, and she looks at him confused. "Uh, Akemi? Toshiro's sister? You alright there, buddy?" "...What." "They program you with some kinda angel Alzheimers? You bummed cigarettes off me to make smoke-a-chinos, remember?" Seras shakes it off, and goes through events as before. He's invisible to the cameras, but still sets off the alarm. "poo poo!," yells Akemi, "That should have worked! Uh, just... can you grab the whole thing?!" Seras grabs the server stack and carries it out of the building. As guards come out the elevator and pursue the two of them, Akemi uses her (noticeably weak) telekinesis to break some pipes, spreading water and steam to make the guards back off. As Seras and Akemi start to get out of the sewer, the party wakes up. They've been unconscious for a couple of minutes. Wakamae has been wildly bouncing back and forth between attending to them, and checking on the chemical splitter. Zelo One is trying to explain the effects of microwaves on this flavor of alien technology to her. There's a crash out front. The samebito shaman has escaped Mirai Medical, and his brother, Bonebreaker, has tagged in. Bonebreaker is now well over 12 feet tall, hunkering down to crawl through the cramped halls of the building. His armor, once like flowing blood, has started to harden. Gears and wheels and chains cover it. It's complex, resembling the technology of the altar used to sacrifice Shiryu in the first session. Seras doesn't have time to ask about Akemi--it's fight time. The party has to protect the chemical splitter and the non-combat staff at least long enough for the process to finish. It's then that Toshiro hits me with his plan, his plan that genuinely had me sitting there in silence for like twenty seconds. See, at the very beginning of this campaign, I gave everybody a write up on Mirai Medical. It includes a list of the staff, who they are, what they do, and a map of Mirai Medical. It also mentions rumors... of a basement. Toshiro immediately turns to Seras and shouts "Check the basement!" Seras can katana his way through pretty much anything. It's his superpower. It's what he do. So he, in turn, slices a massive hole into the basement, ducking into the sublevel to look for some kind of bigger, badder weapon. In the meantime, Toshiro collapses the hallway ceiling onto Bonebreaker. Eleanor has discovered between sessions that she can double her size. Seriously, she's had it the whole time, she just didn't read the whole power. So she gets fuckhuge and starts beating the ever loving hell out of Bonebreaker, trying to keep him buried under debris. Seras discovers a veritable Wonderland of dumb bullshit in the basement. He rips sheets off of tubes, discovering that there's three more copies of him down there. He finds weird brain scans of dozens of people, including Wakamae, and an entire section of the wall dedicated to scans of Toshiro. He pockets a bunch, and by the following round, has also found a cannon. He botches a check to understand how the cannon works, flies straight up through the hole he came from, and fires the cannon at the giant shark monster. AOE sonic effect, and it goes up to 11. The entire party is deafened (except Eleanor, who made the Resilience check), every pane of glass in the building is shattered, and Bonebreaker takes a comical amount of damage. The next couple of rounds are gruesome, with Bonebreaker pinning Seras to the wall with his sword and nearly choking out the other two simultaneously. Toshiro uses his TK to rip the sword out of Seras, hurl it across the room and cut Bonebreaker's arms off, freeing Eleanor to put the beast in a headlock, force his mouth open, and then force it closed again after Seras shoves the end of the sonic cannon into the monster's maw. He unleashes the full force of the cannon straight into Bonebreaker's insides, and the 12 foot shark asplode. Just straight up gore everywhere. Mirai Medical looks like poo poo, but the great beast that's been terrorizing the party for three sessions straight is now hella dead. The shaman got away, but gently caress him. Seras says he'll get him later. He waits for the deafness to wear off, and then... "Who's Akemi?" There's a long pause. Toshiro tenses up. "My sister. Was... my sister." "I saw her. I met her. She was there--" Toshiro almost knocks him the gently caress out right there. Like, rolls to hit. Deals damage. Seras takes it. There's another pause, and Seras decides to take a different course. He digs the scans out of his pockets, the ones he nabbed from the basement. He points at Wakamae, and then at the scans. "Answers. Now." Dr. Kogga takes a deep breath. Wakamae adjusts her glasses. "Let me show you kids a magic trick." Wakamae brings up a sound clip, broken into various tracks. It's the sound of a street on a nice summer evening. One track is a car driving by. The second is crickets chirping. The third is leaves rustling. "Zelo. Do the thing." Zelo One brings up surveillance footage from the last ten seconds on his computer. He then takes a snapshot of that footage with his phone. He then uploads that snapshot to the computer, changes it from a JPEG to a PNG to a couple of different alien file formats. Then he prints it off. The image looks like pixelated, blurry poo poo by now, but very clearly in the image... is a fourth audio track on the sound file. Right there in front of everybody. But nobody can see it. Nobody can hear it. You can't even tell its there, unless you run it through 8 layers of context changes. "There's a series of houses," starts Wakamae, "two blocks worth. In the last ten years, only one family is documented to have ever moved into any of them. The neighbors have never seen anyone in the houses. The owners can't get anyone to rent them. There's nothing wrong with those houses. They're not haunted or anything. Just nobody... nobody moves into them. This sound is from outside one of those houses." Dr. Kogga approaches, and begins explaining the scans. "I call it the Kogga Mind Scan. See, there's plenty of ways to check the physical brain, but the MIND... that's different. Psychic powers work on advanced robots, but robots don't have brains, do they? I barely understand myself what these scans represent... but they're tied to the thought process. Will power. The disconnected consciousness. These," he points to one scan. It's a series of flowing, organic looking circles spreading out of each other. "are normal human minds. With an esper, you see tighter clusters of circles in certain places. Parts of the mind tighten, strengthen, reinforce. This... right here..." He fishes out Wakamae's scan, and points to a single line. It's a void, a sharp emptiness, cutting through the circles. "That's the sound you all just heard. Something digs into the mind here, cuts it open, moves things around, and then sews it all back together. You don't just not here the sound--the sound makes itself disappear from your consciousness. The sound doesn't exist as far as you brain is concerned. And this..." He brings out Toshiro's scan. It's butchered. Absolute bedlam. Empty lines and hard edges and corners and it's almost a whole different image from the normal mind. "This is Toshiro's." Wakamae turns in her seat, staring straight into Toshiro's eyes. "Your family was the only family to have ever moved into any of those homes. ...Allegedly. I think other people have moved into those other houses, as well... and I think someone killed them. I think someone didn't just kill them, but erased them from the common consciousness. Made the world forget they ever existed. Think about that sound--a sound that makes you not hear it, not see it. Imagine stepping over a dead body, but your mind course corrects, and you think you walked across a clean floor. Imagine if I died today, and you forgot that I ever existed. Every picture of me, I'm suddenly gone from it. Every mind on the planet erases me from their personal perception of reality. A killer that retcons people. We provided evidence, in court, that you were possessed when you killed your family. We fabricated that evidence, Toshiro. You weren't possessed. You didn't murder anyone. Someone else did, someone killed your family in front of you and tried to convince you that it wasn't happening. They tried to convince your mind that your family never existed, and this--" she taps on the scan, the chopped up, inorganic, mutilated scan, "--this is your mind fighting back. This is your psychic power giving you SOME kind of resistance. This is you refusing to see the lie the killer wanted you to, and this is that killer PANICKING. All these long, drawn out, jagged lines... he must have tried a dozen different narratives before finding one that stuck, one where he wasn't there. One where you lost control to some phantom force, and did the deed yourself, and that's what all the evidence points to. It's bullshit, but we couldn't prove the existence of a killer whose entire method of murder involves making himself not exist... so we faked evidence to back your possession memory." There's a long pause. Wakamae inhales sharply. "I could walk into my house tonight and the killer could be sitting on my couch and I wouldn't know. I could have a dead sister and have no idea. I could have sent out a DOZEN of you to the sewer or the hospital or to KinetiCorp, and only three of you came back and I'd be none the wiser. I've spent... a lot of time, and a lot of resources, trying to bring this son of a bitch down." Seras is the first to catch it. He looks at me, me as a DM, dead in the eye. "You motherfucker. YOU MOTHERFUCKER." Eleanor's player and Toshiro's player are confused, asking what he's talking about, but I'm already laughing my rear end off. Seras's player shouts it. "FIVE. HEADSETS. FIVE HEADSETS. Zelo had FIVE headsets ready for us, waiting in a box for FIVE OF US. Akemi was with us when we did the server run. Akemi died sometime between then and now, not when the rest of Toshiro's family died. THE KILLER GOT HER IN THE LAST 24 HOURS! SHE WAS WITH US WHEN SHE GOT MURDERED!" Toshiro's player looks at me like I just punched his dog. Eleanor stands up and has to walk off for a moment. I nod. "I haven't been running these games the way they happened. I've been running them the way your characters remember them." Dr. Kogga explains that the JDF project that made Seras (and his brothers downstairs) had no documented purpose. It was shut down because it was unnecessary, hailed as some government sideshow that got out of hand. Wakamae and Dr. Kogga had theorized that maybe it started as a project to fight this retcon killer, but the killer got to someone in charge and erased the known purpose of the project. Thus, a bunch of angels in vats, grown as weapons to fight nobody. Dr. Kogga had hoped Seras might be immune to the killer's erasure effect, but since Akemi had clearly existed, been forgotten, and only relearned about via time travel, Seras didn't seem to have any resistance. There might still be something to him, though, that hadn't been discovered. Eleanor comes back to the room, and spills her story. She has memories of another place, somewhere far off, but doesn't remember parents. She was raised by forest spirits in Jippon, but she's clearly not from here. It's likely that she had parents, once, that came here on a business trip or a vacation or whatever. Now they're gone. Erased. Retconned. A lot of discussion is had. A lot. Whether or not the group should time travel again to save Akemi. Numerous problems with this idea are brought up ("if we get there just as he does the whammy, then our present minds are going to forget why we time traveled in the first place"). Zelo One also explains why he advised against the microwave thing in the first place--there are entities, powerful ones, that only exist in the past. They dwell in the five minutes ago, perpetually chasing the now. When you go back in time, you go to where they are, where they exist, and you give them a foothold. A doorway. They can follow you back through to the present. Since the headsets seem to have a 24 hour-ish jump, the party argues quite a bit among themselves--if they don't do this now, then they don't do it... unless a day from now they jump back to NOW, when they still have the headsets, and then jump again from THERE. "So we need to hold onto these headsets." "Yeah. If we come up with something later, we're going to have to like... do thirty jumps to get back to Akemi." They also start questioning who the FIFTH headset belonged to--Seras, Eleanor, Toshiro, and Akemi only make four. They all start talking about the implications of a killer that can't be perceived. A killer that erases people from history. A killer that made an entire party member not exist. It takes a while for it all to sink in--that even their metagame knowledge was wrong. I get straight up congratulated for finding a way to pull the wool over their eyes, but I couldn't possibly have done it if they, as players, hadn't been so god drat good at this. They cared. They played their hearts out. They gave me stuff to work with and I worked my rear end off to work with it. I've thrown together some of the goofiest, most bizarre pseudo-science anime mumbo jumbo bullshit into just three sessions and everybody made it work beautifully. I loving love this campaign, and these people. Jesus. Lunatic Sledge fucked around with this message at 05:38 on May 30, 2017 |
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May 30, 2017 05:25
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My griffon character just ended a fight by performing a piledriver on a red wyrmling into, appropriately enough, a pile of treasure from 100 feet up. D&D, man. Sometimes wonky, but a bit (or a lot) of crunchiness is totally worth it.
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May 30, 2017 06:14
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Lunatic Sledge posted:"I haven't been running these games the way they happened. I've been running them the way your characters remember them."  This is a magnificent plot hook.
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May 30, 2017 12:58
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So I have this really bad tendency. I'm really good at guessing what the real "plot" is in a game from various small subtle hits, and ruining the GM's big bad twist at the end. In certain nerdherds, I'm considered are prophet. Here are some of my predictions in recent times that came true: -- Get tasked with retrieving a briefcase with a dangerous biological weapon to transform people into controllable super-soldiers? Clearly the people we're stealing this from are actually the good guys and are probably trying to use it to create an army against an alien invasion or something, and the people that are asking us to steal it are traitors or some poo poo. -- Get tasked with helping an imprisoned Paladin who lost his memory gain his power back? Clearly he's a fallen Paladin and actually evil as poo poo, probably the main antagonist of the story, because bad guys don't imprison good guys. Oh look, we unleashed an elder evil... Again. -- Get dropped into a random group that's been going on for a while, while meeting the NPCs. And this is the loveable old crippled goof NPC, everyone in the party likes him, and the universe kind of puts him in unfortunate circumstances, surely nothing wrong with that? I don't know guys, he's probably an evil traitor/spy or something, he's probably not even really crippled. (And now I have to constantly bonk party members on the head with memory erasure spells, because they all have poo poo will-saves and he can read minds.)
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May 30, 2017 13:11
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poo poo, I was almost late to work because this last handful of updates were so gripping.
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May 30, 2017 14:23
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Lunatic Sledge's posts fill my heart with joy.
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May 30, 2017 15:19
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Mondian posted:Did the session end on the cliffhanger card reveal too or are you just not telling us for reasons? Dramatic effect mostly. The card was The Comet. If I single-handedly defeat the next monster encounter I gain a level. Which is pretty rich considerring I killed the Gnome by myself (though I think the elf got off some eldritch blasts at zombies) and leveled. In the worst story vein, I had to OOC exasperatedly beg our group spotlight hog to not to gently caress this up by walking back his action when he declared he was "jumping out & garroting" the Gnome. The same thing he does Every. loving. Encounter. I had literally spent months in game & out of game preparing my revenge scenario & he could not wait a few rounds to pull off my carefully orchestrated attempt to be a badass. It was "taking too long" and I think we were on round 3 maybe? But I got my vengeance & will not dwell on the negative. Kumo fucked around with this message at 16:10 on May 30, 2017 |
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May 30, 2017 16:05
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All these new awesome campaigns. I guess I don't need to post the write-ups for the Tanicus campaign anymore...
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May 30, 2017 17:12
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THE HELL YOU DON'T e. sorry, I like your stories bud Phy fucked around with this message at 17:20 on May 30, 2017 |
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May 30, 2017 17:13
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Lunatic Sledge posted:It takes a while for it all to sink in--that even their metagame knowledge was wrong. I get straight up congratulated for finding a way to pull the wool over their eyes, but I couldn't possibly have done it if they, as players, hadn't been so god drat good at this. They cared. They played their hearts out. They gave me stuff to work with and I worked my rear end off to work with it. I've thrown together some of the goofiest, most bizarre pseudo-science anime mumbo jumbo bullshit into just three sessions and everybody made it work beautifully. I loving love this campaign, and these people. Jesus. gently caress. gently caress. I'm absolutely flabbergasted, and thoroughly impressed. Like, just that line, "even their metagame knowledge was wrong." I would loving kill to have a game like that, because it just takes all the expectations of the players (i.e. that their characters will be hosed with, but the players are safe) and just dumps that right on its head. Like, I'd love to do something like that if I ever get a game going in my area, and it almost feels like I should ask permission to use that concept, just because of how expertly you did it.
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May 30, 2017 18:53
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Kwyndig posted:That second one... I have no idea what could have been going through their head other than "I'll just BS this entire thing and people will love it" which of course is not something that happens at all, so when you called him out he panicked and just dropped everything in a mad rush to cover his tracks. I signed up for a PF game way back. In the first meeting with the GM, he told us that he was going to scale wealth-by-level way back, but don't worry, because he was also going to dramatically drop the prices of most items. When I asked for specifics, he said that he didn't know and he was just going to decide as he went along. Which, I mean... I totally get not liking itemization and WBL in PF and similar games, but c'mon, dude. To my absolute amazement, I don't think the game ever got off thr ground.
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May 30, 2017 19:44
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Harrow posted: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. Maybe I should post this in a different thread, but since it's story/setting stuff and I'm asking for stories: What are some cool things you've done or seen done with multiple dimensions or multiple timelines? I was thinking about what the time travel fuckery in the previous campaign might have done to the universe and I was thinking, well, we explored one alternate timeline in that previous one (Zaaya accidentally sent the party to an alternate timeline where they had died and they actually had to repair their derelict ship with their own corpses on board, it was weird). Maybe the temporal backlash from having deleted, then un-deleted a bunch of stuff from the universe fractured the timeline? Some of the timelines are more or less table than others, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands, with places across the galaxy where the boundaries between them are permeable or where they outright overlap. People don't know this--after all, nobody except the party members and Zaaya have any idea what actually happened in the previous campaign, so modern scholars have no reason to suspect some sort of insane time travel shenanigans had ever happened--they just know there are an increasing number of places in the galaxy where history contradicts itself, technology that's out-of-place, your memory gets fuzzy, that kind of thing. So what are some things I could do with that? I already figure at some point the party has to run into some alternate universe versions of themselves, either as allies or enemies or just a really awkward encounter. Keep in mind, too, that the party's ostensible job at the start of the campaign is that they're bounty hunters, so ideas for interdimensional criminals might be pretty fun.
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May 30, 2017 19:54
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Aniodia posted:it almost feels like I should ask permission to use that concept, just because of how expertly you did it. Nah, have it. I just cribbed meta fuckery from other media (the audience being as lost as the main character is in Memento, characters knowing poo poo only the player should know in Virtue's Last Reward) and applied the basic idea to tabletop stuff. I've always liked the idea of jacking with the players' expectations/perceptions via their character, but it's usually too obvious--"Oh, I guess we're hallucinating now," or too heavy handed--"it was all a dreeeeaaam," "oops we thought those villagers were monsters," etc. Messing with their memories was less a brilliant invention, and more an inevitable conclusion, 'cuz I've wanted to do something like this forever. The players just set me up a perfect storm of blank spaces where "dude who's made your last three sessions not what they seem" made perfect sense, and I could do something really hosed up but make it low key. They weren't tricked into committing some atrocity, they didn't accidentally give the McGuffin to the Main Villain, but it somehow feels more offensive because it was so thick in their plot investment. I didn't take control from them, I just kept information from them that they didn't know they were supposed to have in the first place. I would totally be down for people pulling this poo poo more often, because if your players buy into it, their reaction is amazing when they realize what you've done. Harrow posted:So what are some things I could do with that? The players find out about some future, oncoming crisis... when one of their own arrives from the future to prevent it. However, actually going through the crisis and its fallout has turned that party member into a jaded, ruthless rear end in a top hat with all kinds of insane future tech (at least sufficient enough to travel back in time), and his plan for stopping the thing in the first place has its own huge, terrible toll the party wants to prevent ("Party member X is responsible, let me kill him." or "This species builds the doomsday device, I must exterminate their civilization"). Now they have to not just stop Friend From The Future, they also have to find out what he's trying to prevent and figure out how to prevent it themselves without sinking as low as he is.
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May 30, 2017 20:26
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People who are criminals in one timeline but not another? Maybe a special set of ParaCrime cases where people are convicted based on their actions in alternate timelines establishing their criminal intent. More like PreCrime from Philip K Dick's Minority Report. Heterochiral versions of the PCs. Bizzaro versions.
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May 30, 2017 20:34
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All I know is that the Mirai Medical stuff is loving grade A 
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May 30, 2017 20:49
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Rorac posted:My griffon character just ended a fight by performing a piledriver on a red wyrmling into, appropriately enough, a pile of treasure from 100 feet up. Since you mentioned crunchiness, I feel like I should ask: how closely were you using D&D <insert edition here> grappling, movement, and falling damage rules? I'm not judging you either way, I just usually see people ignoring the rules when it'd be appropriate to the narrative... but since you said the crunch is worth it, I assume that's not the case here.
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May 30, 2017 21:14
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Lunatic Sledge posted:there are entities, powerful ones, that only exist in the past. They dwell in the five minutes ago, perpetually chasing the now. 
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May 30, 2017 21:41
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Rockopolis posted:People who are criminals in one timeline but not another? Maybe a special set of ParaCrime cases where people are convicted based on their actions in alternate timelines establishing their criminal intent. More like PreCrime from Philip K Dick's Minority Report. Using alternate versions of characters is a good idea, especially if they're subtle versions. Not too out there, but if the players wrote good backstories there should be nice hooks where things could go differently for them. Nothing wrong with bizzaro people, but you can really creep them out with subtle weirdness.
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May 31, 2017 00:07
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So the killer has the fifth headset right?
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May 31, 2017 00:26
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We had a week off from our Masks game so we did a oneshot of Monster Hearts 2. Potter's Neck was described in game as being a trashy romance show from Europe. During particularly ridiculous bits of 'the show', our heroes stood up, rewound, or went to get popcorn. Post game, there was an argument on whether we should watch more episodes of the show or smash the DVDs.
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May 31, 2017 01:12
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VanSandman posted:So the killer has the fifth headset right? Probably. Or maybe it was someone back at HQ, someone close to figuring things out. Why isn't Toshiro dead, though? What about his psychic powers made him immune to not just the killer's reality-altering but also the killer themselves?
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May 31, 2017 04:17
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Kavak posted:Probably. Or maybe it was someone back at HQ, someone close to figuring things out. There are so many possible outcomes to this particular question
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May 31, 2017 04:25
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Obviously the killer is a parasitic subconscious manifestation of Toshiro's psychic powers, and so he's not affected by the killer's powers/killed by the killer because it needs him to subsist.
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May 31, 2017 04:42
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Possibly, but whatever this poo poo is it may very well have been going on long before he and his family moved into those houses.
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May 31, 2017 04:43
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Kavak posted:Probably. Or maybe it was someone back at HQ, someone close to figuring things out. Not immune, per se, just resistant. "You never had a family" didn't work, but "uhhh you did it, you killed them" did. "You never had a sister" didn't work, but "your sister died with the rest of your family" did. Being resistant to his power is, in a way, being resistant to getting killed by him--the killer is less dangerous if you can actually see him, even if it's briefly (and then you forget he was ever there). If you mean the second time--that is, why the killer picked off Akemi and not Toshiro, or the rest of the party--it's a secret. That card miiight get turned over in the next session, I'm not sure yet. Seras's player called me today, and apparently he blanked out for half of his job orientation because he was thinking about time travel. It's weird, I'm now basically writing with two different sessions in mind: one for all the goofy poo poo that can go wrong if the party time travels, and one if they decide to just keep on truckin'. Eleanor's player was pretty firm about No Time Fuckery, and Toshiro's player seems torn. He specifically brought up the Butterfly Effect... several times.
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May 31, 2017 05:05
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I feel like Sledge needs to make his own thread and repost all his posts in a row so we can have one big awesome story. Holy poo poo, your M. Night Shyamalan twist was loving
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May 31, 2017 13:18
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Carebearz posted:I feel like Sledge needs to make his own thread and repost all his posts in a row so we can have one big awesome story. Holy poo poo, your M. Night Shyamalan twist was loving
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May 31, 2017 13:34
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Lorak posted:That's what the ? below the avatar is for. shhhhhhh
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May 31, 2017 14:56
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berenzen posted:Obviously the killer is a parasitic subconscious manifestation of Toshiro's psychic powers, and so he's not affected by the killer's powers/killed by the killer because it needs him to subsist. Minor spoilers maybe, but isn't that close to a central plot point in the recent tv show Legion ?
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May 31, 2017 16:51
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So I feel like I need to share this to get some insight as to whether or not I'm a total monster. This is probably going to be lengthy and ridiculous so bear with me. So I play a fairly unique Wild Talents game with my wife. She and I trade-off GMing and we've spent like 3 years building up the world that we've been playing in and fleshing out the characters we meet. It's all very introspective and we can play for 3-4 hours without any real action, just exploring the characters. Her main character is Katya, a wealthy, russian socialite who is also a shape-shifter. Since the inception of the game, and I mean from the second "episode" onward, she's been entangled with the russian mafia. In that episode she was investigating the disappearance of a woman named Anya Udanov, the daughter of Dmitri Udanov, the city's most powerful mob boss. This eventually linked first to a human trafficking ring and then to an alien conspiracy, which itself spiraled out into its own thing (that's so far culminated with breaking into a military base to use an experimental wormhole generator to invade an asteroid serving as the Earth's second moon, and eventually exploding it). About...6 months later, one of her police contacts tips her off to a meeting between the biggest russian mobsters in the city, which she infiltrates, and in the process encounters Vasily Romanov, the son of the second most powerful russian gangster. Turns out Vasily is a total loose cannon and she and him get into a knife fight in the library of the mansion where the meeting is being held. Fast forward about another year and the russian gangs are on the verge of total warfare. Vasily's father, Spartak, is chronically ill and Katya has to break into the Romanov mansion to retrieve a doctor that the Romanovs have kidnapped to keep Spartak alive. It succeeds, but during the mission she witnesses Vasily killing his own father which leads into a sprawling fight across the entire property. Realizing that Vasily is too dangerous to be the leader of that chunk of the russian underground, she stages a video where she shape-shifts into Vasily and declares all-out war against the Udanovs. I used Reign's Company rules for this and it would up backfiring on her, where the Romanovs actually gain the upper-hand due to a mole they had in the Udanov organization. So new plan: Katya teams up with Dmitri Udanov, impersonates him, gets escorted right into Vasily's penthouse and fights him, which winds up with her having to kill him. This is the first person she's directly killed in the game, and in an awesome twist she failed her Stability check and couldn't watch him die. Now then. Fast forward again to about a month ago. I set up an arc where someone is trying to assassinate Dmitri Udanov. It starts with Katya intercepting a weapons sale intended for a sniper, whom she takes down on a rooftop across form a hotel where Dmitri is having a liaison. Next comes a failed carbombing. At this point, Anya, Dmitri's daughter whom my wife saved at the very start of the game, approaches Katya to ask for help. She follows up on this which, tracking the bomber to an illegal underground card game, and from there to The Gulag, a sort of Russian Kowloon Walled City on the edge of the industrial district. After fighting a guy with a tiger she is tipped off to a third assassination attempt, this one being held at a charity gala that Dmitri Udanov is throwing. She works with Anya to make preparations and ends up fighting a gunslinging metahuman who can control sand an broke into the gala by driving a dump truck through the front of the building. The whole time this is happening, we're exploring the anxieties of Anya Udanov, as she's facing an illness her father is facing, her own insecurities about leading the mob if he dies, about not fitting in with the rest of the russian social scene and her own superhuman abilities that were discovered in the second episode. It really resonates with my wife and at the start of the most recent game she took Anya with a bunch of her other russian friends to a beach party weekend to help her unwind and (hopefully) get her laid. It's a great little bit of character exposition and we had a lot of fun. During this arc, Katya is tracking down a woman named Roza who is apparently behind the assassinations. She locates her in a rundown multipurpose building which turns out to be teeming with Romanov supporters. She confronts Roza at the top floor but she escapes via a helicoptor; my wife tries to pursue but receives a phone call from Anya saying there's been another attack and her father is in the hospital. I'm sure some of you reading this can see where this is going. After visiting and comforting Anya, Katya acts on intelligence she recovered from the Romanov building to infiltrate a club called Steppenwolfe where two things are revealed. 1. First, the mastermind behind the assassinations isn't this Roza person. It's Vasily Romanov, who has been brought back to life with cybernetics. This shocked and thrilled by wife, and I felt pretty great about this. For a long time she's been saying "man I wish I hadn't killed Vasily, he was great." Well there you go! Her jaw was on the floor during his reveal. 2. Even more shocking, though, it turns out that Roza is in-fact Anya Udanov in disguise, and is romantically involved with Vasily. Now her exact motivations and goals have NOT been made clear; the last session pretty much ended on that reveal. But here's the rub. My wife is devastated. She's apparently been rocked to her core. The way we play the game can be pretty emotionally hard-hitting, but I drastically miscalculated how brutal this was going to be. She feel betrayed, not just her character, and she's been talking about how it's going to send her character off the rails. Worse still, it's possibly setting back like two years of character development as she doesn't trust ANY of her character's friends now. So, yeah. That's my notable gaming experience.
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May 31, 2017 17:02
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May 31, 2017 17:07
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Depends if that reveal came out of nowhere or if there was a sufficient number of hints available before. These "Looks like I was the villain all along" reveals without warning are just dumb and annoying (and judging from the reaction it was exactly that). In that case, yes, you're a monster.
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May 31, 2017 18:55
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| # ? May 15, 2024 09:19 |
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BabyFur Denny posted:Depends if that reveal came out of nowhere or if there was a sufficient number of hints available before. These "Looks like I was the villain all along" reveals without warning are just dumb and annoying (and judging from the reaction it was exactly that). In that case, yes, you're a monster. 1.) The woman, Roza, had a very conspicuous disguise (dark red hair, dark sunglasses at all times, a giant, obvious facial burn covering half her face) 2.) When Katya met up with Anya after confronting and wounding Roza, her arm was in a sling which she credited to being injurred in the attack that hospitalized her father 3.) Katya called Anya while she had eyes on Roza on two occasions and her phone went right to voicemail, after having it been established that Anya is completely addicted to her phone. 4.) Each time they interacted, Anya's anxiety and stress was visibly worsening. We both agreed that these elements, taken in retrospect, justify the reveal. I don't think the reaction is due to it coming out of left field as much as it was this was the first time frankly any of our characters have been so utterly betrayed. My wife's current plan, after her character cools down a bit, is to cordially invite this character to get their nails done while this telepath character she's friends with reads her thoughts. Though that's contingent on her wanting to do ANYTHING with her friends ever again. She's "joked" that her other plan is to kill Dmitri herself and then fake her own death. Pro-tip: if you play roleplaying games with your significant other, maybe steer clear of the betrayal plot.
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May 31, 2017 19:27
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