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Previous session my party passed an initiation test for a guild/organization of monster slayers, a group who believed in killing nasty evil poo poo so they could ascend to the plane of Ysgard after death. They earned their entry by killing a big bug with a penchant for eating eyes and ovipositing in the empty sockets. This session, they entered the guild hall for a celebration of their initiation. I described it as having a vague sulfur smell, which they didn't pay any mind to. PCs were served some booze (noted for being especially strong). Four of the five PCs joined in on the drinking and got wasted. The kobold fighter abstained because she considered alcohol "the devil's drink" (which devil, she didn't know). There were about ten NPC members in there, who asked the PCs about their abilities and roles in the team over drinks and feasting. The half-elf was the PCs' only healer, and the wizard had fireball. Interesting. One of the NPCs told the wizard that the cook in the kitchen was having a problem and asked if he could take a look at it. Another one scooched over to the healer. Only when an NPC barred the exit did the PCs start to suspect anything, and by then it was too late. The NPCs all stood up at once, revealing strings of red ooze attached to them, leading down through the gaps in the floorboards. The healer was KO'd instantly and only missed instant death by three hitpoints. The wizard managed to survive via a portent die and teleporting out of danger with fey step. Four of the five of them had the poisoned condition from being drunk. And then the monster cast charm person on all of them. Some rounds later, the healer was back up and survived instant death once again thanks to the timely use of an inspiration point. The party got backed into a corner and nearly overwhelmed, until the wizard eventually succeeded on his saving throw against charm a few rounds later and blew up seven of the fake NPCs with fireball. They found the Elder Oblex in the basement, containing a dozen or so corpses within it and pretending to be dead until the wizard finished it off with a fire bolt. The monk took a souvenir, a single stick said to be from Yggdrasil and point the way back to it. The party razed the guild hall to the ground and left.
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Sep 15, 2018 19:12
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While finishing up combat, the rest of the party was covering a basement stairwell of an enemy mercenary company from the front door of the apartment block outside. To keep anyone from coming up as their looted steamer trunk is thrown off the fire escape and dragged to the car, the party's resident explosives maniac primed and threw a No. 82 Gammon Bomb into the stairwell. The bomb doesn't have a time fuse. It has an impact fuse and was filled with 2 pounds of Composition C and ball bearings for shrapnel. The explosion blasts him off his feet (dealing only 3 damage since the stairwell and walls cushioned the blast somewhat) and blows the remains of the front door into scattered chunks of wood on the sidewalk. Whoever was coming up the staircase takes 74 points of damage when it would have taken about 65 to instantly kill him with no chance of resuscitation. I can't imagine what that corpse must look like.
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Sep 15, 2018 19:27
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CobiWann posted:Chapter Index - https://tinyurl.com/Tanicus-Index Much appreciated.
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Sep 15, 2018 19:33
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chitoryu12 posted:I can't imagine what that corpse must look like.
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Sep 15, 2018 19:42
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Yawgmoth posted:I believe the term is "chunky salsa". and it's cousin 'fine red mist' for critical overkills
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Sep 16, 2018 01:39
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First session of a new Adventurer's League campaign, my cleric rescued a cat from a fire, and it promptly adopted her. 
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Sep 23, 2018 03:02
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Had the first combats of our new campaign last night. The party bought a boat, the Merry Mack, off an old sailor willing to sell since no one would just take them to the cursed ruins of Shadukar, on account of the waters being full of horrible things and the "port" being full of other horrible things. The first fight was with a water elemental infused with demon blood and leeches, and went rather well for the party all told; the leeches only did a couple points of Str damage and the elemental didn't hit anyone too hard who couldn't take it. The bard giving everyone +4d6 Sonic damage on hits made short work of it even though it had DR. The next fight, however, is where everything fell apart. An ooze made of a mass of caustic tendrils and rotting detritus plus three undead stingrays; the ooze slammed into the hull and began dissolving it while the stingrays attacked. This wouldn't have been an overly brutal fight if the party just rolls not terribly and the monsters don't roll incredibly well. Unfortunately, what happened instead was two PCs being Nauseated for a round because of the ooze's stench, the bard eating a max damage AoO (knocking him into the negatives from full), and in general no one rolling double digits on anything. Adding to the pressure of having the bard dropped immediately and thus losing out on a huge buff, the party psywar got dropped by two of the stingrays and the ooze dissolved a huge section of the hull, causing the ship to start sinking. Fortunately the party's swordsage is also a sailor, so between that and their escort being an ectoplasm shaper, they managed to get the boat in a shape to allow them a bit of time to heal up, then make the final push to Shadukar. Lord of Hats made a great chart demonstrating just how bad the party's rolls were, which I think is too good to not share.
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Sep 24, 2018 15:18
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gently caress me, that is a lot of 2's. This reminded me of when I discovered that Risk was a terribly designed game and stopped playing it. I lost a battle where the odds were overwhelmingly in my favour and walked away from the game because it made losing certain barring another utterly improbable stroke of luck to my benefit. I wrote down the forces on both sides and took them to a professor of mine who enjoyed war games and was an expert in probability theory, and we worked it out that my odds of losing were 1 in 14 million or so. I'd have had better odds of winning the lottery.
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Sep 24, 2018 17:25
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I mean Risk is a terrible game but losing to something that has a 1-in-14 million chance of happening isn't evidence of it being bad, unless you want to take the position that all randomness is bad game design. (In which case I am intrigued and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.  )
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Sep 24, 2018 17:29
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JustJeff88 posted:gently caress me, that is a lot of 2's. This reminded me of when I discovered that Risk was a terribly designed game and stopped playing it. I lost a battle where the odds were overwhelmingly in my favour and walked away from the game because it made losing certain barring another utterly improbable stroke of luck to my benefit. I wrote down the forces on both sides and took them to a professor of mine who enjoyed war games and was an expert in probability theory, and we worked it out that my odds of losing were 1 in 14 million or so. I'd have had better odds of winning the lottery. I trust you immediately purchased a lottery ticket?
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Sep 24, 2018 17:51
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JustJeff88 posted:gently caress me, that is a lot of 2's. This reminded me of when I discovered that Risk was a terribly designed game and stopped playing it. I lost a battle where the odds were overwhelmingly in my favour and walked away from the game because it made losing certain barring another utterly improbable stroke of luck to my benefit. I wrote down the forces on both sides and took them to a professor of mine who enjoyed war games and was an expert in probability theory, and we worked it out that my odds of losing were 1 in 14 million or so. I'd have had better odds of winning the lottery. Sure, it's possible that's the real odds. But I've found that any time someone posts odds that low either a)there's a mitigating factor where it's not really that unlikely (such as the lottery. The odds of a specific person winning are low, but the odds of someone winning are high) or b)there was a math or assumption error. Basically, ask yourself which is more likely: that a 1:14,000,000 event happened to you or that you made an error
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Sep 24, 2018 20:12
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Kaza42 posted:Sure, it's possible that's the real odds. But I've found that any time someone posts odds that low either a)there's a mitigating factor where it's not really that unlikely (such as the lottery. The odds of a specific person winning are low, but the odds of someone winning are high) or b)there was a math or assumption error.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:03
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Yawgmoth posted:Using your own example: think of how many games of Risk have been played since 1957, and how many battles per game there are. Just because something is unlikely to happen doesn't mean it's impossible, or that someone screwed up to make it happen. Yeah, it's definitely sold millions of copies and so 14,000,000:1 events have happened in it multiple times. Probably just a pet peeve of mine, stemming from having players work out how unlikely that exact bad thing was while ignoring that they were relying on a chain of 10+ events that were likely individually but pretty risky in aggregate. I'm an old grump, ignore me.
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Sep 24, 2018 21:07
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also game dice are seldom actually fair
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Sep 25, 2018 00:23
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not mine, but a member of a Nerd FB group I'm in posted this: ""Hit a conundrum with my D&D group... In our last session, they decided to destroy a floating island nation the size of the Kaua'i island of Hawaii, by eliminating the item that allowed it to float above the clouds... What it crashed into was the mountain range of a prosperous coastal territory the size of New Jersey... I am trying to redraw the map and give them a sense of the damage they just caused... But I wanted to probe the hive mind of the nerd entity so I could establish an appropriate level of destruction. Falling at terminal velocity, what would the damage radius be for an object with roughly 550 sq miles of area, if it fell from a height of 2.5 miles? How far should I make the shockwaves be felt? How big would the dust and debris cloud grow? How far around the impact sight would be decimated?" And how you know it's a nerd group? A) it has nerd in the name, and B) People have made 100 posts discussing it and trying to do the math on what the impact would be like instead of "Campaign over. World over. New World, New Campaign, New Characters"
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Sep 25, 2018 18:58
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SirFozzie posted:And how you know it's a nerd group? A) it has nerd in the name, and B) People have made 100 posts discussing it and trying to do the math on what the impact would be like instead of "Campaign over. World over. New World, New Campaign, New Characters"
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Sep 25, 2018 19:11
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Yawgmoth posted:Would that kind of impact be a global extinction event? I wouldn't think that 2.5 miles would be high enough to ruin the world. And now you have a campaign for unfucking the monumentally terrible thing they did while either trying to hide that they're the culprits (by whatever means) or just owning up to it and dealing with the various fallout. yeah I don't think it'd be global, but everything within that range would go splat, it'd actually do more damage if it fell in the sea due to Tsunamis. But really DM shouldn't focus on the math and more on 'Okay, you guys colossally hosed up, now what are you going to do?'
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Sep 25, 2018 19:42
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Someone did the math (I TOLD you it was a nerd group) Google gives the average density of granite as ~175lbs/ft^3. Assuming your floating island was a mile thick, that's almost 81*10^12 cubic feet, or about 14.1*10^15 lbs (6.43*10^15 kg). At a height of 4km, that's potential energy around 252*10^18 joules. For comparison's sake, the Hiroshima blast was around 63*10^15 joules. The largest nuclear weapon ever tested (Tsar Bomba) was only 0.21*10e-18 joules, which in turn was only a quarter of the total energetic output of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption. According to Wikipedia, 252*10^18J would equal half the entire world's energy consumption circa 2010. Soo.... yeah, global-scale climate change for years to come, death toll in the millions or higher (not to mention secondary effects like tsunami damage, secondary plate tectonic shift, etc.). Really, really, REALLY bad news. And we're not getting into debris in the atmosphere, tectionic shift, lava, tsunami (it would be a Richter 11 earthquake), etcetera.
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Sep 25, 2018 19:42
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I don't think it would be global extinction level of damage. This provides something in approximately a similar scale. https://what-if.xkcd.com/57/ Short answer is: Everything you could define as 'locally' is totally and irrevocably hosed. The world as a whole continues on doing it's thing though.
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Sep 25, 2018 19:52
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Robindaybird posted:yeah I don't think it'd be global, but everything within that range would go splat, it'd actually do more damage if it fell in the sea due to Tsunamis. But really DM shouldn't focus on the math and more on 'Okay, you guys colossally hosed up, now what are you going to do?'
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Sep 25, 2018 19:57
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On quick math you're looking at something like a twelve mile diameter impact crater alone, so that's pretty close to 'every NPC in the game you have met so far is dead'. Actually thinking about it, the damage would be worse in most fantasy realms. They tend to have much more elaborate and deep underground geography, and that's going to all get pretty hosed from the massive tectonic shifts that would result.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:05
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This just makes it sound like having flying islands around is the equivalent of the nuclear arms race, especially if a single adventuring party can gently caress things up so spectacularly.
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Sep 25, 2018 20:11
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Having giant floating anythings is an invitation to create catastrophe to the right sort of mind. Two words: Colony Drop e: I'm monkeying around with meteor impact calculators; unfortunately the best one isn't really set up to simulate a drop from only 4 km. Min impact speed is 11 km/s, and a drop from 4 km up would (neglecting air resistance) produce a speed of 280 m/s. So to match the the drop speed, I increased the drop height, which means decreasing the mass to give the same potential energy. We started with a 16km wide sphere made of granite (density 2800 kg/m3), we end up with a 1.42 km sphere made of granite, striking at 11 km/s from an angle of 90°. https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/ gives a crater of 17 km wide and 7 km deep on sedimentary rock; a quake of about 7.8 on the richter scale, and catastrophic airblast effects at 100 km away. Says an impactor with this energy is a once-every-50000-years event, which is honestly kinda scary. http://simulator.down2earth.eu/planet.html?lang=en-US set to strike the moon (to avoid any atmospheric effects) gives a crater of 26 km wide and 800 m deep and a quake of about 8 on the richter. No atmospheric effects, because moon. So yeah, if you wanted to go into the math, and do a little disaster porn, it's possible to tell your players just how grossly they've hosed up the eastern seabord. Or you could short circuit it with new characters new campaign. Phy fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Sep 25, 2018 |
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Sep 25, 2018 20:13
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Phy posted:Having giant floating anythings is an invitation to create catastrophe to the right sort of mind. Two words: Colony Drop Clearly someone in that group needs to embrace their destiny and turn their character into the Char Clone they were meant to be.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:20
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Dropping a country-sized chunk of rock on the planet from a very high altitude was Ultron's evil plot from Avengers 2. Obviously the PCs need to go on a quest for the
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Sep 25, 2018 21:24
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:This just makes it sound like having flying islands around is the equivalent of the nuclear arms race, especially if a single adventuring party can gently caress things up so spectacularly.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:46
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:War in any sort of space opera setting would, in reality, be super brutal. It's easy to drop something heavy on a planet and gently caress it up real good, and if you're in a space opera, you obviously come from a different planet and don't care if you irrevocably gently caress this one up. You probably would, inhabitable planets with production capacity are probably what you're fighting the war over. Lugging a large body into orbit and then issuing ultimatums, however...
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Sep 25, 2018 22:09
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I know that a couple sci fi universes I read have rules like "Once your opponent controls the oribital stations around your planet, you must surrender or they can warcrime you with impunity (one of the later books in the Honor Harrington serieshave them calling down to a concentration camp "We control the orbitals. Surrender" and the concentration camp folks "say back off or we'll tell them to shoot the hostages". The captain says something like "Thank you, you just made my day." and launches a kinetic kill device from orbit on the leaders of the camp, and send in assault shuttles to rescue everybody.
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Sep 25, 2018 23:23
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One of the things I liked in Seveneves, which had the two warring factions of humanity living entirely in a distributed network of satellite habitats, was that the war was fought entirely on the Earth's surface because there's no way to have a shooting war between habitats in which literally every piece of debris isn't a weapon of mass destruction.
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Sep 26, 2018 03:29
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I think Interstellar won the "2014 original space movie" war, but we shouldn't forget Gravity just for the fact that it shows what an absolute bitch Kessler syndrome is
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Sep 26, 2018 03:35
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Phy posted:I think Interstellar won the "2014 original space movie" war, but we shouldn't forget Gravity just for the fact that it shows what an absolute bitch Kessler syndrome is Gravity was 2013. I kinda forgot myself and had to check.
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Sep 26, 2018 20:18
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Gravity was five years ago?
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Sep 26, 2018 20:32
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Pollyanna posted:Gravity was five years ago? I too sometimes forget that time broke relatively recently.
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Sep 26, 2018 22:07
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So, I'm playing a game of Deadlands: Hell on Earth, which is essentially Mad Max or Fallout, that sort of thing. Very extensive character creation - the DM has meticulously created nested tables for everything; telling you what kind of MRE ration you got and demands that you constantly tell him the specifics of what you are doing or it didn't happen, down to the most spergy minutiae you could imagine. The combat system of Deadlands is both incredibly deadly and modeled for an almost simulation approach with location damage and armor, a crazy amount of side effects, wounds, and everything else. Modifiers typically play out something like this, "well +2 for this perk, -2 for the weather, -1 for it being through a window, -3 for darkness, +1 because it's on this side out of the sun, and if you hit and the location rolls legs or lower body that's protected by the house so that wouldn't hit, we instead compare against the armor of the material of said house to determine penetration...etc." I join this group, and every player is constantly talking about the last sessions they had. This can be a good thing, but there's this prevalent thing I notice in some gaming groups where they instead seem to want to chat or share and compare past game experiences. It's like the joke about the guy who when he is high just wants to talk about the other times he's high. So I'm listening to how this doesn't compare to that time they fought killer clowns, or buzzsaw robots, whatever. The RP is light despite the extensive character generation which includes accountability for events on a random nested table for the last 13 years of events since the apocalypse started. Go find macguffin. It's probably that way. I have selected to play a Road Warrior to embrace my inner Mad Max, and have dumped the majority of my character's worth and skills into this vehicle, an armored muscle car with a .50 cal gun on top. Drive into ghost town, and combat begins. I see a zombie. You have to roll Guts or you are scared. Fail, so no turn. Combat is so spergy, it takes 50 minutes to resolve the first round. During this round my car takes friendly fire from a grenade, and the gun is jammed, the mount destroyed, and it falls on the ground. I get shot in the face twice through the windshield. Everyone starts off with 4 tokens to reroll, so I use one to try and remove the fear effect. Fail. Next turn starts, and the DM takes pity and lets me roll to see if I can escape it on the initiative phase. Fail. Botch, so I can't use a chip to reroll. 50 minutes of combat pass for round 2. The next enemy arrives; a terminator. The DM calls for a Guts check. Botch. I botched it. I have to roll on the critical fail table. Heart attack. Make a check to see if you are okay. Fail. Spend a chip to reroll. Botch. Permanently lose stats and take x1.5 my health in damage and fall unconscious. TLDR: Didn't get a single turn or solitary action beyond a cursory intro, my introduction to the existing party members was to appear, cower in my car for an entire combat, then have a heart attack when it came time to fight the boss. I'm not even sure if I want to continue with this character.
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Sep 27, 2018 06:40
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Roll a new character with all the stats put into driving the car, use your old character's car and have twice the character points
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Sep 27, 2018 07:05
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"It's a simulationist system!" *Hardened road warrior/adventurer collapses in fear and has a literal heart attack at first sign of trouble* The solution is to play a better system or get a better GM.
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Sep 27, 2018 07:15
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Firstborn posted:critical fail table This is a terrible sign in any context except a literal slapstick cartoon. Find a new GM.
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Sep 27, 2018 07:18
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Firstborn posted:So, I'm playing a game of Deadlands: Hell on Earth, which is essentially Mad Max or Fallout, that sort of thing. Very extensive character creation - the DM has meticulously created nested tables for everything; telling you what kind of MRE ration you got and demands that you constantly tell him the specifics of what you are doing or it didn't happen, down to the most spergy minutiae you could imagine. The combat system of Deadlands is both incredibly deadly and modeled for an almost simulation approach with location damage and armor, a crazy amount of side effects, wounds, and everything else. Modifiers typically play out something like this, "well +2 for this perk, -2 for the weather, -1 for it being through a window, -3 for darkness, +1 because it's on this side out of the sun, and if you hit and the location rolls legs or lower body that's protected by the house so that wouldn't hit, we instead compare against the armor of the material of said house to determine penetration...etc."
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Sep 27, 2018 07:34
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Wicked Them Beats posted:"It's a simulationist system!" I rolled on a bunch of Veteran of the Weird Waste and all this. The GM is adversarial and the card aspect of this game makes it super competitive. Thinking on it, I was just loving embarrassed. Not a SINGLE TURN or action the entire night. NOTHING. Failed every roll, and had a pants-making GBS threads heart attack that rendered me unconscious and permanently lowered my already low stats. In a way it's like a fire I can't look away from, because on some subconscious level I know this is bullshit and the GM is bad. I don't know. I just left super disappointed but trying to keep my chin up, but gently caress. The DM's took individual road maps by state and redrew them to how they look post apocalypse. He's obviously worked a lot on this game and the work does show, but I managed to botch myself into looking like a goddamn clown. Most of the other games I can find are 5E, so that's sort of why I jumped at a system nobody appears to be playing. What a rabbit hole. Firstborn fucked around with this message at 12:59 on Sep 27, 2018 |
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Sep 27, 2018 12:54
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Firstborn posted:I rolled on a bunch of Veteran of the Weird Waste and all this. The GM is adversarial and the card aspect of this game makes it super competitive. Thinking on it, I was just loving embarrassed. Not a SINGLE TURN or action the entire night. NOTHING. Failed every roll, and had a pants-making GBS threads heart attack that rendered me unconscious and permanently lowered my already low stats. In a way it's like a fire I can't look away from, because on some subconscious level I know this is bullshit and the GM is bad. I don't know. I just left super disappointed but trying to keep my chin up, but gently caress. Hey friend? Not playing games is better than playing games that make you feel bad. You are not required to pay back his investment at the price of your own happiness.
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Sep 27, 2018 13:40
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