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Foolster41 posted:So the luchadore comment and seeing the "grappler" feat made me consider now indeed going full luchadore and doing a gappler style monk. So maybe kinda late to this, but have you considered Kenku for a non-flying bird person?
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Apr 18, 2019 16:08
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Kaza42 posted:So maybe kinda late to this, but have you considered Kenku for a non-flying bird person? Didn't they have a thing in 5e where they couldn't talk, only mimic? Sounds like something a spiteful gm would latch onto.
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Apr 18, 2019 19:11
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Leraika posted:Didn't they have a thing in 5e where they couldn't talk, only mimic? Sounds like something a spiteful gm would latch onto. Yeaaaah, good point. RAW it's basically not a flaw at all since you can mimic any "sound" you have heard which should 100% let you communicate normally but it's an easy thing to spite up as a dick DM.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:08
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Yeah like you can go "I make a bunch of sounds the my friends in the party knows means X" but this GM already sucks.
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Apr 18, 2019 20:48
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EthanSteele posted:Yeah like you can go "I make a bunch of sounds the my friends in the party knows means X" but this GM already sucks. All words are made of sounds. Once you've heard a few hundred words, you can create any word you want from their component sounds, even if you haven't heard that exact word before
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Apr 18, 2019 20:57
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Kaza42 posted:All words are made of sounds. Once you've heard a few hundred words, you can create any word you want from their component sounds, even if you haven't heard that exact word before It will just sound weird in that case. Plus Kenku look cool. This awesome costume show that pretty well. 
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Apr 18, 2019 21:13
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Kaza42 posted:All words are made of sounds. Once you've heard a few hundred words, you can create any word you want from their component sounds, even if you haven't heard that exact word before IIRC, the Volo's Guide to Monsters addresses that with a "Well ACTUALLY..." loophole closer. Like, other than being unable to fly and wishing they could, one of their major hangups is that they lack creativity. They can mimic anything perfectly, but, they're incapable of doing anything "new" like that. Granted, the way I let the Kenku Druid in my group get around that is by not caring and just letting her go "SQUAWK, whatever she's gonna say." since that's more fun and less pain in the rear end for the table. Let them imagine in their head whatever mimic action and series of noises she's "actually" doing to communicate her point.
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Apr 18, 2019 21:19
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It seems the issue is less flying and more the be g a bird thing and realism, since he said I could be a non flying bird but would keep the tired/dehydrated thing.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:00
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Foolster41 posted:It seems the issue is less flying and more the be g a bird thing and realism, since he said I could be a non flying bird but would keep the tired/dehydrated thing.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:20
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Half the fun is coming up with or just implying the situation that led to a particular phrase entering your vocabulary.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:38
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Plus it gives your Kenku luchador a great excuse to come up with weird names for their wrestling moves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ancWKHOoInE “They saw a bard get whapped by a tavern wench, so ‘gimme kiss’ means ‘I am going to punch you’” Triskelli fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 18, 2019 22:41
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Foolster41 posted:It seems the issue is less flying and more the be g a bird thing and realism, since he said I could be a non flying bird but would keep the tired/dehydrated thing. This is hilarious. Comedy gold.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:59
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Splicer posted:Half the fun is coming up with or just implying the situation that led to a particular phrase entering your vocabulary. Yes! You say a stock phrase and then people go "wait what, does that mean you've been in X situation?" and its rad. The easiest way is doing something like "3 Wolves Howling makes the noise of a hammer striking metal in a blacksmith, the party would know this means she is very bored." Or you could just speak normally like any other character and have "obviously she didn't say that directly, but everybody knows that what she did say means that" as a permanent rider. It's a roleplay thing that's meant to be fun, they don't have any mechanical maluses for it so just let people have fun with it as far as they want to go. the_steve posted:IIRC, the Volo's Guide to Monsters addresses that with a "Well ACTUALLY..." loophole closer. The creativity thing is nonsense that can't possibly be 100% true or they would be impossible to play as player characters. Being unable to string together bad text-to-speech sentences pretty much means they can't do the thing where they say a stock phrase that means something else because they are incapable of the creative thought required to make referencing that thing in anything other than a 100% literal translation possible. They definitely wouldn't be able to be rogues and wizards and they can do that. It makes more sense as a thing of them being a race of people that have never needed to make new things because they can just recreate other things perfectly and everybody stereotypes them as being unoriginal rather than they are absolutely incapable of creativity because the example of Kenku communication given (sound of a hammer pounding an anvil = boredom) disproves that immediately because its them using an existing sound for a new meaning. Or you can go with the sentence you making up having been definitely said by someone at some point and thus circumventing the magic or whatever because it technically isn't new.
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Apr 18, 2019 23:22
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This thread about the bad GM and the bird man is making me tired. Not tired because of the concept of a jungle adventure with a luchadore birdman, because loving-a, but because bad GMs and the mental gymnastics they end up making their players fold themselves into in an attempt to wring some fun out of unfun. You wanna play a loving ostrich in my loving jungle crawl? gently caress yeah. Let’s talk about kick damage of an ostrich and how its hollow-boned body carries a backpack of food and water (or whatever the gently caress) and let’s rock. But I suppose Bad is one third of the title, so bien, continuons.  E: ostrich bones are solid. Google has led me down the rabbit hole and now I know: ostriches are cool as poo poo and their physiology is awesome. An ostrich can run flat out at top speed for a half an hour before tiring. And their kick can kill a lion. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Apr 18, 2019 |
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Apr 18, 2019 23:34
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3e at one point made a race with -- intelligence playable at +0 LA, so being utterly incapable of thought can't stop your wonderful adventuring career.
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Apr 18, 2019 23:44
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That makes sense. It's never stopped people from DMing either.
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Apr 18, 2019 23:53
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cptn_dr posted:That makes sense. It's never stopped people from DMing either. I do not appreciate this unwarranted attack on my character.
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Apr 18, 2019 23:54
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CeallaSo posted:I do not appreciate this unwarranted attack on my character.
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Apr 19, 2019 00:30
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raminasi posted:Yo, I just wanted to compliment you on having a hostile infiltrator in the party but not letting it completely gently caress up your players' plans. That's a tricky line to walk, and it sounds like you were doing it even before they started throwing you curveballs. Thanks! The way I've been doing that is by keeping track of where the spy is actually located at any given time, which allows me to make a list of things he could even possibly know (a lot of the planning for the specifics of this operation happened in places he just didn't have access to, so a bunch of stuff like 'we're disguising one of our boarding squads as droid parts merchants and cramming a loving tank into the docking bay' never made it onto the list). I've also been quietly making rolls for him, both to do things like plant bugs and also to connect pieces of information he learned separately into a bigger conclusion, and he's missed some of those rolls. In particular, he knows nothing about the earlier iterations of the drydock raid plan, which means he had no way of knowing about a device they designed but ended up not using, which will end up saving the party's rear end before this story is done. He did succeed in one very important roll, though, and planted a tracking device on the Boy Bringer, which will come up later in this very story. The party almost exposed him multiple times, including once where they actually made the necessary rolls to spot him creeping around, caught the fucker, and, assuming he was just one of the two thousand assorted escaped convicts they'd brought with them, gave him a stern talking-to before sending him on his way. They had already caught one Imperial spy on the ship earlier, which I think lulled them into a false sense of security, but your cell of 50 can't take on literally thousands of new recruits (they actually sought out and took on even more volunteers at the last station they visited, too) overnight with no vetting without a few troublemakers slipping through the cracks. DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Sorry, did I say our groups would have gotten along fine? I meant they would have gotten along splendidly. This party is very good at...escalation. Whenever they've built up momentum and are in the heat of the moment they tend to just keep tacking on additional objectives and trying to tackle bigger and bigger things, like their plan to sabotage a TIE squadron so the patrols couldn't spot them ending with them stealing half a squadron of TIEs, looting the base armory, and then using literally all of the explosives they captured there to raze the entire airbase complex to the loving ground as a statement. Every time they notice a target of opportunity they change the plan on the fly to hit that too ('oh wait, if we sent Beta Team this way I'll bet they could knife the guard on that turret and then that entire section of the wall is undefended, let's do that instead'). They then keep doing that until they either get in over their heads and provoke an overwhelming response, or win. Splicer posted:Is this your first RPG or... In hindsight I'm realizing I kind of wanted them to buy the tank (I did give them a cruise liner full of luxury goods to steal), I just wasn't expecting them to take it along with them on their covert space station boarding operation Speaking of the boarding operation... Mister Bates posted:(previously on) Everything was quiet for a minute while everyone figured out what the gently caress to do. The surviving Imperials held steady, while one of the nicer members of the party (Ruka, a Force-sensitive bounty hunter who is the party's de facto moral center due to everyone else being kind of insane) got on the comm and started trying to negotiate with the Imperial admiral (Admiral Carlyon, I believe his name was). While all of this was happening, a group of Imperials managed to sneak their way onto a docked warship and attempted to launch without authorization, intending to go get reinforcements. It explodes as soon as it separates from the airlock, and it is at that exact moment that the party realizes they may have walked into a trap. Upon closer examination, every single armed vessel docked to the station is rigged to blow. The Empire has loads of ships, the ISB were willing to sacrifice a bunch of obsolete second-line castoffs (which the party is now realizing most of these ships are) to take out their prey. This, along with Ruka's completely earnest pleas to the Admiral's better nature, starts to make some headway in their negotiation, and the tense Mexican standoff currently going down starts to ease a bit as the Imperial troops realize that they're caught in the trap too. They do not get long to ruminate on this, though. While the Boys are desperately sprinting from ship to ship, attempting to locate and disarm as many of the explosive charges as possible, and the hundreds of wounded are tended to, and the Imperial and Nameless troops are keeping their weapons shakily and indecisively trained on each other, ISB makes their move. Moves, plural, as a matter of fact. A moment before the long-range jamming comes down, the party receives a signal from deep in the system's Kuiper belt, where the Boy Bringer is hiding. It's an unarmed, unshielded, and at this point heavily damaged civilian vessel, slow and unmaneuverable at sublight and over a kilometer long. It's also the party's flagship, the storehouse for most of their supplies, the place where all of their wounded and noncombatants currently are. Their home. They've left behind their best starfighters (relatively speaking), a few armed ships, and a small cadre of trained fighters to defend it - too few, far too few, but this whole raid was an act of desperation, they had to be all in. It's one of these trained fighters who signaled them - the party's most trusted assistant, an aging ex-clone trooper named Tau, who's been with the cell from the very beginning. His voice is clipped, tense. "This is the Bringer, primary rendezvous point has been compromised, attempting to-poo poo! ALL HANDS, MAKE READY TO REPEL BOARDERS!'" They have no time to process that. The transmission vanishes in a wash of static as a huge, ink-black triangular mass emerges from hyperspace right next to the station, a precisely calculated jump. The Imperials, ever arrogant, have painted its name in huge white lettering on the pitch-black hull, so it seems to be hanging in the air: WRACK AND RUIN. It's an Interdictor cruiser, a special-purposes vessel whose powerful gravity well generators have the ability to pull ships out of hyperspace. As long as that ship's here, there's no escape. It brought friends, too, corvettes, cruisers, and plenty of TIE Interceptors. Things are not going according to plan, and the ISB goons are not happy. The Rebels were, according to their contact, executing a quick smash-and-grab. They were supposed to plant explosive charges, attempt to escape in stolen ships which would explode, and for their survivors to be locked in combat with Admiral Carlyon's forces when the Wrack and Ruin rode to the 'rescue', just in time for the drydock to be 'unfortunately' destroyed. Instead, they have arrived to a quiet station. No fighting, most of the docked ships intact, and the whole situation looking for all the world as if the Admiral has just defected to the Rebellion. No matter, they were planning on killing him anyway, this is just...unfortunate. Oh well, if you want something done right, as the saying goes. A holoprojection appears on the station's bridge and at various points on the main concourse. They're not even trying to hide anymore. Officer in a black ISB uniform, crisp, pressed, and well-maintained. "It is deeply regrettable that we have found no survivors from the cowardly Rebel attack on our civilian drydock installation at Ryoone. We are engaging remaining Rebel forces in the area of operations in pursuit of vengeance for this horrible crime, and are confident that justice will be done." He turns to someone off-screen. "Ensure that all of the recordings are transferred to our vessel and then destroy every vessel in the system, no exceptions, no survivors." He disappears. So the party is pretty much at the lowest of low points right now. They're surrounded, outgunned by orders of magnitude, trapped, and their home is in danger. Two things go their way: First, Ruka, who has been speaking to Admiral Carlyon this whole time, is able to strike a tense alliance. They may have been killing each other mere minutes before, but right now, survival is all that matters. IFF codes are hastily updated and all local forces begin to read as Friendly. Carlyon's forces begin firing on the new arrivals. This just reinforces the ISB man's conviction that Carlyon was a defector. Second, the Boys walk up to the rest of the party, who by now are gathered on the main concourse with a couple hundred of their troops (and assorted civilians). They've just been sweeping the Battle of Felucia, the frigate the party was planning on stealing. They drop a pile of plastic explosive charges on the ground. "The Imperials gave us some bombs," Vhlhk says proudly. As the first turbolaser shots hit the station, and the dull thuds of explosive decompressions reverberate through the structure, the party looks at the pile of explosives. Someone has an idea. Only the armed ships are rigged to blow (civilian ships exploding would have given away the game too early, so the ISB saboteurs didn't bother). The Star Destroyer Carronade's hyperdrive is being overhauled...outside of the ship, in one of the drydock's enormous workrooms. The Empire has kindly gifted them with a lot of explosives. They are surrounded by tools, building materials, and competent technicians. One of the party's members, Ithnagus, is a defected Imperial starship engineer; another is an expert demolitionist. They can build a bomb. They can build a really, really big bomb. They've already used fireships to great effect once this battle, why not a second time? They'll need to work fast, though. A few hundred meters down the concourse, a turbolaser hit burns through the deflectors and shears one of the station's docking arms clean off. Emergency force fields snap into place to prevent the entire deck from decompressing. The party's really wishing they hadn't sabotaged the station defenses right about now. Outside, in space, Rebel, Nameless, Imperial, and civilian ships tangle with the Empire's elite forces, in a desperate attempt to buy as much time as they can. Yis, whose highest skill is Deception, begins working on a Plan B. If she can convince their attackers that Carlyon legitimately defected (which she correctly reasons they already suspect), she may be able to convince them that the station's reactor was never sabotaged, and that the Nameless intend to make their stand here. She may be able to lure them in. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Apr 19, 2019 |
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Apr 19, 2019 02:08
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 The Old Republic campaign I played in last year (and hope to resume at some point this) year had its own fantastic moments but admittedly nothing as grand as that.
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Apr 19, 2019 02:25
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 Seriously, you need to post more and post faster. I'm loving every second of this, and really kinda wish I had people around a) interested enough in Star Wars to run pretty much any of the various SWRPGs, and b) even half as batshit crazy to pull off some of the insane poo poo your group is doing.
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Apr 19, 2019 05:25
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How much preplanning do you do on stuff like station defenses and targets of opportunity
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Apr 19, 2019 05:34
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Aniodia posted:
i, too, can post star wars hijinks if there's an audience for that recently launched the final arc of a 3-year Force & Destiny campaign, which has become sorta the equivalent of Epic-Level D&D due to the players accumulating around a thousand XP and effectively unlimited finances the final arc is mostly me trying to contrive the most absurdly dangerous possible scenarios, in an attempt to threaten characters that have proven impervious to any adversary or encounter in the published materials. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 07:54 on Apr 19, 2019 |
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Apr 19, 2019 07:32
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Today my group of friends voted to pick the next campaign system we're going to run. About two years back, I started a Blades in the Dark group with a bunch of different folks from around my small town. They were roommates, wargaming buddies, and folks who kept in touch after a failed jam session. We played three seasons of a Blades campaign across a year and a half. Now, between the lot of us, we've got matching tattoos, graduations, and bad times, weathered as friends. My friends ended the Blades game by flying an airship carrying ghost-based WMDs into the gullet of a Leviathan that had destroyed Duskwall. After that, as the MC / organizer, I didn't know what to do. I ran demos and one-shots, buying time to settle on a campaign I was feeling listless about running. Now we've run 3:16, some new World of Darkness, pretty much every flavor of Powered by the Apocalypse, and a ton of forgettable, goofy one-page RPGs. We've hit some real classics, like Fiasco, Paranoia, and Feng Shui. But we all wanted to start a real, full--scale campaign. We parlayed our experience into a deal: Vote on the system the next campaign would use. Any game was fair game, even those we didn't demo / one-shot. Tonight, the vote count stood at (each player gets two votes, MC breaks - second round vote between the top two takes all): Round 1: Red Markets - 4 Night Witches (un-demo'd) - 3 Apocalypse World - 1 Spirit of 77' - 1 Legacy - 1 Today, the friends I made around a table rolling dice all agreed to commit to a shared future nerdin' out.  We're going to run Red Markets, which was the most unsuccessful demo I've ever ran. We spent two and a half hours (of a 3 and a half hour session) on setting and the worst pub crawl / drunken job offer ever, only for our group to be eaten alive in a Starbucks in under a half an hour after setting out to steal comic books for some rich dude.
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Apr 19, 2019 08:55
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"Oh poo poo things are going pear-shaped" "That's okay we'll just make more explosions!" That is a good Star Wars group. I want to game with these people. Especially since our Star Wars game has in fact officially ended (though admittedly, "we just captured Coruscant" is a pretty good breakpoint). EDIT: I would like to note that if my group was any indication, I fully expect the team to have a new flagship by the end of this adventure, and it will be the Wrack And Ruin. DivineCoffeeBinge fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Apr 19, 2019 |
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Apr 19, 2019 17:27
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I really need to get involved in a Star Wars game at some point.
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Apr 19, 2019 17:28
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chitoryu12 posted:I really need to get involved in a Star Wars game at some point. The last Star Wars game I was in was ages ago. It ended with us flying through a wormhole to real-world Earth, where inside one of the pyramids was a massive machine that would have turned the entire universe into horrific zombie monstrosities. Destroying it caused an explosion so massive that Earth was wiped out, and the proximity to that much loss of life caused both of the party's Jedi to fall catatonic for a month.
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Apr 19, 2019 17:46
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Yeah but how much xp was it worth to kill George Lucas?
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Apr 19, 2019 18:24
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Apparently so much the Jedi buffer overflowed into unconsciousness
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Apr 19, 2019 18:28
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Mister Bates posted:The Star Destroyer Carronade's hyperdrive is being overhauled...outside of the ship, in one of the drydock's enormous workrooms. The Empire has kindly gifted them with a lot of explosives. I sense an arousal in my lap...
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Apr 19, 2019 18:43
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Tunicate posted:Yeah but how much xp was it worth to kill George Lucas? Dunno, we never really got an epilogue and that was the last session we played.
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Apr 20, 2019 01:15
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PupsOfWar posted:i, too, can post star wars hijinks if there's an audience for that  Tunicate posted:How much preplanning do you do on stuff like station defenses and targets of opportunity Extensive! The game went through almost a year of downtime due to various issues before we got going again, so I had plenty of time to get ahead of schedule on preplanned content. I actually don't plan out adventures or story arcs at all anymore, this group does not like to stick to plots. What I do instead is I map out areas of operations - sectors, planets, regions on planets, etc. - and then fill them with stuff. Start out with stuff that exists in the established canon, and then make heavy use of random generators to fill in the gaps (most sectors in the SW universe have maybe one whole planet that's described anywhere in canon, and it might be mentioned in one vague line somewhere). Tweak the resulted generated data to get a region that makes sense - there should be centers of population, economic activities, routes of travel, chokepoints, areas of difficult or impassable terrain (in space that might mean a nebula or black hole or protoplanetary disc); there should also be things deliberately left unestablished, so I or the players can make additions later. My goal is to present the players with the map as a tool for putting together an objective list and essentially planning the campaign themselves. When they decide to focus on something specific, like hitting an Imperial base on some planet or raiding a drydock, we zoom in to another map I've made. This would require thousands of maps if I actually planned out every possible destination for the players, so I cheat a bit - I've actually got a bunch of generic maps for various types of structure in various types of location, which are vague enough to in theory be used anywhere, so I just have to make a few layout tweaks to ensure that the thing makes logical sense for its function in the story, add any local environmental effects or interesting pieces of local geography, and plop labels everywhere and we're good to go. After that it's time to start figuring out where things like defenses and enemy troops and objectives are located; for that, I've got a bunch of ORBATs (Order of Battle, basically a list of all the military units operating in an area). I know roughly what troops the Empire has in an area of space, and from that I can pick some that would make logical sense to be at the place the players are going, and position them in defensible locations. Note that I say roughly, I try to leave myself a lot of leeway, so most of the lists are approximate rather than specific. I've got generated lists of unit names and types, and generated lists of commanders with very short randomly-generated personality blurbs that I rewrite into full-on bios if that specific general or admiral ever appears in the campaign. The unit names and commander names are not actually assigned to specific ORBATs - rather, they all exist separate and unconnected until I need to establish a specific unit as existing in the story, and then I figure out what type of unit would be at that location, pull a unit name of the appropriate type from the list, pull a commander of the appropriate type from the list, and then stick them all together. Prior to that they don't actually exist in the story; once they are established, I can slot them into the web of relations between previously-established major NPCs as though they have always been there. The net result is to make it look like I've done even more preplanning than I actually have - the players can do something like, say, raid a weather station (which they did once, to take advantage of it being a lightly-defended location for them to hack into the local Imperial intranet), and I can say, okay, boom, boom, boom, here's a map of the station with key locations marked, here's the Imperial forces you think are operating in the area based on current intel, here's the local environmental conditions and what effects they might have, etc. It looks like I've painstakingly crafted a place I had no idea the players were going to visit beforehand, but I'm actually just assembling it from a bunch of prefabricated parts I made previously and stockpiled. Same goes for non-hostile locations, like if they're visiting a merchant's shop or meeting with a contact somewhere. In the case of this station, I started with a canon (but extremely vaguely defined) star system, worked out where any orbital installations would probably be, put them there, figured out what Imperial forces would probably be present there, scattered them around appropriately, spread some civilian traffic around the system, then plopped down a prefab station map I'd made, added a bunch of additional modules to turn it into a huge drydock facility, worked out the firing arcs for all its defensive weaponry, and then populated it with points of interest (terminals, power junctions, elevators, the reactor, the Carronade's hyperdrive, etc), docked ships, and enemy and neutral NPCs. Whole process probably took about 30-45 minutes. I try not to include solutions on the maps I make - that is to say, I don't deliberately put huge weaknesses into the layouts, or extremely convenient flukes of geography, or anything that immediately makes the players go 'oh obviously we should do that thing'. My main goal is to make places that look and play like places, rather than settings for a game. The players should be able to make and execute plans that depend on these locations operating as if they were real. I want them to cover the map in planning arrows and notes and move little counters around on it. When they make and execute a plan successfully, I want them to feel like badasses for having thought out a way to tackle all the challenges they were presented; when a plan fails, I want them to come away feeling like they know what didn't work, that they know why it didn't work, and that it makes sense for things to have worked out that way. I don't ever want them to come away from a session thinking 'that was total bullshit', that's a good way to make the game stop being fun. Sometimes that means cheating in the players' favor, quietly, behind the scenes, without them realizing it. If they catch you cheating in their favor that can also kill the fun, it makes their triumphs feel unearned, so I try to do it as subtly as possible and as infrequently as possible. I'm a huge fan of calling for skill rolls to have an in-game justification for just straight up giving the player information they technically have access to but have missed; I also really like using leading questions to direct them into solutions for problems they're facing, so that even if they're completely stumped, they end up feeling like the solution was their idea. I'm also not opposed to just straight-up fudging things sometimes to keep the game fun. I want things to work realistically (within the context of the fiction) and for the player's actions to effect the world in sensible and intuitive ways, and for there to be real meaningful consequences for the things they do, but I also want them to have fun and get to do cool things; when my planning gets in the way of them having fun or doing cool things, I go in and secretly tweak the plan a bit to make the obstacle easier for them to remove (or just get rid of it entirely). For larger strategic-level stuff I'm actually using an Apocalypse World style threat map, tweaked a bit to work with the Star Wars setting, and then obfuscating it behind a bunch of layers so it ends up looking like I've planned things out in much more detail than I really have. When the players outsmart the baddies I want it to feel like a huge and well-earned win, and that means making it feel like the enemy is developing plans, formulating strategies, and making a real and serious effort to defeat them. Anyway, typing up the next bit of story recap now, will post it shortly. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Apr 20, 2019 |
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Apr 20, 2019 01:19
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the_steve posted:Dunno, we never really got an epilogue and that was the last session we played. Ah, without its creator the entire star wars universe (and by extension, the game) ceased to exist. I'd rate your campaign as a solid B+. You killed everything, but sadly missed a lot of loot.
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Apr 20, 2019 01:28
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https://twitter.com/Swandre3000/status/1119338334902456320
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Apr 20, 2019 01:44
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The party is building a bomb. The thing about faster-than-light travel is that it requires a whole lot of energy, and a big ship like a Star Destroyer requires a megafuckton of energy. If you know what you're doing, you can release that energy all at once and make it blow up drat good. The station is being shot to poo poo around the work team, while they rig the thing to blow as fast as they can. A hasty evacuation of the station is being organized, getting Imperials, civilians, and Nameless alike to the ships, but not launching yet; there's no point, everything around the station is still an ongoing space battle and they have no solution to the Interdictor just yet. Yis sends out a bunch of communications to Carlyon and the other party members, in the clear so the ISB will definitely intercept them. After the rest of the party catches on, she manages to convince the Wrack and Ruin that their spy got played, and that this was never a sabotage raid, but that the Nameless came to see through Carlyon's defection to the Rebellion. We need to talk about Yis for a second. Yis is my favorite character I've ever GMed for. She is also by far the worst person I've ever had in an RPG party. She's notable because the rest of the party are, deep down, essentially good people with noble motivations who are just a bit extreme in their methods. Vhlhk is a mad bomber with a sadistic streak and little concern for collateral damage, but he's also a committed abolitionist who is fighting to see his people freed from slavery, and has been convinced by the slaughter of his own family that brutality is the only language the Empire will understand. Eka is a bit haywire in the droid-brain but is genuinely passionate about freeing the galaxy from oppression. The Whitefish (an old Mon Calamari retired admiral) is cold and utterly loving ruthless in pursuing his primary motivation, but his primary motivation is 'ensure all of the people under his command come home alive and safe'. Ithnagus (party engineer) and Tyr (commands the party's fighter squadrons) are both pretty okay people aside from Ithnagus being a bit too cavalier about things like safety and ethics when testing new designs. Ruka is a hired killer but has a conscience and a rigid code of honor. Yis, on the other hand. Jesus Christ, Yis. Yis was originally the cell's weapons supplier. She was running a smuggling operation using a mining supply store as a front, and when the Imperials caught her she was more or less pressganged into the Nameless as a matter of survival. The party knows she fought for the Separatists in the Clone Wars, that the Empire hates her, that she had a reputation as an infamous war profiteer, and that she's good at what she does. They also know her public motivation, which is a desire to see the Empire's economic stranglehold on the galaxy loosened so she personally can become rich again. The rest of the party sees this as distasteful but her skills as necessary. They do not know her actual history, why she is actually wanted by the Empire, or what her actual motivation is. Yis, you see, was the architect of something called the Kintan Genocides during the Clone Wars. The Empire does not want her because she's fighting against tyranny, they want her so she can face a war crimes tribunal for committing offenses against all sentient life. The party keeps kill-counts to track how effective they've been in combat, not realizing that their unassuming quartermaster has to round hers to the nearest million. Her actual motivation is a nihilistic and megalomaniacal desire to be the most feared person in the entire galaxy. She wants to make the Empire - and everyone else - tremble at the sound of her name. She wants to kill so many people that her name is burned into the galaxy's collective memories for a thousand years. Yis is pure loving evil. The party and I have talked about it out of character, and we're not sure we even see the possibility of a redemption arc for Yis; what's more likely is that either the party will eventually figure out what she is and execute her, or she'll build up a circle of followers and eventually steal a bunch of the party's poo poo, gently caress off to become a pirate queen, and become a major NPC villain. The player is fine with either one and already has a (much less evil) replacement character drawn up for if and when that happens. The party doesn't realize that yet, though, and her actions here will serve as a warning sign. She gathers together a bunch of the cell's fighters and begins giving them a 'heartfelt' speech (using Deception rather than Leadership), convincing them that everyone will die here today if they don't sacrifice themselves, that they'll live forever, that they'll be legends, heroes, that they'll strike a mighty blow against the Empire. She convinces one to pilot the heavy freighter they're going to be using to carry the rigged hyperdrive, and the rest to steal anything that will fly and run interference for it, essentially acting as living ablative armor. She does not expect the plan to work - in fact she fully expects it to fail - but that's fine. Plan B's success depends on convincing the Empire that the Nameless have exhausted all of their options, which means this attempt needs to look and feel real. She is dispassionate and cold as she sends two dozen loyal followers off to their certain deaths. The bomb is, at last, ready to go. The party has been chattering among themselves refining the plan as they go, and continue to do so as the bomb is loaded on a repulsor sled and rushed through the burning corridors to the designated fireship (which the rest of the party thinks is going in on autopilot, by the way). There is no guarantee that the explosion will take out all the Imperial ships, so as soon as the bomb is away, everyone will get the gently caress off the station in any remaining ships and run like hell, the plan being to jump away as soon as the Interdictor is dead. The bomb-ship, along with its impromptu escorts, launch, and the thousand or so people remaining on the station begin cramming themselves into the remaining ships as fast as they can. They launch in rapid succession and begin accelerating away from the battle, putting the station's immense bulk between themselves and the Interdictor, so that it will have to either pass over it or plot a time-consuming course around. The ISB commander, on the Wrack and Ruin's bridge, sees the rats fleeing the sinking ship as the bravest among them attempt a final desperate suicide charge. Noble, but futile. He orders all fire focused on the incoming freighter. The escorts die in droves, the hull is perforated, and soon something vital is hit. It knocks the freighter off its ramming course...but doesn't destroy it. At the last possible moment, the hyperdrive-bomb detonates, and it vanishes in an expanding flash of blue-white light. The blast obliterates most of the ISB flotilla, rips a hole in the starboard side of Wrack and Ruin, overloads its deflector shields, and makes the ISB commander extremely angry. He's not thinking straight anymore. He's going to make them pay for that. He orders full speed ahead. His ship will blaze right past the station and cut down these Rebel dogs as they flee. As the ship passes directly over the ruined drydock, Vhlhk gets on the comm. quote:ATTENTION, GODLESS IMPERIAL SCUM! I HAVE NO NAME. I OFFERED PEACE AT THE END OF A GUN TO YOUR FORMER ASSOCIATES. I OFFER YOU NO SUCH TERMS. Vhlhk thumbs the detonator. There is a corona of fire. The drydock, the Wrack and Ruin, and the Star Destroyer Carronade (the long-forgotten original target of this operation) are consumed in an awe-inspiringly massive explosion. The party gets to savor victory for just a moment. There's still a few Imperial ships remaining, their uneasy alliance with Admiral Carlyon might not last past this battle, and they have no idea if their home still exists, but for just a few seconds, they've won. Only for a few seconds, though. There is still work to be done.
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Apr 20, 2019 02:42
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Preechr posted:My Rogue Trader group attended a shady auction. Our GM was convinced we were going to rob it- indeed, we had made preparations to do just that. However, once we arrived, we made some good contacts with the local nobility and manufacturing higher-ups, and decided to legitimately engage with the auction. We got most of the interesting things we bid on and came away with some friends in middling-to-high places that will help us leverage some of our other problems out in the Expanse. I asked the Paladin player who had missed a session how he had crossed the world to meet up at the party. He said he had been sold into slavery. And the other players refused to buy him...instead convincing the head of a local brothel to buy him. Turns out they knew they could steal them and save some money that way😲. First time I’ve ever used ‘pour some sugar on me’ in a medieval campaign.
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Apr 20, 2019 17:59
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A paladin could get good work at a brothel. Combination bouncer and healer for diseases. trying desperately to avoid a “lay on hands” joke
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Apr 20, 2019 21:31
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Preechr posted:A paladin could get good work at a brothel. Combination bouncer and healer for diseases. trying desperately to avoid a “lay on hands” joke Paladin of Sune who keeps trying to hand a tower shield to people. "Sorry, it's his first day, he's still learning the lingo..."
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Apr 21, 2019 00:43
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Golden Bee posted:I asked the Paladin player who had missed a session how he had crossed the world to meet up at the party. He said he had been sold into slavery. And the other players refused to buy him...instead convincing the head of a local brothel to buy him. Turns out they knew they could steal them and save some money that way😲. First time I’ve ever used ‘pour some sugar on me’ in a medieval campaign. If my character was sold into sex slavery, even as a joke that would be easily rectified, I would quit the campaign right there and then
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Apr 21, 2019 00:49
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thetoughestbean posted:If my character was sold into sex slavery, even as a joke that would be easily rectified, I would quit the campaign right there and then Are you saying would sell your character into slavery and then quit the campaign?
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Apr 22, 2019 00:16
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