|
Agrikk posted:It’s like cheat codes in video games: sure you can give yourself infinite ammo and god mode, but why would you want to? I agree it's not a good comparison, as there's often legit reasons to cheat in a singleplayer game and again, the only person it effects is you - but cheating in a group game is just being loving rude, robbing other people of their fun.
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 21:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 10:04 |
|
|
If you're not stealing from your GM you're stealing from your party.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 21:32
|
|
|
Bieeanshee posted:I think the DM sussed out that he was reading from a copy of the adventure too, but that's so generic a dick move that it could have been anyone else. I thought about making a one-shot game where one of the players was a sort of "Dr Manhattan" character who had read the adventure, but only every other sentence was visible. So they would be suitably vague about what could happen.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2019 23:03
|
|
|
The Glumslinger posted:We're trying to smuggle half of our party into a villian's HQ by shrinking them down and stuffing them in a hollowed out Deer statue to try and steal incriminating documents. Ilor posted:Oh, sounds like my old Shadowrun players. Sorry, this is a page back, but the whole "let's shrink down to do A Plan" did actually happen in a Shadowrun game I ran, the hopefully amusing outcome of which is here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3460258&userid=155587#post408931951
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 01:24
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:Some people are just really lucky, but getting above 17 in a 100+ rolls is absolutely some kind of cheating. Just to give you a rough idea, the odds of rolling 17-20 on an unbiased 20-sided die 100 times in a row is a roughly 0.0000000002037% probability.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2019 03:31
|
|
|
I have a dice that rolls 16-20 more but it also rolls 1-4 more as well. So a monk I played using it would do well in combat then fail 2 saving throws and fall over. I also rolled clearly on the table so it obviously wasn't cheating. It is a fun but high stakes dice.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2019 04:06
|
|
|
I have two Crazy Good Luck stories that I enjoy. The first was years ago, in college. We were playing Changeling: the Lost and one of the players was a social type character who was preparing to make a big entrance at some gathering or another. And so another player, who took crafting skills, decided to make a Pope-style hat for him. I called for a roll, figuring I'd give a bonus later on, and the guy proceeded to - on table, no cheating probable - explode the dice five times in a row (in nWoD, if you roll a 10 on a d10, it counts as a success and lets you roll an extra die), ending up with 12 successes. It became a sort of running joke throughout the rest of that campaign, and NPCs kept stopping what they were doing to compliment the hat whenever they saw it. The second was more recently, in a game of the new Legend of the Five Rings edition. This game also uses an exploding dice mechanic. The players were investigating a tea house, when suddenly it was attacked by Dragon Clan monks (the tea house was actually a Kolat front and the players had stumbled on Togashi's crusade against the Kolat). They didn't realize the tea house was actually run by villains, and so rushed to defend it. After fighting for a little while, one of the monks attempts to escape by using a monk power that lets him fly away. One of the players, a Crab, draws his crossbow and takes a potshot at the fleeing monk. And proceeds to roll multiple explosions, inflicting a critical wound and making the monk plummet into the ocean. From then on, whenever the Crab would fire his crossbow and miss, we'd joke that the bolt actually flew past the apparent target to hit its REAL quarry: a monk flying unnoticed overhead.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2019 18:19
|
|
|
Exploding dice are like all crit systems: amazing as a PC tool, and an awful random slog that can get you killed by a housecat. (I feel like if all the developer pet L5R npcs had to actually play their backstories out using L5R mechanics, almost all of them would have died offscreen)
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2019 19:00
|
|
|
Yeah, crits are great for players to have and awful for NPCs to have. I know Kevin Crawford removes them for most of his games because it makes things too swingy and while players love getting them they hate getting hit by them and it sucks. "This encounter is perfectly reasonable for a party of first level except 5% of the time where one of them will die." There's a similar thing in Exalted 3E where at certain points in fights you can end up where you're basically guaranteed to one-shot your target and it's recommended that NPCs should be played where they do death of a thousand cuts and just do multiple smaller attacks against players. Players feel bad when taken out in a single hit, but taking them down a little bit at a time while building up wound penalties lets them overcome their injuries and feel badass and also means that if you do take them out you can be more granular about it and not For Real Kill Them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 17, 2019 21:12
|
|
|
In the first session of the Dragon Heist campaign I'm running, the party wizard was almost straight up killed by a kenku who landed a crit with a shortbow and rolled really high on damage. As in, did more than twice her total HP or whatever the auto-death from massive damage rule was. Luckily, she had the bright idea of using Shield to negate the crit, which still knocked her out but didn't kill her. And then I silently promised myself that only boss tier NPCs could crit the party from then on.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2019 00:09
|
|
|
Those Kenku almost loving murdered my party and knocked out one of the characters in the first round. I swear to God the luck those little bird bastards have is obscene.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2019 00:34
|
|
|
That happened in the one I played too! Three of the four characters got knocked into negative health by the Kenku! The only one that didn't get knocked down was also a Kenku (me). Bastards the lot of them. Managed to heal check one of them, another passed the saves and the last one, in some very blatant GM mercy, was healed by the Kenku in the dark because they didn't want to get done for murder.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2019 00:36
|
|
|
Masks is a tabletop roleplaying game in which you play young superheroes. So, the players stopped 7%, the 0.07 effort robot with minimal city damage, only sending a mentor's super motorcycle through a billboard and into a bus. Somehow, this would far surpass their attempt to stop an underground fighting ring, where one person almost died due to dragon, another got thrown through a security checkpoint, one lost his bow and was replaced by his brother, and the last one accidentally saved their boss at their coffee shop, revealing their identity in the process. Meanwhile all the underground fighters escaped. Whoops.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2019 03:54
|
|
|
The Fellowship campaign I'm running has been amazing. So far, the players have: ● Stolen an ancient stone colossus superweapon from the Overlord, then blew up and collapsed the colossus with the Overlord still inside it. ● Broke up a ● Led a worker's revolution which ended in tear gas, mortar strikes, and the corrupt CEO responsible for the trafficking ring dying from another molotov. ● Defeated an officer in the Overlord's army by tackling him everytime he tried to stand up after being tackled. ● Tried to interrogate said officer by threatening him with being hit by a sack of oranges and then with being hit by a dead squid on a tetherball pole. Because a live squid might "bite him with his beak before I'm done with him." ● Decided that halflings in our setting might be grown from plants and that there may be no such thing as either "young" or "old" halflings. ● Defused a hostage situation with a foul-mouthed archer in a heavily booby trapped forest and I got to adlib the line "I used to be a sergeant and now I kill motherfuckers for corn on the cob." I have the best players.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2019 13:57
|
|
|
Oh are we telling stories about Exploding Die Stupidity? Cause my group has been playing Savage Worlds for a while now, and boy lemme tell ya about exploding dice. I managed to lose the same character twice in the same way. It was a homebrew space opera setting, heavily influenced by Guardians of the Galaxy. A bunch of convicts on a prison planet who manage to get out during a revolt, get into hijinks and ended up saving the world. I was playing the face of the party, a psionic con-artist with a low toughness score, which would be my undoing. Somewhere along the way, we had just managed to get false identities and signed up for an intergalactic deathrace. Go from one end of the know universe to the other, and the use of lethal weapons on other contestants is legal. We get a big sponsor and a brand new spaceship, and off we go. On the way, though, we stumble on a space station with corrupted droïds. Some kind of robot-suprematist collective mind taking over AIs - the start of the overarching plotline. Cool stuff, but in the ensuing gunfight, some R2D2-looking motherfucker gets something like 6 raises (Savage Worlds "crits" or "exploding dice") and explodes my character. I fail my vigor rolls, since I would need like 3 raises to survive that. Well crap. I'm pretty bummed out, character deaths don't happen often with this group, but the GM tells me to keep my character sheet, winking at me. He takes me aside and explains to me that our sponsor took our DNA and created clone of our characters for cases like this. They invested a lot of money on us, you see. So another version of myself wakes up, receives all the info he needs, and get sent back to the group. Next session, the other players are pretty surprised to see my character join them again, but I explain that Big Sponsor Corp has some pretty advanced medical technology - sure I wasn't breathing, sure I had a huge hole in my chest, but that's nothing for modern medicine! The whole "clone" thing wasn't just a safety net for our character though. As we exit this planet, we suddenly get invaders teleporting on board. Which is weird, there's a DNA-barrier on our teleporter, preventing anyone that's not us from getting in without permission... Turns out the rest of the clone crew got tired of waiting for their turn. The other players finally understood why my character managed to get back from the dead, we got a pretty good scene where my character got to decide if he was gonna side with the clones or the OGs, the rest of the party got to see their own dead bodies floating away in space, again, cool stuff. And then we stumbled into more corrupted droids and my character got shot through the chest a second time. Lemme tell you, I built my second character like a tank. Savage World really has its up and downs.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2019 15:22
|
|
|
Out of the Frying Pan... After a fitful sleep of nightmares and decay I get up and see that the two gladiator bands are speaking in hushed tones by the brazier. Broken furniture is stacked nearby as fuel for the fire. My stomach growls and I realize just how hungry I am. As the others begin to stir, a slash of white light appears in midair and widens into a portal, the familiar black and white of shadow Thalos beyond. A man and a woman step through in quick succession. The man, tall, gaunt, and pale with thin silver hair, dressed in robes over chain mail with a sword in his hand. The woman, familiar with dark eyes and flowing black hair, in a black steel breast plate holding a large flail. The Invincible Overlord stands back by the portal and Overlord’s Consort beckons to us, “Come with us if you want to live. Quickly.” The pair look grim indeed, but the offer is one of a very limited number of options, so we stand up and step with them through the portal into Shadow Thalos. The gladiators are awed with the experience, and I am reminded of our first experience with Shadow Thalos in our workshop across the street from the Department of Sanitation Department only a few short weeks ago. I wonder if any of our street sweepers are still alive. The duo turns and marches briskly through the silent streets of Shadow and as we follow I notice that both show signs of battle and sorcery. We walk down the center of the Street of the Gods towards the Great Keep and as we approach the market plaza surrounding the keep we pause. Van Neuman says, “We are going to be attacked here by the Mage’s Guild. They are attempting to besiege us within the Keep both here and in our plane of existence. I am going to hasten us all and then open a portal back to the prime material right in front of the gates. Do not stop for any reason until you are through the portal and through the gate to the keep. If one of you should fall, I will recover you. Do not stop.” He gestures quietly and suddenly I feel the world slow down to a fraction. My thoughts are suddenly clear and focused and I can watch my actions with a strange sense of detachment. The Consort takes up a leisurely jog and I stroll after her, but realize that the City is moving by rapidly. We are all moving and as we get halfway across the plaza, a barrage of elemental balls, bolts and arcane energy come blazing our way, but they are easily dodged for they are moving so slowly. We run straight through the portal that van Neuman opens and we are in Thalos once again and are sprinting past the grim gate guards who were apparently expecting us and into the keep. The guards slam the gate shut and portcullis down as blast of fire splash against the walls of the keep. van Neuman turns to us. “Welcome to Overwatch,” he says.
|
|
#
?
Aug 18, 2019 18:21
|
|
|
Sometimes the model-on-model placement is just perfect...
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 11:59
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:Exploding dice are like all crit systems: amazing as a PC tool, and an awful random slog that can get you killed by a housecat. My first time running L5R, and when I was a much less experienced GM overall, I decided that we should have a combat in the first session to ease people into the system. A sort of tutorial fight against weaker enemies just to get everyone used to their characters and the game. So I looked in the back of the book, and saw a basic "Bandit" character. Me being new to the system and not a very good GM yet, I didn't know how to evaluate their stats in isolation so I just threw one bandit per PC at the group. Unfortunately, in whichever edition this was (it was more than 10 years ago, don't recall exactly) the bandits had LUDICROUSLY good stats compared to their narrative role. In addition to this, every single one of them rolled explosions on their damage dice. It didn't take long for all but one PC to die, and that last PC just ran away with water magic enhancing his speed. I apologized to everyone for messing up with encounter balance and we go play something else. Ever since then, I have houseruled every system with exploding dice that NPC damage dice do not explode
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 16:23
|
|
|
Once, a player who was new to our group wanted to use a critical hit table he found in a magazine. "Fine," said the DM. "But if you get to use it, so do your enemies." DM's my oldest friend, and we've played off and on since 2E came out, but he's got some lovely habits. Like crit fails that make you drop your weapon and lose the rest of your attacks with it for that round. That was a delight in 3E. Dude agrees. I refuse outright, because the game is already too slow, and of course every result on the table is 'target is maimed in some way'. I don't trust my luck. First turn on the first fight after the DM adopts the table, dude takes a critical from a goblin and loses an eye. We dropped the table after that encounter.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 16:31
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:Sometimes the model-on-model placement is just perfect... "Well, monster? Do you yield?"
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 16:34
|
|
|
Bieeanshee posted:"Fine," said the DM. "But if you get to use it, so do your enemies." i believe this attitude is the root of the problems people have with exploding dice. rules do not need to be the same for protagonist characters and any other kind of character. it does not match many people's expectations of heroic fiction to let characters have a remote chance to die from any random attack. (games can use random death like this well, for tragedy or comedy, though they have to consider the real work it would take to create a new character before the player can actually play again, cf clones in Paranoia) it's like the player who says "i leap off the staircase and swing from the chandelier onto the table, kicking the Baron's wine cup out of his hand!" and the dm says "wow, that sounds essentially impossible, make separate rolls for each of those things, failure on any means you break your neck"
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 16:46
|
|
|
i feel some dms fall victim to a strange bias "the villain can pull all this stuff off because i know they've been plotting their brilliant plan for years, whereas you just pulled your idea out of your rear end!" e: n Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Aug 19, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 16:50
|
|
|
Doc Hawkins posted:i believe this attitude is the root of the problems people have with exploding dice. rules do not need to be the same for protagonist characters and any other kind of character. it does not match many people's expectations of heroic fiction to let characters have a remote chance to die from any random attack. The halfway point here is to divide NPCs into Mooks and Names, like Feng Shui did. The Names get to use critical hits/exploding dice/etc just like the PCs, as they're particularly dangerous/powerful/worthy-of-respect. Mooks are just mooks and they do max-regular-damage at worst.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 16:59
|
|
|
Doc Hawkins posted:i believe this attitude is the root of the problems people have with exploding dice. Doc Hawkins posted:rules do not need to be the same for protagonist characters and any other kind of character.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 17:23
|
|
|
In D&D players have to defeat every encounter and only have to lose a fight once to be done. It's not an even situation from the very beginning. Players have to be lucky every time, the goblin only has to be lucky once. It's part of why a lot of people don't like D&D as the Lord of the Rings adventure game because the foundation is about being disposable explorers in a dungeon and you don't care about any of them until the 1 in 10 you have hits 2nd level and you definitely won't bother resurrecting anyone before a certain level. It's made strides to get better at it, but it still lacks tools other games have and hasn't addressed some parts of that foundation.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 17:29
|
|
|
EthanSteele posted:In D&D players have to defeat every encounter and only have to lose a fight once to be done. It's not an even situation from the very beginning. Players have to be lucky every time, the goblin only has to be lucky once. It's part of why a lot of people don't like D&D as the Lord of the Rings adventure game because the foundation is about being disposable explorers in a dungeon and you don't care about any of them until the 1 in 10 you have hits 2nd level and you definitely won't bother resurrecting anyone before a certain level. It's made strides to get better at it, but it still lacks tools other games have and hasn't addressed some parts of that foundation. Long ago, I was a younger and more foolish GM. I believed that PCs should fight to distinguish themselves rather than being mechanically special. I believed that every encounter should have a real risk of failure. And then I read an article, I don't remember where. Maybe Dragon magazine? Anyway, it calculated out a normal number of encounters for players to reach each level. Even level 10 required a bit more than 100 encounters to reach, but let's round down to 100 to account for story awards and such. At 100 encounters, if the players have a 95% chance to win each encounter, that means they only have a 0.5% chance to survive all the way to level 10 and only 0.003% chance to make it to level 20. Raise it to 99%, and your odds become 36.6% and 13.4% respectively. Even a 99.9% chance to win each encounter sees you having about an 81.9% chance to make it to level 20 without a TPK. The article said that if your only options are "victory or death", then any plausible chance of death is going to result in a campaign ending prematurely. Death as an actual risk in an encounter should not be on the table for every routine combat. It really changed the way I thought about encounters and GMing as a whole.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 17:49
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:This is the real issue. Lots of people love the idea of "the PCs aren't special! They're just like anyone else in the game world!" and thus mechanics have to reflect that by being symmetrical. L5R has (in my experience) always been the worst about this, through a combination of incredibly opaque mechanical probabilities, a gigantic menagerie of author self-insert NPCs, and the way the plot/metaplot/modules are written as less a game element and more as a novel that maybe you get to roll a few dice while reading. Symmetrical mechanics have the advantage of being able to remember, because if one side does a thing in a way, the other side does the thing that way, too. It just usually tends to drown in rolls. I've become a lot more open to asymmetrical mechanics just as a way to keep the dice rolling from overwhelming the game. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 19:58
|
|
|
Kaza42 posted:Long ago, I was a younger and more foolish GM. I believed that PCs should fight to distinguish themselves rather than being mechanically special. I believed that every encounter should have a real risk of failure. And then I read an article, I don't remember where. Maybe Dragon magazine? Anyway, it calculated out a normal number of encounters for players to reach each level. Even level 10 required a bit more than 100 encounters to reach, but let's round down to 100 to account for story awards and such. At 100 encounters, if the players have a 95% chance to win each encounter, that means they only have a 0.5% chance to survive all the way to level 10 and only 0.003% chance to make it to level 20. Raise it to 99%, and your odds become 36.6% and 13.4% respectively. Even a 99.9% chance to win each encounter sees you having about an 81.9% chance to make it to level 20 without a TPK. The article said that if your only options are "victory or death", then any plausible chance of death is going to result in a campaign ending prematurely. Death as an actual risk in an encounter should not be on the table for every routine combat. It really changed the way I thought about encounters and GMing as a whole. I wish you could email this to every person who ever has or ever will DM.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 20:49
|
|
|
Unless of course you have simple mechanics for getting new characters back in the game.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 20:53
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Unless of course you have simple mechanics for getting new characters back in the game. Yeah, some games its great and are built for doing that. Like OD&D where you randomly roll your stats in two seconds and go "I'm Herman the fighter lets go" and you churn through them. If you don't have that then you need mechanics to make sure you don't die, even something as simple as some sort of renewable resource you can spend to go "oof, I'm out of the fight, but I'm not dead" is fine. Kaza42 posted:Good Stuff Exactly! One of the things that changed my group's GMing was the "never throw a challenge at the party if you don't know what to do if they'll fail" one. It covers not dead-ending them with clues and all that basic stuff you eventually figure out, but it even includes fights. When doing any game don't have every fight be life or death. Have people run away, have people show mercy, don't have Murder be the basic and expected outcome to any confrontation and don't have fights where the only objective for both sides is to kill the other one. It makes it more interesting and also means the story doesn't end when the rolls go bad. That isn't to say they should never die, just that they should never be at risk of dying unless it matters and feels right. Dying in a big fight against Nasty Boy the Dracolich is fine, getting shanked by a goblin on the way to Nasty Boy's lair, not so much.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 23:01
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Unless of course you have simple mechanics for getting new characters back in the game. Well, the issue with new characters is that your players turned up to play their original character, not a new one. You could just write "Junior" after your dead character's name and turn up saying, "I have come to avenge my father!" like that one awesome anecdotal kid, but then why even bother with the chance of death if the exact same dude just shows up again immediately? Then there's stuff like Raise Dead but I find that lame and world-breaking for many reasons.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2019 23:45
|
|
|
Yeah, rule of thumb is the longer it takes to roll a character, the less lethal the system should be.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 00:04
|
|
|
Gort posted:Well, the issue with new characters is that your players turned up to play their original character, not a new one. Yeah, this is the main issue and why that a lot of the time you just need to session 0 it and immediately say that no one is dying unless they want to because it would be cool for the story. There are games where you go through a bunch of characters and thats the expectation, but most of the time, especially in D&D, people are there to play the guy they made at the start and have adventures through them and if you're just going to go "my identical twin brother shows up" then yeah, why even have them die in the first place? Some players are fine with their guy dying cos then they get to play another cool character they've come up with which is great, but basically 99% of the time, death shouldn't be on the table for player characters in most games and especially D&D5E.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 00:05
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:Yeah, rule of thumb is the longer it takes to roll a character, the less lethal the system should be.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 01:49
|
|
|
Overwatch The Overlord's spell fades and suddenly I am incredibly tired and my muscles are sore like never before. Around us and up on the walls are silent sentinels in black plate armor and helmets. After closing the gate they are motionless and silent once again. The effect is positively eerie and I resist the urge to lift the slotted visor on the nearest guard. I’m not sure I want to know what I’d see there. “Allow me to introduce myself,” says the gaunt man. “I am Lucas Mortiz van Neuman and this is Marja.” “No it isn’t. That is my mother Sultas.” Snakeeyes is calm and relaxed. Marja laughs her not-friendly laugh and says, “Your mother was a perfect candidate for me. Her host is healthy and has a strong conduit of Essence and can Channel well. Of course I took this host.” She runs her hands along her arms and smiles. “For too long I was imprisoned by the Archmages. Too long! Too long did the Archmages besiege Lucas and keep him from me. But he found this perfect host and freed me from my prison.” “You stole my mother from me,” Snakeeyes says like he is discussing the weather. The sky is blue. Yes it is. You stole my mother. Yes, you did. “You mother is perfectly safe in Runed Sardonyx. Go there and free her, if you will. But I shall be keeping this!” “Enough Marja!” the Overlord says sternly, then recovers. “We did not invite our guests here to flaunt our strength to them. Not while we are besieged in Overwatch.” The Overlord’s consort acquiesces and begins to shed her armor and gear as she walks off in a storm. Lucas van Neuman starts again. “Welcome to Overwatch. It is grim times in Thalos and you are weary. Let us discuss tidings over a meal and then you may rest.” He walks into the courtyard and we follow, leaving the gatehouse behind us for the inner bailey, passing up some stairs and into a great hall where some simple and hearty food has been laid out on a long table. There is a Riesling on the table, chilled and pale with condensation running down the side of the bottle. It turns out to be a crisp varietal and very dry with a smooth and unpretentious finish. As we eat, the Invincible Overlord answers our questions. After we fled back down the chimney, the ulgurstasta continued to wreak havoc in the Arena while the wights slaughtered most of the citizens in attendance. Tens of thousands of wights did eventually escape into the city and are running rampant, slaughtering and animating anyone not barricaded in sturdy enough buildings. It being almost dawn now we should see the wights seeking shelter in dark places, but no one is safe outside, especially at night. Many citizens are trying to flee the city over the walls and are being struck down by the fire elementals who are bound to the torches along the walls. Some are escaping through the gates, but those choke points are also scenes of horrible carnage. “Marja and I managed to get to the Arena and we had enough time to imprison the ulgurstasta before we ourselves were attacked by the Mage’s Guild. We were forced to flee into the Twilight Realm and battle our way back to Overwatch.” I am curious despite myself. “You imprisoned the ulgurstasta? How? Where is it? Here in the keep?” “It is imprisoned. That is all you need know.” His tone was very final on this matter, so we moved on. “The most fortified buildings are the noble manors, temples, guild halls and barracks, and those are stuffed to capacity. And with twenty thousand undead roaming the streets, food is going to be a problem very soon. I have ordered the Watch and the Militias to organize supply convoys but that will come with losses as well.” “You do be th’ Invincible Overlord. Canna you do something for ye City?” asks Severance. “I did not give myself that title, nor is my charge to protect the citizens of this City though it grieves me to say it. Believe it or not, but I am trapped here in a stalemate by the damned Archmages of the Mage’s Guild who want what I have, and will stop at nothing to get it. Just as I will stop at nothing to defend it.” He pauses and glances at a simple wood hourglass that sits nearby on a mantle, so quickly that I wasn’t sure it happened. “But that doesn’t concern you. What does concern you is that damnable Exile and her merry band of Deceivers.” He turns away from the table and begins to talk again, more to himself than anything else. “The Exile has finally tipped her hand by going after the crown and I now know her mind on this matter.” “Excuse me?” I ask. “Who was Sarchon and what is so important about this crown?” “Never you mind. The crown is my business and Sarchon should have known better than to craft it, may he rest in peace. Sarchon was a well-meaning old man who had no business meddling in the affairs of his betters. What you need to know about Sarchon is that his works attracted the Exile to Thalos and she has been stirring up trouble ever since.”
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 04:34
|
|
|
Man I'm glad this thread is around because the campaign I'm currently in is basically just a series of stories I want to tell people. My favorite so far, I think, was in a boss fight inside a boat we had at level 3. Our bard Blair had a plot hook from his backstory about attempting to track down a man named Barnabas who staged a mutiny on his uncle's vessel and set him adrift in the ocean on a raft, and we'd managed to track down a lead on the black market that both Barnabas and the ship were in town. Blair had promised his cut of the funds from our mercenary endeavors to my character, a homebrew Draconic Sorcerer variant who put all his points into casting fist, so long as we killed this dude. So, I wrangle the party into coming along to make it smooth sailing, we manage an ambush with our changeling Mia pretending to be Blair and duck below deck to find and kill a man. Immediately the DM is hinting at something the moment we catch sight of this guy. There's the usual descriptions, he's portly and wearing nice clothes that clearly haven't been taken care of properly, but no less than three times she mentions Barnabas is holding a lantern. Knowing this DM for a while and how much she likes alternative solutions, mentioning the detail so we wouldn't have to worry about being able to see I'd expect, but three times? It had to be a sign. Knowing that, I check my spells to come up with a plan, and combat begins. I use the term combat loosely because we really couldn't hit the Barnabas through sheer bad luck, but finally Blair manages to cast Dissonant Whisper on him, sending him scurrying out of cover and into the open, then takes his turn to huck a firebomb at the rogue and I. Up next is my turn, though, and I'm not about to give up the line of sight I just got on this rear end in a top hat just because of a little fire (plus I have resistance to fire damage), and I have a strategy to enact. What followed might have been the tensest few minutes of any game I've ever been in. "I'm gonna cast Control Flames on his lantern to try and spread the fire onto Barnabas." "You're... trying to light him on fire?" "Yeah, I can move the fire in any direction and it covers 5 feet, right? I want to move it straight down, so it catches him on fire." "...Oh nooooo..." The DM then spent a while moaning "oh no" with increasing anguish and furiously flipping through her notes, which is always a good sign, especially when it's followed by the clattering of several dice being rolled. The whole group is waiting mostly silently, sometimes interjecting with what might generously be called concern and less generously wondering if we all just died somehow. It turned out, Barnabas didn't just have one firebomb, he had four. Three more on his person. Three firebombs at 1d20+7 for some reason that I just lit on fire from 20 feet away along with him, on the interior of an extremely wooden boat. It also turned out that Barnabas was supposed to be a recurring miniboss character for us, and that he was going to jump out of one of the cannon hatches the next turn and escape, neither of which was going to happen because I managed to blow him clean in half for almost 60 damage. If it weren't for three charges of bardic inspiration to help me make 2/3 of my Dex saves, and my fire resistance cutting the half damage in half again, I would have died instantly. Instead, I had 8 HP, half a head of hair and no eyebrows, temporary deafness, and a chance to used the Decanter of Endless Water the rogue and I had stolen the night prior to keep us from going down with the ship. Best hundred gold I ever made legitimately.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 14:45
|
|
|
Emery posted:Best hundred gold I ever made legitimately. poo poo son, what's the best 100 gold you ever made illegitimatly?
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 15:00
|
|
|
Ichabod Sexbeast posted:poo poo son, what's the best 100 gold you ever made illegitimatly? Pick any hundred of the thousands we've stolen literally any time the opportunity has presented itself. So far we've jacked two bags of holding, a ring of +1 strength, a ring of +1 dexterity, a druidic focus used by a 20th level DMPC that now lives in the rogue's bra, a crystalline Decanter of Endless Water, a flying sword, a crossbow, around 100 gold of various magic arrows, alchemic reagents, 50gp of ground-up pearl, and the hundred gold we shook down a plague demon for that one time. If you include strongarming NPCs for extra cash, we've made at least 100 plat doing that and got some magic handcuffs, a bag full of precious gems, a third bag of holding, and a cloak of shadows out of the deal. We're level 5 now and I have no idea how we keep getting away with it. E: I feel like I should mention this. My character's specific MO is buttering up nobles and getting them to drop cash on him for public works that never materialize. The rogue just likes stealing from rich people the old fashioned way, and our warlock is a kleptomaniac. We spend a lot of time doing heists. Emery fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Aug 20, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 15:20
|
|
|
Emery posted:E: I feel like I should mention this. My character's specific MO is buttering up nobles and getting them to drop cash on him for public works that never materialize. The rogue just likes stealing from rich people the old fashioned way, and our warlock is a kleptomaniac. We spend a lot of time doing heists. These are the best groups. "Falinoor, late of the Emerald Tower, plans to rule the land. He has flown forth from his gem-encrusted throne to bring chaos and devas..." "Uh huh, big bad, evil, we get it. What was that about the Emerald Tower and gems?"
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 15:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 10:04 |
|
|
The plague demon shakedown sounds like a good story if you're willing to 
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2019 16:22
|
|