|
scopes posted:I loving love dropping in a puzzle or weird situation without even really having a "canonical" solution in mind, and just running with whatever ideas the players cone up with that sound cool or letting their lines of questioning about the situation/environment inform an improv'ed solution. It is how you get the best Shadowrun stories.
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 05:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 00:41 |
|
|
Coward posted:It is how you get the best Shadowrun stories. I may have mentioned it earlier in this thread but some players of mind had the idea to infiltrate a food processing facility by hiding inside sacks of organic flour with SCUBA gear (to mask their auras, you see), then polymorphing the team into lemurs so they could crawl through the air ducts ... lemurs wearing tool-belts so they could unscrew any gates or vent covers they needed to. To quote the thread title, it was so stupid I definitely allowed it, and it definitely worked.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 06:56
|
|
|
I think in one of the old threads, back when Good and Catpiss were separated, someone had posted a Shadowrun story about how they had managed to take down an entire super corporation or whatever as the capstone to the campaign. I think it involved their character dying to bring down a huge satellite or something to that effect.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 13:46
|
|
|
I'm positive that was in this thread because I remember reading it. Search isn't working in the app though!
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 14:56
|
|
|
the_steve posted:I think in one of the old threads, back when Good and Catpiss were separated, someone had posted a Shadowrun story about how they had managed to take down an entire super corporation or whatever as the capstone to the campaign. I think it involved their character dying to bring down a huge satellite or something to that effect. It was a crossposted /tg/ story. Click here and search for "bloodworx" for the start. The climax was basically the Deus Ex Dark Age ending. EDIT: Nevermind, I found it: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3460258&pagenumber=136&perpage=40#post432469070
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 15:05
|
|
|
Our Never Going Home playtest didn't have the huge memorable moments that our Maze game did (might write those up another time), but I really appreciated having the mechanics to support players getting tiny character vignettes. Our unit traveled through wartorn WWI France with the game asking the question of how the destruction and desolation made them feel. We got a few touching introspective bits thinking back to family back home, debating whether it was really worth it to enlist. The prospective-officer looking out for chances to get a little ahead of his fellows. And our six-foot-something gentle giant New Englander, hunching over a little bit of paper, scratching out notes to all his family back home small as he could "so I don't leave anyone out". I liked that. It's small compared to the usual "notable experiences" but it's the first time in a long while I've had a system really support individual vignettes and let people get some character depth. It wasn't the smoothest evee or the most passionate thing ever. But it did its job well and now I'm considering something similar in new games.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2021 15:07
|
|
|
SkyeAuroline posted:Our Never Going Home playtest didn't have the huge memorable moments that our Maze game did (might write those up another time), but I really appreciated having the mechanics to support players getting tiny character vignettes. Our unit traveled through wartorn WWI France with the game asking the question of how the destruction and desolation made them feel. We got a few touching introspective bits thinking back to family back home, debating whether it was really worth it to enlist. The prospective-officer looking out for chances to get a little ahead of his fellows. I'm a sucker for little character moments like these, and this one in particular reminded me of one from a Hunter game I played in a few years ago. The game was set in 1930's America, and the PCs were hobos. We used the hobo code and the information networks amongst migrant workers as a sort of proto-HunterNet. Anyway, after my first character died, I decided to make a doctor. Hunter: the Vigil can be extremely lethal to the PCs, so the group could have used someone good in medicine. But my thinking was, "It's 1933. Doctors are mostly butchers right now. Who would make a better legitimate medical professional in this era?" So I made a nurse. She posed as a boy while riding the rails, but the other PCs knew her real identity. I used a British accent to speak, but didn't specify anything else about her origin beside that she was an immigrant from The Old World, that she was a nurse there, and that she was an undocumented immigrant (not that hobos give a gently caress about that, being a persecuted class themselves). There came a climactic moment in the campaign, when our (literal) murder-hoboing finally came around to bite us in the rear end. A clan of vampires finally got wise to the band of hobos who had been chucking Molotov cocktails into vampire havens and werewolf dens all over Colorado and Kansas. They hit us in a savage ambush. We lost a PC in the encounter, and one more was nearly killed. No one escaped unscathed. My character had used her medicine skill before, but it had never been as critical to the party since the encounter when my first character was killed. One of the other PCs was an American veteran of The Great War. He was our group's paranoid hunter, and he got on rants about how literal monsters preyed on people in the war. That was his awakening as a Hunter. But he was bleeding out by the time we finally got to a safe enough place to tend to our wounded. We had him, me, a dead guy, a stable but unconscious guy, and one more in ok condition to keep watch. My character goes into battlefield nurse mode to save the vet who is bleeding out. He is traumatized by his injuries, but notices (maybe by delirious memory) that my treatment of him is with the skill and urgency of a battlefield nurse. "You... Were there, weren't you?" "Yes," I said after a long pause. "So you understand me when I talk about the horrors I've seen. You've seen the monsters I've seen, in France." I let the British accent slip a bit and said, "In a sense, yes. Please be still." "Please don't let me die. I fear for my soul after what we've done. The violence I've done..." I lapsed into a German accent to say: "Have no fear, William. We've both already been to hell already and found it lacking. Be still, and I'll make sure you don't return for some time."
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 02:01
|
|
|
scopes posted:I loving love dropping in a puzzle or weird situation without even really having a "canonical" solution in mind, and just running with whatever ideas the players cone up with that sound cool or letting their lines of questioning about the situation/environment inform an improv'ed solution. I do this a lot. When I’m running through a campaign arc, I gave a few set-piece things that I want to run because I’ll enjoy running them. But sometimes I have a huge gap in places of my arc where I need to get the plot from A to B but have no idea how to do it. In these cases I’ve learned to set it up so that “hey, A just happened and [wise old crone] says B must happen next” then let my players write the plot through the gap.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 02:09
|
|
|
scopes posted:I loving love dropping in a puzzle or weird situation without even really having a "canonical" solution in mind, and just running with whatever ideas the players cone up with that sound cool or letting their lines of questioning about the situation/environment inform an improv'ed solution. I was in a game with a GM who I think did this too much. He threw out a huge pile of weird random clues, and what do you know, our hypotheses about what they meant were entirely correct! To this day I still don't know whether we actually did figure it out on our first try or he just delegated constructing the intricate plot to his players' imaginations.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 02:53
|
|
|
Railing Kill posted:I lapsed into a German accent to say:  OH gently caress Did the other players know?
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 03:06
|
|
|
Aniodia posted:
I don't think so. One of the other characters was a con man and who had noticed my character's accent was a bit off in the past (as a con man he was skilled at fake accents). The GM gave him an OOC clue from that, but I think that was it. That moment developed a heartwarming comraderie between my nurse and the other vet. It helped him a lot and made him less volatile to have a kind, understanding ear for his tales. It helped my character to be able to let her guard down about her nationality, at least within the party.
|
|
#
?
May 22, 2021 15:42
|
|
|
Tabernacle of Chaos (part III) I open my eyes and find myself standing in a desolate wasteland with rocky terrain and sparse, twisted vegetation. In the distance volcanoes fill a starless sky full of choking smoke, and the horizon glows a dark red hue. I stand on the shore of a dark and languid river that ripples with a greasy sheen. It is utterly silent, and as my eyes adjust to the gloom, I spot a cloaked ferryman poling his skiff towards me. For some reason I feel compelled to wait for him, and the ferryman poles his skiff onto the shore with a grinding crunch. He steps off of the skiff and steps between a pair of simple wrought iron trellises like you would find in a noblewoman’s garden. It then stands motionless and holds out a skeletal hand. As he does so, spirits begin to coalesce and form. A dozen. A score. Hundreds. The boatman stands motionless as the unnumbered spirits float aboard, one hand griping his boat hook, the other extended towards me, palm up in a halt gesture. I search my strange garments and I have no possessions, no money. “I have nothing,” I tell the boatman. “That is because it is not your time. Wait and you shall be returned,” the boatman says in a croaking whisper that is strangely audible over the gurgle and muttering of the river. “What is this place?” There is a wheezing cackling laughter from the cloaked figure. “I will await your return.” “Th˙s?” I feel a tap from behind me on my shoulder. A whisper, “Th˙s?” More insistently now. “Th˙s!” I turn and look and as I spin around, I open my eyes and find myself lying on a pile of gold and silver. On Dragotha’s hoard. I gasp and look at my blackened and smoking clothes. The smoking and steaming ruin of Dragotha’s corpse is lying in twisted ruin among the three stone golems melted to slag. Ospar is kneeling over me and helps me sit up with an effort. I raise my hands to my head as my recent memory of the boatman swirls. Zulshyn coughs politely, blackened and stained herself. “Don’t think that by dying you have been released from our contract.”
|
|
#
?
May 23, 2021 20:14
|
|
|
According to my DM, there is no such spell as Tenser's Walk of Shame.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 18:09
|
|
|
Are those the robes you were wearing last night?
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 18:12
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:According to my DM, there is no such spell as Tenser's Walk of Shame. There is no magic in a walk of shame, gonna have to side with your DM on this one
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 19:36
|
|
|
I still think that you need to make an According To My DM Twitter and post all of this absolute gold.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 20:37
|
|
|
The DM may respond with a poo poo Cobi Says twitter, which may also be solid gold
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 21:26
|
|
|
Ichabod Sexbeast posted:The DM may respond with a poo poo Cobi Says twitter, which may also be solid gold So really we would win twice.
|
|
#
?
May 24, 2021 23:44
|
|
|
the_steve posted:I still think that you need to make an According To My DM Twitter and post all of this absolute gold. That means going on Twitter. I'd rather read The Book of Erotic Fantasy from 3.5 than go on Twitter.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 01:45
|
|
|
You already have. Don’t lie
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 01:56
|
|
|
Agrikk posted:You already have. Don’t lie OK, fine. Maybe I've been on Twitter.
|
|
#
?
May 25, 2021 02:40
|
|
|
I had a notable almost-gaming experience the other day. A guy messages me out of the blue about a game posting I had made two years earlier asking to join the game, I inform him that sadly, no, the game is over, but I'd consider him for a future game. But, I inform him, we're a pretty left-wing gaming group, so he'd need to be down with LGBT rights, not praising cops, respecting people of other ethnicities, etc. or he'd probably make himself unpopular in pretty short time. He seems weirdly unwilling to just say yes or no conclusively to this, instead saying that he'd be happy with the group because he "loves to see both sides" to get a complete perspective on the world. I then flat out ask him if that means he'd be happy to game with fascists just to be able to play in a sci-fi game(which he keeps lamenting that he can't get into), and since he won't just give me a flat "yes" or "no" to this very simple question of "would you tolerate nazis just to roll some dice"? I keep pushing him, because the very refusal to answer it seems shady as gently caress. Until he accuses me of trying to recruit him for a cult and vanishes in a smoke cloud of cyrilic while insisting I'll always be alone if I don't "take more chances." I feel like I dodged a bullet by being suspicious of him, and suppose I will have to deal with only gaming with my left-wing cultists.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2021 08:13
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:I had a notable almost-gaming experience the other day. A guy messages me out of the blue about a game posting I had made two years earlier asking to join the game, I inform him that sadly, no, the game is over, but I'd consider him for a future game. But, I inform him, we're a pretty left-wing gaming group, so he'd need to be down with LGBT rights, not praising cops, respecting people of other ethnicities, etc. or he'd probably make himself unpopular in pretty short time. Definitely dodged a bullet. You did the right thing by laying your cards on the table.
|
|
#
?
May 29, 2021 15:45
|
|
|
According to my DM, just because my character is now a Revenant does not make him a Human Wights advocate.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 19:29
|
|
|
I love the idea of a ghost/undead who's bound to the living world and can't go on to their eternal rest until they see meaningful social reform legislation passed.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 19:49
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:According to my DM, just because my character is now a Revenant does not make him a Human Wights advocate. No, of course not Their actions, advocacy, and activism does that MelvinBison posted:I love the idea of a ghost/undead who's bound to the living world and can't go on to their eternal rest until they see meaningful social reform legislation passed. Bonus if it's an issue from centuries ago, like the succession method for the throne of Lombardy Or restoring Pimlico to the Duchy of Burgundy Ichabod Sexbeast fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jun 6, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 19:51
|
|
|
Ichabod Sexbeast posted:No, of course not What if I go to the town square and moan about reform while using Minor Illusion to draw pictures?
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 19:55
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:What if I go to the town square and moan about reform while using Minor Illusion to draw pictures? That's what Moaner's Corner is for! Could also sovereign glue the doors of the city guard stations closed, or levitate the duke's horse during a horse race
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 20:03
|
|
|
Ichabod Sexbeast posted:That's what Moaner's Corner is for! Settle down, Fred Weasley.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 22:30
|
|
|
Lemniscate Blue posted:Settle down, Fred Weasley. Don't you mean George Weasley?
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 22:40
|
|
|
Which one died? I can never remember.
|
|
#
?
Jun 6, 2021 22:49
|
|
|
Lemniscate Blue posted:Settle down, Fred Weasley. CobiWann posted:Don't you mean George Weasley? I'm not Fred, I'm George. Honestly, woman, you call yourself our mother? Can't you tell I'm George?
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 05:55
|
|
|
Last week I saw probably the most 12D chess combat move I've ever witnessed in D&D. We'd just had a desperate running fuckfest of a combat where we were mostly out of resources, but had driven off the enemy - the last two remaining were a wounded hag and her pet banderhobb, who was chowing down on the Ranger's unconscious pet wolf. The hag opened a temporary portal to her home in the Shadowfell, and we were in no shape to follow. Hag: "Nyeh heh heh! See you soon! I can't wait to see what you'll give up to get your poor little dog back!" (goes through portal with the 'hobb) Warlock: "Don't follow me. I'll be right back." Rogue: "But-" Warlock: "Trust me!" (jumps through portal; portal closes) Rest of the party: ????? As background, Warlock's player seems kind of spacey sometimes, and we're 9th level, so he definitely can't cast Plane Shift or anything. At least a couple of us were thinking "oh gently caress, he's misunderstood Dimension Door, and he's gonna get wrecked." So there he is, trapped in the Shadowfell, surrounded by the hag, her other hag buddy, and their army of spooky critters, with one spell slot and 40 hp. The hag and her banderhobb turn around, wolf's unconscious body half-dangling out of the frog-monster's mouth. Hag: "You dare follow us here?" Warlock: "I cast Banishment on myself and the wolf, and choose to fail my save." Hag: "WHAT THE F-" Pop! Warlock and wolf appear back in the material plane, and we have to break for the night as the discord descends into total chaos.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 12:40
|
|
|
Oh that's wonderful, I love it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 12:52
|
|
|
Not sure if there's another thread to put this in but it's something i've been ruminating on Our party has acquired several encrypted texts over several playing sessions, all looted from corpses of enemies that are part of the same cult that apparently has a huge amount of local power in the city we're playing in. We're essentially on the run from them but also trying to stop their Evil Plan. Our party wizard handed the ciphers off to a wizard friend/mentor of his, who took interest in them. At this point I assumed this was essentially a puzzle we needed to acquire more pieces to and they'd be put together for us. Wrong! the DM made a huge post on our adventure log about how the encryption was a combination letter and word substitution. All the letter ones were solved for us, but over half the words aren't, and at best it looks like they match syllables but are otherwise essentially a foreign language with no way to translate it. This seems really weird to me because we just can't...do anything with this. I brute forced it for a while but when you get to paragraphs with 2/3s of the words being nonsense, and not used elsewhere in the text, there's not much I can figure out. It just seems like an odd choice by the DM to do this , like he expects us to figure it out piece by piece and is getting us excited for it? So weird to me.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 16:21
|
|
|
Luigi's Discount Porn Bin posted:Hag: "You dare follow us here?"
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 17:54
|
|
|
Seriously. That is so awesome. To be able to have a game session and a game mechanic line up so perfectly like that…
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 19:46
|
|
|
mastershakeman posted:It just seems like an odd choice by the DM to do this , like he expects us to figure it out piece by piece and is getting us excited for it? So weird to me. It's something all DMs have to learn through trial, I think. Just because you like a certain kind of puzzle or riddle or even encounter design does not mean their rest of your group will. There's always gotta be an option for "roll a thing, move on".
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 22:24
|
|
|
Luigi's Discount Porn Bin posted:Hag: "You dare follow us here?" Your GM is cool because it would've been too easy for them to just go "Um, she casts Counterspell I guess."
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 22:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 00:41 |
|
|
MelvinBison posted:Your GM is cool because it would've been too easy for them to just go "Um, she casts Counterspell I guess."
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2021 23:13
|
|