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Had a bit of a role playing high point last night and I would like to document it for posterity. Some years ago my family & I moved to a small, Midwestern college town. I didn’t know many people there and as anyone who has enjoyed this hobby can attest, it can be very difficult to find a new group; especially when you move and age through the stages of life. There was a cork board in a lonely, darkened corner of the local game shop for people looking for groups, none of which bore fruit. We lived in an old house downtown, divided into two separate sections. I’d only met the people who lived on the other side in passing, but that changed one day when our baby began teething. It was winter, my wife was out of town for work and I was trying to placate a grumpy newborn. I was anxious about how much noise she was making through the walls & decided to buy a bottle of something to smooth things over with the neighbors. I stopped one of the guys who lived there one day to ask him what he drank. He said he didn’t but that his roommate did and he drank Jameson, so I got a bottle and went over to drop it off one evening. I had our daughter bundled up on my hip, knocked on the door, heard something, waited and then the door opened. I started explaining who I was and why I was there and then stopped cold because I saw a d20 on the table inside. There was a young woman sitting with her back to the door but I could clearly make out the Pathfinder logo on the sheet- having recently finished a three year campaign. “Are you guys playing Pathfinder?” I asked in disbelief. They were. They had an entire map of the Inner Sea on one wall in the living room. Books, minis, paints, all the regalia of nerdom and like mana from loving heaven. I had found my group and we played many wonderful sessions together. Years later, at our goodbye dinner our DM, Adam; told me the story from the other side of the door. They had a session planned and were waiting for another player. They had an open door policy so were confused when someone knocked. He said come in, but no one did and they were confused by the appearance of a “guy with a baby and a bottle of whiskey” on their porch and tightened up- the way you do around normal people sometimes when you play the elf games. “Not ‘Are you guys playing role playing games?’ Not ‘Are you guys playing Dungeons and Dragons?’ But, ‘Are you guys playing Pathfinder?’” Adam said, and laughed in the retelling of the specificity of our shared interest. A few years later the pandemic hit and I got our old group back together over Zoom to play D&D’s Descent into Avernus. I called Adam to catch up in the summer of 2020 and invited him to join in. Since then we’ve been rotating DM/GM responsibilities and presently are playing Adam’s annual Halloween campaign. Every year he puts a one-shot together and had run it with his irl group. He really pulls out all the stops and it’s great fun. In the most recent one, we’re playing a group of diplomats/B-team adventurers charged with upholding a treaty between the Giants who just got a lot of gold from a Necromancer trying to destroy the City-State we represent. We started at higher level and I’m playing a burned out Life Cleric, think Deckard Cain in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. (“Stay a while and hit this!  “) We inadvertently managed to arrive days ahead of our DM’s schedule due to a Wind Walk spell, creating one of those moments for the DM where you’re very proud of the ingenuity of your players but also under pressure, having to change a lot of the plot and quickly. We then engaged in disparate scouting and negotiation missions and managed to make a lot of forward progress without getting into unnecessary fights. But the gold was cursed and began turning our hosts into ravenous undead monsters, and oh hey there is a strange glowing portal and strange glowing portals are, as a rule, seldom good. A monster described as ‘a giant lump of flesh on multiple elephant-like legs with two prehensile stingers who begins manifesting pseudopods that look similar to each of the PCs’ comes through the portal and we all roll initiative. I roll high and declare my Action is to cast the Banishment spell to send the creature back to whence it came. DM Adam apologetically explains the monster has Legendary Resistance which he does not like because it instructs the players “you have to cast that 3 more times for it to have any effect,” so as a compromise, the monster will roll two Saving Throws. It gets a 5 on the first and a 9 on the second. First round of combat, first player turn and the end boss is vanquished. I love table top role playing games. I love the community and there is no high or accomplishment quite like it. Thank you for letting me share this. From one doorway to another there is so much joy and friendship. Kumo fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Apr 5, 2022 |
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Apr 5, 2022 17:01
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Kumo posted:I love table top role playing games. I love the community and there is no high or accomplishment quite like it. Thank you for letting me share this. From one doorway to another there is so much joy and friendship. When everything clicks and you get an awesome story moment, not only does the moment stay with you, but so do the people who were there to experience it with you. X X X X X Per the thread title, my DM was the lead developer on a sourcebook for 5e. So if you want to see some of the stuff he puts us through that I don't talk about... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thedmlair/lairs-and-legends/description
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Apr 5, 2022 18:54
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CobiWann posted:When everything clicks and you get an awesome story moment, not only does the moment stay with you, but so do the people who were there to experience it with you. Is that his youtube channel linked?
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Apr 5, 2022 19:45
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Is that his youtube channel linked? No, that's Luke Hart.
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Apr 5, 2022 21:18
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According to my DM, Bigby's Interposing Hand is not an effective form of birth control.
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Apr 6, 2022 00:11
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JustJeff88 posted:According to my DM, Bigby's Interposing Hand is not an effective form of birth control. Yeah nah, you’re looking for Bigby’s Crushing Hand. Beginner’s mistake!
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Apr 6, 2022 02:41
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There's also Melf's Plan Bravo.
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Apr 6, 2022 17:53
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CobiWann posted:There's also Melf's Plan Bravo. Please do not use acid arrows for contraceptive purposes
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Apr 6, 2022 18:42
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If you absolutely have to avoid pregnancy try Magic Mouth
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Apr 6, 2022 19:44
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All this effort to avoid creating Tasha's Hideous Daughter
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Apr 6, 2022 19:49
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Tunicate posted:All this effort to avoid creating Tasha's Hideous Daughter The typo that she regretted forever.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:55
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What about a simple Shield?
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Apr 7, 2022 00:31
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Personally I'd just apply Mage Armor beforehand.
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Apr 7, 2022 17:58
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Some people say that you lose sensitivity when you apply mage armor, and they're not wrong...but think of all the potential risks of not wearing mage armor.
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Apr 7, 2022 18:02
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Welp, it finally happened. I witnessed an extended cat piss moment as a player. I'm crossposting this from my post in the main D&D5e thread. Spoilering things below because it gets kinda heavy. We've been playing a Curse of Strahd campaign. Last night was effectively a solo session with the one remaining living PC, a paladin, since the rest of us were dead, having TPK'd in the previous session due to running over an untelegraphed turn limit for a siege battle and so Strahd showed up, ringed the arena in fire, and murked the party. That was red flag #1. Red flag #2 was a bunch of stuff about the DM not wanting me to play a fighter subclass and demanding a bunch of absurd nerfs to it if I really wantes to play it. Back to last night -- there was a confrontation between the still-living paladin and Strahd in Vallaki. They had a tense standoff where the paladin declared she wouldn't let Strahd hurt anyone. And then the DM was like "btw your plate armor that you equipped like a month or two ago in real time, several sessions ago, is cursed lol" and suddenly she lost control of her character to Strahd (or to the DM, more properly). Red loving flag!! The DM had the controlled PC cut off an important NPC's arms, and when the paladin's player complained, the DM was like "well you put on the cursed armor and you went off on your own! Nobody cast identify on that armor!" There were no signs that the armor had been cursed until last night. The armor fell apart, and the player regained control of her character, but the damage had already been done. The session closed and everyone beside me at the table except the paladin player was like "whoah no way what a twist!" while the paladin player understandably just left the voice call immediately after the session ended. I tried to call attention to the fact that she was genuinely upset and that I was concerned, and the others still in the call were like "oh yeah I know, that session was really intense and heavy! (paladin) went through a lot!" After trying for several minutes to get the other players and the DM to show some concern about the paladin player's welfare, I gave up and bailed from the call as well. I did a wellness check with the paladin player today and she's planning on bailing on the campaign. And honestly? I am too. This was several kinds of hosed up, and horror game or not, I'm not standing for it. So yeah. Time to drop this for a new campaign, I feel.
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Apr 11, 2022 02:27
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Wow yeah, that sucks. I've been playing Strahd with some friends and our GM has been constantly bemused that our party is the least suicidal group of PCs he's ever had. We've noticed several warning signs of encounters more powerful than us at the time and decided to come back later. We're getting to the end though so we're finally going back to dealing with some of them. Due to the rest of the party stealing from Lady Whaster who was able to find the stuff due to her locate object spell (don't steal robes and the reading material from cultists right before their "book club") my character's brother (an NPC) decided that would be the best time to try and go off on his own adventures. His first stop, that old run down windmill that the party has kept ignoring in favour of other things that seemed more important. Well my PC wanted to give him space and the chance for the brother to prove himself even if he chose a bad time to do so, so we relocated another party NPC from Vallaki to Borovia and then the next day checked in on the mill. My character was very angry to find out what the hags were doing and although we freed the baker and my brother the hags all decided to just go invisible and avoid fighting us. This frustrated my PC to no end because he couldn't even get revenge for his brother. After that the brother decided splitting up hadn't worked out so he was going to stay with my PC. Unfortunately we had little left to do except go to the swamp to fight the witch, so we could get the skull of the silver dragon back to put the revenants to rest guarding the sun blade. We managed to mostly sneak up on the witch until my Paladin got close as heavy armour isn't quiet. But due to some good rolls and making her burn her high level spell slots on counterspelling our lvl 10 party has done pretty well against higher level but solo witch. Sensing that she's probably going to die, she calls out to parley. Offers to let us keep what we already took (the gem for the Wizard of Wine) and she'll even let us take the skull if we stand down. If we didn't leave then she might die but she was going to take at least one of us with her. Now because one of the other party members has played a lot and knows what level something is likely to be based on spell DCs, we had a pretty good guess she had one or two high level spells left in reserve. However we didn't want to meta game and I was the only PC near the witch that round so the call was up to me. So my PC full of frustration he couldn't revenge his brother, and that the hags were still out there to continue to torture people decided this witch, evil and foul, could not be suffered to live. As he answers her to tell her that she must die, she raises her hand and points at my PC's bother. The last spell she'd been holding onto was Finger of Death. None of the PCs had taken enough damage that she felt confident in using it, but my PC's poor brother was just an NPC. An NPC that had been in cloud kill and grasping vines for a turn or two. So he dies and then is raised as a zombie. Honestly the best part of the tragedy was that although my Paladin usually rolls pretty badly on skill checks most of the time the dice had a sense of humour in this case. A Nat 20. Just so he knew instantly exactly what had happened, and that because his brother had been turned into an undead that it was beyond the party's ability to resurrect him now. Next session my Paladin is going straight back to the abbot of the sanitarium. We saw him raise a child from the dead, and due to Divine Sense I know he's a celestial of some kind. Out of character I know the abbot can't raise my PC's brother, and in character he knows it's probably going to take a capital M Miracle...but it'll make a great scene as my guilt wracked Paladin grabs the abbot and demands he return his brother anyway.
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Apr 11, 2022 15:23
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Or having your paladin go through some Pet Cemetery poo poo would be extremely on-brand for Ravenloft. Just an idea. "What comes outta tha ground isn't what you put in tha ground...:
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Apr 12, 2022 12:14
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According to my DM, the evil Rakshasa Empire does not have a right-wing propaganda network called the "Kitsune News Channel."
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Apr 20, 2022 13:46
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, the evil Rakshasa Empire does not have a right-wing propaganda network called the "Kitsune News Channel." They used to, but the Rakshasa overton window has been sprinting towards lawful evil so drat hard that ORNN is more of a problem now Kitsune has people who DON'T constantly call for the subjugation of all to the mighty Rakshasa throne on sometimes (so they can get dunked on), they're practically the Harpers at this point
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Apr 20, 2022 14:12
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:They used to, but the Rakshasa overton window has been sprinting towards lawful evil so drat hard that ORNN is more of a problem now had to google "Overton window". and they say games can't be educational!
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Apr 20, 2022 19:37
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Edit: NM
JustJeff88 fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Apr 23, 2022 |
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Apr 23, 2022 18:28
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efb, so much for checking while replies were open.
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Apr 23, 2022 18:36
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Cooked Auto posted:
It was, and I appreciate the help. I thought to do a thread search on the word 'Dracula' and I sussed it out.
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Apr 23, 2022 18:53
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According to my DM, my Paladin is specifically not allowed to call Strahd a big nerd and ask him where my loving platinum is.
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Apr 27, 2022 16:41
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I got to yell 'YOU WILL NOT GET THIS PIG, X-COM' in a terrible german accent this sunday.
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Apr 27, 2022 16:49
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, my Paladin is specifically not allowed to call Strahd a big nerd and ask him where my loving platinum is. Murder Strahd's dry cleaner Night10194 posted:I got to yell 'YOU WILL NOT GET THIS PIG, X-COM' in a terrible german accent this sunday. Go on....
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Apr 27, 2022 17:36
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They were investigating sightings of a weird giant porcupine thing in the Black Forest in Germany and ran into a team of supposed German intel operatives doing the same. Being reasonable, they worked together to catch the giant spike pig (and discovered it can fire the spikes like crossbow bolts, and was also pregnant, suggesting more giant spike pigs). Then the German guys turned out to be trying to cover it up and tried to stop them getting custody of the suspect pig in question after they tranqed her in a pit trap humanely, culminating in a brawl in the cabin of a truck with the sleeping pig in the back. The pig is theirs. Though their scientist threatened to wake the pig if the Germans kept fighting after they got control of the brawl, which nobody wanted, because that pig was dynamite. File 03, Operation Hog Data was a success, though now they have to explain why they arrested five German operatives.
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Apr 27, 2022 18:06
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Night10194 posted:They were investigating sightings of a weird giant porcupine thing in the Black Forest in Germany and ran into a team of supposed German intel operatives doing the same. Being reasonable, they worked together to catch the giant spike pig (and discovered it can fire the spikes like crossbow bolts, and was also pregnant, suggesting more giant spike pigs). Then the German guys turned out to be trying to cover it up and tried to stop them getting custody of the suspect pig in question after they tranqed her in a pit trap humanely, culminating in a brawl in the cabin of a truck with the sleeping pig in the back. Take a look at this pig’s HUGE quills!
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Apr 27, 2022 19:03
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I have a story to share! I've played a couple campaigns with the same DM (D&D 5e). She just started up a new one a couple weeks ago. The premise: it is 10 years since the previous campaign, and we'll be using some third-party rules. Namely, an Epic Level rulebook. (5th edition normally caps at level 20, but this rulebook raises the cap to 30, with all the bullshit and shenanigans it entails.) We were directed to pick one of our characters to bring to the campaign. If we had more than one character (many players have been with this group for years and have multiple characters), we could submit her a quick "backstory" detailing what those other characters were doing these past 10 years, and she would have them around as NPCs. The group consists of: Tiefling bard Human cleric Human fighter/barbarian cross-class Fish-person fighter Goblin barbarian A homebrew wolf-person race rogue/ranger cross-class And my character, a kobold warlock I had other characters but I picked the warlock for a few reasons. One reason being I tend to forget half of my class features, and warlocks in 5e are pretty dead-rear end simple to play. I figured a simpler character is better in an epic level campaign. The other reason was I love roleplaying kobolds, and this one is especially fun. He's 3/4 crazed (at least), and serves the Raven Queen. He thinks the voices in his head are his Patron (who he refers to as "his Lady") talking to him. Perfect choice to be handed ultimate power, I say! Last night we had our second session of the campaign and I can already tell it's going to be fun! The main conceit is that the other Planes are intersecting with our own, with much chaos and general trouble ensuing. More than just your garden-variety heroes are needed to deal with such a threat, so enter the souped up overpowered ubermenches that are us. Conveniently, my warlock discovered a new page in his magic book that contained a ritual, presumably put there by his Lady, that can close planar rifts such as the ones that have popped up everywhere. Cool! So that means the fate of the world rests on a crazed overpowered kobold. Our destination for yesterday's session was the rift with the Plane of Water. We hired a boat in town and took it out into the ocean, where we discovered that the Plane of Air had also decided to come to the party, and both rifts were creating "The Perfect Storm" sort of scenario. We elected to try and seal the Water Plane first, since we didn't have a terribly good idea of how to even reach the Air one. So we cast Water Breathing and related spells, and off we went under da sea. We found the rift without much trouble, surrounded by weird shaped rocks. A Detect Magic on the rocks didn't turn up anything noteworthy, so my warlock just swam to the rift, got his book out, and started doing his weird chanting. By and by, members of the party started hearing... voices. Including my warlock. But he always hears voices so he didn't pay them any mind. But then the party members started acting weird. The fish-woman suddenly says "You know, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if everything were underwater. We could just make everyone breathe water and everything would be fine, wouldn't it? Maybe we should seal this Plane last, or not at all." Then comes the dreaded phrase. "Everyone, roll me a saving throw!" Everyone, except the fish-woman, fails. My kobold stops the ritual, as suddenly he's pretty sure that sealing this Rift would be A Bad Idea, and "Life is the bubbles" after all. Surely letting the Plane of Water take over wouldn't be so bad. Other party members echo similar sentiments, which ironically makes the fish-woman think something suss is going on. She was initially the one who was fine with it, but the rest of the party doing a 180 all of a sudden made her think something was up. But she didn't have a good way to figure out what was going on, nor to snap us out of it, so we all went back to the boat, talking on the way of how weird it is that we suddenly changed our minds. Back on the boat, suddenly the bard's player gets an idea, asks the DM to roll a knowledge check about how to dispel charm effects. He rolls sufficiently to know what to do, which is a spell he happens to know! He grabs my character and casts the spell on him. Kobold Warlock was suddenly back to his normal self and very annoyed at the party for interrupting the ritual that His Lady told him to cast. So he grabbed the only party member not acting super suss, and he and fish-woman jumped back into the ocean while the rest of the party wonders wtf is going on. Back at the circle of weird rocks, the fish-woman got the idea to try hitting one. It changed colors, all octopus-like to reveal... An Aboleth. Then the remaining rocks in the space started doing the same thing to reveal more Aboleths. Seven of them all together, one for each party member. The dreaded words come again. "Roll me a saving throw!" Fish-woman passed; my character did not. He immediately peaced out to go back to the boat, leaving fish-woman to face seven Aboleths alone. To her credit, she came in swinging! She brought all the Fighter Bullshit she possibly could to bear, laying into one Aboleth with 10 attacks total, two crits, dealing well over 200 damage to it and dropping it in a single round! One Aboleth down, 6 to go. And she's alone. But a die is rolled, to determine which of the party members the dead Aboleth was controlling. it lands on, the cleric! The party cleric is a follower of Bane, god of terror and hatred. And she's pissed that she was forced to walk away from a fight. She grabbed the bard by the collar, and dragged him back into the water. By the time the cleric and bard reached the fish-woman, she was near death from eating too many hits from the Aboleths, but reinforcements have arrived! The bard couldn't do much, but the cleric started laying into them. Another one died, and the bard was freed from his mind control! Further attempts to charm us will be much harder with the bard able to boost our saving throws! More violence ensued, and more of the party were freed from mind control and came join the fight! Ultimately, the cleric chokeslammed the second to last Aboleth into the ground with her bare hands while the warlock and rogue gunned down the last one as it tried to flee. And now we can get back to casting that goddamn ritual! I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, literally shaking, wondering if the whole campaign was going to end right then and there. It was intense! Can't wait for the next session!
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May 1, 2022 00:46
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According to my DM, if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge Magic Missile.
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May 10, 2022 21:08
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge Magic Missile. I thought the whole point of magic missile was that it was literally undodgable. Like yeah, you can negate it or soak it or otherwise make it do 0 damage, but it was going to hit you or your Missile absorbing amulet.
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May 10, 2022 21:20
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the_steve posted:I thought the whole point of magic missile was that it was literally undodgable. Like yeah, you can negate it or soak it or otherwise make it do 0 damage, but it was going to hit you or your Missile absorbing amulet. Sounds like quitter talk, give me another Allen.
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May 10, 2022 21:32
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Our Mage game has reached the plot climax. We've solved a terrorist/murder mystery and sorted things out between the indigenous Kopa Loei mages and brokered an accord between them and certain factions of the Technocracy. We mystically and literally changed the name of the largest hospital in Honolulu (in the fiction, it was named after James Cook, the colonial-era dink who was killed by angry natives on the island). We worked with the "good" Technocrats running the joint to get the name changed to something less lovely, and went into the High Umbra to beat the rear end of the Spirit of Imperialism and add some mystical weight to the renaming. That goes in a surprising direction, as we end up talking it into morphing into its more pure, idealistic reflection: a Spirit of Exploration. Then it fucks off in search of wider horizons, leaving the Hawaiian islands less burdened by the spirit of imperialism. We never went to rounds. It was a cool scene. So that leaves the more malignant factions of the Technocracy, who are less about science or medicine or discovery for its own sake and more about capitalism. They are hell-bent on pushing the Kopa Loei off their sacred fishing grounds in order to drop a magical mining rig on top of the place. We try to preempt them and launch an attack on their base of operations. Our Kopa Loei allies anticipate an attack in response to this, so they stand ready for battle at their sacred ground. But we apparently hosed around a little too long in preparation for this because the Technocrats heli-drop their platform over the fishing grounds right ahead of our attack. We turn a summoned gremlin loose in the Technocrat base to destroy it and jack one of their boats to speed to the fishing grounds where there is a battle between the Technocrats and the Kopa Loei. When we arrive, there are already dozens of bodies floating around bits of broken boats, all over the fishing grounds. Both sides have a few boats, and a handful of Technocrats are up on the platform defending it. Our party fans out, assessing threats and trying to play to our strengths. With no sleepers (mundane people) present, everyone on both sides is going hog wild with vulgar magic. Our Life mage gains gills, fins, and armored scales and dives in the water to heal our allies and get into close grips with a Technocrat black ops agent. Our traditional wizard type hermetic stays in the boat to draw magical power from the sacred site and give it to us to fuel our magic. Our resident goony goon, an alchemist, is set on using Matter magic to take down the platform by way of its struts. My MMA fighter goes with him, partly to cover him, and partly to neutralize the sniper positioned on the platform. The sniper turns out to be a Hit Mark, basically a Technocratic terminator. This one is like a T-1000, liquid metal. A Kopa Loei ally and I close range with him and disarm him, but both of us are Mind specialists and this motherfucker doesn't have a mind in the truest sense. It also resists magic, so I accelerate myself using Time magic and beat the piss out of it with my fists. Mechanically, I have no idea if this is going to work. oWoD combat has "soak dice" based on stamina and armor, and every success on a soak roll subtracts from incoming damage. But you can soak as many times as you are hit; it's not like dodging. My character is spec'd to hit like a Mack truck, but punching a loving Terminator is no one's forte. Three rounds and nine attacks into this beating, the GM says, "it's twitching a bit, and half its face is drooping like it's had a stroke." So it's working. Slowly, but it's working. More importantly, I've kept it in melee and it hasn't been able to pick anyone off at range. So I spend the last of my magical energy to keep up another round of Time acceleration and lay into the Hit Mark three more times: "Do you smell toast, you chrome motherfucker?!" my character yells. I score a few more hits, and it finally goes down. As it does, an enormous figure in a diving suit climbs onto the platform. The GM describes it as a "Hulking, mutant form like he just climbed out of a Rob Liefeld comic." Given the gear, it is also described as "not unlike a Big Daddy from Bioshock." One of its hands flips aside to reveal a cannon-arm. It's other, clawed hand begins spinning viciously. This thing is also a Hit Mark. It is also way to loving big for me to simply beat to death like the other one. I got away with some bullshit there, and I know I'm not getting away with that again. It aims at a Kopa Loei ship and blazes it in half with the cannon. I scramble to help our alchemist finish destroying the second platform strut. It is now in the slow process of collapse, but we still have to deal with this Terminator. While its cannon apparently is in cooldown for a round, it turns that claw on my Kopa Loei comrade and just about disembowels her. Then it lights the cannon up again and turns toward my character. Our wizard, still on the ship, sees this and attempts to counter this, to no avail. He fails to beat the Hit Mark's antimagic field. This is checkmate. I don't have an answer to this, offensively or defensively. It was everything I could do to get its attention too, to keep it from killing the Kopa Loei or turning its fire on the alchemist, who is doing our most important poo poo at the moment. My character has seen this before. In another time. Almost three months ago out of game. He had a Seeking (a process of gaining more magical understanding) in which he came "unstuck" in time and saw this. Or, a certain version of this. In that vision, the Hit Mark had already killed or maimed the rest of the party because my character was not on the platform until it was too late. Joey, the alchemist, was dead in that version. But in this iteration of time, Joey was alive, and he had the last action before the Hit Mark acted again. So he slides more of the same magical compound he had been using to dissolve the struts to hit the platform right under the Hit Mark. The platform under the Hit Mark collapses and it plunges into the clear water. Several turns earlier, our Life mage saved the life of another Kopa Loei mage. When he came to, he took the form of a man-shark... ...and now appears slamming headlong into the Hit Mark. Our wizard threw every buff and debuff at that melee as they could, while the rest of us flee the platform. My character uses Time to greatly speed up the slow collapse of the platform, and I shoot the man-shark a telepathic message to GTFO. He disengages from the Hit Mark and swims away just ahead of the platform collapsing onto the bot. The GM said after the game that the second Hit Mark's cannon did 8 aggravated damage. This is in a system in which character have seven health levels, and agg damage cannot usually be soaked.  He also said the first Hit Mark had 10 dice to soak bashing damage. My character put 14 damage on the motherfucker even through all that soak. It took 12 attacks over 4 rounds to do it, but it got done.  The GM also said that punching the liquid metal Hit Mark was "like punching a turnbuckle," so my character's fists are probably hamburger meat now. But that's a problem for the future. (Or the past, or the present, since it's all the same to my character.)
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May 11, 2022 02:03
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I love big climactic stories like that, especially when time travel poo poo is involved to make it extra dramatic!
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May 11, 2022 02:54
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I came to make a silly 'According to my DM' post, but in deference to that exiting story I'll pocket that for a bit. I wish I knew a drat thing about Mage. All I know about the game is that it involves ludicrously powerful spellcasters that mage a wizard from D&D3.5 look like a nerf gun, yet somehow it works.
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May 11, 2022 03:13
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JustJeff88 posted:I came to make a silly 'According to my DM' post, but in deference to that exiting story I'll pocket that for a bit. As someone who does know a drat thing about Mage, let me assure you that it is as loving impressive as it sounds.
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May 11, 2022 05:16
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Honestly, I loving love the idea of reforming/'fixing' bad concepts like turning Imperialism into Exploration
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May 11, 2022 05:50
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Robindaybird posted:Honestly, I loving love the idea of reforming/'fixing' bad concepts like turning Imperialism into Exploration Me too! I honestly didn't think that encounter was going to go the Undertale way that it did. Maybe I should have, since the High Umbra is an even weirder place than the Middle Umbra, so straight-up combat is less likely to work there. (The High Umbra is like Plato's Realm of Forms, a sort of reflection of the material world populated entirely by the ideas of things. The Middle Umbra is related, but is the "normal" spirit world.) It helped that our resident wizard is more at home talking to spirits than people. Interacting with spirits in either plane is often like solving a riddle, so having someone versed in that was a big deal. (As opposed to my character, who can do astral travel but mostly just explored the High Umbra on his own, not disturbing anything.) JustJeff88 posted:I wish I knew a drat thing about Mage. All I know about the game is that it involves ludicrously powerful spellcasters that mage a wizard from D&D3.5 look like a nerf gun, yet somehow it works. Reclaimer posted:As someone who does know a drat thing about Mage, let me assure you that it is as loving impressive as it sounds. Hit Marks are one of the most feared beings in the game's lore. They are Terminators designed to do the Technocracy's dirtiest dirty work. A whole party can get wiped out by one if they don't play their cards right. My character punched one to death by himself using the Mage equivalent of Haste and vanilla punches. oWoD damage works like this: You have seven health boxes. There are three types of damage: bashing, lethal, and aggravated. If you fill up on bashing, you roll resist getting knocked out (or, you just don't bother if you're a Hit Mark). If you are full of bashing and you keep taking damage, whatever doesn't fit on the damage boxes "rolls over" into lethal damage. If you fill up on lethal, you die. If you're a Vampire or something else that doesn't die to lethal, the above process continues, but this time rolling over into aggravated damage. Agg damage is like fire and explosions and acid and really nasty poo poo. Then again, concentrated machinegun fire will turn into agg pretty quickly. You can skip straight to lethal by using guns or knives, and you can skip straight to agg if you IMO, what makes mages in this game crazy powerful isn't necessarily the vertical power level of individual spheres like Life or Matter or Mind, but the horizontal improvisational options they give players. Each of the five levels of each sphere doesn't give you a single power like in Vampire; each level gives you a framework of power in that sphere, at that level. So players can really go nuts being creative and even mixing sphere effects. For example: Time can speed things up and slow things down. You normally need Time 4 to slow down things en masse. I pitched a combined Mind 4/Time 3 effect to my GM that I called "A Watched Pot Never Boils." It combined Mind's ability to manipulate people's minds with the slowdown in Time. The idea hinged on my character's view of time as essentially a collective illusion invented by conscious minds. So this effect tricks reality into that view by preying on people's minds to perceive time moving slower, so that it literally does. The spell made everyone in a room fixate on something, and thereby time actually moved slower for them...but not me. (I used this to hose the squad of Technocrats left behind at the base we were soon to knock over with a gremlin spirit. Our alchemist chucked a flash-bang into a crowded room, and I used this to slow all of them down but not the grenade. They all did a slow-mo dive, but it didn't work for them like it does in the movies...) Mechanically, all I did was use a bit of Mind to bump a Time effect up one dot, but it's fun to get creative in how to do that, and each character is going to do that stuff differently. Mages are indeed really powerful, arguably the most powerful supernaturals in World of Darkness. But every single PC and NPC in that scene was slinging vulgar magic aplenty, the kind of poo poo that flies in the face of reality and really pisses reality off. We'll have to pay the piper at some point in the form of our accumulated Paradox. My character has managed to avoid triggering any backlash for a long time, so he now has a whopping 9 Paradox. When it triggers, each of those will become a die for the GM to roll. Each success on that roll creates an increasingly nasty side effect of loving with reality. Enough successes can render a character permanently insane, have a permanent supernatural flaw, or simply wink out of existence at the highest extreme. My concern now is that we have one more task that came up in the wake of this battle, and three of us have 6+ Paradox just...sitting there, smiling at us at from the bottom of our character sheets like the Cheshire Cat. 
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May 11, 2022 10:48
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As a former Mage player, that story had everything I love about the system, especially how ridiculous a creative player can get.
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May 11, 2022 13:29
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What's the fun of having so much narrative agency when you're inevitably punished for any use of that power?
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May 11, 2022 14:06
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