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These hyphz derails suck a lot which is why there is now a containment thread for it and all related conversation: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3920895 Please post this poo poo there from now on. hyphz is not banned from posting in this thread like a regular rear end person, but hyphzposting from either corner now is.
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Apr 22, 2020 06:16
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 08:01 |
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Can we talk about our favorite ways our characters have gotten killed? One of the most fun one-shots I was ever in ended with my character trapped in a munitions factory with the bad guys gloating about how dumb she was to get caught. My gm had forgotten my character was capable of breathing fire.
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Apr 22, 2020 06:49
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D&D? The carrion crawler right at the start of the mentzer red box intro adventure. That thing has got me more than any other thing in D&D. I refuse to not gently caress with it. I treasure every single death.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:08
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So in 13th Age my character was this undead wight-ish necromancer and near the end of the campaign we ended up finding this incredibly well-guarded tomb with a deeply powerful crown artifact in it capable of controlling armies of undead. Well due to a quirk with the race I was playing the traps in the module did not affect me at all, being a damage type I was immune to. So I actually managed to grab the crown and it immediately takes over my character's mind, urging her to dominate the world etc etc. Our party's paladin, with great woe and regret, put her down. The campaign ended on him walking out of the tomb, my character's body in his arms, and him resolving to quit the soldier life to go be a farmer instead.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:16
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Dread: I, the sole survivor, dragged myself to the comms station in the barricaded command center and nuked the entire site from orbit (it's the only way to be sure!) by the only method available - remotely crashing the ship into it.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:23
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I have super shaky hands due to reasons, and we were playing Dread and the tower was just looking loving decrepit. We're playing in this bar and the GM tells me to pull to avoid the werewolf/ghoul gribbly that's coming after us. We're running up the stairs from a basement and I'm the last one as it's biting on my leg. "So if I die everyone goes safe and we can kind of reset the tower". "Yeah?" *elbows the whole tower over* "I empty my handgun into its face and gently caress the consequences." I spent the rest of the session kibitzing at the bar but everyone else lived. I regret nothing.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:25
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Xiahou Dun posted:I have super shaky hands due to reasons, and we were playing Dread and the tower was just looking loving decrepit. We're playing in this bar and the GM tells me to pull to avoid the werewolf/ghoul gribbly that's coming after us. We're running up the stairs from a basement and I'm the last one as it's biting on my leg. "So if I die everyone goes safe and we can kind of reset the tower". "Yeah?" *elbows the whole tower over* "I empty my handgun into its face and gently caress the consequences." We once played something vaguely based on Dredd at a friend's wedding reception using a giant garden Jenga set.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:28
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Dungeon World: Subsumed into intelligent heirloom sword as one of the honored ancestors who's spirits guide the sword arm of the war-born.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:31
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That question kinda makes me sad because now that I think about it, all the character deaths I can remember were awful bullshit terrible DM/3.5-isms.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:35
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I actually don't think I have a single memorable good death from RPGs. I've generally been the GM if a game is going well or it fell apart before I could die. Closest honorable mention is a vampire game I had to duck out of because of schedule conflicts where due to party dynamics the GM made the NPC version of my character the eventual main antagonist and it was pretty memorable for everyone involved, and she did eventually bite it, but I wasn't there for when she got staked. All of the other deaths I can remember is poo poo like a GM rushing to accommodate new players to the group so letting them pilot mechs in our BESM game and tuning an encounter around a challenge for that, so my character got splatted on turn one. Then seeing the error of his ways he immediately house ruled the action economy to allow the girl he had a crush on not to suffer the same fate -but still left me dead. Or another GM who didn't realize how incredibly lethal combat is for anyone but regenerating werebeasts and vampires who tuned an intro combat around them and assumed since my character was a werespider they had that level of resilience. Nope a total of 2 failed dodge rolls in the entire game and I was dead. What made that one funny is it was supposed to be a superhero game using the WoD ruleset. So pretty much imagine spiderman went to stop a mugging on a rooftop and immediately is shot twice and falls off the roof dead and that was my time. Best part of all: this was a prologue scene not even the real game. Somehow the dude pulled the WoD equivalent of that dying during the chargen minigame in traveler thing.
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Apr 22, 2020 07:37
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Spirit Of The Century: ramped an (anachronistic, yes) kettenkrad into a zeppelin and did not stick the landing.S.J. posted:all the character deaths I can remember were awful bullshit terrible DM/3.5-isms. Coolness Averted posted:I actually don't think I have a single memorable good death from RPGs. This is tragic. Not even kidding. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 07:57
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Dungeon World: Subsumed into intelligent heirloom sword as one of the honored ancestors who's spirits guide the sword arm of the war-born. This is almost exactly a plot point in Friends at the Table.
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Apr 22, 2020 08:03
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Edit: deleted
Tekopo fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 08:08
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Speaking of dying in the prologue: Changeling: the Dreaming game (yeah I know, but we were just out of high school and still pretty stupid). My character called a Sidhe noble out on his bullshit, got challenged to a duel which - having precisely no combat skill - earned him a sword through the gut. The GM ran with it and had me deliver a death curse/prophecy that kicked off what was supposed to be the driving plot of the rest of the campaign, which unfortunately folded shortly afterwards.
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Apr 22, 2020 08:45
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In the near 80 sessions of tabletop gaming I've done in my life I don't think I've lost a single character.
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Apr 22, 2020 09:09
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I barely have any stories from a players perspective, my small groups irl have never felt any interest in GMing anything. I only know about 4 systems and I've GM'd dozens of sessions for each system, but only actually played 1-4 sessions of each game. I want to play more, but I like GMing so I've never complained about it too much.
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Apr 22, 2020 09:23
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Xiahou Dun posted:This is almost exactly a plot point in Friends at the Table. I don't listen to game streams or podcasts, but it wouldn't suprise me if it were a fairly common thing, it was just "say the obvious thing" events stacked on top of each other. I'm gonna paraphrase everything else but quote the GM because I saved the text because I thought it was cool. "Why is your sword special? " "It's got ancestral battle spirits in it." <adventures> "You're dying, tell me what happens" "I look at my sword and I ask it: Did I do a good enough job?" (quote)"You hear nothing at all for an eternal second, then a thousand voices whisper yes. You feel cold now, and... sharp. You fall to the ground, and there's a metallic noise instead of the familiar thud of a body. Maybe a worthy hand will wield you again. It's what's always happened before". I'm gonna be a little bit disappointed if the phrasing's lifted from a podcast, tbh. SkySteak posted:In the near 80 sessions of tabletop gaming I've done in my life I don't think I've lost a single character. Also tragic. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 09:25
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My one PC death was a consequence of nobody at the table really comprehending how dangerous firearms are in GURPS until we got into a close-quarters fight with Men in Black with machine guns. (We were in high school. The story of why we were playing GURPS in high school is far more tragic, to be honest.) The upside was the GM allowing my PC to survive as a brain in a jar, remote-control piloting a robot version of his old body, for the session or so before the game dissolved after that, because high school.
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Apr 22, 2020 09:37
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PinheadSlim posted:I barely have any stories from a players perspective, my small groups irl have never felt any interest in GMing anything. I only know about 4 systems and I've GM'd dozens of sessions for each system, but only actually played 1-4 sessions of each game.
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Apr 22, 2020 09:37
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As far as I can remember, my only character death was in a game of Quietus, which is a super stripped-down FitD system for playing slow-burn horror stories. You get extra dice from using flashbacks to recall past trauma or betraying the other players in moments of crisis. when Stress maxes out the player fills a Despair track, with PC death or incapacitation occurring when it fills completely. There's also a communal Hope track, which fills when you score meaningful successes against the threat in the game. Me and my friend played twin sisters invited to a reunion with our younger brother, who'd gone missing years before and resurfaced as a millionaire. Long story short, he'd gone insane and lured us out to a dilapidated country manor to kill and eat us to 'truly unite us as a family'. The ensuing struggle put us through the front window of the house, where my PC managed to crawl to her car and get it started with the intent of running him down. The other PC had filled their Despair track and bled out on the lawn, We were one Hope away from surviving and my PC one Despair away from death, so I roll my single remaining die... and miss. The GM describes me kicking the car into drive in a haze of pain and blood loss, running over someone, then crashing into the front of the house. Right as my PC fades out, the blood-soaked face of her brother appears at the window, and pants "Everything happens for a reason."
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Apr 22, 2020 09:47
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Splicer posted:Any notable deaths you've GM'd? When I was first learning Pathfinder it was kind of a Wild West mentality, PCs were expendable as we all were getting used to the system. After one players recent death they decided to get invested in their new character, and to try to keep them alive for a while. It was a level 1 or 2 Gnome cavalier that had a dire-Corgi mount, very cute and fun character. The first session was ending with a deadly encounter, I forget exactly what the monster was but I think it was an Ogre. Some kind of extra big jerk. The Gnome had been doing well and kind of forgot that they were trying their best to survive, and in a fit of overconfidence charged the Ogre (or whatever) on the first turn. Gnome misses the charge, ended movement right next to the Ogre. Ogre hits, crit, double damage, Gnomes HP dropped below their constitution. Dead. I'm pretty tipsy so I might have mixed up some details but yeah, it took us a while to stop laughing from that. Mostly because it was a goofy beginner campaign and I described them being flattened by the blow, and after the fight the party spent some time scraping up what was left "in case you can resurrect a pancake"
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Apr 22, 2020 09:54
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Oh I also ran a game of Twilight : 2000 but set during a modern Red Dawn type of invasion. One player, near mortally wounded and with no chance of medical help in hundreds of miles, decided to ram a Russian checkpoint in a Honda Fit. If he survived the crash, which he did, he was to get out of the vehicle and kill at least one more Russian before being killed, which he did. The guy really just wanted to make a new character and we decided it would be an exciting way to do it lol
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Apr 22, 2020 10:01
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Leraika posted:Can we talk about our favorite ways our characters have gotten killed? Still remember the sheer WTF factor of the possessed bed from that one CoC sample adventure
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Apr 22, 2020 10:25
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SkySteak posted:In the near 80 sessions of tabletop gaming I've done in my life I don't think I've lost a single character. In 20 years of elfgames, I've hit 0HP in fights occasionally but that's never been a death even when playing garbage systems like 3.x. I've had several character deaths but they were all a choice made because it would make the story cooler.
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Apr 22, 2020 11:00
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drrockso20 posted:Still remember the sheer WTF factor of the possessed bed from that one CoC sample adventure I'm reminded of the animate rug from the 3.0 module Forge of Fury. It was enchanted to strangle anyone except dwarves, the module writer apparently never having suspected that a dwarf PC would rock up, see this fine rug, roll it up and carry it back to town to sell. Naturally it killed the shopkeeper he sold it to, and the PCs had to leave town in a hurry when they were accused of murder by enchanted item.
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Apr 22, 2020 11:16
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Leraika posted:Can we talk about our favorite ways our characters have gotten killed? In a LARP context: at a fest LARP I was part of a faction which had been working against much of the rest of the player base, cursing the realm and whatnot whilst maintaining a cover of being loyal citizens (albeit ones with a very Disney Villain aesthetic). It had become apparent that we had been discovered and would before long be caught and executed and so, in keeping with our beliefs (a highly heretical interpretation of the imperial religion all the PCs adhered to), we did a Jonestown-esque mass suicide in the middle of a grand party thrown by an otherdimensional wizardy thing.
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Apr 22, 2020 12:15
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Warthur posted:In a tabletop context: Call of Cthulhu, the Tatters of the King campaign, my character stepped forward and took the hand of the King In Yellow to deliberately steer him back to Carcosa rather than bringing him to Earth. Beautiful.
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Apr 22, 2020 12:37
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Warthur posted:In a tabletop context: Call of Cthulhu, the Tatters of the King campaign, my character stepped forward and took the hand of the King In Yellow to deliberately steer him back to Carcosa rather than bringing him to Earth. If that's the fest LARP I'm thinking of, didn't the rest of the players do a shockingly terrible job of investigating your group's villainy -- including assigning one of your group's members to lead the investigation into himself, and then only noticing after you were all executed that his notes on the investigation, which he'd been carrying round and brandishing at people, consisted of several sheets of paper with "Ha ha ha ha ha" written over and over again.
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Apr 22, 2020 12:39
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Whybird posted:If that's the fest LARP I'm thinking of, didn't the rest of the players do a shockingly terrible job of investigating your group's villainy -- including assigning one of your group's members to lead the investigation into himself, and then only noticing after you were all executed that his notes on the investigation, which he'd been carrying round and brandishing at people, consisted of several sheets of paper with "Ha ha ha ha ha" written over and over again. That was one of the more entertaining groups to ref for ever
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Apr 22, 2020 13:18
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I may well have been the militia officer in question, yes. But to clarify: it's a field of thousands of people and our magical antics caused full blown famines, so lots of people were, if not investigating us directly, at least poking at the consequences of our actions. The normal distribution applies to the results: yes, some people did poorly, some people did very well. Were it not for people doing well, we'd have not been caught, after all.
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Apr 22, 2020 13:51
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I have played exactly one session of Call of Cthulhu, and it ended when another PC flipped out the first time something weird happened and physically forced us into a car so we could drive away. I've been meaning to try it again but it was genuinely the most boring game I've ever played 
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Apr 22, 2020 14:32
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Just imagining a session of CoC where nothing actually weird happens but it's heavily implied that something weird is just about to happen and the players get progressively more and more paranoid.
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Apr 22, 2020 14:35
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I've tried playing and running CoC about 10 times. As far as I can tell it has four modes of play, but I've only found the first three. 1: You do some boring stuff until eventually monsters show up, and then your numbers go down and if you don't run away then you die (hit points) or die (sanity). 2: Same as 1 but you don't even do the boring stuff because nobody wants to do anything in case their numbers go down. 3: D&D except the system's worse and instead of blowing up orcs with fireballs you blow up dark youngs of shubnwordaths with dynamite. 4: The fun one that people talk about on the internet. Tekopo posted:Just imagining a session of CoC where nothing actually weird happens but it's heavily implied that something weird is just about to happen and the players get progressively more and more paranoid. And it ends in italics!
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Apr 22, 2020 14:45
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Tekopo posted:Just imagining a session of CoC where nothing actually weird happens but it's heavily implied that something weird is just about to happen and the players get progressively more and more paranoid. Friends of mine got utterly ruined in BSG and then find out after the game they'd forgotten to put any cylons in.
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Apr 22, 2020 14:51
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Every narrative that deals in genre tropes of adventure and/or suspense should do that once. Invoke all the usual cliffhangers, feature all the usual indicators, and there are just perfectly reasonable explanations every time. Like that one Tintin album that spent 60 pages on some jewels not getting stolen.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:19
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I've tried playing and running CoC about 10 times. As far as I can tell it has four modes of play, but I've only found the first three. Failure mode #1 happens when you regard the monsters as the point of the exercise, rather than (with a few exceptions) the failure condition. I usually get the best results when the players are pitted against humans or human-scale foes with the potential for nastier stuff to get called in should the human-scale opposition be given a free hand. The stuff before the monsters should up should not be static - either the PCs should be actively investigating, looking for clues, interviewing people, discussing what they've found with each other and brewing theories and brainstorming further avenues of investigation, etc., or the NPCs should be acting to create further opportunities for the PCs to do all that investigation stuff (like how in a serial killer investigation if the police run out of leads the investigation continues when the killer strikes again). If that isn't happening then you either have a player issue (not thinking like investigators and following up information), a refereeing issue (failing to present an active world where if the PCs don't find evidence the expected way there's still ways they can progress their investigation as a result of chasing up when related stuff happens), or a scenario design issue combined with a refereeing issue (there's a clue bottleneck in the scenario which is too easy to miss and the referee isn't recognising that and correcting for it). (If you consider investigating, hunting for clues, talking to NPCs and conversing among the PCs to be the boring bit, then it sounds like CoC genuinely isn't for you and also a whole cross-section of other games aren't for you either, including any investigation-themed RPG which actually finds gameplay and interest in the procedural aspects of investigation rather than using "We are investigators!" as an aesthetic premise over the top of a game where the actual challenge is in non-investigative activity, like it's James Bond and what desultory intelligence work you do is basically a mechanism to get you from fight scene to sex scene to fight scene to sex scene as the story unfolds. Nothing wrong with that - tastes invariably differ, investigative RPGs are a niche of a niche hobby - but if you and your gaming pals or your local gaming culture in general have that going on it explains why you're hitting the failure modes so often.) Failure mode #2 is the same failure mode as hyphz players never wanting to face bad consequences ever and is equivalent to a D&D party not wanting to go in the dungeon because their hit points might go down. Any game dies if you do not get player buy-in, player buy-in for horror games is especially important because: horror. Failure mode #3 happens when you regard the monsters as the point of the exercise but the party is more optimised for combat and the referee is leaning into that. Italics are largely the fault of August Derleth mistaking Weird Tales' in-house editorial style for Lovecraft's intention.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:20
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Splicer posted:For a while now I've been thinking there could be a market for a short story collection where about half of the time it's people freaking out over nothing and the other half of the time it's ghosts. Are your friends my friends? I was drunk when I put the deck together and did it wrong. We spent probably 4 or 5 hours on that game slowly death spiraling and screaming at each other only to find out after we lost that there weren't any. It was the best game of BSG ever
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Apr 22, 2020 15:24
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Warthur posted:In my experience: Yeah, i should probably give it another go, it's been over a decade since I tried it. Can you recommend a short pre-made (1-3 sessions) that does it "right"? E: if it helps, the problems I've had running it aren't with investigating and building tension and suspense, they're when the horror happens and it feels like a let down. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Apr 22, 2020 |
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Apr 22, 2020 15:26
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I've been having fun with the Arkham Horror LCG: it's got a few issues but it has novel mechanisms that really change up the game depending on what scenario you do, and the choices you have to make are interesting as well as how you resolve each scenario. It'll probably lose its charm if I ever play the same scenario twice, though. Would recommend it if you have the chance.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:29
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 08:01 |
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drrockso20 posted:Still remember the sheer WTF factor of the possessed bed from that one CoC sample adventure Are you saying CoC had Death Bed, The Bed That Eats?
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Apr 22, 2020 16:14
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