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Yawgmoth posted:...holy shitwhistles. If you guys had been the main characters there'd have only been one SW movie and the end would be a completely even firefight. It's actually a plot point in our game that the Empire is a lot less stupid than it is in the films, at least in our region of space - because the Imperial officers that are blinded by dogma and procedure and are unwilling to innovate have basically been weeded out. Because we've killed them all. This leads to poo poo like them saying "We know they're somewhere in this region of space, right? Let's attach a hyperdrive to an asteroid and program it to zig-zag back and forth throughout this region and turn off the safety interlocks that make it drop out of hyperspace in a gravity well. That way when it smacks into their base it'll vaporize the whole drat thing." We got lucky - it hit a pair of cruisers out on patrol instead of the base. Which reminds me of another story - we'd gone to steal a bunch of manufacturing equipment and supplies from a lightly-defended planet and ended up sparking a popular uprising instead (oops). Now we couldn't very well steal their poo poo; it would be terrible PR. So instead we had to set up defenses for them. The Inperials tried sneaking in a counterattack force; they sent ships in powered-down coasting in inertially so as not to register on our sensors. We spotted them anyways (I forget how; I think it was because of one of the Force-users, but I was otherwise occupied and not paying a ton of attention). We saw that one of the incoming ships was an Interdictor Cruiser - a ship that uses gravity well generators to force ships to drop out of hyperspace, setting up roadblocks, ambushes, et cetera. Can you guess what we decided to do? I believe I was the one to chime in with "Hey, didn't we want one of those?" We used our sneak ship to land five PCs and several grunts and two roly-polys we'd previously found (nicknamed 'the lads,' we'd upgraded their weapons and shield generators and given them heuristic processors so that they could learn; the lads are awesome, as you will see shortly). And we made a beeline for main engineering and took it over. After the big-rear end firefight, the lads roll back up with a bag of muffins. They figured, logically enough, that on a ship that's running silent, a lot of the crew would be bored; they had gone to the mess hall and just waited. Crew would walk in looking for food; the lads would shoot them. Then they'd drag the bodies inside and wait for more people to walk in looking for food. Fuckers ranked up a triple-digit body count.  We took over the rest of the ship from main engineering, set a course for a neutral world, and informed the crew, who'd been locked out of their computers, that they were free to leave once we arrived. Also I was kind and allowed them access to Minecraft on their computer consoles, reasoning that if they had something to amuse themselves with they'd be less-effective in breaking my computer lockout.
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Jan 31, 2012 02:47
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:It sounds that way in retrospect, yeah, but at the time it managed to suck all the fun out of the game. When I say that he put it like that, I mean that those were his literal words: "I spend 4 Miracle Points with my Domain 5 to make [non-Power lynchpin of their plans] too lazy to do that." What a fucknut. quote:I'm considering talking them (sans him) into playing Nobilis 3e, since it's a lot clearer in the rules. So, I will not tell you to consider including him, because life is too short to play with fucknuts. But! Your post made me realize that Newbilis is slightly more fucknut-resistant than NOldbilis was. First of all, in 3e, Nobles aren't immune to direct Miracles, so Sloth could skip the middleman and just make the PCs too lazy to do anything! "That sounds much worse!" you cry. But even in the worse case, it would just give them an Affliction that would give them mad Miracle Points every time it kept them from doing something they wanted to...which it would be doing almost constantly! What's more, it could be overcome for free if anything the PC cared a lot about (ie, had a Bond with) was at stake, and most Nobles have bonds with their 'side' (ie Hell-guys care about Hell enough to fight for it, what a shock). And this is all assuming assuming that he actually can get a hit in, when everyone else in the entire group would respond by simultaneously making him furious with himself for doing something so stupid, filled with longing to see Hell's plans fulfilled, and proud of how much of a personal hand he takes in the plan, etc. etc. A second lesser point is that, with the new Persona stat, Sloth have a lot of other powers that it'd be more interesting for people to deal with. He could take "Sloth is intelligent" as an Estate Property* and then make people, things or himself more or less intelligent, or "Sloth arouses righteous ire in others" or whatever else, and that would at least inject some variety into the awful proceedings. Even if he took "Sloth stops things from getting done," that would just mean he'd be making someone or something liable to mess up organized proceedings in some way, rather than always weighing people down with a boring lassitude. He could also turn people, things, or himself into a particular quality or sensation of laziness, which seems like good fun even if he is only doing it to mess with other players. To reiterate the important point, though (which you seem to already understand quite well): don't play Nobilis with this person, because they clearly can't think of anything fun they want a passionate semi-mortal of unknowable powers to actually do, and this does not speak well for their ability to play this particular game.
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Jan 31, 2012 03:18
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:This is pretty awesome, considering that Interdictor Cruisers are one of the most valuable capital ships, strategy-wise. Especially since you have a gigantic fleet of Trade Federation drone ships. What ambushes/battles did you set up with it?
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Jan 31, 2012 15:40
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gently caress it, now I just want to play the Power of Sloths. Edit: Also, a zealously prideful agent of Sloth would be an awesome character. "I will see the WHOLE WORLD become lazy before I die!"
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Jan 31, 2012 16:12
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So, I've been following this thread from the beginning, and I've finally decided to share some stories. For background, my circle of friends had dabbled with RPGs ever since middle school, mostly just running a few D&D dungeon crawls. A few years ago, we got into it for reals. My first really memorable experience was our Hunter: the Vigil one-shot, or as I like to call it, Five Little Hunters. We were playing a "find the murderer"/"locked in with a killer" scenario, with the PCs being snowed in at a mansion where the other guests were being horribly slaughtered around us. The party had been summoned to the manor by the owner, except for one guy, Q, who was play the social dillettante son of the owner, for a lovely dinner, until the snows hit. The other five guests were also trapped, so we decided to hunker down and wait for a plow. The next morning, Guest A was found with his throat torn out. Everyone else was understandably distressed, so the PCs made a secret plan to track down the killer, led by Q, who knew the house and guests like the back of his hand. The party failed to save Guests B and C, but kept Guest E close, as they had befriended him. At this point, all the clues pointed to Guest D, and the party barricaded themselves in the study, except for me, who had gone upstairs to grab some ammo from the attic. The ST handed me a note saying "Along with th ammo, you find the shredded body of Guest D, and some bloodstained pieces of paper. Don't tell anyone yet, or I'll kick you in the nuts". I "ran" down to the study, with the papers, and burst in the door shouting that we were dead wrong. At the same time, the ST reached into his bag and tossed onto the table papers that had been made to look like bloodstained diary pages. More specifically, the pages of Q's diary discussing his hatred of his family, his spiral into madness, and his new "abilities". Q started laughing evilly, and transformed into a werewolf. Cue audible gasps from the players, as we had been betrayed by one of our own! Combat ensues, and we learned that setting a werewolf on fire only makes him angrier. We only survived because we found some silver chains that had held Q's ancestor, and beat his skull in. High fives were had by all in celebration and general awesomeness. Post game, we were talking and hanging out, and it came up that the ST and Q had planned this a month in advance, and Q had been built as a born liar and scoundrel. Everyone was in awe of the planning and forethought, and we all agreed that this needed to happen again. Later:Mage: Drinking contests, "light" irradiation, and making physics cry!
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Jan 31, 2012 16:37
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FewtureMD posted:So, I've been following this thread from the beginning, and I've finally decided to share some stories. For background, my circle of friends had dabbled with RPGs ever since middle school, mostly just running a few D&D dungeon crawls. A few years ago, we got into it for reals. My first really memorable experience was our Hunter: the Vigil one-shot, or as I like to call it, Five Little Hunters. To give slightly more detail on this one (I was the ST): The first 'guest' murdered was actually the owner of the mansion, the werewolf's mother. As detailed in the diary, the werewolf had been an extremely intelligent and promising student who was forced to stay home in order to care for his sickly mother. He became obsessed over his wasted potential, and eventually bitter and resentful towards his mother over the years before his transformation struck. While escaping from the werewolf, the group discovered a hidden passage to the basement containing two human skeletons, one of which was bound in silver chains. This corresponded to myths they had uncovered earlier about the werewolf's ancestors, a pair of brothers who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I pretty much just hit every Gothic trope I could, but the whole thing only worked because the werewolf's player did a great job at convincing everybody to 'split up and search for clues!' while he picked off the other guests. Androc fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jan 31, 2012 |
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Jan 31, 2012 19:45
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GaryLeeLoveBuckets posted:This is pretty awesome, considering that Interdictor Cruisers are one of the most valuable capital ships, strategy-wise. Especially since you have a gigantic fleet of Trade Federation drone ships. What ambushes/battles did you set up with it? That Interdictor brought our total up to two-and-a-half; we'd had a few before, but one of them was damaged so heavily that instead of repairing all of its gravity generators we repaired half of them, and used the power plant for the other generators to run a planetary-scale ion cannon we'd taken off of one world's defenses and literally kludged it into the ship. So our already-existing Interdictors, the Speed Bump and the Rumble Strip, have been used for plenty of ambushes but sadly none of the ones I was there for.
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Jan 31, 2012 21:56
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Due to the last minute cancellation of a game last week by the GM I ended up running an impromptu one-shot session with all of 15 minutes planning. It turned out to be one of my favourite games of late. The party started as steampunk-esque sky pirates, boozing it up on a pleasure island after a big score. This doesn't last long before an imperial patrol turns up to bring them to justice. Out-gunned and desperate they flee the island, managing to stay ahead of the patrol only thanks to some clever planning by their navigator and the ship's clockwork AI. They hadn't had a chance to resupply, so they stop at a supposedly uninhabited island to hunt animals, gather fruits and the like. Highlights of the next few hours include: The discovery of a local tribe who speak a dialect based entirely around technical jargon, being the descendants of a crashed engineering crew. The protocol bot was the only one who could understand their language initially, so all negotiations between the party and the locals consisted of me whispering messages to the bot, and the bot interpreting them and passing them on to everyone else in whatever manner he liked. The discovery that the huge crabs they'd found on the beach earlier were used by the natives to produce a highly hallucinogenic liquer, leading to much of the party tripping balls on crab juice. One of the players asking if the locals had any interesting beliefs or quirks and rolling really well to find out. I'd had nothing in mind so decided that yes, the main interesting local quirk is their Rite of Manhood: To become a man on the island each youth basically bungee jumps off the edge of the island and through the swarm of sky-sharks below. Those that survive are fully fledged men. Of course the party decides it would be an excellent idea if young Theo The Cabin Boy were to undergo this process... mostly so that the rest of them can rob the village while everyone is gathered on the beach for the ritual. A plan is formed! Theo makes his ritual jump, the party grabs a big shiny stone from the village and makes their way towards their ship. Their resident aeronautical adventurer swoops down on his glider to pluck Theo from the end of his bungee cord and return him to safety. But suddenly! The would be thieves are noticed by the crowd and the engineer and adventurer are set upon by a swarm of sky sharks. Theo and the adventurer swoop under the island and back around the other side, as the ship's AI brings it in over the beach to rescue the rest of the party from the angry locals. Everyone gets aboard and under way just before the sky shark swarm reaches the beach, and they sail away with their glowing prize and the sounds of native/shark related carnage on the air behind them. The glowing rock turns out to be an Imperial control stone, giving them the potential to shut down the Imperial fleets at will. With some planning, some favours from other pirates, and a healthy dose of insane bravado brought on by the huge quantities of hallucinogenic crab juice they're all still chugging they set about crashing the Imperial throne room, killing the emperor, and declaring a republic. They manage to do this, thanks in part to catching a leviathanesque sky-whale and hiding the control rod inside it. They casually sacrifice the rest of the pirate fleet and countless civilians to get their whale past the outer defences, activate the control rod, and open a way into the throne room. Things get bloody as their by now religious visions turn them on each other as well as the emperor, but by the time the dust settles Captain Shellshock is the head of a bold new Utopian republic in the sky. The players have asked for a sequel session, 200 years later, in which the True Sons of Theo the Cabin Boy gather to overthrow the by now corrupt republic. I think I'll update things to less steampunk and more Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow type antics for that. I consider this a success for a game with no planning, where everything was being made up half a step ahead of the players' actions.
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Feb 2, 2012 16:44
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Exculpatrix posted:I consider this a success for a game with no planning, where everything was being made up half a step ahead of the players' actions. This is the only kind of game I know how to run. I'm going to try a different angle this next time. We are going to use Dawn of Worlds, a small list of rules to make a world and its history as a group and then we can discuss what kind of game we want to play, where to play it in the world we've built, and in what time period. I think it would be great for playing back and forth through time in a set campaign universe that WE created. If only I had players.
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Feb 2, 2012 20:07
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Zereth posted:Sometimes they will try and figure out how to steal the ground, too. This is so true. In my group's old epic 4E FR campaign, they managed to shut down the mythallar powering Saccors (Netheril's other flying city) and crash it into the Sea of Fallen Stars. The next session began with one of the players telling me, "so we decided we want to get some potions of water breathing and recover that city. We figure if we can turn it off, we can turn it back on." Two sessions later, they were gallivanting across Faerun in their own flying city. Later, after I revealed that Bhaal had come back (thanks in part to some of their earlier actions)and built a giant fortress of indomitable evil on the largest of the Moonshae islands, they decided that the best battering ram was a thousand tons of flying magic city.
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Feb 2, 2012 20:08
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PeterWeller posted:Later, after I revealed that Bhaal had come back (thanks in part to some of their earlier actions)and built a giant fortress of indomitable evil on the largest of the Moonshae islands, they decided that the best battering ram was a thousand tons of flying magic city. Whenever my friends and I play a game set in space, there will always be at least one spaceship rammed into whatever military base, asteroid, evil alien insect queen or whatever the obstacle of the moment happens to be. The only time this is not true is when we set a spaceship to blow up in a nuclear holocaust before ramming it into something.
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Feb 3, 2012 19:50
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Acceptable variation: the obstacle itself is hijacked and rammed into a planet or sun.
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Feb 3, 2012 19:59
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JimmyT64 posted:The only time this is not true is when we set a spaceship to blow up in a nuclear holocaust before ramming it into something.
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Feb 3, 2012 20:37
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Yawgmoth posted:Why would you do that when it's so much more effective to crash the ship and then detonate it while it's in the thing what needs to be destroyed? It would depend on the type of ship and durability of the object being rammed. if you had a big enough ship and the object was a space station or something, you could imagine the ship would hold together somewhat after collision, like the aft section would be sticking out the side of the station. in those circumstances a Ram > Explode maneuver would work. if the ship is small, relatively fragile, or otherwise prone to vaporizing itself on contact, or the object is really tough, then aiming for a simultaneous Ram/Explosion would prove to be better. 
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Feb 3, 2012 22:42
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Reading this thread has reminded me of a tale of yore. I was once upon a time GMing a large group of what could best be described as powergaming grognards in a campaign about being a Viking in D&D 3.5e. The campaign started with them in this town and I had everything set up for them to start an initial quest chain to expand upon the lore. However when the party and their cart of stuff gets to the elders house, the de-facto party leader asks if there are any windows. Not knowing his intentions I say that there are, and he gets the most evil grin on his face. The bard(leader) tells the group barbarian to stick a lit torch in the cork hole on one of the barrels of ale they have brought along, and they throw it into the house of the elder, setting everything on fire. the two archers in the party then begin shooting down everyone who runs out. Afterwards, they book it out of town and camp a bit away only to be attacked by the populace of the village, of whom they slaughter to a man following a long pitched combat. They then proceeded to gather up a large number of wooden stakes, decapitate all the villagers, and surround the entire village perimeter with the decapitated heads of the townspeople. And then they looted everything and lit it all on fire. That was the first twenty minutes of that campaign.
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Feb 4, 2012 01:03
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And after that, how much longer did your game of Gokstads & Genocide run?
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Feb 4, 2012 01:10
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I'm a little bit confused, what was the benefit of sticking the torch into a hole in a barrel of ale? That seems kind of random. Did they/you think that ale would burn? (It doesn't, at least not in our world, as far as I'm aware.)
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Feb 4, 2012 01:31
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This is one of those situations where you can either be all "Oh I'm sorry, ale doesn't burn" or you can have fun exploding the townhouses of rear end in a top hat villagers and looting the town. Not that telling them ale doesn't burn wouldn't have also been fun if handled correctly. And by 'handled correctly' I mean "Sorry, ale doesn't burn. But what's this? You find some convenient lamp oil nearby..."
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Feb 4, 2012 01:43
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I don't think he specified that the villagers did anything to offend the party besides:
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Feb 4, 2012 01:47
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Doc Hawkins posted:I don't think he specified that the villagers did anything to offend the party besides: If the group wants to kill all the villagers, then I guess those villagers must be assholes that deserve it. 
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Feb 4, 2012 01:55
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Mornacale posted:If the group wants to kill all the villagers, then I guess those villagers must be assholes that deserve it. I think I've reached my limits as a funhaver.
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Feb 4, 2012 03:19
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Doc Hawkins posted:I don't think he specified that the villagers did anything to offend the party besides: Yes, but on the other hand the players were:
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Feb 4, 2012 03:20
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Benagain posted:This is one of those situations where you can either be all "Oh I'm sorry, ale doesn't burn" or you can have fun exploding the townhouses of rear end in a top hat villagers and looting the town. I once had an AD&D character who had an endless jug of the most powerful and unpredictable ale ever created. It never had the same effect on a person, except for my character who was virtually immune to it (outside of getting a mean buzz). If I remember correctly, it had been brewed by a god. Sadly, the jug met its end when it was left in a burning inn after a fairly epic fight. The group had been forced to escape the small town during the fight, and my character was distraught about losing his ale. While everyone else was in the midst of goofing on my inconsolable character, the jug of ale exploded like a small tactical nuke in the distance, wiping the entire small town off the map.
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Feb 4, 2012 14:16
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I'll share my favorite Call of Cthulhu story, I tell it everywhere else. A few years back, at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention, or Philcon, (Back when it didn't suck and wasn't in friggin' Jersey) I got to play a game of Call of Cthulhu with a friend of mine and a bunch of new guys. The six of us played six relatives who were coming together for the death of an uncle and the inheritance of his creepy old mansion. I was playing the eldest, a stodgy banker, and everyone else was given similar work-a-day characters and weird secret ties to one another. Best roleplayer was Phil Khan, who really, really loved having the same name as the convention and was high as a goddamn kite. Listening to him talk, you could believe he really saw those horrible demons. Possibly because he was looking at something about five feet behind and two feet above whoever he was talking to at the time. Anyway, we go to the funeral, do the introductions, start poking about this creepy mansion just as the sun goes down, and then my parents show up--they were lending me the car, but the price was I had to drive 'em back home from the convention when they wanted to leave, so I said my goodbyes and my character left the mansion to go do some emergency banking in town. With the rough traffic, and the fact that we were giving a ride to someone else too, even late at night the round trip was just under two hours. When I came back, the game was still going, but I had completely missed all the supernatural elements--the long dead five year old boy had passed away, and the two demons released from the kaleidoscope prison had grown bored of tormenting the players and headed off to do demon things. So what my character returned to at the mansion was not a supernatural horror show, but five adults cowering in the dark, dancing in odd ways instead of walking (Any sound that repeats itself SUMMONS THE DEMON! Don't walk normally! Unplug the phoooooones!) breaking all the lights (If two light sources light the same place, a demon appears there! Put them all out to be safe! We can use moonlight!) and using mirrors and spoons to watch behind themselves for that drat kid with the knife who kept showing up. So my banker did the only responsible thing--he called the police, who showed up in a few dozen cars with flashing lights and blaring, repeating sirens to have all my depressingly demented relatives taken into custody. Such a pity! He had to have them all declared mentally unfit, and then appointed himself executor of their estates to pay for their stays in the sanitarium. The mansion was inherited by him alone, of course--but he'd share once they were better. I can't imagine a more Lovecraftian ending to a Call of Cthulhu adventure than someone showing up and sending everyone to the crazyhouse. Apparently there was some plot where our uncle was a warlock studying Shub-Niggurath? Also the others had traumatic, repressed memories of a murdered child used in a foul rite to seal demons here long ago? Phil Khan assured me that there was the eyeball of some gigantic creature looking up at him from the well out back, but he was pretty baked. All I know is, my character tripled his financial holdings, gained no Mythos skill, and lost no sanity. Suck it, bitches! I won Call of Cthulhu!
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Feb 4, 2012 15:00
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Hopefully I will have more awesome stories for you after we get more Star Wars today, but I was reminded of my girlfriend of a quick little tale from much earlier on in the campaign (around the time of the Battle of Hoth, movie-wise): We're trying to leave orbit of a planet because we just were up to Shenanigans that included "kidnapping" the daughter of the local sector Moff because she wanted to join the Rebellion (she's currently our head Intelligence Officer, actually) when flight control tells us to stand by for inspection. Being inspected would be bad, and since at this point in the campaign we're basically just a bunch of dudes with a fast ship and not the Sector Armada we have since become, shooting our way out is inadvisable. So I got an idea. "Hey," I ask the GM, "I can tie my slicer rig into our comms system, right?" Sure, he says, looking a little confused. It's not like I can hack a radio or anything. Me: "Good. I want to roll Computer Use to write up a quick voice-changer program." GM: "Okay, sure you can make your voice sound different on the radio. Now what?" Me: "Now I adjust the program so that I sound like Darth Vader. We have plenty of that dude's voice on tape, he's on the news every so often. Then I tell flight control to get bent because I am on a priority mission from the Emperor and if they slow me down I will visit them in person to show my displeasure." GM: "...wow. Um, okay, you're gonna get a big circumstance bonus to your Bluff for that." Me: "Good thing, since I have zero ranks in Bluff.  oh, look. natural 20."GM: "....yeah, they let you leave without incident. In fact they thank you for leaving without incident." Escaping the Empire by pretending to be Darth Vader was nice, but what was nicer was that we'd cracked the Imperial communications net - essentially, their Email systems - some time back. So I decided to send Unca Vader a polite thank-you note for his assistance in getting us off-world so expediently. Anonymized it thoroughly, and sent it off. GM looks at me, grins, and says "Three days later you get a reply that reads simply "I am glad to have been of assistance." From Vader's account." ...when we met up with the rest of the Rebel fleet to plan out Endor and Endor-related missions like our current assault on Coruscant, he made a special note of explaining how my character, Miles, was a quasi-legend among Rebel techies and slicers. See, everyone's sent email to Vader; it's practically a rite of passage. But apparently I'm the only guy to whom he ever wrote back.
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Feb 4, 2012 15:57
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DCB, I want SO HARD to be in your star wars game and I don't even like star wars that much.
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Feb 4, 2012 16:21
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The only time I played a Star Wars P&P RPG I ended up playing the Bounty Hunter with a Machine Gun archetype, except we were breaking out of prison so we were very unarmed. For some reason, this didn't keep us from rushing into battle against a group of prison guards with blaster rifles. As far as I remember, I made a single successful roll: to quietly subdue a passing civilian keeping her from making any noise about the band of scruffy-looking men in prison uniforms and maybe we could later use her as a hostage (I'm pretty sure we were bad people). The wild die kept exploding and I accidentally broke her neck, so we just sort of left her body for the cleaning drones to sweep up. RIP, innocent bystander lady.
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Feb 4, 2012 18:52
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Someone in another thread mention the Dragon Mountain module from 2e, which I remember fondly because I played it. It was a group of us, 15 year olds in 1995, eating cheetos and being awesome D&D nerds. I was playing a 11th level Thri-Kreen fighter, and we had to defend a village from about a 500-strong Kobold army. We know they're coming, and start preparing... when I get an idea. See, in 2nd Edition, if a fighter is several levels higher than his opponent, there's some sort of combat mastery rule where they extra attacks per round based on how over-leveled they are. And then I realized, as a Thri-Kreen, I can naturally get 5 attacks (claw/claw/claw/claw/bite) per round if I stop using my spear. Sure, they only deal 1d3+4 each, but Kobolds only have 5 HP, so any hit would kill them. Then the Wizard, who was ready to start flinging fireballs like the true artillery piece he was, realizes he has Haste memorized.  :Well I could haste you, and get you an extra attack per round. :I'm not sure about that, I only have five years to live, and Haste takes a year off your life. Is it worth the risk? I could die! (dm): You would get an extra attack with each of your natural attacks. :.... : So the kobolds attack, and I wade into combat, claw/claw/claw/claw/bite-ing for all I'm worth. Because of the Haste, the level disparity, and 5 natural attacks modded by the "3 attacks every 2 rounds" for my level, I am attacking 40 times per round. At this point, I explain to the DM that I will simply be rolling a d20, and that is how many kobolds I kill each round, as I am now an insectoid blender of death. Did we get the rules right? Probably not. But on that shining day, for just a few rounds, my Thri-Kreen fighter stood tall. Covered in kobold splatter.
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Feb 4, 2012 19:29
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The combat mastery thing was actually a 1E rule that was dropped for 2E. It allowed a fighter to make a number of attacks equal to his level against enemies with less than 1 HD. But that shouldn't detract from your awesome memories of your mantis-man wading through a horde of kobolds.  Also, Male Man, do you have any stories where your group doesn't murder innocents wholesale?
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Feb 4, 2012 19:55
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Mystic Mongol posted:Suck it, bitches! I won Call of Cthulhu! "Sorry I had to abruptly fly off to Hawaii for business purposes before we finally tracked down the abandoned mining complex, guys--did I miss anything?" "I'A!!! I'A!!! THE BLACK GOAT OF THE WOODS WITH A THOUSAND YOUNG!!!" "Welp."
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Feb 4, 2012 21:22
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Mystic Mongol posted:I'll share my favorite Call of Cthulhu story, I tell it everywhere else. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
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Feb 5, 2012 09:24
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:This leads to poo poo like them saying "We know they're somewhere in this region of space, right? Let's attach a hyperdrive to an asteroid and program it to zig-zag back and forth throughout this region and turn off the safety interlocks that make it drop out of hyperspace in a gravity well. That way when it smacks into their base it'll vaporize the whole drat thing." We got lucky - it hit a pair of cruisers out on patrol instead of the base. Yeah, if you have spare hyperdrives there is no real reason not to make ridiculous suicide bombs. The only example of a hyperspace capable ship hitting a planet in the canon ended up killing everyone. It is a crazy efficient strat (and one of the reasons you can't really play super serious star wars)
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Feb 5, 2012 12:11
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Karandras posted:Yeah, if you have spare hyperdrives there is no real reason not to make ridiculous suicide bombs. The only example of a hyperspace capable ship hitting a planet in the canon ended up killing everyone. It is a crazy efficient strat (and one of the reasons you can't really play super serious star wars) Well, it's also technically difficult in that in order to do it deliberately you have to disable the safety interlocks that cause the hyperdrive to shut down in a gravity well, and then once you do that it's only really good for targets you know you'll be reliably able to hit - so planets and your slower space stations, really. That said, yes, theoretically there's no reason that the Rebel Alliance couldn't be all "suck it, Palpatine, we don't need a Death Star to crack planets wide open, we just need a hyperdrive and a socket wrench" but at that point they become mass murderers. I don't know, I think that it's possible to play super serious Star Wars while still opting not to be Space bin Laden. Just saying. (also I got my dates wrong and game is next week so no new awesome stories yet. I gotta wrack my brain and remember some of the older awesome stories.)
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Feb 5, 2012 13:43
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Well, I mean this is coming from someone who hasn't played the system and so maybe there's something I've missed, but if you have a very, very common piece of technology that you can easily rig to destroy a planet, why do you even need a death star? I can understand some form of pacification weapon, or even something that kills everyone on a planet while leaving it inhabitable, but we're expressly shown that the Death Star cracks planets like a loving walnut. Why would you need to spend the time, effort, money, and manpower to build one if you can just take a cargo hauler, tweak the hyperdrive, and point it at Alderaan?
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Feb 5, 2012 13:59
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Captain Bravo posted:Well, I mean this is coming from someone who hasn't played the system and so maybe there's something I've missed, but if you have a very, very common piece of technology that you can easily rig to destroy a planet, why do you even need a death star? I can understand some form of pacification weapon, or even something that kills everyone on a planet while leaving it inhabitable, but we're expressly shown that the Death Star cracks planets like a loving walnut. Why would you need to spend the time, effort, money, and manpower to build one if you can just take a cargo hauler, tweak the hyperdrive, and point it at Alderaan? Short answer: I don't think anyone thought that far ahead once it was established that hyperdrives collided with poo poo. And really, in all fairness, the Death Star is more powerful than the average hyperdrive-equipped-collision (which is why you put the drive on asteroids and say gently caress it, but even that was hyperbole). Slightly less short answer: Death Stars look cooler. There's nothing about 'we grabbed an asteroid and threw a Dinosaur Killer at the bad guys' that says "FEAR AND OBEY THE STATE" quite as thoroughly as the enormous moon-sized floating battlestation that makes planets go boom and which is also filled with legions of your jackbooted thugs. Longer, 'I'm no expert but this is how it was explained to me' answer: It's both pretty drat difficult to override the failsafes that drop a ship out of hyperspace when it encounters a gravity well (like "there are maybe five technicians in a given sector of space who can do it reliably and have the drive behave the way it's intended to and not just magically disappear or some poo poo" difficult) and the difficulty in getting the drive-rock to its target without hitting other poo poo on the way - see the in-game example I mentioned where a pair of cruisers turned into a ribbon of glittering space dust about three miles long - is not inconsiderable. Basically in order to use the hyperdrive-rock-hit-things trick a lot of factors have to line up juuuuuust right, and even so it's stupidly difficult to pull off, whereas a Death Star works pretty much anywhere and once you have it built all you need is a half-bright crew, most of which you can usually clone. And also it's stupid and try not to think about it too much because Star Wars, dude.
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Feb 5, 2012 14:40
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PeterWeller posted:Also, Male Man, do you have any stories where your group doesn't murder innocents wholesale? ...Huh. How about that, I guess I don't. I don't even think I've told two stories from the same group, either. Which means that I'm the only factor that links these together.
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Feb 5, 2012 17:29
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Also it's really really hard to just straight up destroy planets. You'd need a pretty good sized asteroid, even moving at relativistic speeds. Although I don't know how SW hyperspeed works, if it actually moves you FTL as opposed to say, Star Trek spatial warping than yeah that's get easier real quickly. The Death Star just shoots a superlaser at it.
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Feb 5, 2012 18:19
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GruntyThrst posted:Also it's really really hard to just straight up destroy planets. You'd need a pretty good sized asteroid, even moving at relativistic speeds. Although I don't know how SW hyperspeed works, if it actually moves you FTL as opposed to say, Star Trek spatial warping than yeah that's get easier real quickly. SW hyperspeed works by (as of the last time I was seriously in the loop on SW nerddom) shifting you into an ~alternate dimension~ ("hyperspace") where relativity doesn't apply. Large enough masses cast a "shadow" in hyperspace. And the Death Star was created as a symbol, not an actual practical thing. "Rule through the fear of force rather than the force itself." The Empire doesn't want to be exploding planets full of resources and subjects, it wants to have a big terrifying invincible battlestation; using hyperdrive tricks would be like the USA smuggling a dirty bomb into Tehran. Also, there's sort of a MAD situation: once the loving government of the galaxy starts throwing poo poo into planets, how long before somebody's hurling asteroids at Coruscant? Finally, using hyperdrive isn't really that much better. Hypernav is tricky, so if you launch from far away you risk missing, which could entail blowing up the entirely wrong planet. But if you're going to make the jump from in-system, you may as well just show up with a fleet of Star Destroyers and sterilize the planet from orbit.
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Feb 5, 2012 22:43
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It's been years since I read about the mechanics of hyderdrive in Star Wars, but I thought the deal was, "if you hit something in realspace while you're in hyperspace, you blow up, they don't."
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Feb 6, 2012 06:44
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That's how I assumed it worked too, but apparently hyperspace ramming is canon. So I guess there's no good reason it isn't done constantly except for "shooting lasers at each other is way cooler."
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Feb 6, 2012 10:32
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