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glitchwraith posted:Politely tell the DM that you play DnD to go on heroic adventures with the other players, and that moping up an NPC's left overs is neither heroic nor fun. Then politely leave if there isn't an immediate improvement. But the fight still rages on! Only 10 more spells of higher level than I am capable of casting and he will be completely spent! Oh wait, he's the magic shop owner so he has a million staves and wands.
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Feb 21, 2012 22:05
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My players and I aren't always well-matched: I love intrigue and backstories, they love stealing everything that isn't nailed down, then breaking everything else. Luckily, we all have a lot of fun every time we get together, but we have some pretty different favorite experiences. My favorite encounter happened while my characters were traveling through a forest, and I had them encounter a big black stag that would follow them at distance, staring at them but never approaching. It was a monster I'd pulled from some third party supplement and altered for my own campaign -- it was some magical creature with a fear aura and a gaze attack to invade dreams. I'd originally envisioned this as a mind-control-one-of-the-players scenario (usually I secretly write notes and sneak them under the table to whoever lost their will save. My players love that poo poo, as they know from experience that party infighting can ruin the game, but still want license to do it every now and then) but unexpectedly, the wizard was the one to lose the save. I realized the encounter would go down in one of two ways -- the others would immediately knock out the wizard, and then the stag would go down probably two rounds later, or the wizard would get off a fireball and the party would be toasted. Also the wizard was a newer player, and I don't know if he would have enjoyed the experience. Whatever the case, I scrapped my notes and started making poo poo up. I told the wizard that the forest was looking really dark, and he was feeling faint. The party made camp, but when it came time for the wizard to take watch, they couldn't wake him up. I placed his mini on a separate map from the other players, and told him that it looked just like the campsite, but the other characters weren't there and a black stag was charging through the forest at him. When he hit the wizard, it spawned a black stag in the real world -- crashing directly into the ranger, who was attempting a heal check at the same time. The wizard was built for buffing the other party members, so he's out of damage spells in just a few rounds. However, he was carrying an enchanted falchion he'd taken off of some undead, and as a backup plan had a spell that gave him proficiency with one weapon for 1 min/class level. He takes a couple of rounds to cast that, and true strike -- getting clubbed around by the stag pretty badly, but passing his concentration checks. At this point, perhaps five or six phantom black stags are rushing around the campsite and fighting the rest of the party. As the stag rushes at him, the wizard swings and hits, killing the stag and waking up. The rest of the party sees the phantom stags disappear, and then sees the wizard standing and holding his sword out, his hand bleeding from a stag-shaped wound on his hand. It left a scar, and he gained the ability to cast fear once a day from it. This he used at least a few times, but if I remember correctly I don't think he ever used the sword again. My players' favorite encounter? That was in the dungeon from 3 or 4 sessions before that one. The players were attacked by a horde of skeletons, and spent maybe ten rounds bull rushing them off a balcony, one by one. They still talk about that one the most.
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Feb 22, 2012 01:33
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Roctavian posted:My players and I aren't always well-matched: I love intrigue and backstories, they love stealing everything that isn't nailed down, then breaking everything else. Make up some disconnected clues based on random words pulled from the dictionary. Pick the most entertaining of the explanations they come up with, pretend that was it all along, reward them with magics.
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Feb 22, 2012 02:13
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Splicer posted:Pick the most entertaining of the explanations they come up with, pretend that was it all along, reward them with magics.
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Feb 22, 2012 04:24
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jonthegm posted:This is the most important lesson I have learned while exploring improvisational GMing. Your players are awesome, and collaboration is always better. The best stories are the ones you didn't intend to explore, but you got there organically through play. So much fun! So many of my DM notes have had "the PCs come up with some clever way to get past this." They always come up with something much more entertaining and convoluted than I ever could.
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Feb 22, 2012 04:43
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Splicer posted:Send them to a dungeon with nothing to steal in it. Strongly hint that someone else already stole it all and that all the clues required to find them are scattered around the dungeon. Did that, players thought it was awesome. The PCs tracked down the guys that stole "their" loot. They found them in a tavern boasting about how they'd killed this and that, stolen the other, and defeated the bad guy. The PCs confronted them with a convoluted explanation of, essentially, "we saw it first, you fuckers", then killed them all and were chased out of town by the watch. They didn't even get to keep the loot. One PC, wistfully glancing back at the now burning town and slaughtered adventurers, peasants, and guardsmen, just said "my stuff is still in the stable, but we can never go back, can we?" I also used to frequently have someone steal their horses and baggage train while they were in the dungeon. They'd then chase down the theives and kill them. I thought it was boring and predictable, but they loved the gently caress out of it, even to the point of deciding not to hire guards because "it's more fun when we don't". That's not really the sort of game I like to play in, but drat if those guys don't love it. If I try to do complicated plots or intrigue, they get bored and start looting and burning everything. I'm thinking of doing a Vikings game (not sure what system) just so they can loot and burn to their heart's content. They'll fight peasants, other vikings, and later on, armies that are trying to stop them from being vikings. I don't think I'll need any actual monsters.
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Feb 22, 2012 04:55
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President Unerlion posted:So here's my next story from my 3.5 group. It's short but funny, maybe in a "you had to be there" way but. Just bare with me. 'Hey hero,' the Orc Wizard says. 'Wanna try some Snow Crash?'
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Feb 22, 2012 10:58
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Hey, you guys took care of those snakes. Thanks.
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WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:'Hey hero,' the Orc Wizard says. 'Wanna try some Snow Crash?' 
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Feb 22, 2012 20:04
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WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:'Hey hero,' the Orc Wizard says. 'Wanna try some Snow Crash?' That reminds me of something from last Saturday's game of Dark Heresy. The party, consisting of an Arbitrator and two assassins with an attached NPC astropath, was investigating some techno-heresy, and had traced a renegade Magos' cybernetic daemonhost to a slaughterhouse in one of the hive's uglier districts. After a few blatant hints, they realized that there was some suspicious psy-nullifier activity within the building's Mechanicus shrine, but that if they tipped their hand too soon, their target would blow the building to poo poo and try to flee the planet. The session sort of started to flag there, with everyone giving me these weird, blank stares. As it turned out, none of them had any idea how to handle an investigation. The next part of the conversation was just priceless:  (me): "Come on, haven't you guys ever seen a police procedural?" : "A what now?" : "You know, like Law & Order, Criminal Minds, NCIS, etc?" : "Nope." : "Never." : "I avoid those like the plague." : "So, not one of you has any ideas for finding your guy?" : "..." : "*sigh* Okay, here's a thought: imagine you're looking for this guy so you can score some weed off of him."They found that fucker within five minutes.
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Feb 22, 2012 20:54
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Thesaurasaurus posted:
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Feb 23, 2012 00:03
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"We can never go back" has to be one of the most common phrases in RPG groups.
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Feb 23, 2012 00:23
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Favorite moment was my mage in an old world of darkness game looking into why a girl killed herself. Met up with her youth counselor, found that he had used a mind spell with him to try to get him away from the investigation. So my mage, an assassin, got a bit upset with this and confronted him. Guy talks about doing this to other girls, mage decides its time to give him the food death and proceeds with steps two and three. Step three is colt anaconda to the head, step two is lighting him on fire under the idea that people on fire don't dodge. So there he is, he takes out a bottle of Jack Daniels offering him a drink and stuffs his scarf into it, then lighting it on fire. The man does not smell the bottle or else he would know a simple thing, its filled with gasoline. So this bottle lights the man and the exit on fire, but then the man freaks the gently caress out, gets shot in the head and die- wait no he keeps on running because oh gently caress twist ending that was a vampire. Eventually he dusted him but either way he was not used to gunshot victims just running away.
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Feb 23, 2012 01:06
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This was a one shot WFRP (1st edition) that we played about 10 years ago. The general premise for the story was that the players were children/teenagers from a small village in the north of the Wastelands, when a warpstone (distilled corrupting magic) meteor crashes behind the next hill. Over night, all the kids start channeling magic of various schools. (For reasons that were never made clear the GM decided to use D&D 3.0 magic schools, instead of the built in colours for the setting.) It became clear that we were going to flee our homes into the Drakwald forest as the townsfolk we had known our whole lives turned on us, seeing as how we were witches and all. (NB: For those not familiar with the setting, magic outside of the bounds of the Wizard Schools is not particularly permitted. There are state sponsored witch hunters that roam the Empire, putting witches and mutants to the torch. Consquently, being able to suddenly change forms or start a fire with a snap of the fingers is the first step on your way to being chased out of town by a pitchfork wielding mob.) The next three hours was filled in with the four players making a head long dash into the beastman and goblin infested forest. Three of these players managed to roleplay being teenagers that have be suddenly outcast from the only place they ever knew by their loved ones, cursed with devil powers they cannot control. The fourth player chose to explore what his transmutation powers allowed him to do. He was a bit more methodical about it than I would have expected a medieval uneducated peasant mud farmer's son to be about it, but that's fine. Everyone was entertained when he polymorphed himself into something that looked like a beastman in order to stay warm. These would be those cannabalistic beastmen that lived in the forest that you used to piss your bed with in terror of. Anyways three hours of him trying to derail the adventure and generally make a mockery of the setting and tone this story is a candidate for worst (well, most annoying anyways) gaming experience ever. Except... During a confrontation with a whole band of beastmen it was looking very grim, my character paniced and in doing so used his evocation powers to start a very large forest fire, and burnt up all the beastmen. The PC that was off on his own seeing what silly shapes he could turn himself into, noticed the approaching fire. He cleverly turns the the GM:  "I turn myself into an obelisk." "Ok, you turn yourself into a obelisk"After the fire dies out, we all gather up and take stock of who survived the attack. We eventually find this tall, blackened obelisk that didn't used to be there. "Ok, I turn myself back into a 12 year old." "How? You are an obelisk."This statement started to sink in for when I turned to the GM: "Do I feel safe and protected by this obelisk?" "Actually, you do. It's sudden appearance here is undoubtable a sign from something indicating that you have reached your destination." "Well then, I believe we will set up camp here. I think the campaign just ended."And lo, another proto-chaos cult had been formed in the deep woods. The PC that had turned himself into our object of worship was still sputtering by the time the rest of the players and the GM had decided that ending was metal as gently caress, and probably couldn't have been more setting appropriate if it had been planned from the beginning.
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Feb 23, 2012 02:01
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ocrumsprug posted:The PC that had turned himself into our object of worship was still sputtering by the time the rest of the players and the GM had decided that ending was metal as gently caress, and probably couldn't have been more setting appropriate if it had been planned from the beginning. , maybe.
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Feb 23, 2012 13:27
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WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:'Hey hero,' the Orc Wizard says. 'Wanna try some Snow Crash?' 
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Feb 23, 2012 13:48
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Colon V posted:Except for But without that dick, this never would have happened. You need game changers man. Renegades. Mavericks. Like me
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Feb 23, 2012 16:20
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So I'm glad the good and bad experiences threads were merged, because I honestly can't decide which one this story fits under. But it's certainly my most memorable, and whenever the old group gets together we inevitably bring it up in awed tones, just generally going "what the gently caress was THAT all about?" The old group I'm talking about is one I gamed with a long time ago, when a perfect storm of circumstances landed me and a few of my friends with five like-minded people that all liked to game. We ended up with this D&D supergroup that was just all kinds of awesome. We had nine people altogether, more people than I had ever gamed with before, and our DM, in addition to somehow working nine of us into one plotline, also helped us all come up with our own INDIVIDUAL plotline for each of our characters. It was awesome, and I might get into some of those stories later, but that's not what I want to talk about now. I want to talk about Derek. Derek was one of three teenagers in our group, and easily the most annoying. He showed up dressed in a full length leather trenchcoat despite it being something like a hundred and two outside, and the first thing he said when he found out we'd be gaming with D&D 3.5 was that it was a lame idea, because "there's no point to being anything other than a monk." Because we were all incredible nerds, we actually got bogged down into a three hour argument with this guy over this. It was like trying to knock down an elm tree by banging your head bloody against it. To him, there was no point in playing any other class besides the one that was the "best", and since the monk was the "best" class, all the other ones were for suckers. For some reason, we let him play anyway, and he ended up playing a spellscale sorcerer because, obviously, if he played a monk the game would be too easy. We all kind of rolled our eyes and just got on with the game. Now, since there were nine people all trying to game at once, it was obviously pretty hard to get us all in one place at one time, the end result being that we were split up into two groups. My group started earlier, and Derek's group came in after the first group had actually progressed in the plot a bit. At the time Derek's group started, my group had been trapped in this giant, empty city. There was a similarly giant, haunted citadel in the middle of the place, but the real suspense came when night fell. The first night, my character gathered everyone up and set them up in an abandoned bank to sleep, reasoning that if something horrible came out, we could all hide in the vault. My character draws first watch, and to his horror, soon after the sun sets, he hears the entire CITY come alive. Footsteps, detached conversations from things that don't know they're dead, and...SOMETHING sniffing at the door. The DM tells me that it sounds like there are thousands of somethings out there. Terrified, I wake everyone up and silently move them into the vault and spend the rest of the night waiting for the sun to rise while clenching my sword in a white-knuckle grip. When day comes, the sound vanishes, and sure enough, when we go outside, the city is just as empty as it was before. Anyway, fast forward a bit. I forget how, but our group had figured out that a) the city was alive with goddamned skeletons and ghosts and more skeletons and skeleton ghosts every night, and b) there was this narrow spit of grassland along the wall that the undead couldn't cross. Since they seemed to be homing in on the bank already on the first night, our second day in the place was spent gathering crates and blankets and making a crude shelter inside the restricted area. We figured the undead couldn't sense us if we were inside that area, so as long as they also couldn't SEE us, we'd be safe. This is where Derek's group comes in. They all get thrown into the giant haunted city with us, and sure enough, as soon as out groups meet up, he starts throwing orders around. I spend literally THE ENTIRE DAY, in game time, trying to reason with him that there are thousands of undead in the city. They can't sense us in the shelter we built. No, I don't know if it will work for sure, but they almost found us the first night. Yes, there's room enough for all of us. No, I don't think we can kill an entire city of undead by ourselves. Will you please stop calling me a pussy and get in the loving shelter now? So night falls, and thankfully Derek has come around to my thinking and is hiding in the shelter with us. As the sun sets, the DM starts with the suspense. "When it gets dark, the silence of the city is suddenly replaced by sound. You can hear footsteps and voices, what sound like one-sided conversations. The noise is everywhere. It's like being in a busy marketplace, but something is very wrong with what you hear." Me: "Okay...I pull aside a corner of curtain and risk a peek outside." DM: "Right. You see what can only be described as a HORDE of skeletons. Thousands of them, all milling about, some of them on errands, some of them merely watching. A few are just vacantly staring at walls, waiting." Me: "Creepy." Derek: "Okay. I'm going to run out of the shelter." Me: "...WHAT?" The DM looks startled, with a kind of deer in the headlights look. Derek is grinning at all of us like he just pulled the trump card, and I desperately try to reason with him. Me: "Dude, there's...there's like thousands of these loving things." Derek: "So? They're just skeletons. Like level one poo poo." Me: "...WE'RE ALL LEVEL ONE, YOU loving DUMBASS." Derek: "Whatever. I'm walking out." The DM actually gets a panicked look on his face, and I tell him I try to grab Derek's character. Derek says I need to roll, so I do, and botch it. SO DO THE OTHER SEVEN PLAYERS that try to stop him. It's like the God of Jackasses was watching over this guy. I tell the DM "I'm quicksaving. F6, man." End result, he walks out of the shelter and just kind of stands out there, about fifty feet from cover. That was his whole plan. DM: "As you stand there, one of the skeletons suddenly notices you, then all of a sudden, they ALL do. They stop whatever they're doing and begin watching you with their dark, empty sockets." Derek: "Uh...hi..." DM: "They begin picking up the cobblestones at their feet and chucking them at you. The rain of stones knock you on the ground and soon your battered, lifeless body is..." Derek: "Wait, they don't have to roll or anything?" DM: "There are hundreds of cobblestones coming at you. No, I don't have to roll." He turns to the rest of us. "With the spellscale dead, the skeletons turn their attention to your crude shelter. The barrage of rocks do little to damage the crates you're hiding behind, but that doesn't matter. They're just trying to keep you inside. Before long, the skeleton mages show up." We all sit in stunned silence, letting the TPK that just hit us sink in. Then I timidly speak up. "Um...quickload." DM: "...okay. You're all inside the shelter. There are thousands of skeletons outside." We all breath a sigh of relief. Derek: "Okay...I got it figured out. I'm going to go outside again." Thankfully, we managed to beat him into submission and made it through the night. That was the first time his character died. What makes this one of my best experiences roleplaying is the other two times his character died, but this post went on longer than I thought, so I'll post them up later.
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Feb 23, 2012 21:46
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Pit of Despair posted:I tell the DM "I'm quicksaving. F6, man."
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Feb 23, 2012 22:19
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Oh man, I've experienced a near-Derek moment, come to think of it. We were playing D&D 4.0 (Mince Pieface was actually our GM for this game), and the group had just begun to infiltrate the volcano lair of Tiamat's exarch Irregulon (Activia jokes abounded in that campaign). A bunch of villagers nearby had been kidnapped to work in the mines there, plus we'd heard that Irregulon held a powerful magical artifact, so we were being big drat heroes and sneaking in a side entrance. We'd managed to evade security for the most part, until all of a sudden a giant dragon comes rearing out of the nearby lava pools. Battle ensues as we try to keep it from giving away our presence, and at first we were doing a pretty decent job of subduing it. Then our resident swordmage decides to throw a fire spell at it. A fire spell... at the lava dragon. In character, out of character, the other players and I shouted at him for probably about 10 minutes trying to get him not to do it, but to no avail. I'm not sure what he thought would happen, exactly, but the GM just grinned as the dragon absorbed the fire attack and spewed lava everywhere in retaliation, killing one of the party members in the process as she slipped and fell in the lava pit. Not quite as bad, but still a total  moment.
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Feb 23, 2012 23:07
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Rose Spirit posted:Then our resident swordmage decides to throw a fire spell at it. So I guess you all royally honked your monster knowledge checks? Because that's kind of what they're there for.
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Feb 23, 2012 23:27
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Glazius posted:So I guess you all royally honked your monster knowledge checks? Because that's kind of what they're there for. It didn't really matter what we told him at that point. We had a fighter (me), a rogue, a wizard, and a shaman at the time, but the wizard was too busy laughing at him and the shaman was too shy to ever speak up much at all. The rogue and I didn't really have much Int between us, we just figured that if that thing lived in lava, throwing fire at it wouldn't do much of anything. Plus it takes time in combat to make checks, and we were too busy stabbing.
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Feb 23, 2012 23:53
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This one is among the good experiences, mostly because we were so amazed we managed to survive in the end. A few years ago a friend of mine ran a 2E Planescape game. I was the only poor Prime in a party of Planars so I got run around a lot (my first experience in Sigil was a chase as the Thief stole my Animal Companion). After we ran through the module with the Mercurial we ended up sandboxing a bit and we got led into the world of Greyhawk. The first time we were there we didn't really know what it was both IC and OOC and we were on an island with an abandoned and ruined Mage tower. There was a cracked orb and another orb which was not cracked. Being the dutiful adventurers we were, we stuck both into our packs and didn't really think much of it until later we noticed the unbroken orb starting to fill up with odd parts of Planes we visited. A few bits of wood from Arborea and some metal from Acherus at this point. This would become dreadfully relevant later. The Orb allowed us to travel between planes if we focused on it strongly, as it was filled with lightning. A quick aside to set up a little bit of context for the next situation. My character, a Half-Elf Ranger/Windwalker (Specialty Priest of Shaundakul, for the ability to dual-wield swords at the expense of no Major access to Necromancy or Element aside from Air) had become a member of a Good organization and through this acquired a Decanter of Endless water. This one was special because it connected to the River Oceanus at a point where the water was very distinctly imbued with Good alignment effectively making it Holy Water. We also had a Modron in the group who was our Fighter. We had managed to convince him and a Wizard to install an Iron-Box of Holding into his head, because a Bag of Holding would puncture horrifically with the small armoury we looted off of people. There was a lid on the Modron's head which could be opened so he and the party could put stuff in. Anyway, after we ended up so far out into the Outlands we'd accidentally traversed into the Farplane we somehow made a portal into the Cage. Terrified of the horrific retribution the Lady of Pain would undoubtedly visit on us for breaking the Cage we remained in the alley we'd appeared in, which was shadowed and contained a very reliable portal which we took before it got light. This landed us back in Greyhawk again. We had a boat with us this time and so we decided to row to the mainland. This was not quite so laughable considering the Modron had 19 strength and did not really need to rest. Our party eventually made its way into City Greyhawk and discovered that a Mage was looking for us. When we discovered the Mage wanted the orbs we had previously discovered because he was being pressured by Demon Lords we panicked and used Forget to erase the guy's memory. As we were going to leave Greyhawk alarms went off everywhere as the armies of Heaven and Hell invaded. Suddenly our group of around Lv7 adventurers was facing down a horde of Molydeus and Maraliths. We'd split up earlier so my character was with the Modron who had the orbs in his Box of Holding and they wanted them pretty badly. Enough to burn the city to the ground and wage war on the Prime. The Modron ran faster than my character, just enough to keep pace with the demons who were still out of range to do anything lethal but my character wasn't quite so lucky. Then we hit a fantastic idea. I climbed into the Iron-Box of Holding in the Modron's head, held onto the side and rode in him as he ran away. Furthermore I turned the Endless Decanter of Water I possessed inside out to set it to it's geyser function and we managed to run and pressure hose the demons far enough back to lose them in the woods. Then we used the orb to get the heck out of there. The campaign got even better from then on. We entered into the Astral plane and our Bleaker Mage decided randomly to put the two spheres together. Which was exactly what our GM wanted. As we went to different planes we sucked up parts of them, including the Grey Gem of Chaos from Dragonlance when we broke into that at some point. After this the orb no longer took us where we wanted to go and eventually after the Modron managed to suck my animal companion into it and then try to get it out, he caused it to consume the entire Multiverse. The culmination of our two years of campaign? We got a choice on whether to destroy or keep the Multiverse when we made a new one. That orb turned out to be the seed to create a new reality. Our unwitting party was just crazy enough to do everything the GM wanted us to do with it which was often fairly random and unexpected without him having to railroad us. So yeah, not only did we accidentally get the armies of Heaven and Hell to burn down the City of Greyhawk, we later on accidentally snuffed it out of existence and remade it with a much less vibrant copy when we tried to avoid destroying the universe. Needless to say, the gods of Greyhawk probably didn't like our group so much. We got to muck around in the new reality as primordial gods for a while which was a fun two session epilogue to the campaign.
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Feb 24, 2012 00:49
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Rose Spirit posted:Plus it takes time in combat to make checks, and we were too busy stabbing. Unless the rules changed without my noticing, a knowledge check is a free action as you either know what it is or you don't.
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Feb 24, 2012 00:57
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You get a free one at the beginning of combat usually. I can't remember if this is a houserule or not, but we also played that you could spend an action to try again. If I remember correctly, the swordmage was the only one who had decent int, and they initially got high enough to know the dragon's resistances, but not its powers. To contribute to the thread though, one of my favorite moments from that game was when one of the players, a changeling, decided he was going to impersonate the regent of a small country, and institute a constitutional monarchy. We had a skill challenge to write the constitution of a nation.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:49
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Rules as written, monster knowledge checks are just a free action, but you can't retry them if you fail.
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Feb 24, 2012 02:08
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Rose Spirit posted:the group had just begun to infiltrate the volcano lair of Tiamat's exarch Irregulon (Activia jokes abounded in that campaign).
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Feb 24, 2012 05:03
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Raepdog posted:mage decides its time to give him the food death Never fix this.
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Feb 24, 2012 05:13
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Yawgmoth posted:My old group had decided, first OOC and then IC, that we had to shame/insult every BBEG into attacking us. Only after we had mocked him, his plan, his monologue, his weapons, his armor, and his interior decoration skills, only after making him feel like the dumbest dumbshit to ever poo poo dumb, would we actually attack. We built up quite a reputation and many of our characters actually ended up with honorary infernal rank, since it was never enough to just kill them; we made them feel like incredible morons first and then we killed them, often in really insulting "hold my beer and watch this" level ways. It's beautiful in ways I cannot express. 
girl dick energy fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Feb 24, 2012 |
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Feb 24, 2012 06:11
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Colon V posted:I just imagined an adventuring party consisting of Redd Foxx (tank), George Carlin (melee DPS), Bob Saget (ranged DPS), Gilbert Gottfried (mezzer), and Rodney Dangerfield (healer) as an adventuring party, using different styles of insult fighting to humiliate and ruin monsters without ever lifting a finger. Now you've got me imagining a Monkey Island conversion for 7th Sea.
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Feb 24, 2012 06:15
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A group I played with used to insult bad guys constantly. At least, they did until they were too busy flinging insults to realize that the necromancer had sent his lackey away, not out of embarrassment, but to activate the ritual to raze the kingdom ahead of schedule.
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Feb 24, 2012 06:18
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Colon V posted:I just imagined an adventuring party consisting of Redd Foxx (tank), George Carlin (melee DPS), Bob Saget (ranged DPS), Gilbert Gottfried (debuff), and Rodney Dangerfield (healer) as an adventuring party, using different styles of insult fighting to humiliate and ruin monsters without ever lifting a finger.
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Feb 24, 2012 11:15
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AlphaDog posted:If I try to do complicated plots or intrigue, they get bored and start looting and burning everything. My group would joke about doing that (Same group that joked about ditching the plot to become wandering minstrels, if you happen to recall my previous posts on the subject), but the one time I felt they were serious, I nipped it in the bud by saying "I want a fight or two that's not connected to this grand plot myself, but we are not leaving this town in ruins in order to set up a bandit farm!"
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Feb 24, 2012 19:24
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So we played my gently caress around 4e game last night and the party was advancing through a cave to get to a tower that overlooks a fortress that blocks access to the valley they live in. The fortress has been taken over by orcs and other beasts, so they're trying to make a covert entrance by getting up to the tower and rapelling down the side of the cliff. At this point they've fought a few goblins and hobgoblins working in formation that beat them up pretty good, and after the fight I wanted to call the game because it was 11 already and the next encounter wasn't really ready. They wanted to go on, so I just went with it, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to happen but not how I wanted it to conclude. All I really knew is that I wanted them to run from a big juggernaut ogre that destroyed the environment as he chased them. They found a big room off the main upward slope with a big rock in the middle of it and some chains attached to it. The ranger sneaks up and hears a snorting sound, and the rock unfurls and he realizes with a Nature check that it's a gray ogre. The beastmen use them as near mindless siege weapons, turning them loose on cities to cause destruction and chaos. He's not sure if anyone has ever actually killed one, but knows that it only has terrible vision and a good sense of smell. In the dark cave, it's near blind but it detects him through scent and is looking around. He grabs a rock and throws it across the cave, causing the ogre to break it's chains and run over there while the ranger stealths back to the group and tells them they need to go. They set a trap to trip the ogre if it tries to follow them and proceed up to a ladder and a trap door. The assassin and the ranger stealth up through the door and find some bugbears sleeping, so they quietly move around and coup de grace them. As they're getting to the last one, they hear a crashing sound and a pissed off roar from below them. The clanky cleric runs up the ladder just in time as the ogre's head pokes in to the tunnel and looks up through the hole with one eye. The ranger runs over to the edge and Twin Strikes the eye, hitting with one of the attacks and blinding it in one eye. It roars in fury and on it's turn uppercuts the ceiling and is waist-high in the tower with them. The ranger tries to plink off it's other eye but misses, and the party starts fleeing up the stairs that line the sides of the 100' tower. About this time, minion goblins start coming down from above to attack the party, but seeing the ogre pissed off, they get about half way and turn around to head back up. The ranger is at eye level with the ogre and hits with both his twin strike attacks to the eye, blinding it completely. It climbs out of the hole and blindly swings at where he was, completely taking out some of the stairs and part of the tower wall. The party can see sunlight streaming in from the hole and below them, the fortress they wanted to covertly attack. They keep running up the stairs to escape while picking off the minions, one of which falls off the stairs as he dies. The ogre runs to the sound and bashes that wall too, which causes the tower to begin to creak and groan. Big chunks start falling from the ceiling and it's obvious it's going to come down. The Bladesinger uses ghost sounds to make it sound like the Ranger is near the hole the ogre cut before, and on it's turn it rushes headlong to the location, straight through the wall and into a 60' freefall, plummeting into the central structure of the fortress and penetrating 3 floors deep. They can hear it still alive and pissed off as orcs begin swarming it trying to get it under control. The tower is really going down now, so the Ranger and Assassin charge headlong through the ogre-sized hole, using Acrobatics and a rope to cling to the cliff. The cleric and bladesinger aren't as quick and fail their Endurance/Acrobatics/Athletics checks to move out of the way of falling debris and lose some healing surges. They finally get out on to the rope as the tower continues collapsing and swaying. The ranger realizes it's going to topple over in their direction, so they start navigating around the cliff face using pitons and rope. They actually manage to clear enough distance that he can plink off a few of the bugbears that are looking out of the windows for ways to escape. The tower comes crashing down directly on top of the fortress they mean to assault, killing just about everyone in there. The party meanwhile is clinging to a cliffside using a complicated rope harness system waiting for the dust to settle. We had a really good time, was one of my favorite games in a long time.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:50
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Dareon posted:My group would joke about doing that (Same group that joked about ditching the plot to become wandering minstrels, if you happen to recall my previous posts on the subject), but the one time I felt they were serious, I nipped it in the bud by saying "I want a fight or two that's not connected to this grand plot myself, but we are not leaving this town in ruins in order to set up a bandit farm!" Oh, look, don't get me wrong, they wouldn't attack the guy trying to involve them in the plot, or storm the palace for no reason, or whatever. They'd just decide that raiding the Thieve's Guild or bullying the local wizard or smashing up pubs was way more fun than trying to find the daughter of Archduke Whoever. Give 'em what they want  This usually happens after they talk to me about wanting more plot and less sandbox. Then they'll get distracted and I'll make something up on the fly and they'll have a blast with it. Then when they find out about it they're always all "AlphaDog, why don't you plan things out, you could make even better games if you'd plan more!"  An example that actually happened: Orcs are raiding outlying towns in the west. A secret cult exists in the midst of high society. A dragon has been sighted in the south marches. All of these are planned adventures. The PCs decide to investigate the secret society. Their second lead takes them to a guy who's a highup in the Thieve's Guild (the plot involved them finding out that most of the ruling class were involved in the cult, and they'd have a few ways of dealing with that). Anyway, they decide that the Thieve's Guild needs checking out. Then they decide that the Guild is either responsible for the cult, actively encouraging it, or worse than it. They raid the Guildhouse and chase the Capo through the streets and then the forests, tracking him to his secret hideout and burning it down (none of which was planned). They entirely forget about the cult, and head Northwards into the mountains for reasons of their own. I reskin the black dragon to red and they find and fight it, barely escaping with their lives, and running to a different city where the campaign heads off in a different direction (they've decided to become crime fighters instead of monster killers, it's cool and it goes on for months). When they found out about the other bits of plot I had planned, they were slightly pissed off. Sometimes I think they WANT to be railroaded and just told a story with a few branches. I tried that once and they hated it, so 
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Feb 25, 2012 02:12
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AlphaDog posted:This usually happens after they talk to me about wanting more plot and less sandbox. Then they'll get distracted and I'll make something up on the fly and they'll have a blast with it. Then when they find out about it they're always all "AlphaDog, why don't you plan things out, you could make even better games if you'd plan more!"
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Feb 25, 2012 04:12
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Yawgmoth posted:I would tell them "I do plan but you guys always go off and do crazy stupid awesome poo poo instead of what I plan. Would you rather I just railroad you towards the plot?" That's the discussion we had, and it turned out well These days I just set up an area with lots of crap to do and let them do their thing. I have various fleshed out encounters and locations I can just place wherever, and if they come up with something like "I reckon the lady of the manor is involved in the bandit attacks!" it turns out to be true-ish (might be her handmaiden ot her son or whatever, but since they've decided to investigate something, it's worth investigating). If they ignore the manor completely, no big deal, I'll just use the exact same location and NPCs somewhere else later on. Bandit hideouts, dungeons, and things like rings of standing stones with fell guardians are awesome for this stuff, since if they never went there, they don't know what it was supposed to look like, and if I want it to be cultists of Orcus instead of bandits or trolls (depending on what they're interested in), it's not a hard change to make.
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Feb 25, 2012 05:37
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GaryLeeLoveBuckets posted:They wanted to go on, so I just went with it, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to happen but not how I wanted it to conclude. The Parable of Going With It.
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Feb 25, 2012 06:38
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AlphaDog posted:That's the discussion we had, and it turned out well
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Feb 25, 2012 17:47
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I just overheard some people talk about how their DM hands out Xbox style achievements for cool stuff characters do. Also one of them just said "As a furry" and another said "as an anime fan" to start their statements. They are also apparently running a My Little Pony themed game.
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Feb 27, 2012 00:28
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Its amazing how fast that went from great to awful.
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Feb 27, 2012 00:38
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