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Evilreaver posted:That's exactly it, for me. When I'm writing a session abstract, I'll make absolutely sure that the party can win the encounter with the abilities/tools they have. I recently got them trapped in a quarry while the Big Bad's cronies broke a levy to flood them out, knowing they had a barbarian who could break some poo poo to make a temporary dam while the portal mage got them to safety. If my players die, it's their own fault and they hosed up. My GM did something like this in a long-running Dark Heresy game a few years back. We were sent to a hellworld on a mission because we'd hosed up. Loki (I think it was called, it was several years ago) was a big old frozen ball of ice with a set of Xeno teleportation gates and legends of a "force of immense destructive power" that had been sealed away for five thousand years. The shields were coming down soon, so we were sent in to go get this thing, which was obviously archaeotech and could help win several wars. So we go and find we need eight parts of this McGuffin that have been scattered around the world. We find one and my psyker figures out that it's also keyed to the network of teleportation gates scattered around the planet. Teleporting around, we find a total of five before I almost botch a roll and we come out of the gate in the middle of the Eldar forces on the planet. Like, right in front of the main tank line, and they're waiting for us. I figure we're dead, but a Wraithlord, a walker possessed by the spirit of a dead Eldar hero, steps forward and announces that we're actually the saviors of the planet! He explains he was actually there at the sealing five thousand years ago, as the general, and remembers us going forth to perform the sealing ritual! He hands us the rest of the pieces of the McGuffin, opens the portal to the path, and herds us through. We come out in pretty much the same place, only some Chaos Space Marines we've been fighting are fighting the Eldar and winning. We take down the Chaos forces, figuring that we'd rather have the Eldar here to fight than Chaos. The Eldar essentially tell us afterward they'd been having visions of a great destructive force that needed to be sealed off and had set up a ritual to do so, all they needed was a key. The one we conveniently had brought with us from the future! With the Eldar guns at our back "for our protection", we end up essentially storming a hardpoint fortified by the Traitor Marines, who had captured the ritual site. After a hard-fought battle with their leader, who turned out to be a mind-controlling jerk, we break through and are ushered to a library where the ritual had been set up. As we're running toward it, I yell back at our soon-to-be Wraithlord buddy, "Hey, how do we activate the ritual?" He responds with "You'll figure it out!  "We go faster, figuring we're going to be sealing off some horrible Chaos demon or something after another fight. We're critically low on ammo but figure we have one more fight before we resort to melee weapons. We run into this small-for-40k library. The door shuts behind us. All the noise of battle immediately stops. We look outside and the Techpriest notes the stars have changed. It's almost like five thousand years have passed in an instant. That's right, the GM had us lock away a destructive force so powerful it could punch its way through multiple armies without rest, keep moving when others could not, and even stand up to the Traitor Legions themselves. That force was us. And when we stopped laughing and walked outside, the Traitor Legions started dropping drop pods on us. Because that was how our luck went. That was a wild campaign, too. We went from rank 1-14, and two of us even had the same characters from Rank 1. I should type up more stories when I get the time.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:03
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Wrong thread!
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Sep 24, 2015 19:00
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Harrow posted:I'm working on a Darkest Dungeon-inspired game now and this whole issue is basically the founding principle I'm working with. (Yes, I know Torchbearer exists, but I want something with "tactical" combat and I want to poach some Blades in the Dark crew management and stress mechanics.) The assumptions are: Definitely post this when you're done with it, I love the way it sounds. Re. resseruction magic in DnD: My 4e players neatly sidestepped that whole shebang completely unintentionally by making a party without arcane or divine power sources until the Priest joined the campaign at level 16. Not only was death A Thing To Be Avoided, they managed to go so far without anyone who knew anything about magic. I'm planning on having the epilogue end on a scene where a young adventurer comes in to a tomb they've cleared twice already and find an ancient artifact sword of incredible importance at the bottom of a pile of trash equipment.
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Feb 1, 2016 23:51
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General Maximus posted:On a similar not in depth note, the feeling when you do that and then miss nine attacks in a row over the course of three rounds? Distinctly not amazing at all. Or having the highest AC in the party and still never getting missed, which had been my last few weeks of DnD. The DM's dice just hate me. On the plus side, that also meant I didn't feel bad about diving off the 200' cliff to go help a friend. It was better than another round of double attacks from eight yetis!
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Apr 12, 2016 22:58
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Goddamn, that sounds like a good game. Where'd your GM order those platforms from? My GM's birthday is coming up and he'd love them. ------ Yesterday, during Monsterhearts:
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May 2, 2016 22:10
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Razzled posted:also before this session we almost died to a suit of armor and an enchanted broom. we only defeated the broom by locking it in the closet and firing fireballs into it and then quickly slamming the door before it could beat our rear end some more Having never played Curse of Strahd this is hilarious to me. Please tell me brooms are a legitimate threat to adventurers and you all didn't just roll terribly 
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May 25, 2016 23:49
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Voyager I posted:If your players are the kind of new where they're trying to light campfires by casting fireball at them, maybe explain things to them at a more basic level before having them accidentally assassinate the petty aristocracy. Why do you assume there wasn't an option? "Huh, so Fireball has a 40 foot radius, which would cook the burglemeister. Well, he's a piece of poo poo anyway, what the hell."
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Dec 18, 2016 03:57
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You could also use blank dice and pack in stickers like a 90's board game, then sell premium dice. You keep the simplicity of symbol reading and keep costs down. You could even just put regular dice in or tell people to buy their own, I know my local dollar store has packs of 5d6 for $1.
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Jan 26, 2017 00:54
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CobiWann posted:”Wait,” he cried out. ”Dispater still owes me a wish! I want…I want a dagger like Tellisyn’s cousin had, that anytime I touch someone with it, I send them directly to the Nine Hells!” Holy poo poo what a wonderful dick move. I hope to one day be able do that sort of poo poo to players.
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Mar 17, 2017 16:48
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CobiWann posted:Since some of y'all asked to see my DM's shelf of minis... Those must be the Official Dungeon Master Storage Bins there in the corner. My longtime GM doesn't have nearly as impressive a shelf but he's still got a shitload of those craft boxes full of minis. Also that's an impressive loving collection, goddamn.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:46
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Carebearz posted:I did the same thing with my Half Orc Paladin, but with a greatsword and sweet rear end Smite and great weapon master against someLich. I had a half-orc vengance paladin in a 5e Curse of Strahd game that wrapped up a month or so ago. Not only was it pretty awesome to have one of two non-angsty people in the party, the whole setup made me feel like a badass. Hitting a big badass with a critical greatsword attack with attached smite for 6d6+12d8+15 damage always feels good, and blowing through all of Strahd's 100 temporary HP in one round was also super gratifying. It didn't stop him from dropping me to 3hp or less five times in three rounds, but I'll take what I can get. I'm just really enjoying half-orcs in general in murderhobo games. Who cares about things like morals or the common good when you have people to fight? Evil tends to be stronger than good, so go kick evil in the shins until it either crushes you or you become stronger. Fighting is fun! FunkMonkey posted:My players advised me to have a prepared name back to draw on because they knew if I ever hesitated to give someone's name they clearly didn't matter and could be safely ignored. When I did Monsterhearts I ran a name generator and pulled 100 male and female names for exactly this reason. Everyone got names, generally shortly before dying. bbcisdabomb fucked around with this message at 19:11 on May 5, 2017 |
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May 5, 2017 19:08
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MadDogMike posted:Curse of Strahd My group just finished Curse of Strahd a month or two back and it's really interesting to me to see what others did differently. That crazy wandering wizard is Mordenkainen, and my group brought him in by just punching him out. Turns out even wizards are susceptible to a group all casting Fist more-or-less simultaneously. Then our wizard used his scroll of Simulacrum on the wizard. So for our final fight, we had an extra 18th level wizard with us. Strahd had, in addition to Rahadin, a crazy former party member who had been driven off by one of the other PC's literally shouting that everything he did was evil, so that still ended up being tilted in Strahd's favor. After hearing your end of the story, though, I'm very glad my GM didn't mention Strahd's return. Even if it happens, we've all left Borovia and have no way of knowing. Why go to the trouble of telling the players that nothing they did actually matters?
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May 23, 2017 16:37
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hyphz posted:Recent Big Boss moment for me was the players machine-gunning a Sith Lord at the end of a Force and Destiny game. In Star Wars SAGA the force user gets a cumulative penalty to their deflection rolls for each attack they block in a turn. In a long-running game we managed to kill more than a few Sith lords through the doctrine of superior numbers with superior firepower. Then there was the part of the final fight where one of the Sith didn't even have the deflection talent. Turns out some Sith are extremely vulnerable to being shot by a man-portable turbolaser 
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May 26, 2017 22:47
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evilmiera posted:my Terminator, a guy I'd put enough cyberware into to make sure most of the player's weaponry would do nothing much to him at all and his legs were enhanced to the point he could keep pace with their van. Basically, think the scene from Terminator 2 as they're trying to escape the hospital. Condolences on the party rigger being so bad at rigger'ing to not even have a cannon on the van. It's a shameful rigger that can't explode his way through whatever is in his way  I look forward to hearing more, Shadowrun stories are some of my favorite.
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Jun 19, 2017 21:54
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myDad posted:
How does any nerd hate VM? It's insulting someone so hard it can kill them, I'd take that ability IRL any day!
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Jul 12, 2017 17:36
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Kavak posted:Actually it was Pandemic. Maybe the cards weren't getting shuffled right because the plague spread every other turn. Sentinels seemed difficult but we actually made it through quite handily as I remember. I guess it's usually harder than that? If the plauge was spreading ever other turn then yeah, the cards probably weren't being shuffled right. IIRC you split the deck into equal piles, shuffle one of the poo poo Gets Worse cards in each pile, and stack them on each other without shuffling everything together. You can have back-to-back turns where everything gets worse, but you're guaranteed at least a small breather after that. I have had one truly unfortunate turn where two cards were drawn simultaneously, causing us to lose half the outbreak counter that turn alone, but that's very rare. Pandemic also gets way harder with fewer people. I've won with two players on the hardest difficulty, but that requires a specific party setup and a fair amount of luck.
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Aug 24, 2017 00:25
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CobiWann posted:"The dowry! For marrying Xiamara!" Any game that works in a shotgun marriage is a game worthy of playing.
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Sep 6, 2017 23:45
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Splicer posted:If you ever want to 4e with this guy or a guy like him again, Human Rogue. Built and played right it hits most things on like a 4. Or an Avenger, every roll gets a reroll. A Deva gets to add +1d6 to one of those rolls for extra fun. Of course, in my latest dnd4e game I've managed 4 consecutive double-natural-1 rolls, so it's still not a guarantee 
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Oct 4, 2017 19:19
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the_steve posted:My Scion FATE game has pretty much been The one I was last in starred an extremely moral lawyer, a rock star, a "spy" (read: terrorist paid by a corporation), and a guy rapidly on his way to being the drug-dealing kingpin of New York. Strangely enough, the lawyer and dealer got along best, probably because neither was interested in the rampant murder/hedonism of the other two.
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Nov 3, 2017 18:30
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What a hell of an ending. Breaking a Staff of Power is usually enough to take out even an endgame boss, it's impressive that both parties involved eventually survived.
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Dec 13, 2017 23:31
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I made a grave and extremely rookie mistake last week in my DnD4 game when I presented my players with an extremely huge and ornate door in between them and a boss fight. As I was describing a giant 40' radius half-circle made of dense hardwood and banded with adamantium I could see eyes start lighting up with every adventurer's favorite thought: "We're gonna be rich!" I have no idea how a group of mostly nonmagical types are going to steal ten tons of door before the dracolitch wakes up, but I'm fairly certain they're going to manage it.
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May 17, 2018 00:16
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Tunicate posted:Rookie mistake? You just got them to self-inflict an escort mission. Good point, though an escort mission at 21st level is going to sure be something. Yawgmoth posted:Why would they steal it beforehand when they can kill the boss and then loot everything not nailed down, followed by the nails, followed by everything that was previously nailed down? They did kill the boss! It was one hell of a fight and they barely managed to take down a demon-infected dracolitch in a four-on-one fight. I'm pretty sure only one player knows about the litch part of a dracolitch, and he's good enough to not say anything his character wouldn't know. That dracolitch will be back as soon as it puts itself back together, which will take about sixteen hours. It's pretty grateful to the party for killing the demon that was puppeting it, but that only goes so far. I'm thinking that stealing the giant doors the dracolitch put in to spite its Adamantine dragon rival is probably going a bit over the goodwill a litch is willing to give.
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May 17, 2018 00:35
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CobiWann posted:See, that's garbage. You have to assume players/PC's have "common sense" and that once they're ambushed from above they're automatically/passively going to be looking in that direction when scouting. I hate "if you don't tell me exactly what your PC is doing you don't do it." Just either do a Perception check with a higher number OR have them roll with disadvantage OR have them roll twice and have to succeed on both. The only time this is good is playing Paranoia, and only if the GM specifically tells the players they are drugged-up inbred clones with negative survival instincts.
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May 18, 2018 17:47
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CobiWann posted:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_vdwsLihQ6ACzcTpw_5BljzMN1Gqb1PHkT3gdBnTeQs/edit?usp=sharing I prefer the recaps in the thread because I'm having a hard time figuring out which entry is the latest. If you numbered the google document entries I'd be just fine with those.
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Jun 2, 2018 00:56
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I've been wanting to do some writeups of the games I'm in and/or running, but it's honestly a little intimidating to post in the same thread as Tanicus, Funhavers, or that weird-rear end postapocalyptic catering game that I can't remember the name of but want to play so bad. That said, quote:To do it, do it. My DnD4 party has spent the last few sessions dungeon crawling through the charred husk of a giant Githyanki ship floating on the Astral Sea.* They've been fighting slaver cyclopes and the reanimated undead husks of the ~15,000 Githyanki that died during the fire while trying to make their way to the main chapel to read some sigils written in blood on the floor. In the first fight they took on this ship, they discovered the cyclopes are just about a match for them one-on-one. They have since figured out that there are 160 of them on the ship, so it was decided that the valorous march to the main chapel has now become a stealth mission. Several false starts and a kidnapping later, the party has successfully snuck their way underneath the main gathering of 30 cyclopes, resting about thirty feet from the door to the chapel. After clearing the chapel out and gathering as much information as they can, the party Warlord, an Ordained Priest of Kord, goes up partake in his second-favorite pastime: smashing the altar of any god that isn't his own.** Berethor, the aformentioned Warlord, is generally referred to as "The loud one" in a party that also includes a minotaur barbarian specializing in shouts. He once outscreamed a creature with a sonic attack. So when he screams "Praise Kord!" at the top of his lungs before going to wail on the stone altar, I roll Perception for everyone outside. Five minutes later, the altar is rubble and the Hunter by the only exit starts to report that he hears movement outside. Everyone glares at the Warlord, who sheepishly raises his pick to head-height and stage whispers another "Praise Kord?" After the end of the session, Berethor's player sheepishly admitted he had forgotten there were enemies outside the door, and the Hunter's player said something to the effect of "I would have reminded you, but I didn't think it would have changed anything." This group is pretty great. *Fun fact, it's the same ship they attacked and robbed a few levels ago, last seen rising uncontrollably while on fire. **Berethor isn't even a paladin or a priest, he just took the background "Ordained Priest". The actual priest in the party, who is now an angel, is pretty chill with letting people worship who they will.
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Jun 21, 2018 19:11
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I'm playing in a Dark Sun campaign and we decided the best course of action right now is to attack Slither, the undead crawling fortress, head-on. The GM was prepared. 
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Feb 23, 2019 06:41
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the_steve posted:Fine choice in beverage. I too enjoy A&W. JustJeff88 posted:I'm very fond of Diet A&W Root Beer myself. CobiWann posted:That is an amazing setup. I would be both thrilled and scared to play on that map! The Changeling posted:Diet Barqs or bust! Thanks for the positive replies, I'll pass them along to my GM! The map is made from foamcore boards with the lines traced on. It's a super cheap way to make maps as long as you don't mind spending a decent amount of time on each piece. I used to go for the A&W until my diabetes diagnosis, now I go for Diet Pepsi or water. I'm biased against Barq's ever since I tried going cold turkey on caffeine only to discover that Barq's uses caffeine 
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Feb 25, 2019 18:05
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A friend got Betrayal Legacy for Christmas and we're just now able to start getting together weekly to start playing. We just had a game where my character, 95-year-old Sarah Christian Svensson, ended up being the strongest physical combatant. (Chapter 2 spoilers, if anyone is still planning on playing) Sarah Christian, the owner of the weird house on the hill, discovered two things: The devil had come to collect the household help and collect on their debts, and there was a horse blocking the front door despite the stables being right there. So she did what any sensible homeowner would do: Grab Pa's trusty old claw hammer and get the horse in the stable before she found the Devil's representative and explained that the hired help were still under contract to work for her. Sarah Christian was halfway through the process of beating the Night Mare back to hell when the devil's representative, a boy (24, so still a boy) decided to try to stop her with a pitchfork. One claw hammer to the leg later and he limped off to go try to get everyone back to hell with his knees intact while Sarah Christian got that drat horse off her front lawn. The whole thing ended with a stunned Night Mare fading back to Hell, the farmhand being told that if he wanted to leave to work for someone else he would have to talk to Sarah first (while she brandished her trusty claw hammer), and said hammer becoming a sacred object. Oh, and then Sarah Christian went to bed because she is "an old frail lady and the rest of you shits better be out of my house before I wake up." If anyone likes the story generator part of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, I would heartily recommend Betrayal Legacy.
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Mar 21, 2019 20:15
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Preechr posted:Well, our face had to bow out of the game, so I may end up having to handle face duties. Problem: I’m the navigator. My social skills consist entirely of lying and intimidating. As many of our social interactions are with pirates, this isn’t a complete loss, but yikes. Honestly IME "we don't have a face" is the way to go and makes for really entertaining negotiations. In the last Shadowrun game I played the face stopped showing up after session 2, so our negotiation team became a tag-team of my character, an aggressively in-your-face elf rigger with Distinctive Style: Go Big or Go Home* and one of the party's muscle, The Biggest loving Troll You Have Ever Seen. I have no idea why the guy playing the Body 16/Strength 14 troll chose to dump a bunch of points in Etiquette, but we were certainly glad he did! [sub]*This applied to everything. Loud colors, big hair, elaborate plans, buying $50,000 shots for the only guy to beat him at racing vidcons, a full-on extitential crisis when he realized he hadn't caused any maybe in three weeks, the works.
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Apr 17, 2019 19:17
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The Glumslinger posted:The escape plan is basically just "Violent improvisation", aka the only real thing 2/3 of my RPG groups are good at. To be fair both groups are incredibly good at that.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:38
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Last night in Betrayal Legacy a 225-year-old woman* continued her streak as the strongest physical combatant the house has ever seen. She has the most kills of both humans and monsters, is the longest owner of the house, and is willing to gently caress poo poo up with her bare hands. Hell Says: You Don't gently caress With Sarah Christian Svensson. *She got to be 225 by making a deal with the devil. The deal was "If you don't come to drag my soul out of my body, I won't kick you in the testacles any more." So far, the devil has respected the deal.
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Sep 18, 2019 21:27
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Bieeanshee posted:Have you posted about her before? Because a badass old woman who kicks the devil in the balls sounds familiar. I did post about her once before, a while ago. That was when she hit a Night Mare with a hammer so hard it went back to hell. We're burning through missions pretty regularly again now that the host's kid is old enough to sleep through the night, and hopefully we can finish the campaign before kid #2 pops out in February.
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Sep 20, 2019 01:02
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CobiWann posted:According to my DM, slitting an Orc's throat and getting the blood in someone else's eyes does not count as casting Color Spray. So Orc blood is colorless? Learn some blood magic and power it with orc blood in a waterskin 
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Sep 27, 2019 19:20
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Reclaimer posted:Shadowrun has the Edge attribute, which gives you a pool of points to spend on rerolling a poo poo roll or just rolling with a big advantage (one or the other). Alternatively you can permanently burn one point of it to survive just about anything, though there's no guarantee you won't wind up in custody or with all your poo poo taken off your unconscious body. And it's as expensive to raise as any of the other attributes, like Strength or Agility, so if you have a big pool you're wasting about ten sessions of gameplay in experience points ('Karma') to burn a point. I like the idea of a luck stat, and I think Shadowrun has the best version I've played. My last 5e character was a lucky bastard of an adept with 7 Edge, and it was incredibly handy to be the guy on the team who can do literally anything. Decker get knocked out? Need to bluff a second security guard at the same time? Just want to bump into your mark's favorite trideo star at the grocery store (so you can kidnap them)? Roll edge!
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Jan 15, 2020 18:44
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Railing Kill posted:
Well I know what I'm having for dinner!
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Sep 5, 2021 22:32
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Golden Bee posted:Frankie Kono was the nature boy escape artist, who grew up in the jungles of Hawaii somehow. He had a pet raccoon and the ability to manipulate objects and ways that should be impossible, like unplugging a dental drill from across the room. Which is vital if someone’s trying to kill you with one. Please get permission to post the picture, that sounds great.
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Aug 11, 2022 02:49
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CobiWann posted:Only if I could convince another player to play a Barbarian patterned on Charles Barkley. I don't think that would work. How does a Barbarian get access to the Chaos Dunk? Barkley is probably a paladin.
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Feb 9, 2023 19:01
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pr0digal posted:On the way out Brian's player offhand mentions he'd love to get a shirt that says something along the lines of "I went to the temple of Bahamut and all I got was this stupid t-shirt". A roll or two later Brian is festooned with a wondrous magical item courtesy of the gift shop right outside the temple. Said wondrous item is a shirt of Bahamut wearing sunglasses with that text on it and it's enchanted so it always fits, never gets dirty and his scales always shine. Of course I tried to deface it as soon as I saw it but the enchantment wasn't having this. "Mundane" magical items are the best. I'm calling it now: that shirt is going to get stolen somehow and your capstone adventure will be to get it back, and it will be amazing.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:10
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Golden Bee posted:Beignet, Done That! I missed the name of this adventure and what a wonderful name it is.
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Jul 18, 2023 21:38
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How do you come up with a cooler way to die than death by lava? Just tell the truth, that's metal as hell!
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Sep 29, 2023 02:14
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