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Agrikk's story of the low-level rogue bluffing the party reminds me of a character I played once an a 1st Ed AD&D game. I was bringing a new character into an existing campaign, where most of the characters were lvl 10+. I had been warned that PvP was "A Thing" and I knew from past experience with the group that one particular guy was notorious for it. How then to get my 1st level magic user to survive? The answer turned out to be the clever use of cantrips. Essentially, I was able to use cantrips (which you can cast an unlimited number of times per day, at least under the edition of the rules that we were using) to mimic at least the visible effects of spells. Additionally, I used the "Color" cantrip to give my character a "tattoo" of a spider covering my left eye. So during the first session of the game in which my character appeared, I did some stuff and the PvP guy asked me, "Hey, how can you cast that more than once a day as a 1st level character?" I just tapped my left cheek and said, "sold my soul to Lolth." The look on his face was priceless (casting a terrified, sidelong glance at the GM, who just grinned like the Cheshire Cat), and he didn't mess with me after that.
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Oct 17, 2015 17:02
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Smash it Smash hit posted:Also what i don't see a lot of DMs do is change the DC based on role playing. I think how a character approaches/says/does something should lower or raise it
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Nov 7, 2015 20:20
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Captain Bravo posted:Well, last week, he brought the story up again, this time during some downtime. Everyone starts laughing (Including the other player!) I think this is weird, until they start sharing rape stories...  I hate you all.But in all seriousness, this situation is pretty hosed up and you are 100% right to sever all contact with these people. And PJOmega is right, it only takes one bad-apple to destroy a gaming group. The trick is recognizing the cancer and cutting it out early. Over the years, I have pretty much come to agree with the idea that it's usually better to turn your existing friends into gamers than it is to try to befriend people who are already gamers. I just thank the gods that my group of leper outcast rejects are all high-functioning dorks with lives and careers and families and interests outside gaming.
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Nov 10, 2015 00:10
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Sounds charming. And by "charming" I mean "annoying as poo poo."
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Dec 8, 2015 02:59
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Jenny Angel posted:I think the answer has a lot to do with how much Eva values players getting emotionally invested in her games.
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Dec 10, 2015 04:16
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I ran a game for years where pretty much all of the characters lacked all but the most rudimentary of morals and scruples. They were all members of the same Thieves' Guild, and were pretty reprehensible people doing pretty reprehensible things. But they had realistic personalities and goals. The catch was that they were all family, which instantly fostered a more-or-less cooperative "us vs. them" mindset that kept them from tearing each other apart. It was like "The Sopranos" meets "Rome" and it was a blast. Maybe BlackIronHeart will wander through and regale you with high(low)lights.
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Dec 10, 2015 22:09
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Sgt. Anime Pederast posted:He obviously believed he had the soul of a dragon. 
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Dec 12, 2015 04:30
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Jenny Angel posted:Tomorrow, in Part X, I'll unveil our best attempt to make something worthwhile of this.
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Dec 17, 2015 18:39
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NutritiousSnack posted:Wrong toppings on the pizza too.
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Jan 23, 2016 21:25
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Any game that involves setting the stakes before rolling is going to do this by default. If the stakes aren't "you die," then it's not going to happen regardless of the outcome of the roll.
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Jan 28, 2016 16:12
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Volcano Style posted:The brand of beer I used to summon Sisyphus? 
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Feb 2, 2016 01:30
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In the Apocalypse World game I'm running right now, one of my players is running with a hacked version of the Macaluso playbook I've called "The Urchins." He's basically playing something like 6 or 7 kids between the ages of 4 and 13. One of the abilities of the playbook that he has chosen (a "move" in AW parlance) is where do they keep coming from?, which means every time one of his Urchins dies, he brings in a new one. This is good and cool for the player, because a) individual Urchins are incredibly frail, and b) he's a bloodthirsty madman who will escalate pretty much any conflict to violence with zero provocation. In the first four sessions of the game, he's already gone through like 6 kids, 4 of which were killed (2 accidentally, 2 otherwise) by other PCs. It puts a whole different spin on the concept of "character death," that's for sure.
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Feb 3, 2016 16:57
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Bieeardo posted:At the same time I'm envious of the groups who can pull them off, because as noted they're a hell of a thing when done well. I really should write the cat-piss AAR of this game, because it's fekking priceless.
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Feb 12, 2016 02:44
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CobiWann posted:Sea Lions. 
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Jun 30, 2016 06:32
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Carrasco posted:And they all died happily ever after.
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Aug 2, 2016 00:53
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I love putting players in morally ambiguous situations facing difficult choices. It always makes for great RP opportunities. Sometime I'll have to make an effort-post about one of the sub-arcs of my long-running Shadowrun/Call of Cthulhu/In Nomine crossover game.
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Aug 25, 2016 23:51
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CobiWann posted:Player’s note – When I went to the GM’s house that week for our Ghostbusters game, Ksena’s player handed me a copy of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary and said “You may want to read this for some role-playing ideas…”
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Aug 29, 2016 21:31
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Agrikk posted:One of the things I loved about Harn was how esoteric everything was. Earthmaster artifacts were always good for the esoteric and strange as well. Agrikk posted:(See what I did there?) 
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Aug 30, 2016 18:09
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the_steve posted:Now, the responsible thing is to be weaponizing this spice. Or monetizing it. Or both.
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Sep 5, 2016 23:20
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I had a buddy in a different state offer to pay my travel expenses and give me a place to crash if I'd come run games for them for a weekend-long event. That's kind of like being a professional I guess. I feel like running games professionally would subject you to the kind of quality-compromising incentives you get from stuff like teaching martial arts professionally; in order to keep the doors open, the lights on, and food on the table you have to accept and cater to students/players whom you really shouldn't. So you'll feel the need to keep that rear end in a top hat who's always doing random poo poo for attention and going off on stupid tangents that waste everyone's time and energy, and your game will suffer for it.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:38
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SweetBro posted:On an side-note, I never got the appeal of con-RPGs, outside of comedic games it seems hard make a memorable story in just a few hours. Out of curiosity how much does this awesome GM charge you, and how many players are in any given session? And finally, does the game happen in person, or online (and if inline, over what service)?
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Oct 21, 2016 12:19
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Speaking as someone who works for the government, the above is almost certainly true.
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Oct 22, 2016 01:53
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CobiWann posted:I support my GM by bringing him Big League Chew every game as well as marrying his ex-wife. 
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Oct 24, 2016 23:21
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Back when I was GMing Shadowrun, I just let the dice fall where they may. Once stupid people lost enough characters, they wised up. SR, especially in 2nd and 3rd Edition was pretty rough on people who tried to go the munchkin route. I remember people going balls-deep on Wired Reflexes and what not, only to discover that when the shooting started, all it meant was that they wasted ammo faster.
Ilor fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Nov 2, 2016 |
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Nov 2, 2016 23:43
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My favorite psychological maladies for games are ones that distort how the character perceives or interacts with reality. Schizophrenia (by which I do NOT mean Multiple Personality Disorder, but rather dissociative disorders), hallucinations, and paranoia are all great, because the GM can simply tell the player, "This is what your character sees/hears/smells/etc" and let the chips fall where they may. "You're pretty sure this NPC is lying to you," or "You notice this NPC whisper to his seneschal and catch your name as well as the word 'dagger.' As soon as they see you notice them, they part ways immediately." You don't have to make a big thing about it by saying, "your brain broke and you're crazy now." Just change the information that you give the character about his or her surroundings, ideally in a way where none of the other characters can definitively say otherwise. And even better, you can mess with the entire party this way. Yeah, the Archivist thinks he's seeing demons everywhere, and the whole rest of the party thinks he's crazy. But what if the reason the Archivist is seeing demons everywhere is BECAUSE THERE ARE GODDAMN DEMONS EVERYWHERE and his "malady" is actually an "ability?" Comedy gold. I once ran a Shadowrun/In Nomine/Call of Cthulhu crossover campaign that was lots of fun for this. At one point, the PCs had to rescue a contact's relative from an incredibly creepy sanatorium called "Wyndham Downs." And just to give this context, this was a place that sprang from one of the most vivid and troubling nightmares I've ever had - upon waking I immediately fired up my computer and started taking notes. Anyway, one of the "issues" with this place was the fact that the patients/inmates were prone to suicide, and that one of the most common methods was by hanging. In all of these hangings, the victims always tied this same weird, awkward slip-knot with an extra loop hanging off the side of it, a knot which came to be referred to as a "Wyndham Noose." This was super creepy when a PC observed one of the older patients help one of the children tie his shoe-lace, and do so by tying said Wyndham Noose. "There you go, young man. Now run along." Suffice it to say, the PCs (and hell, the players) were deeply disturbed by the poo poo they encountered in this place. For the rest of the campaign, I'd occasionally throw in call-backs to this particular story arc. Seeing things, hearing things, etc. At one point many sessions removed, the players were meeting a contact in a high-class establishment, and one of the PCs decided she would wear her best "little black dress" for the occasion. When one of the other PCs realized that she'd absently tied the laces in back in a Wyndham Noose, everybody lost their poo poo. Nobody who went into Wyndham Downs came out quite the same. That is the kind of stuff that makes madness work in RPGs.
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Nov 16, 2016 20:26
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 on the whole "gently caress Teddy Bear Malkavians" thing. The ~wackity schmackity~ players can go eat a bag of dicks. Being legit crazy should be loving scary to all the normies in the room. I briefly played a Malkavian who was convinced he was the second-coming of Christ. Nobody came out of an interaction with me saying, "Oh, that wacky Jesus, he's such a card." Instead, they were all like, "That fucker's a serious nutbag who is going to get us all killed, and he needs to be stopped. Like, now."
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Nov 21, 2016 22:21
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Yeah, I guess it depends on how much of a "party" the PCs are supposed to be. In this particular game there was a "plot" I guess, but it was pretty sandboxy. My character wasn't violently unstable or anything like that. Quite the opposite, actually. But he was convinced of his own divinity and the righteousness of his actions, and had little to no regard for "the rules" that vampire society (un)lived by. That made him dangerous. I fully expected the rest of the party to eventually have to kill me, but I was OK with that going in.
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Nov 21, 2016 23:40
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Smash it Smash hit posted:Tell us your weird fetishes
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Dec 12, 2016 06:31
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Railing Kill posted:I have a fetish for my wife's vagina. 
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Dec 12, 2016 22:36
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Yeah, it's torches and pitchforks time. Viva la revolucion!
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Jan 5, 2017 20:56
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You might call those mechanics broken as hell; I call them godsdamned perfect for capturing the cinematic flavor on which the game/setting is based. 
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Jan 24, 2017 13:28
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That width/height mechanic is Greg Stolze's "One Roll Engine." It's used in "A Dirty World" as well. I'm sort of "meh" on it; it always seems to work better in the examples than it does in actual play. For the most part, your dice pools have to be pretty big before you start seeing anything beyond 1 or 2 width with any regularity. It means failure is actually pretty common. In a noir setting that's fine, but it definitely needs ... something to make it work out better in play.
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Jan 25, 2017 06:36
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I think it would work fine if you typically tripled the number of dice being rolled. That would mean a much higher likelihood of getting results that have some variance in both height and width. But that starts to get into "fistfuls of dice" territory.
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Jan 25, 2017 12:49
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Yeah the FFG Star Wars system is actually pretty rad. Yes, the custom dice/symbols are a PITA, but they released an app that rolls and tabulates it all for you if you don't want to mess with physical dice. But the thing I really like about it is that it gives you the ability to add "...and..." or "...but..." to any success or failure. As in, "you succeed in shooting the stormtrooper, and as he falls he shoots the stormtrooper next to him." Or "you successfully hack the console to open the blast doors, but there's a squad of stormtroopers on the other side of it! Oh, poo poo!" From a storytelling perspective, the concept of adding either positive or negative consequences to either success or failure is super cool.
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Jan 25, 2017 23:19
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Mr.Misfit posted:And design-wise an old hat...
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Jan 26, 2017 01:23
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Kwyndig posted:What if you don't like those design goals? "you don't do it, maybe try again I guess?") rather than a 2D scale where you have both success/failure and advantage/disadvantage? I mean, if simplicity is your aim, I guess that's OK. But it's not the 1980's anymore, and the FFG system inarguably gives both players and GMs more tools for telling interesting and compelling stories. I'm having a hard time understanding what your objection to the system really is.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:46
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Oh, I think I see part of the issue, which is a misunderstanding: you can't fail and succeed at the same time. You can succeed and gain advantage; You can succeed and suffer a disadvantage. You can fail and gain advantage. You can fail and suffer disadvantage. That's it. The "triumph vs despair" thing is an extreme form of advantage/disadvantage. Basically, it's just a way to add more options for story elements into the fiction. Could you do this completely by GM fiat? Sure, but it's still GM fiat. Finally, I don't know where you get the impression that the system by itself makes you roll more. For instance, there's no reason you couldn't go all "Apocalypse World" on this and have one roll stand in for an entire conflict if you wanted to. Or go more granular for a tense, end-of-arc boss-fight. Whatever fits the tempo of the story.
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Jan 27, 2017 00:11
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You MUST give this player a beneficial reaction from an NPC now; "Ah, I see by your hat that you have finished the dreaded Scorpion Bowl. Impressive. That's no small feat, my friend." OR maybe a bad reaction, like some NPC is totally a dick to them and they don't know why - come to find out he's tried many times to finish the Scorpion Bowl, never managed to do it, and is bitter against anyone who has. Or maybe both!
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Feb 19, 2017 15:58
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Yawgmoth posted:I'm always wary of GMs who call their games a "sandbox" because in my experience it means the GM goes "okay your characters are in a town. What do you do?" and then stares expectantly, like the players are supposed to come up with a plot; or it's not really a sandbox and the GM wants to have a grand story of the world but doesn't know how to tie all of his half-session plot threads into anything cohesive so it's a "sandbox world" until he takes a creative writing course. FWIW, the Apocalypse World book condenses these ideas into the pithy advice: make the world feel real.
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Mar 4, 2017 16:51
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hyphz posted:The problem with this is when the PCs also want to feel like heroes, but end up deadlocked because for everything they do there will be 4-5 things they don't and those will all get worse. 
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Mar 4, 2017 21:26
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