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My game group in college had a game called "loving Die Already," which can be played in two forms: The first form is a quick thought experiment, wherein you try to out-do the other folks in the conversation in finding creative or messy ways to die in a specified game. Such as "loving Die Already: Mage:" One player deliberately creates a paradox by using Forces to cancel the effects of friction, but the paradox transfers all of the lost friction to the character, so he spontaneously combusts when he raises an arm to high-five his mage-bro. You can also play this version of the game by creating situations that are hard to get killed in specific games, and challenge the players to "loving die already." It's fun when you're up at 3:00 AM (and/or high). Then there is "Secret loving Die Already," wherein your group is playing a regular tabletop game with a player deemed so obnoxious that everyone silently agrees someone should start trying to kill the player's character, or better yet get them to kill themselves. It's a co-op game. If they succeed then everyone wins. They win because their character is loving dead, and everyone else wins because their character is loving dead. I have found myself playing Secret loving Die Already twice. The first was in a game of 3rd ed. D&D I was running back in college. We had a good group going, and I still play with these guys ten years later. One player met a freshman gamer that none of us knew and invited him to play in the game. He knew I was down with new players and made a judgment call to invite him. That turned out to be a mistake. To make a long story short, the new player turned out to be a douche who would answer and even place calls in the middle of the game (at the loving table), played Munchkin competitively in a D&D group that was clearly playing the game cooperatively, demanded to make a character centered around gimmicky mechanics, and designed his character to be a creepy goon reflection of himself. When he hinted at inviting one of his future frat brothers into the game without the group's go-ahead, Secret loving Die Already was on. I threw an undead horde encounter at the group knowing it was the kind of situation that would kill this guy. His mechanical gimmick was jumping because he loved dragoons from Final Fantasy. He jumped into the middle of a horde of undead, far from the reach of the group's Cleric. I went out of my way to describe his death in graphic detail when the horde literally torn him limb-from-limb. He spent five minutes yelling at the Cleric for not wading through that very same horde to heal him. Another time I played Secret loving Die Already was in a game of 3.5 D&D, as a player this time. I was playing a rogue in a party with: A neutral good rogue (me) A lawful good paladin A chaotic good bard A neutral good spellsword A lawful evil sorcerer Anything stick out here? The GM and the paladin's player decided to use a more active and less passive version of the paladin's detect evil from the start, to make things a bit more interesting for NPC encounters. That let the evil sorcerer work in our group without the paladin automatically murdering the gently caress out of him on the spot. But the player wasn't clever and wasn't able to hide his character's evildoing very long. When the group finally threatened him, he complained out-of-character that it would ruin the game for him. The GM let us handle the conflict in-character, and while the group bickered about how, exactly, to punish him, my character shot and killed him with one crossbow sneak attack. The player bitched to no end, but the GM just said, "the conflict was all in-character. You made an evil character in a group full of good guys. I didn't do anything here." The player retaliated by making a chaotic neutral chaos mage using some goofy-rear end 3rd-party supplement that was as mechanically broken as his character was goofy. The character's endless, unfunny antics ground the plot to a halt, even before she started doing evil poo poo. When I killed that character a couple sessions later, the player got mad at me for PKing, but everyone else was cool with it. I've literally never PK'd another player in a game I wasn't running, but I killed his rear end twice in the same game. I just happened to be playing a character that was in the best role to do it. I love PVP in the right games and with the right understanding amongst the group, but the above examples are not that.
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Dec 12, 2014 17:42
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Night10194 posted:I wonder, have anyone ever had a good experience with a DMPC or long-term party ally? I mean, you can always tell the story is going to go bad when you hear 'And it's his favorite PC from X campaign' but has that poo poo ever gone right? I can't speak for my players, but I used one of my past PCs in a game of 7th Sea that I ran. The game was the last in a series of six campaigns that my buddy and I ran over several years. He ran the odd campaigns, and I ran the even ones. Players made new characters each time, but the overarching plot and setting was continuous. I dropped my PC from the fifth game into the sixth one as a plot machine. To make a long story short, she killed a seated member of 7th Sea's version of the Illuminati, "NOM," at the end of the fifth game, so she was on the run and a paranoid wingnut by the time of the sixth game. But her situation made her a great conduit for NOM-related plots. But I never made her a aprt of the group and deliberate made her buzz off whenever important stuff was happening or about to happen. Basically, she'd nudge them in a plot direction or two, or show up long enough to provide a clue, and then turn into a sparrow and fly away because  I don't think she ever rolled into a combat the PCs were involved in. I made that one of my rules if I was going to use her as an NPC. It worked well, I think. Then again, I have some horror stories as a player of other GMs turning games into, "Hey, look at what my old PC can do when I can give him as much XP as I want?" One of those games ended with a player standing up and walking out in the middle of a combat round. Social niceties are the only reason I wasn't right there behind him out the door.
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Dec 23, 2014 22:03
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S.J. posted:There are plenty of sweet miniature games to play out there, check out the Infinity, Warmachine/Hordes, or X-Wing threads at the very least. There also a Star Trek game using the same rules as the X-Wing game, but it uses cap ships instead of fighter-scale stuff. Both are pretty good.
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Dec 23, 2014 22:29
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neonchameleon posted:They tried. They seriously tried. Unfortunately Ed Greenwood was still writing Realms fiction - and (and I'm not making this up) Elminster was reduced to magical ash, I think in an urn, but still survived and recovered. I love how canon FR bullshit is the goofiest story in the last several pages of this thread. You couldn't replicate poo poo this dumb with the goofiest, most sleep-deprived group of players in the world. Re: GMPCs: A friend of mine is a good guy and a great guy to play alongside as a PC, but he absolutely sucks as a GM. He understands the makings of plot, setting, and character. He's creative, original, and sticks to the rules enough to let them work but knows when to let them go and let players be creative. His only problem that makes him suck as a GM is his GMPCs. He just has no self control about them. He just wants to show how cool they are and, whether they are or not, they take over combats and whole stories. He ran one game in old White Wolf, mixing a few games together (in hindsight, a mistake for the oWoD games, but the nWoD didn't exist at the time, so whatever). We had two mages, a werewolf, a hunter, and a mortal in our party. At the start of the fourth session of the game, the GM showed up saying he had this awesome idea for a mod. The mod turned out to be for Highlander-style immortals in the WoD system. Cheesy, yes, but he's not the first guy to try such a thing, in WoD especially. But god drat did the game take a herd left turn. I get the sense that he had the idea out of the blue, so rather than starting a new game with, you know, the players on board with it, he just dropped it into our existing game. The mod turned every combat into "hey, look at what this GMPC can do!" The crazy crap he made up for the mod was especially bad, since a) Highlander-style Immortals don't commonly have supernatural powers besides being immortal, and b) the crazy stuff he was pulling one-upped the mages in the party in sheer craziness. The game did not continue past that fourth session.
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Dec 24, 2014 15:49
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The Deleter posted:Now I want to run a DnD game where everyone is also a muppet. And make the muppet flail an at-will power. I ran a game of Everway once when Muppets came up, sort of. It's beside the point here, but Everway is a diceless game that could be the source of a ton of good, bad, and goofy stories. Anyway, one of the PCs in that game was min/maxed for physical speed, power and resilience, and at the cost of, basically, intelligence and wisdom. Because the game gives you a few picture cards to help form the basis of your character, his background, and his home world, the player had this character be a giant tiger. Not like a cartoony/furry/Disney's Robin Hood-type of tiger, though. Like a huge dude with a literal tiger's head, and about as personable. He was quick to anger and was spec'd to wreck drat near anything that wasn't a demi-god or incorporeal. All he did was murder. He had no other skills. Everway is a world-hopping game. The title city is kind of like Sigil in D&D's Planescape. In this particular plot, he party starts noticing that al of Everway's children are all inexplicably listless. Some investigation discovers a hidden, seemingly protected world deep in the archives of Everway's planar library. This world is somehow the source of all the worlds' children's imagination, and it's completely off the map. It seems as though no one should go or is even allowed to go there. But the party wants to fix the children before things get worse (as there are now signs that the malaise is spreading to adolescents and adults), so they find the portal to the world of children's imagination and go there. The entire world is like a Sesame Street set. Some objects and some aspects of space are oddly two-dimensional. The natives are Nooks: tiny, colorful people made of foam and yarn and googly eyes. They each seemingly have jobs, although none of them can actually do them well at all. There is a Nook dressed as a nurse, for example, but the syringe she carries around is harmless, useless, and sewn to her hand. The little guy wearing a hard hat and tool belt has a tiny foam hammer which is sewn onto his hip. All of the Nooks can talk about at length and sings songs about whatever it is them seem to do, but they are absolutely lovely at everything. Statistically, they blow at everything but singing, teaching children, and slapstick comedy routines. They are also totally invincible. The Nooks and their world was created as the well spring of all imagination for all people int he multiverse. So, whoever set this up made the Nooks both harmless and invincible. This is what little babies and toddlers dream of, so death and violence and real harm simply shouldn't be a part of their reality. (The creators are basically Doozers from Fraggle Rock, but that doesn't matter here). So the PCs show up and start doing their thing for the plot. They find the culprit, fight some of his minions, etc, etc. Most of the PCs enjoy themselves and interact with the Nooks. The giant tiger man is grumpy about the whole thing because he's a humorless warrior like Worf or something (the character, not the player. The player was cool and knew exactly what he was doing). But then he discovers that all the female Nooks have a bell in their tummies. And their hair is long and made of yarn. And they flail around when they sing... The tiger man suddenly can't resist and mauls a little schoolteacher Nook in the middle of a dialogue between the party and a few Nooks about why you should always wash your hands before you eat. He pours all of the hot death he can muster into murdering this tiny person. He uses his blade, his teeth, and his claws. He hurls her around and swipes at her in midair. He pounds her squishy, jangling body into the earth. The player is stunting combat maneuvers all over the place, and he's pulling crazy cards (how the diceless system helps resolve actions) and putting on a hell of a combat show. All the while, the Nook is just giggling and saying, "That tickles! Silly kitty!" She's made of foam, so she just squishes and bounces around harmlessly. The rest of the party calms down the Klingon tiger and they go their merry way. I could share a few more Everway stories if people are interested in hearing about a diceless game that's pretty drat good and very weird.
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Dec 27, 2014 01:34
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Oh boy, bad game store chat! My small city had been starved for a good game store for years. We had a few "dank basement" game stores come and go over the years that were more like clubhouses than stores, and managed as such. Not surprisingly, none of them lasted long. But this town has a bunch of colleges nearby, including the largest university in the state, so it was just a matter of time before someone came in to fill that niche. When we did eventually get a game store that was clean, bright, and not run like someone's club house, it was like a breath of fresh air in the local game scene. I was hoping for a store like the one I left on the other side of the state where I grew up, one that was managed by friendly, knowledgeable staff, and that hosted regular events while minimizing the gross/annoying/weird poo poo that happens whenever you put 30+ gamers in one place. This new store started out great: he stocked games that people actually wanted to buy, and he had a diverse selection. He sold CCGs, RPG books, board games, minis games, old school video game cartridges, and so on. His prices were at retail, but most folks didn't mind because it was more convenient than getting poo poo a bit cheaper on Amazon (and a lot of us are godless liberals who like to support local businesses). The shop was clean and functional as a space to come and play games. The shop was in a separate room from the game tables, and there was a third, smaller room to play tabletop RPGs. Then it all went to poo poo. It's hard to tell when in started, because I think the owner was always hiding a loathsome personality. But as the months went on, his grognardness (grognardiness? grognitude?) started to show through. Such as:  The store started to open and close whenever the owner felt like it, randomly. I was in a group of tabletop players that paid to rent the side room (5 bucks for a few hours, so not too shabby if you are in a position to have to rent a quiet place to play a game every now and then). We did this a few times. The last time we did, we paid at about 6:45 and were planning on being there until the store closed at 9:30. the store owner decided he wanted to leave early that day, so he tried to kick us out at 8:00. We didn't know this, though, because instead of coming to tell us like an adult, he started blaring the shop's music at increasingly loud volume. When I came out to ask him to turn the music down a bit, he said, "you guys need to get out of here. We've been closed for ten minutes." It wasn't even 8:00 yet. When I asked for our 5 bucks back, he just said, "no." We never used that room again. We couldn't have used the room anyway, as it turns out. Shortly after that, he bought a big screen TV and PS3 to put in the side room. He had a copy of Skyrim and a few other games. This wasn't for customers to use or rent. It was for him. He started spending all of his time playing loving Skyrim while his unpaid girlfriend staffed the store. I guess he just got sick of "running a game store" and "doing his loving job." Speaking of his girlfriend, she used to be nice. My wife was acquainted with her from college and they got along well. They're both nerds with hobbies and interests in common. But this other woman started acting mean-spirited and cynical soon after she started dating the store owner. She started adopting this weird, ugly, Randian philosophy that floats around gamer circles like a loving STD. She went from being a mellow, thoughtful, generally nice person to being a Randian, "gently caress you, got mine" libertarian. My wife still thinks she was brainwashed. The game store is right next to a Subway. Unfortunately, parking is at a premium in that building's lot, so when the store would host a Magic tournament for 20, 30, or 40 players, the lot would be completely hosed. The Subway next door stopped by to ask the owner to have his customers avoid the four or so spaces in front of the Subway. He refused. The Subway put up signs in front of their storefront's parking spaces that said "Subway customer parking only." The game store guy did nothing. When one of his customer complained that he got towed after parking right in front of the Subway for five hours for a Magic tournament, the store owner went to Subway to yell at them, and then put up signs in his own shop that banned Subway sandwiches from the premises. He would seriously ask customers who walked in with a bag from Subway, even strangers who couldn't have possibly known any better, to leave his store or throw the sandwich away. Subway continues to tow cars from their spaces occasionally, but the regulars have gotten the hint, even if the owner hasn't. The store slowly slipped away from the model of "here are some games, so come buy them and play them so that other people see them and also buy them" to a model of "we just host Magic twice a week and otherwise gently caress off." First the RPG players got elbowed out. Then the other CCG players. Then the minis gamers. Then the board gamers. I don't know anyone who plays anything but Magic there, and now that's on the decline too because the patronage has been whittled down to the owner's little clubhouse of aggressively libertarian friends. The irony is that he initially had to be convinced to run Magic events, but because he sucks at management, the events strip-mined his store of all of it's customers and sales. He still has a hard core of Magic goons in his little club, but it's not enough to float the store by itself. My wife was hired to paint a mural for the store a while back. This was during some of the above stuff, but before the owner went completely off the deep end (see below). The owner paid her about half what the going rate is for a mural of that size, but she didn't expect him to be able to meet that kind of price. It was extra work for her and built up her portfolio, so she was willing to take the hit on the money without complaint. He, on the other hand, bitched endlessly. He bitched about how much he paid her (minimum wage). He bitched about how it was taking her weeks to paint a mural 20' x 6 ' on one wall, and 20' x 6 on another. He bitched that he was "paying her to stand around" whenever she did not literally have a brush on the wall, like when she went to the bathroom to wash brushes or stood back to do composition sketches. He bitched that she didn't work often enough, despite the fact that he knew he hired a full-time college student who already had another retail job to boot. (He also had no deadline for it, so he was just being impatient). He bitched at her when she took one day off that she had verbally committed to to attend her grandmother's funeral an hour away. He called her a liar and drove her to tears yelling at her about it. That last one broke the camel's back. I showed up to pick up my wife that day and found her in tears, being yelled at by this guy. There were words. I have not set foot in the store since.
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Jan 5, 2015 14:55
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JustJeff88 posted:You have more restraint than I, sir goon. I am not a violent man nor a married one, but if you make my lady cry then you're in for a beating. All libertarians deserve a severe arse-kicking anyway, but then again they tend to be armed to the teeth... because they know that everyone who is a decent person hates them. I had to keep myself from hitting the guy, and I'm not a violent guy at all. I'm not non-confrontational, though. Like I said, there were... words. My friendly local game store from my earlier days is still going strong. They host events every day, and manage to balance huge Magic tournaments with other events so that no one gets stepped on. The guy who runs it is a good guy, and knows how to be both a businessman and a gamer without screwing up either of the roles. It helps that he's not an rear end in a top hat libertarian that is willing to torch any amount of goodwill or respect he has for short term gains, but he's also a way more savvy game businessman. He doesn't sell what he likes. He sells what other people like (and want to buy).
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Jan 5, 2015 18:31
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AlphaDog posted:A game store that was near me in the '90s went (sorta) to the "Magic Only" thing in about a month, but in a really weird way. One month, I'm in there looking at D&D books, thinking about picking up the Planes of Conflict box for Planescape. Our city had a game store, The Wizard's Den, that was doing alright when I moved here in 2001, and by the time they closed in 2006 it was a shadow of what it used to be. The decline was something like: 2000: RPG books, CCGs, comic books, minis, board games. 2001: RPG books, CCGs, minis, board games. 2002: RPG books, CCGs, minis, manga/anime, board games. 2003: RPG books, CCGs, manga/anime, board games. 2004: CCGs, manga/anime, board games, more manga. 2005: Magic, manga, anime, manga, manga. 2006: manga, manga, manga, manga, anime, manga, anime, manga. I literally never saw anyone buy a single manga or anime DVD there in several years of going regularly. I stopped going when I couldn't get good board games there and after I and others looted the place for clearance RPG books long after they stopped ordering new ones. I managed to find a copy of Deadlands core, two 7th Sea secret society books, and the Salubri Clanbook for Dark Ages Vampire. Thanks, Wizard's Den.
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Jan 6, 2015 01:14
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I'm playing in a 7th Sea game right now where all the PCs are officers on a ship, but the regular sailors are all NPCs. They usually could go without names, but whenever we have reason to shout out a name, it usually comes from FTL or some other video game with tons of names in its database. So, now we have brute squads full of guys named Wiggles, Nubbins, Xin Xin, and Scoops. We also have three Arab dudes in the crew named Kareem, Abdul, and Jabbar. My character, the captain, took a liking to one particular brute because he distinguished himself from his squad by doing badass stuff against all odds in key situations. I bought a henchman advantage for my character to upgrade him, but then he got lost falling down an underground chasm. My character fell to her knees, shook her fists at the heavens, and wailed: NUBBINS! NOOOOOO! NUUUUUUBBBBBIIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS! Dignity.
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Jan 20, 2015 21:29
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Kerzoro posted:Did... did you ever rescue Nubbins Like a fuckin' boss I did. I rescued him by buying the services of another brute at the nearest port, plugging him into the depleted squad, and naming him Nubbins. I did get reimbursed for the XP I spent to upgrade the first Nubbins from a brute to a henchman. We never talked about him in front of the second Nubbins. It would have been... awkward. Nubbins MK I died horribly at the bottom of the chasm. R.I.P. 9/11/1668. Never forget.   Or, because it's 7th Sea: he'll reappear, inexplicably alive months later, this time a villain bent on revenge for having been left for dead by the unwitting heroes. 7th Sea II: The Wrath of Nubbins.
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Jan 23, 2015 15:34
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I'm playing in two simultaneous weekly games of 7th Sea. The GMs alternate weeks so neither gets burned out. It has worked well for about a year, but one of them just had a baby. To give him a break for a while, I started running Everway in between the other 7th Sea game. Everway is diceless and *~*interpretive*~* but I love it because it's goofy as gently caress. Normally, it is a world-hopping game with it's own setting, but I'm running it based on the premise of the children's animated film "The Painting." (It's on Netlfix, if you're curious). The film is about figures in a painting dealing with the caste system in their painting that separates completed figures, incomplete figures, and sketches, and dealing with the implications of their painter having seemingly abandoned his creation. Yeah, it has a bit more going on than "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." Anyway, the premise works well for Everway because the character hop between paintings, and the players design a home world to go with their character. The home worlds for this game are paintings, so I asked everyone to find a painting and make a character that calls that painting home. The characters have superpowers because it's Everway and superpowers are still awesome. The cast is as follows:  Don Quixote, from Picasso's "Don Quixote." He maintains that he is a completed figure, but he is a sketch. He is also a senile old man. He is on a noble quest, or looking for one, or... well, he can't quite remember. His squire Sancho Panza can fill you in on the details, such as they are. His power is to animate inanimate objects (say, windmills...). He also has a bony old mare as his noble steed.  "Sandra," the woman in red from Hopper's "Nighthawks." She is sly and persuasive and has a bit of Tulip from "Preacher" built into her character. She is complete figure and is on the run from one or more of the other figures form her own painting. She possesses supernatural persuasion and postcognition. She also owns a gun, which is kind of like a superpower in this game.  "Jeanne," a dancer from Lautrec's "Ballet Dancers." The figures in her painting are forced to perform magical dances for the shadowy sketch in the background (which is creepy as gently caress and I didn't even notice until the player pointed it out). She escaped the conductor in the foreground of the painting and is looking for a new home, even though she is incomplete in her own painting. She has the power of metacognition: she can see the stories of things and other figures, but not her own story.  "Hidetora" a sorcerer from this Japanese painting of unknown origin. He is a rogue and a wanderer and his sorcery can only make natural phenomena (weather, fire, etc.) more severe. He is a complete figure, although his painting is not prejudiced against incomplete or sketch figures because of the nature of the art style of it. He is just wandering for the sake of it, looking for trouble, like you do.  "Left and Right" (or "Louis and Renee," depending on which one you ask), a mind-linked pair of robots searching for their real home painting. One is the logical one, and one is the intuitive one. They are art critics be trade. (They are from a thrift store crap painting of a farmhouse that the player's friend painted two giant robots into. My friend has this painting on his wall.) They have the power to change their size at-will and to analyze things with supernatural detail (like a Tricorder in Star Trek). The above isn't the actual image, but it's the same idea. Imagine this painting with two giant robots painted in it in a different style, like pulp 1950's sci fi novel art. This game is designed to take 2-3 sessions, as it is a temporary fill-in for a month or two while the new dad GM gets his bearings. In the first game, the PCs left their respective paintings at about the same time and found each other in the studio that houses all of their paintings. There, they discovered something wrong with Don Quixote's painting: one of the windmills in the background was smudged out. they went in to check it out and discovered.... something systematically destroying the painting from the inside. Weird figures started crawling out of the fabric of the painting itself. They weren't complete, incomplete, or even sketches. They were scribbled over, abandoned figures beneath the existing painting. They're a fourth type of figure: Mistakes. And they were angry about it. They set about ruining Don Quixote's painting. The PCs fought them off, but they ruined some of his painting before escaping into the studio. They erased poor Sancho Panza's head in the process, so the PCs went back into the studio themselves to look for some way to fix him. They found some ink and a pen to remake his head, although the PC that ended up doing the drawing really hosed up the attempt. Sancho Panza's head is now a derpy smiley face atop his sketchy pancho. He would be more mad about it if he weren't already used so much dumb poo poo happening to him from being Dox Quixote's squire. The PCs tracked the Mistakes into a painting in a dark corner of the studio, covered in a sheet. The PCs bravely entered the painting without being able to see its contents before entering. This is what they found:  They talked with the 500 foot high (in his own painting, at least) titan for a while. He was nice enough, but aggressively and intimidatingly commanding. He kept alluding to his own mythology and that "nothing new will come along to replace me. I will not allow it," while casually munching on his own children. This upset the PCs, and the Don animated a giant stone enough to fool the titan into eating it. (The stone, unbeknownst to the PCs, was placed there by the Mistakes). The titan ate the stone, which rendered him incapacitated and defenseless. The Mistakes then came out of the background to launch their attack. The PCs fought them off for a while again, but were driven out this time. The ruined figures found a kindred spirit in the titan, and their aim is to take back all the canvases from the paintings that were painted over them. They scribbled over Saturn to make him one of them, and they're amassing a force in the Goya painting to go to war with the rest of the studio. The PCs are scrambling to find a way to respond before it's too late. That's where we left off the first game.
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Mar 25, 2015 19:24
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Guildencrantz posted:Maybe she's born with it, maybe she signed a blood pact with a demon I ran a Pathfinder game a while back, and the party met the NPC queen of an island nation. She was the beautiful, beloved queen of an island paradise. All of her people were happy and prosperous and hospitable, and she seemed to be much the same. This Riza from Star Trek: party time spring break drug and sex planet. Her people were sheltered from the outside world, though, and had the belief that rulers were akin to gods, and gods do not die. To them, their queen's immortality was just natural. To the party it was... less convincing. The queen turned out to be a lich using powerful magic to conceal her true identity, and routinely taking offerings from her willing subjects to serve as "temple maidens" in her palace (where they would be promptly consumed for their delicious souls). When the party found that out, they wasted her, much to the chagrin of her people. Unfortunately, the party's gnome alchemist had already slept with her before he found out she was 2,000 years old and undead. Whoops. The party never let him live it down. Edit: the gnome maintained that the party was being "ageist," and that he had come to terms with the fact that he made it with "the ultimate cougar." Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Apr 1, 2015 |
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Apr 1, 2015 14:56
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I played in a D&D 3.5 game a while back that I loved despite all odds. The game just had the weirdest, most dysfunctional group of players I've ever played with, but I still managed to have a good time and I have great memories of it. I had not played with any of these people before, and most of them I knew only for a short time through my roommate. The cast of characters: Our DM was a moody guy, and was my roommate at the time. He's a good guy, and I still game with him now. He was just moody in such a way that made it hard for him to cope with the more troublesome players (i.e. all of them) at times, so I and one of the other players had to do the diplomacy. It was also his first long term campaign. One of the players was a friend to the whole group, but happened to start dating the DM before the start of the game. She's OG, and has been playing D&D consistently since her brother introduced her when she was in kindergarten. I'm just stressing that she's not "the girl friend PC," because that is a thing that exists elsewhere. Besides me, she was the group's other diplomat, and is way better at it than me. She played a paranoid NG human paladin. One of the players was the DM's best friend. He is a power-maxer on paper and relishes the challenge of min-maxing systems. In game, though, he actually acts, but does so in a way that can sometimes cramp other people's style. He would seize upon other people's opportunities to shine, take it for himself, and grandstand like crazy. It should be noted that he is a big fan of big, cheesy, over-the-top anime, hence the grandstanding. He's a good guy in spite of it all. He played a NG half dragon spell sword or sword sage or whatever the gently caress they're called. I don't know how else to say it, so here goes: one of the players is legitimately on the spectrum. He's a really nice guy, probably the nicest one in the group, but he just loving loves Mega Man. Get him talking about Mega Man and it is loving on. He's awkward as hell and knowingly struggles with communication. Roleplaying is one way he tries to work through his communicaton issues. Toward that end, he deliberately made a NG human bard, and was (on paper, at least) the party's face. Welp. The oldest guy in the group was also our resident munchkin. He and I bonded at the very beginning over being veterans of 2nd Ed. D&D. We didn't know it at the start, but he came from a school of gaming that is more competitive than cooperative, both between the DM and the players, and between the players themselves. Naturally, he played a LE elven sorceress. You may see where this is going... I was the other elder statesman of the group. And by that I mean, I was in my mid-20's at the time, and most of the others were 19-22. I do more GMing than playing, so I was the defacto rules guy when the DM wanted feedback. I'm not a rules lawyer by nature, and I actually play fast and loose with rules when I run games, but I was willing to put in my two cents when the DM asked. I played a CG dwarven rogue crossbow sniper with 5 CHA and chain-smoked cigars (hence the emoticon). We had a friend of the group who wasn't actually in the game, but attended drat near every session. He said he hated D&D and refused to play, even when the DM offered for him to join, and even demanded it at a certain point. But he never did. He would just hang out, play video games, and make fun of poo poo that he overheard in the game. He's also a good guy in other contexts, but Jesus tap dancing Christ did everyone want to kill him at some point or another during the campaign. He's included here because he is a part of a lot of the stories in the way that a barnacle is part of the description of a boat. He played a CG no one, doing nothing, ever. By all rights, this group should not have gotten through a single session. We got through an eight month campaign. Not only that, but I enjoyed enough of it to have generally positive memories of it. most of the stories are about the dumb poo poo, but there are some good spots as well. I think most of that has to do with the fact that pretty much all of these people are good people, despite their struggles as a group. I'll share one later when I have a few more minutes. Here's a preview of some of the stories: "Sense and Snipability," or "Why You Don't Make an Evil Character in a Party with a Paladin" "The Crazy Cat Lady," or "Cats, Rats, and the Local Economics of Unmitigated Madness" "Never Split Up the Party," or, "the Most Awkward Game I Have Ever Played" "A Bard's Tears," or "Reasons Not to Trust Your Face" "The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour," or "Don't Ever Be Absent for a Game" "How I Met Your Mother," or "Literally, How I Met My Wife Playing D&D" If anyone is interested in a specific story, I'm willing to take suggestions.
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Apr 30, 2015 17:23
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For future reference: here's the post about my D&D group. I'll use the emoticons there as their names. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3460258&pagenumber=169#post444733986 The cast: The DM. (I'll call him... The DM.) Played a LG human paladin. (I'll call her J.) Played a NG half dragon spell sword. (I'll call him Smaug.) Played a CG human bard. (I'll call him Megaman, which would make him the happiest man on Earth.) Played a LE elven sorceress. (I'll call him Munchkin.) Played no one and just hung around and trolled us. (I'll call him Statler.) Played a NG dwarven rogue. (This is me.)I'll post "Never Split Up the Party" before "How I Met Your Mother" because one is helpful to understand the other. "Never Split Up the Party," or "The Most Awkward Game I Have Ever Played" I mentioned before that the DM started dating one of the players shortly before the start of the first game. I didn't know any of them besides the DM prior to the first game. Everyone knew the DM, but did not necessarily know each other. I was more of an odd duck than the rest of them, but it was mainly the friendship with the DM and the game itself that brought the group together. That was a weird dynamic for me, since I don't usually game with people I don't know. So we all entered into this tenuous arrangement, and on top of that the DM had just started dating J. I also mentioned that the DM is a moody dude. I was his roommate at the time, and we got along well. I think I'm very easy going, but if I was less so his moods might have made it a bad fit. This was not the case with her. She's a great person, but she was not as easy going about his moods, and his moods were not easy on her. She didn't live with us, but she spent a lot of time around our apartment because she lived in a lovely dorm on the nearby campus. In hindsight, they were not a great couple. She admits now that it was more of a partnership of convenience than true affection, and it showed. At their best, they were nice enough, but at their worst they made games awkward. His moods knew no rhyme or reason, so they would sometimes trigger an argument between them literally minutes before people started showing up for the game. To their credit, they hid it well to the rest of the group, but as the roommate, I was witness to the whole thing and I was the one at the table sitting there thinking about how these two were just yelling at each other about groceries or something stupid and couple-y. That made things occasionally awkward, but not The Most Awkward Game I Have Ever Played. That came later. Over first six months of the campaign, the group developed a functional dynamic. J was the diplomat between the DM and whichever player was being dumb at that particular moment. I was the diplomat between the two of them, when need be. Smaug became a sounding board for all of the Munchkin's munchkiny ideas about min-maxing. Megaman became the group's affable mascot. Statler just sat around playing video games and provided the group with something to rally against when we needed it. So, one day Statler and I were out of the apartment playing VTES. It wasn't D&D day (thank god). Now, VTES is a fairly involved game and has a two hour time limit. It involves four or five players to a table, yadda yadda. He and I are at a table with three other players, 20 minutes into a game, and he gets a call. We gotta go. When? Now? Can we finish this game? Nope. Now. Gotta do it.He stands up and scoops without another word. He's normally pretty chatty, but he's uncharacteristically terse so I can tell something is up. We fold, which completely fucks up their game, but whatever. It's just a game. What he tells me in the car is that the DM and J have split up. She was at the apartment when we left. It's the middle of the night, and she doesn't drive, so she's stranded at the apartment of a dude she just split with. So we roar home. I expect to find him in the apartment brooding, and her wandering around outside. What we find instead is her sitting on the couch trying not to sob, looking more angry than sad, and him nowhere to be seen. So, at least she didn't have to wander into a sketchy neighborhood in the middle of the night, alone. But everything else is lovely. Statler takes her home and the DM eventually wanders back to the apartment two hours later from god knows where. His car never left the lot. Just wandering around in thought, I suppose. To make a long(er) story short, he dumped her. I guess he came to the same determination they both did, and he just chose to pull the trigger first. He felt bad about it, and she really wanted the social outlet that the game offered, so he invited her to keep playing. She did, just one week later, and man was that awkward as hell. So remember that awkward tension that I would sometimes have from their fights that no one else at the table detected? Well, now everyone had that. The problem was, some of the people at the table genuinely sucked at being diplomatic and judicious about dealing with it. Everyone is sitting there, tension all over the room thick enough to slice, just trying to focus on in-character stuff to avoid the out-of-character drama. Then, a well-meaning, awkward Megaman blurts out in the middle of a combat with some orcs, apropos of nothing: So, J, are you still going to spend the night here tonight, or do you need a ride back to campus? No, Megaman. I need a ride back to campus.  Oh, ok. I didn't know because you're here and I didn't know... the... yeah. Welp.I wish I could say that blew the tension out of the room. It didn't. The DM got moody and ended game abruptly and early, but not early enough. He probably shouldn't have held game at all that week. In the long run, things turned out well and she got right back into the swing of things. They were both good and mature about it, but no amount of maturity can cover over a wound that fresh. I don't care who you're talking about. It's just too soon. I barely even remember anything that happened in character that week because the whole thing is just a two hour knot of angst, and I'm sure everyone (except for the blissfully unaware Megaman) has the same memory of it. Luckily, it wouldn't happen again between the two of them. Years later, I'd marry J. Our baby is sitting next to me playing as I type this. The DM is coming over for a game in two hours. All is well. Next: "How I Met Your Mother."
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Apr 30, 2015 21:03
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For the sake of reference, her eis the post about my old D&D group: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3460258&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=169#post444733986 Last time: "Never Split Up the Party." This time: "How I Met Your Mother," or "Literally, How I Met My Wife Playing D&D" The cast: The DM. (I'll call him... The DM.) Played a LG human paladin. (I'll call her J.) Played a NG half dragon spell sword. (I'll call him Smaug.) Played a CG human bard. (I'll call him Megaman, which would make him the happiest man on Earth.) Played a LE elven sorceress. (I'll call him Munchkin.) Played no one and just hung around and trolled us. (I'll call him Statler.) Played a NG dwarven rogue. (This is me.)So, last time I mentioned that J and the DM were dating as the game began, and broke up about six months later. the group stayed together, despite the initial awkwardness, and the game continued on to its conclusion. But let's rewind a bit. At the start of the game, J made a paladin with an elaborate backstory. Her character was a guy that got kidnapped by a doppelganger and impersonated by him for several years before escaping. He never did find his doppelganger, so he was paranoid about doppelgangers in general. Because he never found and killed the doppelganger, he never got closure and constantly suspected everyone of potentially being a shapeshifter. J didn't play this to the hilt enough for it to be obnoxious, though. She was pretty measured about it. But it was enough of a thing for her character that she did things in character to act upon the paranoia. Enter my dwarven rogue, Swampy. He was a crossbow sniper, and more of an INT rogue than a DEX one. He was the skill guy, and the group's tactician. Everyone else was of pretty average INT and didn't have great skill points from their classes, so I carried the load for a lot of mundane skill checks. My character had a CHA of 5, though, so I acted as blunt as possible at all times. He wasn't mean, just... blunt, and swathed in cigar smoke at all times. There were more obvious choices for the paladin to pal up with in the group: the bard and the spell sword in particular. They were both literally Good characters, but they actually had more of a chaotic strain to them than mine. My rogue was NG, so he was less about the rogue as a career and more about it as a tactical position in combat. He was about being a sniper, not a looter. So, between that and the complimentary skill sets, the paladin gravitated toward the rogue and they became like a pair ina buddy cop film. I thoguht of it kind of like an Odd Couple kind of relationship. But the paladin was paranoid. No one else in the party, either in character or out, was willing to play along with the paladin's nuttiness. My rogue, though, was. He recognized the paladin's value to the group, and wanted to keep him around (and not going nuts and killing everyone in a fit of delirium). So, during one of the first games, the paladin had "reason" to believe someone inthe group had "been replaced," so my rogue stepped up. Boyscout. Come 'ere. Yes, Swampy? What is it? We need a signal. To make sure... doppelgangers don't infiltrate our group. Yes! Good idea. What should we do? We just need a common call-and-response that is plausible enough to seem like regular conversation, so we can use it in secret. It has to be something common, like "how's the weather," but with a slightly unusual response that can't be accidentally guessed by a doppelganger. Right. Yes. Yes. Ok. Let's use "How's the weather." What should the response be? *Thinks for a moment* "Hurricane's coming."From that point on, J's paladin and Swampy were pals. The irony was, the paladin never really did completely trust anyone in the party except for the rogue. From a functional standpoint, I recommend it for any D&D group with a paladin and a rogue. They complement each other well, as long as both of them look the other way often enough to let the other do their job. But besides that, the two of us bonded over the game as well. Like I said before, I didn't know anyone in this game except for the DM at the start of the game. I had ways to bond with each of the players, and this was the first one for J and I. At this point I should mention that I wasn't attracted to J at that point. It's basic bro-code stuff: don't mack on your roommate's girlfriend, and don't even put yourself in a position to think about it. I mean, she was an attractive woman (and still is  ), but I didn't let myself think of her as anyone other than another friend in the group. And it worked. We got along well, and in hindsight she was probably the one in the group that I enjoyed playing alongside most. The DM dated her for another six months, and even after their mid-game break up, I maintained the bro-code and didn't so much as think about her romantically, let alone pursue it. It honestly didn't occur to me at the time.It wasn't until a few years later, when both J and I had had a couple relationships come and go uneventfully that we came back on each other's radars. We had maintained our friendship, but we kind of went our separate ways for a couple years after the game ended. But we got back together and eventually started dating. J and I are married now. The game was seven years ago, and we started dating about four years ago. The inside of her wedding band reads, "How's the weather?" Mine reads, "Hurricane's coming." The jeweler gave us quite a look, but asked no questions. I still game with J and the DM regularly. J and I host a weekly 7th Sea game that another buddy runs. The old DM plays alongside us as a player now. I'm not naturally an optimist, but it is one of the examples I have from my life of a truly happy ending. The next story will be more of a funny one. I'll go with "The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour," since that one was requested and the chronological order of things doesn't matter much for that one.
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May 2, 2015 18:29
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GHOST_BUTT posted:So we had a party wipe the other day. Awesome. If you're going to have a TPK, you have to at least try to take out a whole town on your way out. I'm pretty sure that's in the Hero Handbook or something. Our 7th Sea game almost had a TPK last week. We're at sea in the Midnight Archipelago (i.e. the Caribbean). I'm the captain of a ship, and the other PCs are all officers on the ship:  Katherine. Avalonian (English) Glamour sorceress. Career sailor from a minor noble family of naval officers. Bullshit artist. Captain. James. Avalonian (English) young gun. Trying to learn the principles of command despite being seventeen. May have... other reasons for seeking command. Second Mate. Alana. Inish (Irish) prizefighter. Drinker and storyteller extraordinaire. Master of the Tops (i.e. in charge of the sails). Vignar. Vesten (Norwegian) warrior. Tank, bodyguard, and defensive specialist. But also a berserker when need be. Sergeant-at-Arms. Sebastian. Castillian (Spanish) scholar, theologian, and medical doctor. Also a closet fire mage. The ship's doctor. Peter. Montaigne (French) knife fighter. Is an assassin for a secret society, but also does the necessary evils for the good of the crew. Technically, not an officer (he prefers anonymity).We were pursuing a lead on a notorious pirate named The Valkyrie. Little is known about her, mostly because all of the information is clearly bullshit: she's twenty feet tall, she can command the sea itself, her ship is an invincible force of nature, and so on. There is a substantial bounty for her capture, though, so we go after it. (Vignar is one her countrymen and would have spoken out against the mission, but his player wasn't around when we took up the mission.  He joined in on the next game, after we found The Valkyrie). James found the bounty and was the most vocal about pursuing it. He made a convincing argument so, off we went.When we found The Valkyrie at sea, they tried to waylay our ship. They could, as it turns out, at least control the wind and weather. We had a trick up our sleeve though, and ambushed them when they came alongside to board what they thought was a defenseless vessel. We opened up with our hidden gunports and did significant damage before they maneuvered away with oars. They tried to "cross the T" while we were immobilized, but we managed to pivot our ship with some creative actions on deck. We peppered them with cannon strikes a few more times, and they hit us a couple times and hit us with lightning once. Katherine used her own magic to heal our ship's damage, in an attempt to appear invincible. By the time they maneuvered back in for a boarding again, their ship was slowly sinking and ours appeared unharmed. Their crew outnumbered ours 3 to 2, and were legendary for their ruthlessness. As their crew gathered on the deck of their ship to board us, Katherine called over to them: I am Captain Katherine Lyons, and I am here to accept your surrender!They did not see the humor in it. They came over with pretty much everyone they had, since their ship was sinking. We paused the game there. Vignar's player was at the next game, as was everyone else. The crew saved Vignar from a slave ship a while back (when his player joined up in the middle of the campaign), so he is fiercely loyal to Katherine and the crew. But he is also a Vesten bearsark, and The Valkyrie is a national hero to the Vesten people. He resolved to go on all-out defense, to protect the crew while not attacking The Valkyrie. He pleaded with Katherine, who is a known bullshit artist, to try to parley with them, to avoid any killing. The rest of the crew scoffed at the idea, but I made the attempt anyway. With Vignar's help, Katherine was actually able to talk The Valkyrie down from the ledge. I put every resource I had into those negotiation rolls, and even then I needed a ton of luck to succeed as much as I did. But it worked. We agreed to tow them to a safe place where they could repair their ship, and instead of turning them in for the bounty, partner with them. Seeing that the Valkyrie wasn't actually an evil monster made it easy to turn on the bounty. An alliance with them would have been more valuable than the bounty anyway. Then James, my second mate, stepped forward. And by "stepped" I mean "lunged." With a sword. That he had poisoned. Without any other PCs knowledge. With one of the most lethal poisons in the game. "This is for my mother, my father, and my brothers! Die, you wicked beast!"His yell alerted Vignar, but James' player rolled an absolutely insane roll to hit The Valkyrie, so there wasn't much Vignar could do. Vignar actually got in the way with one of his skills ("Interpose") , but got ran-through and pushed back so that The Valkyrie got stabbed as well. To top it all off, we found out a bit later that James, who is unskilled with the use of poisons, accidentally dosed himself with the stuff days earlier, when he was applying it to the blade. So now we have two PCs and a key NPC dosed with a poison that kills slowly but incurably over many weeks. Keep in mind that none of the other PCs knew anything about this. James apparently had his whole family die on a freighter that was attacked by The Valkyrie. e was orphaned from a young age as a result. James' player kept his character's revenge background against The Valkyrie a secret, as well as his actions in pursuit of his revenge. No one knew that he was Ahab, and that The Valkyrie was his white whale. No one knew he pushed for the bounty specifically to get an opportunity to kill her. No one knew his life at sea, his whole career as an officer, was a sham to put himself in a position to find and kill this woman. PCs in 7th Sea all have secret backgrounds and personal plots, but they're usually open secrets. The players know, even if the characters don't. Sebastian's fire magic is a secret to every other character except Katherine (who noticed him use it once and agreed to keep his secret). But the players know what Sebastian is. Not even the players knew what James was planning. We were all stunned, in and out of character. So, all hell breaks loose. The Valkyrie is crippled but the rest of her crew attacks. At this point, everyone at the table, including the GM, is thinking "this is a total party kill." The Valkyrie's crew significantly outnumbers ours, and most of them outstrip us on paper. But with some creative actions, tenacity, and a ton of good rolls, we are able to fight them to a draw. In the melee, James finished off the Valkyrie in a phase of the combat when both Katherine and Vignar could see what he was doing, but could do nothing to stop him. He then got hacked to pieces by The Valkyrie's psychotic first mate. Not literally, but he was dead by all rights. James' player spent his last "Drama Die," a spendable resource in 7th Sea, to keep from dying for one round. He played dead. When the battle was over, James was actually the only PC was lost. A bunch of the Valkyrie's crew was over the side and/or crippled, but she was the only one dead. We shouted for the doctor immediately, but she was too far gone. We were able to save James, though. So now we have to pick up the pieces, and we have a PC whose death wish just got fulfilled. But he's still alive. the next game is going to be interesting. Oh, and Sebastian is going to try to devise a cure for the poison. He has several weeks to figure out something no one has been able to do for centuries, or else Vignar and James will both die. 
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May 4, 2015 15:27
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thespaceinvader posted:That story makes James' player sound like a COLOSSAL dickbag, by the by. He isn't, really. 7th Sea is a game about secrets and personal agendas, to a big extent. He did go out of his way to do his thing under the radar of everyone else (and almost get us all killed in the process), but it's understandable. It's not how I or most players usually play 7th Sea, but it's a thing you could do within the tone of the game. Than again, the last 7th Sea campaign I played alongside him, he played an authoritarian Eisen (German) noble and my character came to blows with him a couple times over his bullheadedness, and my character almost shot his once when the noble tried to summarily execute an NPC. James' player just likes being an occasional antagonist, and he's good at it. It doesn't usually derail the whole game, and it usually creates interesting, dramatic moments when it does come up, so I don't mind it. if he were more one-note about it, he'd be a troll and I would hate it. But he does others things besides gently caress with the other PCs. Other players I've played with are huge dickbags and troll the other PCs almost exclusively. I'll get to that later in a story about the old D&D group...
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May 4, 2015 16:01
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Finished grading finals! Back to being a nerd on the internet. This is another post about my old D&D group. I posted "Never Split Up the Party" and "How I Met Your Mother," so now it's on to "The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour." The cast: The DM. (I'll call him... The DM.) Played a LG human paladin. (I'll call her J.) Played a NG half dragon spell sword. (I'll call him Smaug.) Played a CG human bard. (I'll call him Megaman, which would make him the happiest man on Earth.) Played a LE elven sorceress. (I'll call him Munchkin.) Played no one and just hung around and trolled us. (I'll call him Statler.) Played a NG dwarven rogue. (This is me.)The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour "Finest" is used very loosely here. Let me go back for a second and talk about Statler for a minute. Statler is a good guy, but is often  personified. He just has goofy, grognardy opinions about things for no good reason, and he's vocal about those opinions. For example, he gave up on the idea of watching Mad Men before he watched a single episode because he assumed the show was simply "men in the 1960's were jerks." He's not an MRA. He just thought the show would oversimplify things. When people explained to him that the show is about a lot more than that, and is superb regardless of theme, he just dismissed what they said. He had formed his opinion arbitrarily, but god damnit, it was his.Now I've dug myself into a hole. I don't want Statler to sound like a jerk (despite the name I've chosen for him). He has many more positive qualities than he has grognardy ones. He's loyal, he's funny, he's smart, and he's fun to hang out with. He just picks his spots. So, when he's not being fun and funny and smart, he's being a loving douche. His "role" in the D&D campaign was to hang out and eat our snacks and play our video game consoles. He wouldn't sit at the table, or even in the same room. He said that would be too intrusive. Instead, he sat in the next room, visible through the doorway, and played video games. He would also loudly and frequently make smartass comments about our game, even though he usually wasn't paying enough attention to understand the whole context of what was going on. It was like his brain would passively scan for single sentences from the next room, and then he'd pay attention just long enough to quip about it, and then go back to ignoring us before we would yap back at him. for being a douche bag. Everyone in the group had a different reaction to him. The DM alternated between being annoyed by him and encouraging him by playing along and being nice about his quips. J was plainly but mildly annoyed at him. Smaug disliked his quips a lot more to the point that it threw off his game, but he bared it because the DM was buddies with Statler, and Smaug and the DM are BFFs. Munchkin seemed to put himself into game grognard mode such that things happening outside the narrative of the game didn't exist, so he got by just fine. I didn't care one way or the other, because I can tune him out if need be. So let me bring together Statler's lovely opinions and his role in the group. There was a week when J couldn't make it to the game. I think it was the week after she and the DM broke up (see above). They took a week between their awkward break up and her coming back to game. But the DM wanted to run the game, and we were right in the middle of a plot, so all the characters were committed. We were willing to let the DM run J's paladin for the session, since he's not the kind of spiteful rear end in a top hat that would kill his ex-girlfriend's character the very next game. But, then Statler chimed in from the next room just as we were discussing how J's paladin was going to run: Hey, can I run J's character? Do you know the system well enough? Not really. I hate D&D. Then why do you want to play? It just seems like you guys need someone to fill in.We definitely didn't, but the DM was too polite to refuse him, so off we went. Statler really doesn't know D&D to save his life, because he really does hate it. He thinks it's a stupid system and a bad game. That would be fair enough if it had any basis on experience. His opinion, though, was formed by literally one game, almost ten years before. So, he spent the whole session doing the following: Complaining constantly about the system, despite not knowing how anything works. "If taking 20 is a thing, why can't I do that all the time? Why do any of you guys even bother to roll for anything?" Complaining constantly about how J built her character, as if he knew what the gently caress he was doing. Keep in mind, that J is OG. She's been playing D&D since she was six years old. Statler has played it once. "This character doesn't do enough damage. Her spells are all healing and her feats are all for mounted poo poo." (J's character was not a beat-stick. He was a tank, and a healer. He and the bard split healing duties because we didn't have a cleric. Smaug's spell sword and my rogue did the lion's share of the damage output. Rogues doing tons of damage is pretty basic D&D strat, but Statler didn't know poo poo about anything and refused to bend to reality.) Complaining constantly about how lovely the game is and how he was doing us a favor (that was unnecessary in the first place). "I missed. Again. God, this is stupid. You guys are lucky. I wouldn't play this stupid game otherwise." Royally screwing things up for J's character and for everyone else. Because he didn't know the system, he would make tactical mistakes all over the place that J would never make. Any player passingly familiar with D&D wouldn't make them either. "What do you mean I can't use Lying on Hands at range? Why not? Jesus, you're hosed now, Megaman." (The paladin ditched Megaman's bard's side right before a wave of monsters slammed into the bard's position.)The DM had the wisdom and tact to end the session early. That may have saved Statler's life. Smaug, despite the name I've given him here, is a lover not a fighter, but I thought he was going to slap the poo poo out of Statler by the time we stopped. Statler did so much harm to the party in two loving hours that the DM retconned pretty much the entire session, in which he blew a big plot twist. Everyone was miserable at the end of the session, so much so that between that and the recent break up between J and the DM, I thought the campaign might end right then and there. I said in my first post about this group that it is a wonder we got a single game done, let alone a good campaign. This session is one of the reasons this game had no business surviving. I don't know if it's proof that the group was dysfunctional, or proof of the opposite: that we were able to regroup and recover from all that bullcrap and negativity. This isn't even the worst thing that happened during the game, too. Munchkin is responsible for the worst of it, and I'll get to that in my next story, "Sense and Snipability."
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May 17, 2015 00:29
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Yawgmoth posted:For the life of me I cannot figure out why you would let that rear end in a top hat be in the same building as your game if that's the kind of poo poo he pulls. Like, you can hang out outside that session and he can go other places to play video games or whatever; there's zero reason to have him around during the game and zero reason to not shut the door on him if for whatever reason he does need to be there. My thoughts exactly. The short answer is that the DM was too non-confrontational to flat-out tell him to gently caress off while we were playing D&D. And with him playing nice, no one else had the heart to step up and be the bad guy. If anyone was the bad guy to him it was me. I didn't know him as well, but it was my apartment as much as the DM's, so I took it upon myself to tell him to shut up occasionally. But I just didn't do it often enough, for reasons I just stated. I didn't feel comfortable kicking out a guy that was friends with everyone else and that I didn't know well. After that game, more of the group stepped up and told him to gently caress off. He didn't come to game as often after that, and even when he did he kept quiet and played video games or farted around on his laptop. You might be wondering why he tagged along. I still don't know why. He said it was because he like to socialize with everyone, but he just didn't like D&D. But he didn't socialize for the most part, and when he did it was in the worst way possible. It was like he wanted to give the illusion of being social, while not being social at all. 
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May 17, 2015 21:20
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Dirk the Average posted:He probably just wanted to be around people and lacked sufficient interpersonal skills to do it appropriately. Very true. And, sadly, he was not the most socially challenged member of the group. I'll get to that soon.
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May 17, 2015 21:38
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This is another post about my old D&D group. Previously I posted "Never Split Up the Party", "How I Met Your Mother," and "The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour." The cast: The DM. (I'll call him... The DM.) Played a LG human paladin. (I'll call her J.) Played a NG half dragon spell sword. (I'll call him Smaug.) Played a CG human bard. (I'll call him Megaman, which would make him the happiest man on Earth.) Played a LE elven sorceress. (I'll call him Munchkin.) Played no one and just hung around and trolled us. (I'll call him Statler.) Played a NG dwarven rogue. (This is me.)And now, the story my wife and I both use as our personal benchmarks for goony roleplaying: Sense and Snipeability This is a story about Munchkin. He's been pretty quiet in the previous stories, but don't let that fool you. You have to imagine that in every story I tell about this group, no matter what else is going on, this guy spends the entire session making GBS threads up every plot the DM places in front of us and every character interaction the PCs try to have. I want you to imagine that on top of Statler's shenanigans. I want you to imagine this guy not missing a beat, making GBS threads up a session in the middle of an awkward breakup between the DM and J. He had no regard for other players' game or good time. He was going to do his thing, and to hell with everybody else. And "his thing" was being a loving goon. I don't know how else to put it. He's not a typical munchkin, as I understand them. Munchkins game the system and are willing and able to gently caress everyone else over for the sake of their character's gain and their own sadistic pleasure. This guy did all of the same stuff, but for virtually no reason. He played the game like a man who was absolutely sure there was no tomorrow, no justice, and no meaning to anything, in or out of the game. He was a gamer nihilist, and not the goofy kind like in The Big Lebowski. Although, playing alongside him often felt like getting my dick chopped off. So let's go back to the very beginning of this group. I didn't know anyone except the DM yet, and even him I didn't know all that well despite sharing an apartment with him. He introduced me to J, Smaug, Megaman, and Statler. They all knew each other well, and got together regularly on the nearby college campus where I was going to grad school. Then there's Munchkin. The rest of the group knew him, just not as well. He was that slightly older guy that found a bunch of fellow gamer nerds chatting at the commons and insinuated himself into their group. The bizarre thing is, he's not a bad guy outside of a game context. I actually enjoyed, and still enjoy, talking to him about other stuff as long as I'm not about to play a game with him. Because then I'd have to kill myself. When the group formed up, we all sat down to make characters at the same time. The DM told us any alignment was fair game, "within reason." In the context of how he said it, everyone understood that to mean, "Good and Neutral will work, but Evil probably won't fly," which I think is typical for most D&D games. Munchkin had other ideas. Specifically, he wanted to use a Chaos Mage from some goofy rear end third-party supplement that he brought to game. The DM had never seen it before, let alone read it, so he vetoed it. So, maybe out of spite or maybe out of his natural instinct for trolling, Munchkin chose to make an Evil character despite the DM's warning. Now, everyone was making characters at the same time, so he knew J was making a paladin. So, five minutes into the group's first meeting, he's that guy asking to talk to the DM in secret. The DM obliges, and allows him to play his LE sorceress. Meanwhile, the rest of us are at the table, and Megaman is the only one who doesn't realize there's something hosed up going on in the next room. His inability to read social cues made him blithely innocent of most of Munchkin's evil deeds, both in and out of character. You may be wondering how Munchkin got away with playing a LE character in a party with a paladin. Not immediately after returning from his meeting with Munchkin, the DM later conferred with J about her Detect Evil ability, and asked to make it an at-will active ability rather than an always-on passive ability. That would mean that J's character would have to specifically choose to use it each and every time she wanted to detect evil. The idea was that this would allow for Munchkin to at least try to get away with playing his character, at least until J's paladin noticed. I guess it was the DM's way to be diplomatic and get away with not telling either of them that they couldn't play the character they wanted because of another player's choice. Well, he already rejected Munchkin once, so he probably felt backed into a corner about him. Worse yet, Smaug is conniving enough of a player to notice chicanery when he sees it, so when the DM and Munchkin got back from their little conference, way before any of this Detect Evil stuff came up, Smaug said point-blank: So, Munchkin, making an evil character, eh? Good luck with that.It was an open secret. Everyone played along, I think because everyone was new to Munchkin so they didn't want to immediately gently caress him over. As the game began with the party fully formed and walking down a road: LG paladin, LG spell sword, CG bard, NG rogue, and LE sorceress. Megaman, in one of his more inspired moments, literally began the campaign singing (as a bard), "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong." J bent over backward to allow Munchkin's character to exist in the party, not for the character's sake but for the player's. Remember that she was playing a paladin who was paranoid of doppelgangers, so her spamming Detect Evil on her own party members should have been a thing she did all day, every day. But she throttled back on her own character concept to give Munchkin the courtesy to play his own character. Munchkin had no courtesy for us in return. He spent literally every session trying (and often succeeding) in undoing our good deeds. This would have been fun, or funny, in a different context. But the way in which he did it, and the relentlessness with which he did it, was just awful. PCs, even good ones, unwittingly loving over entire cities worth of hapless peasants is common in D&D, and the source of a ton of funny stories. It's a lot less funny when only one player is doing that and everyone else is doing something else. It just made everything weird, and pointless. Worse yet, the way in which he did evil poo poo wasn't even that creative, or funny. For example, the last straw was when he sold a dozen of his slaves (he called them "servants" in front of the other PCs) to a lich in exchange for a magic item. Nothing funny or weird or interesting about it. Just hot death, and a random item table. Munchkin thought it was hilarious. the rest of us were not impressed. But this is where character poo poo and player poo poo bleed together. In theory, if (when) the paladin noticed the evil sorceress, he would be obliged to wreck the evil character. But J isn't a munchkin that wants to spend her time PKing all the time, so she doesn't want to kill Munchkin's PC. But she pulled the trigger on Detect Evil finally, at which point Munchkin says out of character, Oh, what did I ever do to you? You guys are jerks.The paladin was well within his rights to execute the sorceress on the spot. It would have been an execution, too. We were still fairly low level, maybe 3-5, so the paladin could have wrecked her in one or two rounds. But J was too soft. She hated how goony Munchkin was, but she didn't want to be solely responsible for killing his character. I, on the other hand, have no problem with this whatsoever. And I was playing a Good-aligned rogue. So now we're back into character. The whole campaign, I had been making spot and listen checks to notice stuff the sorceress was doing. I also had 18 INT, so I was playing my rogue as much as an investigator as a crossbow sniper. He was ready to jump out on executing the sorceress, but he was just waiting on just one more character to be on the same page as him. As a rogue with 5 CHA, he wasn't the most trustworthy guy in the group, so he felt like he needed someone to back him up with the rest of the group. Out of character, this was me doing the same thing: I wanted to get Munchkin's character the gently caress out of the group, and I was willing to do it myself, but I didn't want to be alone in that decision. Now I wasn't, and both J and her character were fed up with Munchkin and his character, so I acted. The worst (best?) part was, Munchkin was the kind of player who would react to out of character goings-on, so I had to be a bit sneaky with the DM: Guys, get back in character. J, your Detect Evil just went off. What are you going to do? I'm going to at least confront him before I draw my weapon. *turns to Munchkin* "What say you, fiend?" My hand is on my sword. "You have no proof. You are mad, seeing shadows where there are none." I'm trying to talk confidently and dismissively, not with defensive anger. *To the DM, on a piece of paper under the table* I want to unobtrusively move behind Munchkin and quietly draw my crossbow. +10 Hide. +10 MS. *Quietly rolls dice for my Hide/Move Silently and Munchkin's Spot/Listen behind his screen.* "But all those people! Your servants! You gave them to that evil wizard, didn't you? If you didn't, where is your entourage?" *Nods to me* "I do not have to answer to you for anything. My servants are away making--" *To the DM* I put the crossbow to the back of her head and fire. *Rolls damage* 21 damage.She only had 16 HP. I put a knife in her throat before anyone else could start debating the moral rectitude of stabilizing her to face a proper trial or some such LG nonsense. Neutral Good: the get poo poo done alignment.  Unfortunately, The DM did not bounce Munchkin from the game. Worse yet, the PK made the DM feel bad, so he let Munchkin use that mysterious third-party supplement he asked about in the first place to make a new character...
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May 21, 2015 13:43
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Deltasquid posted:How the hell did your disfunctional group not start throwing the table snacks at each other around the second or third session? I really don't know. That's part of why I'm posting these stories. It's a wonder we got through a single game. We played for almost a year, once a week, just about every week. It's a wonder any of us still game/are still sane/are still alive. To be honest, though, I haven't gamed with Munchkin since. Everyone else I have played alongside since then, by choice no less. I just can't bring myself to play with him, which is a shame because he is a surprisingly nice guy and a good conversationalist when he's not gaming. I chat with him on Facebook all the time, but I'd rather slam my dick in a door than game with him ever again. Shadeoses posted:The entire party is chaotic neutral. Awesome. I haven't played D&D in a long time, but the next time I play I kind of want it to be a "gently caress it, let's all make conniving, selfish, lying, looting scumbags" game. Every game has moments when the players fantasize about saying "gently caress it all" and just going how-wild with the system. I kind of want to do that with D&D, just for a short campaign. If the DM really wanted to run wild with it, they could set specific "achievements" for each session, based on whatever was planned that day. Keep the "achievements" secret, and just see if anyone can bungle into them. That would keep the players doing reckless, silly poo poo constantly in pursuit of IRL loot. "And with that last casting of Fireball, you just finished burning down a whole village and somehow only killed the children and infirm. You won today's prize! Here's the bag of Sour Patch Kids I bought for today's prize. Oh, and you're a terrible person." Mendrian posted:Mage time. I love both old and new White Wolf games, but hooooly poo poo are there some goofy people playing those games. I have some hosed up LARP stories from years ago, mostly having to do with WW players that lose sight of where their character ends and they begin. Any game could have such a player, but WW games just seem to attract that particular flavor of crazy.
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May 23, 2015 00:13
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Mendrian posted:Experiences like the ones you're describing make up 9/10's of my LARP stories. They aren't even that interesting to tell. It mostly involves trying to engage players in argument or over an issue only to have entire rooms of people back down because nobody wants to have a flaw or an ideal. I've seen a pack of Carthians refuse to take a hard stance on democracy in a Requiem game. I've seen player-characters struggle to admit they drink blood in a game about vampires. It's like the background noise to every cat-piss story about vampire LARPs--a bunch of flimsy, one dimensional characters built around having absolutely no personality or weaknesses because that would make you ~inept~ or ~a zealot~ or whatever. Meanwhile you're off in a corner trying desperately to roleplay your character (why the gently caress else would you play in a vampire LARP) while people watch you more than participate. It's an awful lot like being at a middle-school dance. Exactly. This, and the fact that the sanctioned game can't turn anybody away as long as they're paying dues makes it really rough. A troupe game at least has the independence to say, "You're a troll. gently caress off," even if they don't often have to do it. the Camarilla (or whatever it's called now) has to invite any member, up until (and often still after) they do something terrible. Kavak posted:World of Darkness games attract the crazies so well that White Wolf even hired a few of them. Phil "Satyros" Brucato and at least one other guy kind of thought Mage was actually loving real on some level. I know a guy who knows most of the WW writers and has written some stuff himself for Geist and Mage. I'll ask him about Brucato and see if he has any stories about him. He might not know him, but he likely does. His relationship with WW has been on the rocks for a while because of their sanctioned LARP and how it got a little (well, a lot) weird on a personal level. His story in and of itself would fit right in here, despite being mostly out-of-character drama. But that's his story to tell. Coward posted:That was always my experience with the Camarilla. A huge number of people inordinately emotionally invested in their characters where it became clear that dressing up and affecting an air of superiority as someone completely different was vitally important to their self-esteem. It made enjoying faux drama or danger really hard, because so many people refused to be vulnerable in any way except on their own ludicrous terms. This is my experience with WW LARPs as well. I have a ton of goofy experiences, and most of them revolve around one or more people not understanding that they a) are supposed to be there to have fun, and b) are in a game that is not real. Things got... weird. StringOfLetters posted:You got some good story-telling mojo, Thanks! Here's one from the sanction WW LARP, then called the Camarilla. This was in the 2000's. My city is small, but has a robust LARP scene. At the game's peak, we had 30 players regularly attending. Masquerade (and later Requiem) anchored the game, with Forsaken and Lost being offered as well. Most of the weird poo poo happened in Requiem. Here's a cast of characters pertinent to this story:  I played an INT 1 gangster from South Boston. He was relatively young, and a Nosferatu in the Lancea Sanctum faction. Unlike most members of the faction, he was there because it was the closest thing to the Catholicism of his mortal life that he could get as a vampire. He was too stupid to think as an immortal and conceptualize any of the differences. But he was also a Tradition hard-liner, and would get downright psycho about people breaching the Masquerade. He was dumb as hell, and a traditionalist with a horrible anger problem. He was also spec'd to wreck the loving poo poo out of people at close range. He had grappling skills, supernatural strength, and Nightmare all in spades. He also had enough Obfuscate to get the jump on most people. I mean, he was literally a professional killer before becomign a vampire. I'll call him Southie. One of the players played an Ordo Dracul Gangrel, and she made that faction downright unplayable to everyone else. She and two of her friends had been playing long enough to be able to bully 80% of the players, and used that bullying to make their faction their own personal weirdo den. Other Ordo characters were welcome to game with them, but they just bogarted all of the plot action, conversation, decision making, and so on. She also had a 300 year old ghouled panther with mutations and poo poo that was represented by a literal stuffed animal. The character walked around with it in the streets (imaginably, of course). Conceptually, her character walked around with a loving panther in the streets of the city. You may see where this is going. I'll call her Ironicat. Ironicat's IRL husband played an Invictus Daeva. His character wasn't notably goofy, but the player was a loving psychopath. Remember that anger problem that Southie had? This guy had it IRL. He once threw a metal chair across a room because another player beat his in a fight. And, no, it wasn't a cool, dramatic thing to do. It was uncontrolled, without warning, and done in anger. Because the Camarilla is an old boy's club of which he was an old member, they gave him a slap on the wrist. He should have been banned right then and there. Instead, he got to keep playing and get involved in this little story. I'll call him Freeper, because on Facebook he's one of those people that jerks off to guns and rails against liberals and won't shut up about Obama being a communist or whatever. A pleasant fellow. Was a new player. A couple of friends and I brought him into the game because he said he wanted to try it out. He made a "character tie" with mine, to give him a foothold to get involved. It's a pretty common thing to do with folks you know, especially new players. I'll call him Newbie. A storyteller, AKA a GM, because WW has to sound *~dramatic and mature~*A long-running political conflict had been brewing between two sides in the city: the Ordo Dracul and the Invictus/Lancea Sanctum alliance. Pretty basic vampire political junk. However, the city's most powerful Invictus, Freeper, sided with the Ordo because of... reasons? (Hint: IRL poon is the reason, because Ironicat and Freeper are both too stupid to separate fantasy from reality enough to not fight with each other IRL about poo poo they did in-character). So, Freeper's character was jacked because he'd been playing for too loving long, and he moved forward with a plot to betray his own alliance for IRL poon. He and Ironicat met up, and unfortunately, Newbie stepped in front of that freight train. He had no idea how outclassed he was until Ironicat ashed him in two rounds. This was done for virtually no reason, and with no IRL courtesy of not PKing a brand new player two hours into his first game. Bear in mind, that according to the game, delivering "Final Death" (i.e. killing a vampire) is illegal unless the act is sanctioned by the city's authorities for some crime against vampire society. So, basically, Ironicat just committed murder, and Freeper's faction is supposed to be the lawful, traditionalist types. But she wrecked the new player's character basically for no reason, and Freeper didn't do a thing. When word of this gets back to Southie, he was in "Elysium," the safe, neutral zone for vampire social/political bullcrap. He managed to not lose his poo poo right then and there, but then Ironicat left with her ghouled panther. He left right behind her. He was out for revenge because someone killed one of his allies, and did it against the rules of the Traditions. To top it all off, Ironicat was a known ally of Freeper in-character, and she happened to be wandering around the city in breach of the Masquerade. Southie, in his impulsive stupidity and anger, decided to take revenge. He was dumb and nuts, but he was still a Tradition hard-liner. So he couldn't waste her without specific sanction to do so, but her ghoul was fair game because it was just a ghoul and was in breach of the Masquerade anyway. Southie follows them for a minute, waits for them to be out of range of help, and ambushes them because that's what he does. I got the jump on them enough to basically cripple her with Nightmare and kill the ghoul in one fell swoop: (In character) "Imma break dis furball's neck. Open dem eyes and watch!" (IRL) *Cries* No! Don't! (IRL) Are... are you crying? What are you doing? Ironicat, are you alright? Are you comfortable with this scene? No I'm not! He's going to kill Nobbles! I'm sorry. I'm not trying to make you upset. But you killed Newbie's character, so I'm just doing what Southie would do. Come on. You can't kill him! *Cries more* It's a character sheet, Ironicat. What the gently caress? *Cries, leaves the room* It just really bugged me that Ironicat did something that had in-game repercussions, and then avoided those repercussions by being a drama queen that can't separate fantasy from reality. At first I thought she was just doing it in a calculated way to get out of the scene, but then I ran into Freeper later, who threatened to fight me IRL for making his wife cry. She was still upset like ten minutes later. I told him the same thing that I thought: that if her character is that attached to her ghoul, she should not piss off other characters that are stupid and psycho enough to wreck her character. And, And if ironicat herself is that upset about losing a fictional character, she should take a goddamn break.He threatened to fight me again and got in my face. A storyteller whisked him away. In the aftermath, the storytellers wanted me to apologize to Ironicat and take on some sort of written sanction with the group. Meanwhile, Freeper got no such punishment because he was an Old Boy with the club. I pointed out that I wasn't personally threatening Ironicat and was acting according to the plot in-character, and that she was basically getting away with whatever in-game by her out-of-game theatrics. The storytellers understood the plot situation, but didn't dismiss the whole thing. So, I got served with a punishment for in-game poo poo that made sense, and the guy that threatened to fight me IRL got nothing. I never served the sanction. I left the group. Good loving riddance.
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May 26, 2015 04:24
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Coward posted:I'd still probably feel that a player has a right to call a timeout in a confrontation where a character is going to murder a loved one, even if it is a ridiculous 300 year old pet kitty (but a panther because that's so dark and mysterious, you guys). She didn't take a time out, though. She had an out-of-character freakout and left the scene entirely, and was allowed to do so. Her "panther" never got killed in the story because she left IRL. Her character never suffered a consequence for her actions because the player was immature about things. Taking a time out to check your emotions is alright if it's a heated scene, but this was handled badly. Honestly, the storyteller should have handed it differently, but then again I don't know what she could have done when Ironicat was freaking out as much as she was. It was dumb as hell on a lot of levels. And I'm not a gamer that doesn't roleplay. I'll get into character and try to maintain motivation and whatnot. I borrowed a little speech from a friend who played a loud, boorish ogre in the changeling game: I would take a few seconds at the start of game to say to the group, "Southie is stupid and a jerk. Anything he does or says is not me, and I apologize in advance if he offends anyone with his stupidity." That was usually good for a chuckle, but should have gone without saying. I can have a heated argument in character and turn around literally seconds later and laugh with the other player IRL about it. Some players need to take a lot longer to step back out of their character, and that's alright. But some players don't step back out of their character at all, or don't know how. It gets even worse when IRL drama bleeds into plot drama, or vice-versa. We had IRL cliques feuding with each other over childish bullshit and had that affect how their characters acted toward each other. It didn't make any sense in the game's narrative, either, which threw off everyone's game even if you tried to ignore it. Worse yet, we would have some people's characters feud in-game and have that create an IRL feud for months, even after the game plot should have resolved itself. But you hit on the crux of it: people trying to be the hero of their own personal story, all the time, every time. There is a time and a place for that, but it isn't every game and it isn't every plot. I understand that impulse, but White Wolf games put you in a position to play other roles on a regular basis. It's supposed to be about conflict between PCs, especially in a LARP where you have enough players for them to create their own plots amongst themselves. On paper, it's an interesting idea. But when the players can't divorce themselves from the narrative long enough to see things objectively and know their role in a story, then you get that Bad Kind of Drama.
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May 26, 2015 11:25
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Shady Amish Terror posted:poo poo like this makes me question why LARPs are even a thing. It's one thing to sit around a table or at a computer and laugh it up while throwing on silly accents and rolling dice, but then you inject play-acting into the scenario and it's just a recipe for disaster. I mean, I've seen LARPing happening. I've also seen the cops get called to LARPs. the LARPs I've played in were hosted on college campuses but weren't in public spaces. I wouldn't have played in them if they had been. that's just disruptive to both the regular folks and the LARPers. It seems like more trouble than it's worth. But to the point of LARPs: having played in some terrible ones and some good ones, I've found some value to them. The good LARPs were basically large-scale tabletop games with tons of players, more than one GM, and a lot more improvised plots from the players. Because you can't always count on a GM being in the same room as you while you're playing, you kind of just... improvise. You go get a GM (and they respond quickly if it's a good game) if you run into something that the players can't resolve or don't know about the plot or setting. Otherwise, players kind of have to trust each other to keep things reasonably honest. Player characters can even fight each other as long as they're both not stupid jerks about it. For example, if Southie started some poo poo with another vampire, they could just duke it out with a GM around. If their combat spilled out into a LARP space that is understood to be "public space," like a hallway that is "the streets," then you may want to get a GM. What it boils down to is that the quality of a LARP depends squarely on the players involved. If you have sketchy, munchkiny, psycho players, then you'll have a bad LARP. If you have good, responsible, sane players who understand improve and plot and motivation enough to play a character and not be a loving idiot, then you've got a good thing going. Good ones are great because they let a ton of people play one game in a player-driven way that a tabletop game couldn't possibly manage. It's not suited for every gamer or every game group, but if that idea interests you, you should try it. I'm talking about theatrical LARPs here, though. Boff games are a whole other animal.
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May 26, 2015 21:20
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Kavak posted:Playing in the Camarilla sounds like being in the actual Camarilla. You have no power and are subject to the whims of people whose only talent is seniority, and the law doesn't apply to them, there's basically no chance for advancement unless someone dies (or quits).  You solved the puzzle! It took me several years of hope and denial to solve the puzzle.  More to the point of what Doodmons was saying about the Camarilla: he's absolutely right. The global chronicle is a good idea on paper but terrible in practice. Local GMs don't have enough autonomy, local Old Boys choke the fun out of everything for the sake of preserving their own hoarded piles of XP, approvals become unmanageable, and regional/national/global GMs occasionally poke their noses in with horrible plots that are no fun and that no one in the local game wants do deal with. I guess the idea is to have a continuous, interconnected story across every city, which would be cool if it worked. Theoretically, if you did something crazy in your city, it would have ripple effects in other cities. And if you travel with your character to play in another city's game, your character's reputation precedes him or her. But that's not what happens. Bullshit happens. Oh, and if you ever want to get a Camarilla vet wound up, ask them about "Approvals." Hint: it's hours of homework you have to do to play a make believe game. It makes Rifts character creation seem breezy by comparison.  I do want to stress that people should try out a local LARP, though. Just make sure it's a troupe (i.e. non-sanctioned) game. You'll probably still have some measure of bullshit, but it'll be a fraction of the bullshit you have to deal with in a Camarilla game. I organized and ran a troupe game in my city after we let our Camarilla game die. Well, we kind of deliberately killed it. But it was a mercy killing. But the troupe game went swimmingly and everyone had a good time and there was no psycho drama.
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May 27, 2015 13:57
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Doodmons posted:Word. If you can find a locals-only game, it's well worth trying it out. There's a non-zero chance that it'll be full of weirdos but odds are if somebody is putting in the effort to run a vampire LARP by themselves with no help from a society, they're really invested in the game and a keen GM is likely to make everyone else keen and the effort they put in can compensate for a lot of poo poo. Plus it'll probably only be like 20 or so people and imo that's a good number for a game. Too many people means that somebody has to be at the bottom of the totem pole and that's not fun. Yeah. There's an ideal ratio of players to GMs. I'd say you need one GM for every 10-15 or so players. Any more than that, then the group should add a second GM to either assist the first GM, or to run their own plots independently. Having too few GMs means you're going to get players stuck frozen in scenes while they wait for a GM to gwt done in another scene to come over and help them resolve theirs. It's not hard to coordinate setting and plot stuff between 2-3 GMs, and everyone's local, so you don't run into the Kafkaesque nightmare that is the Camarilla. I ran a troupe game of 7th Sea and when the number of players swelled above 15, I asked a couple of them to help me for part or all of each game session. I still wrote and ran most of the plots, but they just did a couple of things: they would act as neutral GM presences when other players needed someone to tell them what happens when they couldn't figure that out on their own, and they sometimes played NPCs for me in crowded scenes. Eventually we had enough players that we had two whole GMs writing and conducting plots, with a couple of part-time assistants who got to play their characters as much as they helped run the game. Better yet, in a troupe game, you can control the group of players like you could in a tabletop game: as long as at least one person running the game has the backbone to tell truly disruptive players to find another game, then you can keep things sane and friendly. The Camarilla can't do that without literally months of paperwork, and even then the player will likely not be thrown out. Case in point: the aforementioned chair-throwing weirdo in our local Cam game. That guy threw a loving chair at another player and got a slap on the wrist and was back for the next game because he was an Old Boy. Theoretically, he should have been thrown out, and he would have been if he wasn't connected. But when policy doesn't translate to practice, then it doesn't mean a thing. That last sentence should be on the Camarilla's tombstone.
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May 27, 2015 15:47
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Kavak posted:That sounds like the best way to handle Mages in a crossover venue, plus an introductory spiel like "You could gently caress up everyone and everything else in this game with the right Arcana, please don't be dicks about that!". I was always that guy that wanted to play a mage in the vampire game, but I didn't get bent out of shape about the GMs not letting me do it because I know that for every one responsible player that would follow this rule, there's four that would break it five minutes into the game. Doodmons posted:- Elder (and hard as gently caress) vampire gets into elevator. Elevator starts going up. Halfway up, the werewolf who was hiding on top of the elevator bursts in through the ceiling. Drop into combat rounds. The new World of Darkness games are more intended for cross-game use, but the old games were goofy as hell and people would get shredded at the drop of a hat. Masquerade and Apocalypse, for example, only look similar at a glance. The power scales of combat in those games are totally different. Every werewolf can do agg damage with their bare hands, at will. Vampires have to use disciplines and pay vitae for that privilege, and even then there's not necessarily roided-out kill machines like werewolves. And don't even get me started with old Mage. Edit: Whybird posted:I've never played WoD-style live action, but we had a similar thing at my university. The difference being that, not being White Wolf-licensed, we weren't beholden to their crazy bullshit. We also kept a high turnover rate: each year the people running it would hand the baton on to a different team with their own setting and ruleset and so on. 
Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 15:03 on May 29, 2015 |
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May 29, 2015 15:00
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Whybird posted:This has pretty much been my internal response every time I recollect this story. This may be the only time I have ever or will ever say this, but: this is why paperwork in the Camarilla can be a good thing. Having to submit character backgrounds to GMs all the way up the chain (well, from venue to domain to regional) would catch something like this, and bar it. WW players will do all sorts of creepy poo poo, but the rules actually forbid specific creepiness in a character's concept, like incest for example. Now, that doesn't always mean the GMs will follow-through with barring that kind of thing, because they could be creeps all the same. But our GMs (and I would think most GMs) would not have let this player bring in an incest background with another PC. But the fact that WW feels the need to mention, "don't write incest background, guys, for reals" is evidence of how hosed up some of its players are. Jesus Christ.
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May 29, 2015 15:43
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Doodmons posted:This was nWoD. 1E nWoD Werewolves have this weird reputation for being the (heh) underdogs but they're loving killing machines, particularly if you abuse bonebreaking. 1E vampires didn't really have a lot of survivability, though, either. Not that anything could really have withstood a surprise round of aggravated and lethal damage of the magnitude that an elder werewolf can dish out. In 2E, an Elder vampire probably could have survived that between Resilience, blood healing, vampiric damage downgrading and, hell, maybe even Juggernaut's Gait. Holy poo poo. Welp. Anyway, this is yet another post about my old D&D group. Previous stories: "Never Split Up the Party" "How I Met Your Mother," "The Peanut Gallery's Finest Hour." "Sense and Snipability" Today's story is another Munchkin joint, so you might want to read "Sense and Snipability" to properly contextualize the person we're talking about here. The cast: The DM. (I'll call him... The DM.) Played a LG human paladin. (I'll call her J.) Played a NG half dragon spell sword. (I'll call him Smaug.) Played a CG human bard. (I'll call him Megaman, which would make him the happiest man on Earth.) Played a LE elven sorceress. (I'll call him Munchkin.) Played no one and just hung around and trolled us. (I'll call him Statler.) Played a NG dwarven rogue. (This is me.)The Crazy Cat Lady In "Sense and Snipability," I described how Munchkin made a LE character in a group full of Good characters and how I PK'd the character for it. Well, Munchkin didn't leave the game and was allowed to make a new character. He had wanted to use some kind of goofy, third-party supplement in the first place, but the DM put the kibosh on that idea because the DM didn't know the supplement. This story, if nothing else, is the story about how misplaced guilt can ruin everything. Our DM let him use his supplement for his second character. The DM just asked Munchkin to make a non-Evil character, and he agreed. The DM did not read the supplement, and (foolishly) trusted Munchkin. Maybe he thought he learned his lesson. Maybe he thought Munchkin had a shred of decency or mercy in his grognardy bones. He did not. While this is a story about guilt gone awry, it is also a story about this... thing:  Sorry. Should have added a trigger warning up ahead of that. This is the worst loving supplement I have ever actually seen used in a game. I've seen worse, but they're either never really used and just joked about, or they're just conceptually terrible like "Uncle Touchy's Bondage Dragon-Ponies" or whatever. This book isn't the goofiest thing ever published in D&D's regrettable open license, but it is mechanically the most broken-rear end thing I have ever read. I GIS'd the book cover for this post and I actually had a reaction of visceral anger when I saw it for the first time in seven years. gently caress this book right in it's gatdamn ear. Maybe I'm being too harsh, though. There may be sane ways to use this supplement. I have never known any, though, because the only person I've known to use it is Munchkin. He followed through on his agreement not to make an Evil character. So, naturally, he made a CN Chaos Mage using this supplement. He poured all of his Between the racial bonuses and the class abilities, this character got up to 30+ CHA, which was the operative stat for chaos magic. The supplement made a token effort to "balance" these stat bumps by making other stats go down as CHA went up every couple of levels. So, by the time this character was tenth level, she had 30 CHA and 3 STR and 5 CON. The player also min-maxed the poo poo out of her INT and WIS so that she was functionally retarded but had 18 WIS. This character was a tiny, sickly sociopath with a serial killer's charisma and Rain Man-type of intellect. Oh, and this character could remake reality to her deranged whim. Chaos magic itself was also "balanced." There was a check to use it, and if you failed it you took damage. But if you didn't you were all set. I guess the character could, in theory, get knocked out almost instantly due to the extremely low CON, but she almost never failed because of the min-maxed CHA. Regardless of that, what the character could do with the magic was just horrendous. Who needs STR or skill ranks when you can do literally anything you can imagine, at will? I'll stop ranting about the supplement before I make myself crazy and get into what happened during the game. Munchkin played his insufferable character to the hilt. I still can't decide if he was doing it out of spite for PKing his first character or if he really was that deaf to the other players' suffering. I know that it sounds like the former is likely, but this guy demonstrated so much lack of empathy for other players that it makes me mad just thinking about it. He did that with his first character, so why not with this one too? It could have been both spite and callousness, because this character made the first one look like the Dalai Lama by comparison. The party wouldn't even get into the middle of an adventure before Munchkin's dumb rear end chaos mage would do something so disruptive that it wasted an hour of time at the table. Even if we weren't loving around and stayed in-character and on-task, the trouble this character would cause was so far-reaching and random and constant that it took the entire party to rein it in, if that was even possible. And it wasn't fun for the rest of us, either. This wasn't the kind of goofy chaos that the whole group is in on and making light of burning down villages by accident or whatever. The rest of the group wanted to, you know, have adventures and solve plots, but Munchkin was only interested in making the setting his own personal, deranged sandbox. And no one could stop him because the supplement was broken as hell. I had to resist PKing the stupid character every single session because I already did it once and I didn't want to seem like I was picking on Munchkin. In hindsight, I should have just done it and been the bad guy. He would have been pissed at me, but it would have saved everyone else the annoyance and boredom because the DM was just not willing to flatly throw him out of the group. Here's an example of one single session, but I'm going to tell it in a way that communicates what Munchkin did to every single session: We roll into this small port town. Megaman has found us a lead on a ship captain that can get us across the sea, which we need to do to chase a villain. The ship captain needs ale to supply his ship for the voyage, but his supplier is loving him because he cheated the supplier in a card game recently. We make our way toward the supplier to negotiate with him and-- *~ Turns literally all the town's water into a clear, tasteless ale ~*So now we have ale, but the town is in chaos because literally everyone is drunk. The port is functionless and we're stuck in the city until every man, woman, and child sobers up. By the time they do, the town is on full alert looking for whatever witch did this thing to them. They figure it out easily because Munchkin sticks out like a sore thumb, and they corner us. J's paladin steps forward and, with the help of Megaman's bard, talks the crowd out of-- *~ Flies away and turns into a black cat, perched atop the mast of a ship ~*The crowd now realizes the rest of the group is not to blame and they set about trying to find and kill the "witch," who is still a cat. They storm the ship to try to corner the cat and-- *~ Turns all of the food stores on the ship into rats ~*The rats swarm the townsfolk and they are driven off the ship. The rats go about ravaging the town, eating everything in sight. The party goes about using its skills and abilities to control the rats, and they are finally-- *~ Appears before the mob and magically compels them to worship her as The Rat Goddess ~*The mob turns on the party, fighting us for trying to drive out their new god's rat minions. We fight our way to the edge of town, trying not to kill too many deranged villagers while not getting ourselves killed in the process. We regroup and-- *~ Summons all the town's cats to her. Then, releases the compulsion on the people so she can sell the cats to the townsfolk to deal with the rats ~*The townsfolk, this time (relatively) mundanely compelled by Munchkin's 30 CHA, buy the cats from her and use them to kill the rats. We sneak back into town and confront Munchkin. Magically compels all the town's children to kill the cats, which they do.This set off the DM, and the rest of the group as well. We were playing along and just dealing with things, in-character, but this was the kind of pointlessly sick thing that is gross to do, even in imagination. I don't even like cats and this pissed me off because it's sociopathic for a player to think it's funny enough for his character to do. So meanwhile, Munchkin's character has a pile of money, and she turns all the gold into water, which runs into the sea, ruining the local economy. "There. Now we won't have to pay for ale, and the rats and cats are taken care of. My 5 CHA dwarf, who made trinkets out of metal idly like one would whittle wood, made a tiny metal horse on the spot for a crying child who was just forced to throttle a cat. At this point, Munchkin apparently got bored to derailing the game, and the DM just put us on the loving boat. All of this took just over two hours. Munchkin would act so quickly, and so domineeringly, that he would monopolize the DM's attention and brow beat the poo poo out of him. Worse yet, he had the mechanics to back it up because, again, this supplement is the worst loving thing. Every game was like this after he made this character. Usually, the only way we got anything "done" was in the last few minutes of the game, when Munchkin tired himself out and the DM said, "well, gently caress it. I guess this or that happened, so we can move on next game." This is what finally killed the game. It ended unceremoniously, as many games do, when people just stopped showing up. There wasn't a slow decline, either. We all agreed to stop playing because Munchkin was insufferable, yet the DM didn't feel comfortable simply throwing him out. This group was as dysfunctional as I've ever seen a group, but we could have played for many more months in that game, and even in other campaigns, if not for Munchkin. I still miss that group. Smaug was and still is a min-maxer but he's a nice guy and I rarely game with him anymore because he moved away. I haven't played with Megaman since, but I'd like to do so again, but unfortunately he has also moved away in the seven years since the end of the game. I'm married to J, and I game with her and the DM in an new group once a week now, but I want to try playing with them and Smaug and Megaman, mostly because I miss those guys. But to hell with Munchkin. He's the reason I am totally comfortable telling players to buzz off when I can tell they're going to be more trouble than they're worth. I still regret not PKing that chaos mage on day one. I'll never hesitate like that again.
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May 29, 2015 17:47
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Kurieg posted:How did she come up with that elaborate scheme with an intelligence of 3? 1) 2) I forgot to mention that. She did. That session was one of our last, and the DM finally told him he'd gone too far. And with him being CE and with a paladin still in our party, he wouldn't have lasted much longer. The game ended partly because it basically forced another PK on him, and no one wanted to do that. He was acting like a dickhead about it and saying we were picking on him when we would be constantly trying to foil his schemes. He really would have pitched a fit if anyone PK'd him. In hindsight, that kind of makes me wish even more that I had done it.
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May 29, 2015 18:06
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Dr. MonkeyThunder posted:I had to find and skim that splat because of just how broken it sounds, and either you don't remember it right or that little douche lied his rear end off and got away with it. Neither the class, a prestige class or anything else I could find in that book give any CHA bonuses. Shadow Elves aren't in the book but if he made one old enough it could have +8 CHA for -6 physical traits, and a +4 level adjustment. There's also a hard rule about transformation of only 20lbs per level, and spell duration of a minute per level, so only 320lbs of water to beer for 16min at lvl 20. Even without those restrictions if you misread the rules to scale it up to what he did the roll would still be at least 45. The Shadow Elf might not have been from the Chaos Magic supplement. I just paired them together in my mind because that character was the only time I had seen either of them used. He did min/max the poo poo out of the Shadow Elf, though. The DM gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, so he made her super old to get the CHA bump, and probably utilized other goofy crap from some other supplement. And I have no doubt he was lying about Chaos Magic, just based on the kind of player he was. He was protective of the book and tried to hide the fact that he didn't want anyone else to read it, even out of innocent interest. Smaug, our group's other min/maxer but who wasn't a sociopath, was genuinely interested but could barely get a couple minutes to peruse it because Munchkin was so weird about it. The DM wasn't confident enough in the supplement to call him on its misuse, and he wasn't confrontational enough to ask to read it after he was brow-beaten into allowing it, and after he felt bad about us PKing his other character. It wasn't my game to run, and therefore it wasn't my responsibility to reign in a player (beyond what I had already done to kill his other dumb character). Basically, Munchkin was a manipulative sociopath, and if I had it to do all over again, I would have found the supplement myself and rules lawyered the poo poo out of him until he stopped cheating, quit using that dumb character, or quit the group altogether. Edit: But I am genuinely thankful to have my suspicions confirmed. I never bothered to look it up myself because I wanted to purge it from my memory as soon after the game as possible. Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Jun 1, 2015 |
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Jun 1, 2015 13:08
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TyrsHTML posted:Never met that kind of munchkin that didnt lie at every moment to make their character even more broken. Exactly. Both Smaug and I were onto him. I usually run D&D rather than play as a character, so I can usually smell that kind of bullshit. Smaug is a min/maxer himself, but he doesn't cheat or use it to gently caress with other players. He's not a munchkin. He's just a rules nerd that likes making broken characters. But this is why GMs need to be assertive and shouldn't be afraid to be the bad guy sometimes. My figuring is: most players will get over it if you tell them "no" or call them on something, and the ones that don't get over it probably aren't worth playing with. My wife ("J") and I were talking about this after I posted the story and she remembers Munchkin transforming the town's well water into ale, not necessarily all the town's water. That makes more sense, and puts it closer to the parameters of chaos magic, but it's dumb and probably still outside of the parameters of chaos magic. I have no doubt he cheated, but he probably did so in a way that stretched rather than broke rules. That way, if the DM ever did call him on something, he could just say, "I misread it " or whatever.Munchkins are assholes.
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Jun 1, 2015 19:25
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Foolster41 posted:So basically he was role playing as Magic Man from adventure time? Pretty much. This gets at what's great about Adventure Time. Anyone whose played D&D knows the Magic Man. There's enough of these players running around to give Chaotic Neutral and Malkavians a bad reputation by their misuse of them. Everything the Magic Man does is something that Munchkin could have done, or actually did do. Toes posted:How long did Munchkin play this character for? Why didn't the DM just ask to borrow the splat? Seriously, if he refused, then the DM should have told him to re-roll. Munchkin played his shadow elf for, I dunno, seven or eight sessions. Two of those were productive, and by that I mean we got more than ten minutes of plot resolved. The rest were complete wastes of time. The DM never checked his work, and wasn't aggressive enough about it. The times that Smaug asked to read the chaos magic book out of genuine interest, Munchkin just contrived some excuse why he needed the book in front of him at that moment. It was pretty obvious to me that he was full of poo poo, but I didn't want to be both the new guy in the group who didn't know anyone else as much and also the narc. I kept my mouth poo poo, and that was a mistake. But I agree: the DM in this game, and DMs in general, ought to be more active in dealing with troublesome players. At the risk of sounding , I have ways to deal with obnoxious, disruptive, or antisocial players. But I don't have any special talent that the DM of this game didn't. I've just been running games for over fifteen years. The DM of our game had run only one game before that one, and it shows. He was a great storyteller (literally, not in the goofy White Wolf use of the term), but he just wasn't as skilled at the management part of being a DM. These days, the most I have to do to manage my current group is keep people on task occasionally, because I've been playing long enough that I have developed a strong, cooperative group of regular players. The easiest way to manage lovely players and munchkins is to not have them at the table in the first place. But I'm in my 30's. When I was nineteen like the DM in my stories, I probably didn't have the luxury of having such a good group as I do now, and I would have taken whatever players I could get too. So maybe games like this are a rite of passage for DMs.
Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Jun 2, 2015 |
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Jun 2, 2015 13:02
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GrumpyDoctor posted:"A Shadow Elf is very timid and shy towards outsiders in general, often seeking refuge in any form of shadow to avoid talking to outsiders." Jesus tapdancing Christ. Toes posted:Oh, right. I was under the impression your DM was a bit older and wasn't so new. That's understandable then. No handbook ever tells you how you shouldn't have to put up with assholes, whether they're players or DMs. I've read a few core rulebooks that have some tips for dealing with "difficult groups." They're usually diplomatic by avoiding saying, "some players are dickheads and you should throw them out." Instead, they offer legitimately good advice about managing different personalities, play styles, player motives, and conflicts. If it's written well, it's divorced from the characters and setting altogether and would fit right into some sort of corporate HR dispute resolution manual. I don't mean that to sound as bad as it does, because it's helpful and realistic to approach a game group as Actual Human Beings On Earth before you get into dealing with their make believe personae. But it's easier said than done to just throw an rear end in a top hat out of a game. They are usually tied to at least one other player at the table, and you're likely to hurt more than just the rear end in a top hat's feelings if you get into it with them. Most people aren't spoiling for a fight naturally, so conflict resolution is a rare skill that is difficult to acquire. Almost no one I knew at age 20 had the skill enough to handle a player like Munchkin. What I haven't seen in a game sourcebook is the most important rule to managing player conflicts: don't let them start in the first place. Be diplomatic and discreet when you put your group together, and use good judgment. It's way easier to make up some excuse to not let a lovely player into the game in the first place then to kick them out once they're in. Munchkins are like, I dunno, fleas that way. Once they're in your house, you have to either put up with them or set off a big bomb that will make everyone cry. Or you could "use Frontline on one of your animals" by designating one of the players to kill the rear end in a top hat's characters over and over until they leave IRL. *~ Metaphors ~*
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Jun 2, 2015 20:26
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The conversation about playing online with goons has me thinking about my current 7th Sea game that I posted about once a little while back. The GM just moved away. He's not too far away, but no close enough that's he'll be able to run the game often. He wants to make a point to come up about once per month to run the game, but we're all worried that the time and distance will eat away at that commitment. I know if I were far away, time and money would start to wear away at my willingness to travel that regularly. This GM is one of the best I've played with and he's one of my closest friends, so it would be a bummer to lose that regular game. I know people ITT have had luck gaming online, but has anyone ever Skyped in one player to a table with a live group? I'm thinking something like just putting him over Skype and just putting the laptop on the table. It sounds like it would work, but I just wonder how the players at the physical table might interact differently to a remote player or GM. I guess this is more of a question about player psychology, but I'm just thinking aloud here. Speaking of which, we had a beast of a cliffhanger the other day in that game, and is all the more reason I want it to continue. The cast: Katherine: Avalonian (English) glamour sorceress. She is from a line of sailors from a minor noble family. Her dad lost his sons to the sea, so he set her up in an arranged marriage to get her out of sailing. She ditched the guy on the altar to make a legend for herself at sea. Also, she recently rejoined the Knights of the Rose and Cross after having been disgraced for a few years (see above). She is the ship's captain, party face, and incurable bullshit artist. (This is me). Alana: Inish (Irish) prizefighter. Trained under the setting's first modern boxer, but up to her eyeballs in debt to a crooked Inish noble. She also has the (Wo)Man of Will advantage, which makes her immune to things like crippling and fear, and resistant to magic by sheer grit. She is the ship's Master of the Tops, tank, and drunken beat-stick. ("J" from the D&D stories, my wife, plays Alana). Vignar: Vesten (Norwegian) warrior. He is less of a sailor and more of a warrior, so he is the ship's Sergent-at-Arms and captain of the ship's boarding marines. He is a berserker when need be, but otherwise he is a sword-and-board defensive fighter. He insists on protecting Katherine because she saved him (in the middle of the campaign, when his player joined) from slavers at sea. Katherine has been trying to find a way to free him of this obligation since, to no avail. (The DM from the D&D stories plays Vignar). Sebastien: Castillian (Spanish) doctor. He was a career priest and being groomed to be an Inquisitor when his latent fire magic manifested. So, he has a bit of a crisis of faith, but he is the ship's moral compass and is also a gifted physician and inventor. He has managed to keep his fire magic secret from everyone but Katherine, who has promised to keep his secret in order to keep his mutual trust and respect. (This player does not appear in the D&D stories). Peter: Montaigne (French) sailor. He actually sucks at being a sailor and is on the ship to do the ship's dirty work. He is a knife fighter and (unbeknownst to the rest of the crew) a spy for a secret society of knights fighting a shadow war against ancient aliens. Yeop. No one else asks too many questions, and things get done. Or stabbed. Whatever needs doing. Basically, the party's rogue, and, oddly, Katherine's other moral compass besides Sebastien. (This player is also new to the stories). James: Avalonian (English) sailor. sought a life at sea and traiing as an officer to get revenge for his dead family. We recently found and killed the subject of his revenge, and in the process he poisoned himself and Vignar. He was Katherine's second mate, but she busted him down to "whatever is lower than cabin boy," and he is now under Peter's tutelage and command. He also has a roguish streak, but his skills are broader than Peter's and he is more of a conventional fencer in combat. (This player is also new to the stories).This all happens right after James kills The Valkyrie, the subject of his revenge. We regroup, revive James (if only to pump him for information), and he tells us what poison Vignar is dosed with. He also says that he thinks he dosed himself with it while he was preparing it on his blade. Mechanically, the poison deals one incurable "Dramatic Wound" per week, unless a save is made. Even if a save is made, these checks continue because the duration is endless. A character can suffer a number of Dramatic Wounds equal to twice their Resolve Trait before they are "Knocked Out," and one more kills them. Normally, Dramatic Wounds can be cured by surgery or time, but wounds caused by poison don't heal until the poison runs its course. But this poison's course is endless. This is one of the most lethal poisons in the game, and a couple of doses cost James his entire life savings as a young naval officer. To make a long story short: we have a ticking clock on James and Vignar, and it's about 6-10 weeks long. So Sebastien, our doctor, sets about trying to concoct a remedy for a poison not known to have a remedy. Meanwhile, the ship goes about its business, because whether or not we're about to lose two officers, the rest of the crew needs to be paid. Vignar asks Katherine for one last request, assuming he is going to die in a couple of months. He says he has half of a treasure map, and a hated cousin of his has the other half. He thinks it's some kind of sacred Vesten site of an expedition from hundreds of years ago (think Vineland and/or Lief Ericsson's voyage). His cousin apparently thinks it's a huge gently caress off pile of gold. Katherine is apprehensive until he tells her that this cousin is also the person responsible for getting him caught by slavers in the first place. Now she's in on the plan, if only to ruin this rear end in a top hat cousin of his. Katherine and Alana go find this cousin of Vignar, who manages a branch of a Vendel (Danish) trade consortium. Think of the most ruthless, amoral colonial merchant you can imagine. That's this woman. Katherine plays nice with her and arranges to transport some of their goods as a pretense for being in the office. All she has to do is confirm that she's there, because Vignar claims the map is valuable enough that she'll have it with her like he does with his half. Back at the ship, the party cooks up the patented Hare-Brained PC SchemeTM to break into the office and steal the cousin's half of the map. We go to the office at night. Peter and James are supposed to sneak in while the rest of us cause a diversion outside. Both sides of the plan go tits-up faster than I've ever seen a Hare-Brained SchemeTM do so. Both parties botched their respective rolls about as badly as possible, simultaneously. A bunch of goons come out of the woodwork to give us poo poo outside, and the rogues get caught on the inside. We could have beaten all of the goons, but then the cousin would have suspected something and hidden away the map. In a pinch, Katherine and Vignar decide to try a different tactic. We call out the cousin, who comes outside with our party's rogues and a few of her own goons. No one is detained or knocked out yet, but both sides are looking for a reason to start fighting. The cousin sees Vignar with Katherine and puts everything together. Katherine sees that she has figured out the connection between the ship captain she just met and her hated relative. Katherine appeals to what she guesses is the cousin's hubris, based on how Vignar described her and how smug she was acting earlier. "Alright, alright. Crew, hold your weapons."*They do so, as do the cousin's goons.*  "What do you people want?" "Your map, of course. Let's end all this nonsense now that you know why we're really here." "You can't have it, unless I can have his half." "Sure. We can exchange halves now, make copies, and we can each leave in search of the treasure at our own time. We can make it... a race." "That's a bold challenge. I have a whole merchant fleet at my disposal." *Spends a Drama Die to activate the villain's Hubris* "Yes, well, we are just one small merchant vessel, and with virtually no cannon with which to defend ourselves. But I have my pride, and I would assume you do as well and wouldn't send your cronies after the treasure. A worthy woman of the seas would seek the treasure herself, of course."In 7th Sea, every major character (i.e. Heroes and Villains, not nameless brutes or henchmen pawns) has a hubris. GMs can spend Drama Dice to activate PC hubrises. But players can do the same to activate villain hubrises. The problem for players is, unless you have some kind of rare mechanic to actually know a villain's hubris, you have to guess what it is based on how they act. Up to that point, the cousin was acting really proud, to a fault, so I have Katherine play into that. It works. The cousin buys it, and her crew believes Katherine's outright lie to boot: that our ship was virtually unarmed. We sail on a small ship that is tougher than most ships its size and has hidden gun ports. The crew's plan is not to chase the cousin to the treasure at all, but to ambush her as soon as we can safely do so. And, if push came to shove, our ship is faster and could win a race as a plan B. Playing into her pride makes her leave to find the treasure with just her ship, instead of a bunch of ships that would have been impossible for us to deal with. We beat them out to sea and set an ambush elsewhere in the archipelago. We spring the trap, catch them off guard, and deal them some severe damage before turning tail and running for the goal. We don't want to risk a long, pitched battle with them because the cousin's ship is packed full of Eisen (German) mercenaries. We just want to slow their ship. We end up beating them to the treasure island by most of a day as a result. We can see the map's ultimate destination from the shore: a mountaintop with "horns" protruding from the peak. The natives at first greet us and offer us some special drink. All of us but Alana and Vignar fail a mystery check to resist some kind of effect. When Alana asks for seconds and thirds, the natives are aghast in some combination of awe and fear and annoyance. That tips off the rest of us that something is deliberately wrong with the drinks. We all immediately start refusing (and some induce vomiting), and then the effects become clear: they are sedatives. At this, Katherine finds a way to use the misfortune to her favor and says to the interpreter just as the cousin's ship crests the horizon: "If you harm us, the people that will come after us will destroy your entire island. We are emissaries. They are evil incarnate."She points at the horizon. The natives buy it, because Katherine is a master of bullshit and I rolled like a champ to intimidate them. While the natives are momentarilly distracted by the sight of another, larger ship incoming, we book it. Well, we try to. Those who can still walk help those who can't, and we flee through the jungle toward the mountain. The natives pursued and we fought some off. Between the adrenaline and the vomiting, most of us shake the sedative effect by this time. We continue to flee because the natives had started to set ambushes and booby-trap the jungle. Bad news for us, but worse news for the cousin's crew, who are probably running into it right about now. When we get to the mountain, there is a wide staircase carved into the rock that goes all the way to the top. At the top stands an eight foot tall Vesten, who has apparently been there for hundreds of years through unnaturally long life and black magic. His long beard was festooned with human bones, and human skulls hanged from his armor. He wears a necklace made of human ears. I am beginning to think the natives aren't cannibals at all, and just drug travelers to feed to this guy. The giant issues a challenge to the group for ritual combat to the death, and Katherine turns to Vignar. This is his "treasure," after all. "Let me have this, captain. To the last, I will die a Vesten." "Alright." *Turns to the rest of the crew, draws her sword* "Don't let anyone onto the peak until we're all dead on the side of this mountain." *Quietly* "Alana, I don't really want to die here, so if I give the word, you go up there and kill that bloodthirsty bastard. Got that?" "Oh, man. I am not drunk enough for this. Hold on." *finishes off hip flask, throws it off the mountain* "BUUUUURP. Yep. Let's do this thing."We left off last game with angry natives and/or the cousin's crew charging up the mountain to face us, and with a one-on-one viking death match at our backs. Worse yet, Vignar is carrying one Dramatic Wound from the poison. Even worse, he ages a week for every round he spends in a berserker state, which will trigger that once per week check on the poison every round. Katherine is loyal to what he wants to do up there, but she also doesn't want to just let an officer die in vain. I will totally send a drunken boxer up there to finish off the psycho viking.
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Jun 5, 2015 14:57
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Golden Bee posted:Why not gather and facetime them in? That's kind of what I'm suggesting just using Google Hangouts or Skype instead. Enough of us have tablets and laptops that it wouldn't be hard to do. My /only concern would be how realistic and effective it would be. My Lovely Horse posted:If it helps, I'm the GM in a situation just like this, and I've been keeping up for almost four years now. That is definitely good to know. We're going to try it out in a couple of weeks once he gets settled into his new place. Captain Bravo posted:Oh my god, this is the most metal loving thing ever. Oh, and I forgot to mention one more mechanical thing that makes the whole situation metal as gently caress: the evil Vesten has a Fear Rating of 4. In 7th Sea, that means that everyone trying to fight him has to roll their Resolve with a target number dependent on the Fear Rating. If they fail, they lose a number of dice equal to the fear rating to all attacks and defenses against him. FR 4 is high. FR only goes from 1 to 5. Vignar has decent Resolve and barely passed his check.... for now. When the evil Vesten enters his own berserker state, as I'm sure he will soon into the combat, he'll increase his FR and automatically provoke a new check. If Vignar fails that as he is likely to do, the only way he'll have out of the FR penalty is to enter his own berserker state (which renders him immune to fear). But that's even more reason Alana is our ace in the hole: She has (Wo)Man of Will. She is immune to fear all the time. 
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Jun 6, 2015 01:34
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Bieeardo posted:We used to have a guy Skype in. I think it would have worked better if there were better mics involved, and maybe webcams to keep visual focus. It worked fairly well though. Too bad this guy cheated on virtually every roll he made. I'm not too concerned with this guy cheating. He's running the game and uses a screen when he's at the table anyway, but I can tell that even the few times he does fudge things, it's in the PCs' favor for the sake of drama. It's just too bad he's not running Paranoia. It would be funny to be talking to Friend Computer on a literal computer the whole time.
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Jun 6, 2015 01:52
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When people ITT started mentioning Muscle Wizards, I just assumed it was a particular STR-build for the normal 3.5 Wizard that I wasn't familiar with. Then I clicked that link to the Wiki.
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Jun 19, 2015 17:26
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My local group's two 7th Sea games are ending soon, and it looks like I'll be running a Pathfinder game to replace one of them. I want to get pumped to run D&D again for the first time ina few years, so I've been reading back through the thread looking for D&D stories. If anyone has any good or funny ones, I'm all ears. In the meantime, I'll share one from the last time I ran Pathfinder: I was running an open-ended, player-driven campaign, start from level 1 and all the way up. I think we ended at level 14 or so. I planned the game to make generous use of random encounter/treasure tables, and most of the plots were optional. I wrote note cards for each plot that were like the mission log in Fallout. Basically, the party would talkt o someone and hear of A Thing That Needed Doing, and I would give them a card for that. They could add notes to the back of the card when they got more leads, and we would tear up the cards when the plot got resolved. Most of them were dungeon crawls or other one-off plots that were designed to be resolved in a single session. The game was also written to be light-hearted, so all of the missions had punny names like "Girl, Interregned" and "Where Did You Come From, Where Are You Goblin?" The PCs were...  Mad Tom, a Chaotic Neutral Human Witch. He was a nutty hobo with a bit of a megalomania problem. The player left his familiar to me, so I designed her to be a dead magic goddess trapped in the body of a sarcastic fox that was the Fool to his King Lear (i.e. the only one able to give him poo poo without him going ape poo poo on them). Glibbons, a Neutral Good Gnome Alchemist. Basically a mad scientist, but more like The Nutty Professor than Victor Frankenstein. He always had good intentions, but often his schemes would outstrip his good intentions. Also, he chucked grenades around like they were rice at a wedding, and with about as much good cheer. Maj, a Chaotic Good Elf Rogue. His background was that of a "dungeon fixer," someone whom you would hire to "test" security measures in a castle or dungeon or whatever. He considered himself a legitimate businessman, and did act as a consummate professional. Less of a thief and more of a secret agent, but just as effective with a sneak attack. Lawrence, a Neutral Good Human Fighter. His concept was that of a mean mercenary with a heart of gold. He was a mercenary by trade, but he would do charity work in secret and otherwise act like a big mean thug. He would save a building full of poor little orphans, but he would take great pains to appear to be paid for it. But if you weren't a helpless child or damsel, you were definitely going to pay up for his services. Thok, a Lawful Neutral Half Ork Druid/Fighter/Monk. Thok's philosophy was simple: the wilderness is law, and you had better get the gently caress out of its way. He served nature in the most brutal, amoral way possible. He also turned into dinosaurs and took Fighter levels to get bonus feats to let him get the most out of combining Monk poo poo and shapeshifting. Definitely less of a spell caster and more of a beat-stick.Since I'm trying to get pumped to run Pathfinder, I'm going to share a  story.The group was pursuing a quest about a notorious Half Ork warlord. This guy had shown up at the tail-end of another plot they resolved earlier, and had been wreaking havok in a wide area ever since. By the time they finally decided to deal with him, he had amassed a small army and was holed-up in a ruined castle in a forest. The warlord was worth a small fortune to several local lords and barons, and the party stood to basically gain a keep by killing this guy. The thing is, I designed this particular quest to get the PCs to bite on chasing this guy around, but not actually eliminate him yet. I figured I'd introduce him in one mission (done), show how dangerous he is in this mission (now), and give them a better chance to beat him in a third and final mission (later). At present, the PCs were level 7 or 8, and the warlord was level 13. Between that disparity and his warband, it should have been functionally impossible to beat him. This mission was supposed to be about getting some info about him, showing him as a danger, and getting some loot for the PCs to use against him (and other quests) later. Well, they loving killed him instead. When it got right down to it, the PCs tracked him down to his ruined castle, which was crawling with his minions. Most of them were out on patrol or with lieutenants ravaging the countryside, but he still had about 100 dudes in the castle with him. Worse yet, the danger that I wanted to show about the warlord only becomes clear to the PCs as they enter the area and see him: the guy is possessed. He was a dangerous warlord before, but now he's using black magic and poo poo. He's atop a shattered tower (like you do), chanting over some magic crystal (like you do). The part had prepared to fight a beat-stick, but now they had sorcery to deal with. Glibbons, Maj, and Lawrence moved to deal with the minions, while Mad Tom and Thok moved toward the tower. The battles with the minions went well for the PCs, and they managed the movements of the warlord's troops well. They were able to carve a path for Tom and Thok toward the tower, and were able to hold the line to give them time to get the job done. But inside the tower, the extent of the warlord's magic power becomes clear. He's been throwing up heinous spells in anticipation of the PCs, and they don't have the HP or saves to realistically make it through enough to survive a fight with him. As Tom signals a retreat to regroup, the result of a nat-20 stealth check kicks in: one of the warlord's lieutenants has been sneaking his contingent through the woods toward the castle the whole time. The PCs are now almost trapped inside the castle, between the warlord behind them and the new army of minions between them and safety. The PCs manage to find a building that at the edge of the castle grounds that is intact enough to shelter them form the fireballs the warlord is now hurling down at them from the tower. It is also far enough from the largest group of minions that they get a few rounds to regroup before they are beset again. The party weighs their options, but it looks bleak. Maj pinpoints a spot in the minions' formation that looks weakest, and the party prepares to assault there to punch a hole int he lines to escape. The party runs out to engage the enemy in one last, desperate, TPK attack like "Charge of the Light Brigade." It comes around to Mad Tom's turn and his action is needed to finish off a wounded minion, or else Lawrence will die on that minion's next action, and likely with him the rest of the party will die as the line collapses. Instead, Mad Tom turns the gently caress around. *Mutters incoherently to his familiar* What are you doing, Tom?! We need you up here! We need all the help we can get to escape! *Suddenly snaps* I will kill him or I will die in this place. What the gently caress are you talking about? This is a bug hunt, man. The battle is lost. Let's get the hell out of here! He is an affront to magic. He must die. Noooooooooooo!If you're not familiar with Pathfinder's Witch, let me give you the TL;DR version: the Witch is a support caster. It is designed to have very few direct damage options, and is much more about indirect effects, buffs, and debuffs. It's more about Enchantment and Illusion than Evocation and Alteration. As such, Mad Tom had already exhausted what few options to hurt the warlord from the range he was at that moment. All except one. Phantasmal Killer. The thing allows for two saves: Will to disbelieve as per normal Illusion rules, and Fort to survive it if Will fails. The possessed warlord failed the Will save by 1, and failed the Fort save with a nat-1. The melee on the ground halted on both sides when the warlord let out a supernatural wail from atop the tower and plummeted to the ground 80 feet below. The sound and sight stunned both sides, and the minions fled in terror as Mad Tom turned back around at them, petting his fox familiar and cooing, There, there. The bad man is gone now. He's all gone now.Craziest Hail Mary I have ever seen myself in a game. I don't mind that a future quest was prematurely solved by this, because that was way cooler than anything I could have contrived. Sometimes, you just have to let PCs be badasses. And by "sometimes" I mean "always."
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Jul 2, 2015 20:16
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