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Guildencrantz posted:Wait, an RPG that caters to people's inner kindness and innocence? That feels... Wrong, somehow. 7th Sea not only rewards you for being good and kind, but it pretty much requires it as part of the game's genre (i.e. swashbuckling Renaissance fantasy). If you do too many mean or ruthless or evil things, you lose too much Reputation and turn into a villain (and hand your character sheet over to the GM). It actually makes for a fun gameplay dynamic because there are usually easier but ruthless ways to solve a problem, so you often have to choose between paying for a problem in blood, sweat, and tears... or in virtue. There's obvious mechanical rewards for not getting beat up all the time for being a goody-goody, but there are also different mechanical rewards for having a high Reputation.
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Jul 17, 2015 19:22
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Freudian posted:People I follow on tumblr posted the end results of their D&D campaign: Haha. Holy poo poo. Lichtenstein posted:Our 7th Sea group turned from musketeer-ness to full-on murderhoboism pretty much as soon as GM started introducing the dumb metaplot elements. What started as fun swashbuckling adventures about escorting a lone cannon through the occupied not-Spain to aid the brave guerillas (I honestly can't remember what was the point of that to sustain a whole campaign. I don't think anyone cared) ended up in what was supposed to be a cool climax where we help prepare some not-Spanish town's defenses to ward off incoming not-French army, but somehow our efforts at pressganging people to prepare fortifications ended up in establishing a full-blown The first edition 7th Sea rules are easy to circumvent and frankly broken in a lot of places. A friend of mine and I used a house rule early on that made Reputation more like a mix of literal reputation and karma, so that you couldn't avoid backlash for at least some of your bad deeds, even if you covered your tracks. That made way more sense to use, given the game's genre and tone. Later on, we even had two separate tracks, one for literal rep, and one for karma. If either of them dipped below -20, you were a villain. That made for fun character concepts, though, because you could play someone who had a bad rep, deserved or not, but who had a heart of gold. Or you could play someone who appeared squeaky clean, but who did underhanded poo poo all the time (but not enough to become a villain). I eventually rewrote the entire goddamn game system from the ground up, because I love the setting and genre, but holy poo poo was first edition broken.
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Jul 19, 2015 02:39
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revolutionary committee and war communism policies.
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I love it when games have ludicrous currency systems. I mean, I hate it, but sometimes it's funny. How much is a GP worth? Fuckin', I dunno. Who cares? You're in some one horse town, just throw down 1 GP and you're set at the inn. I usually don't even use SP and CP past level 2 in my D&D campaigns because why bother? Just round everything up to the nearest GP. If the players bitch, then they can go murder the nearest monster and get a hundred times the difference back. Once the party is buying magic items, most mundane poo poo just isn't worth keeping track of. Some of my players in the past have hemmed and hawed over prices of mundane goods and services down to the SP and CP, even when the cost was negligible to them. Like, the party is carrying around about 2,000 GP in cash, and they're haggling over how much SP a few "fine meals" should cost when meat is not included in them. Then there's currency conversions in games. 7th Sea has six or seven currencies, with different conversion rates for each of them. (It's horrible, and the game encourages you to just use the Guilder, or Dutch currency, to flatten things out). My favorite one in that game is Ussura, i.e. Russia, who don't use currency. They have a barter system, and the only conversion anyone else has been able to figure out for their system is 1 Guilder is roughly equal to 1 literal chicken. The same players that fuss about small amounts of money have a field day in Ussura, because they have to figure out how to fraction chickens as currency. Things quickly get... messy.
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Jul 20, 2015 15:27
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Guildencrantz posted:Re: currency, I'm having a lot of fun with it in my post-apocalyptic campaign. There's a barter system, but nobody wants to get bogged down in the minutiae of that, so we just use an abstract barter value in "whatever random less-than-useful crap you carry around to trade with". I ran a post-apocalyptic campaign back in college and I used water as a base currency for bartering. Keeping in mind, this was more of an environmental apocalypse like The Road than a zombie apocalypse, so clear, fresh water was even harder to find. I didn't have a hard system for it. I let the players just decide how much water was worth to them, and I decided how much it was worth to the people they were trading with. I had a system for the PCs needing food and water over time, and that was it. It was pretty interesting, and one PC died of dehydration because someone else in the party lost too much of the party's water in a poker game with the leader of a band of raiders. We did the poker game IRL too, and what happened might be worthy for its own story ITT.
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Jul 20, 2015 20:27
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Captain Bravo posted:That is a great idea for a cursed artifact. The Most Valuable Bauble In The World. Literally the single most valuable item in existence, everyone that lays eyes on it intrinsically understands it's value, but you can never do anything with it because anything you trade it for will be worthless in comparison. Also makes you an incredibly lucrative target for opportunists. The ultimate White Elephant. I'm going to use this in my upcoming Pathfinder game. My players
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Jul 27, 2015 15:39
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Getsuya posted:See in Terra the Gunslinger, damage is not based around hit points or anything like that. Instead, when you hit someone the numeric damage you do corresponds to a damage chart with specific things that happen to the person at each number. Only by doing EXACTLY 13, 20, or 30 (or more than 40) damage can you kill someone. Every other slot is survivable, though often with demerits. Not so bad, right? Just aim for one of those numbers and it shouldn't take too long. It sounds like a fun alternative to the usual HP or damage boxes. An easy fix would be to tone down the sheer number of chips the GM gets, or to not let the GM (or the players) use their chips for just that specific use. I like games that give both sides an expendable resource that they get as a reward for good roleplaying, so the rest of it is probably good. Terra the Gunslinger sounds a bit like Deadlands, and that is a good thing. Evilreaver posted:
shadowrun.txt Back in middle school (or early in high school), when I first played Shadowrun, some kid just did not understand what a meter was. He had carefully cultivated an understand of a meter as about equal to a yard, and by "about" I mean "exactly, because he was dumb." He also bizarrely refused to let anything dispel any preconceptions he had about anything, ever. It was a great combination. So things went like this:  Trolls are about 2 meters tall, so they need special armor made and need special accommodations in some vehicles. That's only six feet tall. That's tall, but not that tall. No, it's like... 7 1/2 or 8 feet, dude. No. Well, whatever. What's the difference? Two feet is the gatdamn difference, you dunce. Moral: never play tabletop games with people you don't know, especially when you're all fifteen year old idiots.
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Jul 28, 2015 11:58
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Captain Bravo posted:Uhh, two meters tall is about 6'6", nowhere close to seven and a half feet. He was right. The description in the book may have been 2.2 or 2.5 meters or whatever. I don't remember first edition Shadowrun's description of trolls the the letter. I just remember it was 7-8 feet once you converted it properly. My bad. In any case, the dude literally thought that yards = meters exactly. At one, that isn't so far off that it's too much of a problem. But by two meters, the difference starts to matter.
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Jul 28, 2015 13:18
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Dirk the Average posted:A meter is around 3.25 feet, or about 1.1 yards. They're not the same, certainly, but they are pretty damned close. Aw, hell. Now I sound like a huge 'sperg about it. Well, I still think rounding 2.2 or 2.5 or whatever meters to 2 and calling it yards is dumb. I mean, Shadowrun trolls are 7-8+ feet, and he literally called them 6 feet because he was lazy about rounding the measurement, and he refused to listen to anyone else about it. That was my point. I am just mistaken about how much of a difference there is between yards and meters. I guess it has more to do with the guy chopping a foot or two off the measurement out of laziness.
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Jul 28, 2015 22:55
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I just started running a game of Pathfinder and I decided to add a little something to spice things up. I gave the PCs a village at the end of the first session. The village is small, but has room to grow. It is full of nothing but peasants, so the PCs are the de facto leaders and defenders of the town. The trick is, I also designed a system for developing the town, so that the PCs can take actions to build or improve certain buildings in the town in between their quests. Depending on what they build, the town can start producing different types of magic items, offer services, or do other beneficial things for the PCs. But the town will also start resembling the aggregate alignment of the PCs, based on their actions afield. If the PCs run around like a bunch of goody-two-shoes, then the town will turn into Whoville and be full of do-gooders. Then again, if the party runs around like Murder Hobos like I expect, then they will foster a town full of Murder Hobos. Worse (better?) yet, the magic items the town produces will tend toward the town's complexion. A more Murder Hobo-ish town will tend to produce more hosed up items. I'll be using random item tables and taking into account the town's complexion when I roll (or reroll) to make items. Like so: Hey, boss. We made a new weapon over in the workshop. Cool! What is it? Looks like a... Merciful Vorpal Dagger. *cums* Why did you make this? Well, we're good people, you know, but Jerry just woke up in the middle of the night with an irresistible urge to kill. Oh, hi, Jerry! How are your kids? Good! How's yer mum? Etc, etc...I'll report any story nuggets from this system if anything funny comes of it. We only just started, so the town is still a blank slate, but that won't last long. I can also post the rule system I wrote for it if anyone is interested.
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Aug 11, 2015 18:42
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Yawgmoth posted:Why PM it when he could post it for all to see? I imagine it deals nonlethal damage right before lopping off the target's head. Hey, you roll up truly random items, and you're going to get a little messy now and then. I'll post the file for folks to take a look at. It's a few pages, because it explains what each of the buildings do, and how they are used. The only info not included here is the "behind the scenes" stuff, which is frankly a bit slap-dash. Basically, I'm going to have the town's Ethics and Order in front of me during the game, and tick it up or down depending on what the PCs do. When we get to item generation, I'll get a certain amount of rerolls for items that don't quite fit the town's complexion, based on my judgment. So, if the town is a Order 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, that's fairly chaotic. If I roll up, say, an Axiomatic weapon, then I'll get a reroll or two to get something else. Then agian, if the same town rolled to generate a Deck of Illusions, that's fairly chaotic, so I wouldn't reroll that. It doesn't guarantee the town won't produce items against its complexion, but it makes it much less likely. I'm secretly hoping for a moment when a good town makes an Unholy Avenger for no reason. That's our Jerry! *laugh track* Anyway, here's the rest of the info. This is what my PCs got, and it's 95% of the system (everything but what I just described above). Enjoy!
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Aug 11, 2015 19:31
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My Pathfinder players were trying to complete two quests last night. The first was about a Loser Orc. He was captured when he attacked the PC's town, and he is disgraced for not having died In Glorious BattleTM. He asks the PCs for help to save his family. He says his clan will kill his wife and children if he is not reported KIA or if he does not return within a few days. The PCs agree to When they get to his village with him in tow, the rogue in the party is scouting ahead of the group. He botches his Stealth check and is found by a six year old girl orc. She is wearing a frilly pink sundress that is spattered with blood. She sneaks up on him and tugs on his pant leg.  What're you doing here, human? Oh! Ah. Yes. Well, I was... just... looking for my... watch? Yes. I dropped it. I don't care about that. I'm going to skin you alive. Umm.... Stay here, piggy. I gotta go get my knives.The rogue wisely goes to get the rest of the party, including the Loser Orc. When the girl gets back, she is exasperated, and armed. Aw, jeez. Well, line up. I'm gonna have to carve you all up one at a time. I just a kid. Hey, little one! It's your papa!She casually tries to start stabbing the rogue. He easily holds her back. Eventually, the Loser Orc's wife comes out to the party's increasingly untenable hiding place on the edge of the village. The wife has four other kids in tow, and she looks pissed. She calls the party stupid for being so loud, she calls her daughter stupid for not having killed any of the humans yet, and she calls her husband stupid for being alive.  What do you idiots want? We are here to save you and your children. Yeah! We have to get out of here. Wait. How many kids do you guys have? Five? There aren't any more, right? No. Yeah. See, we didn't exactly plan on taking a whole litter. You're going to have to pick... three? Yeah. Three sounds like our max. Yeah. So which three do you like best?The cleric and the cavalier are apoplectic, but there's enough other PCs going forward with the Sophie's Choice that their arguments fall on deaf ears. They appeal to the orc mom to rebuke the ruthless PCs. Instead... Oh, well this baby is a pain in the rear end. And... well, T'Gah, you're not very handy with a knife. I'm afraid mommy's going to leave you, too.The cavalier finally steps in and offers to adopt the unwanted orc children. The cleric offers to school them back at the PC's town. Well, if you're that eager, then take all of them. All they do is slow me down. Why do you have so many kids, then? Gruumsh does not approve of contraceptives.The party, with the help of the orc mom, then convinces the little girl orc to burn down her own house as a diversion to cover the group's escape from the area. She is downright eager to do so, being a chaotic evil little brat. The village is mostly full of children, women, and elders, since the fighting age men are out in the war camp that currently threatens the PC's town. (More on that in a minute.) They rush to loot the burning house because they're also a bunch of chaotic evil jerks. The party takes the opportunity to escape free and clear. Well, except for the rogue. He and the orc mom team up to quickly loot the houses of all the orcs that are looting her burning house. They also get away free and clear, by the grace of some badass stealth rolls when all is said and done. Meanwhile, one of the PCs had split from the group on the way to the orc village. After a random encounter with a dire boar, the party's ranger, a half-orc, decided to team up with some NPC dwarves who were chasing the boar. They figured out that if they could keep the boar running away in more or less a straight line, that would lead it to charge right into where the Loser Orc said the war camp was. So they do. The ranger and the six dwarves charge into the camp right after the boar's onslaught, and in the ensuing chaos they waste dozens of orcs. Other orcs run into the woods to regroup, and when the re-emerge, they number about thirty to match the seven good guys. But the ranger knows what their chief looks like. He knows his name too, based on the interrogation of the Loser Orc. So he steps forward and issues a challenge to the chief. The chief answers the challenge. The dwarves and the other orcs form a circle and single combat begins. The ranger's player rolls initiative. I roll initiative. The ranger goes first. He attacks with two axes. He's still only level 2, so he's not into a lot of the cool ranger two weapon feats. He has ambidexterity and not much else to help him hit. He rolls a 4 and a nat 20. The 20 confirms a crit. He rolls 8, 4, 8. With his strength, he deals 23 damage. The orc chief is incapacitated a second after combat begins, with an axe to the face. The dwarves and orcs all gasp. Before any of the orcs can react, the ranger reaches down and decapitates the chief. He holds up the head to the other orcs and threatens them:  IS THIS THE STRONGEST OF YOUR PATHETIC TRIBE? SEEK DEATH ON MY AXE OR RUN HOME, WORMS!He crushes the Intimidate check, and they all run off. The dwarves give him the ol' slow, dramatic applause. He departs from the dwarves and heads toward rejoining the party. They are headed in his direction, toward the war camp. He meets them on the path, still carrying the orc chief's head. He greets the party and tells them that they don't have to worry about the warband any more. The Loser Orc and his wife are going to pass through the PC's town and head east, in the opposite direction of their old home. They are going to leave all of their children with the party, who are now apparently going to raise them in the town. The ranger has boiled the chief's head down and mounted the skull outside of his cabin in the hills overlooking the town.
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Sep 5, 2015 00:35
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Yawgmoth posted:That is the most distilled Essence of Murderhobo story. Thanks. Honestly, I expected more murder. Everyone, including me, was gearing up for a big combat at the orc village. It would have been combat against mostly orc children and geriatrics, but I'm sure the party would have hacked through them all. (I was going to use the normal orc stat block for the women, and the goblin stat block for the children and old folks.) The monk was disappointed because he wanted to kill the Loser Orc In Glorious BattleTM from the beginning. The barbarian was disappointed because he didn't get to kill dozens of (evil) children. I usually run Pathfinder with a loose reign on plot and encounter outcomes. I don't even have an overarching plot for this game, just a bunch of quests. Some of them could balloon into bigger plots, but that's up to the players. I also don',t care how they resolve. I don't need every quest to get resolved with a big combat. I pay more attention to what the players are telling me out-of-character than what they're saying to each other in-character, because I care about what they want as a player. I'll let stuff like this go on for a while, but if I ever notice that, say, the barbarian's player is as annoyed as his character at not being able to be all the murder hobo he can be, then I'll chuck a good, meaty combat at him, or the whole group. This is a pretty good group, though, so they're good at making their own solutions. I just provide stupid situations for them to murder their way out of. I can't wait to see what they do with those orc babbies. Their human ages are 1, 3, 4, 6, and 10. Some of them are young enough that they could be pulled away from chaotic evil. The six and ten year olds are going to be... challenging. Oh, and this is the game with that town system that I wrote, where the town starts to reflect the PCs alignments and their actions. Yeah, things just got chaotic (and a little more evil) in the town...
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Sep 5, 2015 11:54
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Skellybones posted:Does rescuing evil people out of kindness count as evil? No, it's actually good, but having evil children in the town will nudge the alignment a bit. That part might be a wash. The party's actions were good (for the most part), but chaotic. The town is not going to handle the orphans very well at first.
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Sep 5, 2015 13:14
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Shady Amish Terror posted:The Murder Hobo's Burden. You're on the right track. A lot of the quests and reoccurring stuff will be based on whatever the party does. I have very little planned in advance. I have NPCs to plug in where they fit well or interestingly, and some plot ideas to throw at them if things get slow. Other than that, they are in control, whether they know it or not. I play fast and loose with a lot of the rules in D&D/Pathfinder, including (or especially) alignment. The party can choose to help the Loser Orc if they see some redemption in him. That can be either practical or ethical. "Hey, this guy isn't a mass murdering fuckhead and he can help out the town smithy. Let's give him a home" is as valid to me as "his actions preclude him from necessarily being evil." It helps that our group's cleric isn't a pedantic dink about alignment rules and actions. Clerics and paladins can get downright insufferable in the hands of the wrong players. But all of this is why I'm leaving pretty much all of the quests up to the players: if they want to go further in helping out the Loser Orc and his (frankly more valuable) wife, then they can do so without risking their good alignments. They don't even have to "convert" the kids or the adults to good, either. They can do wh8atever they hell they want, and I'll reflect their decisions back at them in the form of tangible consequences, rather than goofy alignment rules. The Loser Orc is evil, but he just doesn't have as many outlets for it as most orcs because he is such a coward. It doesn't matter much because he doesn't have a character sheet, but his wife does. She's one of a bunch of NPCs that are potential allies to the party, depending on what they do. And a mostly good party could find ways to ally with a chaotic evil rogue if the situation is right. It's just going to be a lot harder for them to gain her help than it would for other potential allies. As it is now, the party is sending the orc couple (minus their kids) due east. The party doesn't know this yet because they haven't explored that direction form the town, but there's a humanoid settlement to the east that might be a goldmine for the orc lady. It's a Randian/Libertarian hellhole. They have no central government, law, or guard. Most of the population are Sovereign Citizens. They use a medieval version of Bitcoins. And a sly, chaotic evil rogue is walking right toward them. 
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Sep 6, 2015 00:47
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Alright, that's pretty hilarious. Oh yeah. Those two lovebirds will probably show up again. The players seemed to get a kick out of them, too. The "Bertcoins" that the Randian town uses are magic crystals created by one Bert Satoshi. Their only magical function is to automatically (and randomly) change their color saturation every time one is passed from one hand to another. But all of the crystals change hue at the same time when even one is passed. So no one can use them to pay for anything reliably or in great number. More crystals are created by local "miners" who spend all of their daily castings making more, which reduce the value of all of the existing crystals. The spell to make the crystals often causes heat stroke, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur as side effects (functions like a magical blight). And since this place is a libertarian paradise, there is a vigorous black market (or, "market," I suppose) using Bertcoins to buy and sell drugs, bounties, and slaves. The many pickup artists that live in the town also use the Bertcoins to pay each other for PUA training at the local PUA guild hall.
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Sep 6, 2015 02:01
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Caphi posted:p.s. Pathfinder realized this was a problem, and, being totally on the ball, fixed it. This is Pathfinder, in a sentence. It fixed just about all of my issues with 3.0/3.5 D&D. It's amazing. I still haven't gotten a chance to try 5th ed yet, but Pathfinder is good enough that I don't really mind.
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Sep 9, 2015 23:48
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Splicer posted:
Ah. That's what I get for replying before I read a whole post. I still think Pathfinder is way better than 3.5. The classes, mainly, are balanced better than they are in 3.5. The Paizo supplements aren't broken garbage, so I can run a game and not have my whole game hosed by some player with a rogue (not to be confused with "Rogue") supplement. It's just a lot tidier and more mechanically consistent than 3.0/3.5 ever was. I don't expect them to be able to completely fix something like item creation rules, though, because there's so many variables to it that there's no way to account for them all in a system. At a certain point, the game should throw its hands up and say, "gently caress it. You deal with it, GMs." I actually prefer that, because it gives me more justification for what I was probably going to do on my own anyway.
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Sep 10, 2015 00:11
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That was sarcasm. Read the rest of the post. They fixed nothing, just gave some lukewarm GM advice and marked it as "done".
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Yawgmoth posted:In a word, no. No they aren't. They just added a bunch of text to every class and as usual the non-magic classes get poo poo like "you get +1 damage if you charge with a sword that's naturally magnetic and also on fire" and the casters get free metamagic and extra spells slots for having a paragraph of backstory written for them. Still better than 3.5. The Ranger, for example, goes from being an almost unusable mess in 3.5 to being a decent, competitive class in Pathfinder. Favored enemies? I don't even remember a time anyone used them in 3.0 because they were so useless beyond level 5. Pathfinder applied a simple house rule to scale it up a bit. Problem solved. I don't need them to reinvent the wheel. There isn't much a D&D game can do to address how broken spellcasters get compared to everyone else at high levels, at least not without completely rewriting how spells are learned and cast. That would be a different game entirely. I'm not looking for that when I sit down for Pathfinder. I'm looking for D&D 3.75. I don't expect it to be perfect. I expect it to be an improvement, which it is.
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Sep 10, 2015 00:40
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Takuan posted:I'm running a Feng Shui 2 campaign. My players are acting as the entourage for an NPC participating in a invitation-only martial arts tournament, held on a secret island estate, hosted by a representative of the Thunder King, with representatives from the various secret war factions as the other participants. A tense, post-fight banquet ended in a pie fight, instigated by one of my players. This reminds me of the story about the end of Dr. Strangelove that never got filmed: the folks in the war room were supposed to have a Stooges-esque pie fight as the nukes started going off. Peter Sellers' improvised final lines were so goofy, though, that Kubrick used that as an abrupt ending instead. You can still see the cart pull of cream pies in the background of the final scenes. That said, both improv comedy or pie fights can improve any scene, in any game.
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Sep 24, 2015 16:57
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Evilreaver posted:Coined a phrase during last night's game, whilst a mid-to-low-level party engaged in airship combat (bargain-basement "flying" machine VS Imperial Aerial Battleship): Truly words to live (and die) by.
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Oct 7, 2015 01:55
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Everblight posted:Update! I've never played in a good Star Wars game, but this sounds rad as hell. Than again, I've only played in a couple of short-lived ones. Maybe I should trick one of my friends into running a game. I'm still running Pathfinder. Having solved the Orc problem near their home town, the party is moving their adventuring underground for the time being. The party for this adventure includes: Barbarian Rogue Wizard Cleric Monk Cavalier Bard The Ranger's player is not present for this game, so the Ranger is hanging out in his cabin overlooking the town. In an earlier adventure, the party found an insane hermit living in a tiny cave in the forest west of the town. He had captured one of the townsfolk and the party was looking for the missing person. They found him, tied up in the hermit's cave. The hermit hadn't hurt him or anything, and was just yelling nonsense at him in a language no human knows. When the party moved to rescue the captive, the hermit retaliated by leveling a wand at the party. No one passed a Spellcraft check to ID the wand in a spit second, so the Barbarian knocked the hermit senseless with one stroke. As it turned out (after a random wand generation on the spot), the wand was a Wand of Animate Rope. The hermit was nuts, so it made a bit of sense. The party rescued the villager and left the hermit for the time being to be nuts all by himself in a hole in the ground (not before taking all his poo poo though). But after that and the subsequent orc adventure, the party found some information back at the town that hinted that something might be mind controlling people from underground. Based on what they heard, it would account for the behavior of the mad hermit. So, off they go to chat with him again. The hermit is still in his little cave, a hole in the ground with a stone roof really, just being nuts. Same poo poo, different day. The party observes him and figures out that he must be being mind-controlled. Then a random PC is picked to make a Will Save. The Monk passes, not surprisingly, and I describe the failed effect as "a momentary wave of dizziness." He reports this to the party, but they continue wasting time trying to interrogate the hermit and discussing strategy among themselves. Another PC is asked to make the same Will Save. The Cavalier passes this time. Same description. Now the Monk and the Cavalier are getting antsy, but everyone else is bizarrely ignoring the obvious warning signs of mind control magic oozing through the walls of the hermit's home. They keep talking, and the Monk wisely goes outside "to keep watch." Another PC is asked to make the Will Save. This time, the Barbarian fails it. He immediately stops, holds his hands up, and says in his character doesn't know (AKlo): Innnnnnnnncoming message from the Scorpion Clan! Await further instructions!The Cavalier speaks Aklo and translates. He also explains that this is the language of some fae creatures, and probably doesn't bode well. AS he does so, the Barbarian is issued a one-word Command (as per the spell), in his head, in Common: KILL. He is compelled to follow the command, if not for very long, but he is otherwise free to choose his interpretation. The only options he has are his own friends and the hermit, so he chooses the hermit. Luckily, the Cavalier stuck around and was the best equipped to step in the way and absorb the Barbarian's attack. After that, the party drags the hermit out of his home, literally kicking and screaming, to see if they can get him out of range of the mind control. In the process, the Barbarian knocks him out because the hermit did literally 1 HP of damage to him in the scrum. The party still wants to talk to the hermit, especially if they can get him outside the mind control zone. And the Cleric can wake him with a spell. Except... I'm not wasting a spell on this clown. Let's just dig.Their thinking is that the source must be close, so if they start digging at the lowest point nearby (the bottom of the hermit's cave), they will find whatever is causing the hermit's madness. They had gathered some information to make the deduction based on what little they got out of the hermit's frothing, so I guess they had had enough with standing around getting mind controlled. So, they dig. And they get somewhere. After a little while of digging and Will saves, they bust a hole in the earth under the hermit's dwelling. The Barbarian was the only one to fail his Reflex save and fell into the hole. Now he's legitimately pissed. This is not th8e Barbarian's day, which means inevitably it is definitely not going to be someone else's day, either. The party spelunks around the tunnel complex they find themselves in. They find some Derro (insane, subterranean fae who are almost certainly accidentally wrapped up in some Lovecraftian poo poo they can't possibly understand), and the Derro are up to some poo poo. They have tables set up with crystals hooked up to fragile apparatuses, and they're wearing weird helmets festooned with wires and other fragile doodads not unlike the crystal apparatuses. They're holding one ear/the side of the helmet and talking into the crystals. The Cavalier translates and says that what they're saying makes little sense even knowing their language. It's a lot of this kind of thing:  Affirmative. Scorpion Squad Seven en route. Zugzug-niner: Report. ...Repeat. The spider is in the web. Repeat... Bleep-Blorp to Gobbledeguck-zeta. Unknown agents in grid D-5, level 1. Repeat...The party gives them a sound thrashing, and they manage to capture two of the Derro alive. One of the Derro recognizes the Wand of Animate Rope, and is pressed into saying that he didn't make it but he knows who did. Apparently there are a ton of other Derro, and there is one who churns out wands. The other Derro crushes a Bluff check that none of the PCs detects and "spills the beans" about "The Reverend Mother." the PCs press him for more information about that, and he reveals that she, whoever she is, is to the south. He continues acting like it is a bad thing that the PCs know this now. It isn't. The Derro are afraid of the Drow Temple Matriarch that they just set the PCs moving toward. The Derro are much less of a threat to the PCs, and the Drow are down there as a much more long-term threat to the PCs and their town. But the PCs buy the ruse hook, line, and sinker, and move south, down a path the spirals slowly downward into the earth. They encountered some more Derro, killed them, then ran into a trap further down the passage. The trap unleashed some knock out gas that KO'd the Bard and the Cleric at the start of the encounter. The rogue, who blew a check to disarm the trap, is by himself down the south end of the hall. The rest of the party is about 50 feet behind him at a "T" intersection between the west, east, and south passages. The party came from the west. Giant spiders come in from the east passage, and the Rogue is ambushed by something that mauls him (it is a Dark Lurker, one of those leathery, toothy things that falls form the ceiling). He's more of an INT rogue than a fighter, so he's hosed on his own in melee. The Monk runs after him to help, and he is ambushed by another Lurker. So the Barbarian leaves the Cavalier and Wizard to deal with the spiders and defend the still-unconscious Bard and Cleric. The Monk is able to pry his lurker off himself, and the Barbarian slays it easily. The Rogue is still embattled. Meanwhile, the Cavalier is taking a beating trying to hold the line by himself while the Wizard lays down support from behind. They don't want to give up any ground because the Cleric and Bard are unconscious right behind the Cavalier. After a few rounds, the spiders break through the Cavalier's choke point. One gets the Wizard into melee, and one moves to encase the Cleric in a web. The Monk and Barbarian have just finished killing the Rogue's Lurker, and just before they move to run and help the Cavalier, this happens: Who dares sully the threshold of my temple with the stench of humans?A female voice echos through the chamber. Then, supernatural darkness blankets the "T" intersection. The Monk and Barbarian both charge into the darkness and are given a choice: move at full speed and risk a Reflex save to avoid tripping, or move at half movement and not get to the spiders in one round. They both charge in, top speed. They both fail. The Monk uncharacteristically falls on his face, and the Barbarian joins him seconds later. The Rogue can't see poo poo, so he doesn't risk shooting into the darkness. The Wizard gets lit up like a Christmas tree before the Cleric finally passes a Fortitude save to get the gently caress up. The Bard is still out cold. While the Cavalier and Cleric and Wizard desperately try to finish off the spiders, the Rogue hears a door open down the hall behind him, further to the south. The Drow Temple Matriarch looks at the scene: two humans groping around in her darkness spell, three more battered by giant spiders, one unconscious, and the one closest to her badly wounded and alone. She says quietly to the Rogue: Annihilating you would be an affront to my dignity, let alone yours. Return when you have... composed yourselves. (Probably uncharacyeric for her, but I didn't feel a like TPK would be fun or appropriate here, so I was giving them a way out).The rogue, who is an INT/CHA-type of guy, raises an eyebrow at this. Never one to waste an opportunity, he takes a chance: Sure, sure. Totally understandable. Hey, listen. Do you know anything about those Derro guys? That's the only reason we're here. If you could call them off, we'll leave. Youl'll leave regardless of-- Wait. What did you just say? The Derro. they were mind-controlling people on the surface. We just assumed you... had... something to do.... with.... oh.  I will deal with them. And you will leave.The rest of the party finishes off the spiders. They wake the Bard, who got a nice nap out of the whole thing. Nothing ever got to him. They rejoin the Rogue at the tail-end of the negotiation. The Rogue explains to the group that the Derro misled them, and that they are in conflict with this Drow Matriarch. She hates them and wants to be rid of all of them. But the same applies to the PCs. The Rogue is pitching the "my enemy's enemy is my friend" kind of argument, that the Drow can help get rid of the Derro much more thoroughly than they could on their own. The Wizard (an elf) and the Cavalier (a half elf) aren't having it. They are in no condition to kill her on the spot, so they just want to get out before they do something everyone will regret. The Drow offers for them to come into the temple so that "we may pool our resources." The Rogue, Bard, and Cleric are overconfident enough in their numbers and resources that they think they can take her if things (inevitably) go wrong. But they genuinely want to collaborate with this psychopath that just tried to kill them all. The Monk is with the Wizard and Cavalier in leaving, if only for the sake of prudence. That leaves the Barbarian, who has been having a really bad day. He got whacked by the hermit, mind controlled, fell down a hole, fell on his face twice in the darkness spell, and never even got to kill a giant spider. He hasn't even used a Rage power yet. Without saying anything, he tenses to Rage and spring at the Drow. I let the other PCs roll Perception to notice this, and the Wizard picks up on it. He puts the Barbarian to sleep with a spell before he can leap into melee with the Reverend Mother and probably get everyone killed. He goes to sleep, dreaming the angriest dream.
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Oct 12, 2015 14:50
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WereJace posted:First game of anything I ever played was AD&D with some friends from high school and my brother, with their dad DMing. I was playing a CN thief, and my brother was playing a Paladin. What the rest of the party was doesn't really matter-there was a single Cleric. I think we were playing Temple of Elemental Evil-all I remember was that we left Hommlet, hiked out to a ruin and were immediately set upon by giant toads. Mine and my brothers were the only characters who jumped in to fight them, and as a result my character got mangled. A great deal of discussion erupted at the table over whether or not the Cleric should waste a healing spell on a Thief. (I should note that I hadn't actually done anything to any of them at that point. I picked Thief with the notion of playing Catwoman in mind, not 'steal from the party and ruin everyone's fun'. They literally did not want to help a party member because it said 'Thief' on my character sheet.) After half an hour, the Cleric was coaxed into healing me by the Paladin, and the game continued. We didn't get very far, because the pattern kept repeating itself-trouble showed up, only the Paladin and the Thief would enter into combat, and there would be another protracted discussion about whether or not my character should be healed while I tried not to look too furious at my friends. Nah. This is totally justified. 13yo or not, they were dicks and had multiple chances to get their poo poo right. the_steve posted:Pretty sure that's the sort of thing that prompted the rename to Rogue in later editions. I like "rogue" better because it's more open-ended. The last rogue I played wasn't a thief at all. He was a fixer. He investigated things, kept things quiet, and sniped bad guys with a crossbow. I do have a meta-PVP story. I've played in a couple of game where PVP happened for in-character reasons, but I did run a game in college where PVP just had to happen because the player was a dink and no other reason. I have no regrets, nor do any of the other players. It was my third year of college, and we had a good core group of players by then, most of whom I still play with now, over ten years later. WE had gotten past that rough freshman year, when everyone is new and you don't know who will or won't jive with your play style. Our group played fast and loose with 3.0 D&D's rules, we had a fairly serious game with some comedy sprinkled in, and no one was a munchkin. We played gamer for about two years like this, and everything was fine. Then one of my players met some freshman in one of his classes. It was still the first couple of weeks of the semester, so he didn't know the guy all that well, but he figured out he played D&D. I also happened to be starting a campaign soon, so my friend asked if he could invite this new guy to play. I said yes. This guy showed up and immediately and constantly did tons of poo poo that pissed everyone off: He insisted on making a character to ape Final Fantasy's dragoon class, which would have been alright if that didn't also come with an anime flavor that didn't mesh with anything else in the game. He was on his phone constantly. This was right before texting became more the norm than calling, which would have been bad in and of itself, but the phone calls were way more obtrusive. He was on the phone with women in hilariously futile attempts to mack on them. He was a big, stupid goon who was trying to reinvent himself as a lady killer, and it wasn't going well. He would get mad when he missed parts of scenes for being on the phone. He blamed me mainly, but also held it against the other players that he wasn't being included. Someone less polite than me pointed out that he was just lucky we were letting him sat at the goddamn table while he was on the phone. He was a horrible womanizer. It was worse than just some goon trying in vain to make booty calls to three different chicks in one evening. We only heard his end of the calls, but from that we could all tell that he was dismissive, domineering, and rude to the women he was trying to pick up. Typical PUA bullshit before there was a term for that, basically. He was a munchkin who played more against his fellow party members than with them. He did a munchkiny thing to the party in the first session, and I made a light-hearted comment like, "Haha. You don't need to screw them over. That's my job." He didn't get it, or care, apparently. He kept doing it. He was also just plain dumb as hell. The tactical decisions he made were awful, and they hosed over the group as much as his deliberate attempts to gently caress them over. He was playing a "Dragoon," who he used a Fighter to build. Basically, he specialized in spears and had a magic item that let him use the Jump spell. But he was the best front-liner in the party. He was a fighter, and otherwise there was a cleric, a wizard, a (bow) ranger, and a bard. He would jump into combats far from the party, thereby abandoning them to whatever melee he left behind. Then he had the gall to complain that the cleric wasn't healing him, when he was routinely far away from the cleric, with a bunch of monsters between the two of them.So I killed him. Well, his character at least. I engineered an encounter that would catch as many of his weaknesses as possible, solely to kill his character and get him the gently caress out of the game. The party, still at level 4 or so, was at a political conference in some castle. Things went tits-up and the party had to flee the castle with a horde of undead swarming into the place. They got caught by a huge group of zombies meant to provoke the Fighter into jumping into them. He did, and found himself in the middle of 30 zombies with no allies within 40 feet of him. His character died while he was yelling out-of-character at the cleric's player for not moving to heal him. He asked to make another character. I told him "everyone gets one. You'll have to wait until I start up another game." That was a lie, but the campaign lasted another six months, so by then he had bugged off entirely. PVP is a necessary evil.
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Oct 13, 2015 13:28
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Shady Amish Terror posted:I realize this was the halcyon days of your youth, and obviously the solution worked, but it really must be reiterated for newer people joining the thread: talk to your players. And if one of them is an asshat ruining the game for everyone else and can't understand that, kick them out, it's your game. Definitely. I should have just bounced him after the first game, but kicking someone out of a game they're already started in is sometimes easier said than done. Nowadays, I'd do it in a heartbeat, but then again I don't have to play with random people anymore. I have had a solid group for a decade now. To folks in college trying to find a good game: take your time. Find a group that works with your play style. College is a big place, and your group is out there somewhere. Don't invite random PUA goonlords into your game. You don't need to.
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Oct 13, 2015 14:35
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Yawgmoth posted:That reminds me of a VtR chronicle that used the VtM -> VtR translation guide I was in. This port triggered me with Camarilla LARP flashbacks. gently caress. Gotta go drink until I can't see anymore.
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Oct 14, 2015 21:00
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Yawgmoth posted:Because a lot of people can't seem to grasp that they aren't the main character of the world we live in and for whatever reason just can't process that other people aren't just there to amuse them. It's really unfortunate, but sometimes it leads to a good story. Yeah. It's more understandable (but still a problem) when players don't understand that their character isn't the main character of a story. But it's so much worse when that narcissism extends into reality. I just try not to play with folks like that. There are some games that have mechanics that help the GM make individual PCs the "star of the show" for periods of time. 7th Sea, for example, has character backgrounds that are basically personal plots. Skilled GMs in 7th Sea can thread those into the main plot(s) and use them to highlight individual characters one at a time without throwing off the whole campaign. That just helps spread the field of focus a bit. It doesn't do anything to slow down rear end in a top hat players that are really self absorbed OOC, but it can breaks things up when "alpha gamers" are running off with all the plots in-character.
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Oct 15, 2015 00:26
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Arx Monolith posted:Ran a pathfinder game and let a player roll up a goblin sorcerer. His whole character was based around using the cantrip Prestidigitation, which is basically "I do a magic trick". Walk into the royal hall? Confetti shoots out my sleeves and I announce "We have arrived!" Samizdata posted:I will not lie, however. Anytime the players in any of my campaigns start being really clever with their limited resources, I start cutting them slack. Prestidigitation rules and is the best example of players doing the most with the least. Cantrip stories are why low level campaigns are fun. Edit: Back in college, I was running 3.5 D&D and we had a cleric in the party. (This is the same game that had the PUA douche bag playing the "Dragoon," but this was way after his character died and he left the game). The party found themselves in a sort of Seven Samurai scenario: a small town was being regularly raided by a gang of bandits, and someone in the town inadvertently killed the bandit leader's son. So the PCs show up and they're the only thing standing between the town and annihilation at the hands of a very angry bandit leader. To make a long story short, the cleric set up a triage clinic at the center of town, while the rest of the party went off to the front lines to fend off bandits. The bandits outmaneuvered their defenses without them knowing, and a bunch of them got into the town. The cleric took charge and got the villagers in the infiltrated area to his secure clinic. He then left the clinic and stalked the bandits through the town, picking them off one by one. He ended up taking out about a dozen bandits by himself basically by isolating them, using whatever crap was around like barrels and alleyways and literal piles of garbage, and clever uses of low level spells (to save his better ones for healing). I let him incapacitate all but a couple of the bandits without combat because his tactics were clever and his rolls were good. When the rest of the party returned to find a dozen dead or knocked out bandits strewn all over town, they asked the cleric about it. Did you do all this? Yep. Were you able to heal the townsfolk too? Yep. So you did all this with cantrips? They're called orisons. 
Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Oct 18, 2015 |
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Oct 18, 2015 12:00
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The chat about using 0-level spells in overpowered ways is a conversation every group has had at some point (hopefully in middle school or high school). If the group agrees to do poo poo like that, go for it. I just pity whoever is trying to facilitate an interesting game out of that nonsense. It reminds me of a thought exercise we used to do with old Mage (because new Mage isn't nearly as broken): think of the most creative and/or horrifying ways to one-hit kill a person using any combination of spheres, but none of them could be higher than 2 dots. The difference here is that we would do that just sitting around chatting for a few minutes, not around a table with some poor sap trying to run a game. Creativity is one thing but it has to make way for a good, collaborative game, because there's other forms of creativity that get squashed by power-maxing bullshit all the time.
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Oct 21, 2015 00:48
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the_steve posted:Scion last night. Holy poo poo, it was a comedy of errors. We did pretty much everything wrong, yet somehow managed to survive AND attain Demigodhood. Awesome. This is the best kind of game: players barely making progress toward net good, mainly because of their own reckless errors. Speaking of reckless errors... I'm playing in a friend's NWoD game that runs opposite my Pathfinder game every other week. (We found that everyone wanted a weekly game, but having alternating GMs running two different games kept things fresh for the players and kept both GMs from getting burnt out.) The NWoD game uses the new God Machine rule set and is a mortal/tier-1 Hunter game set in 1938 American south. The GM let us make any type of character we wanted, but with two stipulations: we had to have had an experience with the supernatural prior to the game that we still didn't fully understand, and that we had to be transients for whatever reason. I am playing a character that is a shameless rip off of Woody Guthrie crossed with Tommy from O Brother Where Art Thou? He is a hobo troubadour and champion of the working class.... but he sold his soul to the devil (or someone...?) to play the guitar real good.  But that's not the reckless part of the story. At least not yet. Here's the reckless thing that happened the other day: Another PC is a gambler who lost everything and is looking for the rear end in a top hat that cheated him and took everything. Until then, he's a hobo like the rest of us. At the end of one game, we hopped a train to get out of town in a hurry. (One of our party members, a black boxer modeled after Jack Johnson, pissed off some cracker locals and we had to jet.) We boarded the train in motion to avoid cops and/or a lynch mob at the station, so it was a bit tricky. All of us made the check to board the train safely... except for the gambler. He hosed it up and ended up about five cars down from us, a bit bruised but no worse for wear. But he was alone with two stranger hobos. He also had one of the party's only two guns, and most of our bullets. He fell asleep and woke up to find himself robbed of his gun, about half of his food, and all of his cash ($2.20). So he asked the hobos point-blank for his poo poo back. He figured any pretense is pointless because it was obvious who took the gear. That got the gun pulled on him with a less polite demand to "step off the train and there won't be no more trouble." The train was still moving, and while disembarking wouldn't have been impossible, it definitely wasn't a great idea. Between that and the desperation to get his precious gun back, he decided to fight two hobos by himself in close quarters. He had no weapon except for a bottle of liquor he could hurl at them and try to light them aflame with his lighter. He tried that, but his lighter didn't catch on them when he threw it. Four combat rounds later, he was shot, his throat was cut, and he was pushed off the train to his death. Being a mortal in the World of Darkness is hard. We've lost two PCs already in five sessions. ~Epilogue~ The rest of the party heard the shots fired, and two of us got atop the train and ran across the rooftops toward the gun shots. (Not me, I'm the party's bard.  ) By the time they got there, our friend had already been murdered and thrown off the train, but they figured it out and killed them in revenge. We got  
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Oct 25, 2015 20:42
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Smash it Smash hit posted:I wanted to play my character some backwoods tall-lanky grappler that wandered into a weird situation. My DM has morphed him into the son of a frost giant chief who is slowly turning blue/hulk. Not the worst but thematically and combat wise he has slowly been morphing each character into what he thinks is better. He calls them "rewards" but it ends up being just changes. Hey, at least your DM isn't taking actions for you that change your character's gender against your will. Yet.
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Oct 28, 2015 19:43
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Smash it Smash hit posted:I have and he just was complaining because "there wasnt much he could work with with that story" and i was like, he doesnt need an epic story he is just some bumpkin that loves to put people in headlocks. He gives all his money away once he gets it and the only wealth he had is that he wears every piece of jewelry he finds because it makes him look fly af. Or, better yet, it's a more interesting story because a bumpkin gets embroiled with an epic quest and continues to be himself in spite of it all.
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Oct 28, 2015 19:53
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Samizdata posted:Sometimes you ended up wanting to tell a DM "Look, buddy, this is my character that I am playing. You want me to leave so you can play with yourself?" I had a ref in DC Heroes who pretty much determined that whatever we did, we were following his exact plot. It went beyond railroading straight to being down the barrel of a railgun. I had a player in one of my games in college who we didn't know anything about at the time. He was a freshman and the rest of us were in our third or fourth years. He asked me somewhat bashfully at character creation if he could play a female character. I said, "Sure, go for it. I do it all the time." He seemed relieved, so I asked him if anyone ever game his poo poo about it. He said his DM in high school went out of his way to get his character raped when he played a female character in one campaign, and he wanted to make sure no one in our group was "like that." 
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Oct 28, 2015 20:03
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Whybird posted:Because people who won't ever shut up about rape hate it when people try to get them to shut up about rape, and the only way they can get "making creepy weirdos shut up about rape" to sound like a bad thing is if they claim they're doing it because of a political agenda. The sense that I got from that poor guy who joined our college game was that his old group gave him poo poo about being a dude playing a female character. God only knows what the grognards would have done if a flesh-and-blood woman were to play in their group. Having his character get raped is obviously all kinds of tasteless, creepy, and evil, but I have a problem in general with people who can't get beyond someone playing a character so different from their real selves. The way I see it, the characters are fiction, and fiction writers have to write characters that aren't themselves all the time. Being able to represent other points-of-view is one mark of a good writer. Besides, one of the reasons I'm gaming is to escape my boring rear end life for an evening every week or so. I go out of my way to make characters that are nothing like me. But a lot of people either suck at characterization or are the type of person that can't resist self-insert fan fiction-y type stuff. That's ok I guess, but it can produce this mindset in some groups that people should automatically play their gender, race, age, and so on.
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Oct 31, 2015 20:50
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Kibner posted:I have a hard time playing a character with a significantly different moral code than my own. I don't know why. Different gender, race, age, etc. I have no problem with. I have a hard time with different moral codes too. I'll try it sometimes, but I don't like it as much. That's probably normal, but of course I would think that.  Speaking of which, I ran a Battlestar Galactica game using that goofy Margaret Weiss System that's ported to a million sci fi licenses. It's not a bad system, but it's not great either. But I had a big group that wanted to play a BSG game at the time, so off we went. I devised a system to generate characters, just to spice things up (and to gently caress with the players). I had sixteen pre-gen characters to hand out to the seven players. Each one had some build points left unspent, so people could do some customization after they got their character, but the core of the character was set. The way they got their character was to answer a series of questions, the answers to which moved them around a sort of morality grid. Think like the beginning of Ogre Battle, where a wizard asks you multiple choice questions that test your morality. Some of the players deliberately trolled it and answered questions in the most dickish ways possible, trying to get the most Gaius Baltar-y character. One guy succeeded at that. (His story is hilarious in its own right, and I can tell it later). Another guy answered questions trying to get a jerk, and boy did he get it. This player is pretty far to the left politically, and is pretty much a pot-smoking, capitalist-hating, socialist. By trying to get a ruthless character out of the grid, he got a literal fascist. Every session was brutal for him, although he had a good time. Every session ended with him saying something like, "I can't believe I'm going to have to have all of those workers killed. It turns my stomach, but my character pretty much gets off on the idea of killing commies." I sympathized with him, because I'd have a hard time with that too, but he did a great job at playing the character. Near the climax of the campaign, he set off a plot he had been weaving for almost the entire campaign, which was a coup d'etat. Along the way, his plot involved some deals with various devils, some double-crosses, the murder of another PC to cover his tracks in a pinch, and nearly selling out the fleet to the Cylons more than once. He almost puled it off in the end, but two other PCs and and NPC union leader with a lot of dead friends managed to flush him into space just as his coup began. Had they failed, he probably would have been President For Life by the end of the day. It was awesome. When his character was flushed into space, the player stood up, took a sarcastic bow, and the other players clapped. (I know, I know, it sounds like the punchline in a STDH story). He attended but sat out the last two sessions, and he told me he had no regrets. That story is always what I think of what good stories can come out of players challenging their own moral codes.
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Nov 1, 2015 02:30
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Mendrian posted:Inability to try different moral perspectives usually comes down to difficulty compartmentalizing. Unless we're talking about psychopaths which is a whole other kettle of fish. To whit; a character who is okay with stealing doesn't see himself as evil. He sees himself as a rebel, or a downtrodden victim, or the hero of a story who needs what he's taking. Justification is the name of the game for me. Yeah. That's how the BSG player approached it. He was able to compartmentalize some pretty heinous crimes in the name of his character's way to save the human race. Out of character, he wouldn't do it, but the dire circumstances around the character (and the tone of the game) helped him settle into that role. It was pretty interesting.
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Nov 1, 2015 03:44
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Galick posted:My group has been playing Way of the Wicked (a Pathfinder module that goes from 1 to 20, with you as the villains) and so far, it's been an absolute blast. No one's gone cat piss yet. We've got a bit of a megalomaniac antipaladin who was betrayed by his comrades and country, and went waaaay overboard in attaining vengeance. He's a seven foot tall monster who uses a two handed sword and axe alternatingly. Our second party member is a Tiefling slave trader, who is highly aristocratic and noble despite her previous occupation. She wields a scythe explicitly because she likes fostering the "demon who will eat your soul" image, because it amuses her. And I'm the last party member, a former assassin who was part of a team of assassins who got betrayed by her master and was left standing above a duke with a blade in hand while the guards busted in. Now her subplot is her reenacting Kill Bill. That sounds like fun. Evil characters can make for a fun game, but without good justification like the ones you describe, I have a hard time sticking with it. I've played in a few evil games and they usually just degenerate into bloodbath after bloodbath for literally no reason. It just kind of gets.... boring. It sounds like the players in your game actually put effort into their backgrounds, which is more than I can say for most of the evil games I've played or heard of.
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Nov 2, 2015 15:56
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Mr. Maltose posted:The trick about pretending to be an evil person is that evil is not a motivation. Evil isn't a reason to do things, it's a removal of reasons not to do a thing. Exactly. A good example is one of the major NPCs in 7th Sea: Esteban Verdugo. He's the head of the Inquisition, and he literally tortures people to death for a living. But in his own mind he's justified for the sake of good. He genuinely believes he is doing good by punishing sorcerers. He even believes he is helping them, by sacrificing their bodies to save their souls. He doesn't do evil to do evil. He does evil to do good, because that's more understandable and more interesting.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:48
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Isn't the sarcastic term for Good "Stupid? As in, "He's a paladin so of course he's Lawful Stupid." I usually hear it applied to LG (because, really, gently caress those sanctimonious prigs), but I guess it could apply to NG and CG as well. We just need a sarcastic, pithy term for Neutral and we can complete the set.
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Nov 3, 2015 16:53
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IPlayVideoGames posted:CN is basically the "lol im so random" alignment, anyway. I know it's possible, but I've never actually played with anyone using CN any other way. I hate it like I hate Malkavians in V:tM. I hate it because of what bad players do with it.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:11
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Poison Mushroom posted:Chaotic Neutral Oh my god. I just figured out exactly why I hate Deadpool so much. I mean, the monkey cheese-ness of Deadpool is a bit grating, .but I think the experience dealing with CN characters as a DM and as a player make it so much worse for me. I have a hard time thinking of Han Solo as CN because the end of the first movie is so deeply ingrained in the collective nerd consciousness, and it cements him as CG. But he really is CN for 95% of that movie.
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Nov 3, 2015 17:54
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Robindaybird posted:I like playing Paladins, but between the type of players that can't do nuance so they end up rear end in a top hat Fundamentalists and GMs that actively go out of their way to put them into no-win situations that I feel like I can only play this class with a select group of people. I let a player play a "secular paladin" once. He was basically a knight in shining armor, doing good for good's sake, rather than for he sake of a god. There wasn't anything that changed the mechanics, and he had all the same rules and restrictions. His ethos was just about humanism and community, rather than that of a specific god. It worked pretty well, even if it struck a different tone than a typical D&D character. Some of his moral codes and political philosophy was a bit of out genre, but I didn't mind it.
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Nov 3, 2015 19:32
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