Notable Gaming Experiences: The Gospel According to CobiWann's DM

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Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

The funny thing about this is that the Best Gaming Experiences thread was originally created because too many people were posting awesome experiences in the Bad Experiences thread. But times have changed.

Anyway, I've been saving up some of my favorite posts from the past two threads for a while now. Unfortunately I do not remember who posted most of these, and Google isn't helping, so if anyone knows, please tell me so I can edit it in.

Wandering Knitter posted:

I once gamed with a man who spent an entire session rubbing the flat side of a knife against his neck while glaring at the other PCs.

We never invited him back.

quote:

One game, we were going along the side of a mountain, and we were ambushed by something, so the dm let me summon orcas on the slope so I could cause whale-alanches.

I also dropped a celestial bison from the roof of a building, through a skylight, onto an unsuspecting gaurd below.

quote:

Pure sandbox games can be pretty fun, but they are entirely dependent on DM creativity. If you're drawing a blank that session the game grinds to a halt. I remember a D&D game where the players fought a Manticore on 3 separate combats because I couldn't figure out what they should be doing. I think I ended up fluffing it that the succession of Manticores were each avenging the previous Manticore, Inigo Montoya style.

quote:

the bard spent the entire fight a little distance away, breakdancing so hard that it filled the other pcs with righteous courage. occasionally he would cast some sonic damage spell and yell "bam!" while striking an insolent you-got-served pose. one of these spells struck the deathblow.

the bard served the huge terrifying monster so hard that it died.

quote:

Every Sabbat game I ever saw was nothing but one big munchkin wet dream. If it wasn't random slaughter and carnage (equestrian demolition derby anyone?), it was nothing but goth-Dragonball episode. In fact I know one game where the characters wanted some more experience so they got on bus and drove to a series of warehouses full of ninjas just so they flex their potence/celerity/obtenibration/vissicitude/temporis.

quote:

Someone once told me a story about RIFTS being played in a gaming shop, he said something about rolling a crit with a knife, and that the crit rules said to roll every die readily available. Well they were in a drat game shop, so naturally being total nerds they rolled the store's entire inventory of dice. Ended up destroying a planet.

Don't know exactly how RIFTS works, or if the story's legit, but from whats been said it wouldn't surprise me.

quote:

Lionel's biggest achievement came when Bob asked him to make a new character. Lionel found a demonic form power he really, really liked. It let him eat anything with no penalties.
We made our way into some corporate building to steal some information. Most of us chose stealth, but Lionel had a different solution. After the alarm sounded, he told us, "I'm assuming my demonic form and then I'm going to eat the security guard".

Play stopped. We tried to talk him out of it, but he was adamant that we couldn't have any witnesses. Bob tried to reason with him, letting him know that it would take a long time to eat an entire person and we'd definitely be caught.
Lionel's response: "No way, it only takes one turn! The book says I can take man-size bites!"
That took a moment to sink in. We had to call the game for the night.

quote:

Well, the guy would show up with his books and stuff, then five minutes or so after we started he would slip out a bayonet and whetstone and start sharpening the bayonet. He'd randomly slam it down into his pile of books, interrupting whoever was talking and leaving the rest of the table wondering if he'd finally snapped and was going to kill us or something. He never did, nor did we ever find out if he had the gun that the bayonet would have attached to. Very quiet otherwise, played a mild-mannered elf wizard whose goal was to build a peaceful tree house with a library and alchemical lab. Guess he counts as an "American Psycho" type dude. All of his books had little triangular puncture wounds that went from the hardcover front to the hardcover back. His PHB was like swiss cheese, and was always the one given to newbies who didn't have their own gear.

quote:

The paladin, as his FIRST course of action, drops chain-trow and declares he shall bugger the unicorn awake.

Angry Diplomat posted:

I had an important villain flee to an impregnable fortress once. he was hiding inside this tower made of evil purple stone that was stronger than steel, with an enchanted door made from the same stuff. when they found out they couldn't put a dent in the walls or penetrate them using magical means, the bard says, "alright, I want to go to town and hire a wizard and a druid of at least these levels to accompany us for a day or so."

I figure, what the hell, they'll try throwing more spells at it but I can't see how they'd get through the tower that way. I ask him if he's sure he wants to spend the money and yes, he is quite sure. so the bard returns to the big evil tower in the mouth of an extinct volcano, hired spellcasters in tow.

he had the wizard animate the door, then had the druid cast awaken construct on it, so that the door was sentient. then he threw his nearly +40 diplomacy modifier at it and politely asked it to open.

the villain was very surprised to see them

And my personal favorite

quote:

Oh, man, the first campaign I DMed fits squarely into this thread. It was 3rd edition, and the PCs were a half-orc barbarian, a halfling rogue, a human bard, and, because the party was looking a little fragile, my DMPC, a human fighter. I realize DMPCs are usually terrible and all that, but seriously, with an unoptimized fighter, what could go wrong?

Well, DMPC or not, a lot went wrong. The biggest problem was that I was a very permissive DM and the bard's player was incredibly clever and imaginative.

Rogue does the fighting, fighter does the rogueing

Ironically, the fighter NPC ended up being quite useful to them. The rogue preferred stabbing people and picking pockets to disarming traps, and I had built the fighter to be a pure-constitution, hitpoint-packed supertank, reasoning that a resilient meatshield would be useful for keeping the bard alive while the other two went ballistic on monsters' faces. The bard's player looked at Toughguy McSoakalot with his crazy Fortitude save and said, "hooray! You get to spring the traps!"

Hilariously enough, the NPC's background was that he had been framed for a crime and was lying low until the heat died down, so he really didn't have much choice but to stick with the party. They threw him into poison gas traps, spiked pits, goblin ambushes, collapsing caverns, and all manner of other madness, and if he complained the bard would just roll Diplomacy and score a 35 or something similarly ridiculous while basically patting him on the head and offering him a cookie. In retrospect it was extremely funny, but as an inexperienced and overly-permissive DM, it frustrated me quite a bit.

Hello, I'm Bardsby von Singerson, and this is my petting zoo

Every monster the party defeated, the bard would try to tame (he had maxed ranks in animal handling, obviously). Every NPC the party met, the bard would try to fast-talk (maxed ranks in bluff, diplomacy, and intimidate). If neither of these worked, he would use a spell or wand with a charm effect or something similar. He later took Leadership and got a negative-channeling cleric cohort so he could rebuke and control undead. This loving guy had a sack full of trained stirges, giant angry mosquitoes, that he could (and did) unleash on NPCs who angered him and appeared to have more blood than they really needed.

The party also developed a propensity for gathering prisoners/slaves. This came about after I had the fighter offhandedly comment that butchering defeated opponents was a little different than he was used to; he didn't really like killing in cold blood. What I intended as a bit of characterization became a weird obsession for the party - they would tie up and drag around every single NPC who didn't die immediately after the fight, sometimes leading around comical prisoner trains of dozens of duergar, drow, bandits, gnolls, orcs, and hell knows what else. This persisted, becoming ever more absurd as the bard used lies, intimidation, and magical fuckery to keep everyone in line, until...

You get HOW many wishes!?

We were playing through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil module, which is really quite a good mega-dungeon if I remember right. It's got all kinds of cool poo poo, with a pretty interesting storyline, and a good DM could weave it into a campaign quite well. Unfortunately, one little bit of strangeness in a flavor-text paragraph ended up sending the campaign flying so far off the chain that it smashed into an alternate universe and destroyed it.

One of the clerics of Tharizdun carries a weird tentacle-covered staff thing that does crazy poo poo to any sane person holding it, unless they make certain will saves. In another part of the dungeon, controlled by a rival faction of crazy murder priests, is an altar used to sacrifice living beings to Tharizdun. A little sentence in the altar's DM-only description notes that Tharizdun grants a Wish in return for the sacrifice of a sentient being on the altar, if the person conducting the ceremony has that crazy staff. Whatever, interesting bit of flavour, right?

Oh, no. The bard was still playing Pokemon with the NPCs, and he inevitably captured and managed to subdue the mad priest with the staff. Through some weirdness - I think an antimagic field was involved - he managed to make him harmless enough to interrogate, and then promptly passed all his intimidate rolls with flying colours. As soon as the priest mentioned wishes in exchange for sentient lives, rear end in a top hat Bard found inspiration.

The party smashed their way through that part of the dungeon, enslaved everyone within, found that loving altar, and set up the ritual. Then rear end in a top hat Bard took the staff in hand, succeeded his will save, and, with the help of the barbarian's brute strength and judicious use of various mind-affecting spells, started feeding his hilarious prisoner train into the altar like some kind of horrible, bloody, Lovecraftian clown car. I frantically read and reread the flavor paragraph, and was eventually forced to concede that, yes, it did specify one wish per sentient life, and there was no mention of a limit to Tharizdun's generosity.

After the altar swallowed up the two dozen or so guys they had with them, the party went raiding and enslaved a group of gnoll workers in a nearby cavern, then sacrificed them too.

They ended up with something like 36 wishes before I finally managed to break through that "everything within the rules is acceptable" early-DM barrier and told them that the altar had broken and wouldn't work anymore.

I wish I was Superman

The first thing the bard did with all those wishes was to dig through obscure splatbooks/adventure modules/God knows what and find these weird evil rituals that turn people into powerful guards. The first one was some transformative spell that, despite almost nobody in the multiverse knowing it, was apparently of a low enough level for a Wish spell to duplicate. This caused the rogue to turn into a half-shadow, which made him automatically succeed every move silently check ever, as well as being able to turn ethereal and having +6 or so to Dexterity. The rogue thought that was pretty cool, since his idea of "roleplaying" amounted to "I pick his pocket, then congratulate myself on being an awesome pickpocket".

The bard then turned his attention to the fighter. He showed me an adventure from somewhere or other that involved people being turned into crazed half-golem monstrosities. The rules for the ritual to do so were in there, and he could, by wishing for the golem arm as a magical item and wishing he knew how to carry out the ritual, do the same to the NPC! But he wouldn't be crazy because the rogue would knock him out first, and the pain wouldn't drive him mad. I, being a first-time DM, didn't know what the hell to do about this, so I just shrugged helplessly. The bard got his confused half-golem bodyguard (but not upset, because he rolled over 40 on his bluff check to convince the fighter that the cultists did it), the rogue got to laugh about how he knocked out the perpetually-unfortunate NPC with a sock full of copper coins, and the fighter got damage reduction, spell resistance, and haste or something like that.

The barbarian wasn't having any of this "diluting my strength with evil book magic" nonsense, but that turned out okay because a basilisk later turned him to stone and then the bard had him animated as a golem and then had a druid Awaken him and that meant that he was basically the same character except with Hardness 8, construct immunities, and a shitload of strength. I don't even know, all I could do was stare dumbly at this crazy bastard as he pointed out the different spells and how they worked.

The party later had a portable hole installed in rockbarian's mouth so that he could "eat" useful items and retrieve them later, though this ended up getting used as a halfling pillbox instead, with the rogue peeking out of the terrifying stone berserker's open mouth and peppering everyone with arrows. Also, they wished for a Lifedrinker Axe, and the bard gleefully pointed out that its level drain did not affect constructs, meaning that the barbarian could use it without negative effect, meaning that every enemy they ever fought after that wound up with a boatload of negative levels within the first few rounds.

The bard chose not to apply any silly templates to himself, instead settling for some combination of magic items that made it mathematically impossible for him to ever fail at any charisma-based skill check likely to arise before early epic levels. He spent the rest of the wishes on a shitload of money and powerful magic items for everyone in the party.

I don't understand how giving 36 wishes to my enemies could turn out this badly

The party was easily able to bulldoze the rest of the module. Highlights include:

- The barbarian becoming angry when a gnome tried to cast Enfeebling Ray on him, declaring "I pick him up and eat him," and then rolling double 20s on the unarmed attack after grappling him, instantly killing the gnome with a bite (in fairness, this one isn't really a worst experience; it was hilarious)

- The bard somehow clearing 50 on a diplomacy check and convincing an angry dragon that it should take the time to listen to the party, then launching into a ten-minute salesman schpiel trying to hock his tamed stirges as guards for the dragon's treasure room, and succeeding

- Killing an entire army of 100 or so first-level fighters by throwing a single Ochre Jelly in a jar at them and then running as far away as possible ("they all have bastard swords, and Ochre Jellies just divide when hit by slashing weapons!" Yeah, too bad you have to figure out how to kill 700 Ochre Jellies when this is done)

- Discovering that, rules-as-written, the barbarian could destroy four cubic feet of solid stone with a single full power attack

- Killing Imix, Prince of Elemental Fire, a 14th-level giant super elemental with all kinds of scary templates and magical items, in two rounds

...and that's how I become a millionaire, or maybe King. Can I be both?

rear end in a top hat Bard was not content to slay a demigod in twelve seconds. No, he wanted to bring the whole world to heel.

The first thing you should know is that the Return module takes place in a huge fuckoff mine in an extinct volcano. Having killed or enslaved literally every living creature in this entire sprawling cavern complex, the bard promptly went to the nearest city and diplomacy'd up a few hundred workers, who he would hire to refit the mine and get it up and running again. The Stronghold Builder's Guide was consulted, money was counted out and spent, and pretty soon rear end in a top hat Bard was a wealthy gold magnate with one of the richest mines in the region.

But, hey, why mine gold when you can command gold to rise out of the ground? A little searching, more diplomacy, and he was able to gain a cleric with the Earth domain as one of his (many, MANY) followers. In exchange for rations and the occasional 50 on a charisma-based roll, this cleric heaped even greater quantities of money in rear end in a top hat Bard's lap. rear end in a top hat Bard took this money to a local wizard, had him create some magical items with uses per day, and rented out these items for a fee, making back the cost of creation within a few in-game months. All extra money went into more "initial cost, no upkeep" ventures, until this guy was basically just printing money on a grand scale. Rockbarian and Shadowrogue were his shady enforcers, while Fightergolem did odd jobs.

The party went on a couple of brief adventures before rear end in a top hat Bard's player came up to me with a little spreadsheet detailing the time that had passed and the income he should have. I don't remember the exact figure, but I do remember that it was basically enough to buy one of everything in the Stronghold Builder's Guide and then heap even more enchantments on top!

To make a long story short, they ended up with a flying castle, and a flying galleon, and a crystal in the castle that could cast Earthquake and Reverse Gravity so that an entire city would fall apart and smash into itself, and a fountain that could cast Heroes' Feast, and a personal army (everyone took Leadership), and...

The barbarian, at least, had a great sense of humor about the whole thing. Instead of being an annoying powergamer, he was a hilarious powergamer; his magic items included a Monocle of Searing Ray and a flying Rowboat of Doom (anyone whose shadow it fell upon was affected by the Doom spell). He even had a wizard make a Butt of Stinking Cloud, which was a golden butt which, when squeezed, would cast Stinking Cloud once per day. Height of high school comedy, right there. I don't think he ever used it, but he sure did love his dapper eye laser.

To make an already long story short, that campaign ended with the party fighting gods at level 14 and deciding that basically nothing was a threat anymore and it had stopped being fun. I have to admit, though, that even with all my frustration as a DM, the insane amount of godmoding and gleefully over-the-top powergaming was actually incredibly fun in its own way. I started sending great wyrm dragons at them, only to have them shot down by their flying galleons with batteries of Maximized-Fireball shooting cannons.

So. As a DM, worst experience with roleplaying. In terms of hilarity and fond memories, surprisingly not that bad.

I also loved the story about the guy whose friend had a homebrew campaign with superpowered elves who needed to touch a tree every 24 hours, and then the players blew a hole in the planet and it turned into a post-apocalyptic campaign, and all the elves died. I only have a small excerpt from it saved, though.

Cygna fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jan 13, 2012

# ¿ Jan 13, 2012 08:08

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:23

Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

To keep this thread on track, I'd like to recount my stories of the Crazy Russian. I've discussed him a bit before, but never really went into detail. He's played in two games and run two others. And every time, he was the group's worst experience.

Ivan loved to drink. He kept a flask of something-or-other with him at all times. He liked to get trashed and climb onto the roofs of buildings, and would sometimes get other students together to fight with quarterstaffs and fists. For several years he didn't have an official place of residence on campus, so he lived as a vagrant, sleeping in lounges and engineering labs and occasionally showering in the athletic center. He carried a shiv everywhere he went. In short, he sounds like the kind of guy that would be a blast to know, until you actually get to know him. He had this abrasive personality and laugh that slowly grated on your nerves until you would just walk away. He could be a flake, but god help you if you missed one of his games. And most of all, he was adamant about always getting his way.

Let's start with the Pokemon game. I'll leave his D&D antics for the next post.

So, my gaming group is all nerds. We grew up with Pokemon. And one day, because we are all lonely pathetic geeks who will die alone, one of us decided to run a Pokemon game, using the most wonderful of systems, BESM. (Yeah... We know better now.) For those of you who aren't Pokemon nerds, I've included images to help illustrate this story.

So the premise of the game is that we're all new trainers, chosen by an academy to go on a fabulous training adventure. Then the academy blows up, and the people running the region are all corrupt and evil, something about Darkrai, and we have to take them down. Standard fare for a tabletop game.

Ivan played a con man. He would get NPCs drunk all the time and try to, I don't know, sell them stuff? Get information from them? Sleep with them? It was never clear what his motivation was. Either way, every time we entered a new town, his first plan of action was "find a police officer/pretty girl and get them drunk", and we were all subjected to long, torturous scenes of his character slurring at the bar.

His Pokemon of choice was Absol, which was also the choice of Pokemon-loving furries everywhere (did I mention Ivan was a furry? Because he was). A dark-type Pokemon, in a setting where we'd been told that all dark-type Pokemon are evil and feral and will try to kill you. This Absol was apparently special. Along with my Magneton, it ended up being the most broken Pokemon in the game. Except in my case it was an accident ("Magneton has three heads, so it should get two extra attacks per round, right? :downs:

") whereas his Absol was explicitly designed to break the power level of the game as painfully as possible. He was actually talked down into having an Absol instead of the Steelix he'd originally statted up, which was probably roughly as powerful as a god. The Absol had three attacks per round, each of which did insane damage, and could run something like 200 meters per second. Oh, and it could talk. More on that later.

Ivan knew no alignment besides Chaotic Stupid. Aside from getting people drunk, his character created explosives, got involved in crime, and generally stirred up trouble. At first it was just mildly annoying stuff, so we didn't really care, but then he turned it up a notch. Our characters were lodging in some old man's house near an ocean. He had a boat, and our characters were on the run from something. It was fairly obvious an ocean chase scene was coming up, so Ivan decided to contribute in his own unique way.

:drugnerd:

"When nobody's looking I sabotage the boat."

Well. Of course we had to use that boat that very night, and none of our characters could tell that it had been tampered with. And it sank in an ocean that was full of Gyarados.

That was when the rest of us really started to get pissed. We only avoided a TPK because our DM didn't want to end his game due to one person's stupidity. We asked him what the hell was up with trying to get us all killed, and he got defensive.

:drugnerd:

"It's my character! It's what my character would do. I'm roleplaying. Don't railroad me!"

That would be his excuse for the rest of the game. Whenever he did some stupid poo poo, he passed it off as roleplaying. When repercussions came down in-game for his actions, we were railroading him. It all came to a head when we got to Monochrome City. It was described to us as a semi-totalitarian utopia, where police crack down on anyone who looks like they might be a troublemaker. You know, like Arizona.

Of course, we all got into trouble almost instantly. The worst offenders were my character, who attempted to start an underground Pokemon fighting ring and accidentally killed a police officer in the resulting crackdown, and Ivan, who immediately tried to take down the entire power structure of the city by way of getting police officers drunk, an attempt which also ended in violence. We were all brought to a kangaroo court, and the two of us received the harshest punishment, having exploding ankle bracers attached to our legs, a Ditto masquerading as blood cells injected into our veins, and a parole officer who was to monitor our every move.

I readily accepted this-- as a side note, our DM was very fair and let us get away with lots of crazy poo poo. This wasn't some method of punishing us for messing with his plot, it was just a way to throw some more elements into the crazy plot twists ahead. I knew that when my character flaunted the law, this would be the end result, because he had told us that stepping one toe out of line in this city would result in crazy, unjust punishments. But Ivan hated it. We were railroading him and punishing him for playing his character the way he imagined him! The DM refused to change the ruling, and Ivan basically threw a hissy fit.

In the sessions to come, Ivan's character rebuked his parole officer and continued acting like an ex-con jackass. Eventually, he got on a bus headed to god-knows-where, intending to leave the group and return to doing his own thing. He got a call from his parole officer asking what the gently caress he was doing, and saying that if he tried to run, he would take drastic measures to stop him. Ivan's character responded by saying that he knew where the parole officer's sister lived and that if he tried to stop him, he'd rape her.

That was the last straw, both for the parole officer and the DM. The button was pressed and the ankle bracelet exploded. Now, to be fair, I'm pretty sure a GPS anklet shouldn't explode with the force of a land mine. But as stated above, the GM loved doing crazy dramatic poo poo ("Yes you can attack the floor above you, now there's a whole building falling on top of you, roll to dodge"). The bus crashed and rolled over. Ivan's character, sans one leg, crawled out of the wreckage. He had lost most of his hit points and had no way to run. So when the police officers arrived to take him in, did he give himself up peacefully? gently caress no! He and his Pokemon fought them tooth and nail. His Absol decapitated officers and his Beartic froze them solid. Finally, one of the commanding officers decided enough was enough, and spoke the command word, transforming the Ditto inside Ivan's character into a Snorlax and killing him instantly.

My Porygon caught the whole thing on HD video, and we found a way to show it to everyone we met from then on. :cool:

We though that was the end. Ivan had apparently hated the game, after all, and wasn't shy about saying it, so he probably wouldn't want to roll up a new character, right? Wrong. He approached the DM before the next session, demanding to be allowed to play as his Absol. The DM told him hell no, that he'd have to make another human if he wanted to play. An Absol wouldn't fit into the story, especially because people in towns tended to attack dark Pokemon on sight. But he persisted. He'd spent the points for Absol to be able to talk and gave it intelligence equivalent to a human! That meant it was totally valid as a player character!

Finally, the DM relented and allowed him to play one session as his Absol, to tie up loose ends his character had left. The first thing he did was enter my character's bedroom through the window. My character had previously been established as a super-paranoid person who had almost been killed by a swarm of dark Pokemon earlier in the game. Naturally, I sent my Magneton to attack it on sight. And Ivan yelled at me for metagaming.

He kept trying to attend sessions after that. Eventually, the DM just started ignoring him whenever he asked, because he didn't want to deal with his whining anymore. The game was brought to its conclusion without Ivan, and that was the end of that.

But Ivan also loved to play D&D...

To get the obvious question out of the way:

Radish posted:

I can understand the perverse enjoyment of watching this dude do everything he complains about and making an rear end out of himself trying to defend his game against any threat to his precious fan fiction (and likewise it's funny reading your post about him), but why does anyone give him the time of day in the first place?

Ratspeaker posted:

I think the only reason we all put up with him is because he's going to be graduating next semester, so we won't have to deal with him much longer. Besides, having a player that everyone can be united in hating does wonders to minimize the infighting and drama that usually springs up between the group.

I think he was supposed to have graduated by now, but he's stuck around to finish his fabulous 3.5 game, which I'll get into next. Hooray.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2012 02:36

Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

So here's a rant. I'm in a Pathfinder game right now that's pretty fun. Except this one girl--her voice. Her voice. It's like a harpy strangling a cat while scraping their nails on an aluminum door. And she narrates every line through shrieking. There are plenty of times in a tabletop game when shrieking is appropriate, but "I roll an Acrobatics check to climb up the ladder" isn't one of them. Neither is "I ask if he wants to buy a Dwarven waraxe," which wasn't that funny the first time you said it; definitely not funny enough to warrant repeating it a dozen times each session.

I tried to ask her if she could maybe take the edge off her shrieking, drop it a few decibels, or at least lower the frequency, but since I'm the only one who cares about it, she refused. In an effort to avoid becoming "that guy" I've started bringing earplugs to sessions that let me semi-hear the rest of the table while protecting my sanity. I apologized to the DM, because that itself is rude, but it's either this or leaving the game, and I really do enjoy the game; I'm just too neurotic to handle her. I know that I'm the one in the wrong here, because I'm the only one affected, so I try to keep it under wraps, but this is a thread about bad games and goddammit she is what makes this game suck for me.

She's the same person I mentioned in the last thread who played an eight-year-old firebender in the Avatar game. She was obnoxious then, too. Her character portrait for the Pathfinder game was some anime loli girl holding a giant axe. She was also the party healer, but was so :downs:

at it that the DM had to go easy on us to avoid multiple party wipes. Doing things your character sucks at can be funny, but when we're facing off against a room full of mummies, maybe you should be focusing on damage control and prevention instead of wading in to plink them with your Dwarven waraxe and 8 strength! Thankfully we're all switching characters for the start of the next campaign book, so at least she'll get a new gimmick.

On a lighter note, in another game, the guy I talked about before with the Rumiko Takahashi obsession and a flight crew harem named after My Little Pony characters is now playing a sexy Japanese catgirl. It's going to be a glorious, creepy train wreck.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 16:56

Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

wellwhoopdedooo posted:

Have you considered that you may just hate her voice because you hate her personality? I only ask because it seems like such a trivial thing to get really worked up over, and addressing the real issue (or realizing it's un-addressable and bowing out) will probably be a lot more productive.

Oh, I do hate her personally. I think at least 50% of the gaming organization does. This is actually the first time I've been the odd one out, most groups she joins have at least one other person who can't stand her. But the party is her, her boyfriend, a "nice guy", and a genuinely nice guy, so nobody wants to start anything, myself included.

I should have clarified that I'm one of only four people who show up regularly. I considered just leaving, but it was a choice between leaving and causing the game to die off, or staying and looking like an rear end in a top hat. The group already knows I'm legitimately crazy, so I'm hoping they won't take it personally, and if they express a problem with it, I can leave without the guilt.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2012 18:39

Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

Yawgmoth posted:

You should stop thinking like this because it's thought processes of this line that stop you from getting not-crazy. Not-crazy should be your end goal, fyi.

I know that, which is why I spent the first couple months trying to man up and deal with the situation like an adult, but it's gotten to the point where I need to either compromise or bow out. When I explained the situation to the rest of the group and asked if they'd rather I stay or left, they said I should stay, so whether or not they were just being polite, this is where I am now. I don't want to poo poo up the thread further with e/n posts so I'll just say that I am trying to get non-crazy, and building a tolerance is part of that, and I'm just trying to make it suck for as few people as possible. I'm sorry I brought it up.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2012 02:27

Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

Thuryl posted:

Why are you asking for their opinion on whether you should stay in a game you're not enjoying?

Because like I mentioned before, the game itself is pretty fun, and the other players aren't bad. I could enjoy it a lot more without that girl, but that's life. Besides, it's Pathfinder, which counts for a lot.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2012 05:06

Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

Last night was the first session of a new game. We were discussing our characters while the DM did some last-minute stuff, and one guy mentioned offhandedly that he had actually wanted to play his other character, but he couldn't, because this was a level 10 game and it would be too difficult to scale them down. Because he was level 154.

I thought he was joking, so I made some crack like, "Did you earn every one of those experience points?" Of course he had. He'd been playing this character for years, starting from first edition and converting for each new edition up to 3.5, and eventually his entire party was playing a level 150+ campaign.

How could anyone handle a level 154 campaign when the math for normal epic levels becomes so complicated that each round of combat takes an hour? They had spreadsheets. What does a CR 154 encounter look like? Is it even possible to get it that high using published D&D monsters? No answer on that, which is too bad, because whatever he was fighting must have been amazing.

His 10th-level character was a half orc/half troll with 40 strength, 20 charisma, and epic-level equipment. He rode a magic half-basilisk ostrich that could breathe fire. His character sheet was on his laptop, nobody was allowed to see it, and he couldn't figure out how to calculate his own attack bonus. :eng99:

# ¿ Oct 8, 2012 06:16

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:23

Cygna: Mar 6, 2009; The ghost of a god is no man.

Randalor posted:

If I were the GM, I would ask to see his character sheet. I think he did something (or several dozen) wrong when making his character. Especially if he doesn't know how to calculate his attack bonus while being in an epic-level game...

We all took the DM aside afterwards and told him to please, please check his character sheet, so hopefully it'll be fixed by next session. If not, well, more stories.

I'm know he's lying about starting in first edition. He's not nearly old enough for it to make sense, unless he had a really weird DM.

Yawgmoth posted:

so at some point you have to start not only killing gods (who always give each character XP = your level x1000), you also start having to create gods just to kill them in order to level since there's no setting where there's >70 gods.

Since I'm a big goon, the only thing I could think of while he was telling me all this was a quote from an old TGD thread.

crime fighting hog posted:

Earlier people were talking about level 50 D&D games, but the nard who practically lived in my game shop back home boasted about his level 72 Fighter, and my friend and I sat around thinking of what the hell you fight at level 72.

Armies of gods, I guess.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 20:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Notable Gaming Experiences: The Gospel According to CobiWann's DM