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Yawgmoth posted:I've had this happen exactly one time and the response from everyone was "well the gently caress you AND your character, stop being a poo poo and either be a part of the team or gently caress off to the car until we're done playing." I prefer the approach of "Awesome. You're roleplaying being an unstable sociopath with no respect for the law. Good for you. Now you get to roleplay through the consequences of being an unstable sociopath with no respect for the law."
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Feb 12, 2012 12:09
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Yawgmoth posted:I've never been a fan of trying to punish someone in-game for being a shitheel. It never works to solve the problem and in fact usually makes things worse. Oh, I'm definitely in favour of responding to OOC douchebaggery with OOC negotiation. I was thinking more of the situation where a player goes and has their character run around breaking laws and expecting to avoid any IC consequences "because it's what my character would do", which isn't always a problem with the other players.
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Feb 16, 2012 19:25
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Liesmith posted:yes you can! but you are gonna get hosed up by air, water, and storm elementals Not to mention angry protestors holding placards reading "END CLOUD CRUELTY NOW".
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Mar 8, 2012 12:49
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Did I mention yet that our GM has already told us, months ago, that as a result of some of our actions, "a significant part" of the Return of the Jedi... didn't happen the way it happened in the film? DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Number Two: Seven figures arrive on the elevator into the Throne Room. Six of them are Imperial Guardsmen (the dudes in red, the Emperor's personal guards). The seventh is all in black robes and carries a lightsaber. Because, well, the Emperor had more Sith lackeys than most people knew. I'm not sure that's just any Sith lackey. 
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Mar 19, 2012 22:37
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thiswayliesmadness posted:Edit: Something I was wondering. Has anyone really had a long term evil game work out well? I found them fun as one shots or small games, but long games always devolve into full on party conflict. Of course it didn't help my gaming group back in the day wasn't the best. I should have realized how much of a pain one player would be when he insisted he his druids name be "Lord DukeKing Numbnuts". I ran one for maybe six or seven sessions -- I think the main thing that kept it together was that a criterion for generating a PC was that their goal had to be "somehow murder the King". The forces of good were organised enough, and a big enough threat, that they didn't really have time to betray each other.
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Mar 25, 2012 22:27
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:The enemy, who had just arrived, consisted of six Imperial Guardsmen (the dudes in the red armor) and one ominous-looking fellow in black holding a lightsaber, who turned out to be The Grand High Imperial Inquisitor Fuckhead (note: name may not be accurate). God drat, and I was convinced that your GM's line about ESB events running slightly differently was going to mean that the guy coming into your room was Luke Skywalker, having just recently turned dark-side.
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Apr 16, 2012 18:53
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I'm running a heavily modded D&D4e game right now, sort of an anti-steampunk game where the players are the oppressed underclass trying to overthrow those swish bastards with clockwork zepplins. I'm really pleased with the party I have: Thorni: A Dwarven paladin (the setting has no demonstrable gods, so paladins are more a sort of secret order of superheros) trying to free his people from slavery Angela: A Rogue working for the setting's Mafia, who are hedging their bets by having some allies in the rebellion Blink: A Blazer (reskinned Dragonborn -- condemned criminals who've undergone a supersoldier programmed, so that they can shoot lightning out of their eyes). Zoe: An artificer, turncoat daughter of one of the Empire's ruling families, and Mad Scientist. Somta: A religious fanatic from one of the nations crushed by the Empire, now working magic by snorting the incredibly hazardous magic gems that more sensible mages keep at arms' length to power their spells. Fredi: A ranger and member of one of the old families who are backing the rebellion, and also the leader of the group by virtue of nobody else wanting to get the blame when things went south (spoilers: they went south at an average rate of once per session.) The party are hired to investigate a village where one of the Rebellion's contacts has gone AWOL. The village could potentially be a key point on a network smuggling dwarven slaves out of the mines where they're forced to work, so the rebels want it at least vaguely sympathetic to their aims: they don't need everyone in town waving the flag, but they need a situation where a stray dwarf gets shepherded to safety, not reported to the Empire. As the PCs arrive, under cover of being a salt-trading company, they stop in at the inn and are accosted by a couple of the local toughs and Sam, the slimy little poo poo leading them, who isn't happy about someone else coming in and being a bigger power in the village than him and his people. Fredi sweet-talks Sam into meeting the next day and talking things through. Fredi remains blissfully ignorant that she messed her diplomacy roll, so Sam figured out she wasn't telling the whole truth right off the bat. At lunch, Sam invites her to come with him and meet the head of the family. Thorni and Blink come too, with Angela, Zoe and Somta following at a discreet distance. Sam takes her to a field, where he pulls the bag off a scarecrow's head to reveal the last rebel contact, still alive and pegged out in the field, and demands Fredi explain who he is and what she's really up to. E: E: Smilies replaced with character names. Whybird fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Jun 2, 2012 |
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Jun 2, 2012 03:08
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Fredi thinks quickly, and comes up with a story that he's an old enemy of hers who is trying to block their salt trading business. Sam offers her the opportunity to kill her enemy here and now, and hands her a knife. She realises she can't murder the party's contact in cold blood, and tries to stab Sam. A pitched battle in the cornfield occurs, with the party eventually defeat Sam and most of his minions, drag him off to an abandoned windmill, and stay to torture as much information as they can about him. They learn that Sam is the lieutenant of the Gorristers, a family of criminals and thugs, and that Sam's brother will no doubt be coming for him. They pump him for some more information, then kill him by beheading. After heading back to the town and spending some time getting their contact warm and alive, the party hear that the Gorristers are demanding their heads, or they will burn the village to the ground. The party reunite and decide to fake a handover, then ambush the Gorristers as they come to collect. There follows a session of planning as the PCs transform the local inn into an ambush site, and finally in the evening the head of the Gorrister family comes down with an entourage of goons to collect Fredi,  and Angela.Fredi is in the inn, pretending to be tied up. The others are hidden at various points, well-armed. The Gorristers pour in and start threatening Fredi, demanding to know where the others are and where Sam is. At which point, Angela asks if she can emerge from her hiding-place on the balcony and throw Sam's head at him, which she's carried with her this time, at the head of the family as a first move. I let her roll for it. Natural 20. Not only does she hit the horrifying badass patriarch of the Gorristers with his dead cousin's head, but with a natural 20 she manages to throw it so that it kisses him on the lips before landing on the floor at his feet, staring up. The patriarch spends the first two rounds of combat frozen up in shock, while Blink blasts his minions away with his gaze and Fredi grabs her weapons from under the table and hacks into him. They manage to take the whole lot with barely a scratch, capture the Gorristers alive and have them executed by a lynch mob. The next time the players return to the village, the pub sign's been replaced. It now shows Sam's face being hurled through the air, and is named "The oval office's Head". E: Desmilified. Man, those seemed totally readable last night. Whybird fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Jun 2, 2012 |
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Jun 2, 2012 03:13
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I'm pretty sure one of the players in my current game is shaping up to be a Notable Experience of his own. Whether a good or a bad one I'm not yet sure. He thinks outside the box with his plans. So far outside the box that sometimes he loses track of what the original plan was supposed to be. Like the time when after the party had fought zombies who'd had their bodies hollowed out and filled with rats, he suggested keeping the rotting, diseased skins as a clever zombie disguise. In the end he was content to just keep a rat and try to train it. At the end of the last fight where the party ambushed a stagecoach there were some dead horses left over. He decided he wanted to take one of their heads because "maybe I can use it for a prank". The other players are terrified of him. They're convinced he's got some sort of master plan that he's working towards and they haven't figured out what it is.
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Nov 2, 2012 14:30
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Dareon posted:Unless it's a Wookiee and you happen to like making Wookiee noises. And really, who doesn't. I once played the D&D version of this, a dwarf who spoke in a drunken slur which only one of the other characters could decipher.
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Nov 19, 2012 14:51
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Send him into situations where shooting makes the problem worse. He's asked to bodyguard the CEO of a company at a very important cocktail party. The press show up and start asking questions like 'Hey, aren't you the man who killed a bunch of guys in Temple Street? What sort of message do you think Mr. Wright is trying to send to his business rivals by employing mass-murderers?'
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Jun 25, 2013 08:48
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I think I might have made one of my players cry by killing off a PC. One of the big bads of the setting wants to kidnap the team's resident mad scientist. She's also after the same crown mcguffin that the team want, and sent a strike force of (a) a reanimated revenant of a former player (b) the ghost of the previous Emperor (c) a couple of smallfry flying undead minions as backup. They turned up at the top of the tower where the crown was kept at the same time as the players, the revenant being carried by the others since she can't fly on her own. The players start fighting, with the scientist running in to the centre of the fight to try and keep any of the undead from escaping with the crown. She's the party's healer and buffer, and is not built for melee, and takes a hammering while the rest of the party fight their way to her. They hold the undead off for a while, and the revenant realises they're not winning this one -- so she grabs the scientist (who by now is down on the ground, bleeding out) and leaps out of the window, shouting to her minions to catch her. The rogue leaps after her and grapples on as she falls. Unfortunately without the revenant's backup, the party manage to wipe the floor with the flying undead minions before any can get out. The revenant, scientist and rogue fall fourty feet: the rogue is taken down from the falling damage and starts to bleed out, while the other two die on impact. The party manage to catch up to the rogue in time to save her, and I ended the session there, because we were all pretty shell-shocked -- the rogue's player absolutely nailed it with how he played his character's reaction to her friend dying, and I'm pretty sure another player was close to tears. Definitely an intense session, I can't wait to see what they do next (or whether the dwarf is going to listen to his familiar's advice on necromancy 101)
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Aug 1, 2013 16:17
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My Lovely Horse posted:I can't take credit since it's from Mother 3, but I humbly submit "magypsies", although it really doesn't solve the basic problem. It sure doesn't if you're playing in the UK, where there's a serious problem with otherwise normal human beings asserting that Romany people are all thieving gyppos and denying that they're racist in the same breath. But this isn't D&D. I mean, not the forum. I vote for 'casties' or 'sparks'
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Oct 28, 2013 11:20
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The thing to remember with Paranoia is that you can lock the PCs in a room with a piece of string and providing their secret societies disagree over what to do with the string, fun will happen.
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Oct 31, 2013 08:04
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They actually just employ a kobold to sit in the control room behind it and keep pulling levers and pressing switches to activate bits of wall and panels and start cogs moving so people think they are getting closer to solving the nonexistent puzzle despite the acid spray.
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Dec 18, 2013 14:57
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I'm not sure whether this counts as good, bad, or cat piss. Possibly all three. Petrolblue is playing The Fae in my Dungeon World campaign. She's a foot-tall fairy with an obsession with trying new kinds of food. Another player has just got a 'make magic items' skill, and decided to try it out by enchanting Petrol's weapon -- a tooth they stole from a treacherous talking coyote -- with 'any magic, I don't care what, something that'll help her eat things'. So now, unknown to any of the other players, the rules for her weapon read: "When you stab somebody who trusts you with this, their flesh will make a meal fit for a king."
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Dec 19, 2013 00:07
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The session of Dungeon World last night featured the players getting into a cook-off against an undead chef who was being kept alive by a Lovecraftian beast of insatiable appetite so that he could keep on finding it new and exciting flavours. As challenged party, the undead chef got to choose the key ingredient: he went for gelatinous cube. Cue the Artificer setting up a Rube Goldberg-esque trap to dump their gelatinous cube into a vat of marinade, and the Mastermind using his 'reveal an enemy to be an ally' move to order the cube 'Bad cube! Down! Spit it out!' after it broke free and swallowed members of the party. The ending involved the Fae using her Traitor's Knife (when she stabs someone with it who trusts her, their flesh becomes magically delicious) to murder some of their rival's sous-chefs and add them to the marinade, and ended up recreating the Iron Chef episode from Futurama. She has now claimed the undead chef's enchanted pepper-grinder as her primary weapon.
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Feb 13, 2014 11:31
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The Supreme Court posted:I absolutely love this! I've put it up on the Dungeon World Google plus group, hope you don't mind. I'm still finishing Pirate World: I'd love to include this in the one-off short adventures in the book, would that be cool? Totally, although it wasn't specifically a Pirate World adventure as such -- I think the only bit of Pirate World that we're using is the Brute playbook. But sure, feel free to take whatever you like!
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Feb 23, 2014 19:52
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My proudest moment as a a Paranoia GM was driving a player to eat his own psychological evaluation form out of frustration.
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Mar 3, 2014 13:41
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I do not regret letting time travel into my Dungeon World game, not one bit. My party had a pretty sensible plan to travel into the past and gather information from an NPC who skipped town last night. Then they got ambitious, and realised that they could prevent the Clock Mage's past self from making the Faustian pact he made with his future self. (In a previous session, the future mage had saved the past mage's life in exchange for a promise to kill another party member who would go on to challenge the future mage's mastery of time and space.) Their plan was to disguise the present Clock Mage as the future Clock Mage and make the pact go as remembered, but have it happen between the past mage and present mage, rather than past mage and future mage. Unfortunately, the future mage still showed up. The present mage threw a punch at the future mage, and the party's Brute (who'd spent the afternoon getting drunk, and just wanted to kill something) joined in, getting mixed up between which was which and killing the present Clock Mage messily. I told the mage's player that his new character was the past Clock Mage they'd shown up to prevent from agreeing to the bargain, but who they could still rescue. And then the Fae got bored and tried to kill and eat her past self. Time travel is awesome.
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Mar 27, 2014 01:36
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SpaceViking posted:I think the best part of this is how he was totally okay with ending the pregnancy in his bizarre conceptions about how pregnancy works, but as soon as she said the word abortion HE HAS TO SAVE HIS CHILD. I think the best part of this is the phrase "a terrible GM even by erotic Pathfinder standards".
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Apr 14, 2014 09:49
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petrol blue posted:Ah, artificer, let me count the ways I love you... Belching clouds of combat drugs and lobbing bombs, good times. Let's not forget the way you reskinned your healing powers to be a flying, intelligent syringe full of potion.
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May 25, 2014 10:49
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You're in good company, at least. The British children's TV show, Chorlton And The Wheelies, was supposed to have a pentagram on the cover of the evil witch's spellbook. Unfortunately the team didn't know how to draw a pentagram and welp.
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May 28, 2014 09:04
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I much prefer giving locations descriptive names rather than polysyllabic jumbles. Springvale or Sweetwater or Firestone are much easier to remember than Xy'gol'ath. I should really try doing something similar with NPCs -- the Lawful Obnoxious angel fae in my setting love their titles and my players can usually at least remember enough of them to come up with an insulting nickname.
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Sep 17, 2014 11:25
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thespaceinvader posted:Dungeon World dot txt Dungeon World stories! The session before last, my Dungeon World group visited the Upper Air, home of a group of fae who are anthropomorphic personifications of outer space. They ended up messing with the garden where stars are reborn, getting into a fight with the Moon, and riding it home in exchange for helping pull its bad tooth. This session they unleashed a magical superweapon on part of the afterlife as part of their plan to murder the Grollub, an enormous Suriname Toad that had seized one of the Gates of Death and was eating all the souls that were coming through instead of ushering them to their rest. Next session they are attending a shareholder's meeting in Hell for the infernal corporation some of them have shares in.
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Oct 23, 2014 12:40
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I am deeply, deeply saddened that the guy behind The Munchkin's Guide To Powergaming is also the guy behind making Gor into an RPG. Was TMGTP ever actually any good? In my memory it was OK for a few laughs, but it's difficult to imagine anything good coming from a man who uses phrases like "rakish fop" and "gentleman bastard" to describe himself in public.
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Nov 13, 2014 21:34
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Dungeon world! Early on in the game, my players fluffed a Spout Lore roll on a particular area of the map, so I asked them: "Okay, what do your characters erroneously believe about this region?" They described in detail the happy, friendly villages of halflings who lived in peace and harmony with nature, the scenic pyramids which were completely uninhabited, and the way that the soil was so verdant that food just hung off tree branches, so nobody visiting would need to pack provisions. Tonight they realised it was the best place to go to find a portal to Fae. The halfling village was full of jolly rural yokels with names like Wimbim Merrycheeks, and welcomed the with open arms and quaint rural music and invited them to a feast. It was about midway through that they realised they were eating human flesh, and when they refused to eat any more the merry country folk peeled their lips back to reveal rows of razor-sharp piranha teeth and attacked. The fight went quite well until one of the PCs rolled badly and, out of ideas, I asked him what he saw the halflings doing that looked like bad news.  "They're bringing out their pet!"Okay, I asked, what does it look like? "Well, it's huge, green, scaly, has six legs, and has huge eyes--"I had an idea, and suggested that its eyes might be hypnotic. "Yeah! And its mouth is full of teeth that it can spit out at you, and..."Fucker nearly killed the entire party.
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Dec 18, 2014 00:32
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Happy Birthday, Robot! Robot is not on fire today, but soon will be. Robot has caused an emergency by starting that cult! "Robot?" Controller says, but Robot isn't listening. Robot's audio sensors are deliberately jammed -- Controller is cross. Controller panics and presses buttons, but the chanting continues. Robot's enjoying his surprise party -- and all his party games -- but not Controller. Robot stops -- that smell isn't incense, maybe it's candles? Now Robot is on fire, and so is Controller -- what fun! Controller's so silly -- but when the grey dawn rises, he's quiet (but still moving around). Robot is all tired out; Controller seems sleepy as well -- dead to the world. Robot is making his cult very happy -- the sun will rise tomorrow. The marketing department of vicar.net was right all along, except for one thing. The product recall bankrupted the company, but the cult kept going. Robot still visits Controller in his cage from time to time. THE MORAL: Birthdays are overrated.
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Jan 1, 2015 23:28
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I've never played WoD-style live action, but we had a similar thing at my university. The difference being that, not being White Wolf-licensed, we weren't beholden to their crazy bullshit. We also kept a high turnover rate: each year the people running it would hand the baton on to a different team with their own setting and ruleset and so on. We also had a downtime system in which players would email us between sessions with what their characters were up to. I took my turn at being part of the GM team for a while, and got to experience the wonder of two characters, who we'll call A and B. A was a decent, mild-mannered, jovial kind of a guy. He wanted to play a moblord -- we thought this was a great idea. B approached A and asked if she could play his sister, and if she could come up with some linked background. A thought this was a great idea, he wasn't big on writing enormous character backgrounds himself. B proceeded to detail how she was A's sister, and also his daughter, and also his regular BDSM incest partner. Two things happened which I'm still not sure I can explain. One: A read this background from the seeping, pus-filled nadir of fanfiction.net and decided cool, whatever, I planned on just being a moblord but if she wants me to be her incest daddy then I'll roll with it. Two: the GM team read the background, shrugged, and let her play the character. A and the GM team then proceeded to get a weekly update, alongside B's regular character downtime, of the horrific things that she and A were doing. After a while, A started posting back: as far as I can tell, in a spirit of one-upmanship. Things came to a head when one of the other players, having got hold of a scrying pool, and having gotten suspicious of what A was doing for entirely different reasons, used her downtime to scry on B. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake for us to forward her the edited highlights.
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May 29, 2015 14:48
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This has pretty much been my internal response every time I recollect this story.
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May 29, 2015 15:24
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Yeah, there seems to be this tendency among a certain kind of player to conflate being shocking with being literary. But it's the GMs' job to slap them down, because otherwise -- as our example proves -- you end up with other players either leaving the game in horror or making it the norm, and before long your entire game reeks of cat piss. We luckily didn't get to that point, and I think someone must have had a chat with B after the game was over because she did tone it down after that, but it really should have been us.
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May 29, 2015 16:28
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So, uh, are there any 'mass raise dead' spells in this setting that could lead to the PCs having to chase down their treasure hoard with butterfly nets?
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Jul 21, 2015 12:35
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D represents a committee of people trying to bring power back to the people and away from the megacorps, and hiring runners through crowdfunding. The missions D sends the players on are decently-paid and involve doing genuine good, but even if the PCs' mission doesn't bloody the nose of a corp, the fact that they're on the payroll of people who are is eventually going to make them into targets. -Or- D is the entertainment division of a megacorp. Their senior staff frickin' love watching shadowrunners murder people live on camera. The missions that they send the PCs into never have surveillance, because the surveillance in the buildings has been suborned by D's own deckers for his clients' private show.
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Aug 31, 2015 09:33
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Mendrian posted:Why is it always the people who like to sprinkle rape into their games that always seem to complain about other people politicizing their games? As if the world being a terrible place isn't a choice they make as creator? 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.
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Oct 31, 2015 19:58
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In the first ever game I ran one of the players had a spell that let them speak to machinery. When she used it on a mad scientist's device it told her how it had tried its best for master but it still wasn't good enough and he just got angry and hit it. THAT'S IT GUYS WE'RE RESCUING THE MACHINE
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Nov 19, 2015 09:26
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Yeah, I would honestly say to the group 'It sounds like you want to play something more light-hearted and silly than what I had planned, is that right?' and brainstorm a bit about the kind of thing they'd be up for. Though even in a light-hearted silly game, phones should totally be off and in pockets, that poo poo's rude as hell.
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Dec 14, 2015 18:34
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The Old Jedi Card Trick
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Jan 22, 2016 13:23
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My approach is just not to have fights against chumps where the stakes are 'Does the group die?'. If the enemies aren't important enough for the PCs to feel like dying to them would be awesome and dramatic, they're not important enough to break out the full combat rules for.
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Feb 3, 2016 00:57
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Writer Cath posted:Gunthrack's Cornucopia It was one of my players who first drew this. She'll be seriously stoked that her magical items are being used in games!
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Sep 12, 2016 08:46
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She asks if your player's Cornucopia has a 'bees' setting, because ours totally did. And since this is the Notable Gaming Experiences thread, I probably should elaborate. The way it worked, when they got hold of it, was that they could roll during combat to try and find a new setting. There was a list of adjectives that could apply: "sticky", "burning", "bouncing", "hallucinogenic", "bees", and so forth. If the roll was good, the player could just pick two adjectives from the list. A middling roll, and the player picked one but the GM picked the other. On a bad roll, the GM secretly picked both, wrote the result down, and only revealed it when they fired it.
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Sep 12, 2016 22:12
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