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My worst gaming experience not related to to terrible, cat-piss players, was our group's first, and only, game of Paranoia. I was ready for a little break from my normal GM duties so one of our players volunteered to run a game of Paranoia. I had heard a little bit about the game but only the volunteer had ever actually played it. He describes the general feel of the game and we agree to play next week. We show up at his house next week, having read or ignored the short "the rules we need to know" pamplet and get ready for the game. It starts out great! Our guide begins by roleplaying a higher clearance functionary, passing out character sheets and setting out a cup full of pens. Nobody falls for the trap by grabbing any of the blue pens instead of red ones. With the bored tone of a bureaucrat, he walks us through character creation then reminds us about the drinks and pizza in the kitchen. We lose a player to some grape soda but the gm laughs it off and says the kitchen is out of character. Finally the game really gets started and it also immediately goes downhill. Our first task is to get our new equipment issued to us and gear up. We find our way to the dispensery after passing a long line of people only to find out that we passed the back of the line half a block back. I guess we just didn't "get" the game because we all just stood in line like good little drones until the malfunctioning little robot that has been acting as our link to our boss informs us that if we do not report to the briefing room in ten minutes, we will all be termintated. It has been a good two hours and we have done nothing but wait in line aside from a couple half hearted attempts to cut ahead so about half the group decides to just skip the gear while the other half is determined to follow through on their first task. At this point, one of our players has been sitting on the couch texting other players about how they are bored and everyone else is visibly not having fun so we just call it there. The gm apologizes and tells us he was running a stock situation from the book and that the spirit of the game was finding ways around the broken bureaucratic system while trying to rat out our team mates for favor with the higher ups. This is my worst gaming experience because, by all accounts, Paranoia is a fun game but I'll get a chance to play again with this group because we couldn't get out of the lets follow the rules and play for the team mentality. That mindset shouldn't make games worse!
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Jan 16, 2012 18:23
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 15:02 |
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Yeah, I think the worst part is that the gm was so into and doing a great job but we just weren't the right kind of players for the game. I don't want to discourage a good gm cuz its one more game I don't have to run.
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Jan 16, 2012 18:48
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I recently discovered a gaming group that began with tabletop wargames but has since brought in the fragments of RPG groups from our town. A lot of new faces, some kids new to rpgs, and some pretty chill dudes. Its pretty exciting since I haven't had a chance to game much in awhile and I will be participating in an Eclypse Phase campaign stating this weekend. After looking through the rulebook and meeting the players, I have mixed feelings. While the game setting and rules look like a lot of fun and the other players (two wargamers and too complete newbies) seem cool, I know the gamemaster from a couple of very lackluster sessions of DnD 3.5. He is in love with power gaming and boasts about how if he isn't breaking the game the DM isn't doing it right. We are all at a table getting to know each other and discussing the rules since no one, including the gamemaster, has played before and he starts handing out houserules for being able too hack non robotic brains with technical skills (something characters with psi traits can already do) and tinkering with how other things work ingame without even knowing all the rules already in the game. No one even asked for the house rules and we had to persuade him that it messed up game balance and marginalized players that wanted to invest in psi talents. I'm willing to give him one play session in hopes that it'll turn out fun but I don't have high hopes.
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Feb 27, 2012 19:51
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The problem is that I am pretty sure that he plans to just do his own thing and that he is going to be a combative DM. We were discussing our possible character ideas and I mentioned putting together a old guy in a Flat (normal human body without gene screening, etc.) that had been a cosmonaut on an old sleeper ship. His only trans human aspects were a cortical stack and access jacks to interface with his exoskeleton. This is where the mind hacking house rules came out with this big smug look on his face. If I knew the players better and it wasn't my first day meeting the group I would ask to take over since I usually like running games anyway. As it is, I suspect it will either fizzle and I'll try to pick up the pieces of what I think could be a fun game or we'll all have fun and I'll have a nice story for the tread.
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Feb 27, 2012 21:01
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We finally had our first game of Eclipse Phase this weekend with the rookie power gamer DM I described earlier in this thread. It is off to a rocky start with the DM floundering on how to get us hooked into the scenario and trying to counter every party action behind the scenes. We have been cooling our heels for a month after being contracted by the Firewall organization. We have no information on what we are contracted to do and have had no contact for the past month. When we finally are contacted by the our handler, he plays coy and refuses to give us any details other than to get on the ship in the hanger that is programed to take use to our target destination. The ship is totally hack proof and the the handler is apparently a master hacker with no history to be dug up by our sentient AI program also master hacker PC. In transit, we are contacted by another organization with a counter offer to our job that we don't realize is a counter offer because our employer hasn't actually told us what we are supposed to be doing. This organization's handler is also untracable and apparently capable of wiping out our Ego back ups, knows every detail possible about our characters, and can shut down the mesh in our area at whim. After the session, I tried to explain about player agency and that we are here to play so we don't have to be tricked into accepting missions but I don't think it got through. Think I'm gonna have to bale on what could have been a fun game.
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Mar 5, 2012 18:48
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InfiniteJesters posted:Good RPGs in the hands of bad bad DMs are the worst thing, I swear. He certainly wasn't the worst DM I've ever had and, honestly, He was there for the first game I ever DMed and it was a worst experience on both sides of the DM screen. I'm hoping he'll take the advice I've given him and it'll get better since we are playing with two players new to pen and paper games (the best kind of players)and I don't want them to get turned off.
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Mar 5, 2012 19:35
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I'm waiting to see if he takes my advice next session before bailing, and even then I'll probably just offer to take over as DM if everyone is having a bad time. I don't plan to just hijack his game but then I don't plan to drive an hour for a bad game when I could be running my own or playing one of the wargames the next room over. As far as rookie GM mistakes I've made, I let a power gamer electrical engineer play a tinker qnome in the first game ever ran in DnD 3.5. I had never even played DnD before and was willing to put up with anything after writing up an entire low magic setting. Also, the players started with a prison break scenario (in this case, a chained together on a wagon). Yeah it went as bad as you might think it would.
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Mar 5, 2012 23:32
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My Lovely Horse posted:I play with physicists and chemists. Once our DM described a strange material, "like metal, but transparent" and got in reply a long explanation about what exactly it is that defines a sustance as a metal or makes it transparent and how the two properties are incompatible. He thought about that for a second and said, "that's all well and good but this is my world. So: you found this transparent metal. And it smells faintly of peppermint." The fledgling Eclipse Phase game I've been whining about for a week is run by that same electrical engineer I DMed for so long ago and one of the other players is some sort of mathematician so we end up with half hour derails about astrophysics or some poo poo. Its like playing with the Big Bang theory and I don't give half a poo poo about it. Just let me play my 120 year old alchoholic Russian cosmonaut in Iron Man armor. Chance II fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Mar 7, 2012 |
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Mar 7, 2012 16:00
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Yawgmoth posted:Well, I happen to like the New World of Darkness system. The core is basically "normal people in a world like ours but the campfire stories are real" and is pretty simple to make characters and play in. The system is basically "add attribute to skill, roll that many d10s, 8+ is a success, more successes = more better." It can get more complex if you want and you can move into stuff like Hunter, Vampire, Mage, etc. if your players are interested. There's a lot of good material for it, and also a lot of... well, just check out the World of Darkness megathread and see the worst of the worst of it. We'll help you and your group to dodge the awful bits and direct you to the good parts. I love nWoD because it is fairly simple and easy to mod to suit a variety of settings. Unfortunately, the local LARP group has turned off most of the players in my area.
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Mar 12, 2012 21:52
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Yeah, I've been talking up a '60s era espionage game a friend ran and would like to run again and a couple people have been interested in playing one of the Blank:the Blankening games but it is frustrating to see this thousand yard stare from people who got a sour taste from the local Larp creeps. It doesn't help that they keep trying to pick up new members from our hobby club and then turning around and alienating them with their mega powerful legacy characters.
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Mar 12, 2012 22:07
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I chose to ignore anything that isn't the original trilogy and to never play Star Wars rpgs. It is the only way to avoid being disappointed.
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Mar 13, 2012 20:19
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The "What do you want out of an RPG?" thread reminded me of one of my favorite casual rpg experiences. We were a small group that had recently split off on our own after getting sick of the powergamers and grognards of our old group and were pretty tired of DnD style games in general. We had a nWoD campaign going but one weekend we decided to try something light. Maverick was on the night before so I told the two players to think of an adventurer concept inline with post civil war USA. Rachel says she will be Mad Maggie, a former trick-shot circus performer ala Annie Oakly while James will be playing a former confederate scout with a bum leg from a minnie ball taken during the war. I tell them to choose three skills and allocate six points among them. Mad Maggie has Trick Shooting, Showmanship, Coarse Language. James writes down Scout, Bowie Knives, and I think Field Medicine. The adventure begins with the two boarding a riverboat steaming from Chicago down to New Orleans and hosting a grand poker tournament. I tell the party that they are members of Abe Lincoln's Paranormal Secret Service, run by the President after staging his assassination at Ford's Theater months earlier to combat an insidious threat growing within the United States. Their mission is to capture and interrogate a pair of Copperhead operatives disguised as carpet baggers before the ship reaches port in New Orleans. The party has crudely drawn likenesses of their targets. The party decides that one of them should search the ship's cabins while the other participates in the poker tournament, since almost all the passengers will be above decks to observe the games. James elects to search the cabins since his Scout skill helps him keep a low profile. The next couple of days pass as Mad Maggie cheats at cards and flirts with the ship captain and James plays a game of cat and mouse with their targets until he finds their cabin with no one around. He breaks the lock and searches their baggage, discovering a mask so realistic that it seems to have been peeled off of a living person. James studies the mask and realizes that it is the face of one of their targets just as the cabin door crashes open and their other target steps in holding a derringer. James spins and throws his Bowie knife, catching the target in the bicep. The man drops his gun but lunges at James, catching him in a bear hug. James struggle but the man's bones pop and grind as his arms seem to dislocate and constrict around him like snakes. Up close, James can see a reptilian face beneath the living mask of his assailant as its jaw lowers and two sharp fangs descend toward his face. James kicks up, nutting the creature and freeing his arm enough to wrench the bowie knife from the creature's arm and skewering it, pushing the creature back and over the rail where it falls to the deck below. James hurriedly drags the creature back to his own cabin, locking it inside a trunk as the now alarmed crew search the decks for the source of the commotion and the thick puddle of blood on the deck. The Poker tournament is paused and James relays the information to Mad Maggie. They know that there is still another of these creatures on board and that it could be disguised as anyone. The Captain announces that one of the passengers seems to have gotten drunk and fallen overboard and that they will be pulling into port at Vicksburg, MS to send a dispatch to inform the passenger's next of kin. The party is running out of time since they will loose their target if he disembarks in Vicksburg before they can identify him. To shorten this story a bit, some more scouting work and a tousle a tousle with a bribed crew member identifies the second target as the leading player in the tournament. James helps Maggie cheat her way through the tournament were she wins the prize and talks her way into a quiet drink with the target in his private cabin as the creature doesn't know that she is connected to James. Maggie gets the most out of her showmanship skill by dosing the creature's drink with poison taken from his partner's fangs and proceeds to rope and hog tie the creature as he clumsily tries to escape. during the night, the players cut free and sink one of the life boats before raising an alarm, claiming that the prize money has been stolen. When the second creature disguised as the gambler can't be found, it is decided that he stole away in the night with the prize money on the missing life boat. At Vicksburg, the players disembark and wire Washington for pick up with two steamer trunks full of snake monster and a carpet bag full of poker winnings.
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Mar 14, 2012 17:02
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Splicer posted:Every syllable of this is pure gold and I am stealing the poo poo out of it. We played a couple more games in this setting but I never settled on a title. To this day we still refer to it as "Lincoln's Angels"
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Mar 14, 2012 17:27
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Funktor posted:What sort of ruleset did you use? I'd love to set up a game something like this. I made it up along with the setting in like an hour. I forget how we tracked health but all the skill rolls were a d6 plus plus skill level if one came into play. Unopposed skills checks you rolled for a target number and opposed skill checks you tried to roll higher than your opponent. It was all very loose and really just something we got attached to I guess. Oh and we added a faith mechanic one time when we put the game in a gothic horror setting. You could burn a faith point for a reroll and you gained faith buy sending ungodly horrors back from whence they came.
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Mar 15, 2012 15:26
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Okay, so we just started playing Eclipse Phase with a pretty new GM and it was off to a rocky start. I gave him some advice and asked that we not try to make a bunch of house rules when none of us are all that solid on the rules to begin with. I just got an email where he says that he is planning to use the D20 Star Wars Rules in the Eclipse Phase setting?! "Its basically the same thing and since we aren't using the Psi rules (when did we decide that?)we can just drop that use make them force powers" What the hell guy? I was giving you a break but how is that better than just learning the actual rules?
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Mar 15, 2012 18:54
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areyoucontagious posted:All in all, I still had a pretty good time, and I'm hoping the rest of the group did too. I'm thinking I might just have to tone down my murderous instincts, because I can only stand behind the "I took the 'Cruel' disadvantage!" argument so long. Ya shoulda just pistol whipped the idiot. That way you are staying true to your character without needing a reset. And if the guy decides to fight back, great! The DM should let it happen as long as it doesn't escalate to more gun shots and now you have a good mini stress meltdown for your zombie apocalypse survivor group.
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Mar 16, 2012 17:21
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Rumda posted:Yeah The best way to feel out a potential gaming group is to just get to know them, on time when I was looking for an irl group I started talking to a guy who had mentioned on-line he was looking for players, and then met him and the other gm of the group for a drink, ok it turned out that the only day the current group as a whole could meet was the one day I couldn't but ... My old group always met at my place because it was the only place with enough room/no kids/not buried in bachelor debris. We were always looking for new members since our work schedules made it hard for everyone to meet every week so I usually would me any prospective members off site. I would never let some internet stranger in my house and would be leary of going to another stranger's place to game. Pretend games are not worth it. Now some wargamers have a couple of office rooms rented out and have opened up one of the rooms for rpgs.
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Mar 20, 2012 18:07
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evol262 posted:So? If a group implodes because one rear end in a top hat is too immature to stop being an rear end in a top hat then you are probably better off finding a better group anyway. Meeting new people isn't the end of the world and neither is not playing elf games. Chance II fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 21:26
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I remember reading "Villains by Necessity" by Eve Forward when I was in high school. Its basically an Evil Campaign dnd story where the protagonists are some of the last "evil" beings in the world and the last of the druids trying to help them restore balance to the world. Essentially, the Forces of Good finally got the upper hand in the battle between darkness and light and forced the retreating forces of evil back through a sort of mystical gate and sealed. The books starts up years later as the days are getting longer, people are uncommonly healthy, flowers are blooming out of season, etc. The interesting bit was how the book depicts some the "good" aligned characters. An Elven master wizard is essentially an benevolent dictator of his own city state and regularly conducts magical brainwashing to make criminals good upstanding citizens. Later, the party is being hunted by a Robin Hood like son of one of the original great heroes. He comes off as a bored adventure seeker using the excuse of capturing the group of villains to take his huge private army of rangers and wizards on a great hunt, stopping to root out half dead monsters and boogie men along the way. Also, he intends to "rescue" the beautiful druid.
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Apr 5, 2012 17:56
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 15:02 |
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I usually end up having to be the DM so I've been enjoying actually playing in our local Eclipse Phase campaign now that we have somebody that actually bothers to learn the system rules and prepares for the game sessions. Anyway, everybody except myself is new to rpgs and are basically playing variants of mercenary and assassins so I decided to roll up a charismatic hypercorp executive that could basically run damage control when the rest of the team blows up things that are important and that is what I did for our first few sessions. That all changed when are mission lead us to Mars. See on Mars we had to operate out of the equivalent of space Tortuga, bunches of criminal cartels growing into a semi permanent black market settlement. This is because a high ranking member of our organization has gone rogue, forcing us to go underground and cutting off a number of resources. My character, being a legitimate businessman doesn't want to be involved with this sort of dealing. Instead, he sets up shop in New Shanghai, a large city nearby and also the location for the rogue agent's hypercorp headquarters. Since this is crazy sci-fi, I also sends a fork, a slightly reduced digital copy of myself, to Eres Mons, the black market hovel the rest of the group is located at. At this point I just take over playing as the fork, who has a forged identity, and things rapidly go crazy as the forked personality isn't worried about how his actions would reflect on the company. Within a couple of sessions, the fork is has become a drug kingpin and is rapidly headed toward becoming an NPC as his personality shifts further and further away from the original. Playing the thug for a change was fun but my real favorite moment is when the rest of the team hooks back up with the original when their mission leads them to New Shanghai. The whole time that the gang and my character's fork was working in Eres Mons to gear up and establish themselves a base of operations, I was playing my original character to the side with the GM. Now the big bad guy of the mission runs a hypercorporation that deals in genetic research and produces a large percentage of the bodies people need to download their digital conscousness into and, on Mars, people without bodies or who have to resort to living in cheap robotic bodies are treated as second class citizens at best or indentured servants at worst. My character had been using his contacts and cash to gather skilled people who were tired of the hypercorp regime and provided them with bodies and funds to find other like minded souls. This had been going on for a few in game weeks, so when the rest of the party shows up in New Shanghai, they find out that they will be backed up by a number of anti-corporation terrorist cells.
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May 7, 2012 17:28
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