|
I have only ever tabletop gamed once, and it was mediocre, but parts of it, I think, need to be recounted. DnD 4th edition. Dragonborn paladin, dragonborn cleric, elven wizard, halfing rogue, and me as a half-elf Star warlock. Everyone is really interested in playing but no one other than the paladin actually knows what they're doing, and the GM is a great guy but has no clue how to GM. We're running Keep on the Shadowfell and being generally incompetent, but fun is occasionally achieved. Now there are two things you need to understand. One is that the name of the guy playing the cleric was Luciano. Everyone called him Luc, which I always mangled the pronunciation of and called him "loosh" or "looge". The second is that the guy playing the wizard is the best kind of completely insane guy. The character's name is Quarion, who always refers to himself as QUARION, THE GREAT WIZARD. The player always gets in character and puts on a crazy high-pitched voice. Quarion is always going off on tangents about how he is THE GREATEST OF ALL WIZARDS and that he's TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, DON'T YOU KNOW, and he's basically the craziest old man except an elf and with the ability to blow up a battlefield with fireballs. He also constantly casts Ghost Sound or whatever it's called to make it sound like other party members are farting at inappropriate times. At one point, we fight kobolds, and Quarion takes a tiny amount of damage from a javelin. He immediately freaks the gently caress out and makes a beeline for the cleric, screaming that he's horribly wounded and needs healing. The cleric, not quite sure what to make of this, does so, and Quarion proclaims "Ah! You have saved my life! In gratitude, I believe I shall create a new kind of recreational sport, the sport of sliding rapidly down iced slopes, and I shall name it Luge in your honor!" I very nearly died from laughing. (as a side note, the dragonborn paladin's backstory said that he was a member of the Order of the Broken Fist, who are so named because their founder once faced a deadly opponent without any weapons, so he just punched his enemy into submission and broke both of his hands in the process  )Would anyone be opposed to me posting stories from RPing in City of Heroes here? Been there a long time and I have quite a few both best and worst stories.
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2012 13:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 23:03 |
|
|
It occurs to me that the way we play CoH is more like tabletop than anything else. We have a close-knit group of friends with a lot of different characters, we come up with interesting things that could happen if you put different characters together, and then whoever is the primary architect of the current plotline acts as the ST. This is greatly assisted by the Mission Architect, the buggy but extremely flexible player-made content creator. This particular story is about the single greatest thing I have ever seen someone do with the Architect. It's also rather short, which is nice. A friend's character, who can best be described as a nerdy as gently caress teenager who wants to be both Green Arrow and Batman (tech bow, crazy trick arrows, detective skills, genius-level intellect) goes to investigate why the power has died in an office building. He calls in me, a psychic who, in addition to powerful telepathy and telekinesis, is capable of molding reality with her mind to produce protective shields and teleportation effects. She senses something very ... wrong inside the building, but does not sense any human minds, inside this large office building in the middle of work hours. They head inside, and meet up with a police inspector who happens to have supernatural powers and a magical sword. (He's a pretty cool guy.) They search the building, and find the staff. They have all been transformed into completely blank, white, faceless silhouettes that have been rendered mute. Then they realize that they can't talk, and indeed no sound can be produced inside the building. My character compensates by relaying thoughts between the three of them, but they are still freaked out, because the things are following them. What the ST did was so amazingly simple. She put all the NPCs inside in blank white tights and blank masks. She set them as hostile to the players.. Then she removed all of their attacks and powers. So these featureless things followed us through the entire building, crowding around our characters, trying to get closer to us, and the farther into the building we went, the larger the crowd got, until the rooms of the office building were packed full of mute shadows of human beings, surrounding us on every side and just ... standing there. And of course, she told us to turn off our sound as we went into the building. We were so freaked out and tense that when some of the Silenced actually moved through the crowd and attacked us we jumped out of our costumes. These ones were different, they were actually wearing equipment, though it didn't make them any less terrifying. They were also brutally hard to fight, and if not for the detective we wouldn't have made it. Eventually we made it to the top floor and went into an office. We looked out the window, and saw that the same thing was happening all over the city. The people, all the people, were being Silenced, and the buildings were being whitewashed into featureless white rectangles. I sent a mental message to a contact outside the city, who was still in control of herself, but confirmed that this was happening everywhere. To make a long and tense story short, we stumbled upon a mage that had managed to protect himself from the phenomenon, who told us that the Silence was a manifestation of the Void, the nothingness between dimensions, that was attempting to absorb our world into itself. He told us that the only way to stop it was with the opposite of Nothing and Silence; Imagination and Creativity, and told us where we needed to go. We met a girl who appeared to be made of ink. She left a dripping trail behind her, and wherever the ink dripped it turned to a rainbow of colors. The aggresive, armored Silenced had pinned her down, but we fought them off and saved her, and then she and the mage transported us to ... somewhere else. What happened next wasn't clear, but when we returned to our own world, the Silence was gone, and we could speak and hear again. The world and the people were restored. My character actually did some loops in the air and shouted for joy. We asked the rainbow-girl, Inki, what she had done, and she just smiled and said that the Void was no more. She had "colored in the blanks." We asked the ST why our characters had been spared, and she said that the inspector had been protected by the spells on his sword, and that the Silence had not touched the psychic because "it saw her as its own." For the archer there was no explanation, at least not one she could explain, and that disturbed both the players and the characters greatly. The ST in question never, ever does anything without a reason, and will fit plot points into place years later. We all remembered what had happened, as did the mage, but no one else had any knowledge of how close the world had come to oblivion. We agreed it was better that way.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2012 03:02
|
|
|
The ST was actually playing the inspector, and narration was mostly delivered through him. We usually do something like that. At one point there was a series of missions where the main villain hired a bunch of our villain characters to help her steal weapons for her plan - the people she hired weren't important to the plot, but they let everyone follow along and show the players what was going on behind the curtain.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2012 04:05
|
|