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Have to say if you have a guest player where it's clear that he'll be around only for X sessions, setting up a brief storyarc where someone joins the party and turns out to be a traitor is very far from the worst thing you can do with that. If your guest player isn't an asshat and your DM isn't a pushover of course.
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Nov 16, 2013 20:28
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That reminds me of the time I'd just read the wiki article on the thuggee and decided to center a short adventure around that. So my party met a succession of "harmless travellers" who claimed to be looking for safety in numbers, but were secretly in cahoots with each other and were planning to jump the party once they felt they could safely overwhelm them. The party got wise to the scheme and decided to wait and nab the whole gang in one strike, and hid the Warforged in a crate so they'd seem less dangerous and have an additional element of surprise. Dude spent two weeks in that crate. He insisted he wouldn't come out until the bandits made their move. That's dedication to a plan.
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Nov 21, 2013 14:04
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I agree but I have to admit, the image of a trap that has vents just opening up all over the place almost takes it back around to Tex Avery style slapstick.
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Dec 17, 2013 21:13
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Behind the scenes of catpiss: I was talking to the guy who introduced me to D&D back in the day recently, and he told me about the new campaign he was running, with a huge focus on investigation and courtly intrigues. He explained how he'd plotted things out: first someone from royal family A was going to be assassinated, with the PCs taking the blame and going to prison, then they'd be freed by a mysterious figure who would only explain they had "a mutual friend", the PCs would naturally assume this was a trusted member of royal family B and come along, try to clear their name but they would be betrayed by an ally later on on behalf of, as would later emerge, that very same member, because he was in league with the evils in family A and they wanted to assassinate or otherwise disable every family member so the ruling power would default to the highest advisor... At that point I asked "okay, so, what are the PCs doing while all of that intrigue is going on behind the scenes?" "Well, first off, they have to get out of prison." "Okay, fair enough. After that?" "Hm, what?" "... right." He also explained about this one guy who existed in the campaign world, a 250 year old former PC more powerful than the gods ("you know how even the highest gods in 3.5 are only something like level 56, well this guy is higher") who was trying to stay out of the gods' business but kept getting pulled in. The party was going to meet this guy, "but he's not interested in them." "So why do they meet him then?" "If you have a character like that running around, you just include him, and he can have a big dramatic monologue." e: then he started talking about having the party meet old characters we played when he DMed and obviously probed me for input on mine ("only thing left to figure out is if Samar is still alive...") and I said "well that's up to you really" and thought "hell no he isn't if getting all mixed up in this unholy mess is what's in store for him". My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Jan 2, 2014 |
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Jan 2, 2014 20:08
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Barudak posted:c) That somehow doesn't make him a god himself. See how many logic holes you can spot there just immediately, I was at three. SUPER NEAT TOY posted:I think you should hatch a really elaborate plot to kill him and see if the DM will allow it or the lengths he will go to in order to protect him.
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Jan 2, 2014 23:04
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Barudak posted:You'll poop it out. Alternatively there's that 3.5 prestige class where you level up by eating starmetal and slowly turn into a construct.
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Jan 16, 2014 08:18
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One step closer to Saints Row: The RPG.
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Jan 30, 2014 22:51
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Dareon posted:I ran a short campaign where the captain of the ship the PCs were crew on was only ever referred to as The Captain. I didn't actually have names for her or any of the other crew, and the players didn't mind at all. It helped that this was when Nextwave was popular.
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Mar 13, 2014 12:36
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Oh man. Again, same here, except for us was a wooden bench that we carried it around for what amounts to no good reason. Actually used it to get over the protective wall of a goblin village, too.
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Mar 13, 2014 14:31
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You could spin Astonishing True Tales into a whole setup with different settings and subsystems: Astonishing True Tales of Times Yet to Come - 1950s pulp sci-fi Astonishing True Tales of Crime - 1940s noir Astonishing True Tales of Adventure in Strange Lands - Victorian adventure stories in Africa and Asia Astonishing True Tales of Times Long Past - Conan the Barbarian/Harryhausen fantasy Astonishing True Tales of Weird Science and Horrors - classic monsters
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Mar 20, 2014 09:30
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Not much of a story really. Party meets the evil hobgoblin raiders on the bridge. Some of them take cover behind some pillars, the paladin and bard stay in the open, paladin slightly ahead. Paladin declares he'll stand his ground and let the enemy come to them. The hobgoblin leader takes a look at the situation, stays right where he is and orders his underlings to open fire on the bard as one. The bard goes down. Sometimes you got to wonder, what did your players honestly expect to happen. To their credit, they immediately said "uhm yeah, let's never mention this again and just rush them". This time.
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Apr 8, 2014 13:56
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Ettin posted:In between his GMPC wetting his dick, they spent entire sessions on things like shopping and having dinner. It was tedious as gently caress - I ended up bailing and having someone call me if it got interesting, and I wasn't even there expecting to masturbate. Umberto Eco posted:Well, there is a criterion for deciding whether a film is pornographic or not, and it is based on the calculation of wasted time.
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Apr 14, 2014 08:10
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I wanted to have a zombie mage in an encounter as a last minute addition. I took the token I had for regular zombies and drew a silly beard and pointy hat on in GIMP. In doing this I didn't consider that Masterplan crops your token graphics a little bit.  That's just gonna have to be something we all have to live with.
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May 3, 2014 20:59
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"Alright, important bit of street wisdom: when you're talking to someone who calls the surrounding area 'my hood', you should avoid using phrases like 'gently caress your hood'."
My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 19:20 on May 11, 2014 |
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May 11, 2014 18:12
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My wizard is trying to make Enlarge Dong into a business but no one's even interested in the sales pitch.
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May 13, 2014 19:17
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Christ do I hate Forgotten Realms
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May 15, 2014 12:21
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Turns out the goatmen weren't preparing to summon devils but to create golems.
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May 28, 2014 10:48
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If the rest of the group is into combats and random encounters you're basically going "nope, we are playing this my way, bitches, cause my character has the means" and that ranges from kind of to tremendously lovely, yeah. Imagine if you were in a game heavy on diplomacy and avoiding battle and a new guy comes in and plays a barbarian who attacks everyone. Might as well let the dorks be dorks and find a game that suits you more, or else try and get a group conversation going about random encounters vs. actually following the module's plot in the first place. e: to be fair just saying "hey you're ambushed now" is also not unshitty My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Jun 7, 2014 |
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Jun 7, 2014 10:02
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See now that sounds more like you guys are on the same page as players and need to have a chat with your DM, and it doesn't sound like he's running a good-but-different-from-what-you-want game either. For that setup the raven/trickery thing sounds fine, you just need to get the DM to buy into it.
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Jun 7, 2014 13:25
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A tale of two cat-pisses. In a 3.5 one-shot last Halloween I played a rogue and there had been exclusively sneak attack-immune enemies in six encounters. Great. Then came one encounter with regular beasts in it. I was excited. Giant cats! Actually unironically great! I'll get to do the one thing I can do in combat! Oh no I won't because there's a witch loaded up with enchantments who just hit me with Charm Person, and now we all get to figure out mid-combat what that actually implies because it's a spell written very much for PCs to use on NPCs. So what does clever me do in a bout of frustration? Look up the exact wording of the spell while the initiative is going around, and then deliberately move away from one of the giant cats so it will opportunity attack me, because any action by the caster or their allies "that threatens the charmed person breaks the spell." There's really no in-game reason I could have mustered. It was metagaming in its purest form, playing on the fact that the DM probably wouldn't know all the details of every spell. That day, we both were the cat-piss. Though I will argue, the DM more so.
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Jun 7, 2014 16:18
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Warlock in my 4E game managed to take eight enemies down to exactly 0 HP over the course of the session, whether they had 5 or 18 or whatever else left. I need to make some sort of precision trophy.
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Jun 9, 2014 14:55
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There's nothing "happened to be" about it, it's all about making the players answer to a silly teddy bear.
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Jun 26, 2014 16:57
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If my players started falling for in-game spam I'd drop absolutely everything and accomodate their every wish in pursuing their goal, laughing all the way to the inevitable conclusion.
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Jul 22, 2014 06:25
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I actually have a plot involving a prince coming up in my game, I might just drop my plans for that entirely and go with the spam thing.
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Jul 22, 2014 09:23
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Just caught up with this thread.Gazetteer posted:Your GMPC is a travelling potion merchant whose prices are so low he must be crazy! The potion merchant appears at increasingly improbable times and places in order to give the party free samples and heavily discounted healing items.
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Feb 8, 2015 11:23
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Golden Bee posted:No play in a month means the game is dead. It's your fault on this one, but let me know if you ever want to buy a bridge. Although that being said I'm definitely starting to feel complacency set it, it's a good thing I already had everything prepared or I'd probably have been like  . Gonna need one hell of a recap.
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Feb 17, 2015 09:05
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I once spent an entire fight dominated because saving throws. I kept dropping hints that someone could First Aid me but noooo.OneThousandMonkeys posted:How do you even remember wtf is going on in a monthly game. If my games miss a week no one can remember what we were doing when we come back.
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Feb 17, 2015 20:57
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We're doing a storyarc where our warlock's pact is becoming unstable and creates random magic effects, so I made a short effects table mostly cribbed from various wild magic surge tables. I included some pure fluff effects and some minor mechanical ones, but so far, every other time the random effects have come up it landed, without fail, on "you become 1d10 years younger." She's gone from a woman in her 40s to a spry twentysomething. I'd originally included that effect only to have a small chance at something good happening, but now that I think about it, if this happens another time or two, things are gonna get really interesting...
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Mar 31, 2015 09:47
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My Lovely Horse posted:We're doing a storyarc where our warlock's pact is becoming unstable and creates random magic effects, so I made a short effects table mostly cribbed from various wild magic surge tables. I included some pure fluff effects and some minor mechanical ones, but so far, every other time the random effects have come up it landed, without fail, on "you become 1d10 years younger." She's gone from a woman in her 40s to a spry twentysomething.  e: "Is it reversible?" "Technically, yes."
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Apr 5, 2015 15:34
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Splicer posted:This is starting to sound like the backstory to a horrible anime e: that same session they got trapped in a dreamworld, fortunately they know a friendly dream shaman who told them, okay, this is bad, but I'll join up with you and show you how to get out. Just do one thing first - find a safe place. Something where we can hide from nightmares and won't be disturbed. Which they did. 
My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 07:29
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Bieeardo posted:My local group realized that it was a really, really bad idea to LARP randomly in public areas when an undercover cop approached them one night in a downtown park. Goddamn cop thought the idiots were having a drug meet. Actually there's a movie in that, I think. "d20 Jump Street".
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May 27, 2015 06:54
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Railing Kill posted:The GM just moved away. He's not too far away, but no close enough that's he'll be able to run the game often. He wants to make a point to come up about once per month to run the game, but we're all worried that the time and distance will eat away at that commitment. I know if I were far away, time and money would start to wear away at my willingness to travel that regularly. 
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Jun 5, 2015 15:00
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All I can see is Cho Aniki: The RPG.
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Jun 19, 2015 11:18
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I'm reminded of the time when our party spent a long time away from civilization, long enough to gain one or two levels. When we met friendly NPCs again the DM gave us a brief rundown of how we met a few more experienced folks who could give us some combat and magic pointers, "so you can use your new class features and stuff now." I quietly turned to one of my fellow players. "That's the first I'm hearing of this." "Yeah. I'm using my stuff all the time." "Same. I don't think he noticed." Carried on playing and the DM never mentioned it again. 
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Jun 24, 2015 16:49
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You're all missing an important aspect: what, for the love of god, happens once he hits level 5?
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Jun 25, 2015 09:07
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Mairn posted:As far as what happens when the commoner hit's 5: He crafts slightly faster.
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Jun 25, 2015 09:25
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Dareon posted:My immediate first thought was "brothel."
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Jun 25, 2015 13:13
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The Grammar Aryan posted:-There's a check to see if you're a Paladin, and if you are, you get an invisible buff named "Fight +1." ========== My party of intrepid adventurers is exploring the tomb of a legendary gambler and have to summon a spirit to power up a broken slot machine. To do this, they must substitute the letters in the spirit's name into numbers, then trace it on a magic square, which was part of the battle map. I took this idea from actual occult practices where it's supposed to work... more or less exactly the same, really. Lest you think we're all weird pagans, I just thought it might be a nice additional challenge for grid-based combat (and it was!). Round one. The teenage warlock enters the magic square and draws the first sigil. Suddenly, undead monstrosities appear and start tearing into her! Two critical hits mean she's almost down, the third monster approaches... ... the player chants "gonna roll a 1, gonna roll a 1..." ... I roll a 1. Round two. The warlock has to move on, but she will draw an opportunity attack. She moves, I roll the attack... ... player chants "gonna miss, gonna miss..." ... it misses. Round three. Same situation. Her teammates have, by now, buffed her up a bit and between that and her own abilities, she's got a solid 25 AC now. I roll for an OA... ... she chants "no more than 24, no more than 24..." ... and I roll exactly 24, look around, and say "suddenly I'm kind of nervous about what might happen if you finish drawing that name." My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Jul 19, 2015 |
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Jul 19, 2015 14:59
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Definitely a Dread Rorkannu situation. "SERVANT, I DESIRE MORTAL PLEASURES. INDULGE IN GLUTTONY ON MY BEHALF. SPARE NO EXPENSE." [...] "SERVANT, YOU HAVE EATEN ONE OF THE DONUTS, AND PAID THE DONUT MAKER 20 OF YOUR GOLD COINS." "That's how much it costs!"
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Jul 20, 2015 08:40
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NinjaDebugger posted:An ettin pirate who collects skulls is an awesome idea. You can have him wear a skull on each shoulder, too, so nobody's sure which two skulls his name is talking about.
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Jul 21, 2015 13:39
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