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How someone responds in a game when presented with a baby seems to be a pretty good metric for how insufferable they're gonna be. Don't think I've posted this one anywhere before. My first try at D&D passed kinda uneventfully with me trailing everyone who knew how to play learning the quirks of the system like how lashing alchemist's fire to arrows doesn't make you Rambo and using stoneshape to collapse a mine on somebody inconveniences them less than just hitting them with a sword. I figured I had the whole thing pretty well worked out and was pretty psyched for the next campaign the group was starting, finally I could build a character that'd contribute and do cool things. First session starts with an hour of everyone gathered around the table, sitting in silence rolling up their character sheets. The way they did it, which I gather was houseruled, was to roll each of your stats in order with two extra dice, discard the two lower numbers - don't recall exactly what I got, but I wound up with my highest stats being barely-above-average intelligence and wisdom, and for everything else... I recall a lot of 8s. So I tell everyone to go on ahead with the game while I spend an extra half hour or so trying to use my hazy grasp of the mechanics to devise a first-level character built around staying as far the gently caress away from physical threats as possible while still technically participating in the game, wind up statting up a kobold sorceror with a crossbow and halberd, all ranged and ambush specialties. I haven't been completely following what's been going on in the story so far, but I show the GM my character to announce I'm ready, and the GM introduces me by dropping me in the middle of a graveyard full of rising skeletons. Alone. Rest of the party's off a couple blocks away at a bar. I win initiative, use my first turn to scramble up a tree and jab my poky stick at anything without a pulse that comes too close. Skeleton warrior gets the next turn, uses it to shamble over and oneshot me into the negatives. I bleed out before the rest of the party even realizes I'm there. I politely declined to stat up a new character, and that was my last experience with D&D :I Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Feb 18, 2012 |
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Feb 18, 2012 21:17
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Dr Pepper posted:You DM was a dick and the other players didn't call him out on this dick move... why? They all demanded to see my sheet so they could find out what I did wrong, and dropped it when nothing obvious sprang out. I think it was just accepted as how the game was supposed to be played in that group, I think I set a record with the one-turn wonder there but I recall at least one player's character dying during opening exposition in the first game, when he mouthed off to the questgiver who was also the GM's character from an earlier game and a wacky >9000-level magic dude. The GM probably had some really specific idea he never expressed about how poo poo was supposed to go down in the graveyard, either with the other players saving my rear end or me at least taking more than one hit to eat it or who knows what, and just wasn't about to contradict the dice when they said I was dead. Funny enough I tried a Call of Cthulhu oneshot with the same group and their take on the arbitrariness of mortality didn't pan out much better there, though at least that time I stayed in the game a hell of a lot longer. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Feb 18, 2012 |
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Feb 18, 2012 23:40
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Golden Bee posted:Put them on the spot. This is brilliant, Mad Libs Paranoia would be terrifying and glorious. Could probably build a whole adventure around that. Relaps posted:Please name them Tubtub. :3 (I THINk that's what Kobolds do, right? Repeat syllables for their names?) If not, I guess 'Thubgurl Khosplae' is an alternative! IDK what the name should be but it needs to be followed by his/her formal title, a Wizard of Goatse Also drat wasn't expecting that story to make that much of an impression, I'll have to see what else I can recall. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Feb 20, 2012 |
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Feb 20, 2012 05:23
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Ashdesert posted:I was thinking "maybe the GM accidentally put you in a situation over your head and isn't willing to fudge the dice," until I got there. If the GM is using one of their old characters as an NPC, run as fast as you can. Same group, separate GMs. But yeah pretty much. Fortunately it didn't escort us around anywhere, and pretty much just popped up once at the very beginning to get the group together, send us on our way, and sort of menace us about what'd happen if we went off the script. I was more put out that my awesome mine-collapse idea didn't work. What the hell are Druids good for? Mr. Maltose posted:One of the best campaigns I was ever in had the heroes mentored by the ghosts of the PCs from our last game, which was a 3.0 game (the current game was 4th). Eventually we got tired of being told completely wrong tactics and told them to go away. They were eventually bound to a lich we fought, under the assumption that the noble band of adventurers would never attack their mentor figures. Pretty dumb for a lich, I guess. So did they try to fight you using 3.0 mechanics? I'm picturing a barbarian dude trying to work out how to punch someone from a universe with no strong nuclear force and a couple extra dimensions. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Feb 21, 2012 |
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Feb 21, 2012 05:53
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One Tall Fellow posted:Minor infractions of the law got the party thrown into jail, and more than once we found ourselves trying to escape the executioners block just for trying to accomplish the goals he set for us. Jerry would complain that we weren't playing right and scrap the campaign, and the next week we would roll new characters for a new adventure. After about two and a half years of putting up with his bullshit... So, uh, these games, your sessions were like every six months, right?
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Mar 9, 2012 20:30
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6. Amulet of Turn Dead 7. Sword so Vorpal it doesn't even leave a cut as it passes through
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Mar 23, 2012 08:16
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Captain Bravo posted:Try that Hyperdrive Asteroid trick again. Give them a taste of their own medicine! Airlock? They're the evil empire It'd be pretty hilarious if they went down to a prison riot though Seriously it's great how well he's captured this battle being a total chaotic clusterfuck.
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Jun 3, 2012 16:58
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Malachite_Dragon posted:Tell him the internet says he should let you steal the second Death Star goddammit. Yes, it's cliche as hell and near every Star Wars party tries to do it, but it's like climbing Mt. Everest- We try it because it is there. With as awesome as your party is, I think you could do it in spectacular fashion. They already stole Coruscant, it's well too late to avoid it being that game. E: Does Coruscant have engines? It seems like the kind of thing the SW EU would do. Can you ram the Death Star when it shows up? Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jun 4, 2012 |
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Jun 4, 2012 05:55
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Exculpatrix posted:Following on from that 7th Sea story, Linnus's player has sent me blueprints for 17th century sea mines. Hell yes build a fleet of Hunleys and crew them with NPCs you don't like
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Jun 6, 2012 14:14
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Have you ever handled one of those things? With a long enough stem they'd make a hell of a truncheon.
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Jun 6, 2012 18:09
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If your giant doom spaceship takes a ton of traffic to supply and maintain when it's in a proper port with all the proper poo poo right there, it probs takes two tons when it's out in the field trying to look inconspicuous. How many 100% loyal freighter crews the badguys have to devote to just that one project? I mean I'm hazy on the SWEU poo poo, but we're pretty much talking the equivalent of an invisible aircraft carrier floating around the open ocean, trying to stay invisible while getting ferried all the poo poo both mundane and exotic an aircraft carrier needs to keep running indefinitely from the same handful of seaports by your usual batch of misanthropes the important people felt weren't quite qualified to crew a ship with actual guns, right? Oh and the military involved just went out of its way to try and blow up as much of its logistics tree as possible, which probably did wonders for both morale and the pool of actually qualified secret-ops bulk hauler crews. The space occupied by the ship itself is nothing, it has no fixed location and can stay hidden forever if it wants to only pop up at the absolute worst time and place. The space occupied by all the poo poo needed to keep it out there with working engines and a still-alive crew is another story. This doesn't sound like the job for super space radar, this sounds like a job for paying off the Teamsters. Maybe they don't find the star destroyers that way, maybe they just find the supply depots where they're keeping all the expensive and now increasingly rare replacement parts for whatever poo poo is constantly breaking down on invisible space battleships (probably the toilets). Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Oct 26, 2012 |
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Oct 26, 2012 07:27
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Privateers relied on having a nearly uncontested global superpower with secure ports and all the supplies they could ever need in order to stay alive at all and still were a small force for a specific context that got their poo poo ruined on a regular basis. You wanna see how that works without the full support (including actual real navy) of an empire the sun never sets on, look at what pirates are now. The thing about Al Qaeda guys is they have all the same needs as any other army (loads more people supplying food and bombs and keeping things running than get to tool around blowing poo poo up being holy warriors) and at some point have to pull some or all of that from non-elite cadre members or else give up 99% of their combat strength - and as a consequence are sustaining information leaks all the time. They're just structurally equipped to contain the damage: keeping everything in tiny cells with limited interaction means if cousin Shamir who goes out to pick up the kebabs and is completely devout and loyal but never completely got over that time a mule kicked him in the head as a child or Ahmed who got stuck on gun-cleaning duty and is pretty burnt out on the whole glorious martyr thing get too chatty with a snitch in town they're probably only going to directly screw maybe half a dozen relatively expendable people, 'cause that's all they know about. And by the time those guys have all been rounded up and waterboarded everyone they know about knows the jig is up and has gone into hiding. You can't run a naval fleet on a cell structure, or even build a boat worth a drat, which is why Al Qaeda's MO is a handful of dudes at a time with boxcutters and underpants bombs. You can't hide the occupying army's airfields, not without giving up the ability to occupy in the first place. When guerrilla forces want to operate on a battlefield scale they drop the concealment and begin acting as conventional armies with a territory and a rear line. With some internal discipline you can keep secret where your operational tip-of-the-spear forces are for a while (and navies did, back in the pre-satellite days), but everything beyond that is a lost cause informationally, it's fixed in place and highly visible and pretty much has to be defended. There's a hell of a lot of planets, which is why searching them and surrounding hell of a lot more of nothing at all instead of finding a way to get the relevant information to come to you is a bad idea. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Oct 26, 2012 |
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Oct 26, 2012 08:11
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Correction: They have two giant invisible spaceships. And no shipyard capable of handling them (at least, I don't recall the Death Star involving a Star Destroyer drydock). And their enemies have the blueprints.
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Oct 26, 2012 08:40
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Haha welp, is there anything in the SWEU that isn't completely over-the-top? Looking forward to the story of the session where they finally after long effort track down the two invisi-destroyers that have been raiding the gently caress out of the shipping lines, only to ambush three. 
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Oct 26, 2012 08:53
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I've steered the hell clear of any non-movie Star Wars stuff ever since someone told me Darth Vader's gloves were officially called Mandalorian Crushgaunts and had a ten-page backstory but did literally every single author write in their own Luek Airskipper and a Mortality Sun that's totally more badass and powerful than every other already existing one?
Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Oct 26, 2012 |
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Oct 26, 2012 16:35
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Nah they both pretty clearly were gotcha deals, there was no reason to have that skin contact clause other than that the GM was specifically planning from the start to screw him ASAP. Isn't that sort of thing, like, how you train people to be the bore who won't walk into a room without casting a dozen divination spells and poking every possible surface with a ten-foot pole? Stupid careless player, haw haw, but how fast do you think the game woulda started dragging if the guy was 'careful' and started taking the time to clearly detail how he could in no way be construed to be in violation of the terms of this unwinnable arrangement while hobbling around trying to perform the functions of an active player in a game, while the GM threw more and more poo poo at him to try and distract him from productively using his incredibly volatile super-items and trick him into letting go of the drat book/cloak for half a second? Sounds to me more like the player was smart enough to not play that game and just quietly let the power-crazed adversarial GM 'win' at the first opportunity before poo poo started getting nasty. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Nov 3, 2012 |
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Nov 3, 2012 06:20
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Okay so why was that important? What valuable game-related purpose did those properties serve? For what reason did the GM, who is making up a world that does not exist and does not have objective magical rules regarding skin contact beyond whatever he decides on for narrative convenience, decide to give this player a desirable item with a giant red-flag 'take your attention off this for one instant and it's gone' clause, and then when that didn't succeed in either benefitting the party or derailing the game entirely (take your pick) instantly dropped another with a roughly identical setup on him? Yeah, theoretically I guess it's possible the store owner guy's just inept at doing things that work, playing to the known characteristics of his audience or conveying intent to other human beings, that's not exactly unheard-of in the hobby; but if I was a player in that game with the poor interpretive faculties given to us non-mindreaders, and especially after that first time where the GM confirmed what he's about by having some jackass wizard insult me rather than call it a mulligan, next time something like that got dumped in my lap for drat sure I'd be looking for the most unrewarding possible way to throw the match in the hopes that this dude would lose interest in trying to use arbitrary GM fiat to gently caress with me and focus on running a goddamned game. And then unless I knew that guy was otherwise amazing I probably would find a reason to never play at one of his games again. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Nov 3, 2012 |
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Nov 3, 2012 07:12
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Yeah man and when I find out I've got a guy who's bad at public speaking I always set things up so he's the party face and then demand that players roleplay out all their diplomacy rolls in the Land of Men Who Heckle Guys Who Say Umm. That's a pretty common game type! Peasants are ill-mannered! It's boring to just make everything just dicerolling! And hey, if I really wanted to be an rear end in a top hat I'd have lightning strike the lot of them where they stand! 
Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Nov 3, 2012 |
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Nov 3, 2012 07:52
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TalonDemonKing posted:'You can provoke the drow priestess into attacking you if you can get 15 insults in under a minute'. Holy poo poo this rules, every game needs an insult fighting system
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Nov 3, 2012 09:55
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Colon V posted:Survival works well where it's a core point of the game. Like, if you and your group were playing a STALKER tabletop game, tracking rations and ammo and water and weight would make perfect sense. Yeah this could be legit cool in a high-lethality, low-resources game that's all about making do with what you can carry on your back and still fight or run and agonizing about carrying that spare mag of ammo or another day's water ration and where every little bit makes a huge difference, but motherfuck trying to inventory like 100lbs of food and healing supplies and arrows/bullets and every magical geegaw that's the key to every possible situation you might encounter. D&D dudes can stab abstract concepts to death they can loving well carry infinite food in their backpacks and if they bought a quiver of fifty arrows they're gonna have forty-nine arrows left when the campaign ends. Also note that STALKER generally ends with players getting like half a dozen of those super electric speedup artifacts and infinite-sprinting around the map with enough supplies to feed and arm a battallion for a year, the inventory system mostly just discourages compulsively hoarding hundreds upon hundreds of broken AKSUs like the rest of the game drives people to. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Nov 5, 2012 |
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Nov 5, 2012 04:43
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Yeah I gave up trying to keep track of D&D arrows even before I gave up on D&D, when I realized every enemy needed like ten of them to go down. What, am I gonna keep a loving tally? If it's one properly placed arrow per rear end in a top hat and you're only seeing a few assholes a session that'd be another story entire, then the emphasis is on 'don't miss', but if the average load between supply runs is dozens or hundreds of combat rounds nnnnope. What I remember as really sticking out though was looking at the spell material components requirements in D&D early on and wondering who on Earth actually tracks those. Campaign ends abruptly as party wizard leaves for another continent in search of special batwings, 'oops your sulphur supply ran out looks like you can't cast Fireball anymore'. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Nov 5, 2012 |
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Nov 5, 2012 05:53
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Really an adventure campaign that's just 'running a tavern where all these loving adventurers keep showing up' would work pretty well. You just stay in place, all the horrible things come to you, you worry a bit more about keeping the place from burning down rather than how best to burn it all down, and instead of a treasure chest at the end it's revenues and tips from patrons who don't carry change in denominations smaller than a fist-sized diamond.
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Nov 5, 2012 07:51
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Volmarias posted:You don't even need to have the character escape to become a recurring villain/theme. They surely have friends, family, associates, etc. And, even if they don't, someone running across the container and knowing who you were could cause your players to now be on the wrong side of the law, or to get a grisly reputation that colors some of their future encounters. Have it both ways. The grunt, with nothing left to do but fume and think, slowly crafts an intricate plan for revenge. Whatever natives exist in the backwoods of some butthole Star Wars planet stumble across the crate, and are quickly convinced that the mysterious talking box is a god. From their worship and a general knowledge of modern technology and soldiering he crafts a lethal and fanatically devoted shadow empire that reaches out to the stars to dog the players at every turn, following them to the ends of the universe and always showing up in the least-expected places. The grunt becomes an invisible mastermind, always one step ahead of the players, always growing in influence and ensnaring them ever deeper in his twisted revenge schemes... but he never quite figures out how to open that crate.
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Nov 20, 2013 22:29
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