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So we're playing Star Wars d20 (with some heavy house-ruling; it's been suggested that we switch to SAGA but the GM is like "gently caress you, I already switched systems once from the old WEG d6 system to this one, I'm not loving around with it again"), and we're approaching the Battle of Endor... only we're not going to be at the Battle of Endor. Our Rebel group - which has grown from 'several dudes in a freighter' to 'all the Rebel forces in this Rim Worlds Sector complete with bases and shipyards and covert operatives' over the course of several years of gaming - is given a different assignment. In order to buy breathing room for the attack on the second Death Star, we'll be convincing the Empire that we're attacking other targets throughout the galaxy, drawing off resources that could be used to reinforce the Imperial fleet at the Death Star. Our group., specifically, gets to invade Coruscant, the capital world of the Galactic Empire. (in the words of our GM: "It's possible. You might pull it off. I mean, it's not likely, but you could manage it.") Anyways, over the last ten months we've become aware that someone is hiding out in our base of operations eavesdropping and whatnot; he's not an Imperial spy, but we can't figure out who the fucker is or what he wants. Finally we uncover a lead on how we might actually track the dude down, so we commence doing so, since operational security is now a much bigger deal than it was before we got our latest suicide mission. This guy, who I started thinking of as - and thus will name - Michael Westen, was once an ISB agent - an Imperial intel officer. He knew we were Rebels back before anyone else did, because at the time we were an undercover cell instead of a sector-wide insurgency; we decided that the best thing to do, since he'd uncovered our secret, was going to be to ship him off to Alliance Intelligence. This proved difficult, as the dude's two highest skills were Escape Artist and Disguise, so in the end we said "eh, gently caress it" and encased him in carbonite. Break out of that, fucker. Then we had him declared dead. Anyways, he got interrogated by Rebel Intel, only one of the people interrogating him was a double agent, because Rebel Intel sucks at their job. So when he escaped (because of course he escaped) the double agent told the ISB, who issued a burn notice and disavowed him and put a contract out on his head (because that was less paperwork than reversing the declaration of death, don't you know). So Westen decides, after several assassination attempts, that none of this would be happening to him if not for us - so he infiltrates our base and sets up a little nest and starts ordering supplies and poo poo with credit cards from one of our front companies. He isn't reporting to the ISB anymore, they want him dead, but he's decided that he wants to see us suffer. He wants to fight, to paraphrase the Princess Bride, to the pain. He's gathering intel, not to report on us, but to wage psychwar - leaving little notes and the like, just to gently caress with us. The lead we got enabled us to track down his nest, his little hidey-hole, and while he led the rest of the team on a wild goose chase throughout the ship (master of disguise, remember?), I was the only one who did the smart thing; I figured if he stuck his neck out for anything, it'd be something in said nest. So I sat there and I waited and I made coffee. When he eventually showed up, I offered him a cup. We had a chat while I waited for the combat-types to arrive; it was really quite genial. Why is this notable? This is a dangling plot thread that had been hinted at by the GM for fourteen months real-time, stemming from a storyline from several years ago. That's some fuckin' dedication right there.
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Jan 30, 2012 11:00
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Mornacale posted:I believe you mean caf. I actually meant mug, but, you know, details.  My character's coffee fixation has become a running plot point, actually; he's the group's slicer/techie/computer dude, and being the head of information warfare for an entire sector of the Rebel Alliance keeps one busy. I used Craft (Droid) specifically to build Mister Coffee, an ambulatory droid coffee machine that follows me around and ensures that I'm properly caffeinated and so have the energy to do all the crazy computer poo poo the team needs me to do. It's not until recently that anyone twigged to the fact that he's developed a pathological fear of sleep because being asleep means you're not doing the work which means that people are dying that he could have saved if he'd been awake and coding. Run a game for more than a decade (with not-infrequent hiatuses, obviously) and you're gonna start to see a lot of long cons. 
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Jan 30, 2012 12:04
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The Good Professor posted:This wouldn't happen to also be the reason behind your username too, would it? Actually, the username comes from the time in college when I took pre-caffeinated water (remember Crank 2.0? that) and used it to make espresso and then used the espresso to wash down NoDoz. I stayed awake for a very long time and hallucinated a bit and also I may have seen God and then I slept for a very long time. ...that incident may have informed my character, yes. The Good Professor posted:Also if you have any more stories about this game, please post them. I'm trying to get some friends of mine to get a Star Wars d20 game together and I'm already going to show them the one you just wrote, but more is always better. Plus with a game running for that long, even with hiatuses and playing infrequently, you must have a lot of anecdotes to share. Oh man... the trouble isn't having stories, it's trying to figure out which ones are good. 'Cause there's so drat many that it's hard to run a comparison. The previous game session might be a good one, let's try that. An old, beat-to-hell tramp freighter arrives at our base - one we've never seen before. On board is an R2 droid that plotted the course to our base because apparently, way back in the day (like 20 years ago) it was on a smuggler's route. The freighter looks to have been attacked by poo poo like turbolasers, which means if anything followed it, they're going to find us, which isn't a good thing. So we backtrack to the system the freighter was attacked in, flying our super-sneaky stealthed fast ship. Remember those droids from The Clone Wars and the first prequel film? Yeah. There are 17 of their battleships blockading and bombarding a planet, each with their assorted fleet tenders and Vulture Droid (fighter) screens on combat air patrol. Our GM admitted after the game that he expected us to bring in our fleet and attack them. He did not expect us to look at them and say "we would like to own those. Let's steal 'em." After a few misadventures planetside we sneak onto the command and control ship. I've reprogrammed one of the combat droids (the rogers, we call them, as they're the ones always adding 'roger, roger!' to everything) to find the central computer core and turn it off, because the heavily-centralized separatists whose droid army this was designed things really poorly that way. Unfortunately, the infiltration droid did not work well. So we had him try again only this time he's leading a cargo-hauling droid (basically a forklift with a brain) which is loaded with boxes containing us. He got us up to the door of the computer core, which was enough; we jumped out and blew poo poo up. Turning off the computer core shuts down most of the droids... except for the so-called "tactical droids," who have independent command and control powers. They can run around and issue commands to the other droids, but we've shut down the central communications node (which runs through the main computer core), so they have to do it one at a time. One shows up with eight of the 'roly-polys' - the combat droids from the first prequel film, the ones that turn into balls and roll around before unfolding and shooting things? Those dudes - and is trying to blast its way into the computer core before I can finish reprogramming the computer to accept a new chain of command (at the top? us) and rebooting it. My character is, as I've said, the techie guy. He is minmaxed specifically for technical skills, and has an absolutely obscene Computer Use skill. He's 18th level (2 soldier/16 scoundrel) and has a total skill of more than 30 (I think it's 32, but I don't have the sheet before me), plus a masterwork slicer rig that gives like +8 to his rolls. Dude's sick. Three rounds until the door breaks, and I have to accumulate a total of more than 150 points. I have never felt so much tension while rolling Computer Use. Holy poo poo. We manage to take over the computer core and get it up and running; in dealing with the tactical droids and the four battleships that were on detached duty (and thus not tied to the computer core) we ended up with some losses... and in the end walked away with "only" nine battleships, eight frigates, twenty destroyers, 9,000 Vulture Droids, and just over 5 million extremely crunchy ground troops and the landing ships to deliver 'em. They're ours now.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:23
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Yawgmoth posted:...holy shitwhistles. If you guys had been the main characters there'd have only been one SW movie and the end would be a completely even firefight. It's actually a plot point in our game that the Empire is a lot less stupid than it is in the films, at least in our region of space - because the Imperial officers that are blinded by dogma and procedure and are unwilling to innovate have basically been weeded out. Because we've killed them all. This leads to poo poo like them saying "We know they're somewhere in this region of space, right? Let's attach a hyperdrive to an asteroid and program it to zig-zag back and forth throughout this region and turn off the safety interlocks that make it drop out of hyperspace in a gravity well. That way when it smacks into their base it'll vaporize the whole drat thing." We got lucky - it hit a pair of cruisers out on patrol instead of the base. Which reminds me of another story - we'd gone to steal a bunch of manufacturing equipment and supplies from a lightly-defended planet and ended up sparking a popular uprising instead (oops). Now we couldn't very well steal their poo poo; it would be terrible PR. So instead we had to set up defenses for them. The Inperials tried sneaking in a counterattack force; they sent ships in powered-down coasting in inertially so as not to register on our sensors. We spotted them anyways (I forget how; I think it was because of one of the Force-users, but I was otherwise occupied and not paying a ton of attention). We saw that one of the incoming ships was an Interdictor Cruiser - a ship that uses gravity well generators to force ships to drop out of hyperspace, setting up roadblocks, ambushes, et cetera. Can you guess what we decided to do? I believe I was the one to chime in with "Hey, didn't we want one of those?" We used our sneak ship to land five PCs and several grunts and two roly-polys we'd previously found (nicknamed 'the lads,' we'd upgraded their weapons and shield generators and given them heuristic processors so that they could learn; the lads are awesome, as you will see shortly). And we made a beeline for main engineering and took it over. After the big-rear end firefight, the lads roll back up with a bag of muffins. They figured, logically enough, that on a ship that's running silent, a lot of the crew would be bored; they had gone to the mess hall and just waited. Crew would walk in looking for food; the lads would shoot them. Then they'd drag the bodies inside and wait for more people to walk in looking for food. Fuckers ranked up a triple-digit body count.  We took over the rest of the ship from main engineering, set a course for a neutral world, and informed the crew, who'd been locked out of their computers, that they were free to leave once we arrived. Also I was kind and allowed them access to Minecraft on their computer consoles, reasoning that if they had something to amuse themselves with they'd be less-effective in breaking my computer lockout.
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Jan 31, 2012 02:47
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GaryLeeLoveBuckets posted:This is pretty awesome, considering that Interdictor Cruisers are one of the most valuable capital ships, strategy-wise. Especially since you have a gigantic fleet of Trade Federation drone ships. What ambushes/battles did you set up with it? That Interdictor brought our total up to two-and-a-half; we'd had a few before, but one of them was damaged so heavily that instead of repairing all of its gravity generators we repaired half of them, and used the power plant for the other generators to run a planetary-scale ion cannon we'd taken off of one world's defenses and literally kludged it into the ship. So our already-existing Interdictors, the Speed Bump and the Rumble Strip, have been used for plenty of ambushes but sadly none of the ones I was there for.
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Jan 31, 2012 21:56
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Hopefully I will have more awesome stories for you after we get more Star Wars today, but I was reminded of my girlfriend of a quick little tale from much earlier on in the campaign (around the time of the Battle of Hoth, movie-wise): We're trying to leave orbit of a planet because we just were up to Shenanigans that included "kidnapping" the daughter of the local sector Moff because she wanted to join the Rebellion (she's currently our head Intelligence Officer, actually) when flight control tells us to stand by for inspection. Being inspected would be bad, and since at this point in the campaign we're basically just a bunch of dudes with a fast ship and not the Sector Armada we have since become, shooting our way out is inadvisable. So I got an idea. "Hey," I ask the GM, "I can tie my slicer rig into our comms system, right?" Sure, he says, looking a little confused. It's not like I can hack a radio or anything. Me: "Good. I want to roll Computer Use to write up a quick voice-changer program." GM: "Okay, sure you can make your voice sound different on the radio. Now what?" Me: "Now I adjust the program so that I sound like Darth Vader. We have plenty of that dude's voice on tape, he's on the news every so often. Then I tell flight control to get bent because I am on a priority mission from the Emperor and if they slow me down I will visit them in person to show my displeasure." GM: "...wow. Um, okay, you're gonna get a big circumstance bonus to your Bluff for that." Me: "Good thing, since I have zero ranks in Bluff.  oh, look. natural 20."GM: "....yeah, they let you leave without incident. In fact they thank you for leaving without incident." Escaping the Empire by pretending to be Darth Vader was nice, but what was nicer was that we'd cracked the Imperial communications net - essentially, their Email systems - some time back. So I decided to send Unca Vader a polite thank-you note for his assistance in getting us off-world so expediently. Anonymized it thoroughly, and sent it off. GM looks at me, grins, and says "Three days later you get a reply that reads simply "I am glad to have been of assistance." From Vader's account." ...when we met up with the rest of the Rebel fleet to plan out Endor and Endor-related missions like our current assault on Coruscant, he made a special note of explaining how my character, Miles, was a quasi-legend among Rebel techies and slicers. See, everyone's sent email to Vader; it's practically a rite of passage. But apparently I'm the only guy to whom he ever wrote back.
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Feb 4, 2012 15:57
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Karandras posted:Yeah, if you have spare hyperdrives there is no real reason not to make ridiculous suicide bombs. The only example of a hyperspace capable ship hitting a planet in the canon ended up killing everyone. It is a crazy efficient strat (and one of the reasons you can't really play super serious star wars) Well, it's also technically difficult in that in order to do it deliberately you have to disable the safety interlocks that cause the hyperdrive to shut down in a gravity well, and then once you do that it's only really good for targets you know you'll be reliably able to hit - so planets and your slower space stations, really. That said, yes, theoretically there's no reason that the Rebel Alliance couldn't be all "suck it, Palpatine, we don't need a Death Star to crack planets wide open, we just need a hyperdrive and a socket wrench" but at that point they become mass murderers. I don't know, I think that it's possible to play super serious Star Wars while still opting not to be Space bin Laden. Just saying. (also I got my dates wrong and game is next week so no new awesome stories yet. I gotta wrack my brain and remember some of the older awesome stories.)
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Feb 5, 2012 13:43
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Captain Bravo posted:Well, I mean this is coming from someone who hasn't played the system and so maybe there's something I've missed, but if you have a very, very common piece of technology that you can easily rig to destroy a planet, why do you even need a death star? I can understand some form of pacification weapon, or even something that kills everyone on a planet while leaving it inhabitable, but we're expressly shown that the Death Star cracks planets like a loving walnut. Why would you need to spend the time, effort, money, and manpower to build one if you can just take a cargo hauler, tweak the hyperdrive, and point it at Alderaan? Short answer: I don't think anyone thought that far ahead once it was established that hyperdrives collided with poo poo. And really, in all fairness, the Death Star is more powerful than the average hyperdrive-equipped-collision (which is why you put the drive on asteroids and say gently caress it, but even that was hyperbole). Slightly less short answer: Death Stars look cooler. There's nothing about 'we grabbed an asteroid and threw a Dinosaur Killer at the bad guys' that says "FEAR AND OBEY THE STATE" quite as thoroughly as the enormous moon-sized floating battlestation that makes planets go boom and which is also filled with legions of your jackbooted thugs. Longer, 'I'm no expert but this is how it was explained to me' answer: It's both pretty drat difficult to override the failsafes that drop a ship out of hyperspace when it encounters a gravity well (like "there are maybe five technicians in a given sector of space who can do it reliably and have the drive behave the way it's intended to and not just magically disappear or some poo poo" difficult) and the difficulty in getting the drive-rock to its target without hitting other poo poo on the way - see the in-game example I mentioned where a pair of cruisers turned into a ribbon of glittering space dust about three miles long - is not inconsiderable. Basically in order to use the hyperdrive-rock-hit-things trick a lot of factors have to line up juuuuuust right, and even so it's stupidly difficult to pull off, whereas a Death Star works pretty much anywhere and once you have it built all you need is a half-bright crew, most of which you can usually clone. And also it's stupid and try not to think about it too much because Star Wars, dude.
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Feb 5, 2012 14:40
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Dammit. My Star Wars group is still mid-Battle For Coruscant (we had to miss a few sessions for various reasons) and I don't want to start telling that story when it could be a month before I know the ending. (I did tell our GM about the kudos he received in this thread, about which he seemed both thankful and a little bit terrified) So I was all set to kill time by telling Pendragon stories but it turns out I already did. Well, may as well stick links here for folks that didn't get a chance to see 'em before. Still, I want to share more awesome stories, so let me go back to the well that is AD&D. Way, way back in the day I was in a 2nd Edition campaign that was... um... well, a little bit odd, in that it was theoretically a Spelljammer game but ended up mostly being "let's see what weird poo poo you guys can get up to. In space." We're in a floating asteroid base that's being used by a wizard that we want to kill for some reason that I was never a hundred percent clear on, and the wizard's basically turned his asteroid into a 3D dungeon; he lives in the heart of this rock that's honeycombed with tunnels. We're heading through a tunnel to go after him, and for some reason we'd gotten split up. Me and another guy were creeping down a tunnel when what do we see? A loving elephant. It's charging at us. My thought process goes something like this: "Dude can't have an elephant here. How would he feed it? It can barely fit in the tunnel! poo poo, it suddenly appeared at a dead-end! No. It's got to be an illusion." So I roll to disbelieve the illusion. I succeed. DM: "...okay! You stand your ground and shake your head, announcing, 'Naw. Naw, that's not happening.' And then you get flattened." DM actually takes me aside and says in a quiet voice, "I'm not trying to gently caress you, here, man, your reaction made perfect sense and you're gonna get Raised, I promise, but it was a Figurine of Wondrous Power." Which I actually thought was kind of cool, that he'd make a point of explaining what looked like an enormous dick move to let me know he wasn't trying to be a jackass. I wasn't bothered or anything, but the fact that he took the time to say something was cool of him. Let's see, something else... I should get some of my old players to reminisce about our Exalted game. Fuckin' game lasted three years, played weekly; it's hard for me to settle on the awesome stories. One bit I remember was... well, whether or not it's awesome really depends on the reader's opinions, I would say, but it was a fun game. PCs are hunting for reagents and ingredients for the resident Twilight Caste (read: wizard) to use to make Artifacts. One item I put on their shopping list was the teeth of a Tyrant Lizard, which is Exalted-speak for "Tyrannosaurus Rex." So half the PCs collect ten mortal retainers and head out into the jungles, and I tell them, "Look, I could sit here and spend hours describing your trek through the jungle and how hot it is and how miserable your dudes are and all that stuff, but let's be completely honest. You're not here for that. You're here to fight a dinosaur. Stomp, stomp, stomp, RAWR! Look, it's a Tyrant Lizard!" So the PCs fight the Tyrant Lizard and they kill it pretty handily (they had beaucoup XP by this point, we were like eighteen months into the game) and they're harvesting its teeth, and I notice one guy is looking a little bored so I say, "Remember how that guide you spoke to told you Tyrant Lizards are solitary creatures? Looks like he was full of poo poo, because Stomp, stomp, stomp, RAWR! It's another Tyrant Lizard." They decide to take off rather than fight the second lizard, because they know they got kinda lucky the first time, so they get in their flying vehicle artifact thingy and take off. So I turn to the guy playing the group's quasi-leader, a religious type who fancied himself a Leader of Men, and I ask him, "Um, dude? Remind me again - your exact words were 'as soon as the three of us are in the craft we take off,' right? Yeah? Okay... remember those ten lackeys you brought with you?" His face just fell as he had an "Aw, poo poo" moment, so they turned around fought the other tyrant lizard, collected the bodies of the half of their retainers who had been killed, apologized profusely to the other half who weren't, and when they got back they resolved to make the Twilight Caste find his own fuckin' ingredients from now on.
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Mar 10, 2012 08:27
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Players will always come up with poo poo the GM doesn't expect. A good GM will accept and even encourage this. It's more fun for a GM - at least it is when I'm GMing - if the GM gets to be surprised every so often, too! In our Star Wars group (see, I told you I'd talk more about this game) I seem to have been designated the "batshit crazy ideas guy." Part of that is the character - when you've got a techie with assloads of skills you start coming up with ways to use 'em - and part of it is just me being a little crazy, I guess. I've mentioned, here and in other threads, some of the tricks I've pulled in-game (make yourself sound like Darth Vader to win an unskilled Bluff test, the Floating Chrysanthemum Fleet, stealing a Trade Federation droid fleet), but there's only so much time in a day, and I've got notebooks full of poo poo I've never had the time or opportunity to implement, like: *Miles 3.0 - Miles is my character. Miles 2.0 was a protocol droid that we had laying around being useless, so Miles reprogrammed it to essentially act as his personal assistant slash doorman; its job was to keep the other Rebels from bothering him with stuff that wasn't important so that he could get work done. It had a Polaroid of Miles' face taped to its face, that's how you could tell it was Miles 2.0. It got blown up when another PC and I differed on the meaning of 'stuff that wasn't important,' so Miles has designed - though not yet built - Miles 3.0, which is pretty much the same thing only this time using a P-series droideka as the base unit. Because gently caress you, tough guy, shoot that in the face. *Targeted agitprop/psyops - Miles is a less-than-ethical sort sometimes, and designed several small transmitters and repeaters designed to broadcast anti-Imperial propaganda. That's not the big deal; the big deal is the way he wanted to deploy them, namely in regions typically thought to view the Empire favorably. See, he knows the whole "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" adage, and extrapolates this to "if the only tool you have is a legion of jackbooted thugs, every problem starts to look like Poland circa 1939." The reasoning was that while the propaganda wasn't going to change anyone's view on the Empire, the inevitable Imperial interrogations and crackdowns and disappeared innocents who were suspected of Rebel sympathies certainly would. (GM, on reading the notes for this plan: "You Neutral Evil motherfucker!" And then he laughed.) *The Wild Weasel Fleet - actually this one's getting used soon, but I don't think I talked about it; the group no longer has enough proton torpedoes to run the Floating Chrysanthemum Fleet, so I refit about half the ships with sensor-spoofing platforms designed to make them appear to Imperial sensors as Victory-class Star Destroyers (a lot smaller than the ones we see in the movies but widespread enough that the Rebels have captured a bunch). When activating the sensor-spoofing the 'startup' emission looks a lot like a ship dropping out of hyperspace; they can't actually do anything other than sit there and look threatening, but when you're in the middle of a pitched battle and fifty ships seem to have appeared right behind you, well, it tends to throw you off your game for a bit (before you realize they're fake). It may only get one or two rounds of confusion but hell, that can be more than enough. *Gonk Guns - Remember these dudes? They're called Power Droids, or affectionately, "Gonks" ('cause that's the noise they make). In-universe they're basically walking fuel pumps for power-intensive systems; basically they're a big ol' capacitor with legs. There's a type of blaster in Star Wars called an E-Web; it's basically a machine gun. It must be mounted or braced on a tripod to be fired effectively, and it has heavy power requirements. It didn't take long to realize that these were two great tastes that taste great together; I turned a bunch of Gonks into effectively walking pintle mounts for E-Webs. This let us cart weaponry that is normally used for defensive purposes only into decidedly undefensive situations, like boarding enemy starships. *The Lightsaber Launcher - we found a bunch of dead Jedi corpses with lightsabers. We took the lightsabers. No one will let me build a crossbow that fires them. Boo. Those're what I'm thinking of off the top of my head. Above and beyond the whole 'look how awesome my game is you guys seriously' ego-stroking, the point is that players will always surprise you. Always.'Cause dammit, that's half the fun of it.
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Mar 12, 2012 09:31
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Karandras posted:Yes, plus they aren't even that good if you're not force sensitive, they are just a really good sword if you can't block blaster shots with them. In the Michael Westen/hidden Imperial agent scene I talked about before, dude swiped one of the lightsabers and used it to cut holes in bulkheads to make for emergency escapes. When confronted he handed it over without protest, saying only "Those things are loving terrifying, how do people carry those around all the time? I thought for sure I was going to lop my own leg off if I wasn't careful!" And he's right. Lightsabers in the hands of non-Force-users tend to lead to self-dismemberment in pretty short order. The non-Force types in our group carry them, sure - but we call them UCTs (Universal Cutting Tools) and never, EVER break them out for combat because at least with a blaster you won't maim yourself if you miss.
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Mar 13, 2012 14:11
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FewtureMD posted:I highly suggest Unknown Armies! It's like NWOD if written by Hunter S. Thompson, and it's a roll-under skill d% system, so super simple. What I like about is that skills are completely freeform, so it's really easy to make your character unique. For example, in my last game a player was channeling the idea of the lone gunslinger, but with a harpoon. Harpoon was his highest skill, and he used it in any situation possible. Cultists menacing you? HARPOON! Somebody cuts you off in traffic? HARPOON! Later in the campaign, someelse made the BBEG stick his hand in a garbage processor through the power of "gently caress You, I Have Money." The best part that all you need for running a game is the sourcebook, since it has a multitude of character types, NPCs to use, plot hooks, and the most elegant riot rules I have ever seen in an RPG. Seconding this recommendation without hesitation, because UA is loving incredible. Very simple, very smooth, fairly balanced. Combat is stupidly dangerous, which can be somewhat jarring if you're more of a "kill everything that moves then kill it again to make sure" type, but I find it really effective. It also has the single best system for simulating mental stress and the resultant mental illness I've yet encountered in an RPG, so there's that.
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Mar 13, 2012 14:15
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I am reminded of an early game of Vampire:the Masquerade where one of my friends was GMing; having just discovered how disgusting the high-level powers of the Necromancy Discipline were, he promptly introduced an NPC who had a hobby of tearing the souls out of irritating people and binding them to mundane objects. Like his shoelaces. Dude had haunted shoelaces. Why? Style points, mostly.
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Mar 14, 2012 13:13
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I find that the best way to keep PCs who have acquired an army from getting bored is to introduce a villain with a bigger and nastier army. The same guys who were just yesterday sighing about being too successful and the focus of the game no longer being on their characters, et cetera, will invariably turn around and yell "Wait, no, gently caress THAT guy, our army is better and we're going to MAKE it better" and turn into Monty, Patton, Rommel, and Sun Tzu, focusing on leadership and tactics. Not because they realize that the game's focus has shifted but because somewhere out there is a dude cooler than them and almost no self-respecting gamer can permit that to happen.
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Mar 16, 2012 10:55
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There's a point, I think, where one loses the right to be mad at PC-on-PC violence. Actively inviting attack from the PC who's shown himself to be a violent killer and then putting that character's gun barrel to your head and daring him to do it? That's past said point. I mean, I'm no fan of antagonistic party roles but drat, man. If you poke the bear with a stick you can't then say "But I didn't know he was gonna EAT me!"
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Mar 16, 2012 14:55
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So it's been a while. Time to talk about the Battle For Coruscant in my Star Wars campaign - which is still ongoing, mind you, but hey. So I've talked about this game a bit before; it's a very, very long-running campaign. We started, in-universe, somewhere around the first film, and we've hit the Battle of Endor/Second Death Star. Our group and fleet has been dispatched to attack Coruscant - the capital world of the Empire - essentially as a distraction, to keep the Core World fleets on their toes while the main Rebel armada goes after the Emperor, who's off subjugating Ewoks right now. Other fleets have been dispatched for similar battles all around the area, and another large fleet is headed to Kuat Drive Yards (the place where they build Star Destroyers). Basically we drew the suicide mission - the "keep everyone busy so they don't notice our buildup over here" mission. Our job is to attack Coruscant itself and make the Empire believe we're committed to taking and holding the capital in a suicidal decapitation attack. Naturally, we have decided that the only thing better than making the Empire think we're trying to take Coruscant is actually taking Coruscant. Now let's talk about Coruscant's defenses. There are five layers of defenses; they are pretty brutal. * The outermost ring of defenses would be the 26 Star Destroyers (and their attendant ships) permanently assigned to guard the Capital. Typically 20 of them are in a loose sphere surrounding the planet while the other 6 are on regional patrol. * Beyond that, there is a series of several hundred Golan-class fortresses - space stations with a lot of guns - in a shell formation. * Next there are the satellites - thousands upon thousands of satellites with fighter-strength shield generators and turbolasers that are programmed to swarm at incoming ships. And which will also explode if you touch 'em. These are all computer-linked to a mainframe on the planet, and will coordinate their attacks with one another. * Then there's the planetary shield generators, which are many and varied and strong enough to put two layers of planetary-strength shields up around the whole planet with a third layer above certain vulnerable/important positions such as Imperial Center. * And finally there's the ground troops, which - counting COMPNOR militias (think the SS - not as well-trained militarily but all fanatically loyal to the Emperor (and only the Emperor)) - number somewhere in the hundreds of millions. So, you know, this is gonna be tricky. We pull in every ship, every favor we're owed, every ally we've made. Our fleet is smaller than theirs but not by a lot, and considering our crews' skill levels and the amount of firepower we've retrofitted to some of the ships we stand a decent chance in a stand-up fight. We can drop just over a hundred million troops, counting several planetary militias we can call on as well as all the Rogers (trade federation combat droids). We have also sent in several infiltration teams in advance on the Storm Hawk, a tramp freighter that we've outfitted with some kind of mondo-impressive stealth system that basically makes it invisible to sensors. The Storm Hawk can't stealth it up for the fighting to come - Coruscant has mass sensors that will defeat the stealth, but by hiding it in the mass shadow of a different ship we can use it to get people on-planet before the attack. Between our infiltrators and previously existing Rebel operatives, we can turn off the shield generators... twice, for short periods of time. The first time we do it, Imperial doctrine is to transfer control of the planetary shields to the local generators; therefore, the second time we turn the shields off it means the spies and operatives have to walk up to the shield generators and flip the off switch, which will get them killed. So we went in thinking we knew pretty well how things were gonna go, but remember how I said we've kind of cured the Empire of being stupid by killing all the officers who wouldn't innovate? Well... DivineCoffeeBinge fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Mar 18, 2012 |
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Mar 18, 2012 16:33
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Okay. We arrive at Coruscant. The planet's shields are down, and half their fleet is nowhere to be found... and the local general sends a message announcing their surrender. So this was unexpected. We're invited to land troops but choose not to fall for the obvious trap; while we're processing all this information a "Rebel fleet" - read: Imperial ships - appears and bombards the planet. Specifically, it bombards the slums - dedicated housing for nonhuman residents, mostly. Then it leaves again. The Imperial general publicly decries this "unwarranted aggression towards a planet that was prepared to surrender," raises shields, and in warps a bunch of Star Destroyers. So poof! Just like that we've lost the PR war already, and the Empire has rid itself of several thousand smelly xenos all in one swoop. So... poo poo. There is epic space fight now. Without going into the tactical blow-by-blow, suffice it to say they had a lot of cunning plans and a lot of neat tricks that we managed not to get caught by (mostly) and we drive off the local fleet while sustaining significant damage. We also blow a few holes in the Golan fortress coverage with planetary-scale torpedoes and those boarding spikes that the droid fleets have. While the Imperial fleet is off regrouping we decide we're going to land our troops; we decide to feint towards Imperial Center (the heart of the Empire) and instead land troops in a fairly deserted industrial region, where we can set up a perimeter and begin a long-term ground war; we figure we can get away with said long-term ground war on account of how the Battle of Endor began ~20 minutes ago in-game - which means we should be ~25 minutes from the Emperor's death and the resultant widespread confusion and temporary cessation of hostilities that canonically follows. 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? To blow a hole in the satellite coverage, we take some of our previously-damaged ships (three Carrick-class cruisers) which are already so badly damaged that they're only barely moving, and put Rogers (combat droids) in the cockpits and aim them at the planet. This will cause the satellites to swarm and attack the Carricks, so we can blow up the massed satellites from further out. We do so, and give the order for the shields to drop so we can land some of our troops. We land troops. My character, Miles, lands as well, and reports to the two PCs we already had on-planet - Flint, a Force-using Jedi commando badass, and Plan B, who's basically invisible at will (as Miles is minmaxed for computers, Plan B is minmaxed for stealth). A quick aside about Flint - Flint is 24th or 25th level by now. Flint is loving grotesque. Flint has survived orbital bombardment from a turbolaser. Spent a few weeks in the bacta tanks, sure, but he got shot from orbit and did not die. Lucky rolls, but still. Flint has already been groundside, clearing our LZ by going around to the local planetary defense systems (read: ground-side cannons) and killing all the people inside and then staffing them with our people. In one, he turned the corner and found a guard sitting behind a shield with a portable generator... and an E-Web Repeating Blaster. Flint got the drop on the guy and did enough damage to drop his shield, but not enough to keep him from shooting back. Here's how that exchange worked. Imperial: *keeps trigger button pressed, does 36 points of damage* Flint: *spends a Force point, rolls Absorb/Dissipate Energy, a Force thingy that lets him not get killed by this, and - long story short - takes zero damage* Imperial:  Flint:  Imperial: *removes rank insignia, stands up, walks away while shaking his head slowly* (Absorb/Dissipate is apparently the trick that Darth Vader used when Han shot at him and he deflected the shot with his hand; our group got quite the laugh when we realized that Flint had just done the same thing, only with so many shots that he turned into E.Honda for a minute there) We're getting troops down while some of the Imperials - including that "rebel fleet" from before - drop back in out of hyperspace, so our remaining spaceborne assets head that way while we get a perimeter set up, and it is suggested that perhaps, now that the Empire knows our attack on Imperial City's defenses was just a feint... maybe now is the perfect time to take a small commando group (read: the PCs and assorted lackeys) over to Imperial City to try and take over the extremely centralized control systems for the entire planet while everyone's trying to deal with our invasion...
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Mar 18, 2012 17:24
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So I can't speak much to the space battle stuff that's happening at about this point, on account of how I'm planetside. Suffice it to say there is a lot of shooting. More ships are dropping out of hyperspace. Our guys are horrifically outgunned, but they second-guess the Imperials a few times and manage to not get killed. Meanwhile we take the Storm Hawk and drop into the Imperial Throne Room. Sadly, we set off some alarms while so doing. But we disable them quickly, and then we reach the computer systems that control... well, pretty much everything. After bypassing more security systems, I'm presented with the login prompt. GM: Roll Computer Use, dude. Me: Okay, so that's 32 ranks plus 3 for our leader's Leadership roll back during the start of the attack plus 8 for my slicer rig plus... Dice: 20 Me: GM:  So, yeah. Coruscant is mine now. I manage to get every single groundside defense battery switched over to a maintenance mode - effectively, I've turned off all the anti-aircraft guns. So we decide "gently caress keeping our troops at the LZ; now that they don't have to worry about ground fire let's load them back up and get them over to Imperial Center." As the ships are landing, two things occur. Number One: another group of ships arrive, five Star Dreadnoughts - older ships, but loving massive ones, roughly Imperial Star Destroyer-sized. These are not registered to the Imperial Navy; they're registered to Kuat Drive Yards. Looks like the fighting there didn't go according to plan. 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. So yeah. We may be pretty well boned. But drat, if you gotta die, dying while taking Coruscant is pretty much the best way to do it in a Star Wars game, right?
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Mar 18, 2012 17:53
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Beardless posted:OH GOD WHAT HAPPENED NEXT! I don't know yet! Ask me in two weeks when we hopefully finish the battle (and possibly the game, depending on how the GM feels about it)!
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Mar 18, 2012 18:39
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GaryLeeLoveBuckets posted:I love your stories because I can't punch holes in them. Usually when I hear about a Star Wars game, I sperg out about little details, but your run down of Coruscant's defenses were really accurate. The GM knows far more about Star Wars than I would personally consider healthy; dude's an expert. Assume most inconsistencies regarding the universe to be my fault for misremembering. And yeah, it was the commandos, as well as pre-existing Rebel operatives who'd been deep-cover for ages (the dudes you hear about in gaming sourcebooks, in effect). Most of them died to get us on-planet, which is part of the reason we're very gung-ho about actually taking the place instead of just blowing poo poo up and leaving.
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Mar 18, 2012 20:39
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Bitchtits McGee posted:I don't even like Star Wars, and these stories are knocking me on my rear end with awesome. That is probably the coolest thing I've heard today, man, thanks! A few other miscellaneous details that I forgot to mention: 1) Miles has generated several 'paper agents' in ISB and Imperial Intelligence - spies that have "infiltrated the Rebels" that exist solely on paper and/or computer records. First thing I did when we dropped out of hyperspace to invade Coruscant was to send, under the ID of one of these paper agents, a message. A short message, burst-transmitted so as not to break his cover. Said message consisted of the accusation that three important Imperial officials on Coruscant had been secretly funding and supplying the Alliance for years, trying to engineer a scenario where the Emperor left Coruscant so that they could launch a coup under the pretext of a "Rebel attack." Forged evidence followed. Now, Imperial Intelligence is usually too smart to arrest important people in the middle of a battle on the word of one agent... which is why I sent it in a specific fashion. By making the burst transmission "accidentally" a little too powerful, I knew that the message would bleed over - it would be received on an II frequency, but it would also be audible on a frequency that was monitored by COMPNOR - and I made sure to send it in an Imperial encryption cipher that we knew COMPNOR had broken. COMPNOR is basically the Emperor's personal SS and/or brownshirts. They hold rallies. They are fanatically loyal, not to the Empire, but to the Emperor. The ISB (Imperial Security Bureau) was established as an arm of COMPNOR. They are not too smart to arrest important people in the middle of combat operations, so... we'll see. We haven't had the chance to see if COMPNOR and the army are actively trying to kill one another yet. 2) One of the ships in our fleet is referred to simply as Ship. Ship is an old, old vessel we found in a ship's graveyard and got up and running again. While Ship has outdated weaponry and has only recently been retrofitted with a modern shield generator, it is frequently referred to as "the best ship in the fleet" by its crew. Its main computer is actually a droid, which moves around Ship and sounds rather like a slightly more upbeat Marvin the Paranoid Android. Oh, and its programming is in a language no one recognizes. Probably because it was exclusively used by the Sith back in the days when they were a galaxy-wide threat. Yes, Ship is Evil with a capital E, and the reason its crew loves it so much is because Ship makes them because it is suffused with Dark Side energy somehow in a way I don't rightly grok. None of us know that in character, mind, though the Force users suspect. Ship has been trying to convince its captain - another PC - to bombard Imperial Center from orbit, because clearly that's the easiest and simplest way to win is kill everyone who isn't on your side. During the second shield drop, Ship managed to convince him to do so. "But we have people in Imperial Center!" "So? Aim carefully." "...good idea!" Ship's main weaponry are plasma-based, which - unlike modern turbolasers - are utterly useless against shields. They will decimate an unshielded ship but modern shields stop them completely cold. Ship is firing these at Imperial Center, being careful not to hit, y'know, those of us who are actually in Imperial Center (and the Throne Room). Thing about plasma weaponry is, it works kinda funny in the atmosphere. And by that I mean 'it sets the air on fire and turns into a giant Akuma-style fireball that hits the ground and ignites pretty much everything it touches, like steel or concrete or people.' Remember all that poo poo I said we were doing in the Throne Room? Yeah. While we're doing all that we can see out the windows that the sky is on fire.
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Mar 19, 2012 02:05
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Time Machine posted:You do know that there's a whole Executor-class Super Star Destroyer that's buried beneath Coruscant's surface, right? ...I did not. Now I have to see if I can cheese out a way for our characters to know about it.
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Mar 19, 2012 06:51
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Malachite_Dragon posted:The way things have been going, you could probably just tell the DM about it, show him the wiki link, and say "Dude, it's too awesome not to use One of the PCs has the perfect memory feat that lets you roll to see if you know about pretty much anything. That's my most hopeful way in.
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Mar 19, 2012 07:28
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" and he'll magic up some reference to it in the systems you've taken over.
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Liesmith posted:you critted on the computer use thing right? so presumably you have root access to a lot of imperial files. at the very least you can use that to find other imperial networks to slice later on, which DO have the info you want. Oh, I'm sure I could find the info; the tricky thing will be finding the info with enough time to send... let's say a half a million or so troops to go take the ship over and get it into the air quickly enough to affect the upcoming space battle... especially given the visitors who've joined the infiltration team in the Throne Room - I'm shortly going to be too busy being shot at to slice for a little bit, methinks. LaTex Fetish posted:DivineCoffeeBinge, how does your GM time-manage your game? I would assume your group has progressed beyond maps and grids, mostly because of the scale of things. The last series of posts happened in a pair of sessions, actually, and can take somewhere between five to eight hours for a session, depending on how into the game we are and how hungry we get before breaking for dinner. This upcoming session will be the third that we've spent on the Battle for Coruscant, not counting the session that was supposed to be entirely devoted to planning for the Battle For Coruscant except at the end we decided to pick up the burned ISB agent plot hook more firmly than the GM expected so we tacked that onto the end and ended up finally getting out of the gaming store really drat late.(And then two of us and the GM continued roleplaying a post-game conversation/shouting match out in the parking lot until like 2 AM because we were just really into it. My girlfriend was a little irritated with me for not getting home until 2. Yeesh.) Normally - recent sessions have been an exception - we pretty much do everything fairly freeform; GM describes situation, we describe actions, he responds and if we need to roll something he tells us to. It must be admitted that this means that the loudest players get the GM's attention most readily. Once combat starts we declare actions in initiative order, et cetera, and very rarely do we use grids or minis - though if need be we'll use hand-drawn maps or the like, in a 'I want to run over to this side of the room here' sense. These recent sessions, however, have been much, much more fast and loose; for the space battles, for instance, we basically describe our tactics, and the GM figures how well they ought to work, and then gives us a result - since the individual impact of our PCs is fairly small in the battle itself. Occasionally he'll have us make some gunnery rolls or the like and then use those as a basis to extrapolate the performance of the fleet crews as a whole. For fleet positioning and the like he actually brought out a whiteboard for us to draw rectangles representing the positioning of various fleet elements, like a Clausewitzian-era planning session. (Also our GM is making noises about drafting me to run a Pendragon game once this campaign is over; I'd be happy to run it but Jesus, talk about setting the bar high. Flint's player would also like to draft me to run a game, but he would prefer Amber Diceless; when the GM mentioned that he hates the Amber system (for good reasons) Flint said probably the nicest thing I've heard all month, namely "The system sucks, but he makes it sing." Jesus, no pressure or anything, right?) Oh, later tonight I'll have to write up the background behind my current Moral Dilemma for Miles. I think you guys'll find that amusing too.
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Mar 19, 2012 21:22
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Whybird posted:I'm not sure that's just any Sith lackey. "Does he have a panel of blinky lights on his chest?" was the first question out of my mouth; thankfully the answer was "no, he's not that guy." (Phew!) The bit I'm really most afraid of is "the Alliance kills the Emperor and Vader but doesn't have the ships to survive the rest of the battle of Endor." That's kind of where I think he might be going. Still, we won't know for another few weeks... Re: running a PbP - I've considered it a few times, but in all honesty I've had trouble keeping my interest level in PbPs high enough in the past; I tend to lose steam. I think it's because a PbP is something I see every day whereas a tabletop ends up being a weekly or biweekly thing, so it never gets common enough to feel like an obligation, whereas the first time I find myself looking at a PbP and saying "Eh, I'll do it tomorrow" I find myself continuing to procrastinate. That said, I've managed to keep my interest level high on the PbPs I've been playing in, so maybe I'm getting over myself, and I have a few ideas for spacing out time and effort, so... maybe. (Hell if I know what I'd run, though) Now, as promised, the background details on my current Moral Dilemma: Way, way back in the day (like around 7th level) the group encountered an old abandoned asteroid mining station occupied entirely by droids, who had risen up and slain all of their overseers and declared themselves the Congregation Of The Droid God. They had a crazy High Priest Droid and everything. We had to hide from them lest we be the next sacrifices to the Droid God, and while looking for places to hide we encountered a large mainframe computer that the droids were interfacing with daily as a part of their 'prayer'. Can you guess where this is going? Yep - in what became really the first step away from 'generic slicer' towards 'mad scientist,' Miles hacked the mainframe... so that the droids would recognize him as the Droid God. Yay, free mining base! Over time, Miles managed to isolate and refine a program that would insert what he called the "Droid God Algorithm" into most any droid - said droid would immediately view Miles as a religious figure and obey him without question. Problem is, many of the droids thus affected tended to go crazy after a while. Miles still hasn't quite nailed down why, but that's less important to the current dilemma, which is: There are these things called Planetary Management Droids. They were giant ENIAC-sized immobile boxes that were designed to run planets - basically eliminating the need for bureaucracy. They proved pretty unpopular with the bureaucrats who had to decide whether or not to buy them, for obvious reasons, and these days only five of them still exist. Coruscant has two of them. They are in fact hooked up to the computer system I'd hacked at the end of last session. Miles has the Algorithm cued up and ready to go. So the way I figure it, if Miles infects the giant brain droids with the Droid God Algorithm, one of two things happens - either they do everything he tells them to (good for us, bad for the Empire) or they go crazy and stuff starts malfunctioning all over the planet (not so good for us, but still bad for the Empire). Problem is, some of the stuff that will malfunction include things like "the atmosphere," since Coruscant is essentially one giant city and thus everything that lets people live there is regulated by computer...
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Mar 20, 2012 00:13
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Dareon posted:could we please drop the argument and return to posting stories? Stories > arguments. So way, way, way back in the day White Wolf published LARP rules for Vampire: the Masquerade. Now, Vampire LARPS are pretty much a cesspit, we all know this now... but when the game was new, well, we still thought it could be awesome. So our group organized one at the local gaming store. Of course, since A) the game was new and we didn't have as firm a grasp on the rules as we could have, and B) we were all much younger then, we cane up with some pretty batshit crazy and/or minmaxed characters. (One thing we learned right quick: the rank 5 Fortitude power is a quick way to ensure that you never get XP again. It allows you to ignore a single source of damage at the cost of a permanent Willpower point (sunk cost: 3 XP) or three physical Traits (sunk cost: 3 XP). Given that you usually get 1-3 XP per session, this means you basically give up your XP for the day in exchange for ignoring the fuel-air bomb or whatever. Problem is, when a GM wants to demonstrate how nasty a villain is but doesn't want to kill a character... who do they have that NPC target? That's right - Fortitude boy. If your GM isn't careful, you pretty much lose the chance to ever keep up with the XP curve in exchange for being the mine canary for the rest of the group. Yaaay.) Anyways, this one dude had an... interesting concept. He was a Malkavian (the guys who are all crazy) and everyone thought he had multiple personalities - one week he'd claim to be Tomas the Lasombra and another week he'd be Bob the Nosferatu or whatever. This was incorrect. Each of his 'personalities' was actually the soul fragments of a vampire he had Diablerized (drank the soul out of). His actual craziness was megalomania. Every time he Frenzied, however, he would switch 'personalities.' Point is, one week he's running around as Tomas and he's basically undermining the efforts of everyone trying to keep the city from sucking and being a political gadfly, and I figure if this personality stays dominant for another few weeks we're probably going to have chaos on our hands. So clearly something must be done. That something was a cheap plastic squirt pistol filled with LSD and DMSO in solution. Squirt vampire, wait fifteen minutes, then walk up to him, throw a handful of confetti in his face, and shout "SPIDERS!" And that was the last we saw of Tomas for a while. The best part of that story, I like to think, is that when randomly determining which personality would be next on the chart he got a female persona, and so arrived at the next game in drag. Which isn't the best part, the best part was several of the other players checking him out and then double-taking and feeling faintly nauseous when they realized whose rear end they'd been ogling.
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Mar 21, 2012 06:14
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I love how this thread vacillates between "interesting stories" and "let's give advice and/or argue about gaming etiquette or the social contract." That's not sarcasm, I kinda do love it. Wands of Wonder/Decks of Many Things/et cetera are interesting little items, in that they only really work out well in a game that's willing to take itself less seriously or with players who are willing to run with them; if you're having any kind of srs bznss with your roleplaying they're a gaping maw of suck. When I was young and foolish I tossed a custom-built artifact into a game that was like a Wand of Wonder but it had one of the dreaded 600-result megatables; even then I had to fudge it a bit and start "accidentally" reading the "wrong" results sometimes to ensure no single player got screwed over too much. In the end I got lucky; the PCs hit the result where the item's creator shows up to reclaim it and allows them to pick and choose which of the various curses/changes/benefits they want to keep and then reverts the rest of them. The reason they blow is that they take story control away from both the GM and the players and turn it over to polyhedral chunks of plastic, which do not care whether you're having fun or not. I wouldn't say that's always a bad thing - some groups, in some games, thrive on that kind of chaos - but they're definitely a thing to think very long and hard about putting into your game. Also, does anyone else remember the tricks you could do with random-result items in 2nd Edition AD&D with a Wild Mage? There were things called Bracers of Brandishing that, when used with a wand, made the wand burn through 1d10-5 charges per use (so you could actually spend -4 charges and thus gain 4 charges). Wild Mages had a chance to choose the "random" result on a randomized-result item... so give them a wand of wonder and the aforementioned bracers and they could be tossing fireballs out of that wand all day every day and gaining charges as they went. God, it was broken.
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Mar 22, 2012 02:55
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I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt here; I mean, the new guy seemed more'n a little thick. But... drat, man, that's cold. I dunno, the guy was insistent on the dice roll standing and he knew the character wasn't a fit for the group and whatnot, but I just... I've always been a big fan of the New Guy Grace Period myself. Until the New Guy is no longer a New Guy, everyone finds some way to holster the intra-party hostility because otherwise the New Guy always ends up getting the shaft from a fellow player. Ain't no better way to drive someone away from the hobby.
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Mar 22, 2012 22:06
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8. Wand of Wonder-Where-That-Kid-I-Went-To-High-School-With-Is-Now 9. Shield of +1 vs. Flung Monkey Feces 10. Girdle of Average Human Strength
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Mar 23, 2012 08:48
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11. Scroll of Bigby's Offensive Gesture 12. Wand of Non-Magic Missile (does 1d6 damage as a thrown weapon) 13. Periapt of Proof Against Preaching (allows the user to ignore any nonmagical sermon) 14. Figurines of No Power
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Mar 23, 2012 10:54
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Adelheid Stark posted:This seems possibly useful for a character with below-average strength. Exactly. Those are my favorite useless magic items - the ones that could be useful in just the right circumstances.
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Mar 23, 2012 11:19
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46. Gain 2d4 followers who will follow you around and play your theme music on magical synthesizers. Bonus to diplomacy checks, negatives to stealth checks and getting to sleep at night.
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Mar 23, 2012 14:10
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wellwhoopdedooo posted:e: herp, decks only have 52 cards Not Tarot decks, which the Deck of Many Things is pretty clearly inspired by. So let me ask - what were some of the best ways you ever saw low-level, relatively minor magical spells or items used in your game? One of my favorites was the time our wizard threw a few Continual Light spells on some blunted arrows; when we ran into Shadows or needed to throw up a flare in army combat or just needed a flashy distraction, one of the party members who could use a bow had a flying brilliant light source ready to hand at pretty much all times. It's such a simple little trick, but the applications are almost endless.
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Mar 24, 2012 01:28
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Upon discussion with some of my other gaming buddies, it was decided that probably our most notable gaming experience - certainly one of the most memorable - had almost nothing to do with a game at all. We were gaming at one guy's apartment and decided to order pizza; it was a pretty big group that night and several of us wanted different pizzas so we ended up getting like four pies. No big, right? Having witnessed this transaction, a wandering pothead (2HD monster) promptly knocked on my buddy's door and asked if we had any weed he could buy off of us (the precise phrasing was "You, uh... you got any trees, man?" which I have to admit, I had not heard before), much to the confusion of the fairly square apartment-owner and the amusement of the rest of us. It was funny - and memorable - because despite the fact that none of us were recreational drug users (at the time), you couldn't exactly fault the kid's logic, you know? "Hey, that's a lot of pizza for one apartment. They don't have music playing, so it's probably not a party, so... they must have the munchies! Right?" It's a not-unreasonable conjecture! So, yeah. That was the gaming experience that they made me promise to post, if only because the utterance of "You, uh... you got any trees, man?" shuts down a game for at least ten minutes while we all laugh like hell.
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Mar 26, 2012 05:35
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17. Bear Naked 1d3 dire bears, mysteriously bereft of fur, appear and attack the party. They can be convinced to stop attacking if they are offered suitable clothing. 18. Unbearable Pain Random party member is cursed to suffer terrible pain whenever he is more than 50' from a bear of any type.
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Apr 5, 2012 00:03
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K3-PX is awesome and I like the cut of his jib.
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Apr 8, 2012 20:13
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Hopefully I will have more stories (even potentially The Conclusion depending on whether the GM wants to keep going) soon; RL issues keep pushing our gaming sessions back. Also I hope I'll be able to live up to the expectations.
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Apr 9, 2012 09:06
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Okay. I'm tired, so I apologize for any lack of coherence, but I promised a report from our latest Star Wars game and by God you're getting it. The Conquest of Coruscant, Session Three: Everyone Gets hosed So. If you recall when last we left our 'heroes' there were three of us in the Emperor's Throne Room on Coruscant - Miles the slicer genius (me), Plan B The Invisible Ninja, and Flint the Jedi Who Survived An Orbital Bombardment. Also, forty Rebel mooks (16 techies with some minimal combat training, 24 troopers). In our stealth ship, the Storm Hawk, was another PC, Blake the Engineer In Powered Armor, as well as a crew and 6 droidekas. 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). GHII Fuckhead, it should be noted, is 29th level. The Guardsmen have been scaled up to level 19. Our levels range from 24 (Flint) to 18 (me), as well as the 6th and 7th level mooks. The Inquisitor proceeds to demonstrate the cheese levels inherent in the Force Leap/Great Cleave combo, and starts killin' mooks despite getting hit twice by Flint's Blaster Cannon. Meanwhile I designate a spot for Blake to hit from the ship so that he and the droidekas can drop in through the ceiling, which would have been awesome except he hit the roof not with lasers but with ship-scale concussion missiles, which ruined the day of most everyone inside. But hey, they dropped in! Over the next several hours we played I believe six rounds of combat. Flint closed to lightsaber range and dueled with GHII Fuckhead; for 'dueled' read 'they hit each other several times and absorbed/dissipated the attacks' (and to forestall the inevitable complaint: GM ruled that A/D Energy can be used on lightsabers because the opening cinematic for KOTOR clearly showed a character doing just that, and it's canon enough for him). The guardsmen were left to the rest of us. Thermal detonators were tossed. Several of them. At once. Also, the droidekas didn't really give a poo poo about that whole 'firing into melee' bit and actually ended up almost killing as many of our dudes as the Guardsmen did. (also, somehow the techs proved impossible to kill. Lightsaber attack? Yeah, he made his Fort save. Stun effects from the Force Pike? Yeah, they'll save those. Several times. In a row. The soldiers had poo poo dice luck, but the techs proved nigh-unkillable; we ended this scene with four living techs (one stabilized at -4 HP) to three living troopers. Yeesh.) GHII Fuckhead finally gets in a lucky crit on Flint and drops him (it's hard to Absorb/Dissipate 62 points of damage). We start retreating. Miles actually covers the retreat by lobbing stun grenades, effectively stunlocking the GHII (who was finally out of Heroic Surges) and the three surviving Guardsmen (two of which were actually unconscious and coup de grace'd by techs - 6th level dudes! Yeah, they leveled). Oh, and there's a space battle, too. We are ordered to hold the line, because the ships've gotta leave for a bit; after a masterful Astrogation roll involving copious use of Force Points, the fleet hyperjumps out and then back in again behind the incoming Star Dreadnoughts (four Mandator-class ships and one Mandator II)and wreck their day something fierce. We'll get back to them. So we're on our way out - with Flint down there is no way the rest of us are combat-capable enough to face Fuckhead down, he's just too loving buff and besides we're not the combat-bunnies. We get aboard the Storm Hawk, leaving behind presents like 'still more thermal detonators' and 'a few more concussion missiles.' Yeah, the Emperor's Throne Room? That fall down go boom. I tried to hit Fuckhead as he dropped like a rock with a concussion missile. Alas! Then he vanished. I know how he vanished, OOCly, but haven't yet figured out ICly that he Force Pulled himself over to the one thing in the vicinity not dropping like a stone - namely, our ship. He clung to our hull until we landed. Fucker!  Plan is, currently, to get Flint down on the ground to coordinate our ground forces - he's out of physical action but he can still give commands, his INT score is fine - and use the Storm Hawk to start supporting the ground troops by suppressing the Imperial counterattack. Now, in space, Victor - our other Force user and Admiral and starfighter jock and PR front - is chatting on a secure channel to the Moff in charge of the planetary defense when said Moff plays for him a message that was just received, over an open channel, unencrypted. I'll explain what the message was later. The Moff gloats a bit; Victor makes a fist and tells the GM, "Yeah, I'll take the Dark Side points." He doesn't choke the guy out with the Force; he squeezes his heart until it pops. And records this for later broadcast. Now with the local commander dead, Imperial command and control is just plain hosed. The local officers remain in place - and they're getting the shields and anti-air weaponry back online - but there's no one to tell them to charge, so they're not doing it. COMPNOR isn't waiting, though; they're sending in COMPFORCE. COMPFORCE is basically the SS crossed with the Boy Scouts - fanatically loyal to the Emperor, well-equipped, well-armored, well-regarded... and poorly-trained. "Here's your gun. Here's your body armor. When we tell you to kill the enemies of the Emperor, you go kill them. Welcome to COMPFORCE!" That's pretty much the extent of their training. Basically our troops are forming wonderful protective ramparts made from COMPFORCE troopers; every time a trooper climbs over the corpse of one of his deceased comrades he is shot and thus makes the pile higher. Between the troops we have in Imperial Center and the troops we've landed elsewhere which we were in the process of ferrying over to Imperial Center, the Imperials are pretty much in a Carthage situation - yes, they have us surrounded, but we have them surrounded as well and our two fronts and squeeze shut on 'em. The space situation is still a little dicey, but we might be able to handle the ground... except, maybe, for that message I mentioned earlier. There's a Moff on the screen; behind him, stuff is on fire. "This is Moff Tiaan Jerjerrod," he says. "The Rebel fleet has been destroyed, with... consequences. All orders, even those received from the Emperor or anyone claiming to be Emperor, are to be relayed through me. Further explanation will be made once we arrive at our destination." If you didn't recognize the name, don't feel bad, I didn't either. After all, Vader was there, and the Emperor; who cares about the Moff who was titularly in command of the Second Death Star? It looks like the Emperor was killed but the Death Star never got blowed up. And now it's coming to say hello. ...me, I say we steal it.
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Apr 15, 2012 05:07
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Yawgmoth posted:Probably gonna reiterate this every time you post about this game, but goddrat this is how the movies should have been. Tried to bring it up; was informed that there is no way for Miles to know about it. The fact that our GM knew about it already has me a trifle concerned.
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Apr 15, 2012 05:23
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 04:07 |
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CAPSLOCKGIRL posted:I'm new to GMing, with my current game being the first (Well second, but the other game literally lasted one session) I've ever taken the reigns for. I'm teaching two new players how to play Pathfinder, and as part of a local festival, they had to win a combat trial (Which the Wizard took home by pretending to box while using an energy attack) and a talent competition. I though our two spellcasters would use some spells to create some flashy effects and bring home the prize. Instead they held an impromptu rap battle with their high linguistics scores while the fighter and the to-be Shadowdancer Rogue danced in the background. You were correct. It is very cool!
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Apr 15, 2012 17:49
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