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Agrikk posted:
This is amazing. Please tell me you have more of the amazing stories of the Lucky Flash. 
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Aug 26, 2014 21:10
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VanSandman posted:
There's one in every group. The one in one of my current groups is kind of hilarious in that it doesn't come out of him being dumb so much as monumentally uncreative. He's a good guy, an old friend, and he isn't disruptive or anything, just very prone to latching onto the first thing he sees and staying stuck on it like an angry pitbull. For instance, we're playing an old school Warhammer Fantasy RP 2nd Ed game where the PCs are all Wizards of different flavors. He's a Death wizard, the mages who are best at dealing with undead and who deal in entropy and time magic. He also rolled a high Weapon Skill for a starting character and decided, thus, that the best use of his (unarmored, lightly armed) PC is to rush into melee. We're trying to hold a gate against skeletons and the necromancer animating them, he has a very powerful 'Undead Shall Not Pass' spell, and he ignores it to spend the entire fight trying to put down a single skeleton with his melee weapon while the gates nearly fall and the rest of us have to take insane risks to get the necromancer in range and take him out. The GM had thought the encounter would be pretty easy, since we had a wizard whose magic was all specialized against our enemy and the rest of us could deal with whatever he couldn't stop, and instead it nearly killed us all.
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Sep 6, 2014 07:14
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Remembered a Dark Heresy story about an incident that wasn't meant to be the end of the campaign it was in, but we decided it should be because the PCs were never going to top it. The PCs were a Fenrisian Space Wolf Fangirl (who was also a giant Feral Guardsman), a quiet, efficient, half-insane-due-to-failing-Insanity/Corruption-tests techpriest, and a very angry Imperial Commissar whose mentor had turned to Chaos and made Daemon Prince. They go to the Commissar's feudal-world home to investigate some bad poo poo going down with one of the local kings, and lo and behold, they suddenly find palaces of bone erupting from the ground and unholy, chittering things pouring from the sky as a full on Warp Incursion starts. Instead of fleeing to report it, they requisition a battle tank from the local Guard forces, drive it into the middle of the Incursion, fighting off daemons and an attempt by the ground to eat their tank, until they're finally immobilized in the castle courtyard. They tell the crew to keep shooting and survive as long as they can, hopefully they can end the incursion before they run out of ammo, and run into the castle. They get split up when the Commissar's Mentor appears as part of a small cabal of minor Daemon Princes who had offered the king a place among them in return for damning his planet, and the Commissar tells the other two to keep going and stop the ritual, he'll hold this guy off. He's fully expecting to die. He fights his mentor for a couple rounds, but the guy's impossibly skilled and slices his arm clean off, taking him to the point where one more solid hit will kill him. The mentor's Slaaneshi, and is taking the time to savor watching the Commissar bleed out while Khorne whispers in his ear 'I can help you, you just gotta give in, angry dude.' He spends Fate points to undo his Blood Loss and Stun, gets to his feet, and charges the Slaaneshi with a shriek of defiance and crits the ever-loving gently caress out of him, cutting him down and Banishing him back to the Warp. He then looks down at his severed arm, ties it to his back, and runs to join the rest of the party where they're pinned down by daemons and trying to kill the King before he Ascends to daemonhood and turns the planet into a Daemon World. Keep in mind the Commissar is still at 'any more damage will kill you', but he throws himself into the fight with his one remaining arm and his blood-soaked chainsword and gives the Techpriest and Guardsman one clean shot at the King as he surprises the daemons, which they nail, blowing the guy apart and banishing the Incursion entirely, sending the monsters screaming back into the Warp and saving the world. He then collapses and they drag him back to their barely surviving tank, fix the treads, and drive back out to meet their Inquisitor, who is basically doing an astonished slow clap that they not only survived, but succeeded. I had more campaign planned, but...we all decided that was the right note for those PCs to go out on.
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Sep 6, 2014 15:08
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Agrikk posted:
Jesus Christ yes. 
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Sep 7, 2014 06:56
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We had a similar Evil character in an Evil campaign. Elaith, an Asamir Favored Soul/Soul Eater. Someone the Devils had held down and forced the thirst for souls on, to corrupt him and turn him from a servant of Good to a servant of Darkness, and it had loving worked. He still looked like a holy warrior, and had all kinds of gear on him like a Merciful sword and skill at grappling because he'd been loath to take lives before his change; now he used it to capture people in order to do his soul cocaine until it was shooting out of his eyes like evil laser beams and he was strong enough to punch through marble columns (Soul Eater is goddamn hilarious). The thing is, he was effective, useful to the party, and discrete about his actions until it came to be time to throw down. He happily walked around convincing people he was a holy knight, and they could trust him with the plans of the forces of Good, and couldn't you just join him someplace private, he has dire news the Prelate alone needs to hear and *Nom*. Creepy and unsettling, but effective and subtle. He worked with the rest of us mostly because we always made sure he got his fix and that was all he really, truly cared about anymore.
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Sep 7, 2014 18:32
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God Of Paradise posted:
This is actually how you describe a bad RPG character. 'I moved things forward but hated my character and didn't have any fun and was too depressed to play' is not an example of a good evil character. You're right not to cause bad problems for everyone else, but if your character bores the hell out of you you probably shouldn't bother playing them.
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Sep 14, 2014 19:18
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Yawgmoth posted:Never underestimate how far a party will go to protect/save/resurrect the Team Mascot. When I first ran Dark Heresy, the party wanted an Adept but no-one wanted to play the terrified scholar dragged along on horrifying adventures, so they asked for an NPC one to tag along. They would later go on to attack an Inquisitor Lord himself to get their terrified nerd back, as well as defending and dragging the poor man through a daemonic incursion (on three separate occasions), an underhive, and multiple outright warzones. They thought it was hilarious that they were able to keep this bookish, frightened university professor alive the entire campaign.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:09
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One of the DH campaigns I ran (I think DH has produced the best stories of any of the 40k RPGs, for me, maybe rivaled by Black Crusade) featured a party of explorers going into the Underhive to look for relics of technology. The party's Techpriestess was a former ganger herself, who had paid the 'sinner's toll' by bringing something valuable to Mechanicus explorers and been allowed back into the real Hive and into tech-Seminary. They worked with Trauma's old gang a lot, as they were settled near the Great Elevator that led from the Upper Hive down to the hellhole below and the party used the Kitbash Kutters as their sort of Mechanicus basecamp. One day, a Spyrer (Rich fuckers who put on incredibly advanced gear and go slaughter underhivers for fun) came through and killed a couple of the Kutter NPCs, including the previous Gang Lord and an old merchant the party was fond of. Trauma followed her up, confronted her in the Spyre of the Hive, and politely told her 'I know what you did and it got in the way of the Mechanicus, I will find a way to make you pay for it.' The Spyrer woman laughed it off and kept walking. Trauma used Ferric Lure to pull the pins on all the Spyrer's grenades surreptitiously and walked off praising the Machine Spirits for bringing justice to such a heretic as horrified nobles watched an 'equipment failure' reduce the Spyrer to a greasy smear. The party later worked to get that Noble House excommunicated on suspicion that their Spyrer tradition was Khorne worship by deceiving an Acolyte team, leading to the downfall of the entire house. Players can get really, really mad when you mess with their home base and 'their' NPCs.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:57
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I was thinking about the X-COM Spycraft game I was in once, and I remembered a character who lives in infamy among my friends: Shifter, the Faceman. Shifter was a deep-cover operative with a chameleon-like personality, able to make himself at ease in almost any social situation. His player couldn't make the first couple sessions, so he and the DM came up with an idea; Shifter would play one-on-one makeup sessions as he worked his way into the auction of a stolen plasma pistol by a shady arms dealer to an IRA boss and other organizations. We only later found out any of this was going on; Shifter's efforts turned our hilariously failed first infiltration (we rolled terribly, planned badly, and basically made every rookie mistake possible for a fresh group of agents) into slander he was able to turn against one of the potential buyers, blaming our bungled infiltration on another faction involved. We then learned from our mistakes and did a lot better with the rest of the operation, leading up to attacking the convoy carrying the plasma pistol in an attempt to kill or arrest the buyer and recover the weapon. This was the first session Shifter's player could make. By this point, he had the guy we were after convinced he was his best friend and closest advisor, to the point that our target, who had gotten free of the wreckage of his car and had a clean line of escape, came back to rescue Shifter and try to get him to safety, only to get tazed for his trouble and brought in by our team. I've always liked the Faceman class since.
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Nov 3, 2014 19:40
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:4E has been nice because the party rarely moves faster than two or three combat encounters a session, so it's not hard to fully plan one session and then see where the party's behavior takes them next week. When I moved back to 3E a month or two ago for a nostalgia kick, the amount of planning I had to do for one session killed my kick by week two or three. The solution, obviously, is to do as much balancing and prepwork as 3E itself does: None, just do it on the fly.
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Nov 6, 2014 01:24
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No-one (sane) playing 3E is ever playing for the rules. They're playing to roll some dice, hopefully get high numbers, and laugh with friends while pretending they put a lot of thought into picking feats and poo poo.
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Nov 6, 2014 02:52
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It's wizards all the way down, really.
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Nov 16, 2014 08:04
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Does that actually work? I was under the impression most Cthulhoid BS is immune to tommy guns.
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Nov 19, 2014 07:23
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Though Deep Ones are kind of the chump jobbers of the CoC world. Unless you're in the water. Don't be in the water with Deep Ones.
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Nov 19, 2014 08:07
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I wonder, have anyone ever had a good experience with a DMPC or long-term party ally? I mean, you can always tell the story is going to go bad when you hear 'And it's his favorite PC from X campaign' but has that poo poo ever gone right?
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Dec 22, 2014 19:17
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I asked mostly to make sure I wasn't alone in having it work out pretty well. In the Pathfinder game I ran (before deciding gently caress Pathfinder) the party rescued a parish priestess from a horrible place-spirit in not-France and decided to bring her along as a healer and buffbot. I think that's one of the keys; the party deciding to bring the character with them.
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Dec 24, 2014 07:47
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Echophonic posted:Sidelined all the punk-rear end DM fiat dudes like Elminster and murderated a bunch of gods. I think Mystra ate it and now wizards have Daily powers? Also added all the cool races to placeswhere they made sense. Pretty sweet if you ask me. If an event in Faerun killed off Elminster whoever wrote it will be forever my hero. Did this happen? Did Elminster and Mystra buy it?
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Dec 24, 2014 09:47
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How do you set up magic bear Goddess and not realize you've achieved your peak and should run with it?
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Dec 26, 2014 01:46
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Kai Tave posted:That's really bizarre. But that gets you awesome ways to motivate the PCs and get them engaged via the kid who stole the Arch Militant's pistol once and the RT was like 'I can respect a lad who goes right for the inferno pistol' and adopted him. That actually happened once.
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Dec 26, 2014 07:34
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I remember in one of our games in high school we discovered Hobo Dave wasn't actually lying/drunk/crazy and really was king of a secret, fabulous golden city hidden beneath the sewers.
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Dec 26, 2014 20:59
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You know, I'll give your GM credit for at least understanding what was going wrong and rolling with the last twist there.
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Jan 4, 2015 00:22
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My ex girlfriend is a caring and kind nurse in training whose usual PCs are axe wielding murdermachines, demon cultists, and terrifying mutants.
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Jan 31, 2015 23:16
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petrol blue posted:It's almost like RPGs are an excuse to explore aspects of yourself that can't get much real-life time! Well, obviously. Back when my arthritis was relatively untreated because I didn't have insurance (Thanks, Obama! I'm super glad to have good health insurance now!) I played a lot of very physically capable and agile characters because I, myself, couldn't move very well and was constantly sore.
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Feb 1, 2015 01:19
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I was running an Adeptus Evangelion game, and one of the players decided he'd keep the lovely, lovely default Pallet Rifle around for comedy for the first battle. His first shots struck the Angel and did nothing, because the gun does d10 damage to a creature with likely DR 8-10 or more, even at low levels. Then the gun jammed. So he looks at me and goes. "You know, gently caress it. I throw the rifle at it." He hits the Core, bypasses the AT Field, and rolls a triple exploding 10 for damage, blowing the thing the gently caress up. The only Angel to ever be killed by the Pallet Rifle.
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Feb 16, 2015 19:31
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Golden Bee posted:No play in a month means the game is dead. It's your fault on this one, but let me know if you ever want to buy a bridge. I dunno, my current irl game has missed 3 weekly sessions in a row but it's been because someone gets wildly sick each week because it's crud season.
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Feb 17, 2015 03:33
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Kulebri posted:The thing is, as a GM, you're *always* in control, no matter what. No matter how powerful or clever or lucky the players get, you're always going to have more resources than them. For some reason, though, crappy GM's don't seem to understand that, and get extremely insecure when PCs do something they don't anticipate leading to stupid overreactions. "What, your flight spell completely negates my pressure-plate corridor? Well gently caress you it's several miles long so your spell will run out before you get to the end" "You prepared Death Ward this morning so you're immune to level drain? Well guess what you were dispelled on your way in and the wraith still drains you". Just loving give the players their "a-ha!" moment, let them feel good that they out-thought you and quietly add another obstacle somewhere down the line if you need to preserve tension. In 13th Age, I had no idea their Cleric had Turn Undead ready and she vaporized a good bit of a major boss's backup on turn one. There's really no reason to do anything but say 'Well, I guess that worked out really well and that power worked.' No summoning extra reinforcements or whatever, they set themselves up to win fairly.
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Mar 26, 2015 14:57
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Doodmons posted:It's a shame. Our group's plan if we all died was to collectively come back as a group of torpored German Landschnekts who awoke at the same time in the city caves. We were all going to borrow plate armor and fake swords from our reenactor friends and get character builds that were carefully statted to be absolutely monstrous but coincidentally required absolutely no approvals from GMs at all. We were going to spend all our time drinking beer and having a laugh and telling anyone who tried to communicate with us that we were speaking 16th century German and if they didn't have that as a language we couldn't understand them. Then occasionally roll out and stomp on any combat encounter that presented itself. Ah well. This would have been a fantastic idea.
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May 27, 2015 04:29
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In a setting where magic and enchantment are based on dreams and embodied ideas and memories, I had a player enchant his .357 revolver with the idea of the Video Game Magnum, turning it into an armor piercing one-handed sniper rifle.
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Jun 8, 2015 17:14
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Did ammo suddenly become bizarrely scarce for it too? Because that would be incredible. 'Well yes sir we carry .357 right...um...huh...we...seem to have run out somehow?' You have given me a fantastic idea.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:04
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Harrow posted:That is fantastic and I love it and now I want to run a game in that setting. I wonder if my players would be creative enough to really play with the concept of magic as realized ideas. It's the sequel to a fantasy game I ran about breaking an endless and pointless cycle of Ages between 'Light and Dark' by killing the divine bureaucrat left behind to empower the destined heroes and destroyers every thousand years. 1000 years after the first game, one of the Dark Lords who was only sealed away (they didn't have the resources to kill him at the time) has gotten out, as expected, and he and a new crop are trying to come again into the lands of men. In the meantime, without a regularly scheduled apocalypse every 1000 years, the Metal Age has been defined by the end of medieval stasis and the advancement of both magic and science to a near future world. The old land of berserkers and schaldmaidens has become a socially tolerant Scandinavian democracy, only to find itself besieged by a dark wizard who uses the dreams of transhumanism to try to build a world where no-one has the option to suffer via his army of death robots converting people into contented, happy cyborgs. The heroes take to the hills to raid cybernetic conversion camps and play Norwegian Fantasy Partisan X-COM. I admit this game was basically inspired by Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords and then putting my own spin on it. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Jun 9, 2015 |
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Jun 9, 2015 19:48
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Used modified Warhammer Fantasy 2e for the Fantasy Zombie Apocalypse stuff in the first game, using modified Dark Heresy for the future stuff. It seemed to fit a group of people who start out not really knowing what the hell they're doing, since the first game followed a bunch of conscripts who ended up being essential to saving the world and this one is a bunch of civilians. Rewriting tons of the equipment and stuff to make it no longer Warhams based, modifying how magic works, that kind of thing.
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Jun 9, 2015 20:02
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Freudian posted:People I follow on tumblr posted the end results of their D&D campaign: You had ONE JOB, Paladin.
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Jul 18, 2015 21:06
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So I'm running a Double Cross campaign in a setting I came up with for another campaign, which is mostly an urban fantasy setting but with some weird biblical backing from the Parables of Enoch and such. The team of PCs are a former Dominican nun and ex-Inquisitor werewolf knight (Neumann Super Skill/Chimera Physical Shapeshifting), a fairy knight errant changeling woman (Orcus Domain and Space Magic/Solaris Plant Magic) and a gravity wizard with demonic powers because idiot British skull and bones types tried to sacrifice them and accidentally messed up the bargain and gave the powers they were sacrificing them for to their victim (Pure Balor Gravity Wizard). Think Double Cross Shin Megami Tensei and you aren't that far off. Anyway, their current mission sees them in Ann Arbor Michigan at the U of M (their paranormal detective agency/devil may cry office is in Detroit, located between a hair salon, a payday lender, and a decent Cantonese restaurant), having been hired by the changeling's fairy queen and the ruler of the Nochols Arboretum (public park and botanical garden) to defend a student who's being harassed by a rogue fae noble since she turned him down at a party in midsummer. So far they have appeared in the Fairy Realm via a secret path behind a popular bar set up by one of the kinder fae to help drunk people somehow make it home without driving, met a magic pangolin timekeeper, been glamored into more exaggerated versions of themselves (including the wizard just turning into David Bowie, which the Fae take as a good sign about a person), met the knight's frenemy who is the Vice Minister of Lilies and who tries to be a cool business elf, and then discovered the woman they're protecting is the copy of the knight left with her human family when she was kidnapped by the fae. Now she's trying to spare the engineering student they're protecting by telling her the knight's the copy, not her, while the other two are getting into a car chase (without their own car, the wizard can teleport and the wolf-knight is fast as hell) with unseelie who disguise themselves as cops because 'assholes who bully you into not calling them on breaking the rules and enjoy hiding behind laws and power to torment people' makes American cops a natural disguise for them. Also they discovered marijuana works like garlic on a vampire on the local fae because the court of herbs passed an ill-advised measure saying it was to be treated like an invasive species and no local fae could help it thrive. I'm really enjoying running this game.
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Oct 30, 2020 14:13
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Their past missions have involved an evil British star sorcerer tricking a local artist of the macabre into a reverse dorian grey to get their attention so he could talk to their gravity wizard (evil wizards don't just, like, call you on the phone they gotta be convoluted) and getting the DIA haunted, and helping a spanish nun who was made into a weird sin-eater so she could destroy a demonic possession that spread like a biological contagion but now it was trying to make monsters and she was building weird hives in abandoned buildings in Detroit to try to avoid hurting anyone. They had to exorcise the demonic remnant and kill it after talking down the active duty Inquisitor who thought she was Super Possessed. It's been a really fun time!
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Oct 30, 2020 19:06
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Today the Double Cross heroes confronted a dread hive of wasp-like fairy cops, before discovering the realm of their adversary was like a cruising 1950s teen movie and facing a fairy lord resplendent in his golden mail and oaken spear, behind the wheel of his '69 convertible of legend after he pontificated at them while being photographed shirtless by his fawning court. I also actually forgot their gravity wizard had a 'direct an AoE to only hit me' spell and that outright stopped said fairy lord's ultimate attack from kicking their asses, because Double Cross is the kind of game that simulates anime fights well enough to include actual mechanically supported NANI!? moments where someone pulls their own bullshit to shut down someone else's bullshit.
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Nov 12, 2020 04:08
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Yawgmoth posted:this is the most Utena thing I have ever heard in a game. Completely intentionally! Utena is incredible.
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Nov 12, 2020 15:07
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It's actually a good strategy if you have limited use defenses and were likely to go down despite using them! Since in DX you can always get back up (at low HP, and at a cost in Encroachment) as a free action if you aren't at/over 100% Encroachment yet. That same fight featured their werewolf nun intentionally springing the trap that she has a 100+ power that lets her take a full turn before she goes down, when she goes down, and then two 120% powers that let her get back up once while at 120% or better, then another that transforms her into her ultimate battle form there. She very nearly went completely insane, but also got to pull off a genuine 'I, too, have a second form' combo on a boss in his second form. Which culminated in said villain getting punched in the face by gravity after distracting himself with his own edgelord speech, and then rooted to the ground by a 'do all the status effects' attack by their fairy knight, then his extreme Dodge shut down by another reaction, just in time for the stage-2 werewolf train to smash him to bits. Double Cross's mechanics letting you organically pull a bunch of anime bullshit in combat, from team attacks to crazy trap reactions to 'I refuse to die' combos? That's the good part of Double Cross.
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Nov 28, 2020 02:08
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I love that the money legitimately has no game effect and never really comes up but the characters are very certain to collect their standard fees when negotiating with angels, fairy queens, crusading knights of the Inquisition, and the Detroit Institute of Art.
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Dec 3, 2020 14:12
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For the tactical game I'm running on Sundays, the party are a bunch of 18-20 year old conscripts doing their boring mandatory military service in a sci-fantasy world when a great war breaks out with powerful sorcerers yet again like it did 1000 years ago. One of them is a wizard, whose master insisted he not defer his service to try to get the poor, anxious guy out and about and socialize him some. Wizards are a big deal! They're vaguely superhuman (ish), and as a Light Mage he's regarded as vaguely holy, despite barely having his magic under control and having no idea what he's doing. Another of the players is an extremely upbeat and energetic overachiever medic who looks up to the wizard and thinks he should be more like a Jedi. Her player decided that while they were busy digging trenches and carrying ammo ahead of an assault, she was going to try to inspire him to greatness. The player wrote their own setting-specific version of I'll Make A Man Out of You to try to get the poor wizard over his anxiety. It did not work, but everyone was very happy it happened.
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Jan 5, 2021 06:47
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The poor conscript soldiers in my sunday game ended up backed up to the actual ancient keep their military training base was built around, because it was built by dwarfs and couldn't be tunneled under by enemy bio-horrors. They held the ancient gates as the Legion had 1000 years before them, though they did NOT throw a mountain at the enemy, but they did call in a cruise missile strike which is pretty close. Their nervous wizard discovered his full magical power (the medic thinks it's because of her montage song), and accidentally came out of the closet because he was frustrated about a cloned assassin monster being referred to as his ex (it was designed to kill wizards!). Then teamed up with their immigrant kid heavy and his 20mm cannon to kill the thing when the dark lord attacking them possessed it directly, exploding the wavering horror with radiant bolts of light while their engineer threw fire everywhere and their medic blazed away with her flamethrower, daring monsters to get up so she could knife the poo poo out of them. Then when giant crab tanks almost overwhelmed them, the people they'd been holding out for arrived, the Avatara of Fire himself (a man embodying the magic of passion and righteous violence) cooking the enemy tanks before melting a ton of snow in the mountain pass and their garrison charging out to kill the drowning monsters, winning the battle they've been fighting for 4 missions. It was pretty great! Like Lord of the Rings with assault rifles, really.
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Jan 25, 2021 04:12
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