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Quarex posted:Well, one of the players had taken a flashbacks Hindrance (I converted to Savage Worlds' "Realms of Cthulhu" for the campaign), and the very first time they tried to coordinate an ambush on the water tower they thought cultists were inside, he blew his Spirit roll, and immediately thought he was back in the park where they had been assaulted by supernatural forces the last time they were planning an ambush; through re-enacting his past behaviors, he got into his nearby car and managed to botch a driving roll and drive over one of the other PCs waiting in the bushes, who of course thought he was being attacked and opened fire on the car, which managed to trigger the OTHER PC who had taken flashbacks, who then began furiously struggling against imagined cultists trying to drag him into the darkness (knocking himself out in the process through a botched Fighting roll). All while the single member of the party not either having flashbacks or being attacked by someone with flashbacks had no idea any of this was going on (I think he was wearing ear protection and did not hear the shooting), and went through with the ambush all by himself. And this was all in the first new session. I think we all were pretty sure the party was going to kill themselves before the end of that game.
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Jan 13, 2012 03:07
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:01 |
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Nothing will ever convince me that CoC was intended as anything other than a dark comedy game.
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Jan 13, 2012 05:58
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I've talked about this game/group a few times in the old Worst Experiences thread. The system is basically the Marvel Superheroes RPG with a bunch of houserules, an the setting is Every loving Thing Ever. If it's another RPG, it exists in his game. If it's a card game, it's a world. If it's a movie, a comic book, a novel series, a TV show... anything. Some worlds are combinations of >1 of the above. You can play literally any combination of anything if you bullshit your "I have a concept for a new character" pitch well enough. It's a game that makes RIFTS look simple and focused by comparison and it's a pretty enjoyable game if you can completely stop giving any fucks towards balance or sane mechanics and just have fun with it. It's also a totally ongoing world kind of thing, where he just uses the "setting" as it is forever. He's been doing this for the past 20 years or so. It can be fun, but a lot of times it's a total pain in the rear end because he has no understanding of game balance and is one of those "I need total realism as I understand it in my game" kind of guys. So for my last story with them, we all made new characters who were chosen for whatever reason to fight Zadkiel and stop him from taking over heaven and then reality itself. Did I mention he likes to take comic book/movie/game plotlines and run them without even filing the serial numbers off? He does that a lot. Anyways. Since he likes to give his bad guys super awesome powers that we never get access to despite him repeatedly saying that he wouldn't prevent us from getting anything if we found a way, I decide to make a character that would have a way: a Blue Mage. A blood elf blue mage, because blood elves from WoW eat magic. Makes sense to me, and him as well. And then he asks if I want to have WoW Mage spells as well as the blue mage power-learning ability! I say yes because why not, who turns down extra powers? So now I have a mage that has a bunch of utility powers and learns new ones by getting hit by them. I had also taken a bunch of flaws like "overconfidence", an addiction to pain and to gaining new powers, a nemesis, high curiosity, etc. for advantages like "lucky" (get a certain number of rerolls per session) and "daredevil" (getting a huge bonus whenever I attempt something exceptionally dangerous to myself, like for example throwing myself in the way of an oncoming attack!), and basic things like good reflexes, iron will, that sort. And thus we play and we, by strange coincidence, all have ways of learning enemy powers. I can learn them by being hit by them, another player can learn them by consuming the souls of the dead, and another can learn them by seeing them being done and practicing them in downtime. Only one can't, and she's the GM's wife. She starts out with stats well over everyone else's, a god-level tracking power, constant regeneration, and a slew of demon powers. Because she's a demon with amnesia so she doesn't remember being evil. So she's a good demon.  We largely ignore her because she always does this poo poo and almost always fails to capitalize on her ridiculous overpoweredness. We roll our eyes and push on.Long story short(er), we assault heaven and fight Zadkiel and his minions to try to take back heaven after chasing a guy inadvertently working for him around multiple worlds and fighting the D-list villains of Marvel. I have picked up a number of interesting powers at this point from them, as well as a couple pokemon and some new characters he thought up on his own. We were also given amulets that gave us Ghost Rider powers so he couldn't just immediately kill us all, since apparently he can't directly kill them. So instead he has his black angels try to do it. We all get a secondary form that does the ghost rider flaming skull thing, and makes all of your damage have added hellfire damage. Now, in his game he's got this thing called Purefire. Purefire is sentient, divine fire that angels and really good mages can wield. There's also Hellfire, which is used by demons and really evil mages, and also the ghost riders. And then there's anti-Purefire, which is like corruption incarnate and used by these guys. Try as they might, no one has ever gotten a character allowed to use any of these, regardless of backstory or plot. We've got character who have caused literal genocide who can't access these. So when one of them conjures up a bow and arrow made of anti-purefire, I take the opportunity and try to catch it. And I catch it with my left hand, only because of the huge boost from my daredevil merit. I takes half my hp in damage from the arrow, then another 30% from the resulting fire in my soul. Then Gabriel (specifically, the Gabriel from the end of the Prophecy movies, who was helping us because the GM always needs to have at least one GMPC with us) jumps into the fray, with his purefire, the anti-purefire I just caught, and the hellfire from the ghost rider amulet all struggling for dominance when I activate my blue magic learning. The GM goes for a bathroom break and tries to figure out what exactly the gently caress happens, because a lot of setting material is in his head only, including the exact workings of these divine fires. His decision? I get the power to summon up a bow that is made of and fires arrows consisting of all three at once. The one that takes the fore is the one that will hurt the most. I conjure up my new bow, and fire off an arrow. It hits Zadkiel in the head, and it goes through, doing x4 damage. He's not dead, but he is weakened so much that God can banish him to hell to be torn apart by demons, which is just as good (and lets the GM bring him back later, slasher movie sequel style). Then God requests we return the amulets and we will get our rewards for aiding in returning things to the way they should be. But I can't take mine off! Also, my fire has turned completely black. The amulet fused with me, and now I permanently have a secondary form that makes me look like this along with some damage reduction. Really awesome way to end the game for me, I thought. Then he tells me that he is planning on sometime soon running his game over IRC for some other people who have moved out of the area, and would love to have me join in and play this character in said game. So I shall be guaranteed many more stories of memorably good and memorably bad quality! oh wow this got long.
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Jan 13, 2012 20:32
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Chance II posted:This is my worst gaming experience because, by all accounts, Paranoia is a fun game but I'll get a chance to play again with this group because we couldn't get out of the lets follow the rules and play for the team mentality. That mindset shouldn't make games worse!
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Jan 16, 2012 18:44
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President Unerlion posted:So in the last 18 seconds, game time, a barbarian charged two pirates, threw his ax into the water, they followed suit with their weapons, and how they are standing around unarmed.
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Jan 18, 2012 21:40
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Sionak posted:I remember we posted about it on a forum, way back then, and the general consensus was that we were playing CoC completely wrong. I think we were doing it right.
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Jan 20, 2012 00:36
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TGLT posted:
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Jan 20, 2012 16:16
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President Unerlion posted:Ok another story:
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Jan 20, 2012 21:57
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Sworder posted:-The DM instituting a rule that rolling a "super-fail" (Two natural 1s in a row on an attack roll) means you hit a random other creature on the battlefield as your weapon slips out of your hands. quote:-Brandi moved away a few months ago As for seeing how it ends, this really seems like the type of game that "ends" when the players get sick of purposeless fights and fetch quests, or when the DM decides she wants to go back to throwing kobolds and hobgoblins at the party instead of tracking down things with a high enough CR. Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jan 29, 2012 |
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Jan 29, 2012 17:20
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted: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." quote: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.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:42
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JimmyT64 posted:The only time this is not true is when we set a spaceship to blow up in a nuclear holocaust before ramming it into something.
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Feb 3, 2012 20:37
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DCB, I want SO HARD to be in your star wars game and I don't even like star wars that much.
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Feb 4, 2012 16:21
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Ratspeaker posted:
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Feb 10, 2012 04:02
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"It's my character! It's what my character would do. I'm roleplaying. Don't railroad me!"
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Quarex posted:This concept would work great in the gritty Pokémon reboot that surely is coming to theaters near you any minute now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDX1m0Y2Vkg
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Feb 10, 2012 05:13
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AlphaDog posted:It's not pokemon, but I'm thinking of adapting Mage into a Harry Potter game. Set at Hogwarts during World War 2. I'm thinking of playing it grimdark and seeing what hilarity emerges. I would absolutely play in this. Would this make Death Eaters/dark wizards the Scelesti?
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Feb 10, 2012 21:49
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I usually start people at 6. You have 3rd level spells definitely, a good number of feats, and also the ability to have at least one level in a prestige class.
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Feb 12, 2012 04:57
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Whybird posted:I prefer the approach of "Awesome. You're roleplaying being an unstable sociopath with no respect for the law. Good for you. Now you get to roleplay through the consequences of being an unstable sociopath with no respect for the law."
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Feb 12, 2012 17:32
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Etherwind posted:"He's a bit quick on the trigger finger when we're being chased by demon-possessed people."
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Feb 12, 2012 23:50
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President Unerlion posted:So we have chickens, cows, pigs and more than a few deer running around armed with pikes and suited with full plate armor.
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Feb 15, 2012 00:18
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There was a guy who went to FNM who would throw his deck about half the time he lost, the other half he would just poo poo on any attempts to be a good sport about things ("good game" "no it wasn't! gently caress this game!") and just generally sucked any enjoyment out of the game there was to be had. He finally got banned from the store, not because of his constant tirades but because he got convicted of sleeping with a 14 year old girl.
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Feb 15, 2012 17:31
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Thelonious Funk posted:Just curious, you're not hating on 4e for this, are you? Because this is not the fault of 4e. It's the fault of nerds being nerds. Let's be fair, this isn't even "nerds being nerds". This is shitheads being shitheads.
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Feb 16, 2012 22:57
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Strange Matter posted:Gary goes over to her and delivers a coup de grace with his gun to her head while saying "Happy Mother's Day."
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Feb 17, 2012 02:40
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Eox posted:Well, it can be done properly. I'm going to be running a game pretty soon here and it'll have characters from the pathfinder game I play in (we're all level 2 in that game so they aren't ridiculous world-ending soul destroyers) I made one of my old PCs of an evil game into a BBEG for another game I ran. He was a lich who had turned an entire country's coins into phylacteries, so I figured he'd be a recurring villain. Instead they did some digging into the lich ritual, then what he used for the 120k in materials (120,000 gold coins), and then convinced the kingdom to switch to printed currency and smelt the coins into bars. Made him go from a constant threat to their lives to being the target of their hunt before he could make another phylactery, was pretty impressive.
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Feb 20, 2012 19:11
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jonthegm posted:This is the most important lesson I have learned while exploring improvisational GMing. Your players are awesome, and collaboration is always better. The best stories are the ones you didn't intend to explore, but you got there organically through play. So much fun! So many of my DM notes have had "the PCs come up with some clever way to get past this." They always come up with something much more entertaining and convoluted than I ever could.
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Feb 22, 2012 04:43
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Rose Spirit posted:the group had just begun to infiltrate the volcano lair of Tiamat's exarch Irregulon (Activia jokes abounded in that campaign).
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Feb 24, 2012 05:03
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AlphaDog posted:This usually happens after they talk to me about wanting more plot and less sandbox. Then they'll get distracted and I'll make something up on the fly and they'll have a blast with it. Then when they find out about it they're always all "AlphaDog, why don't you plan things out, you could make even better games if you'd plan more!"
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Feb 25, 2012 04:12
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AlphaDog posted:That's the discussion we had, and it turned out well
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Feb 25, 2012 17:47
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AlphaDog posted:I actually can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not
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Feb 27, 2012 14:09
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Some people really hate that style of gaming.
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Vodurden posted:"You can hit things with your hammer to repair or unrepair them" 
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Feb 28, 2012 02:19
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HiKaizer posted:getting a group of different people together with at least a flimsy pretense of narrative integrity isn't always easy.
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Mar 1, 2012 03:20
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Fighting-Fefnir posted:That rule was enacted after I started stealing people's pants by convincing the the wearers their combat prowess would improve without them.
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Mar 5, 2012 14:21
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Letting an engineer of any kind have free rein in D&D is a recipe for disaster, really.
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Mar 5, 2012 23:51
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Ashdesert posted:What I learned from that evening: if the players come up with a solution that's sufficiently clever, roll with the punches.
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Mar 9, 2012 20:01
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Colon V posted:
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Mar 9, 2012 21:18
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Dareon posted:Like Hibbert the Ineluctable is an rear end in a top hat wizard that traps his dungeon with summons in the weirdest places. Rogue opens a chest, 1d4+1 fiendish centipedes. Fighter steps into a room, sudden owlbear. Wizard falls into a pit trap, so does a celestial badger.
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Mar 12, 2012 04:00
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w00tmonger posted:so having looked through the forum, this seems like the best place to ask some things. I'm looking at throwing together a group this summer, but I have never dm'd before. For that matter, I havent played in a rpg for years and years. None of my group will have likely played rpg's before and I dont want to bog them down in rules and formality.
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Mar 12, 2012 21:21
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Well, I happen to like the New World of Darkness system. The core is basically "normal people in a world like ours but the campfire stories are real" and is pretty simple to make characters and play in. The system is basically "add attribute to skill, roll that many d10s, 8+ is a success, more successes = more better." It can get more complex if you want and you can move into stuff like Hunter, Vampire, Mage, etc. if your players are interested. There's a lot of good material for it, and also a lot of... well, just check out the World of Darkness megathread and see the worst of the worst of it. We'll help you and your group to dodge the awful bits and direct you to the good parts.
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Mar 12, 2012 21:47
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Yeah LARPers are pretty much the bane of existence, but I've brought a few people into nWoD by saying "you didn't stop playing D&D because of the 400 lbs. neckbeard at the game shop playing an 18 charisma elf, don't let LARPers stop you from playing this game."
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Mar 12, 2012 22:00
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Chance II posted:It doesn't help that they keep trying to pick up new members from our hobby club and then turning around and alienating them with their mega powerful legacy characters.
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Mar 12, 2012 22:31
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:01 |
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So what was stopping you from just letting the grenade go off in the room where the mook was and let them break in?
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Mar 13, 2012 04:02
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