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Secret Machine posted:After conferring with my keeper (who is also a goon), we determined you’ve followed the Cthulhu blueprint perfectly. The party should always be in a near state of disaster, committing crimes to cover the previous crimes, then going mad and/or dying. My first DM I was given the Crimson Letters module to run. Anyway, my group was still new to this (it's been quarantainment, none of us have done any tabletop RPGs before this) and just promise anyone anything. I was intending to have the old half-ghoul wizard in town subtly hint at what they should do, and send them to the right place in the right time, but then they snooped around his store and came on the bedroom where his two ghoul kids live. So I figure what the gently caress, have him spill the full beans and tell them their asses belong to him now and they're gonna bring that book. The wrap-up summary was 'You've learned there are two copies of the Book. You've promised the book four times over, however, once to the original questgiver, once to the mob, and twice to Literal Satan.' The next day we picked up the module, a corpse rose, drove one mobster insane before the brawler and other mobster could bring it down, then the brawler reacted to the freaked out remaining mobster pulling a gun and demanding answers by smashing him to death with a nailbat. That scene ended with 'Following the screaming and gunfire, you climb up out of the morgue and leave the hospital into the midday sunlight, your bat caked with brains and rotting flesh. The coroner is following you from a safe distance, screaming about how he 'Knew you three wanted to poke his stiffs!' The cars parked in the streets are all damaged, and there's a fire hydrant blasting into the air and a powerline down over (the insane mobsters) crashed car, with the horn blaring. Sirens sound in the distance. Plus side you probably owe one less book.' (Oh yea and the cops were known to all be on the take with the mob). PipHelix fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Jul 13, 2020 |
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Jul 13, 2020 00:50
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Holy gently caress, I solicited advice on doing a CoC in 'Nam so I could mash up Predator/Annihilation/Platoon. Someone suggested Delta Green so I checked the sourcebook and holy smokes, the given reason for disbanding DG in Cambodia is basically what I already had planned. However, the two things I was hoping to add weren't covered in the books, so I figured I'd ask. 1. The combat just DRAGS. This might be a function of my group or a function of the game, but we've spent 2 hours on a 3 on 4 fight where two mooks were flattened by a car with one roll. The roll was a failure but I allowed for anything other than a fumble to count because of proximity and surprise and specifically to shorten the fight. I was hoping to do something whereby getting shot (based on setting, I'd think most of the combats will be gun focused, but wish in one hand and poo poo in the other as a GM) will be a seriously damaging thing, with the potential for instakills. I'd keep the odds of being hit minimizeable unless you're doing some Rambo stuff. 2. To counteract this, I was going to have Players run multiple PCs, probably two, with the option to recruit more on the fly (there's a lovecraft monster hunting the jungles and lots of soldiers from all sides, as well as civilians, running away from it). Neither of these seem covered by any CoC rules, so I figured I'd ask right off the top, does running two PCs who may not have aligned motivations and one or both may actively be hiding secrets from the team, or their other PC seem too much? I feel like that's manageable, but it would be a definitely be a role playing ask, and to date our group has mostly been just running our personalities through the characters, filtered by whatever skills they have. Also, towards the end, it's likely the Player might have to have a PC betray the group, including their other PC. I feel like, as an improv nerd and chaos muppet, I might be trying to map my idea of a GREAT time onto (more) normal people, who may not like it. Making the combat be exciting but quick is the main thing however. I'm imagining like, one round of hunkering down, returning fire and trying to spot where the fire is coming from, another round of maneuvering, a couple thrown grenades and machine gun barrages and the opposition withdraws, maybe leaving a wounded character to interrogate or a dead one to investigate for documents. (The setting is a previously trapped shoggoth is loose in the jungle, so anyone left alive is running for their lives, no one is trying to win a war.) But, yea 3-5 rounds tops, but maintaining a frisson of danger. Does anyone have advice on running combats in ways that are quick but seem fair?
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Jul 13, 2020 02:02
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moths posted:What's bogging down your combat? It absolutely shouldn't be taking hours IRL to squish two guys with a car. Yea, that's what I was thinking. Like I said, multiple characters was an attempt to get around having combat involving guns be, you know, combat involving guns. As in if you occupy the wrong space at the wrong time you don't keep fighting and then have someone roll first aid+medicine then rest up at the hotel for a week. Your rear end is dead. Or at least on the ground yelling for help. So that combat didn't seem massively random and unfair, like, how, say casualties in a gunfight tend to be. We trade off DMing, and part of this is inexperience. On the one hand, DMs not willing to deviated: In our second game ever the GM had us get sprayed with machinegun bullets to prevent us from chasing down a mobster's getaway car (he had nothing prepared for this eventuality so he just had us get shot.). We spent like 30 minutes arguing about healing and I'm like 'We're in loving Harlem. I recognize this map, I used to live two blocks away and Harlem Hospital is two blocks south of that. A 70 year old Lawyer and a 30 year old journalist with clean rap sheets are talking to the NYPD while bleeding from gunshot wounds. We'd absolutely go to the hospital and get patched up. In fact we would probably be brought there, even against our will.' Nope, game says FA/M (none of us had this) so we just spend most of the rest of the module at half HP because we tried something the DM hadn't thought of and he panicked. On the other, I tried allowing too much deviation, player started a random fight with the party split (that should have killed the party). This was extremely annoying because this guy, when DM, allows for NO deviation from what the book's laid down. But when he plays other people's stuff he's an overexcited kid who just shortcuts through all the plot. So when the fight he starts jumps off, I hadn't prepared for this, the party was in no shape to have this fight, and whats worse the party was split. So I'm trying to A) Figure out where and in what relation everyone is to each other B) retcon a way for the other party members to get to this fight and save their friends in time C) Put enough English on the rolls that the group isn't waxed by one guy's ADD. (Thus: telling one player with basically no Drive Auto that since the two goons with her jump out to see why the lead car crashed, and are right in front of her, if she slams the gas, anything but a fumble is a hit, with reduced damage die. She managed to get good enough damage to knock them both out. I also allowed that the combat in the car was being done with penalties to hit and to damage, because the absolute warbeast I'd set up for the final bossfight was in the front seat was trying to swing at them in the rear, like a dad telling kids to knock it off. As it was two PCs were knocked cold.) Another part is we were playing with someone who paid absolutely no attention to the game, and then would agonize for I'm not kidding like up to ten minutes about whether to swing the loving bat already. They are no longer with us, so far there's been no combat yet but I have to imagine this would help. One thing that I've gotten feedback on is, I absolutely hate the maps that come with D20, they're drawn like dogshit, so low res it can be hard to read the text and way too busy for how little there is to do in most of the rooms. I overcorrected I suppose by basically doing away with them in the last module I ran, which it was rightly called out that people didn't know who was left to fight, who was ganged up on, etc. So, necessary for combat, but I still feel like investigating rooms, I'm going to leave that stuff out. I hate as DM and the group is definitely frustrated by wandering around rooms checking cabinets and dressers and what all and there are like, two rooms in this mansion where anything of meaning is available to interact with. But I'm also not about to furnish this goddamn dream-palace the book makers gave me with twelve other rooms of poo poo to keep people interested. I just tell 'em, "there's 3 or 4 rooms that catch your interest" and all the rooms have overlapping clues so they can miss stuff and still complete the module and never feel like they have to just keep punching spot hidden at everything. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 00:53
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Hostile V posted:Yeah new Delta Green just has guns lumped into "small caliber, medium caliber, large caliber" per type of gun with different rules for automatic fire. It also has rules for lethality or "did you just kill this thing instantly or not". Oh really? I libgenned a scan of the first book (or an early edition) and my eyes crossed at the pages and pages and PAGES of random guns. Lethality rules intrigue me. I might have to be not a cheap bastard and pick up a recent book.
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Jul 16, 2020 00:56
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Nessus posted:You're going to need to address that one way or another to have a fun game experience. We're doing 'Dance of Vice Horror and Ecstasy'. I dunno if this is in the module or the person decided to stretch their legs but there was a character who gave a lecture on mirror magic in the backroom of the bookshop. We interview him and the DM (good guy, just inexperienced) is evasive, 'uh, no, I don't know anything about that. Uh Mirror magic, it's just like, magic with mirrors.' Our interest is piqued considering we were literally sent through evil mirrors to a dreamworld where we were all murdered. Long story short, that guy was a TOTAL red herring, had nothing to do with anything, the DM just got caught flatfooted. Afterwards, I tell him, 'hey man. These books say to do this but these books can be kinda lovely. Dude was literally the focus of the scene (he was stood on a stage in the center of the room with all PCs and NPCs arrayed around him, he lectured us on a VERY evocative topic, you can either change what he says, or make up a clue for him to give us so we're not spending a half hour pumping this dry well. Annoying DM, guy who allows nothing but then does anything he wants, for example right after this scene asked the DM to get up and leave so he could plan a random assault of two old men who are somehow involved, at this bookshop and inviting us to come to their ceremony, to like, I guess spring this hijacking of the dude's story on him? I don't know RPGs but kicking the DM off his own table is WTF, seems to me as a newbie whos DMed two modules before? Fight kicked off and my brawler got a spell put on him cause no poo poo, these guys are wizards they're inviting us to a magic ceremony? I get fear put on me so I say my character shits his pants and runs, kicking poo poo out one leg of his pants, grinding it into the carpet with the other, out the door and he's gone and just go fix a drink? Then they spend an hour trying to kill two old men cause the next best fighter has 50 in his combat skill? This DM guy, he tells me that he likes the Red Herrings, the investigatory aspect is interesting. Agatha Christie novels have red herrings! I'm like, have a lot of problems with this, but simply say, yea dude, but we're all adults, some of us are east coast some of us are west coast, we all aren't young and all have jobs and a lot of us have early get ups. He wasn't having it. God this is getting annoying. He's impervious to the the most forthright of gentle criticisms, I feel like I'm gonna have to organize some united front of kinda over it, slightly embarrassed mid-30 year olds to tell a guy he's acting like a baby... PipHelix fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 06:11
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moths posted:If so, that's an interpersonal problem that can't really be addressed in-game. Direct confrontation isn't fun, but maybe start doing after-session "what worked/ what didn't" feedback chats. He insists on "one criticism one compliment" at the end of every game cause it's some military thing. I get the idea but it adds almost an hour to the end of every session. I've done specifically this, directing my most pointed criticisms at the book so that people don't feel they did something wrong, they were just misled into it by the book. I also did an entirely homebrew module (2nd attempt DMing and maybe 6th module ever played) specifically to demonstrate a good time can be had getting off-script. Specifically, since I was putting in the work, I didn't waste time and energy creating useless characters and places, everything had a purpose and multiple locations/people had overlapping information so there were lots of ways to figure out a next move. People seemed to like it, so I don't feel like I totally discredited the idea with a bad execution. But we just can't break out of this and the dude is insisting on it. It's occurred to me after the discussion last night, that the dumbest person in the world can sleepwalk through an Agatha Christie novel and still figure out whodunnit, just by reading page after page. This is like a crappy old Sierra adventure game where you make *zero* progress if you don't guess the moon-logic necessary to progress or call the hintline. We usually end up having the DM give us hints or Deus ex Machinas to get out of it anyway, but somehow this is qualitatively different from how I try to run mine. Also, for how much this DM insists on teasing out the Murder of Rodger Ackroyd, it's been months since he didn't shortcut through plot, usually by starting a murderfight with nonhostile NPCs. Ugh. I like this guy as a friend, but loving, I don't have it in me to spend 4 hours at least once a week playing calvinball with this guy.
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Jul 16, 2020 19:27
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moths posted:Huh. Yeah if you've already talked to him about it and there's no improvement, he's either unable or unwilling to get better. I have twice got up and left with over an hour left to play. Both times he was DM and was pulling some 'nyah, you gotta do what *I* say' nonsense. The first time was when I tried to hold two night-watchmen guard mooks at gunpoint. I couldn't take both of them in a straight fight but I could absolutely drop one and role-playing wise, nobody charges a man with a gun for a minimum wage job. He first said I didn't have my gun with me, which I was able to prevail upon because I literally announced the fact cause he kept trying to find story reasons to disarm me (in fairness I min/maxed that character because CoC revolves around like, 3 skill checks unless the DM really wants to swim upstream to provide opportunities for, like, climb or repair mech. I was inexperieinced with tabletop and too experienced with video game RPGs. Anyway he was so boring to play I retired him). So I'm like, 'ok fine, bring em on, I'll kill one of them and with a lucky roll I'll be alive in the next round to get the other'. So he tells me he's gonna bring more mooks in on the next round followed by armed police. He also tells me that if I surrender we will be booked but sprung by the questgiver and provided with more plot threads to chase and no long term consequences and I'm like, sounds like the next thirty minutes to an hour of this game are locked in and don't need my input. The second time was the next time we played, I told him that my glass cannon character, whose backstory is that he is a sniper, and was already wounded in a fight earlier that session, wouldn't accompany the group to the final showdown in an apartment building but would instead post up on the roof next door to provide cover. During the interminable combat, he keeps telling me that all the rolls involve a super high chance of shooting a team member, so I refuse to take a shot. The dude was packing a Martini rifle, 1D8+1D6+3 (Yes that's an 11HP centered distribution, did I mention I min/maxed him beyond the point he was even fun to play?) So a flubbed shot meant basically instakilling a teammate. He kept coming up for reasons that no one could either get clear of the monster or push the thing up against or through a window on the wall we all coordinated I'd be covering. I think he literally wanted to just kill a PC. Anyway, I told the group to text me if I ever got a free shot but otherwise assume I pass on all future combat rolls. Oh yea, the rolls got away from him and PCs were getting knocked out and the rules said you need a continuous chant to seal the evil, but combat prevented the combatant from chanting. So it looked like the monster was gonna win and kill everyone so he told me my character can go to the apartment and help. I asked him how long a wounded 70 year old man would take to run down 6 flights of stairs, and up another six as compared to the number of combat rounds left until everyone alive was dead. And assuming my presence was needed, and the chant hadn't been broken by that time, how long a wounded 70 year old long range specialist would last in a small room with a monster that's conked half the party already. So my shooter can't shoot cause he doesn't like that I'm trying to play independent of what the sourcebook says I should be doing, but I can teleport when he chooses to cut the teams number one damage dealer out of combat out of pique and then accidentally almost kills everyone. No idea how they survived but everyone was alive for the next module so I guess it worked out. I've tried gently explaining it I've tried directly explaining it, I've tried withholding participation I've tried modeling alternative behavior. I'm texting around to see if I can't get other people to back me on this, cause we each have staked out hard positions and the only other person to DM (the one DMimg this current module) feels trapped between us, and isn't really trying to pick a side and hurt a friends feelings, which I get. The other big issue is he's super psyched for this, like, campaign where it sounds like it's going to take us a full real-human-time year to play through. Way we've been playing it's been one-off modules and him me and this other guy trade off. I don't know if that's going to work when the whole thing is one overarching story and I'm completely uninterested in using sourcebook material as anything other than a jumping off point to improv around. I absolutely can't do 50 weeks of this kind of play, but given that it's become this friend group's main mode of quarantine keeping in touch I'm hesitant to just chuck it entirely. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jul 16, 2020 |
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Jul 16, 2020 20:41
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Yeah, Honestly these posts are so long cause I start out reasonable length and I just keep remembering stuff that pissed me off at the time but didn't rise above the frustration noise level. Goddamn it. Literally lost touch with one of the 3 members of this once kinda tight group cause I blew up on him when he was being (wildly) unsafe during the (relatively) not that bad Corona of May while crashing on my couch. Been trying to not to be a big rear end in a top hat twice in rapid succession, cause when you have two big beefs (or are tempted to) with your friends so close together, usually means you're being the rear end in a top hat. Nessus posted:Is he running a pre-packaged campaign? Lol if this is Beyond the Mountains of Madness. I dunno but its of a piece with this Cthulhu in 20s Berlin setting and it has been a real annoying problem with it's grimdark adult content nonsense. Like there's some Slaanesh type god we're on the trail of, Abzu, so all this sexy-time nonsense starts happening. Guy's reading the script "a young woman in a skimpy negligee answers the door. She is barely seventeen -" I cut in "Or she could just be eighteen, or even 20!". And get mostly ignored, even though this is clearly bothering the lone female in the group. She got legit pissed when he had his character blow coke up her nose to revive her after she got knocked out (he's been just REVELING in the opportunity to do drugs, oh my god can you imagine!? How Adult!). Why indeed would somone object to getting dosed while unconscious. This would all be the kewlest most twizted poo poo ever if we were 14 or so, but we're goddamn mid-30s. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 01:48
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moths posted:I'm guessing he's running Berlin the Wicked City which actually looks like a cool as heck module set in the aftermath of the Great War. Yeeeup. There's all these insane rules for drugs and this guy, again, military so all this stuff is forbidden fruit to him (he freaks out if anyone smokes weed *near* him IRL, though probably with reason.) I'm just like, it was funny at first, but once I realize I gotta roll all this nonsense for stat bonuses/penalties, and for addiciton on the literal first bump... It's very Satanic Panic. "Oh no! you did a line, now you're addicted and get miserably sick you cant get a fix every three hours!"
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Jul 19, 2020 02:40
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Libertad! posted:CoC has emphasis on investigation, although it's kind of a joke that the ideal play style is to be intentionally ignorant: "burn all the books, avoid looking around the corner with the horrible noises, etc" that seems counterproductive in the accumulation of clues and solving of mysteries I would say absolutely use your discretion to skip the 'roll for listen/spot hidden/intelligence... OH NO YOU HAVE GAZED ON THE ABYSS ROLL FOR SAN!". I'm a newbie and I'm already sick of it. It's obvious and boring and since SAN is the fuse that is constantly burning on your character it shouldn't be necessary. I've made it clear how unsatisfactory my current game setup is. At this point I just sit back silently when there's a coffin in the room and we need to roll listen and a pit and who wants to look in it. Nevertheless I had a character lose six Sanity in one go and 10/44 total in the last session, bringing things to a screeching halt while we rolled up sanity tables and all this stuff except I eventually rolled INT and repressed it or something? Always bail if the book seems dumb or not fun. Game can be fun, it just requires the DM to exercise a lot of judgement. Personally I'd save SAN rolls for times it makes sense. Last module I ran, I had characters who had seen dead bodies/magic stuff in previous modules get a pass on rolling SAN while new, 'virgin' PCs had to roll. It's just massively dumb that someone who's fought zombies needs to roll for SAN everytime he sees a corpse.
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Jul 21, 2020 03:46
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Nessus posted:I think you have good instincts. The dead body rule, I believe, is more for when you abruptly encounter a dead body that you didn't expect. If you go to your elderly co-worker's funeral, it's grim and sad, but you expected it; now if you come home and find his body laying in your bed, that's a different story. Less bad than that but still annoying. We went through the portal to the orgyverse and like three times the DM was describing what we were being carried through, conveyor like, and each time it was a roll. So we got to the end and two of us had to roll indefinite right before, you know, squaring up against a god in the process of apotheosis, and there was obviously an 'oh gently caress I hadn't intended this' reaction and it was like, dude there were three rolls and one was a 1d8 when we look at the big three faced head. How did you NOT see this coming? Also, why *three* rolls? Why not just combine them at the end? Also, re the orgyverse, it's lame the DM is playing this, and he did choose the sourcebook, but what kinda dork WRITES this stuff? As a 13 year old virgin I feel like I coulda made wilder, less squicky 'adult' campaigns. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 02:59 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 02:53
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Hey, btw, been meaning to say. I feel this could be a fun game, but without an example, it's hard to argue for trying something new when I'm just going on my gut here. Anyone running these games that someone could drop in on? E: I really can't recommend Berlin: The Wicked City little enough. Everything about it is fiddly and dumb and seems written by a really horny 14 year old. I also had my character, after winning a fight with a literal demigod in her home dimension get Poochied, because the evil breast milk you drink to go there makes evil bugs grow in your guts and you autodie after a roll for a number of months which, why a roll? We're guaranteed dead between this module and the next, why insert this faux randomness in a cheap insta-kill for doing a thing necessary to complete the module? I'm extra pissed cause I announced my Harpo Marx character was lactose intolerant the second the words 'breast milk' were first said. I then said he only swished it around his mouth and violently poo poo out anything he swallowed as soon as swallowing it, totally ignorant of the whole evil bug thing. This was not enough to clear the system. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 03:00
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I should mention that the whole orgyverse module has been run by DM # 3, who is a good guy, not an RPG guy at all, and part of our friend group that's been split up by joblosses and moves. Therefore I don't think he's likely enjoying this, I can only imagine he even agreed to play because he moved to a brand new state just as the lockdown locked down and I can't see having any social life under those conditions for the last 4 months, I don't think he's going off-book, I think he's more likely straight plugging with a gross script assigned him by DM#1, which he tried doing to me, who would be DM#2. Last module I ran I did a fully homebrew Terminator/Metropolis crossover cause I was sick of the nonsense and I wanted to do something actually, you know, fun, while not chucking the 1920s Central European Aesthetic. He tried assigning me some crap out of the book as a base for it, and I was like, nah I'm good man. Discussing our next game over zoom I brought up all my complaints again (like, how was I supposed to not guaranteed-condemn my character by doing a disgusting thing I didn't want to do in the first place) and he mentioned he sent me the sourcebook PDF when he was trying to get me to pick a sexytime module, so I'll report back. Honestly, my background in Tabletop prior to this is some podcasts and WTF!D&D, and this seems of a piece with the Kult and Exalted reviews they did. But I'm pretty sure this is just the misogyinistic 'Twizted Adult Xtreme' poo poo that's been free floating in the nerd culture, since, God, at least Heinlein getting past Chaosium's editorial division. E: I think I'm about to hit a rich vein of 'content' so what are the forum conventions/rules/laws around copy-pasting Sourcebook info? I know it's technically stealing IP, which in real life I could not give a poo poo less about but I don't want to get myself banned or the site in trouble. I never heard of X-cards before, and I do like the idea. However we basically hit on that idea instantly in that last module - When the 17 year old hooker was introduced I immediately said 'Or maybe she's 18 or even like 20?' and to his credit the DM just didn't really dwell on her looks or 'profession' much after that, basically expositon dump and beat it. On the way out, when DM#2, the guy who is driving us down this whole road, announced his PC asks for her number, the lone female in the group immediately says 'she gives you a fake number' he argued that since she was a hooker she wouldn't do this. Like, are you planning on going back to this imaginary hooker later when we're all split up, dude? Did you think that you banging her would be part of the module content? Also FFS, pick up on these hints that are at the limit of what politeness allows. Not to say I'm going to let politeness constrain me if this poo poo keeps up, just, still. Jesus. I don't want to have to stand up and Bella Abzug this goddamn RPG from a soapbox but if I have to I have to. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 22:32
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Why would you admit this. What in particular? I thought it was a pretty good protest character. Mechanically the games are dry as toast. We walk into a room, everyone punches Spot Hidden/Persuade/Charm/Initimidate/Fast Talk and with 5 separate rolls are almost guaranteed success. DM gives us info based on the success, we move to the next room and repeat. So I played a mute, illiterate clown with no interest in being particularly helpful but also more than willing to gently caress with any NPCs assuming the GM would come up with reactions for them other than 'I am outraged! Get Out!'. The making GBS threads the pants, that started based on him getting hit by a fear spell. I had to describe the effects and the first thing that came to mind was 'obviously, he loads his pants'. Then that became a running gag, pretty much the only thing I was allowed to do (which was fine by me turns out I wanted to have as little to do with this content as possible) besides mostly get bodied by spells or get thrown out of places by bothering NPCs, was to come up with elaborate reasons to poo poo my pants and procure new ones. And frankly, given that it means that canonically I was the character with the least exposure to this nasty-rear end module's magic McGuffin is fine by me. Even if it didn't keep me from getting killed by it.
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Jul 23, 2020 22:44
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Nessus posted:You are sounding like a miserable rear end in a top hat. I am definitely miserable and I'm trying not to be an rear end in a top hat. 'Protest' as in, this PC and his skillset/lack thereof is not going to be anticipated by the sourcebook, I'm not trying to gently caress things up for people (which is how DM#1 has played his PC's) but I'm gonna role play a chaos Muppet to the hilt, so you'll have to stretch as DM to accomodate him. I gave him massive (canonical, IMO) points in a made up skill called 'Distract/Annoy' which seems self evidently useful and which I tried to use a couple times, including once in a situation where a character was literally hypnotized by the goddess and someone had to snap him out of it. Sourcebook only allowed for someone to hit him for 1HP, which is what I ended up doing after rolling a hard success on Distract/Annoy. I also gave him huge (Marx Bros Canonical) points in Music, and when told sourcebook says I need to pick a specialization picked 'Clarinet' cause it seems like the dumbest funniest option. We ended up getting a chance to play a magic, evil piano, but since I was only, like, Boston Pops level skilled in Clarinet I was of course flummoxed by a piano. Since nothing was given for him to do, I basically did nothing, which to me was fine and it kept me mostly out of everyone else's way. The first couple one-off modules which we played were fun since we were all new and goofing around and the herky-jerkyness of the script and mechanics was fine since none of us could be expected to anticipate that and correct for it in advance. I've also like DM-ing, but that's also true of every egomaniac playground tyrant. To the extent I think I'm -not- that, what I liked was the ability to improvise with a completely free hand without asking permission from someone who is either too nervous about getting off script to grant it, or someone who doesn't want to deviate from xtreme sexytimes. As well as to excise that kind of gross business or tone it down or redirect it as I saw fit. I think I would have fun with this game with a different dynamic, partly because I literally have, and honestly, that's really what this questioning is becoming. Like, if I were to do this elsewhere, with other people, what are things I should try/look out for. But basically, I've straight up said everything that bothers me with how this game is played and this other guy has essentially said, 'no, gently caress that, we need to do this as written'. So we've both staked out pretty hard, irreconcileable positions, the next move, even just walking away, is going to be an escalation on that. And given that it's going to be 4-5 months at the earliest before I can interact with any of these people in any other way, it will be a bummer in a big way to do so, if it seems like I'm vacillating and venting instead of taking action. E: As to Dead Man Stomp, we did run a one-off module from that book (or is that the module's name?). But since pretty much the beginning DM#2 has been talking up some campaign that is going to be a single, uninterrupted story, run by DM#1, that will last for probably a year of real-life time at our once-a-week pace. I've had misgivings from the start and have also said I don't think this is a good idea, and have been straight up refused. So that avenue has been tried and foreclosed. Yea I know I know, bail it's the only option. Also, we're all adults, I'm not worried if the tiff will blow over, but I'd like to do something with my quarantine besides water the plants, play video games and jerk off. Or at least now I would, after 4 months of doing all three to the point of abusrdity. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 23:11
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Nessus posted:If you are interested in RUNNING Call of Cthulhu I imagine you'd get players. I am SO interested. I really liked my first homebrew, thought it had some potential, and with a second chance could be even better, and likewise, feel like if I had shook the book off from the start in running Crimson Letters that could have been more fun. I also homebrewed a Vietnam Scenario that turns out, in outline essentially the same as the instigating event for Delta Green. However I've got sense enough to know that my enthusiasm is way outstripping my breadth of experience and probable skill level. Anyway, if anyone absolutely NEEDS to put a super problematic whore in their game, here's two full pages of it, with the in-one-case-only-not-a-huge-red-flag* discussion of Age of Consent included:   Turns out I never got sent scenarios, just seeds. But from a discussion of the scenario we ran, emphasis mine: uneral processions with tiny children-caskets are seen everywhere, and the police, flooded with calls for help, have their hands full every minute. Within days the Bacchanalian revelers who follow Abyzou are openly raping and killing anyone weak and helpless, especially children, wherever they can find them. The corpses of children and infants are being dumped into mass graves. The PCs, if they play their cards right, may eventually receive help from a young phone girl (a teenage prostitute catering to the elite), who is actually a manikin that was given life as part of the ritual that summoned Abyzou. Again, I can not recommend enough that people not give their money to Chaosium for this book. It's hosed and they should get hosed financially for having put it out. *Call me a hypocrite if you must, but you wanna talk about Age of Consent in this specific context, I'm your huckleberry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ahU-x-4Gxw Dumb anecdote, once while teaching a college level course, this song came on random on my ipod I had playing through the speakers on low as background as the class filled in. Some zoomer kid was blown away by the baseline and kept asking me what the name of the song was. I hope he eventually found it and realized why Mr. Pip kept looking side to side and sorta coughing into his arm and muttering it's a "Hem cough ahem by a band called New Order" when asked. At least a Joy Division song didn't come up. Speaking of Nasty German Sex poo poo, I was very troubled when I learned what that name meant. E: I just now realized Shazam was totally a thing at the time, he probably had the title on his phone by note three and was only asking to wind me up. If so, well played, Zoomer. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 02:23
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Nessus posted:I think that if you approach things with the attitude of "I am new to GMing this, so we're going to do some module one-shots so we can all get our bearings" you will get happy uptake from bored people in lockdown. You may wish to post fewer sex worker charts. If you are interested in one of the classic works, "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" is a very "scientific adventure eventually develops into something more" story, while I think Masks of Nyarlathotep is more of a globe-trotting pulp adventure. I have never given Masks a deep read but BTMOM's most problematic content is some period sexism. Yea, like I said, I wasn't sure what the mores/rules/laws are regarding that. I spoilered it up and heavily advertised what it was and thumbnailed it so it wouldn't be legible if the mouse passes over it. If you think it should go, sure, but for real. This is actually tame compared to the scenario material. Should I trash it? No problem if so. So 'Philosophy of RPG'? I'll check it out. What's Hyphz, btw? E: Checked it out. Seems like this guy was a no-good GM? I'll read a bit to figure out what NOT to do, at least. EE: JEEEEEeeezus Ceeeerist. And I was self conscious about the page and a half I've monopolized with MY bitching. Holy gently caress. I'm fine with the sexism stuff, every character I've played has been deliberately awful people played for maximum buffoonery. I've been a murderous feral street urchin, a more mean, dumb vicious harpo Marx (though the aggressive woman-chasing went out the window once it became clear who the women NPCs were gonna be). I once decided to roll a 'simple country lawyuh' type, and essentially made Matlock. Trying to figure out how to give him combat usefulness, doing the math on a 75 year old man in 1920, I made him a sharpshooter during the Civil War for the 'good guys' and a total refusal to discuss the matter further. Then turned out the module was Dead Man's Stomp, in Harlem. I like to think I played him so that he was the butt of every joke. Introductory line was "Nice to meet y'all, can I just say how COMPLETELY at my ease I am here and how randomly I selected the only five whites in this bar to beeline towards?" I get the other side of the debate but I'm fine with an outre rear end in a top hat protagonist as long as it's clearly a critique of that kind of rear end in a top hat. I just don't see how you can Will-Ferrel-as-a-petulant-manboy-but-thats-supposed-to-be-the-joke the sexual exploitation of children or the hentai level of sexual deviancy in the last scenario. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 02:51
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Nessus posted:I don't follow you here. It kind of sounds like you're bragging about playing a racist rear end in a top hat? Like I get the feeling this is more confused turns of phrase than anything but it's a persistent thing here. You aren't going to make for fewer assholes at a game table by being one yourself. I didn't have him say or do anything racist. I had him behave, essentially, the same way my mom did when she'd come to visit in Harlem. A lot of protest-too-much compliments, most of which were backhanded, and a lot of comically over stated caution. The kind of way a person who "doesn't have a racist bone in his body and doesn't care if you're black white yellow or purple with polka-dots" behaves when in an actual diverse/poor/both neighborhood. He was also a blowhard and a dullard. I guess, I'll try and un-confuse it. I'm trying to play along while playing a character who is more than just a skill sheet. I can code up a python program to roll my rolls for me at an appropriate time if all I wanted to do with Tabletop RPGs was just roll my way to the end of the story. Given the time period, the author of the setting, and my friend group's penchant for comedy based on that sort of Will Ferrel-y unpleasant, overconfident moron (we're all millenials who came up right as Judd Apatow and Adam McKay were cranking one of those out every two months it seems like) the characters I make are generally unpleasant people who were mechanically useful to the party, but as role play content were mostly a sideshow to crack the jokes I'd be cracking if me and these people were hanging out at a bar. The Feral Urchin was Fourvel from Comedy Bang Bang, then Matlock, then Harpo. I think I'm gonna bail on the Year Long Slog, but the two characters I'd rolled for that were basically Teddy from Bob's Burgers and a cross between Buster Bluth, Jay Gatsby and Trump, Jr. Just a worthless, stupid, sullen failkid who's spent his entire life getting kicked out of different colleges and buying his way out of trouble but never got a job or learned any skills other than making the helps' life miserable. Given our politics, playing this character as a miserable, spoiled, self-defeating (except in combat and rolls) jackass will serve the same function as bitching about the news, while being slightly less repetitive. Maybe I'm off base, but no one has complained about it, other than the constant joking can be distracting from the action at hand, which I think is fair and I'm trying to balance. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 03:23
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RudeCat posted:Yeah, have you tried making a character who is interesting and who engages with the game world instead of one who grinds against it? Fourvel (I named him L.P. Hovercraft cause it was my first character and I was being an rear end in a top hat) was an 11-year old threshing machine, as is canon for the knife-crazy orphan character. I gave him all brawl and steal and sneak cause I didn't know what else to do with my first character but go hard archetype. Our first one-shot was the one where you crash at a light-house and Deep One Young come at you. He single-handedly killed two of the three when one member was crazy and the another was dead and saved the party. I'm not trying to spoil the game or go OOC or make life tough for the other players, here. Let me explain the 'protest character'. We have a person who naively rolled a photojournalist in our first ever session. Other than a quick early death in the first module, which we all agreed would have been different if the GM had understood combat mechanics better, leading to a ret-conned revival, she's our longest running character. For the sake of role play the player filled the character with stuff like photography, chemistry for developing pictures high points in English cause she writes her own stories, and stuff like that. No combat skills. This character has been almost completely sidelined in every module we've ever played, except for my homebrew where I specifically arranged the story such that the photos she takes and the story she writes affects public opinion for or against the different sides, leading to them waxing or waning in relative strength throughout the campaign. I specifically took the time to explain to her that her character was going to be critical in the module, spoiling some of it, because I knew she'd gotten so used to hanging back that it would be multiple days before she put together how she was affecting gameplay. That was a not subtle and a big lift to include for that one character but I also put in a car chase, for the guy who'd rolled a racecar driver and put 75 points in the till-then entirely unused Drive Auto. If there was an astronomer or an accountant or a tugboat captain I'd have figured out plot-critical things for them to do. I want the player to not only have to, like, roll Accounting to read the governments budget to realize the skynet project is eating up the whole budget under different contractor shell companies but for the group to go HOLY poo poo YOU DID IT, MAN when that turns out to be somehow a critical and necessary thing to help them win. I want them to be happy they picked Accountant and feel like that guy is something badass and be invested in the character. The point of brewing the module was 'The god-drat book doesn't tell you anything but what a charm or spot hidden roll will reveal. If you instead deviate from the book you can make something for everyone to do and create a more fun time.' The next module we go back to examine abandoned crime scenes and interrogate witnesses. Charm/Spot hidden. So I roll a character that would be totally useless to the module as I would assume it would be written (and it turns out I wasn't wrong). But by pulling another combat character out of the PC pool, there was essentially no way for the group to win the final fights that had to that point been the ending of every module (we ended up pushing the god into a hole and she died). And by making the party 3/5 characters with out the default skills the pre-written modules lean most heavily on, I was hoping the GM would recognize it. If that sounds passive-aggressive, when I had the idea I got on the group chat and went Me: "Holy gently caress New Character Idea! Harpo Marx!" lovely GM: "That's gonna be impossible to play, how are you gonna talk to anyone?" Me: "Doesn't seem to stop him from saving the day in, like, every one of their movies. Make something up like I did for the Journalist." Days later at the first session of the new module: lovely GM: "Ok so you're that Lawyer Kentucky J Mooseknuckle right?" Me: "No Dude I'm Chumpo Marx, like I said" lovely GM: "Nah man how the hell is he gonna fit? You guys don't have any ranged combat that way. You're the lawyer." Me: "Dude, you're gonna make this all up, so (discussion of sheet, Harpo in the movies is all stealth/steal/disguise/distract the villain) here's how I'm playing him, make something up." I think I made it pretty clear why I was doing what I was doing, and within the confines of not saying to a friend "Dude gently caress you, this isn't fun you're sidelining two friends for up to 5 hours each evening we play, until that changes I'm siding with them and playing their kinds of characters that are totally available to roll but have no ability to interface with this Choose Your Own Adventure Level Play" I'm being as confrontational and explicit as I can. If I'm wallpapering this thread with self-justification I just want to make it very, very clear that I'm specifically trying to not be the kind of player being critiqued here. And that's because I think critiques of those players are valid. I want a game that is fun, amusing, and engrossing for all. I'd like it free of the Taxi Driver kid hooker poo poo. I'd like it maybe a little better written and plotted than these modules have been, but that's not necessarily something every GM can guarantee. But they can at least do a little more work on the back end to give us something to engage WITH, than just read the PDF from top to bottom, with pauses for where it says 'Players can roll Spot hidden to..." My instinct since I was a little kid was when I see someone getting sidelined or bullied or made fun of was to go over to them, and tell the other people 'gently caress you, I'm with them, do it to me too.' That's what I'm doing here. Maybe I'm not making it clear in the game, maybe I'm not making it clear on the board. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 03:58
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RudeCat posted:I think then that you need to be the one who runs these games, because you're not going to change hearts and minds by playing a meta-game against the GM while the other game is running. That's going to be the best way you can make sure that people aren't getting bullied or sidelined. Yea I hit that realization several posts ago. Like I said, I tried polite and subtle, then I tried teasing and tweaking, then I tried coming out and saying it flat and got a hard 'no' that leaves me nowhere to go but over the top. It's just so alien to me to be told 'hey man you're kinda bugging your friends' and not get a 'sorry', not get a denial, but get a 'no actually this is good and you like it and I'm changing nothing.' Funny how life works. I coulda gone my whole life and never knew this guy had a lovely DM inside him if we'd never been quarantined.
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Jul 24, 2020 04:38
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TK_Nyarlathotep posted:Edited to add: Seems they really took this poo poo seriously and I did not consider it as having as many warnings as it does. Doesn't make it in good taste, but it does mean they warned you. Indeed the book is full of warnings to the Keeper NOT TO SPRING THIS poo poo ON YOUR PLAYERS WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT IT. Yeeeup. Guess which of the members of the group is the only one with access to the unexpurgated, unabridged text, warnings an all. He did mention the 'adult' themes, and I'm like, ok, I'm fine with that to a degree. I'm an adult, I've done the sex with other people some of whom have liked to do stuff I would not have thought of myself. I've done all the non-gas-station-synthetic drugs from alcohol up to opium. Sure lets rock. Then it's like, a 13 year old kid's sleepover bullsession. Everything is described with the maturity and versimillitude of the 'bags of sand' monologue from 40 Year Old Virgin, or like, Go Ask Alice. If LSD had been invented yet you'd have to roll SAN to not jump out a window trying to fly. Which, again, wouldn't be a killer because none of us would know it's in the book if the DM would exercise restraint and judgement, but I'm of the opinion you basically you can't say 'Its in the book' as DM. That the words left your mouth at all is a tacit endorsement. And you were wondering why I went scatological when I needed my clown character to react to fear. That was about the only fetish that module DIDN'T rub our noses in (heh) so it kinda just seemed appropriate. Also thanks for the phrase 'Magical Realm', I just googled that. E: I was reading around on people's thread reccos, and one of the goons made a cheap game called Hard Fast and Loud which I picked up. It seems like the antidote for our groups woes (or at least mine). Gonna suggest we try it out, or at least try to break off a subchunk to try it with. It essentially provides *nothing* not even a setting or antagonist, the group needs to collaboratively determine all that before the game starts. It's the 180 degree opposite of how we've been running things and it would be a refreshing change of pace at least. EE: Re-reading my own effort post, re the Accountant's Hero's Journey, I gotta go back and watch Untouchables.  Every game should end with a dork of a character like that ripping poo poo up out of nowhere. Or at least contain the potential for that to happen. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 15:48
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Warthur posted:You sure about that? In my copy various ways of resolving it are discussed on page 190-192. So, our DM very heavily lampshaded that the pit of dead souls in the ghost dimension or whatever would completely obliterate everything, even a god, that got pushed in there, so that's what we did. Then everyone who went into the dimension was instakilled. When I asked how, specificially we were supposed to deal with this and not get waxed, he kinda handwaved that we could just wait for it to leave its dimension and come into our world. Unsurprisingly, completely refusing what seems like the normal plot progression and idly waiting for an evil god to complete apotheosis involved like, dozens of rabisu mooks pouring out and an insane HP and damage monster that probably would have wiped the whole party, because we had two fighters*. He sorta trailed off and I assumed that meant he hadn't really gamed any of this out in advance was realizing the answer was 'you're hosed no matter what, happy ending scenario is a few members unwittingly swallow an instakill fishhook.' Is there a method of winning that module that doesn't rely on a cheap 'And then you all die, nyah!' ending, and doesn't depend on your Team being Seal Six? *For how much this game (base, not pulp) wants you to play some accountant or chauffeur or something, all the book-based modules I've played (as in the ones I didn't either rewrite or do up from scratch) assume most of the NPCs will be brawlers gunners. I've also asked why I have to roll SAN for seeing an embalmed dead body at a funeral but not for beating a man to death in the street with a hammer. Character creation is 'Choose a career and roll your stats. Ok, we've given you 240 skill points, of which 100 will be grounded into dumpstats you might never see used. The balance you put in brawl, persuade, and spot hidden.' I should make it clear I've had fun with this game, but it feels incredibly half-written. Like they came up with 500 character classes and didn't grow any of them out /design any modules to accomodate any of them beyond 'fighter' or 'rogue'. Or consider what sort of things actually gently caress actual humans up permanently and which ones are just sort of uncomfortable. I get this could be a me thing, but it seems like the DM has to do a lot of heavy lifting to round this game out. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Aug 4, 2020 |
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Aug 4, 2020 19:24
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Nessus posted:"Beyond the Mountains of Madness" has some gunplay in it but is heavily privileged towards antarctic survival and scientific operation skills. I don't know the Berlin scenarios but your GM is bad. Yea, our GM sucked. But I was given 'Crimson Letters' to run, and there were no skill checks called out in the module to advance the plot but spot hidden, persuade, and psychology. I've had fun doing this game, but it's specifically when I choose to expand on the modules or make my own thing up. Everything that bugged me about lovely GM was his slavish devotion to the sourcebooks. Adding nothing, subtracting nothing, refusing any idea or solution not explicitly accounted for in advance. My beef is with him, but it wouldn't be nearly so boring if the sourcebook he followed like gospel assumed any player would want to explore more than 30% of the character sheet. You can argue that it's being a lovely GM to do it how he's doing it, and I agree, fully. But he kinda fell into a trap set for him with the way the modules are written. Never played one, but I assume D&D books don't allow you to create random golem hedge wizards or gnome bards then provide instruction only for what happens when a human fighter comes in and swings his sword around. The base game as sold is 70% of a good time. I get it. You made it clear a while ago that you're not interested in hearing more of my saga. Which whatever, but also, this isn't the busiest thread ever, and a guy replied to me and I'm replying to him. I sunk probably 12 hours into that stupid module and jaundiced as I might be I'm legitimately interested to see what the other potential endings were. And a good way to prove I'm up my own rear end here would be to wait for the guy who read the sourcebooks to explain how in that one module the players come to a satisfactory conclusion. PC deaths make sense and seem justified, challenges are meetable with a variety of different team compositions, etc.
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Aug 5, 2020 04:37
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UnCO3 posted:This might interest some people here: Oh man, you just reminded me there's a sequel to The Vorrh I've never read. I'd check it out if you haven't, give you a lot of good ideas.
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Aug 7, 2020 03:08
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Nessus posted:Also, as an unrelated thought, your earlier example of a character made me think of a convention module - someone's going to stage a film version of some kind of "Requiem Mass for Suggie" on the soundstage across from where the Marx brothers are filming. Obviously, you name it "A Night at the Opera." Hah. Everytime the shuggoth tries an attack, it turns out Harpo did the leg gag with its pseudopod. 
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Aug 7, 2020 03:12
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Nessus posted:if someone explicitly says "I check his desk drawers," you just tell them what they find, but if they're like "We search his office," well, Spot Hidden, folks, high rolls find the knife. Yea both of these are things I came up with independently after my first day running a module. Not trying to say I'm a genius it's just how glaringly obvious/necessary these particular tweaks are, even to people with almost no background in tabletop.
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Aug 7, 2020 03:16
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Mycroft Holmes posted:So, this is a little weird, but have any of you ever heard of the Kaiserreich mod for Hearts of Iron 4? It has Germany winning WWI due to US non-intervention. The important thing is, it has a 4 way US Civil War between leftists, fascists, a MacArthur coup, and the pacific states. I plan on using Acthung! Cthulhu to run a campaign where the characters are members of the left-wing rebel movement. Now, I need to revamp the stuff in the rulebook to fit with the new geopolitical scene. I've already figured the fascists should be using mythos stuff, but I need a way to filter that through the intense christian fundamentalism of the southern US, where that faction is based. Canada, where the royal family has fled to after a revolution against them established a left-wing government, takes and puppets new england during the fighting, so they will be the antagonist during the second phase of the game and the true source of the mythos weapons the fascists use. If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to them. As to zealot fundies siding with Cthulhus, Zack Parson has a whole series with this as a jumping off point: https://www.somethingawful.com/news/insidious-beast-hand/1/ editing cause you were asking for rulebook stuff and I went on one about my own modules that I've aready discussed anyway. Gonna leave this here though: Anyway, not like you have to make your lefties bad guys also, but I like the whole 'no way out/no good options' of the Cthulhu mythos stories. People had fun though, and I've found the best part of a homebrew is you can create stuff directly at your players, instead of trying to invest them in someone else's writing. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 17:51
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Anyone ever read Hospital by Toby Litt? I'm toying with the idea of doing a one-off in the same kind of setting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_(novel) Litt initially adopts a realistic tone, portraying several conventional scenarios associated with medical drama, including a nurse's romantic interest in a doctor, the arrival of a coma patient from another hospital, a young boy's stomach-ache (which he believes to be the result of an apple tree growing from a seed he had earlier swallowed), and the medical troubles of other patients. As the novel progresses, situations become increasingly surreal, as the ritual slaughter of a baby by Satanist doctors causes an impenetrable fog of implicitly supernatural origin to beshroud the hospital, impeding contact with the outside world. As the young boy continues to search for an exit, various bizarre events occur: a group of patients begin to worship the comatose man who had been transferred into the hospital earlier that evening; meat in character's stomachs regenerates into the animals it had been taken from, ripping their torsos open; and the young boy's fear that an apple tree is growing inside of him is realised. Wikipedia doesn't make it super clear but basically no one can die, or even stay hurt, everyone heals (or rather their 'bodily integrity' is always restored, see the animals reviving and a really squick scene with a woman who was giving birth when the weirdness came down I'd definitely skip). I really like the idea of there being essentially no way to physically die, other than being put into the fog and this leads to mental insanity, as since people still feel pain, torture and violence become widespread once society breaks down into full on Lord of the Flies with Satanists. The best way to do it would be to have a character get mortally wounded/killed, as them magically coming back all of a sudden in the OR, wounds instantly stitching up and all, would be an immediate 'Ruh-roh, Raggy' for the group and give them an intro to the idea of what they're dealing with. Hell I could have a scalpel or foreceps get sealed up inside that leaves them incapacitated with pain until someone cuts it out (anaesthesia and other drugs also don't really work for the same reasons, everyone's basically Wolverine). Basically I feel like gameplay would be faster and crazier if jumping down a 5-story elevator shaft to escape (or just beat someone down the stairs) is a totally valid strategy, as long as your SAN can take having your shinbones pushed through your chest cavity and dealing with the pain for a minute or so. Anyway, I'd like it to seem like a natural transition from the usual unexpectly old tomb in a pyramid or a speakeasy with a fish-man in the back to a left turn that happens before anyone quite realizes. Opening the scenario with 'Ok, rolling a d6... Joe, your guy is shot to death, you're bleeding on the street' is cheap and weird, as would be any opening scene that just functions as a cattle chute to get someone killed/incapacitated with no escape. I'd also like it to be a PC that's hurt for the stakes, not like, the group is visiting somone's sick aunt. Could be I'm asking too much here, but any ideas? PipHelix fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 18:11
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Nessus posted:Contrive slightly to have some social connections among the PCs - doesn't have to be everyone but, say, two of them are related or they're two/three couples. Then at your opening ask them all to roll 2D6 and explain that play will begin with everyone down that many HP, due to the car accident they were in on their way to their cabin in the woods. I actually talked to the DM of my current game and he's down. I'm gonna get a little tap on the shoulder next time we're about to get into a situation that will likely end with a PC hosed up on a lifeglug in some ICU somewhere so I have my notes ready (I had to specify, that like, being dragged off by ghouls or eaten whole by some hellbeast isn't gonna work for the intro). So like, we get in a fight, someone gets their neck snapped or gutshot or whatever, combat resolves, DM pushes his chair back and I plop down and like, narrate him or her being carried off in an ambulance, does anyone go with them, do they comfort them, what is said, what do they do as they wait around for surgery, , do they... maybe go to the cafeteria and have a burger (hee hee) and as EKG starts flattening out do they have any final meaningful words... followed by a flash, everyone gets a blinding migrane for a second, the dying PC seals up in as grotesque a manner as I can imagine, followed by shouts of joy and screams of pain and horror throughout the halls, and scene, see you all next week to figure out what the gently caress. Lots of development yet to do but, idea is the 'coma man' is/was a powerful Mythos cultist who hosed up a dimensional gateway spell and fried his mind, at the moment of braindeath his dying psyche split a bubble of the universe off into limbo. The satanist doctors, the nuns working as nurses, the janitor who is secretly a Santeria/Obeah/Cernobog priest (depending on what part of Europe we're in when this happens) will all assume it's something to do with them, and send the team off on random bloody goose chases that will mostly just serve to show how out of their depth everyone is (and give them someone who can interpret the tattoos and scars on the coma man, or his journals if they can find his personal effects). Unless/until I come up with a better idea the best option for escaping will be cutting him open and climbing through, and since he's the only one who can be physically harmed and die, there won't be enough time for *everyone* to go through before his body dies. And when the cultist dies every mind trapped in the bubble dies with him. So anyone who escapes wakes up in an Andrea Doria ghost ship of a hospital with everyone dead, but bodily completely free of whatever disease or injury or disfigurement brought them there in the first place. A good 'No good ending' since by escaping the way they do they're condemning at least a couple dozen innocent people, but there's no way to get more than like five or six people out even if the group all sacrifice themselves and stay behind. Good chance for the 'dead' PC to die staving off the rest of the hospital, while at the same time introducing some noble doctors or nurses and such that the player might want to pick up as a replacement. Or who knows they could greedily fight to be the first one through to get a deathmulligan and leave someone else in the party stranded. Just now had a brainwave that I can handwave away Pediatrics by saying a polio outbreak required the whole hospital to be cleared of children except for like, one or two moppets who were stuck in iron lungs. That way it's a small enough population the group can have a Newt to keep safe (or I can just decide they're hiding if the group doesn't go looking for them) and we don't have to worry about what happens to the kids in the hospital when it goes Grand Guignol. Like, I'm just gonna steal shamelessly from the book and that book gets nasty. Opioid addicts smashing up the pharmacy, satanist doctors torturing people to escape, etc.etc. If anyone asks what about the adults (I honestly dunno what the implications are for polio infections in adults, I'm not 95 years old) I'm just gonna slowly repeat that There. Are. No. Children. In. This. Hospital. and hope that's both the end of the discussion and some drat good foreshadowing. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Sep 15, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 22:43
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Nessus posted:On the topic of children in the place: If it's in the modern day there is likely a separate Children's Hospital building, and you'd obviously be in the trauma ward to start with, so you might have a moppet or two but not giant mobs. It's 1930s, I'm just gonna handwave it with some polio filler. I like that it *isn't* recognizeable horror but (assuming I set the scene right) is pretty horrific. Gonna try to run it in 3 or 4 3 hour sessions, so by the time the group has their head around the new rules the door is barricaded against the rest of the hospital, whichever doctor or whoever they ally with is hooking the patient up to transfusion bags to keep him alive long enough for them to climb through and readying the bonesaw. I'm a big Coen Brothers fan and one of my favorite things about them is in their best movies, *no one* knows what's going on. Lots of people think they do, they're wrong, and every action they take based on their wrong ideas makes things worse and more complicated for everyone else. So yea, I like the idea that this guy was a pretty leveled-up wizard who still nonetheless bit off more than he could chew, and at least three religious factions are all going to claim credit for/insight into the situation and immediately go to meaningless, futile war with each other and try to enlist the group The way I keep it from becoming a total wild goose chase is at the end of the 2nd module, if they haven't explored or asked around enough to learn of the cultist, well, the rest of the shell-shocked, terrified people in the hospital will have found him and begun forming opposing cults centered on the McGuffin (Cult A: Maybe if we revive him it will all be over? Cult B: Maybe if we KILL him it will all be over, Cult C:NO! He's been spared this torment, he must remain asleep! Nun Nurses: You're all heretics! Satanist doctors: No, over here, look at US WE'RE running things now! Service level pagan cultists: Silently working the corners and using access keys to cut power/water/gas to unfavored levels, loot drugs from the pharmacy/non-meat food from the cafeteria to gain the allegiance of the jonesing and starving ex-patients) The intent is to sketch these groups out, let the players decide who they want to ally/fight with and only flesh those out. That way it seems like a huge world with lots of possibilities but I am not working a full time job prepping the next week.
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Sep 19, 2020 15:28
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Night10194 posted:The entire adventure is just going into the house and repeating a chant for 2 hours while the monster tries to freak you out or interrupt without being able to directly interfere; the mechanics are mostly just rolling Sanity and hoping it goes well without really making any decisions or discovering any clues or making preparations beyond 'have one PC standing by with the trusty BAR in case of trouble'. Ooof I've hated the modules I've played that end like that. It takes (at least) two characters completely out of the action for the climax. In the one I did that called for it, I skipped the chant and made it so that they find at the end the ritual required a human sacrifice, and had them deal with a couple unpleasant npcs along the way. They killed most of them outright, but for reasons of timecrunch/police interference threw one of them, unconscious, into their trunk. And still by the time they got to the end they'd completely forgotten him and had almost resolved to murder the most annoying PC before someone recalled he was in there. I'm 'always give people something to actively be doing'. In the lovely games I've played, the one main thread is player boredom and disengagement. "Your turn. Yea, I'm what, just chanting? Yea for another two hours. Ok, I keep chanting then, I guess." Bleh. E: Or, OR, make it clear from the start that whoever is chanting when the ritual is complete gets, like, knowledge of a (not terribly powerful) spell or something. So that the booknerd characters have something to look forward to by game over, as they're huddled into a corner mumbling while the brawlers defend them in epic battles for the next two hours. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Sep 19, 2020 |
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Sep 19, 2020 15:38
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Nessus posted:My only comment here then would be that it would be more versimilitudinous if the PCs wake up late, or had to go through some other area that caused a time warp, because I do think it would take people somewhat more than a few minutes to form fratricidal religious orders and such. Oh sorry. Let me explain. You straight up can not die (or at least, stay dead), but also can not leave. It's going to take a while for people to get over the 'ok this is weird but lets just keep it together until help comes.' or 'Holy poo poo I can walk/see/breathe again!' to 'Kill The Pig, Slit It's Throat, Drink It's Blood!' Think Groundhog Day. I believe Bill Murray is supposed to be trapped in Punxatawney for literal years of the same day. It's my intention that I'm going to give the players a hospital, a very lightly sketched out set of new mechanics (clue 1: Their friend walking out of the morgue saying something like "holy poo poo you guys I died and I'm alive and I literally watched my chest stitch itself up, here are all the friends I made letting ex-corpses out of coldboxes!) and a cast of NPCs to interact with and just let them run. If the PC's get stumped for something to do, I'll give them a prompt along the lines of 'A week passes... No word reaches the hospital from outside, no one who ventures into the Fog returns. A thoroughly panicked night porter with a wife and newborn at home made the attempt with a rope around his waist. The second he was enveloped the rope fell to the ground, cleanly severed at the point it entered the fog. No further attempts have been made.' 'Another week passes. On Wednesday (?) evening (??) a doctor suffered a mental breakdown, and began hurling invective at anyone near him. It got so bad a nurse snapped and stabbed him through the eye with a letter opener. After he recovered from the shock, he bludgeoned her to death with a paperweight, precipitating a bloodbath melee between doctors and nurses that mostly demolished the resident's lounge and half the administration wing before tempers cooled. A cabal of doctors have since announced they are reserving the entire top floor as their personal domain. Anyone caught trespassing will be flung from the roof. Repeat offenders will be stripped before hand and their personal effects appropriated or burnt." 'Two weeks pass, and with them the Food Riots like a passing fad. The experience of starvation has become so universal and common that people have more or less stopped even commenting on it. The crowds at the hospital chapel that had been thinning, essentially tail to zero. Nuns are a less common sight, suggesting some of the sisters have abandoned the habit for secular clothing and membership in one of the Floor Gangs, Coma Cults or suicide by Fog. Sister Christian Motorin (yea I love bad jokes and I can not lie) remains, faithful to the end. She might welcome the company and a chance to unburden herself.' Don't want it to be railroady, but since I'm also REALLY switching things up here, the only thing I can guarantee my players is that the experience will be novel. So I want them out quick enough (in real people time) the novelty can't wear off. The two weaknesses are that you can full-on-die by entering the Fog, which I'm certain will be exploited but it is canon and anyway I need a way to keep them all in the hospital. Second is that the coma guy is very clearly Capital S Special. In the immediate aftermath, I'm gonna say no one is going to pay him much mind, they were just cured of, like, bone cancer. Or they're studying the cured with the idea of becoming the world's most famous doctor, or a saint, or the Antichrist. So the PCs won't know about him unless someone declares they're going ward by ward bed by bed to Figure This poo poo Out. After that but before society breaks down, the doctors and nurses and nuns are going to be highly defensive of him, because of their oaths and because he's their last link to normalcy (and the secret satanist doctors/administrators are going to want to monopolize access to him). After it's all the way broke down, he's basically going to be Haram Es Sharif for every splinter cult in the place. A very fragile peace that the PCs can exploit by siding with one or another group and steal him away in the confusion. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Sep 20, 2020 |
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Sep 20, 2020 02:32
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mellonbread posted:Ran a game of Laundry RPG. Training sounds like, yipes. Magic... not quite sure what's happening with apps and computers. Can humans actually do magic in this? Maybe just D&D and have some weapons/armor be enchanted or whatever the word would be in this one?
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Sep 27, 2020 03:41
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Anyone deeper in the mythos than me want to help with an appropriately sharklike (but definitely great white or bigger sized) mythos monster the group could encounter in Limbo? I've decided the endgame of my module in the hospital is going to require them to side with either the satanist doctors (expert surgeons), the nuns (skilled nurses) or the janitorial staff (access to medicines, blood for tranfusions etc) to cut the hole in the comatose Cultist to escape. They can of course try it themselves, but none of them have medicine skill enough to perform what is essentially open heart surgery without almost instantly killing the patient. Plan is, the different allies will be able to keep the patient alive for different amounts of time, but all of them will demand to be one of the first through, consuming 'one tick' of alive time (except the nuns, but a bunch of nurses with no medicine aren't going to get you much in surgery. Problem with siding with the Good Guys). Once the timer runs out, the patient dies, the reality bubble his husk had been maintaining pops and everyone left over is cast into limbo. At which point we transition into Quint's Indianapolis Speech. There's going to be about 300 people total thrown out of the Hospital into Limbo with them and every round I roll a 3d<remaining living people>. And the three people whose number comes up get eaten, with the PCs who didn't escape through the cultist numbered 1, 2, 3..etc. They gotta POW roll to find a gate, POW to float to it, POW roll to open it, and decide whether to stick around and help anyone else escape or chickenshit out and force the next PC to roll to open the gate again. Idea is the highest POW PCs will be the ones to find and open the gate, with the lower POW PCs only task is having to flail their way through The Nothing after the high POW ones. Unless high POWs don't wait and peace out, which I and hopefully they would find hilarious. Anyway, what's an appropriate type of monster that could be snatching people up. I googled Byakhees but surprisingly the wiki makes them sound like weak mooks. E: did the math, with 3 PC's in Limbo, the odds everyone gets out alive is better than 50/50 until 20 turns are up, and with fewer PCs (I don't think I'll throw more than 3 out unless they do something massively stupid) the odds are even better. I see the whole escape taking like, 5 turns, 10 at the outside if they eat absolute poo poo on the POW rolls. So that's 75% chance of everyone getting clear, in the worst case (3PCs, 10 turns). But of course the RNG is the RNG. Does this seem fair and survivable, but also threatening enough? I want my players appropriately freaked during, and if someone gets it they get it, that's the game, but I'm not trying to pulp the party. And VV: Bholes sound good. They're Dreamlands monsters which fits the whole 'outside of any actual plane of existence' setting. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Sep 29, 2020 |
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Sep 29, 2020 18:15
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I found Hunting Horrors and like the idea of that. Appropriately dragon/sharky, appropriately sized. And if one of them goes for a PC, I can have it not be an instagib like a massive sandworm Bhole. But even so I'm rolling a 2d10 and if they survive, that fucker's taking at least a foot off and that is gonna be canon from then on if they get out. To keep from getting out over my skis I'm gonna focus on running this module. But finishing up the last Vorrh Book, I just got a brainwave for another homebrew. Gonna need to come up with an excuse to send the group to the Congo. Gonna keep the the Book's idea of the magical realist evil forest that holds the Garden of Eden as a starting point. Gimmick is that humans weren't cast out, they escaped. ctrl+F ing the wikipedia for mythos gods and found: Rhogog, The Bearer of the Cup of the Blood of the Ancients; A black leafless oak tree, hot to the touch and with a single red eye at the center. Bingo, so there's your 'tree of knowledge'. Gonna say that the angels (Elder Things) set up a research station around it tens of thousands of years back, experimented on animals using its influence on sentience/souls/whatever you wanna call it, including a pair of australopithecenes. One of whom used his brief moment of sentience to swear an oath to the Rhogog to save itself and its mate. Violence ensues, order breaks down the Elder Things get eaten/corrputed by the things they should never have meddled with (as usual) and now the forest is more or less ruled by more or less ensouled animals including The Original Man, kidnapping anyone dumb enough to enter the forest and either stealing their souls or feeding them to the tree. And thats where the PCs come in because there's miles and miles of valuable hardwoods in that forest and King Leopold needs a new cocobolo armoire. Basically Heart of Darkness meets Planet of the Apes meets a PETA Ad. Gonna call it "In the Arms of The Angels". And though I didn't start from the dumb name and work backwards, the dumb name was like, idea 3, and it definitely influenced everything else  E Including my fervent wish that they side with the nuns cause their ally NPC is gonna be offered at the end as a replacement for the PC who dies to get them into the hospital. Sister Christian Motorin is a tough old broad with a deep SAN pool and tons of POW (unshakeable faith) and I'm looking forward to her choking Adam to death with a vine or something. But also, mustn't weight those scales. Gotta let the PCs PC. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Sep 30, 2020 |
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Sep 30, 2020 17:30
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Last two weeks finally found time to run the trapped-in-a-hospital-under-a-shroud-of-undeath campaign. Been good so far, though 1) I'm out of practice DMing - It's been like six months 2) the switchup mechanic took a little time for my friends to get up to speed on. Current PC death tally - French chef - 0 - None, played safe. Investigative Journalist - I - Kicked to death by a steer Roboticized Bartender - II - Explosive Reincarnation, volunteered for vivisection IRA hitman - II - Shot to death (same cop, same interaction) So far the feedback has been good. I'm also glad that they haven't been relying too much on my PC, who I had killed to get them into the hospital. Questions for the thread Dealing with a snotty player: The IRA hitman has been kind of abusing the consequence free violence, which could be fine, but in a boring uncreative way, which is not. Twice he engaged a cop (who tbf roughly interrogated him in the first day) in combat. First time whatevs, hell yea, death to the pigs. Second time was during an all-hands exposition dump with the party and major NPCs. I followed up on an idea I'd been toying with and did away with most of the combat rolls and HP, as this was a point-blank-gunfight a hit was a kill or incapacitation. He was mad that he called a knee shot on the cop, who promptly domed him so I could get two peaceful rounds before he revived. He's right that a consciousness roll might have knocked the cop out, but also, the cop would now be unconscious, uninterrogateable and I'm not sure what he would have proceeded to do with a group of terrified, peaceful, civilian NPCs who (he doesn't know) do not have any useful information for him at this point in the module. Actually I do know, he woke up, randomly shot the CEO before the cop put him down a second time. I'm pretty confident I'm in the right here. I indulged him, but fast forwarded the group through his tantrum and saved everyone a My Lai scenario that - especially played straight according to the rulebook combat - would have taken the rest of the night and canonically alienated the party from almost every NPC in the game. Balancing player-tailored-content with keeping-the-group-as-a-whole-engaged Obviously in Cthulhu some jobs (chef, journalist) aren't directly applicable to a stock module except for like maybe one roll, so I like to cook up something that their skillset, or their PC's personality is uniquely applicable to. But its also hard to write specialized content that can't be bruteforced by the whole party just rolling 'Spot Hidden' or gangstomping some poor NPC, thus me trying to split them off. The issue that's been coming up is I get nervous leaving other people out of the action, and either rush the PCs with current focus through or shift focus too early. I feel like practice will help but any advice on this to foreshorten my getting my sealegs? I will say, the IRA guy has helped me out a little bit on that front since the cop now hates him, as does administrator of the hospital and he's terrorized all the important doctors and nurses. Like, he literally half convinced the party that the medical staff must know SOMETHING cause why wouldn't they all scatter and run when the gunfire started? Good question! Maybe I should have just had them run out and made the party wait a day to get their leads! So basically the only character who won't stonewall any PCs he might tag along with would be the head of janitorial. I have some sneaky/combat related stuff in the next week, he can Sam Fisher his way around and break necks to his hearts content, so I'm not like, freezing him out as punishment. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 17:38
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Afriscipio posted:Have the party made contact with the custodial and catering staff of the hospital? Your chef would be the obvious point of contact with them. This was exactly the plan. There was pre-existing labor disputes between Administration and Staff, and now this is stretching everyone to the breaking point as far as anger and suspicion. Nothing builds camraderie among working class people like talking shop with someone who Gets It. I've also decided that the escape hatch I'm giving Lothar the NPC-Slayer is, the evil head doctor is going to reach out to 'that loving mad-dog from the all hands fiasco' and give him a DM-adjacent rundown about how 'He's got a lot of enemies, but he's going to need some friends in here and I'll need an errand boy'. The first task is literally going to be 'fetch me a coffee' since Facilities will have declared rationing of electricity and water, and doctors are universal caffeine addicts. Perfect opportunity to burn precious ammo shooting some miscellaneous minimum wage rear end in a top hat over the price of a cup of joe. So he gets to roll his boom boom dice on people who've done literally nothing to deserve it, and that will serve as a conduit for the party to figure out who the big-swinging-dicks in this module really are, because as of the end of Day 2, as far as anyone knows (any PCs, this is CoC, obviously someone or ones is a Secret Cultist) they're still just in a hospital with a bunch of panicky civilians. I get the sense that he's likely to balk at being the bad guy's Renfield, even as a double agent, and I'm just gonna break character if that happens and just be like 'look dude, if we're being at all realistic here, no one would want to work with you, OR any of the party members if you're with them, so this is your content and that's all I've got.' E: Nessus, the one thing I was asking about, is, is there any advice you can give about splitting the party to keep the inactive members engaged in the actions of the group that is active? Obviously you want to strike a balance between leaving the others twiddling their thumbs and making the one player feel rushed, but are there any non-obvious things to try? And sometimes I want to ONLY give a character information? Either because I think that Player/PC is likely to misinterpret it, want to hide it from the group, or the scenario doesn't necessarily allow for them to escape it and fill the group in later. PipHelix fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Nov 20, 2020 |
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Nov 18, 2020 19:00
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Also, for a reward for escaping, besides a boost to everyone's medical skill which is always handy and no one has, I was going to have the PC's either get the cultist's journal or like, a scrap of his skin or something that has a spell on it. I was thinking a lower grade version of the ritual the cultist was trying. Something along the lines of healing/restoration of maiming/crippling effects, granted via a human sacrifice. Requires the laying on of hands - it can be done on a hostile, conscious NPC but it requires finishing them with an unarmed brawl roll. Can be used to heal someone else if they have hands on the caster at the time. Also permanent POW hit and a big SAN roll for everyone involved in the conga line, since again, the full version of this ritual spaghettified the cultists' mind across dimensions and ripped a chunk of reality into a bubble universe. 1. Too OP? 2. Anything similar already exist in the published literature?
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Nov 20, 2020 18:52
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Wrapped up, people seemed to like it. PC death tally - Investigative Journalist - I - Fell from 5th floor of building climbing the outside of the hospital Roboticized Bartender - I - Air-filled syringe induced embolism IRA guy basically led the action for the whole group, bratty, but fortunately I'd mapped out enough contingencies that I could let him run rampant without sidelining people. Gave him the blockade-running coffee fetchquest as a chance for him to be stealthy/violent whatever. He chose to go directly to the head of facilities and demand it, on behalf of the doctors who are hated by the downstairs guys. Though he knew all this, it was still his move. Eventually I'm like 'roll fast talk' he gets a hard success and gets a bag of grounds thrown at him to get him out of there. Proudly arrives back at the doctor's lounge with a bag of dry grounds, demanding a reward, refusing to acknowledge the common useage of 'get me a coffee' does not include 'bring me coffee grounds'. He comes up with the bright idea to boil a water ration using bunsen burners in the lab area, but like, orders the doctor to do it for himself. Anyway, this spirals and he caps the three doctors and in the chaos the other players decide to, you know, pursue the game. The journalist, who got their hands turned into tentacles by a demonic posession, decides to climb up the outside of the hospital to break into medical records, gets a lead, but takes a header off the wall on the way back down. Meanwhile the bartender checked out some noises he heard while being vivisected and discovered the sacrifice, and the nun and cleaning lady I had serially disappear as opportunities to get people telling them to CHECK OUT THE DOCTORS locked in a supply closet. Between that session and the next, since the chef had been helping the staff portion out the remaining food for rationing and got into their good graces, and is offered to make a move on the patient, and the journalist uses the info she learned to get one of the doctors to agree to betray the others and make the same move. Next session the IRA guy goes straight for the patient, to kill him. Since he's out of bullets, and I tell him no one is going to just allow the one person everyone hates to walk up and pull the plug on the one remaining patient in a hospital, who is becoming a focal point of, like, cargo cult worship he goes outside and blows up an ambulance as a distraction. Meanwhile the journalist tells the bartender and chef as an aside and they rush to the ICU while she gets the doctor. Basically the whole group spontaneously decided to ditch the trigger happy guy, very proud moment as a GM. The ensuing brawl was a lot of fun, bartender buried a fire ax in one of the doctors before one put an air bubble in his carotid with a syringe. The doctors had rigged the drunken puppet-CEO with a second pair of doc-ock arms salvaged from the Bartender's robot corpse (long story) and he tore the barricaded ICU door open with an extreme strength success, but IRA guy took him down as he arrived on the ICU floor. The janitor, cop, and remaining doctor got tangled up in a confused 3-stooges style clutch at the stairwell and the PCs who could escaped via the patient before he died. The Limbo bit after was ok. IRA guy, dead bartender and the PC I'd been running who died to jumpstart the module were floating. Since the party was split and half were fully done with the module, they were kinda bored but it was always the backstop in case someone killed the patient early, and the last one through was always going to be overwhelmed by the hospital and realistically would never get through. Probably a better way to handle it, but whatever, it covered the contingency of people not escaping. Rolling who got sharked on a 300-sided die meant that the PCs never got close to attacked, but that probably would have been the end of them, and I wasn't looking to kill a PC on this bottle-ep in a larger campaign unless a choice or the dice dictated it. Bartender was happy his spirit ended up back in a robot body, as he wasn't sure if his organic parts resurrecting in the pocket universe was meant to be permanent. Everyone got a good laugh when my PC demanded to stay behind and hold open a portal to help NPC civilians escape and the bartender bodily shoved him through, landing his spirit... directly in his dead body in the morgue. I'd planned a tragic and heroic farewell, and he got the biggest wet fart death in a long time. All in all, not bad for a homebrew. People weren't furious with me after at any rate. One thing I really liked was by making death a lot cheaper, combat went a lot quicker. You hit that guy with a fire ax? He's loving down. Roll success shooting a guy? He's dropped, next? It allowed the one player to play as violent as he wanted without devoting 90% of the play time to his character. Though whether I greased the skids so much he played that way more than he would have? Who knows what's cause and whats effect. Final thought, while explaining the background bits the PCs missed, I explained the patient spaghettified his spirit across multiple dimensions, and then when he snapped, he broke reality like a piece of spaghetti, which always snaps off a small fragment, and it had to be called to my attention I'd used two separate spaghetti analogies to explain this module without realizing it. https://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813 PipHelix fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Dec 1, 2020 |
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Nov 28, 2020 06:40
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Nessus posted:As for giving individuals specific information, you should absolutely do this. If you are in a physical or semi-physical (Discord, etc.) environment you can just take them aside into a chat room or give them a note/personal DM. If you want to be a clever beaver you can do this occasionally for everyone at random in order to make it seem less obvious, but this is the year 2020 and people will in my experience generally not be assholes about this stuff. Yea, to kick it off, each player was alone, and after their bit, were allowed to spectate silently, so they start confused and gain more info as they watch each other player go and put some pieces together. I also ordered them so that the later players got the most important clues so that everyone was on the same page. That worked well, where I hosed up was ending it without re-uniting people, so next game they were all still split apart the hospital and wanted to do independent investigations. In between each game I'd pick a player, usually someone who didn't get much to do, and have an NPC reach out to them with some secret info, so they'd have a leg up on everyone and threads to chase down/vital info to share in the next one. That works pretty good, I've found. Two of four players had agreed to separate plans to escape, cutting the other one out, so when the journalist ran to get a doctor and head to the ICU as soon as the IRA guy announced he was just going to murder the ICU patient, the chef immediately clocked what was going on, and without telling anyone beelined for it. The bartender was read in privately on a DM I wasn't part of so seeing the whole team just assemble (and freeze out the guy who was trying my patience the most) with no prompting was pretty cool. I'm not sure he is even aware the group was trying to ditch him as things precipitated so fast and he didn't end up in Limbo alone.
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Nov 28, 2020 07:12
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