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Bobulus posted:What is TG's opinion on introducing multimedia into your games? All my games are via skype and maptools, so we've already got the visual stuff taken care of, but I'm very tempted to rip up Skype to forward my computer sounds so that I can add ambient music / background sounds / whatever to games. Ambient music adds a lot to a game; I often have some mood-appropriate music playing softly in the back. Also, having props to hand out is great; if you're playing over Skype, then you can't physically give the players handwritten letters or maps or things (which is fantastic fun if, say, they're trying to navigate a dungeon with only a kobold's scrawled map to tell them where the traps are), but sending scanned in images would work just as well. I agree with ItalicSquirrels about not overdoing it though.
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Oct 19, 2009 23:50
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Yarrbossa posted:Off topic, but highly relevant question...how can you defend against players casting Hold Person then slitting their throat? This seems to be their method of choice and usually works... If it's something the players have been doing repeatedly on everybody who crosses them, it's probably fair to say that the King has heard of their favoured tactic, and if he recognises them as a threat, has specifically had his wizard make him up some sort of magical item for him to wear that reflects Hold Person (and only Hold Person) spells back at the person who cast them. Possibly it also creates magical fireworks that spell out "LIKE I WAS GOING TO LET YOU BEAT ME WITH THAT ONE."
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Dec 17, 2009 22:18
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RagnarokAngel posted:I have a long term villian I'd like to establish as a credible threat There are lots of ways to establish a villain as a credible threat other than have him trounce the party in a fight. Have them encounter enemy NPCs who are working on his behalf, or friendly NPCs who won't help them because they're scared of him, or give them a mission where the objective is to get in and get out before he arrives. If the aim of a fight becomes "Finish this within <x> rounds, or <NPC> will arrive and you'll be doomed" having the NPC be more powerful than the party can take when he arrives is much more justified, because by getting out of the fight in time the PCs are simultaneously establishing him as a threat and winning an encounter against him.
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Mar 31, 2010 21:25
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Fenarisk posted:Well once that sunk in it killed the last 30 minutes of the night. The bard/sorc was visibly upset from what she had done, to the point of tearing up and not really caring the rest of the night, and the rogue looked to feel bad about it as well and even said "Man I kind of regret that, I don't think we should have done it that way...". This was a huge issue since the rest of the night was great gaming. It's okay for your PCs to gently caress up from time to time, and if they do it's not your job to fix their problems. I actually don't think the call you made was a bad one; the only thing I'd have done differently was to stop the game for a tea/smoke/beer break when a player teared up to check that they were okay to continue, and if not to call the session there and watch a film or something instead. As for what to do next, my advice would be to go with option c): check OC with your players about the kind of game they want to play. Given how willing they were to go straight for combat, it sounded like they were after high-octane action where they fight a lot of bad guys, while you want this to be a game with shades of grey where they have to face the consequences of their actions: they're trying to play Star Wars, you're trying to run Star Trek. If that's the case, then either you can agree that in the future you're going to more clearly signpost which NPCs they ought to be killing so that they can do things their way (they might have seen the glassy-eyed thing as a hint that hey, these guys are zombies, it's okay to cut loose) or they can agree that they're now aware that they're going to have to make sure the NPCs they're killing are actually bad before they kill them. Once that's decided, I'd chalk the encounter up to experience, possibly apologise OC if you've upset them, and move on. I really don't think you should let the PCs retcon their actions: it'll just take any tension away from the next hard decision they have to make if they know you'll not let them gently caress up.
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Apr 27, 2010 23:37
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Also, I like ItalicSquirrels' idea, except for the bit where most of the villagers get saved. I don't think it's a good idea to go with widespread resurrects of NPCs under any circumstance, even if it is a god doing it, and in this case I can't think of any way it'll not look like the GM tacking on a happy ending. For the bard/sorc's dream, the slant I'd go for is something like: the bard's god posted:"I hope you've learned from your actions why love and compassion are so important. I'm not angry at you. I'm just disappointed, because you're an incredibly talented individual and so are the people around you, but they need to be led by someone who understands love and compassion so that you don't ever misuse those talents again. I hope you see now how true this is; without love and compassion your team would be free to do this again and again until your hearts turn black. You have to stop this happening. I know you might think you've failed me, but you haven't: not totally, not if you learn from your mistake, not while you still have the opportunity to make things better. You then get to have the PCs turn up as mystery saviours, pull children from burning buildings, fix barricades, and kick some bandit rear end (or even find out some clever way of talking the bandits round to protecting the village). All the while the villagers who survived are now awkwardly grateful to the people who are at some point going to have to admit that they were the ones who torched the place to start with.
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Apr 27, 2010 23:58
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Ray and Shirley posted:The next few sessions I'm planning all involve my players being set loose in a city that has been cordoned off and turned into a giant prison. They'll have a quest or two, and a few goals, and know roughly how to get to them. But how they get there is largely up to them. No, this is a good idea. My advice with any city in an RPG is that the physical geography less important than the political geography: you need to know who's in charge and what they're like. My usual approach is to decide who the big players are in the city (other than the PCs) and sketch down what their philosophy is, what kind of stuff they're good at (selling stuff? thievery? persuading people to do things?), and where in the city their power base is (this can be as vague as 'the docks'). Three groups like this is about the right number for three sessions. So there might be a criminal underworld who just want power over the prison-city, a secret society of prisoners who want to find a secret way out, and some sort of dodgy religious cult. Try to give all of them reasons why they're not ideal people for the PCs to work with, so no one group is morally the right choice to go with; that way, your PCs have to make difficult choices. Also, try to set them up so that all of them are at odds with the others in some way. Once you've got those set up, then in my experience encounters and plot tend to write themselves when you have a quick thought at the end of each session about what each of the groups have learned about the PCs, how they feel about them, and what they're now going to try and do as a result. The other thing you'll want to think about is just how the society within the prison-city deals with things like crime, and how efficiently this happens. You might want to signpost this to your players fairly early on: you could, for example, have one random encounter near the start be them witnessing a cutpurse being quickly grabbed and arrested (if you want to make the point that justice is swift) or a bunch of thugs beating someone up in broad daylight and everybody getting out of the way (if you want to do the opposite).
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May 3, 2010 23:55
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Masonity posted:
If you've sold the game to the players as "The game starts with you being the mind-controlled servants of a shadowy organisation, compelled to follow their orders by magical amulets around your necks (which you haven't yet found a way to remove)" then it's not railroady to have the first session be just that. In my book, railroading is when a GM forces an entire plot upon you. That's why it's called a railroad: there's a story laid out in front of you and you've got no option but to follow it. Having single plot points that get forced on your characters is far less bad, especially because it's much easier if the players miss their plot point in Dungeon A to relocate it to Dungeon B instead without making the players realise they were forced, and especially especially if your plot point is of the form "This thing, which is outside of your control, happens to you. How do you react?"
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Jun 25, 2010 20:52
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Son of Thunderbeast posted:Yeah, those were also two major problems I foresaw. And honestly I have no solution to the first one without serious railroading (like, "he seems way too powerful to attack head-on, are you sure?"). First off, are the main damage-dealers in your party ranged attackers? If so, then you're basically set: have some NPCs with the party who charge in, and try to melee it. Roll the dice very visibly for its attacks on them so that your PCs can see that it's hideously good in melee combat. If your party's main strikers are melee fighters then it's a bit trickier because the players' standard instinct will be to let the strikers get up close. My advice then is to drop the mechanic where the PCs have to chip away at its health, go with Dire Penguin's mechanic of it throwing minions who slow the PCs down if they're ignored, and make sure that the PCs know that it's much stronger while it's in the tomb (maybe sunlight weakens it, or something). You still get the chase scene with fighting in it, they're just not fighting the main boss during it. I've just had a third idea occur to me. When the lieutenant teleports out, he leaves his mooks behind. Have the lieutenant's mooks all flee the zombie-beast as well as the PCs, except for maybe a couple who charge in and get munched as a warning to the players that this thing's out of their league. The mooks and the PCs are both fleeing from the zombie-beast and fighting each other at the same time (since the mooks have figured that they don't need to outrun the zombie if they can take the PCs down and let it munch on them...)
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Aug 3, 2010 00:15
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Infinitum posted:I was quite sad that my poor Kobold champion who had survived the whole encounter without a single point of damage done to him until he was the only survivor left was boiled alive before he could tell the group his next bit of information. I don't quite get what you mean here. Are you saying you want to punish them for killing your Kobold champion too easily? Because efficiently killing things that are attacking you is sort of what being an adventurer is all about.
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Aug 3, 2010 21:13
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Some other ideas I've heard are (a) having the charisma roll not determine how convincing the PC is but what other factors come in to make him more or less believable: so if a player is accosted by a town guard at night, mumbles something like "I was... umm... looking for my cat" but rolls well, then the guard is drunk, or incompetent, or at that moment a black cat runs across their path -- or (b) you make the charisma roll before you start talking, and depending on how well you do, the GM gives you an impression of what the best way to win this particular NPC over is.
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Aug 20, 2010 00:06
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Party Boat posted:Okay, here's a dumb idea I thought up in the shower, TGD please let me know just how dumb it is. This sounds like a great plan, though I'd drop the embarassing side of things and just make it plain dangerous, so you've got this gambling club full of adventurer adrenaline junkies. Also, no reason to add the possibility of an additional reward if your player loses, since they'll no doubt think of something inventive and useful to get the NPC thrillseeker to do if they win.
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Jan 8, 2011 19:49
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Apocadall posted:Close to what I had in mind would happen, except now they want to start looking for allies and build an army to crush that city. I wasn't even expecting it. Awesome, let them do it! That gives them even more reason to start running through dungeons: after all, getting goblins or kobolds to join them against the human scum is one thing, but if they could get through all the traps in an particular crypt and parley cleverly enough, they'll be able to get a demilich on their side...
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Apr 21, 2011 15:26
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If you need other reasons why this group is working with him, the thing with Lawful Evil is that they do keep their word. So you could go with something like "Yes, he's a fucker, but he's given his word that he's helping #[party's backers] (either because there's a common enemy, or because the necro got caught and did so in order to save his hide) -- so better to have him travel with us so we can at least keep an eye on him, and you never know: we might even have a good influence on him."
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May 8, 2011 16:33
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Iron Squid posted:I'm DMing my first game and need some advice. I'm looking for non-cliche ways to bring the PCs together. In the past its always been "You meet in the tavern" or something. I'd like to find something a bit more imaginative than this. I've always taken the approach of "it's the players' job to decide how their characters met and why they're working together". It's much more fun to hit the ground running with the party ready-formed than to have ten minutes of awkward introductions while the three devil-may-care lone wolves use their Stealth roles to lurk in a corner and be mysterious. So before the session starts, I'd go over their backgrounds as a group and brainstorm ideas for how they know each other, how long they've been working together as an adventuring party, and what kind of stuff they've done before. Are they a group of roving problem-solvers for the King's spymaster? A bunch of thugs who are one step up from being bandits? An crack commando unit, framed for a crime they didn't commit and dishonourably discharged, still wanted by the government and surviving as soldiers of fortune?
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May 13, 2011 10:20
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AlphaDog posted:Edit: Or flat out tell him not to bring up rules discussions during the game. If he has a problem with a GM decision, tell him to mention it as it happens, but then discuss it after the game, possibly without the other players around if they aren't interested in that sort of thing. That's worked for me in the past, but it's a little bit oldschool "GM IS ALWAYS RIGHT" for some groups. The way I always phrase this is not "GM IS ALWAYS RIGHT" but "perhaps you're right, but right now I would rather keep the combat flowing than interrupt the game with an argument, so we'll do it my way for now and after the session we can figure out who's right and then make sure we get things right in the future". Seems to work pretty well in general.
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Jun 19, 2011 00:40
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Masterplan is pretty drat slick. If your monsters are mostly homebrew anyway (the campaign I'm running is largely against human enemies, so I keep on having to build new and exciting kinds of human to fight), the lack of compendium support isn't a problem. It's also really nice for actually running encounters: you can track initiative, calculate damage after resistances, and be reminded when an effect on a player ends.
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Jul 7, 2011 12:07
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Iunnrais posted:I'm sending my players through the shadowfell right now. I've repurposed the plane slightly, so that it is the plane of dead dreams... echoes of the future that will not come to pass, or of things in contention, or of things that should, nay, MUST not come to pass. Still filled with undead, but now they're undead with a purpose. The kobold civilisation is aware of its status as an echo that will not come to pass, and wants to change this. So before its rulers will allow the PCs to pass, they need to promise that when they leave the Shadowfell they will bring with them one of the civilisation's mighty heroes, who believes he can unite the disparate kobold nations into an empire. The party encounter a battlefield where they recognise people they know amongst the dying. This is a battle that may or may not come to pass in their lifetime after a horrible diplomatic misunderstanding (something like "Okay men, if I draw my sword when I'm negotiating peace with the enemy general in the middle of the battlefield that's the signal to charge; OH gently caress A SNAKE IS ATTACKING THE ENEMY GENERAL I MUST SAVE HIS LIFE"); one of the survivors tells them how it happened, in the hope that they can avert it. The Forest of Self. This is where you meet the manifold future versions of yourself, and see all the ways your life could turn out differently. The PCs need to recover something at the centre of the Forest, and must rely on future versions of themselves to tell them the way. The future versions try to convince the PCs why they're the future version that PC should be striving to become. Killing a future version of yourself has Metaphysical Ramifications.
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Jan 20, 2012 21:01
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Lord Yod posted:If the party has gained some notoriety then presumably tales will have spread about the scary as gently caress charging barbarian and how he comes down on you like the hammer of the gods etc, so smart enemies will attempt to counteract that. This way, you can also counteract the disappointment of the barbarian player that his charge isn't working so well when the enemies shout "Oh, poo poo, it's the barbarian! Formation alpha! Formation alpha!" and he realises he's gotten so scary people are forming plans in advance on how to deal with him.
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Jan 25, 2012 21:03
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Yeah, the restrictions on Enchant Magic Item are pretty sensible: the cost of casting it is equal to the cost of the magic item you create, and you can't create a magical item higher than your level, so it basically turns him into a portable magic item shop. Provided your player is okay with the "The DM can ban items from the world" rule, so that he can't pull ridiculously cheesed-out items from some poorly-playtested fanwanky sourcebook, it has no balance issues. It also makes for great plot hooks, if you tell him that occasionally he may be able to make items above his level provided that he can get the right (ridiculously rare, found at the end of a quest) components. And it adds great flavour to the game if the party's fighter isn't just swinging a +2 sword he bought in a shop, but a +2 sword that the party's artificer crafted using the bones of a dragon he killed personally. (It also means that my party's artificer has rigged the rogue's spellgun with a killswitch for use in the event that the rogue tries to execute any more hostages.)
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Jan 30, 2012 20:12
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Iunnrais posted:Well, they've been in the wilderness all Heroic Tier, and I've been wanting to get back into a civilization type quest, though I'm not as good at it. But I'm definitely not sure how to run a GOOD Xanatos Gambit. The way I would do this would be just have a number of clues that the PCs recover after completing a quest reference Xanatos's name, dropping increasingly more information about who Xanatos is. Then when the time comes, decide for yourself what Xanatos's plan actually was, based solely on the criteria that every quest the players were on was a keystone in it. Then have the PCs uncover the truth of what Xanatos' plan was and let them have fun thwarting it at the final stage. Bonuses if you retcon Xanatos in to be one, or more, of the quest-givers in a Cunning Disguise. Extra bonuses if you do it in the manner of Prince Ludwig The Indestructible.
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Mar 9, 2012 02:48
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Eh, if I've had to I've always thought of nonlethal damage as the bit in the fight where you stick a sword through a guy's coat, missing his body and stapling him to the wall. The kind of game I'm running, I want the players not to have to choose between fighting at 100% efficiency and not being murderous dicks, so I'm entirely happy for D&D4e nonlethal damage to be as combat-effective as lethal damage.
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Apr 3, 2012 23:57
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rotinaj posted:I'm terrible at coming up with good puzzles for PCs. Has anyone found an especially good source for dungeon-based puzzles on the web? I'm quite pleased with the gauntlet of traps I came up with for an all-Dwarf game I'm running. The players are trying to reach the tomb of an undead dwarf-king. He made a pact with his people a long time ago to remain in his tomb until the council of dwarf kings changed their mind on their "all undead are evil" stance and came crawling to him to have him pull their arses out of the fire (he was under the impression this would take about five years; it's actually two centuries and counting.) As part of the pact, the council got to seal up his tomb with traps to prevent anybody unworthy coming to release him. So my thinking is that these are going to be traps designed to test people, not to annihilate people. They want to make sure that anyone getting through is a Good Dwarf, not just some random rear end in a top hat who wandered in. Trap 1 is the Test of Ancestry: only he who follows in the footsteps of his forefathers may pass. The floor is a 9x9 grid split into 3x3 squares, each with the likeness and name of an ancient dwarf king engraved on it. It takes a skill check to try and remember what the king was famous for: kings who are famous for good things (according to Dwarven society) are safe to walk on, and kings who are famous for bad things trigger a block that smashes down on anyone in the square then retracts into the ceiling, damaging them and knocking them prone. Meanwhile, artillery monsters snipe at the PCs from the opposite side of the room. Trap 2 is the Test of Knowledge: only he who wields his wit wisely may pass. The wall has sixty-four square drawers on, each with an engraving of a dwarf armed with one of four designs of weapon, helm, and shield. One of them contains a key that will open the door; the others are empty, and carved inside with ticks and crosses indicating how many out of weapon / helm / shield are correct (basically, the players are playing Mastermind.) Their first three guesses are correct; after that, the ceiling starts slowly to descend and each incorrect guess releases an enemy into the room. Trap 3 is the Test of Blood: only he who is truly of dwarven descent shall pass. It's a short corridor; midway through, a pressure-plate causes a hidden blade to slice across, about six feet off of the ground, passing harmlessly over the players' heads.
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May 7, 2012 09:57
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veekie posted:It could make sense as a divine agent for a god of war. Kill the right guy and plunge the world into a century of warfare. Payment in immortality. The assassin wants to shift his game up and start being employed by gods to assassinate other gods: they provide the right tools (the other god's One True Weakness), he provides the skill and the plausible deniability. Killing the whole royal family wasn't part of his plan, it was his sales pitch.
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May 17, 2012 00:02
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Andre Banzai posted:Very good points. To be totally frank, this particular villain doesn't even need to appear there, I was just going to throw him there for the heck of it. Now you have convinced me that "for the heck of it" is not a particularly wise reason. If what you want to do is introduce a villain who you want your players to be afraid of, then the absolute best way to do it is by having other villains name-drop him. In series 1 of the TV show Heroes, one of the major antagonists is Mr. Linderman, but you don't ever see him in the flesh until it's nearly the end of the series. What you have heard, since episode 1, is a lot of powerful people saying "Linderman wants this" or "Linderman won't let us do that" or "We have to keep Linderman happy". The absolute easiest route to do this is to have the bad guys be carrying a letter from the villain with instructions on how to do whatever it is the players just killed them for. But there are lots of ways to vary this. You can have the letter describe the PCs in detail, as well as containing a tactical analysis of their favourite strategy. If one PC likes using fire spells a lot, have a promise from the villain that enough anti-fire potions will be delivered in a week's time to equip the minion's whole army. Then the next miniboss the PCs face will be loaded up with exactly the right magic items to counter their favourite tactics so far. You can have, rather than a letter, a diplomat from the Big Bad providing advice to the Little Bad. So suppose your big bad is a necromancer: then when the PCs come up against a bunch of orcs, their chief has an undead "advisor" who he's clearly terrified of. Smart PCs can even try to drive a wedge between the two. You can even, if you want to add the personal touch, have the Big Bad be capable of projecting simulacra / aspects / duplicates / whatevers of himself. Weaker versions that have fooled whoever he's employing into thinking they're the real deal. He can see through their eyes and negotiate with the PCs (if they get his attention), but if they take the simulacra down, all they're doing is inconveniencing him, not solving the problem for good.
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Jun 2, 2012 02:04
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Guesticles posted:I just really feel like I could do better, and that this place deserves better, but am drawing a complete blank, and wondering if anyone had any suggestions. All those militarised poisons need test subjects. They're kept in cages, horrifically mutated, and go berserk and attack anything that comes near. When the PCs reach the floor where they're kept, a lab assistant sees them, throws the lever to release them, and flees up the stairs. One floor's a test chamber, designed to see how quickly the effects of a new toxin take hold. There are six pipes on each wall dispensing airborne poison; the players need to shut each one off by hand while enemies hamper their ability to move around.
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Jun 5, 2012 12:06
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Guildencrantz posted:I definitely don't want the players to RP raping, pillaging, slaughtering innocents and making human sacrifices because that's wrong and creepy, or describe that poo poo in detail, but at the same I want them to know that their characters do these things and believe they are sometimes okay. Does anyone have ideas on how subtly accomplish that without hamfisted, uncomfortable descriptions of them slitting the throats of defenseless monks etc.? Go with shades of grey: include bad Vikings and good Christians. None of them have to be PCs, but you can define what is usual in the PCs' world by the people they hang around with, who talk enthusiastically about how many people they've killed and how great it is when they beg for mercy before you kill them. The PCs are still free to be all noble, but it's clear that the society they live in isn't.
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Jun 24, 2012 23:38
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PurpleLizardWizard posted:I am thinking that I want to build my own city, so that I don't have to worry about my fictional stuff matching up with real world locations at all. I've looked at Block by Bloody Block, and honestly didn't find it that useful for building a whole city, just for putting a few interesting locations in it. I also can't decide where to put that city. I'm thinking the US, 'cause that's where we all live and we wouldn't need to learn new cultural norms and legal systems, but I can't decide what region. I want to make a city that's fairly large, one big enough to attract concerts and have pretty much anything I thought of in it. I just can't decide beyond that. The most important thing isn't the city but the people in it. Who's running the city in the mundane sense? Obviously, technically the mayor, but whose pockets is he in, and who are the contenders? WoD being what it is, you probably want to make this more interesting than just Republicans vs. Democrats: what about the mafia? The unions? The tea party? Freemasons? Then there's the question of who the big players in the occult are. I don't know WoD that well, but the thing I do when I'm brainstorming settings is to throw together groups based on a common set of beliefs or philosophy. That way the players can engage with them in debate, which is often more fun than just thwarting their schemes. Crucially, make sure that these guys are at each others' throats: make sure you give them each something to fight over. Equally crucially, give these groups tentacles everywhere. There are a lot of people working for them who don't run across rooftops fighting werewolves, but just pass information that comes to them on to their contact, or look after a package for a few days while it's on its way to somewhere else. The benefit of this is that plots write themselves. Because the big players are so numerous, the players can't take a crap without running into something that's related to one of the groups. The players decide they're going to go into a bar and get drunk? Awesome, they've wandered into one of the operations owned by Group A. They get to witness a shady figure come up to the bartender and drop something suspicious off for safekeeping; when they investigate it and get caught, Group B can come to their aid, trying to paint themselves as the good guys while manipulating their new pawns. And when the players do something utterly stupid (as players are wont to do) you can be sure that the news will get back to someone who hates them and can blackmail them with it.
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Aug 11, 2012 09:59
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Iunnrais posted:My campaign is about to go epic, and it's going to start off with something that I think is suitable for the tier. An Umbral. If the Umbral is sentient, then it has a soul, or a mind, or something similar. If they perform the right ritual they can enter the Umbral without being instantly disintegrated and traverse the inside of this mind, which takes the form of a vast, surreal and disjointed city. From there on there are a couple of places you could go which don't just involve hitting things with a sword, but my first thought is that at the centre of the city there is a throne, and a person sitting there can merge themselves with the Umbral's mind; a PC could choose to take the throne and then send the Umbral away from their planet, at the cost of becoming an immortal soul-sucking necromantic black hole.
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Aug 22, 2012 21:56
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Guesticles posted:For the solution, I'm thinking about giving the Bard and Cleric the option of skill challenge to alter the magical runes of the circle on the lowest floor so that it will take them further up the tower. It will take time, and during that the rest of the party needs to deal with the iron cobras. How about putting some teleport runes in the Cobras' chamber that they use to summon up any allies who want to visit them without having to slog through however many floors of poisonous awfulness? The PCs can use these during the fight to summon their allies, but doing so takes up a turn and requires a skill check. Or just have the baddies fight at full power, and have a reason not to kill the PCs off if they beat them. My favourite is to have them interrogate the PCs -- baddies need intel as much as anybody else, after all. Then midway through the interrogation (before or after a player has been killed for resisting, depending on how cooperative your PCs are) something more important than the PCs demands their immediate attention, and they go off after that -- completely unaware that there are two other PCs still lurking around the tower to set their friends free.
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Sep 20, 2012 22:44
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Guesticles posted:Second, I'm trying to give my party a better class of villain than "I could kill you now... but I won't." Acererak levels of taunting are about as far as I want to go down that road. Oh, there are lots of actual good reasons for a competent villain to want the PCs alive other than gloating -- are they high-level enough to know things like how the kingdom's defences are organised, the kind of encryption its messengers use, that jazz? Because if so, they're far more use alive than dead. Failing that, maybe he hopes to use them to lure his other enemies into a trap, or maybe he's just so convinced in the rightness of his cause that he's confident he'll be able to talk the PCs over to his side once he has the opportunity to sit down and explain things to them. Equally, an obsolete security system might have had its last instructions be to take prisoners alive, not kill them. (Or it might have somehow gained sentience in the meantime, be bored with guarding, and be looking for people it can somehow install as a replacement for itself so that it can go out and do whatever newly-sentient iron serpents want to do. Or it's crushingly lonely and wants some new friends to play with to while away a few millenia.) Hell, if I had a security system that wasn't capable of making a decision on its own I'd set it to incapacitate and imprison, not kill, just in case the ally who was a vital component to my schemes managed to wander in by accident.
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Sep 21, 2012 19:11
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Affi posted:Group is annoying and wanting to play Devas, Pixies, Plants and Gitzerai. How do I get rid of their bodies? The way you stop them is by saying "Guys, this isn't the style of game I want to run. I'm not having fun with all these ridiculous bits of setting, so going forward I'm only allowing PCs from the basic PHB. Don't worry though, I won't run any fights that are unfairly statted, and I'll make sure that your vanilla characters have just as much cool plot as your half-demon-half-dragon golem trees. Probably more in fact, since they're now more likely to run into stuff relevant to their species." E: Another fun option is "Well, you can't /start/ as a dryad, but what about this: you're an elf druid who was born when his mother did the nasty with a nature spirit. You're pretty normal looking but sometimes when you're wounded it scabs over with bark (but it doesn't give you special powers or anything, it just freaks people out and makes them call the town guard). You reckon if you found enough nature spirits and eat their souls then maybe you could transform yourself into a proper dryad one day... AT A HORRIBLE PRICE." E. E: Even better if the first spirit he comes across is this thorny Douchebag who's luring people into his den and eating them. The next few are causing a disturbance for people but really just want to be left alone. Then they start banding up for protection against this spirit-murdering soul-eating monstrosity who is wanted for murder most anywhere that respects the natural order by now. Whybird fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 13:43
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Him being a misogynist shitstain aside (seriously, kick him out for being a misogynist shitstain) the line I always go with when players say or do things like that is just "Is that what your character is saying?" or "Is that really what you're going to do?")
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Nov 25, 2012 18:17
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The elite/solo question is just a case of asking how many other monsters are in the fight with him. If he's doing the work of four guys he's a solo, if he's doing the work of two he's an elite. When I'm after inspiration for how to do a boss fight in DnD I always think about video be bosses -- particularly in the Zelda games, and in WoW. Messing around with the terrain, allowing players to make skill rolls to neutralize his nastier powers, and spawning minions to give the party's controllers something to do are all great ways to make the fight into more than just PCs slogging away at an enemy's HP meter.
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Dec 15, 2012 14:17
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P.d0t posted:Well, I'm thinking "solo with 2-3 beefy henchman" or "elite with 6-10 minions" or something. Am i in the ballpark on that? A standard enemy is about equal to 4 minions, so the first setup you describe will be a match for 6-7 PCs, while the second will be a match for 3-4 or so. (This all assumes your monsters are about the same level as your PCs.) Myself I like matching up solos with a bunch of minions, to keep the battlefield busy and help him flank PCs. One of the biggest disadvantages a solo has is that it has a lot of difficulty controlling the layout of the fight when it's outnumbered,so large numbers of minions help rectify that a bit. The other thing to remember with solos is to use their limited resources (action points, per-encounter powers) at the earliest opportunity. PCs can still take them down scarily quickly, so make every moment the solo's alive count.
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Dec 17, 2012 13:42
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God Of Paradise posted:Does anyone have advice as to how to convert D&D 3.5 into a more strategic/urban plotting and scheming role playing game rather than a hack and slash? As a bunch of other people have said, I think running with D&D 3.5 is going to be an impediment to this, but if your group really are set on using 3.5e (have you suggested alternatives?) then it could be made to work. Right now I'm running a 4e campaign that is very heavy on the plotting and duplicity in between fights: really, the thing is just to be ready to GM-fiat a lot more than you would do with regular D&D, since D&D doesn't have rules for a lot of the things you'll be trying to do. One thing I might recommend if you're looking at a negotiation-heavy campaign is Rich Burlew's overhaul of the Diplomacy rules, they're pretty good. I've never been personally that impressed by CoC's insanity rules -- rolling to determine a kind of insanity (do they still feature that?) seems a lot less fun than picking something appropriate to what just happened. Unknown Armies has a very slick system, if you've ever read that.
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Dec 31, 2012 13:18
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My Lovely Horse posted:I'm well aware the ideal way to handle it would have been to put my foot down when they first grabbed a roadside bandit and threatened to hang him by his lower intestine unless he showed them the way to the bandit camp, but I didn't and here we are. Might yet turn into a moral decision payoff, at least. For now I'm wondering - I've got some ideas, but how would you guys have the gods react to that group of adventurers waltzing up, given that the fate of the world is in a very immediate sense at stake, and that these guys are the most capable mortal warriors are going to get right now, but also all of the above? Assuming standard 4E cosmology/divine interests/entries under "the gods." Presumably many of the evil gods want the players on board as well: I mean, not all of them want the universe destroyed if that's where all the best evil takes place, right? So while most of the good gods are offering their boon with strings attached like 'stop torturing people', the lawful evil ones have sent a representative. (None of the gods are too happy about him being there, but their rulebook does say that he has a right, and he's sworn an oath to play nice while he's there.) Asmodeus -- or whoever -- wants the end of the world stopped too, and sure, these guys overthrew one of his cults, but he's a pragmatic fellow. He'd much rather the saviours of the world were his people rather than a bunch of do-gooders. So he's there to offer them his boon as well, and his doesn't come with any strings attached at all.
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Jan 5, 2013 16:24
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I have a fairly big group and some fairly flaky players, so I've made it canon in the setting that there is a flu-like disease called the Shivering Sickness which adventurers, being people who spend lots of time in new places without enough warm gear and healthy food and sleep, are particularly prone to. It causes attacks of exhaustion and aphasia, so a person suffering from it can just about follow their friends around, but can't contribute in any meaningful way. When a player can't make it, IC their character is knocked out with the Shivering Sickness.
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Jan 11, 2013 13:28
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The other option is during character generation to say: "The game is going to start with your characters as the prisoners of a group of bandits. I'd like you to take it in turns to describe how and why your character got taken prisoner, and a way in which your character has interacted with the character of the players on your left and right: this can be from before you got captured, or it can be some way you've got to know each other since." It's a really good trick for building party cohesion and means that they're not all just "welp, nice getting out of that prison with you, let's go our own separate ways now".
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Feb 2, 2013 15:57
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How about: Imix had a clever lie ready for why the Cult would be on his side if the battle. He wasn't banking on the Titan having spilled the beans about those artefacts. The Sultan started asking difficult questions; Imix resorted to cruder means. Some sort of mind control or suchlike. The Titan relays this information to the PCs, along with where Imix's pet mind controller will be on the battlefield. If they can take him out and leave the Sultan standing, they get an efreet sultan on their side, otherwise they have to fend the Sultan off too.
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Feb 19, 2013 09:27
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 22:06 |
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Factions, factions, factions. Figure out three to five organisations per city and work out what they want, what their members are like, how they exert influence, what they're trying to do, and where they're conflicting with the others. Then assume that in any given scene, at least one (usually more) will have someone loyal to them there: not a spy, but a friend of a friend who passes interesting news (like the arrival of a bunch of tooled-up adventurers) up the food chain. Plot and good times and politicking pretty much write themselves from there on in.
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Feb 20, 2013 10:19
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