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My policy as a GM is never to shy away from giving the players more authority. Authority never comes for free, it always has strings attached, and it never fails to paint a great big bullseye on them for later.
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Apr 7, 2017 12:32
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I just started a 5th Ed game last night. The whole game is a randomly-generated dungeon crawl. Every room is generated by a number of d20 tables: Room size Number of doors Type of room Room hazards Room features Monsters Loot There is no pre-generated map. I'm just going to draw the thing as we go along. The rooms are rolled-up ahead of time, and I'll just plug them in as we get to them. The goal is to find food, clean water, and places to rest while they also look for a way out. The game begins as the PCs wake up in magically-sealed sarcophagi. The other PCs are the only ones alive in the room, and all of them are waking up at the same time. The sarcophagi were sealed to apparently keep them in suspended animation, and the rest of the 30 or so sarcophagi have broken alchemical apparatuses on the sides and have long-dead corpses in them. Evidence suggests the room has been undisturbed for at least a few hundred years. The PCs know who they are, but not how they got here, or where "here" is. I also decided that, in the event of a player absence, their character would be teleported somewhere random in the dungeon, be given some cryptic information, and return the following week otherwise unharmed. A session could be just a few rooms, or it could be many hours of in-world time, so that could get interesting. One of my players can't join until mid-May, but he happened to have last night off so he was able to join for character creation and the intro session but he'll be gone next week. Keep that in mind. There's one more unopened, undamaged sarcophagi. There is a GMPC in there. He or she is as randomly-generated as the dungeon (background, race, class, gender, etc.), and the only preconceived idea was that they would be some kind of wildcard in the long term. The idea was to have them wake up after the group, and the group would find evidence of their passing, their help, or their meddling. The party would have to figure out from afar if they trusted this person or not, because they need all the help they can afford. Naturally, the PCs tried to open that last sealed sarcophagus. I didn't want to make the check impossible, because I don't like doing that in general. But the DC was 20, and all of these dudes are level 1, so I figured it was a safe bet. The barbarian got a nat-20, so the thing pops open. But now I'm on the spot. Sure, I could fudge the whole thing and say, "It doesn't open." But that seems cheap, and unadventurous. This blows my plan to have the GMPC working in the background for a while, but I'll make this work. I don't have the GMPC generated at that moment, so I roll one up on the spot: Background: Urchin  Race: Halfling  Class: Paladin  Gender: Female I stop at alignment because I wanted to make that most likely neutral from the start, just to keep this character in the wildcard role. But having rolled up a paladin, I decide to roll up a random deity, just to see where that takes me. It'll probably turn up something nonsensical, so if it doesn't work I'll just do something without dice:  Deity: Tiamat Suuuuuure, let's go with that. I decide to go more with the sleeper agent angle than the deliberate wildcard. So I present her as "Jillian Ravenscorn, Champion of Bahaumut." This and her cheerful but practical demeanor instantly earns the party's trust and respect. Suckers.  After some exposition and good character intros, we're ready to kick open the first door just before we run out of time. So the next game is going to start with one PC suddenly winking out of existence due to the player's absence. And that's before the brainwashed halfling paladin of Tiamat eventually turns on them. 
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Apr 7, 2017 13:19
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That's an awesome concept! Can't wait to read how it plays out!
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Apr 7, 2017 19:17
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Well, our campaign certainly took a turn this last session. For those who haven't been reading along, we've got an Eberron campaign where our party's running up against some nasty Xoriat cultists who are working to turn off the sun, distribute magical drugs everywhere, and also spread a magical plague that turns people to crystal (at first you needed a Cure Disease spell in normal daylight to cure it, now it needs to be in magical daylight *and* normal daylight). I joined the group as Skurrg, the gnoll Warblade, shortly after the other members managed to return from an accidental jaunt to Xoriat itself due to a teleportation mishap. Recently we secured Lyra Boromar's re-election campaign against cult-connected Dwarven Donald Trump and then used that influence to force her establish a scholarship at Morgrave University for students of monstrous races (because I needed to give my Daask buddies a good reason that I just helped a Boromar win). From there, we investigated one of Not-Trump's "Discount Rehab Clinics", and found that it was a front for harvesting Liquid Pain from junkies. We then murdered the crap out of one of the cult leaders, and start clearing out the rest of the place so that we could safely bring the press in to reveal what was going on. All in all, things were going pretty well! Anyways, we've just about cleared out the last space, a cave full of crystal-mutated mushroom monstrosities, and were up against the last monster left around, a big nasty plant thing called a Root of All Evil. And then Follow's turn came up. You see, Follow is a psion, and besides his psychic powers, he also has an extremely powerful Rod of Wonder that he uses whenever he's not burning power points. This has been everything from covering himself in bees, to summoning magical healing chili, to granting random people random feats or powers (I've picked up two Warlock invocations this way), to creating a giant tsunami, then the next usage undoing that tsunami, and then almost immediately creating another tsunami. On the whole it's more good than bad, but it's pretty much always weird. So Follow points the Rod at the Root, activates it, and... Rod of Wonder posted:Call a Daelkyr (ECS pg. 278) [[1d10*5]] feet away, then regret your life choices. After a long moment of collective shock, we decided he was grateful enough for being freed that he wasn't going to immediately kill us, so we finished off the Root and reluctantly talked some stuff over with him. We learned that the whole "sun-extinguishing and crystals" plan was the work of one of his old friends from back in the day (whose nickname that he apparently hates is 'Clippy'). At this point, we are pretty drained of fighting resources, and also level 10, so we figure we have to get in his good graces somehow to not die in short order. So we offer him all the Liquid Pain we picked up from the cult. And he accepts. And he fails his save against addiction. So now that we've got a drug addicted Daelkyr living in the middle of Sharn, a Pain Pit that we're probably going to have to keep in operation because the alternative is "addict Daelkyr searching for his next fix", and also he's said that he'll keep in touch for when he needs something from us. 
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Apr 10, 2017 03:20
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The Lord of Hats posted:Call a Daelkyr (ECS pg. 278) [[1d10*5]] feet away, then regret On the plus side, if I'm reading the right book, it sounds like he's quite capable of making Liquid Pain more efficiently, what with Quickened Insanity, Mind Fog, Aura of Madness, etc.
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Apr 10, 2017 18:31
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Sage Grimm posted:On the plus side, if I'm reading the right book, it sounds like he's quite capable of making Liquid Pain more efficiently, what with Quickened Insanity, Mind Fog, Aura of Madness, etc. I do wonder how they're gonna keep the daelkyr from realizing what the pain pit does & that it's literally in the abandoned temple above his new home.
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Apr 10, 2017 20:21
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Look that's a problem for another day, we're busy trying to stop this guys college roommate from turning off the sun right now so he can do what he wants with that little pain pit.
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Apr 10, 2017 20:30
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Our party has been trying to track the movements of a very secretive and powerful underworld boss. He's usually pretty hands off, making the other criminal organizations deal him in on their businesses, but can read minds and freeze people around him seemingly at will. We have only seen him once, where he froze us (despite our high plain d20 rolls), sauntered into an interrogation we were performing and killed our captive. The boss showed up again at our most recent session, strolling up a road behind a two of our characters and a couple NPCs who were en route to meet the rest of the party in a cave. The DM called for a roll- natural 20. As a rule, I do not get these when it counts. The DM even pointed this out to me in disbelief when I announced it. But this time I did, and my character was untouched by his magic. Turns out he was just a regular dumpy human if you aren't immediately affected by him, and the DM stuck to it. So my paladin executed the boss on a dusty road filled with paralyzed onlookers- divine intervention doesn't happen so you can just have a chat. As a player, it was crazy and totally unexpected- we were planning on having to track him, infiltrate his lair, and avoid him outing our secrets in the process. As a new DM, though, it was a heck of a lesson in how to run a good game and let a story happen. I'm sure this will generate its own problems and is just one of many plots, but it was really neat to see someone let go of a pretty big part of the narrative. I'll miss the boss- he was a legit scary villain until he got caught unawares.
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Apr 11, 2017 17:26
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BadSamaritan posted:Our party has been trying to track the movements of a very secretive and powerful underworld boss. He's usually pretty hands off, making the other criminal organizations deal him in on their businesses, but can read minds and freeze people around him seemingly at will. We have only seen him once, where he froze us (despite our high plain d20 rolls), sauntered into an interrogation we were performing and killed our captive. A lot of folks rightly complain about d20 systems having a baked-in 5% chance of automatic success (and automatic failure). From a GM's perspective, nat-20's and nat-1's can be obnoxious, but this is a case where, in the hands of a reasonably flexible GM, it can create unexpected, dramatic moments. Good on your GM for rolling with it.
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Apr 11, 2017 18:15
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According to my GM, writing a fantasy novel called 50 Shades of Drow will result in the Lightning Lord exploding in a fountain of blood.
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Apr 17, 2017 17:24
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CobiWann posted:According to my GM, writing a fantasy novel called 50 Shades of Drow will result in the Lightning Lord exploding in a fountain of blood. Expand it to elves in general: 50 Shades of Fey.
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Apr 17, 2017 17:29
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:50 Shades of Fey.
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Apr 17, 2017 18:26
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If Varis converts to Judaism, we could call it 50 Shades of Feh
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Apr 18, 2017 03:07
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Railing Kill posted:I just started a 5th Ed game last night. The whole game is a randomly-generated dungeon crawl. Every room is generated by a number of d20 tables: Make the rooms randomly reconnect to each other and you're running Cube.
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Apr 18, 2017 03:35
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Is it bad that I almost want to do that in a game of my own?
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Apr 18, 2017 10:08
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On Saturday night, my friend Gabrielle has her D&D game. Things got spiritual this weekend. The below is all copy/pasted from social media with her permission. We were in Egypt in game last night. Three out of four of us were Jews and one of us is playing a Jewish Cleric. There were a lot of Passover Jokes. A boat of orcs was coming towards us on the Nile and the Cleric was originally going to cause a whirlpool to knock them out. The paladin's player suggested that he should part the water, like the Red Sea. Cleric split the waters. The boat dropped. Cleric dropped the spell. Orcs downed. DM went "........" DM threatened to doc XP from the paladin cause he kept on making DeNile jokes. And then at one point we were discussing the fact that we had enough power to recreate the ten plagues. Paladin: How would we do the Death of the First Born? Gabrielle: The old fashioned way?
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Apr 18, 2017 21:34
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I don't think my Pathfinder DM is very good. He never pre-reads the module, so we end up sitting around for like 10 minutes multiple times per night as we wait for him to figure out what the gently caress. And what makes that worse is that he has run this module before, with some of the same players at the table. He's got a pretty nice setup for us to play, but he has to drag some computers and poo poo like that around each and every time we come over, never before, always after we get there. Like it is some surprise that we might need this stuff at or about six o'clock. He's also weird about deciding things on the fly. This past weekend we ran into some trouble against some robots and three of the four of us ended up knocked out. My plucky level 2 sorcerer was up and moving, but out of spells and with just a single hit point, as I had to chip away at a self-healing robot from a distance (thankfully at least he granted us the grace of the robot not being able to leave its room). I hit it with a flare gun and he openly debated for several minutes where the flare hit and if the flare could be removed or if it would just keep doing damage, yadda yadda yadda. He eventually determined some parameters and had an open roll to determine if the robot could get the drat thing out, but the alternative was the campaign grinding to a sudden halt because of a near total TPK.
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Apr 19, 2017 04:34
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Antifreeze Head posted:I don't think my Pathfinder DM is very good. He never pre-reads the module, so we end up sitting around for like 10 minutes multiple times per night as we wait for him to figure out what the gently caress. And what makes that worse is that he has run this module before, with some of the same players at the table. He's got a pretty nice setup for us to play, but he has to drag some computers and poo poo like that around each and every time we come over, never before, always after we get there. Like it is some surprise that we might need this stuff at or about six o'clock. Lord Zedd-Repulsa posted:DM threatened to doc XP from the paladin cause he kept on making DeNile jokes. 
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Apr 19, 2017 08:47
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Goldbee ran a Troublemakers one shot on Monday and we had a PC experiencing his very first tabletop RPG session. True to form, even though we were all elementary school kids, it devolved immediately into murder hoboism. I don't think we met anybody who we didn't immediately assault or rob. There was some plot about a mysterious parade but we went into the woods to drink beer, shoot BB guns, and fight a werebear. The new guy will be back next week.
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Apr 19, 2017 12:02
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raminasi posted:Make the rooms randomly reconnect to each other and you're running Cube. At least one of my players has pointed that out. I'm not planning on doing spacial fuckery all over the place, but some of the random effects can do that from time to time. I had to postpone game last week, and I might have to do the same this week. My players are getting downright rowdy about it. That's good, I guess, and things will get going whenever they do. It helps that we haven't started any of the actual dungeon crawl yet. I'm just itching to run this game and try out my new halfling Cylon buddy.   
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Apr 19, 2017 14:31
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Since some of y'all asked to see my DM's shelf of minis...   
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Apr 21, 2017 00:52
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 Just...
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Apr 21, 2017 01:51
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Was he a WotC rep? They used to get paid in product. Or just kinda bad with money?
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Apr 21, 2017 01:58
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Antifreeze Head posted:Was he a WotC rep? They used to get paid in product. Or just kinda bad with money? 30 years worth of gaming, trading old product for new minis at the local game store's monthly swap meet, and a whole bunch of Reaper Kickstarters. And really what gamer isn't kinda bad with money? How many of us have books for systems we've never played or will play, says the guy with every Rifts, Eclipse Phase and Warmachine/Hordes book on his shelf? (Don't ask me about my two bookcase collection of Doctor Who audios...)
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Apr 21, 2017 11:40
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This is especially true now that Bundle of Holding exists. I only learned about the place a few weeks ago and now I own the complete works of 3 different systems that I'm probably going to glance through the main book of once and then never actually play. I never thought the concept of bundle bloat would spill over into RPG systems.
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Apr 21, 2017 13:48
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CobiWann posted:Since some of y'all asked to see my DM's shelf of minis... Those must be the Official Dungeon Master Storage Bins there in the corner. My longtime GM doesn't have nearly as impressive a shelf but he's still got a shitload of those craft boxes full of minis. Also that's an impressive loving collection, goddamn.
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Apr 21, 2017 17:46
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That's a hella impressive collection! As one of those who pestered you for the pics, thanks very much for sharing, CobiWann. So, I'll be getting back to the Burning Wheel Lathidia write-ups soon, but we've had a couple cancelled games - one because the GM had oral surgery and couldn't talk for long periods of time without profuse bleeding, and another because Sera's player's dad had a rather serious heart attack the night before one game (he's fine now, but it was a pretty close call.) Last night we had an amusing scene in the game I run. I won't bother with a full write-up - the game is very lore-heavy, non-traditional fantasy with a custom system, so to do full write-ups would require large info-dumps and prefaces to provide needed context, and I don't want to bore anyone - but the scene itself is easy enough to share. The context: Rancor the minotaur champion has just been possessed by a Vetala (a type of hungry ghost desperate to inhabit flesh once again). This is taking place during a pitched combat, where the other PCs don't want to do him serious harm, since they need him back on their side, so they're trying to talk him into fighting off the possessing spirit. One PC by the name of Ek, who plays an rear end in a top hat Kes (a violence-averse species of reptilian aardvarks), is taking point. Ursula is a human holy knight. quote:Rancor: Must! Consume! Living Flesh! Anyway, I found it quite funny.
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Apr 23, 2017 18:26
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Yesterday in Dungeon World my party worked extra hard to get a ghost high. They actually erased it instead but they did get to see into the past so it was a net profit for them.
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Apr 23, 2017 23:48
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HiKaizer posted:Yesterday in Dungeon World my party worked extra hard to get a ghost high. They actually erased it instead but they did get to see into the past so it was a net profit for them. loving around with ghosts is so much fun.
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Apr 24, 2017 02:05
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I hate Wild Magic. Two back-to-back surges saw Varis lose all his clothes and magic items as they circled him in a ten foot sphere AND... ...well, Varis now knows a new spell. "Confetti Bolt."
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Apr 24, 2017 14:16
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CobiWann posted:I hate Wild Magic. Two back-to-back surges saw Varis lose all his clothes and magic items as they circled him in a ten foot sphere AND...
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Apr 24, 2017 14:32
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CobiWann posted:I hate Wild Magic. Two back-to-back surges saw Varis lose all his clothes and magic items as they circled him in a ten foot sphere AND... Yeah, but now he gets invited to all the parties. "HAPPY NEW YEAR!" 
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Apr 24, 2017 18:41
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CobiWann posted:I hate Wild Magic. Two back-to-back surges saw Varis lose all his clothes and magic items as they circled him in a ten foot sphere AND... D&D merchandiser! Now all he needs is Tunic Ball.
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Apr 24, 2017 19:21
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Samizdata posted:D&D merchandiser! Now all he needs is Tunic Ball. Magic Missile variant where the missiles are t-shirts.
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Apr 25, 2017 00:48
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the_steve posted:Magic Missile variant where the missiles are t-shirts. Tunics. Can't break the immersion.
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Apr 25, 2017 06:10
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So I'm currently running a 5e West Marches game for a couple people, which has been really fun in that it's lots of quick one-off adventures, then back to the inn (The Last Resort) to get hammered and plan for next week. The problem is that I've established that the Inn is way out in the boonies and the very last bastion of any kind of civilization, so there aren't a whole lot of shopping opportunities for my players in between missions (or ever, really) Thankfully, amongst adventuring types the Inn is fairly renowned, so I came up with a solution; magical mail-order pamphlets. Overnight, these drat things appear all over the Inn, wedged in doorframes, all over bar tables, and most notably nailed to the wall in the privy.       I didn't want to give anything TOO powerful, and I was also careful to word the descriptions in such a way that the players would have some idea what they were getting but not specifically what it does, with a few pinches of snake-oil / used car salesman thrown in for good measure. I figure I'll add new items in as they get stronger / as I come up with interesting ideas.
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Apr 25, 2017 08:23
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Do a later pamphlet offering trade-ins at (some low percent) of market value, then on the next trip another one offering used items at a 10% discount. At some point have someone realise they just bought their own shirt back with a different enchant laid over it.
Splicer fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 08:54
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Oh my, those pamphlets are amazing! Where did you find them? I'm so going to make some pamphlets to hand out for Abeforth's... "Now we could kill that gnoll tribe, but that's cutting off a potential future customer base!" CobiWann fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Apr 25, 2017 |
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Apr 25, 2017 09:50
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Have the emporium expand into door to door delivery using on-demand labor. Boom, your murder hobos are now murder task rabbits.
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Apr 25, 2017 16:06
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CobiWann posted:Oh my, those pamphlets are amazing! Where did you find them? I'm so going to make some pamphlets to hand out for Abeforth's...
As far as stories go, I guess I have something to contribute - Like I mentioned before, the game I'm running is a West-Marches style campaign, so there isn't an overarching plot, just exploring the wilderness and finding interesting enemies/dungeons to explore and loot. For the most part, it's been pretty combat heavy and they haven't encountered much worth conversing with, so I decided that I'd give them something a little different for a change of pace. While following a lost modron that they recovered from an earlier adventure, they come to a rocky forest with many coursing streams and rivers rushing through various gullies. Following the road, they find a bridge, and a small Kiosk manned by a Goblin bedecked in gold jewelry, going by the name of Roughtcuff. As the party approached, Roughtcuff quite cordially welcomed them and hit them with his sales pitch: You want to cross the bridge, it'll be 50g a pop. Players being players, their immediate response was '...and if we don't?' while slowly reaching for their weapons. At this point, a massive green hand reaches up from beneath the bridge and effortlessly plops down a waterlogged ogre corpse across their path, and Roughtcuff introduce his business partner, Nulk the Troll. My players are a ranger, barbarian, sorceror, and bard, mostly around lvl 3. They might be able to take on the troll, but there's a pretty good chance of at least one of them biting it, so they decide they'd rather negotiate (after I explain that no, you couldn't use Suggest to get the Troll to just hug the goblin to death, and besides the caster doesn't speak giant and the troll doesn't know common). I think on average my players have maybe 200g apiece, and the price point of 50g was set high specifically to encourage them to negotiate, which Roughtcuff is more than willing to do. After some back and forth, they settle on 10g per person and 10% of the profits from whatever adventure they're on, and Roughtcuff guarantees their safe passage through this particular neck of the woods, access to all bridges therein, so long as they stick to the path. The party agrees (except the sorceror, who despite not really needing gold or gear is being a bit of a skinflint), and Roughtcuff takes out some ratty parchments and a stick of charcoal, and scribbles out a contract. A little backstory about Roughtcuff is that he's smart. Like, not even 'for a goblin' smart, but genuinely smart smart. Roughtcuff & Nulk Transit Solutions Inc was his brainchild - he managed to convince the local troll clan (consisting of the trio of Nulk, Sulk, and Bulk) to clear out the forest and keep the bridges in decent repair, in exchange for a regular supply of "Inkblech", a goblin-brewed booze that is actually potent enough to give a Troll a pretty good buzz, which means it's drat near fatal to anything else. In my game, if goblins are evil, it's mostly because they're shortsighted and violence is more often that not that simplest means to their ends. Roughtcuff is just smart enough to take the long view of things, saw a niche in the local adventure/adventurer ecology, and set up a fairly successful business. The other thing about Roughtcuff is that his literacy is self-taught. Like, he's aware of the concept of written language in that he's seen a dude reading and writing from a distance, thought that it was pretty neat idea, and proceeded to scribble out his own written language. So the contract that he offers to the party is complete chickenscratch, completely illegible to everyone except himself. Nonetheless, there's a couple of lines at the bottom. The party tries everything they can think of to weasel out of the contract. The sorceror uses prestidigiation to sign a name that'll disappear, the barbarian marks an X, and the bard writes a fake name. I think the Ranger was the only honest one of the bunch. Roughtcuff checks their names, files the paperwork, and hands each of them a newly-scrawled ticket to show if they encounter any more trolls out there. They proceed on their merry way, and are currently neck-deep in a dungeon, murkin' thangs and gettin' xp. I don't really know what they expect is going to happen on the return leg of the journey. What they don't know is that Roughtcuff's 'contract' was really just a memo taking note of each of their appearances and the amount agreed upon. He doesn't really give two shits about WHAT was signed inasmuch as the marks just represent that an agreement was reached, so it'll be interesting to see how they try and weasel out of it, or if they'll actually play it straight and pay the toll. If they decide they'd rather brave the wilds, I'm going to have some pretty nasty encounters waiting for them to demonstrate that a guarantee of safe passage might actually be worth the pittance that they agreed to.
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Apr 26, 2017 05:53
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