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VolatileSky posted:http://kotaku.com/man-stabbed-seven-times-during-magic-the-gathering-gam-1797380701 loving Timmy probably got what he deserved. (Kidding. But really,  )It's been a while since I've checked the thread, but I'm looking for the goofy item lists that folks were brainstorming a little while back. I'm running a D&D5 dungeon crawl and I'm looking to freshen up ye olde loot tables. I remember there being a few posts with compiled lists a little ways back, but I couldn't find them. it may have also been in the GM Advice thread, but if anyone has the post links or knows the users that posted lists, let me know and I can look up post history to fetch them. Thanks! Edit: I found the posts. They were in the GM Advice Thread. Railing Kill fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Aug 3, 2017 |
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Aug 3, 2017 19:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:In this morning's session, my D&D 3.5 Factotum/Chameleon character got to test out his new spell: Divine Power, which sets his Base Attack Bonus to be equal to his character level (effectively making it the same as a Fighter's BAB), and increases his Strength by 6. lol at a dm allowing divine power does your dm allow night sticks and divine metamagic too? just lol
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Aug 3, 2017 19:43
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curufinor posted:lol at a dm allowing divine power just lol
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Aug 3, 2017 20:23
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it's not like he's using quickdraw iaijutsu to murder the gently caress out of something, littering katanas everywhere he goes
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Aug 3, 2017 21:34
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Tunicate posted:it's not like he's using quickdraw iaijutsu to murder the gently caress out of something, littering katanas everywhere he goes Yeah, but I have to admit, IMO, 4 attacks for a level 6 character meant to be a jack of all trades, master of none, is a little ridiculous.
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Aug 3, 2017 21:45
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Samizdata posted:Yeah, but I have to admit, IMO, 4 attacks for a level 6 character meant to be a jack of all trades, master of none, is a little ridiculous. gradenko_2000 posted:sets his Base Attack Bonus to be equal to his character level three attacks from BAB with BAB = character level suggests gradenko being at least level 11. I don't know where you got the idea he was level 6.
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Aug 3, 2017 21:51
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This is gettin' kinda meta.
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Aug 3, 2017 21:58
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Red Metal posted:three attacks from BAB with BAB = character level suggests gradenko being at least level 11. I don't know where you got the idea he was level 6. Level 13 Factotum/Chameleon. The rest of the party is a Warforged Psion/Crystal Master, a Gnoll Warblade, and a Human? Archivist/Walker in the Warp (homebrew class). Him getting fighter bab for a little while is in no way out of line with what the rest of the party is doing.
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Aug 3, 2017 22:07
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worst abuse of divine power is with divine metamagic, nightsticks, and the 24-hour spell duration upgrade metamagic. if you thought real hard, allowed nightsticks, divine metamagic, i think factotum can do it
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Aug 3, 2017 22:27
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Who cares? This is a catpiss thread not a broken build thread.
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Aug 3, 2017 22:31
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As Podi can vouch, all I make are broken builds. Persisted Divine Power isn't even on the radar for actual hardcore OP 
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Aug 3, 2017 22:55
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i suppose that's true. divine metamagic abuse of divine power is more of an example to completely and totally show why casters beat noncasters in 3.5 forever and anon amen. the real broken stuff is in other metamagic feats 
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Aug 3, 2017 22:57
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curufinor posted:i suppose that's true. divine metamagic abuse of divine power is more of an example to completely and totally show why casters beat noncasters in 3.5 forever and anon amen. the real broken stuff is in other metamagic feats Invisible spell 
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Aug 3, 2017 23:18
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Tunicate posted:Invisible spell
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Aug 4, 2017 00:06
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Yawgmoth posted:One of these days I need to remember how I made a caster who got free silence and free still who used invisible spell so that poo poo Just Happens around him. It was hilarious. I had a Beguiler/Shadowcraft Mage that could do that. Arcane Thesis is a hell of a thing when you really only use one spell to begin with. They also got to the point where their shadow spells were more real than reality.
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Aug 4, 2017 00:45
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Yawgmoth posted:lol at me having a problem with gradenko's factotum hitting a bit more often for an extra 3 damage Yawg looks at my character the way someone might think of a cat playing with a bit of string And yeah, the "combo" is no great shakes, but I tend to be more of a mechanics guy when it comes to TRPGs, so I enjoyed being able to pull off something that I didn't explicitly look-up in a guide.
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Aug 4, 2017 02:29
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Railing Kill posted:loving Timmy probably got what he deserved. (Kidding. But really, I don't know that I ever posted them, but I've been working on a list of ACME Magical Items. ACME: The Last Word In Dungeoneering. ("Uh-oh!") I can pastebin them or something if interested. Fakeedit: well, that's what I get for waiting. Can you link the posts?
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Aug 4, 2017 02:46
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Red Metal posted:three attacks from BAB with BAB = character level suggests gradenko being at least level 11. I don't know where you got the idea he was level 6. I guess I thought the Str boost was also equal to level or something. It still strikes me as leading down the WoW path. "Why does that Blood DK do more damage than my healer? NOT FAIR! MAKE IT THE SAME!"
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Aug 4, 2017 02:47
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Samizdata posted:I guess I thought the Str boost was also equal to level or something. heading away from the WoW path is another path that path leads to pun-pun and the omnificer
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Aug 4, 2017 02:48
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Yawgmoth posted:One of these days I need to remember how I made a caster who got free silence and free still who used invisible spell so that poo poo Just Happens around him. It was hilarious. Be a psion that can reliably make a DC 15+power level concentration check to suppress the power display when manifesting?
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Aug 4, 2017 04:24
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JUST MAKING CHILI posted:Be a psion that can reliably make a DC 15+power level concentration check to suppress the power display when manifesting? Not exactly the same since you can't make people stub their toes on invisible six-inch-high walls of iron
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Aug 4, 2017 07:03
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Yawgmoth posted:One of these days I need to remember how I made a caster who got free silence and free still who used invisible spell so that poo poo Just Happens around him. It was hilarious. Dwarf Runecaster + Geometer. May be dependent on your GM to allow the effects of both of them simultaneously. It's also not 'free' in the sense that you have to pay a bit of gold to get the silent half of that, but it is free in that it doesn't raise the slot level of the spell.
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Aug 4, 2017 09:17
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Tunicate posted:Not exactly the same since you can't make people stub their toes on invisible six-inch-high walls of iron Psionic suggestion (use telepathy to speak into their mind) to act like they stubbed a toe on an invisible six-inch-high wall of iron. That only requires level 5!
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Aug 4, 2017 15:04
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JUST MAKING CHILI posted:Psionic suggestion (use telepathy to speak into their mind) to act like they stubbed a toe on an invisible six-inch-high wall of iron. That only requires level 5! If I wanted half-measures, I'd cast Illusory Script and write 'you stubbed your toe and also you can't see this writing' on the wall.
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Aug 4, 2017 21:10
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one of the better magic item compendia is actually from gurps. super loving flavorful http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/alphabetarcane/ there's also a modern thingy too http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/macguffinalphabet/ they all got gurps effects and things but pretty easily translatable
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Aug 4, 2017 21:12
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curufinor posted:one of the better magic item compendia is actually from gurps. super loving flavorful That looks great, thanks for the pointer.
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Aug 4, 2017 22:17
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super loving small tho. intended as macguffiny things for a whole campaign to revolve around sorta
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Aug 5, 2017 06:45
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Welp. We had two people I sort of know from my sword fighting group, a gal and her boyfriend. (we talked a little about RPGs and I mentioned I run a group and asked if they could join). Now I have to ask the boyfriend to not come back. One of my original three told me he said he enjoys those daddyofive videos (the guy who abuses his kids by screaming as a "prank" and had his kids taken away) and (understandably) she felt uncomfortable being around him 
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Aug 5, 2017 07:43
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Foolster41 posted:Now I have to ask the boyfriend to not come back. One of my original three told me he said he enjoys those daddyofive videos (the guy who abuses his kids by screaming as a "prank" and had his kids taken away) and (understandably) she felt uncomfortable being around him Ugh, those videos are horrible, not just screaming but terrifying their kids, gaslighting them, and encouraging them to attack and beat each other - I can definitely understand why she's not comfortable around someone who thinks that kind of thing is funny.
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Aug 5, 2017 16:04
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Foolster41 posted:Welp. We had two people I sort of know from my sword fighting group, a gal and her boyfriend. (we talked a little about RPGs and I mentioned I run a group and asked if they could join).
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Aug 5, 2017 17:01
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Yeah, I'm worried about her, though when I talked to the player who was uncomfortable she said that the girlfriend seemed okay (followed by three question marks though). We'll have to see, but I have a feeling she's gonna go too. I haven't had this sort of RPG drama since my old 3.5ed days. Oh gosh. It looks like I never told those stories here? One time a female cleric(?) decided to take a guard of a place we were infiltrating (some kind of fantasy tavern club thing?) and tie him up and do an uncomfortable S&M scene ("Call me mistress"). That same character I believe (or at least, same player) had a baby monkey fur bra. And she made a big deal out this. I have a bunch of other stories that are less cringy and more more player stupidity. One of my favorites is the time we nearly killed a god. I'm a Lizardman Sohei (Oriental Adventures) along with a few others. We are investigating a big tower. In it are places for making and storing magic items. Rows and rows of magic items. We get to the second floor, slaughtering everyone that is inside (Challenging, but nothing incredibly difficult). taking in probably literally hundreds of thousands of gold worth of treasure, all organized and categorized for us even with a magic catalog. We get to the top of the tower, which is protected by some kind of disintegration shield (we tested it). We should have taken this as a warning. The center of the tower has a feather fall spell built in to it, so we weren't too afraid of falling to get back down. We have a spell caster cast a fly spell and disable the magic of the shield. I vaguely remembered objecting to this idea, and thought it was dangerous. We do it anyway. We were immediately attacked by four wind elementals. They eventually captured us and a wizard (around level 40) who owned the tower came out. He was really mad (Understandably since we killed off all his mage magic crafters and stole a lot of stuff). He demanded we drop everything we stole. We do (except one who is sneaky). He then demands we surrender and be his slaves to pay off the dept, or we could challenge him to a duel. We choose the second. he even offers to allow us to choose the battleground. We choose a small room. The battle begins and the guy keeps teleporting everywhere. And then somehow our monk manages to do about 150 damage and the mage is forced to roll for a check vs. massive damage. He succeeded the roll, but if he had failed, the theoretical experience would be enough for all of us to become level 26! (Of course, only the monk would get the experience and you can't level more than 1 level anyway) Still nearly killing a character that was basically impossible was quite thrilling. I'll maybe share the other stories some time.
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Aug 6, 2017 00:59
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Recently, an nWoD (new world of darkness, now Chronicle of Darkness after the whole business with paradox buying the IP and the guy in charge of it being a huge oWoD grog) game of Demon that I was in wrapped up, and what a crazy ride it was. To provide some quick background for those not familiar with the game line: nWoD has its setting as basically a moderately shittier version of the real world with lots of supernatural stuff abound and mucking things up. nDemon has you playing as a former servant of a vast, possibly intelligent but maybe not, machine that has downright deific levels of power, albeit said power has to get applied in very specific ways through often very odd processes. Quaintly enough, this being is named the God Machine. This God Machine has angel servants, but they're more like robots that are shamelessly stealing biblical iconography at times. Demons, as you might have guessed, are such angels that have broken free and developed that troublesome trait known as "free will". They're consequently hunted in an effort to recycle them because angels are costly resources. nDemon is best described as classic spy fiction meets the matrix meets looney tunes (some of the powers are basically cartoon physics). Of course, the particular setting of this game was complicated much further by the fact that it was a custom version of the World of Darkness that had been used in several other games run by the same ST, the events of which were canon to the setting. Long story short, all the supernatural stuff got revealed, life went on for the most part although there was plenty of turmoil and shakeups as a result. The demon game is set a decent chunk of years in the future after the big reveal. Demons are one of the few supernatural groups that managed to keep themselves hidden for the most part, on account of it being vital to their continued survival and them being very very good at it. As a result of being set a ways into the future, cybernetics are much more advanced. Think Metal Gear Rising, the tech level is about thereish but a bit more widespread. There's a lot to say about this crazy ride of a campaign and if people are interesting, I'd be happy to elaborate on other aspects later. However, the focus of this post and the following one I will make is on two particular characters from that game: Rook and Muse. Muse was my character and the name is somewhat misleading. If you imagined some sort of social character with lots of powers to mess with people's heads, you'd be very far from the truth. This is because Muse had a rather peculiar notion of what inspiration meant: to be met with a challenge and to rise above it. Often, this meant Muse beat the poo poo out of people but specifically didn't kill them. If they were interesting, she'd show back up later and fight them again to see if they'd gotten any better. Not to say she would not happily complicate people's lives in other manners. It's just that she really, really enjoyed fighting. Muse's original character concept has a few different angles going for it. One, I wanted to take all the ludicrously powerful defensive options demon provided, slap them on one character, and then ask myself the important question: How does this nigh-invincibility affect how someone would think? Muse is the type who walks into traps to trigger them because she can and she knows she can get away with it. She is hideously reckless and often seems very un-clever despite having decent intelligence simply because she absolutely could solve a problem by simply walking through it until it stopped being a problem. This recklessness also fed into a second notion: Rook was a very paranoid character, always coming up with extensive plans, backup plans and just generally assuming everything will go as wrong as possible. He was sneaky and cunning. Consequently, he and Muse made a hilarious buddy cop duo. They were the only two characters who knew each other from before the game started and had often worked together because they made a remarkably good team. Finally, although this didn't really solidify as a conscious notion until later: I made a character who had completed their character arc ages ago in the span of about 5 minutes. Muse broke free not because some dramatic event like many demons, she fell when she realized she could just walk away, so she quit to go pursue things she found more entertaining and that was that. Muse was a complete character from the get-go, completely aware of who she was and at peace with that. Throughout the entire campaign this remained true, things didn't happen to Muse, Muse happened to everything else. Understandably, you might think this makes for a boring character that would get old fast, but at least for me, Muse's gimmick of using her nigh invincibility to commit acts of combat trolling never lost its charm (that's another point that should be noted. Muse was almost always pulling her punches. She'd kill when it wasn't practical not to, but otherwise she preferred leaving opponents alive, otherwise they didn't learn anything). Furthermore, although Muse herself never fundamentally changed in any capacity, one thing did evolve over the course of the game: Her relationship with Rook. At the onset, they were acquaintances and perhaps as close to friends as Rook, as he was at the onset of the game, would allow. Over time, this would evolve to, by the end of the game, the weirdest sort of basically-married couple. Edit: Daeren's post reminded me of a trait I forgot to mention: Muse was lazy and tended to spend long periods of doing not much of anything punctuated with intense amounts of action. When Muse was motivated, she was VERY motivated, but tended to let life come to her rather than actively pursuing things. She let Rook worry about things like "plans" and "goals". I should also mentioned, spurred by Daeren's post, he is 100% correct I blundered into what ultimately became the character of Muse. More like I discovered a character that was already kind of defined and waiting there to be written. The game's rules, the kind of story nDemon tries to tell, and the particulars of Rubix's campaign basically just made this character something that was waiting to happen. Obligatum VII fucked around with this message at 05:12 on Aug 7, 2017 |
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Aug 7, 2017 04:01
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Rook was a very interesting character and one that did have quite a bit of character growth throughout the campaign by dint of exposure to both Muse and the other characters in the game. As mentioned previously, Rook was paranoid, cunning, and sneaky. He carefully tried to avoid developing attachments to anyone because he might need to abandon them all at a moment's notice and go into hiding. This began to erode as the game went on; Rook started very cold and analytical and although he remained a cynic all the way through to the end, he began to see people as more than just tools or things to observe. I'd go into more detail, but I think his player could do his character more justice than I can and it just so happens that Daeren also has an SA account.
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Aug 7, 2017 04:06
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Muse and Rook shenanigans were one of the highlights for me in running that game.
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Aug 7, 2017 04:54
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Obligatum VII posted:Rook was a very interesting character and one that did have quite a bit of character growth throughout the campaign by dint of exposure to both Muse and the other characters in the game. Howdy motherfuckers, I'm here to sing you the song of my people. As noted, this was a very long running game, and there's a fuckton of anecdotes we can get into, but I think it's best to start with our perspective: our characters, and what we wanted to do with them. Where Obligatum unwittingly blundered into a character that had solved the central existential question most Demons face, I deliberately made a character who thought he had. Rook started, as noted, as a cold, nearly heartless information broker and smuggler. He was not human, he did not care to be human, and he found demons that groped and strained at the illusion and sensation of humanity to be misguided at best (and self-sabotaging idiots that were liable to take everybody around them with them when they made a mistake at worst.) Rook was built to be the perfect infiltrator/thief, meant to get in and out with something the Machine wanted like a ghost - ideally without the theft ever being noticed at all. He Fell when he hooked himself into an unfiltered surveillance network and had a mind-shattering look through God's eyes. He erased most of the memory of the experience, but the quiet, obsessive desire to experience something even close to that again was one of the major things I kept in mind while playing him. He was insatiably curious, incredibly meticulous when gathering information about operations, and the only two things that would regularly make him risk his neck even the slightest bit were his kleptomanic habits left over from his angelic days, and his own desire to be as informed as possible about everything he saw as necessary information. In short, he was pretty much the perfect example of a demon played straight in a game with an oppressively crushing atmosphere, where anyone and everyone can betray you and is best seen as an asset that should be easy to cut off and burn the second they start to bring heat on you. And this was not the sort of game he ended up in. This was a game of batshit schemes, explosions, and cybernetically augmented giant squid with psychic powers being integral parts of the God-Machine's ultimate plans. Rook ended up being effectively the only sane demon in a ring of murderous joy-riding maniacs, comprised of the following: Muse, a demon whose primary disguise is a spirit of strife and solves problems with the Machine by sauntering directly into its territory and punching the nearest cultists in the snout to assert dominance, because she knows she can get away with it A demon with a deeply dysfunctional obsession with the concept of Truth who cannot stop trying to drag their enemies (and thus, the ring's efforts against them) into the public eye A hedonist with an immense, filthy rich cult with an incredibly high profile public image as a pharmaceutical company that very openly opposes the primary cult the ring's working against An ex-Hunter/Killer angel that doesn't particularly care about loose ends that give them more people to kill An impressionable demon picked up about five minutes after he Fell that considers the ring his family and responds to direct threats against them poorly This left Rook in the unenviable position of desperately trying to clean up the trail of destruction and chaos left behind by his ring, which was more or less akin to juggling chainsaws. The storyteller confided in me repeatedly that if it were not for Rook's constant efforts and paranoia IC and my arguments to other players OOC to maybe not follow through on their particularly bad ideas, the ring would probably have been hunted down and had all its covers ruined at least once. This constant extreme stress wore down on Rook's ability to remain completely detached. But even beyond that, it was primarily his association with Muse that made him more and more human. They were effectively the perfect partners in crime - Rook's constant paranoia, planning and awareness made up for Muse's general laziness and apathy, while Muse's impulsive nature got Rook past his tendency to lock up, and nigh-indestructability gave him a tool to aim (and shield to hide behind) that let him take risks far more often than he otherwise would. Their banter over the course of the game, debating their points of view, defending each other's faults, and shockingly effective mechanical ability to work together made them practically inseparable by the end of the game, which led to both of them rubbing off on each other. Muse got more eloquent, reflected more on things, paid more attention, and was better able to describe her ethos, while Rook was more willing to take risks, started to see innate value in humans and humanity, and got much less willing to jump straight to killing people as Plan A. If y'all are interested, Obligatum and I (or the storyteller, Rubix Squid) can tell anecdotes about the game, which include: That time Rook had to pull an emplaced machine gun out of his pants That time the main antagonist of the game tried to stage his own assassination by RPG-7 and how Muse foiled it on live TV just to piss him off That time we blew up Tokyo Tower so hard it retroactively never existed That time we forced the God-Machine to DDoS the entire internet into submission to try to shut us up
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Aug 7, 2017 04:56
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Daeren posted:An impressionable demon picked up about five minutes after he Fell that considers the ring his family and responds to direct threats against them poorly You forgot to mention his most important character trait: Maxed out Dad stat (not an actual stat, but he ended up literally adopting a lot of NPCs). Edit: It wasn't planned at all on anyone's part, either, he just became the dadliest demon naturally.
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Aug 7, 2017 05:06
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I'm running Demon starting next Sunday (after an aborted attempt a few months ago) so I would absolutely love any anecdotes or insights you can share, particularly in terms of how you constructed heist stories and how to design challenging but not insta-lethal encounters for PCs, especially when some, but not all of them, are optimized for fighting.
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Aug 7, 2017 05:08
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm running Demon starting next Sunday (after an aborted attempt a few months ago) so I would absolutely love any anecdotes or insights you can share, particularly in terms of how you constructed heist stories and how to design challenging but not insta-lethal encounters for PCs, especially when some, but not all of them, are optimized for fighting. A combat optimized demon is a nigh-unstoppable engine of destruction. Provided they don't bite off more than they can chew, they absolutely should demolish anything you throw against them. It's never a fair fight in nDemon. One side is the one doing the stomping. If you want to put the fear of the God Machine in them, always run it on the razor edge of them pulling too much heat and being the ones stomped.
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Aug 7, 2017 05:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm running Demon starting next Sunday (after an aborted attempt a few months ago) so I would absolutely love any anecdotes or insights you can share, particularly in terms of how you constructed heist stories and how to design challenging but not insta-lethal encounters for PCs, especially when some, but not all of them, are optimized for fighting. First of all, be wary of anybody with Just Bruised. They will not die. Ever. Seriously, Muse had a bunch of demonic parts that gave her survivability but it was Just Bruised and Turn Blade that made her nigh-immortal. You need to get very creative about hitting people with one or both with Tilts or other environmental problems to give them a challenge - or more accurately, get them the hell out of the way so the rest of the team can be threatened. Second, demons can use a lot of their not necessarily combat oriented tricks in combat to some pretty good effect, but even a mostly noncombatant demon with Knockout Punch or Merciless Gunman or a few demonic parts like Horns can whip out some really nasty surprises against anything you throw at them. A properly kitted demon will be nearly unstoppable in a straight up brawl or gunfight against an opponent roughly at parity with them by objective metrics. The trick is, that's assuming fair fights are involved. Fights you want to be high stakes should never, ever be fair. The God-Machine has no reason to ever fight fair - if the Machine's had enough time to analyze what a ring's capabilities are, ambush them, use the rudest poo poo you've got in terms of action denial or Tilts or damage over time or nasty conditional effects, split them up, prey on the slightest weaknesses they have. It's important to remember that you can afford a lot more pressure on a party of demons than you can on most other splats, because demons have the most powerful panic button to ever exist in a World of Darkness game. If even a single demon goes loud, anything short of things they have zero business fighting at all will crumple like tinfoil before them...but you now have license to drop the hammer on them and change the combat scenario into a "run like hell" scenario after the players solve their immediate situation.
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Aug 7, 2017 05:22
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