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Yawgmoth posted:If I were your DM I would never plan anything for any session because you guys would just come up with something infinitely more entertaining anyways. Which is awesome. After that session (this and the previous story are from the same session) he told us that we ended up loving up his plans about 5 times.
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Jan 20, 2012 22:25
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This was my military group before we PCSed away from one another. For this story; I play a goliath barbarian, while my friend plays a human rogue. Playing 4th edition, come across a bottomless chasam with stairs (without rails) leading down, platform to platform. We had just finished out a group of enemies on one of the platforms, and looking down, we spot a few orcs on the next platform, some 10 tiles away from us. Trying to be creative, I decided to take a brazier and dump out the coals onto the stairs, creating dangerous terrain they would have to come up. Rather than doing so, the orcs simply waited around until the coals cooled off. Not having any of that, I decide to get a running jump to go over the coals, to charge the orcs. A botch roll on the jump, and barely succeeding on my roll to stay on the stairs, I am now face down on a bunch of burning coals. My friend decides to attempt the same thing, except now with me in the way. He jump; fails his roll, then critically succeeds his check to stay on the stairs. The DM asked him where he wanted to land. After a thoughtful minute, he decided 'On the barbarian.' Queue a quick discussion about momentum, physics, and using coals to 'roll' the barbarian down the flight of stairs while the rogue surfed on his back. We made it to the bottom of the stairs in one piece (Myself taking 1d6 burning coals and 1d6 stairs damage), and we end up a tile away from the orc -- Provoking an attack of opportunity.
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Jan 24, 2012 23:05
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I was helping to play test a friend's roleplay system last year at Sakuracon, and the GM had the prefab characters and decided that since it's a one-shot beta test that he didn't have to be serious. We had a Robot, a Pirate, a Ninja, a Samurai, and a Mage who's possessed by an evil spirit among our options - all of them had rivals. So the premise: Mad Max meets Iron Chef. First round, we had to kill the ingredients, in which case is a Caesar Salad Slime, a Chocolate Pudding, and a Beef Dragon with corrosive barbeque breath. As a note, in the system, you get points for being very dramatic, creative, or just made the GM laugh - so this is important. Me: *after my pirate character gets pulled free from the Caesar Monster* (In character) Could you gentleman perchance have something as I could clean myself with? Ninja player: Here you go! *he tosses a wet wipe at me* I noticed a skill on my sheet about a portable cannon, and stood up. Me: Now Gentlemen, I suggest you look away for just a moment or I'd feed you to the sharks I will! *feigns hiking up skirt to pull a Cannon out* And when I was about to pull the ultimate move (Summon my pirate crew) to eat the Caesar Slime, I made this grand speech, and the GM interrupts me saying it's overkill. Me: Ah, Never ye mind, they don't eat their veggies anyways. So I shoot him. Now the second round is where it really gets fun. We had to prepare the food, BUT our rivals are sabatoging our work, and we can do the same. It's been so long, I only remember the highlights. I pitched in by having my pirate crew turn the dragon on a spit and liberal application of alcohol. The Ninjas are having an epic duel with forks and knives, the mage flooded their kitchen while in full on Mechefistoles mode. We were told that we were the loudest table, even shouting down the BESM table. I sat in on a different session with one of my friends playing the Robot, she was playing as a full on friendly Robot helper who accidentally had an rear end in a top hat Modulator chip implanted.
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Jan 26, 2012 07:14
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I'm part of a D&D 3.5 campaign run by a friend of a friend. It's a trainwreck of a game run by an RP- and anime-obsessed girl in her late 20s who still acts like a teenager. It's more of a "funny" bad than anything else, so I don't mind hanging around and playing along to see how it ends up. The players are: Me, playing a tribal half-orc Barbarian/Horizon Walker Bob, my and the DM's mutual friend, playing a human Wu Jen (Asian-inspired spellcaster) specializing in fire magic Lacee, playing a catfolk rogue Brandi, the DM, with her DMPC, a *~super-hot~* half-drow swashbuckler who runs at the first sight of combat Highlights so far include: -Being attacked by 3 Hill Giants at once. Bob traps them inside a Wall of Fire spell shaped like a box, so they have to choose to rush through the flames and take a bunch of damage, or be slowly roasted alive. Two of them die rushing out of the wall, while the third charges at Bob, only to be killed by my attack of opportunity as he runs past me. We're then attacked by two more Hill Giants that we apparently didn't see despite Lacee having Spot and Listen skills through the roof. One of them charges at her (being the closest), attempting to bull rush her back into the Wall of Fire that's still there. Her 5-foot tall catgirl somehow manages to overpower a charging giant and stop it dead in its tracks. -The DM instituting a rule that rolling a "super-fail" (Two natural 1s in a row on an attack roll) means you hit a random other creature on the battlefield as your weapon slips out of your hands. It's an automatic hit that rolls damage with all the modifiers your original attack would have had. 10 minutes into the session, I end up killing Bob in one hit with a botched leaping power-attacked charge. We manage to talk her down to him being left at one HP, since hurling a 12-pound sword nearly 70 feet directly behind me is borderline impossible even with my character's strength, and even intentionally trying to throw the thing would only get it 50 feet at maximum. -Starting a wildfire the size of the central US by casting Fireball in a grasslands during a dry season, killing thousands. -Railroading leading us on MMO-style quests. Our second session was almost entirely made up of going to a bulletin board, seeing what goblin/orc/kobold army was massing nearby, kill their leader, bring back his head/ear/sword and receive reward. If any of us tried to leave town on our own, the guards would stop us and ask why we were leaving without the rest of our group. No matter our response, they'd get suspicious, cast Hold Person on us and throw us in jail until the rest of the party went to pick us up. Several sessions in, we still don't have much information on whatever plot may be going on, besides "big army of giants is gathering in the mountains" but we're not allowed to investigate it without the guild's permission, or else we'll be paralyzed and thrown in jail until we, in a Zone of Truth, agree to not investigate it until we're allowed. So despite being railroaded every step of the way, there's no apparent destination in sight. -DMPC constantly and shamelessly flirting with every other character in the group, male and female alike. Attempting to knock him unconscious with the flat of my sword led to me getting hit by a lightning bolt from nowhere during a clear, sunny day. -DM's response to any easy encounter is "more of them appear." Combine this with the fact that magic is relatively rare in this world, so magical healing costs are extravagant, and you get my Barbarian who's been at less than half HP for nearly two in-game months. -The descriptions of all the major NPCs begin with "He looks like <comic book superhero>, except..." -Brandi moved away a few months ago so we've done most of the campaign with us at my table and her on webcam. She's not interested in learning how to use Maptools or IRC or anything. And now it seems her husband may be joining us as well, so it'll be her and "Jay" at her end and everybody else at another. Recycling Centerpiece fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jan 29, 2012 |
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Jan 29, 2012 16:43
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Sworder posted:-The DM instituting a rule that rolling a "super-fail" (Two natural 1s in a row on an attack roll) means you hit a random other creature on the battlefield as your weapon slips out of your hands. quote:-Brandi moved away a few months ago As for seeing how it ends, this really seems like the type of game that "ends" when the players get sick of purposeless fights and fetch quests, or when the DM decides she wants to go back to throwing kobolds and hobgoblins at the party instead of tracking down things with a high enough CR. Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jan 29, 2012 |
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Jan 29, 2012 17:20
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Yawgmoth posted:And why the hell haven't you said "hey guess what, you're not here anymore so we're just gonna play with the people who left, go find another group to play City of Anime Heroes with"? Because her moving away gives you an engraved invitation to tell her to gently caress off. Eh, it's not so bad. Only a few hours every other Sunday. Plus she and Bob are good friends and Bob's been my best friend for like 20 years so I'm willing to put up with it for his sake. quote:As for seeing how it ends, this really seems like the type of game that "ends" when the players get sick of purposeless fights and fetch quests, or when the DM decides she wants to go back to throwing kobolds and hobgoblins at the party instead of tracking down things with a high enough CR. Yeah, probably. Only time can tell.
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Jan 29, 2012 19:56
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Yawgmoth posted:In any game crit fail rules are generally terrible, but in D&D they're exceptionally terrible because of the huge amount of rolls you're making. The odds of rolling snake-eyes with D20s is 1/400. It's not a bad "flavor" rule as long as everyone's ok with it.
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Jan 29, 2012 20:26
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Cross posting from the Good Experiences thread since for some reason which one the forum is actually using keeps changing. I just had a new best experience tonight! (DnD4e) Our party was tasked with hunting down and capturing an elusive "Lady of the Lake" by the empire in which we were all born, Roshar. This empire has, for the last twenty-odd years, been ruled by a megalomaniac Empress bent on dominating the world. Our party has come into conflict because we're a mix of generally good people who buy into the propaganda out of ignorance or stupidity, people who just like to kill stuff and don't question why, and my character, Damakos. Damakos a joint-smoking tiefling rogue who has lived for the past fifteen years in a monastery of Pelor with monks who generally oppose the war and the Empress' harsh methods. He only joined the army because he wanted to spread the word of Pelor to the troops, and maybe ease their pain with some cannabis. Unfortunately (because the plot says so) he was sent on this mission with the rest of the party. Now he tried and failed to convince the party to run away because he thinks the Empress is a megalomaniac. So instead he went with them with one goal: kill the Lady and send her secrets to the grave with her. When the fight finally commensed, the first two thirds of it involved the hapless tiefling getting tossed about by golems. On one round when I thought there was nothing I could do without spending an action point or violating a mark, my second at-will that I had basically forgotten about got me a critical hit (plus sneak attack) damage on my first shot, bloodying the golem in one hit. Later, I charged that same golem and managed an improbable hit on a MBA (as I'm a dex-based class) and killed off the golem (another party member had dazed it so I got sneak attack there too.) I also killed the second golem on the next round with an immediate inerrupt, and on my turn, I had a chance to take down the Lady of the Lake too. That second at-will gave me enough distance to get close enough to use an actual Dexterity attack, and I rolled good (the dice were kind to me)... So I drove my sword into the mage's heart. She made her first death saving throw and I forced her to make another by using the daily power on my sword. The d20 came up 1. Ding dong, the witch was dead! (And my character was promptly wasted by our party's Hexblade) (Just to be clear, I told the DM ahead of time I would be doing this and he said he has plans for either scenario. I didn't intentionally just dick over the entire game.)
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Jan 29, 2012 22:01
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Volmarias posted:The odds of rolling snake-eyes with D20s is 1/400. It's not a bad "flavor" rule as long as everyone's ok with it.
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Jan 29, 2012 23:02
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I occasionally run one-shots of Atomic Highway for my tabletop group, using a not entirely serious take on the setting that I've dubbed Atomic M25 (or Green and Unpleasent Land). In the last session, having completed their mission, they were preparing to drive back out through the hedge of mutant leylandii surrounding the town they were in - they'd discovered on the way in that it had the ability to make people want to stop and then send them to sleep. They took some sensible precautions - a brick under the brake pedal etc. then the player of the Morris Man says, "We should sing to keep awake." Me: Sure, sing. Players: (More or less in tune) The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round... Two verses. It would have felt churlish to make them roll after that performance.
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Jan 30, 2012 01:40
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Sworder posted:Eh, it's not so bad. Only a few hours every other Sunday. Your time is only as valuable as you hold it to be. e: Speaking of valuing people's time, I feel bad that I've turned two experience threads into three, rather than into one. 
Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Jan 30, 2012 |
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Jan 30, 2012 02:04
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Chaltab posted:Cross posting from the Good Experiences thread since for some reason which one the forum is actually using keeps changing. Should probably just ask a mod to lock both of the old ones. (Not it.)
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Jan 30, 2012 03:45
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President Unerlion posted:
Oh my god this is possibly the best thing yet.
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Jan 30, 2012 03:58
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gently caress. Ok you are carrying a horse above your head. Everyone around, and even a few horses are visibly awe struck.
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Doc Hawkins posted:Your time is only as valuable as you hold it to be. I am reminded of that one xkcd strip about competing standards. But hey, on the subject of wasting time, let's talk experiences. One of the campaigns I've been playing in ended on kind of a bitter note last week, and I bear a lot of the responsibility for it. A member of my regular group wanted to start up a campaign. The basic concept seemed fine: in a remote island nation, some rebels have broken into the king's menagerie and stolen some rare and dangerous animals, and our PCs have been hired to bring them back. From the description of the campaign, I was expecting a straightforward wilderness trek where we'd brave some natural hazards, track down the rebels, fight them or else maybe betray our employer and side with them, and either way get a reward and move on. Nothing too deep and meaningful, but simple and fun, and it'd give me an excuse to play around with a new character build. After a couple of sessions, though, it became clear that it was actually the kind of game where we sort of go from one place to another seeing parts of some grand plot that was going on behind the scenes and never actually learning enough to fit all the pieces together and act on the information we have until the big reveal at the end. In fact, every time we were lucky, smart or stubborn enough to achieve something major that the GM didn't plan for, the GM fussed about how we might "ruin the plot". OK, that's not my favourite style of play, but at first there were enough cool and fun moments that it was worth sticking around. Things got worse after we actually found the animals, cut a deal with the rebels and brought them back. Our characters had no reason to stay on the island after the job was done, and we as players were running out of reasons to keep playing as well, but the king told us "oh, hey, there are more animals over in this place that you didn't bring back yet!", because (as we later learned) we had to go to where the last plot dump was so that we could finish the plot. Still, it seemed like the campaign was nearly over, so I spent the next couple of sessions tolerating the game while snarking privately to another player who felt the same way over AIM (it was an online game). Not the most productive response, I know. The last straw came when we actually got to the place where the rest of the animals were. After more than four hours (real time) of travel through a forest and a mountain pass with no significant challenges or choices, we spent over an hour listening to two NPCs talk to each other about a bunch of stuff we mostly didn't know or care about. We'd been promised (not for the first time) that this would be the last session, and as the hours dragged on it became obvious that it wouldn't be. I couldn't bear the thought of showing up yet again for another session like the one we'd endured for the last six hours, so I finally spoke up and said I wasn't having fun, I didn't feel my input into the game even mattered any more, so was there any reason for me to still be playing? The other player I'd been snarking with did the same. The GM seemed sincerely surprised and a little hurt -- they had no idea we felt this way, did anyone else in the group feel the same? A noncommittal chorus of "no, I'm still having fun" followed from the rest of the players. Well, at that point I couldn't just let it drop because I was baffled about how anyone was still enjoying the game after that session, so I pressed on and asked the rest of the group what they were actually enjoying about the campaign. After an awkward pause, I got two answers of "not much, really", one answer of "I'm curious to see how the plot ends", and one answer of "I dunno, I just kind of gently caress around and make my own fun" (I was doing the same at first, but I can only stand that for so long before I want to make a decision that actually matters). In the end, we agreed to end the session, talked for a little longer about where to go from here, and decided that the GM would run one more session to wrap things up for those last two players, while the rest of us left the game. That final session just got run, the campaign was wrapped up and the last two players seemed satisfied with the ending. In hindsight, I wish I'd brought up my problems with the campaign at least three or four sessions earlier. The only reason I didn't is that for the last two sessions we'd been promised that the next session would be the last one, for sure, and I figured that if everyone else was okay with how the campaign was going I might as well stick it out and not make waves. Lesson learned: don't do that, or you'll end up playing D&D in Abilene. Thuryl fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Jan 30, 2012 |
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Jan 30, 2012 04:06
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Thuryl posted:In hindsight, I wish I'd brought up my problems with the campaign at least three or four sessions earlier.
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Jan 30, 2012 04:14
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Colon V posted:It sounds like this may have been that DM's first time at the wheel. If you get a chance, talk to him later, and tell him what your grievances were, so he can learn. Yeah, it was the GM's first time. We've talked about it a little since then, and things are basically cool between us now, I think. I'm just not sure yet whether it's the kind of cool where I can trust that their games will be fun for me or the kind of cool where I agree not to play in their games so we don't end up hating each other.
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Jan 30, 2012 04:19
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I posted about this in the WoD thread, but I'm still super excited about how well my VTM20th game went and want to brag about it some more: The feel I was going for was Pulp Fiction with fangs. The game was set in Las Vegas, which is a prominent location for prize fighting—boxing, UFC, and the like. It would not be uncommon for a major championship match to take place in Las Vegas, maybe even an entire tournament, capped off with an extravagant final showdown at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. However, some joker decides he's going to game the system by ghouling some of the fighters, lending them a supernatural edge in the championship. With the amount of attention the tournament draws, this has the potential to be a devastating Masquerade violation. So for obvious reasons the prince is pissed. All the PCs also received secret clan-related objectives from their primogen that were secondary to a main group mission. The Ventrue was tasked to cause property damage or bad publicity at the club that one of the aforementioned ghouls hung out at, because the prince wanted to buy it out. The Gangrel (with anarch sympathies) wanted to get him caught red-handed. The Tremere working against the Nosferatu, working against the Toreador, working against the Ventrue, etc. Jyhad! The game went beautifully pear shaped like ten minutes into the main quest proper as the backstabbing started almost immediately. The Tremere player made everyone his bitch, provoking the Nosferatu player into doing something stupid then making the Toreador player take the fall. The Ventrue player cleverly manuevered the group to the location he needed to damage, trusting his coterie mates to lack discretion. As a result of the player's actions, the Nosferatu are in danger of losing their status as the Prince's favored servants and the Tremere have been granted permission to greatly expand their chantry and thus their power base in Las Vegas. Also the Toreador primogen has been humiliated, and thus the Tremere have earned the prince's favor. The Tremere player ended the session feeling pretty invincible, with everyone else hating him. Other highlights included, a ghouled MMA fighter hopped up on vampire blood threw the Gangrel PC out the window of hotel suite at the top of the Flamingo, and then the session ended with a car chase with hunters dressed as Elvis impersonators. The getaway vehicle was a black van with the picture of a cat with angel wings and a halo silkscreened onto the side. In blackletter text reads the words "HOME PET EUTHANASIA." One more thing: to keep the game going at a reasonable pace I instituted a house-rule that every player gets three covert rolls a session, which they send to me via google+ on their phones. This was to prevent the group from waiting 10 minutes while I parsed a bunch of covert actions, (a problem i noticed in Paranoia). The rationale ingame was that in a group of backstabbing bloodsuckers who know they are backstabbing bloodsuckers, opportunities where every other member of your coterie is looking the other way would be few and far between. This system worked really, really well. insanityv2 fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Jan 30, 2012 |
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Jan 30, 2012 04:40
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I love the covert actions thing. But then whenever I run games, I like to have players surprising the other players. I know that we all seperate ingame knowledge from out of game, but for me, there's just something more fun about passing a few notes to the ST or whatever, having the other players doing the same, and then seeing what happens. nothing backstabby or douchy as a rule, but generally I love unexpected plot twists.
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Jan 30, 2012 04:48
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So we're playing Star Wars d20 (with some heavy house-ruling; it's been suggested that we switch to SAGA but the GM is like "gently caress you, I already switched systems once from the old WEG d6 system to this one, I'm not loving around with it again"), and we're approaching the Battle of Endor... only we're not going to be at the Battle of Endor. Our Rebel group - which has grown from 'several dudes in a freighter' to 'all the Rebel forces in this Rim Worlds Sector complete with bases and shipyards and covert operatives' over the course of several years of gaming - is given a different assignment. In order to buy breathing room for the attack on the second Death Star, we'll be convincing the Empire that we're attacking other targets throughout the galaxy, drawing off resources that could be used to reinforce the Imperial fleet at the Death Star. Our group., specifically, gets to invade Coruscant, the capital world of the Galactic Empire. (in the words of our GM: "It's possible. You might pull it off. I mean, it's not likely, but you could manage it.") Anyways, over the last ten months we've become aware that someone is hiding out in our base of operations eavesdropping and whatnot; he's not an Imperial spy, but we can't figure out who the fucker is or what he wants. Finally we uncover a lead on how we might actually track the dude down, so we commence doing so, since operational security is now a much bigger deal than it was before we got our latest suicide mission. This guy, who I started thinking of as - and thus will name - Michael Westen, was once an ISB agent - an Imperial intel officer. He knew we were Rebels back before anyone else did, because at the time we were an undercover cell instead of a sector-wide insurgency; we decided that the best thing to do, since he'd uncovered our secret, was going to be to ship him off to Alliance Intelligence. This proved difficult, as the dude's two highest skills were Escape Artist and Disguise, so in the end we said "eh, gently caress it" and encased him in carbonite. Break out of that, fucker. Then we had him declared dead. Anyways, he got interrogated by Rebel Intel, only one of the people interrogating him was a double agent, because Rebel Intel sucks at their job. So when he escaped (because of course he escaped) the double agent told the ISB, who issued a burn notice and disavowed him and put a contract out on his head (because that was less paperwork than reversing the declaration of death, don't you know). So Westen decides, after several assassination attempts, that none of this would be happening to him if not for us - so he infiltrates our base and sets up a little nest and starts ordering supplies and poo poo with credit cards from one of our front companies. He isn't reporting to the ISB anymore, they want him dead, but he's decided that he wants to see us suffer. He wants to fight, to paraphrase the Princess Bride, to the pain. He's gathering intel, not to report on us, but to wage psychwar - leaving little notes and the like, just to gently caress with us. The lead we got enabled us to track down his nest, his little hidey-hole, and while he led the rest of the team on a wild goose chase throughout the ship (master of disguise, remember?), I was the only one who did the smart thing; I figured if he stuck his neck out for anything, it'd be something in said nest. So I sat there and I waited and I made coffee. When he eventually showed up, I offered him a cup. We had a chat while I waited for the combat-types to arrive; it was really quite genial. Why is this notable? This is a dangling plot thread that had been hinted at by the GM for fourteen months real-time, stemming from a storyline from several years ago. That's some fuckin' dedication right there.
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Jan 30, 2012 11:00
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Why is this notable? This is a dangling plot thread that had been hinted at by the GM for fourteen months real-time, stemming from a storyline from several years ago.
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Jan 30, 2012 11:30
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That reminds me of a D&D story I've probably told before in one of the threads. During some heavy duty magic analysis on artifact, our party found out quite by accident that someone must have cast Modify Memory on us some time ago. Naturally we immediately became very curious but trying to remember who might have cast Modify Memory on you and why is, for obvious reasons, doomed to fail from the start. So we shelved it for later and added paranoia to the curiosity. Eventually we found out that the caster was a bard spy sent by a rival group who had, in fact, been holed up in a cabin on our very own ship for months, regularly using Modify Memory to make us and everyone else on board forget about her existence altogether, and of course keeping tabs on us all the time. All this became especially notable when we remembered a prior session. See, we'd regularly take passengers on board and, as players, sometimes forgot about a few of them. That session we'd resolved to keep a list once and for all, sat down and listed everyone we could think of. Towards the end the DM piped up: "Don't forget the bard." "There's a bard, too? Huh, I guess we did forget about her." He'd flat out told us what was up in a way that meshed with the in-game events and that made sure we wouldn't figure it out until the right time. Masterful setup.
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Jan 30, 2012 11:31
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:So I sat there and I waited and I made coffee. When he eventually showed up, I offered him a cup. I believe you mean caf.  (That's loving awesome.)
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Jan 30, 2012 11:31
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Mornacale posted:I believe you mean caf. I actually meant mug, but, you know, details.  My character's coffee fixation has become a running plot point, actually; he's the group's slicer/techie/computer dude, and being the head of information warfare for an entire sector of the Rebel Alliance keeps one busy. I used Craft (Droid) specifically to build Mister Coffee, an ambulatory droid coffee machine that follows me around and ensures that I'm properly caffeinated and so have the energy to do all the crazy computer poo poo the team needs me to do. It's not until recently that anyone twigged to the fact that he's developed a pathological fear of sleep because being asleep means you're not doing the work which means that people are dying that he could have saved if he'd been awake and coding. Run a game for more than a decade (with not-infrequent hiatuses, obviously) and you're gonna start to see a lot of long cons. 
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Jan 30, 2012 12:04
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:coffee fixation ... decade-long game This wouldn't happen to also be the reason behind your username too, would it?  Also if you have any more stories about this game, please post them. I'm trying to get some friends of mine to get a Star Wars d20 game together and I'm already going to show them the one you just wrote, but more is always better. Plus with a game running for that long, even with hiatuses and playing infrequently, you must have a lot of anecdotes to share.
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Jan 30, 2012 13:08
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Interesting thing that happened in my last session. The party had to free an ally from the dungeons of the Order of Tiamat. Just a little sidequest, but in an adjacent cell there was a strange creature that the Order had captured to study. It was a mind flayer, and I'd placed it there to foreshadow a storyarc I'm planning that has something to do with the Far Realm leaking and aberrant creatures starting to show up. I thought maybe they'll fight and kill him, maybe not, either way this will put the presence of strange poo poo in the world on their radar. So they snuck into the dungeons, their buddy is pretty beat up, any minute a group of Tiamat's priests will arrive, they're quickly setting up a portal ritual in an empty cell, and now they're starting to get telepathic commands ("Free me and take me with you!") from the cell down the corridor. No one in this world has even heard of mind flayers, and there's no time to figure out what exactly is lurking there in the dark, but they have a hunch it's something not altogether good and aren't about to open the door. But hearing the priests approaching, the warlock gets an idea, he walks up to the mind flayer's cell and says: "Tell you what buddy, we're not going to take you with us, but I'm going to throw you the key before we bail, and you can take the fight to the guys who put you here. Deal?" "... it is acceptable." Ritual's almost done, Warlock throws in the key, runs like gently caress to the cell where they set up the portal and blocks the door. They hear the other cell open, they hear the priests come in, and their own portal opens, and the last thing they hear before they go through are screams and a horrible slurping noise. Long story short, half the Holy Order of Tiamat is now secretly controlled by a mind flayer that I'd originally put in as throwaway foreshadowing. I could not be happier. It's not so much "what am I going to make of this situation" but "what horrible place am I taking this first."
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Jan 30, 2012 14:43
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The Good Professor posted:This wouldn't happen to also be the reason behind your username too, would it? Yeah I'd love to hear more about this game. Rebellion is my favorite era for Star Wars but I can never get any of my friends to DM it. They always want to run KOTOR era which I know nothing about and see as kinda dumb. I've wanted to do a game similar to the one you're describing for a long time, probably since the first Dark Forces game where it showed that the Rebellion had their own bad rear end secret squirrels handling business throughout the galaxy.
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Jan 30, 2012 18:20
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Disclaimer: I haven't played SWTOR, so that may set all this on its head.GaryLeeLoveBuckets posted:They always want to run KOTOR era which I know nothing about and see as kinda dumb. I have a bunch of friends who don't like Star Wars but loved the KOTOR 1/2 settings, and I think the appeal is just the deconstructing that era does (kinda half-assed in Bioware's case, pretty full-throated in Obsidian's) to the story: when is it good or bad to be a Jedi, when is the existence of the Jedi a good or bad thing, what kind of collateral damage do the Jedi do to the planets and people under their influence, etc.
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Jan 30, 2012 19:20
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But most importantly, it's much easier to justify everyone being a jedi. 
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Jan 30, 2012 20:45
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tzirean posted:Disclaimer: I haven't played SWTOR, so that may set all this on its head. I think these are interesting questions, but I tend to dislike Jedi in general and the setting is loaded with them. Like I've always preferred Han Solo to Luke Skywalker because Han gets by on his wits and skills. While Luke is skillful himself, it always seems like he has to use the Force to bail him out and it feels like a cop out. I guess Han feels mortal to me and the risks he takes feel more real while I expect the Force to save Luke if he gets in over his head. What mainly appeals to me about the Rebellion setting is that the players are the underdogs. There's no Jedi Council for them to run to if they're in trouble and after a few levels they are probably more powerful than some of the Rebellion's heroes. While the Empire has Vader, Emperor Palpatine, countless troops and endless credits, the Rebellion has...the players. I think that's what always appealed to me about the X-Wing book series. The pilots failed or died occasionally because they were in the dirt fighting the battles that matter.
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Jan 30, 2012 21:05
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The fundamental reason I have never really gotten into Star Wars fandom is because I, like GaryLeeLoveBuckets, find Han Solo far more interesting than Luke Skywalker, but for some reason every Star Wars thing after the original trilogy decided to focus primarily on either Jedi or droids, both of which are pretty humdrum compared to "science fiction danger hero!!!" (opinion, obviously) I also have a special fondness for the random alien races, though, which made it all the more infuriating when The Old Republic gives you a choice between playing a human or a different human wearing make-up or a prosthetic horn. =-=-=-=-= Notable gaming experience from the ongoing Cthulhu-inspired-players-playing-themselves game I have written about here and in the good experiences thread: One game, just after finally figuring out that I am a horrible gamemaster (they found clues a couple of games in a row that there was a group calling itself DAGON and meeting in various creepy locations; tracking down one of the meetings led to discovering the Downstate Area Gamers' Outreach Network, who could not afford a nice conference room), they were going back over their notes to try to figure out what other things they thought were important that were actually just complete bullshit, and realized they had two different unrelated clues they had overlooked in tracking down DAGON, both pointing to the importance of a lightly wooded area just north of town. Upon arriving there, they found hints to the existence of an underground tunnel structure. They decided to try to find another way in, as whatever/whoever was under there would surely anticipate someone using the entrance. (Un)fortunately, the first person to try was the guy who took my "Calamitously Constructive Criticals" Edge, which makes it that there are critical failures in the first place, and that when one happens it provides an unexpected positive result to accompany the severe negative result. Walking around the field near the tunnel's entrance, he says "I am going to test the soil with a shovel," critically fails, and thus discovers part of the tunnel system by plummeting through the soil into the darkness below, shovel-first. His foot hooked another party member's backpack and pulled it in as well, conveniently spilling its contents in the process. When the plunger stopped being dazed at the bottom of the pit, he realized there was something resting on his chest. The moonlight streaming into the pit let him see that it was the little statue of Tsathoggua that the party had found earlier and assumed to be basically unimportant. The rest of the party found where he fell in, shone their Maglites down the hole, and discovered him surrounded by hundreds of ghouls, all staring blankly at the little statue on his chest, instead of tearing him to pieces. This was basically the climax of the scene, as this was the closest the party had come to definitive proof of actual supernatural events (they had encountered ghouls once before as I mentioned, but they just seemed like some weird cannibalistic humanoid), but they then went on to Pied-Piper the ghouls to an entrance where the one guy could get out on a ladder that they pulled up behind them. They then tied the Tsathoggua statue to a pick-up truck with rope and dangled it back in the hole ... until they could set off the improvised explosives they rigged up to collapse the tunnel structure, and whipped the statue out of the tunnel at the last possible second)
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Jan 30, 2012 22:33
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Because I'm generally a fan of the Power of Needless Subdivision (better known as Doc Hawkins), I'm going to share a 'worst experience' for both my players and me involving Nobilis. This was in the era of the Great White Book, when none of us could really figure out how it all worked. This wasn't much of a problem, though: we're all good enough at kludging that we figured 'take level of effect we're trying to achieve; subtract relevant attribute; spend Miracle Points to equal the difference' worked fine. No, the problem was the players. Or specifically, one player. We decided that we wanted to play the Powers of the Seven Deadly Sins, or at least five of the seven. We had Wrath, a neo-nazi woman who turned her section of their little Chancel into a perfectly ordered concentration/military training camp; Pride, an ascetic man condemned to Hell for sins undisclosed who was working to encourage the toddler beauty pageant industry as an exercise in unwarranted parental pride; Lust, a lesser water elemental who drew Hell's attention by drowning an entire village in a fit of jealousy and was working to encourage drug and pharmaceutical abuse; Envy, an ordinary living man who got roped into this over his head, who was planning OOCly to eventually increase the publicity on the lifestyles of the richest people in the world, to encourage more people to envy them; and Sloth, a lesser demon promoted within the ranks. You'll notice that I said the least about Sloth, because he literally had no plans beyond 'dick with the other PCs.' Not 'the other Powers of Hell', 'the other PCs.' Every time one of them tried to do something, he'd work a Miracle to try and shut it down - and not even in an interesting way. He would literally say, "I spend 4 Miracle Points to make his servants too lazy to do that." and that'd be a level 9 Miracle. This happened for two sessions, and each time we'd ask him what he was going to do to advance Hell's agenda himself, since he'd just shut down someone else's attempt. "Nothing." Eventually, we all got sick of it, and just gave up on that game for a while - until I created a Magic: the Gathering hack for it, a trick that I'm convinced is a rite of passage for Nobilis 2e players.
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Jan 30, 2012 23:18
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:This happened for two sessions, and each time we'd ask him what he was going to do to advance Hell's agenda himself, since he'd just shut down someone else's attempt. "Nothing."
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Jan 30, 2012 23:38
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Yeah, that made me laugh. Although I'm sure it wasn't funny at the table.
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Jan 30, 2012 23:44
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So my DM friend, who got tired of playing Neverwinter Encounters (because they weren't satisfying enough, really) tried running his own spin of Neverwinter at an open table in the local gaming store. Here is how it panned out. quote:Lord Neverember, Open Lord of Waterdeep, self proclaimed protector of Neverwinter, and a sophisticated rear end in a top hat who sits on top of a mountain gold, invites the player to his hall to speak of unrest emerging from a nearby Orc tribe. He amuses the players with a hospitality that is normally reserved for far more dignified guests such as Kings and Queens. The players are treated to rare and tasteful delicacies and fine spirits of foreign lands, tobacco of the richest flavors, and the entertainment of musicians that lingered in the heart and lifted the spirits days on after they were heard.
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Jan 30, 2012 23:54
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“Friends of Neverwinter, I am pleased that you are enjoying my humble hospitality, yet I must confess I brought you here for a purpose. Events have recently transpired that disrupt the delicate balance of Neverwinter and with that the protection of this city that I am...”
: “What are you protecting!? This city is falling apart and you don’t do anything but sit in comfort while the city suffers. Who do you think you are you vagrant!?”
: “Halt! None are allowed to cross this bridge without paying the toll.”
: “What do you plan on doing? The beasts are coming straight for you.”
: ”Wait… why didn’t the guards fire off a volley?”
“So… who wants to play Chutes and Ladders?”
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Though he was being really stupid in the last story, the first two don't seem that unreasonable. My the DM was just playing him that way, but my understanding from encounters is that Neverember is sort of a opportunistic prick.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:01
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Colon V posted:You said he was Sloth, right? Honestly, that sounds kind of brilliant, in the "this probably isn't intentional, but if it is, OH MAN" sort of way. It sounds that way in retrospect, yeah, but at the time it managed to suck all the fun out of the game. When I say that he put it like that, I mean that those were his literal words: "I spend 4 Miracle Points with my Domain 5 to make [non-Power lynchpin of their plans] too lazy to do that." I'm considering talking them (sans him) into playing Nobilis 3e, since it's a lot clearer in the rules.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:04
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The Good Professor posted:This wouldn't happen to also be the reason behind your username too, would it? Actually, the username comes from the time in college when I took pre-caffeinated water (remember Crank 2.0? that) and used it to make espresso and then used the espresso to wash down NoDoz. I stayed awake for a very long time and hallucinated a bit and also I may have seen God and then I slept for a very long time. ...that incident may have informed my character, yes. The Good Professor posted:Also if you have any more stories about this game, please post them. I'm trying to get some friends of mine to get a Star Wars d20 game together and I'm already going to show them the one you just wrote, but more is always better. Plus with a game running for that long, even with hiatuses and playing infrequently, you must have a lot of anecdotes to share. Oh man... the trouble isn't having stories, it's trying to figure out which ones are good. 'Cause there's so drat many that it's hard to run a comparison. The previous game session might be a good one, let's try that. An old, beat-to-hell tramp freighter arrives at our base - one we've never seen before. On board is an R2 droid that plotted the course to our base because apparently, way back in the day (like 20 years ago) it was on a smuggler's route. The freighter looks to have been attacked by poo poo like turbolasers, which means if anything followed it, they're going to find us, which isn't a good thing. So we backtrack to the system the freighter was attacked in, flying our super-sneaky stealthed fast ship. Remember those droids from The Clone Wars and the first prequel film? Yeah. There are 17 of their battleships blockading and bombarding a planet, each with their assorted fleet tenders and Vulture Droid (fighter) screens on combat air patrol. Our GM admitted after the game that he expected us to bring in our fleet and attack them. He did not expect us to look at them and say "we would like to own those. Let's steal 'em." After a few misadventures planetside we sneak onto the command and control ship. I've reprogrammed one of the combat droids (the rogers, we call them, as they're the ones always adding 'roger, roger!' to everything) to find the central computer core and turn it off, because the heavily-centralized separatists whose droid army this was designed things really poorly that way. Unfortunately, the infiltration droid did not work well. So we had him try again only this time he's leading a cargo-hauling droid (basically a forklift with a brain) which is loaded with boxes containing us. He got us up to the door of the computer core, which was enough; we jumped out and blew poo poo up. Turning off the computer core shuts down most of the droids... except for the so-called "tactical droids," who have independent command and control powers. They can run around and issue commands to the other droids, but we've shut down the central communications node (which runs through the main computer core), so they have to do it one at a time. One shows up with eight of the 'roly-polys' - the combat droids from the first prequel film, the ones that turn into balls and roll around before unfolding and shooting things? Those dudes - and is trying to blast its way into the computer core before I can finish reprogramming the computer to accept a new chain of command (at the top? us) and rebooting it. My character is, as I've said, the techie guy. He is minmaxed specifically for technical skills, and has an absolutely obscene Computer Use skill. He's 18th level (2 soldier/16 scoundrel) and has a total skill of more than 30 (I think it's 32, but I don't have the sheet before me), plus a masterwork slicer rig that gives like +8 to his rolls. Dude's sick. Three rounds until the door breaks, and I have to accumulate a total of more than 150 points. I have never felt so much tension while rolling Computer Use. Holy poo poo. We manage to take over the computer core and get it up and running; in dealing with the tactical droids and the four battleships that were on detached duty (and thus not tied to the computer core) we ended up with some losses... and in the end walked away with "only" nine battleships, eight frigates, twenty destroyers, 9,000 Vulture Droids, and just over 5 million extremely crunchy ground troops and the landing ships to deliver 'em. They're ours now.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:23
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Our GM admitted after the game that he expected us to bring in our fleet and attack them. He did not expect us to look at them and say "we would like to own those. Let's steal 'em." quote:and in the end walked away with "only" nine battleships, eight frigates, twenty destroyers, 9,000 Vulture Droids, and just over 5 million extremely crunchy ground troops and the landing ships to deliver 'em.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:42
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Sometimes they will try and figure out how to steal the ground, too.
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Jan 31, 2012 00:48
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Actually, the username comes from the time in college when I took pre-caffeinated water (remember Crank 2.0? that) and used it to make espresso and then used the espresso to wash down NoDoz. I stayed awake for a very long time and hallucinated a bit and also I may have seen God and then I slept for a very long time. (That story was also awesome)
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Jan 31, 2012 00:51
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