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Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
I'm about to join a game of World Wide Wrestling soon. I am so pumped about this. I want to play a character whose gimmick is that he thinks (or, behaves) that he is a referee. The guy running the game and one of the other players are huge fans of some of the goofier wrestling promotions, like Chikara.

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Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Kavak posted:

Please tell me his theme music was live ragtime piano.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PlhJOzH0gY

"Electric tie rack! Electric tie rack! Rackin' up electric tiiiiiiies!"

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Golden Bee posted:

WWWRPG at the weekend getaway is odd.
10+ players including a Geisha called The Geesh, a stepsibling feud btwn the technician and the Golden Boy, a Bronx/Brooklyn/Jersey Feud, and two giants who HATE each other, all wanting to win the Teddy Roosevelt Nat'l Park trophy.

My tentative character concept for our upcoming WWWRPG is a luchador whose gimmick is that his mask is possessed and makes him do evil, heel-ish things. Outside of the ring, the man is an evangelical Christian who believes wrestling is wrong (he believes anything that isn't Christ-related is bad). His act is meant to be a cautionary tale, not unlike Mazes and Monsters is to D&D. He is the only one who takes it this way. So he is a heel both in and out of character because he hates wrestling.

Edit: I can't wait to win a title belt, and then immediately burn it to "cleanse it of Satan's power." That'll go over with the fans, um, like a fart in church. But just imagine the ratings!

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Mendrian posted:

I want to echo the sentiment that 'sandbox' far too often just means 'any old poo poo can happen'.

I once played a single session in a game run by two 'legendary' local DMs (yes they literally both ran the game at the same time). They had a huge wait list and a stupid vetting process, and you had to start at level 1 no matter what level the group was. It was a 'sandbox' in the sense that I think the DM had some grand idea in mind about demons but for the most part the party hung around in taverns and occasionally followed rumors that were so obviously bog standard plot hooks it staggers the mind. Except any time you wanted to do anything - rent a horse, walk down a street without getting mugged, rent a room, check your currency, whatever - it was painfully roleplayed out.

The reason people like sandbox videogames is because there's a ton of poo poo to do and a ton of variety in that poo poo, and because all of it is ostensibly entertaining. I'd like to see a sandbox game sometime that is built around the grand theft auto premise - you've got a dozen things to do, only some of which is actually adventuring, and you can engage with any of it at any time, but the list of things is known and finite. You can buy shops, or play the underworld crime organization minigame, or you can just go do that loving quest for the prince.

The last game of Pathfinder I ran was like this. I thought of it more like Fallout (since I was playing New Vegas at the time), but it was the same idea. When the players did poo poo, they would receive "Quest Cards" (short notes on 3 x 5 note cards) that indicated a new quest. Sometimes these would come from the conclusion of another quest, or sometimes they would come from something random that happened in the middle that enough people thought was interesting. Some of them were planned, and some of them I made up on the spot. But the players could pursue any quest they wanted, and very few of them had time limits just so I could give the players that freedom. Each quest also had an XP reward and loot reward. The XP reward was on the card, and the loot got listed if that information became known to the players. It all worked really well, and if my upcoming game weren't a dedicated dungeon crawl, I'd use the system again.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Cooked Auto posted:

So for the past couple of weeks now I've been playing in a D&D5 campaign based on the MtG setting of Ravnica. It's a slightly uneven experience at times due to the GM being relatively new at it but it has worked so far and everybody else is good on offering suggestions for improvement.

For those who don't know all that much about it, Ravnica is a plane where one giant massive city has spread across the entire thing and is essentially controlled by nine different guilds. Who all hate each other but can not really do much because of the magical guildpact that ensures that poo poo does not hit the fan with all out warfare.
So it's fantasy Coruscant with a heavy slavic influence.

The players:
Lukasz - Devarkin (Dark Elf) Rogue. Guildless and the most jaded in the group and has no real hesitation towards outright murder if needed. Has decided to take Anatta under his wing to train her, regardless if it's something she wants or not. Childhood friend of Iskra.

Anatta Nowak - Human Rogue, part of the Golgari Swarm guild. Has lived all her life in the undercity as part as one of the gangs that roam the sewers. Which has also led to her having a rather unwashed appearance.

Ember - Human Barbarian, part of the Gruul guild. A recent arrival to the city proper as members of the Gruul clan live in the ruined and reclaimed parts of it.

Zermat - Human Eldritch Knight fighter, part of the Rakdos guild. A weird and eccentric man, fitting for a guild that can be described as either murderhobos or murderclowns to a certain degree. Has a tendency to always wear a mask.

Iskra - Half-Elf Wizard. (My character) Guildless but was formerly part of the Izzet guild, aka the guild of mad scientists, before she left in disgust after having research and subsequent fame stolen from her. Known Lukasz for most of her life.

Anyway, the basic story so far is that the party is wanted by the Boros guild for somewhat unknown reasons after a man slipped Iskra a note before dying while in the middle of an open street during a festival. On this note was the symbol of one of the many Gruul clans, the Split-Eyes, living out in the rubble areas of the city.
But before we had much of a chance to explore that we were contacted by a nobleman who had tasked the one who died into investigate a string of gruesome murders across the city. And the clan on the note was somehow linked to this as well.

Skipping ahead a session or so the party sets out for a trip to the Rubblefield where this clan and their shaman that we were going to speak to lives.
During this trip a couple of things happened.

The first one was Lukasz almost managing to get murdered by an angry female boar after having found one of her kids trapped underneath a fallen statue while out hunting on his own and disposed of it. This happening as the rest of the party was chatting amicably with each other around a campfire, more or less oblivious to his plight.
During his second trip, this time alongside a pair of other Gruul barbarians that acted as our impromptou guides, he managed to prove himself a lot better until the point he had to skin their pray and failing that somewhat.

The second event happened during the last leg of our travel towards the barbarian camp. Turns out the Split-Eyes had a history with another clan we encountered during our trip and as payment for getting guided there we had to rescue a pair of kidnapped women. So Anatta, being the crafty rogue she is, thought that brewing up some paralytic poison could be helpful.

What started with a poor Nature roll from Ember at identifying a mushroom ended in hilarity as Anatta rolled really poorly (A nat 1 with a -2 penalty) while making the poison and managing to splash it over herself. Aside from swallowing some of as we. At which point she began screaming about imps crawling all over her and began screaming incoherently. Iskra quickly deduces that the mushroom in question was not poisonous but instead possessed hallucinogenic properties.

By now Anatta is flailing wildly on top of the giant packbeast that was our transportation and fighting against the others trying to hold her down so she didn't fall off. Iskra dispells the situation by casting sleep on the poor girl to calm her down, and manages not to knock out anyone else in the process. So the others tie her up with rope before she wakes up again, in the meantime Iskra figures out how to purge the poison out of Anatta by drinking salt water. Lukasz mixes a couple of tablespoons of salt into his waterskin, but after that comes the problem of making the girl drink it.




At the end of the session the GM saw fit to level us up (which I assume was almost incidental), so this was probably the first time I've had a character gain a level from someone getting their hair washed.

:stare:

No amount of hairwashing is going to get all the poo poo and fungus out of that woman's hair. Golgari don't gently caress around with living in filth. The party's lucky she's humanoid and not a shambling fungus monster.

A friend of mine ran a short-lived Mage game set in Ravnica. (It was short-lived due to scheduling troubles :( ) He let us go hog-wild with the goofy races in the setting and gave use a suite of free Merit dots to build our racial traits. I played a Loxodon (humanoid elephant) who's suite gave him Large and natural 1L weapons for his tusks. He was an orphan that got abducted by the Rakdos and used as a pit fighter for decades before he was finally freed by a joint Boros/Azorius operation against the nightmare circus he was held in. The GM asked about his background and I described it as, "You know bear baiting? Ok, so Imagine that but the bear is sapient, and also an elephant instead of a bear." This is a man who has killed a lot of murder clowns over the years, just to stay alive. He joined the Azorius and swore his life to them for saving him. In the present, he was the Grizzled Old Veteran DetectiveTM.

Things got real interesting when one of the other PCs came in as a Rakdos street magician.

(For reference, the Azorius are Ravnica's lawyers, cops, and judges. They are led by a sphinx, and their colors are W/U. Boros are Ravnica's military, and they are W/R. I think they are led by... an angel? Yeah, that sounds right. Rakdos are R/B and their leader is a literal demon. Their purpose in the city are the "entertainers," which they take very seriously.)

And another PC was a shambling fungus monster from the Golgari. It was like interacting with something truly alien. It was cool as hell.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Decorus posted:

I just found this thing I wrote* a few years ago, that I thought someone might find interesting.

It's an in-character epic poem/recap of the first adventure in a short campaign inspired by that Wrath of the Titans movie they made a few years ago. I played the bard, and decided early on that my buddy was going to be the hero of the story whether he wanted to or not. It was great fun, and D&D 4th worked pretty well to describe an aspiring "classical" hero.

*shamelessy stealing large parts from the Iliad

This is rad as hell. Every game I've played that had the players write their own postgame write-ups was better for it. It gets everyone to engage in the game more and think about what they're going to do next time. It's even better if the characters have writing gimmicks like this that fit with their characters and/or the setting. My write-ups for my droid character in an Edge of the Empire game was written like a program's log. I made up a bunch of programming :techno: that looked vaguely like programming language and wrote the log around that.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Cooked Auto posted:

Now that I know one of the players in my group would love because he has a tendency to go for mostly non-human or slightly off kilter character concepts.

Pretty much anything goes on Ravnica, as far as PC races are concerned. All the GM has to do is make up stat blocks for them, which isn't too hard in D&D. Off the top of my head, there's: elephants, lion-people, centaurs, fungus-people (called Corpse-Jacks), doppelgangers, sphinxes, blue alien looking dudes called Vedalken, angels, demons, giants/cyclopses, and basically every standard D&D race like elves and dwarves. Every guild is run by a different non-human race, to highlight how weird things can get:

Azorius (W/U): a sphinx
Boros (W/R): an angel
Golgari (G/B): a lich, I think? Maybe a corpse-jack though
Dimir (B/U): a shapeshifter
Izzet (R/U): a dragon
Rakdos (R/B): a demon
Gruul (G/R): a cyclops (whose name is Bobyrygmos, apparently the Greek word for "the sound of a grumbling stomach")
Simic (G/U): don't remember.... an elf, I think?
Orzhov (W/B): a ghost council of dead popes :spooky:
Selesenya: elf (...? Selesneya is like a plant commune that has all of the city's plants working on concert, so the actual head of the guild is the collective voice of the plants, just speaking through their chosen humanoid, who happens to be an elf woman. Think of it like the Borg and Locutus).

Oh, yeah. That reminds me. We had a mage that was a human who was another voice of the Selesneya collective. So he was also pretty alien because talking to him was like literally talking to a bunch of plants that had learned speech. It was also different enough from the corpse-jack, though. The Golgari saw all non-fungus beings as food, but he wanted to learn from them. Learning, to a fungus, meant growing, which meant eventually eating everything. He basically followed the rest of the party around and helped out with the tacit, creepy understanding that, "eventually you'll all die, and I will eat your bodies and grow strong." So he was always encouraging the party to take the most dangerous options, although he was also.... patient. Very, unnerving patient. He had little interest in the missions and basically wanted to see us all die. But he also wanted our enemies to die. So we were useful to him as long as other people were dying in our wake.

The Selesneya dude was not self-interested but more like an eco-terrorist. The Gruul usually fit that mold, but the Selesneya can also be that way when they're not being hippies. He had a sort of dualistic personality: he'd be serene and peaceful in one moment, and amorally violent like a natural disaster the next moment. Things would trigger it, but it wasn't a truly human motive so to the rest of us it was unpredictable. Both the Selesneya and Golgari characters were hosed up and awesome.

Meanwhile, my loxodon just wanted to solve mysteries and protect people. And yet he got stuck traveling around with these weirdos.

My backup character concept was an Orzhov sphinx con man.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

ellbent posted:

I started a game of Blades In The Dark now that the full version is out, and one of the changes is that now your crew of scoundrels need not just be thieves, but they can also be a group of assassins, smugglers, ruffians, drug dealers, or a cult.

My first thought was "man, a cult would be pretty cool. Too bad they'd probably never go for it."

So against my expectations they unanimously decided to be a cult. Go figure.

In a couple weeks we'll be starting the tale of 'The Lighthouse,' a Daring cult of the forgotten god "The Queen in Tattered Sails," whose defining characteristics are Alluring and Cruel. I'm excited.

I am picturing a more maritime version of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgVfjXA_QY0

So, rad as hell.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
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 :shrug:

Race: Halfling :banjo:

Class: Paladin :psyduck:

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:

:siren: Deity: Tiamat :siren:

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.

:getin:

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. :whatup:

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

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.

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.

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.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

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. :kiddo::hf::black101:

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
Running a D&D5 campaign in a randomly-generated dungeon crawl. We had the rogue swipe a golden idol from a minotaur and leap across a chasm to try to taunt it into falling down the chasm. The cleric and barbarian waited on the other side of the chasm, in case the minotaur made the leap. The rogue failed, but was prepared and had a rope tied around him for the fighter to haul him up. The minotaur, meanwhile, makes the leap, and lands to hit the barbarian. The minotaur's rules state that he takes both his axe attack and gore attack if he charges. He misses with the axe.

The gore is a nat-20.

He deals 28 damage to the level 2 barbarian, KO'ing him instantly. But the barbarian is a half-orc, so he blows his ability to come back from 0 HP with 1 HP. Two actions later, the barbarian rages and hits with his own nat-20.

Fuckin minotaur puts both horns straight through the barbarian's chest, and it just gets pisses him off.

:black101: :black101: :black101:

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

PMush Perfect posted:

Please tell me he front-kicked the minotaur into the pit.

I wish, but it was pretty cool anyway. The 5e half-orc has an ability called Savage Attack, which adds an additional weapon die to critical hit damage. So the barbarian went from rolling 1d12+4 damage to 3d12+4 damage at level 2. Not too shabby. He ended up dealing close to 30 damage. Had he not done that, the minotaur probably would have had the rounds to mash someone else, or pitch someone down the chasm. Everyone else was doing single-digit damage, if they were hitting at all.

Between Savage Attack and the extra life ability, the 5e half-orc is rad as hell. I'm pretty drat impressed with 5e in general, in particular with what they did with the races.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

CobiWann posted:



Is it bad that I feel for the king in this picture? He just looks so sad and desperate for help...

I'm usually a GM's helper as a player, since I run a lot of games. But I did something like this on purpose once, a little bit, just to be a jerk.

My buddy was running old 7th Sea. the system has Brute Squads, these groups of 6 dumbasses that are meant to get mowed down en masse. Think like the waves of idiots the three Musketeers push down flights of stairs like dominoes.

I was playing a Pyeryem (shapeshifting) spy, whose personality was very nice. She was not cut out for the ruthlessness of spying, but was kind of roped into it by her background. Anyway, being such a nice young lady, she decided that the best way to get into the villain's manor was to rub elbows with one of his guards. Two Brutes stood outside the gate of the manor (the rest of their squad was somewhere nearby, ready to materialize out of nowhere if combat occurred, because that's how Brutes work). My character went right up to one of them and simply asked his name.

:j: Hi there! What's your name?

:toughguy: Uhhh.... *GM fails to think of a German name off the top of his head* ....Who are you?

:j: My name is Kira. What is your name, good sir?

:toughguy: I... don't... know.....

:j: Oh my! What an interesting life you must lead, not knowing your name. I also do not know my last name. But enough about me. Tell me: are you from Freiburg, or have you immigrated?

:toughguy: Ummmm.... please move along, miss.

:j: I have decided I am going to call you Karl. It is so nice to meet you, Karl.

:toughguy: :psyduck:

This continued for a minute. The GM started getting annoyed. These guys don't have names, let alone backstories. I put him on the spot about a bunch of dumb poo poo, deliberately because I know how annoying it is to think of little details on the spot. But I didn't belabor it and I had a purpose. My plan worked: the guard did eventually let my character onto the premises. Even better, when poo poo inevitably went sideways in the manor and the guards were asked to point out the culprit between my character and a bad guy I was trying to frame, Karl stepped forward and pointed at the bad guy.

"That brute deserves an upgrade to Henchman," one of the other players said.

I just said, "His name is Karl. Get it right." :colbert:

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Falstaff posted:

Tonight's game had the party attempting to find a way past the borg-like hordes of mecha-zombies guarding the overlord's fortress (built from the corpse of a titan.)

Most opted to create a distraction and then sneak past, but not Rancor the minotaur. He grabbed an assortment of knives from his backpack and tried to convince the mecha-zombies that he was a traveling knife salesman. And also that they shouldn't try to assimilate him because then they wouldn't be able to buy knives from him at his crazy, crazy prices.

It, uh. It didn't go so well for him.

I hope the player pretended his knives were Cutco knives. Everyone I know at least three people who have worked that pyramid scheme multi-level marketing career opportunity. It went about as well for them as it did for Rancor.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Falstaff posted:

Last night's game, the PCs embarked on a quest to discover what was behind the strange, magical summoning that was luring their townsfolk off into the badlands (and to their subsequent doom). They track down one boy's father, deep in the grip of the siren call, who was trying to escape a pack of predatory tigeroos (tiger-kangaroo hybrids).

These are epic-tier heroes, mind. They've previously achieved such feats as shattering mountains with their bare hands, sang doomsday monsters to sleep, and cured curses that were by definition incurable. They do as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Yet, in the course of the encounter:

-Several PCs end up badly injured.
-The father is mauled nearly to death.
-One of the tigeroos ends up eating an artifact that gives it sentience and great power...
-...which then escapes (to appear as a villain in a future adventure)
-A fortress is leveled in the ensuing battle
-In the end, they only barely manage to fight the tigeroos off.

This was all during the first encounter of the adventure.

It was a hilarious streak of probability-defying luck that almost stopped the adventure before it really began during what was meant to be an easy filler encounter to get things rolling. Though if nothing else, my players are looking forward to getting a rematch with the newly-awakened Neshu the Tigeroo Goddess.

This reminds me of when a string of critical fumbles, critical hits, and just plain failures led a character in one of my old 3.0 D&D games to get treed by three wolves. Not dire wolves, not celestial wolves or whatever. Just vanilla wolves. The character was level five or six. And was a ranger. He never lived that down.


CobiWann posted:

Yesterday during a fight with an adult red dragon, my Sorcerer literally spent the entire fight frightened by dragonfear and paralyzed by carrion crawlers because he could NOT make a save to, well, save his life. The rest of the party was getting their rear end kicked as one would when fighting an adult red dragon, and there I was getting auto-critted twice a round and worried that my level 12 Sorcerer was going to die at the hands of a CR 2 creature.

To quote Skeever, "The Senators goalie made more saves today than Varis did."

As both a Pens fan and as a DM, I heartily approve of this post.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Bieeardo posted:

Is Ms. pleasurable rotting meat new to gaming? Because I've seen that kind of obnoxious poo poo from newbies who take 'you can do ANYTHING in an RPG!' to heart.

I was thinking the same thing when I read the story. Sounds like the player is both staggeringly unfunny and a rookie. Bad combination.

Robindaybird posted:

With someone like that, you have two options: You ask her to not come back, or keep her and end up with 2-3 players quitting down the line because they can't stand it

Yep. Cut her loose. Find a way to do it. It sucks but it's like ripping off a ban-aid. Do it once, quickly, and it will save you a lot of trouble later.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
I think part of the issue is that it sounds like an all evil campaign. I don't mean that as a criticism of OmanyteJackson, but a ton of cat piss stories start with, "So I was running this evil campaign and..." Those games tend to attract and enable bad players, or otherwise good players who let loose with some bad habits. I've seen those campaigns turn otherwise good, cooperative, sane players into screeching morons. I don't want to say they're a bad idea across the board... but I also don't know how else to end that sentence. :/

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
If the thread is starved for cat-piss stories, I might be able to dredge up some more LARP stories, because holy poo poo did I game with some crazy people for years.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

VolatileSky posted:

http://kotaku.com/man-stabbed-seven-times-during-magic-the-gathering-gam-1797380701

Ok which one of you knows this guy? Spill the beans, this thread needs more grog.

loving Timmy probably got what he deserved. (Kidding. But really, :ohdear: )

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

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

sfwarlock posted:

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?

Sure!

Here's a post I found about good ideas for rooms and traps:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=264#post469838237

And a few about goofy items:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=268#post470548911

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=270#post470818207

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=270#post470843402

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=270#post470844387

There is a bunch more less concentrated posts about magical items around pages 265-270 of the GM Advice Thread.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
D&D5 PC cast:

:bravo2: Luca, a half-elf bard
:toughguy: Baby Cakes, a human fighter
:science: Thor, a human cleric (storm domain)
:black101: Feng, a half-orc barbarian
:psydwarf: Ruck, a dwarven wizard (necromancer)
:smaug: Fiona, a halfling Paladin (of Bahamut) <---- DMPC, to help with scaling if a player or two is absent; race/class/gender randomly generated

I'm running a D&D5 dungeon crawl wherein the PCs wake up in the middle of the dungeon with no memories and have to find their way out. The dungeon is huge, and there have been clues here and there about what's going on. So far, the PCs know that the dungeon is several thousand years old, a lich built the place, and it was built atop a magical research facility of some kind. There are also dimension breaches here and there because of whatever magic made the place. The rooms, encounters, and loot are all randomly generated. I wrote up the randomization tables myself to be able to scale things the way I wanted. The encounter tables heavily favor hostile encounters, but there are chances for neutral or even friendly encounters.

I mention this because the party has been through three levels of the dungeon and over 30 rooms. They've only found one friendly encounter (a lost faerie dragon that they rescued from a doppelganger and its pet cockatrices) and two neutral encounters (both goblin merchants that offered to trade loot with them). Every other room had increasingly mean monsters in them, and the party is currently in need of a Long Rest badly. Most of them are hurt, most of the casters are short on spells, and the barbarian is exhausted from raging.

Luckily, I rolled up a neutral encounter for the room they were headed toward. I rolled for Succubi/Incubi for the encounter. I decided the idea was that these idiots got lost in the dungeon after coming in through a dimensional breach from their home. They shut themselves into a room to stay away from the more marauding monsters and just waited.

Then the PCs show up.

They see three men and three women, all apparently human. They have barricaded the doors, which makes perfect sense to the party. But they also appear to have busied themselves with turning the room into a harem, rather than a fortress: there's makeshift couches and beds everywhere (made from the remnants of laboratory tables and such), and they've actually taken the time to find (or make?) puffy pillows to distribute all over the room. There's surprisingly little food and water stockpiled, which I note but the party largely ignores. They appreciate the grapes and liquor that these floozies inexplicably have, but dangerously ignore the little details.

The bard goes on point as the party face and starts talking to these people. Things are going well so far, and plan to let the encounter be a sort of high-risk social encounter. The party can get some valuable information and resources if they play their cards right, but playing games with the "humans" in the room risks falling prey to them. Even if their identities are discovered, the succubi are more reasonable than most of the monsters so far, so perhaps they can be negotiated with to work toward a common cause (i.e., escape). Basically, a social encounter to break up the hack-and-slash stuff just a bit.

So let's pause to talk about Thor. His name isn't lazy player design. The player designed the character to be Thor Odinsson. The idea is that he is Literally Thor, and he got wasted and lost a bet in Valhalla, only to wake up stuck in the human world... or so he thinks. He doesn't remember anything any more than anyone else does, so it is unclear to him, to me, and especially to the rest of the party if it is all delusion. Half of the party takes him at his word, and half of them think he's a loon. He carries a hammer and can chuck lightning, so he's at least that much Thor.

He is also a lush, and someone with remarkably few doubts or hesitations. He believes he is a god, after all.

So as Luca and others start in on the social encounter, Thor drinks the prodigious amount of mead offered by one of the young ladies. Now thoroughly drunk, he propositions one of the succubi, effectively bypassing (and auto-failing) the Charm effect that succubi normally have to put on someone to seduce them.

Seeing this, the other succubi/incubi go to work, thinking the game is afoot, albeit suddenly. I call for a Wisdom Save from everyone (except Thor, who's already balls-deep in his succubus). Ruck and Baby Cakes fail. Fiona and Luca pass. Feng is already passed out from carrying several levels of exhaustion. His PC said upon seeing the room full of pillows, "I collapse on a pile of pillows immediately. I talk to no one. I do nothing." So he's immune, being dead to the world from a long day of raging.

I have Thor, Ruck, and Baby Cakes make Constitution Saves against the murderous effect succubi poon has. They all fail, and suffer the full force of 5d10+5 damage. This reduces Thor and Baby Cakes to 0 HP, and brings Ruck to 8. Even worse, this damage reduces max HP until a long rest is had. They all pass out from being hosed to death.

This leaves poor Luca and Fiona awkwardly standing in the corner of the room, outnumbered by succubi and staring at all of this, powerless and horrified. (If Fiona weren't a GMPC, she probably would have gone right to combat as soon as the seductions happened, but he's not a PC so I wanted to leave the decision making up to the PCs, which at that point included only the bard Luca.) So they wait things out and spend them time fending off the advances of incubi and trying to wake Feng.

By the time Feng is awake (and cranky about it), Ruck is also awakened (with 8 max HP) and everyone in the room knows the jig is up. Everyone (including those hosed to death) rolls initiative. Luca has very few spells, Feng has two levels of exhaustion (half speed, disadvantage on skill rolls), and Fiona has no spells left. Ruck has a lot of spells, but has 8 loving HP at level 6 (pun totally intended). Even worse, it's a race against time for Baby Cakes and Thor, whose turns are spent making Death Saves. there are six succubi, so I nerf their HP a bit and leave two of them aside to hit Baby Cakes and Thor each round until someone goes around to deal with them.

When all is said and done, Four succubi/incubi are dead, and two flee via etherealism (only to be killed by a ghost allied with and following the PCs. Long story.) All the PCs survived, but Baby Cakes and Thor both took two out of three Death Save failures. Now the party has a room full of pillows and demon corpses to enjoy their well-earned and extremely awkward long rest.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

That is indeed the character's namesake. The player chose a picture of Baby Cakes stabbing someone through a door as his portrait on Roll20.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

the_steve posted:

If they needed a rest so desperately though, couldn't they have just rested in one of the rooms they cleared before moving on to the next?

Not in this case. They came from a flooded room via a crawlspace, and the rooms prior to that had been sealed off. Usually they can take their chances with getting a long rest wherever they have swept a room, but their situation was a little desperate going into the succubus room.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

gradenko_2000 posted:

The party killed a Balor today. Its name was Boustrophedon. We pregamed all our buffs, smacked it with something like -11 Dex and a bunch of other ability damage, two negative levels, a critical trip attack, and all it got to do was breath a single Power Word Stun before keeling over and dying.

That's the first time in a long time that The Honest Mistakes have completed a task without kicking a worse can down the road.

Yawgmoth posted:

The final tally was -3 str/con, -17 dex, -1 int/wis/cha, and 2 negative levels before succumbing to an assortment of critical hits and untyped energy damage.

Poor fucker never had a chance.

This is why I never let the players pregame for as long as they want, because they will always bowl over the encounter if they have even the slightest competence. Even a CR20 Balor. Anything. I'm a sucker for improvising (contriving, if need be) some kind of ticking clock once the encounter is known to be imminent, and ten saying, "you have x rounds to prepare. What do you do?" It's usually an in-game time mechanic, like rounds or minutes, but real time works too if they players are really dragging their feet about talking strategy.

This is also awesome, though, and the players rule for having put that much hate on a Balor. :drat:

Speaking of which, I used a powerful sphinx in tonight's D&D5 dungeon crawl, and used a real time clock in the encounter. Since the party is stuck in this huge dungeon, they have to scavenge, steal, or trade for any items that they need. So far, they're been looting rooms and bartering with a clan of goblin merchants, but I just gave them a new way to get some items. There's a (plot important) sphinx holed up in a room they just found. He has been sleeping for a long time and wants to game "in such a way as is tradition for my people." So he'll tell them a riddle and give them 30 seconds to solve it, in real time. (I let characters make INT-based skill checks before the riddle is read to buy them more time if one or more of the rolls re high enough.) The catch is that the party has to "ante" one item. If they can't solve the riddle in the time given, they lose the item. But if they get it, they get that back and an item of slightly more value than what they ante'd. Alternately, they can ante themselves and consent to a good, hard hit from the sphinx (he is part cat, after all). I only did that last part because the sphinx really wanted to play but the party was a little gun-shy about anteing the items they happened to have.

It worked out pretty well. The party won twice and lost once. The time thing worked well, which is nice because I didn't know if it was going to be too much or too little time. They players loved it and got right into it, spazzing out like people in a high-pressure game show.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I still think there's this huge unexplored design space in structuring combat such that the worst thing that can happen is that you score a normal hit. It would probably even be easier to project an estimated combat length to do it this way.

While I agree with this, I also don't have an issue with misses. My response to anyone bitching about there being a 5 percent chance to miss no matter what is, "Have you ever even seen a real melee? poo poo is chaotic."

There was a Marvel diceless system that let everyone always succeed at using their powers because, as my buddy put it, "when does Wolverine ever fail to SNINCK?" I guess that makes sense in comic book metaphysics, but sword and sorcery doesn't need to be that clean cut (to me, at least).

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
A CLOSED MIND IS AN *~open heart~*

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
Holy hell. I just caught up with the thread. It took me hours, but that's what I get for leaving it unread for a few months.

I'm fishing for ideas for a series of articles I'm writing for my blog. The blog is a home for a few different columns I've had in mind about nerd poo poo, and one of them is about taking semi-deep dives into different aspects of GMing, using anecdotes as a way to discuss them. I won't spam the thread with links unless asked, but I can provide them if people want examples. But are there any topics in or challenges to running games that people are curious about exploring in some depth?

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Razorwired posted:

It sounds cool but it might be more suited to somewhere like the GM Advice thread. This one is more focused on anecdotes either about campaigns or terrible nerds and the campaigns they ruin.

Oh, dang. Yeah! I'll go post over there. Thanks!

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
I've been running a homebrew of old 7th Sea that a buddy and I wrote a few years back, way before the actual second edition came out. We had a fun case of something on a player's character sheet lying in wait and emerging at the most dramatic/hilarious time.

The campaign's main plot is two-fold. The party is in competition with an evil merchant prince to acquire all the pieces to an ancient relic that turns out to be an airship. It's basically a race to see who can get this piece of tech and spring it on a 1668 world in which it could wreak havoc. The other, increasingly related plot involves a long-lost heir to the Castillian (Spanish) throne. The current king is a boy who is badly over-matched by the Montaigne (French) invaders in his country. The party has found this lost woman who has a claim to the throne over the boy king, and is a powerful practitioner of the supposedly extinct Castillian fire sorcery (and a sign of her ancient royal lineage).

So after a dozen or so sessions, the party has finally assembled all the necessary pieces and beat the merchant prince to the airship. They find it guarded by a sleeping dragon. Dragons are supposed to be extinct, and were driven extinct by the same efforts that made the Castillian fire mages all but extinct. The dragon wakes up, as the fire mage in the group has dragon blood in her veins and he wants to speak to her after eons of fitful sleep. She being an NPC/walking macguffin, I set her and the dragon aside as they begin a tense negotiation, because the party has to go deal with the merchant prince's minions who have just showed up. I contrive write a scenario in which each PC has to face one member of the merchant prince's team. This is happening during the airship's startup sequence, so the stakes are everything, at least up to this point.

So the party goes to rounds in their respective duels up on/around the airship, while the would-be queen speaks to the dragon on a platform below where the ship is hanging.

Here's the thing: I had to run one player's duel in a separate session due to a schedule conflict. So I did his earlier in the week, and knew its results as the rest of the duels kicked off during the regular session later in the week. In the regular session, the players did a great job. Those who had decent (randomized) matchups gritted their way through their duels. Those who had bad matchups found clever, resourceful ways to trick or cajole the opponents out of combat. It was a good session all around, and a couple characters even had some development alongside the bad guys.

But back to the first PC, the one who did his duel earlier in the week. His character is the one most interested in the airship, and most equipped to learn to pilot it. So he's at the helm as the duels begin. He gets into a jam with his duel, so when his turn comes up one last time as he's on the edge of incapacitation, I ask him what is his action.

"I look up, away from the enemy, and say, 'I could really use some help, Old Friend.' "

I had honestly forgotten about this thing on his character sheet. At character creation, he and I discussed an advantage his character has called Sidhe Ally. The Sidhe are powerful fae, bizarre and inscrutable. It's understood in the rules that a Sidhe Ally can be powerful, but costly and unpredictable. The player mentioned then that his character helped a strange hunter in the woods one time, and had earned a life boon. He knows this "person" only as "My Old Friend." Think like the fable of the mouse and the lion, but here the mouse is a human and the lion is a gatdamn alien.

The pull stunned me. I had honestly forgotten about it, as it had been several months since we discussed it. I had it in my notes, but... :shrug:

But here's the thing: it was perfect for the drama of the scene, totally by accident. Better yet, the player had no idea about why, as he is brand new to 7th Sea and its lore. He did not anticipate what came next. He just wanted to get out of his duel alive.

The Old Friend shows up, gliding down into the mouth of this volcano atop an eerily-glowing, enormous antelope. The rider is androgynous and regal as gently caress. They are dressed and equipped for a hunt. As a horn blares from.... somewhere?, the Old Friend fires an arrow at the PCs foe. That duel was just about over, as both of them were close to incapacitation, so it felt fair to give the player the duel at that point. So the Old Friend's arrow strikes the baddie and literally puts her to sleep. Like Sleeping Beauty. She slowly sinks to rest atop a bed of flowers that spontaneously generate under her. So that's that.

The Old Friend and the PC have a short dialogue before the Old Fiend notices the dragon on the platform below them.

The Old Friend's sonorous voice changes suddenly into a jarring, discordant cacophony of five voices at once. And they say,

"What is the meaning of this? What say you of this dragon here in your realm?"

The character and the player both blithely explain that their friend is negotiating with the dragon right now. Neither of them know that the Sidhe absolutely hate the dragons and will kill them on sight.

"Tally ho then, my boy," the Old Friend says in their normal voice. Then switches again to say, "The hunt is on." With that, they leap their alien antelope thing off the ledge and onto the lower platform. poo poo immediately goes bananas down there, and the tense negotiation of the fire mage ends abruptly and violently.

Now: fast forward a few days to the other players' duels. They all do their thing, win the day and all that. Good stuff. As I conclude the last combat and we go back into a more dramatic mode, one player says in character,

"Alright. The ship is operational. As long as Aodhan stood his ground at the helm and that dragon isn't freaking out, we should be alright."

They emerged from their rooms to see a cone of flame seemingly incinerate the NPC macguffin they had been protecting for eight sessions. (As a fire mage, she is immune to fire, but in the moment most of them forgot this both in and out of character). Then the dragon took wing to pursue them in their airship, which they scarcely know how to pilot.

At least they'll have a powerful alien flying around as their wingman. They're going to need it. :black101:

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
My six-year-old recently asked to try D&D. Prior to my most recent game I was out of practice in running games for the last couple years, so she didn't see or hear much about it until my recently concluded 7th Sea game over Zoom. Even though most of it took place after her bedtime, she heard enough of it to get interested. We started with 5E D&D, and I probably would not have picked D&D or Pathfinder for a new player prior to 5E. But 5E is streamlined enough to be a decent entry point, so off we went.

I helped her make a Chaotic Good Tiefling Druid. I did a bit of brainstorming/fudging and decided that a half-Rakshasa Tiefling was the closest she could get to playing what she wanted: a cat-person. Once she found out there were classes with animal companions her stated goal were to, "befriend all the animals, and use magic." She picked druid before she even found out about Wild Shape. :getin:

The character is a shoemaker who lives in the woods and gives away her shoes to help people living in nearby villages. Much of this was pulled from random rolls for backgrounds and character traits in the PHB, but my kid went and ran with them. She has a gaudy style that only a six-year-old can muster. All of the shoes this druid makes are big, chunky platform shoes with glitter and rhinestones and rainbow colors all over them. They are Lisa Frank nightmares. But they are expertly made and freely given, as "girls that live in the woods don't need money." :allears: I established, therefore, that the village nearest to her woodland home is distinct to travelers as all of the residents, male and female, young and old, walk around in :sparkles:fabulous:sparkles: platform shoes at all times.

The druid's name is Rockstar Kitty. These are her stories. :doink:

Chapter 1: How to Make (Animal) Friends and Defenestrate People

Chapter 2: Highway Robbery

Chapter 3: The Munificent Seven

Chapter 4: "I Steal the Dead Goblin Meat from the Monster Cat"

(I can post these stories if people are interested. I'll at least write up the first one and go from there if there's interest.)

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
My six-year-old recently asked to try D&D. I helped her make a Chaotic Good Tiefling Druid. The druid's name is Rockstar Kitty. These are her stories. :doink:

Chapter 1: How to Make (Animal) Friends and Defenestrate People
Chapter 2: Highway Robbery
Chapter 3: The Munificent Seven
Chapter 4: "I Steal the Dead Goblin Meat from the Monster Cat"

Chapter 1:How to Make (Animal) Friends and Defenestrate People

Rockstar Kitty starts out in her woodland home, a few hours' walk from a nearby village full of yokels with incredible shoes. But on her most recent trip into town to deliver the latest batch of fabulous shoes, the villagers tell her that some of their dogs and barn cats have gone missing. Rockstar is all about helping animals, so she springs into action.

She finds an usual number of animal tracks leading into the forest, the same forest where she lives. She follows the tracks until they branch off in all sorts of directions, but generally northward. She picks one set to follow, and it leads to a den dug under the roots of a huge evergreen. A badger emerges and is pissed. Rockstar Kitty casts speak with animals and is disappointed to find that the angry badger won't talk to her, not even in curses. There is just a low...drone where the animal's voice ought to be. So she fights her first combat (honestly, an introductory exercise, if anything). She beats the badger and something pops off the back of its head. The thing is a silver plate with a magic rune carved onto it, and absent this the badger now "speaks" as he normally would.

The badger is a grump, and even more so since it apparently was just mind-controlled for unknown purposes. He's cranky and curmudgeonly but is deep down warm and friendly, and fiercely loyal to those he cares about (namely, those who just freed him from some wizard screwing with his brain). Rockstar names him Wesley.

They follow more of those tracks to the northern edge of the woods, which breaks into the foothills of some distant mountains. They also see a tower in the hills, and the tracks all go to and from there. After a random encounter with a couple unfortunate kobolds, they close in on the tower. Outside of the tower, a mountain lion prowls around. Rockstar uses Speak with Animals and Animal Friendship to get on the same page as this one. The quiet, stoic mountain lion has a dark sense of humor and is a "speak softly and carry a big stick" kind of character. Rockstar names her Big Claws and the group approaches the tower's gate.

The gate is guarded by a gargoyle, who comes to life and attacks the group. My daughter starting digging deeper into mechanics when she learned the value of Faerie Fire and having advantage on rolls against an enemy with high AC than a kolbold or badger. "I'm going to make him look so good," she says as an attack with advantage produces her first critical hit. Big Claw's pounce also teaches a valuable lesson about tacical movement and knocking enemies prone. they grind the gargoyle down and kick the door open.

Then, out of nowhere, my daughter says, "I don't want to go in." She says, "The bad guy is in there. Or more statues. I want to go to the top." Rockstar asks Big Claws to go into the tower and meet her at the top. Her hope, I assume, is to meet the culprit at the top and get help from the mountain lion. She casts the spell she was most excited to add to her character sheet (for some reason): Jump.

Rockstar leaps onto a window sill high up the tower, but not quite at the top. She climbs one more story up to the top floor. Wesley, tucked in her backpack, is super not happy about any of this.

Through the window at the top floor, Rockstar finds a human wizard in deep concentration. She crushes a stealth roll and an insight roll to tell that the wizard's mind is elsewhere (probably focused on one of his ensorcelled animals or another gargoyle), and gets the jump on him. But instead of attacking him, she waits for Big Claws to show up in the open door. Big Claws bursts in and mauls the poor bastard when Rockstar casts Faerie Fire again to prime the attack on the wizard. The wizard manages to get up long enough to see two of his spells fail against Big Claws' saves and then gets backed toward the window. Rockstar then goes to her weapon of choice, the Druid cantrip Thorn Whip. She's been using it as a primary attack, but has been obsessed with trying to make use of the tactical movement of pulling an enemy toward her. Up to this point, it hasn't mattered, but it does now. She hits the poor bastard (which knocks him out anyway), and pulls him out the window. She passes an acrobatics check to stay on the window sill, while his Wile E. Coyote rear end falls to his death. None of the actions or tactics at the tower were suggested by me. This was all a six-year-old murder hobo'ing this whole scene.

In the aftermath, the village and forest's animals go back to their normal behaviors, and Big Claws is convinced to pal around with Rockstar Kitty. I try to describe levels and getting items to improve the character over time, but my daughter is more excited to acquire animal friends. Fair enough. I let her keep Wesley and Big Claws as we move forward.

Next up: a brief encounter between some bewildered bandits, and an even more confused child.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Nemo2342 posted:

If she already wants to collect NPC companions she's got a bright future ahead of her.

A pattern does start coming together as I start playing loose with the rules for Animal Friendship in order to feed her endless hunger for cute animals, and to give her some help in an otherwise solo adventure. This is a girl who has slowly and inexorably accumulated stuffy animals that she "needs" to have on her bed. The count is currently eleven. Most sessions have Rockstar finding a way to befriend a new cute animal. I'm pretty happy with the most recent one, but I'll get to that.

Cartoon posted:

And so it comes full circle as the Tolkien started his literary career from letter written from Santa Claus to his children.

This is why I'll always be a Tom Bombadil apologist. Dude was a throw-in for Tolkien's kids' entertainment. It's rad dad behavior, and I support it 100%.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Coward posted:

It is interesting to think back to when I was playing as a child and, yes, accumulating friends was always way more important than stats or gear. Helped, too, by the fact that the people I was playing with were mostly of the same opinion as well. Wonder if my little boy will grow up being as fabulous with the gaming as your daughter.

When I was teaching my daughter I had a flashback to when a friend first introduced me to 2E AD&D when I was eleven. He was trying to explain the concept of an RPG, and my only frames of reference were boar games and NES-era video games. My daughter hit me with a few questions like one of the ones I asked:

"So I can do anything, like something stupid like jumping off a cliff?"
"You can. You can do whatever you want. You'll just die if you do that."
:aaaaa:

I remember thinking the comparative agency that stood behind that answer was staggering. That exchange will always stick in my mind as my eureka moment, when tabletop games blew apart the boundaries of things like board games. It took a couple questions like that, but I could see the look of realization on my daughter's face when she had the same eureka moment. Pulling the evil wizard out the window was one of those answers put into action.

That part was just murder-hoboism, though. Later on, she'll do some stuff that has real, positive effects on the setting and she gets invested in it. It's adorable!

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

Yawgmoth posted:

I inflicted this bit on my players today:


They spent a considerable amount of time discerning if he was or would be a hostile, asking what he was doing out in a wasteland, what exactly that thing he is milking is, etc. and of course I got real weird with it because he is a rogue druid milking a gull.

:psyduck:

Galaxy brain: inflict this on D&D players.

Universe brain: inflict this on Shadowrun players. (Or anything out of genre)

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
I'm playing a snarky goth Halfling Bard in my buddy's 5E game. He's running the published Undermountain campaign and we just found some dude stuck at the bottom of a deep hole.

Monk: "Should we save him?"
Paladin: "We should save him."
Me: "How do we know he's not like...a reverse Buffalo Bill?"
Paladin: "What does that mean?"
Monk: "He throws us some lotion, and then kills himself."

We ended up rescuing him. He turned out to be a revenant. Oops! :shrug:

We're betting that his sob story of betrayal is at least true enough to mean his former friends are assholes and that when he inevitably drags us into a confrontation with them, that they won't be good guys. Even if we're completely wrong, we have a paladin who can smite the piss out of him at a moment's notice. Soooooo

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

This is great. These abrupt exits happen all the time due t schedules/real life stuff, so It's good to see a way to retcon one in a creative way. It reminds me of how they went back in TNG and gave Tasha Yar a proper send-off after originally having her die feebly to a puddle of black goo.

I'll type up another story about my daughter and I playing D&D later, but for now I have a quick one from the Undermountain game I'm playing in:

We run across a room full of "vampires." The GM affects a Bela Lugosi accent and they say they can let us pass through "their domain" safely for a modest fee. My smart-alecky goth bard notices that their accents are performative, and they are wearing makeup to look pale. They're also laying it on thick, trying to charm the group (and failing). Just as our monk is saying, "We have plenty of money. Let's just pay them and not bother with this," I decide to lean into being chaotic good. I'm onto their poo poo, and these guys are assholes. They need to pay.

So I go over to the one closest to our flank and pretend that his charms are working. I lean in (probably beckoning him to stoop down, given that I'm a halfling) and whisper, "We know you're all frauds. We're not paying, and if you want to live through what happens next and earn some loot, you'll help us." After an astronomical persuasion check, he nods in acknowledgment. I go back to the group, position myself in my usual pocket behind the paladin and monk, and huddle up to, "discuss how to divvy up paying the vampire lord." In the huddle I actually tell the group to attack immediately, that none of these morons are vampires.

The group wheels around and gets a few surprise attacks on those closest to us. When the "vampires" begin fighting back, they outnumber us almost three-to-one and begin to turn our flank. But that's where the mundanely charmed rube is. He turns around and starts fighting them just enough to hold that side of the battlefield. Three of the bandits pile up near him but it looks like they're going to move past him on the next round. My "pocket" has collapsed and the "offensive line" is way up ahead in melee with a bunch of idiots. But the sucker did his job just long enough.

Still playing dumb, just for fun now, my bard yells, "They're vampires! We have to use fire!"... and I launch a charge from a Wand of Fireballs at the cluster on the flank, including the rube. The poor sap managed to snap a glance at me before impact. I say, "Sorry. We don't have a policy of paying mercenaries," as he dies horribly.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.

JustJeff88 posted:

That's almost harsh, mate. Ouch.

??? It wasn't meant to be harsh. I didn't make the comparison to be snarky. I meant it as an abrupt exit for a character that was later 'improved upon. :shrug:

Lazy like a Fox posted:

I was trying to read this thread all the way through before submitting this story, but this thread is impossibly long and I'm impatient.

This happened about a year ago, but the group still brings it up frequently.

Last January, someone posted on a local FB gaming group that they were going to be starting a weekly 5e game, and did an open call for players. The game was originally intended to be a drop in game with a rotating cast of players coming and going at their will, so the DM tried to cast a wide net by posting the call to a few different groups he was a part of. Maybe too wide, it turns out.

So the night of the first session comes, and I'm a little nervous because I only know one other person at the table (and if this thread shows anything, it's how unpredictable a table of randoms can be). But I get there fashionably on time and have a nice chat with the DM before everyone shows up- he's a nice enough guy, and like me, works in the wine industry, so there was plenty of drink around to help calm my nerves. I ask how many players are coming and he just sort of shrugged: "I'm not really sure, it depends on who actually follows through on their posts". Turns out a lot of people followed through, and before long there were 6 players, including me.

But the DM says we're waiting on at least two more, who are coming from a town at least a 90 minute drive away. So everyone continues to hang out, drinking wine, chatting about our character builds and getting to know each other while we wait for the last two.

Then a 50 year old guy shows up, Toby (obv not a real name) and as he walks into the room he loudly announces "Now I'm not the bard of the group but I do have a story to tell" and he proceeds to tell us the most insane tale of how he got to the game that evening. Basically:
-He and an unnamed female acquaintance left their town (90 minutes away from the game at least) and drove in the acquaintance's car to the DM's house.
-Halfway there (about 40 minutes out) the two of them stop at a Popeye's chicken. In the restaurant they have some kind of argument which culminates in her saying she doesn't feel safe with Toby.
-He then says "If you don't feel safe with me, you can just leave me here and I'll make my own way to the game". She does so.
-He takes a Uber the last 20+ miles to the DMs house.

The whole time he's telling this story, everyone else around the table is making awkward eye contact as if to ask "Is this guy for real?" because the story has an absolutely staggering number of red flags in it. But whatever, he's here, so let's finally start the game.

The game itself goes well, with the ludicrous party of 7 taking on some orcs and helping a small town. It should be pointed out here that Toby was the only player who had written a backstory at this point, and it was 3 pages long for his Human Polearm Fighter. He's definitely taking the game more seriously than the rest of the table (and strangely, he's the only guy not drinking) but we're getting along enough.

Then at 10:30 the game breaks for the evening, with all of telling the DM we had a terrific time and can't wait for the continuation. But Toby has to wait for an Uber back home. And it's late in a rural county, so it takes a little while. The rest of us leave by 11, but Toby is there until 2:30 in the morning, hanging out at the DM's house and "helpfully" critiquing his DMing style, until an Uber driver takes his request (for those of you keeping score at home this is probably 60-70 miles of Uber rides for the game round-trip).

Ultimately the DM's wife didn't feel comfortable with him at all and the DM "disinvited" him from the game- but until as recently as July he was still getting FB messages from Toby, asking how the game was and if there was an open seat still available. That game has now met every week for the last year with almost the same group, and we all still often talk about that first night and the crazy rando who spent hundreds of dollars on rideshares to play a boring character in one session.

:stare: :stare: :stare:

I love the in-game narratives in this thread, but the cat piss stories like this are the secret sauce.

Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
In the one game I've played in the new Star Wars system, we only had one force user in the party, but he wasn't a Jedi so we avoided the problem of the Jedi's code governing the whole group's actions. I didn't find the force user to be mechanically broken, though.

I played a protocol droid who malfunctioned to begin thinking he was a secret agent. He wore a tuxedo over his gold body. He had a Walther PPK-shaped blaster that would shoot out of his forearm and into his hand. He drank coolant fluid out of a martini glass. His designation was 60-ND.

That's my Star Wars story.

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Railing Kill
Nov 14, 2008

You are the first crack in the sheer face of god. From you it will spread.
Played in our 5E Undermountain campaign last night. We found a hidden key, avoided an acid trap, and beat a big monster to get the box that goes with the key. When it was opened, my Bard spent a few minutes to ritual-cast Identify on its contents. The whole time, our Warlock is pacing around and asking for the item himself. He's trepanned himself to give the...thing that he communes with better access to his brain. He supposedly doesn't sleep either, but that's clearly an exaggeration. Whatever his patron is, it is hungry for magic items, and the Warlock is something of an arcane investigator. He and my Bard actually work great as a team, as my she is something of an amateur investigator herself and curious about spooky lore.

Inside the box is a desiccated heart. The DM tells me in secret that whoever activates the heart will die, having their heart replaced with the desiccated one. My Bard goes ashen for a moment, and closes the box.

"What's in the box," asks the Warlock.

"Nothing. Well, nothing we need right now. It's dangerous, and better left alone," I say honestly. I close and lock the box.

The Warlock's patron begins speaking to him, saying, "We need that box, Felix. The musician...she doesn't understand. She isn't privvy to The Secrets as I have made you. You need to take it from her."

I make a successful Insight check to tell that the Warlock is looking at me with some kind of Kubrick Face. "What do you want, Felix? I told you it's dangerous. All it will do is kill you." I try to use Sleight of Hand to quickly hide the key on my person, but I roll terribly and he sees me clearly slip it into my corset.

After a pause, with perfect comic timing, the Warlock's player suddenly and awkwardly interrupts the Paladin trying to move on. "HEY GANG. LET'S TAKE A QUICK NAP," he says. We just took a short rest a couple encounters ago. No one buys it, and we move on.

So now I need to find a way to not get mugged by our own party member while sleep. Fuckin' Warlocks, man. Fuckin' Warlocks.

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