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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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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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Doc Hawkins posted:Yeah, there's always some need to have everyone at the table to be down with your character, but that goes super-double when they're terrible. If you aren't constantly explaining yourself, checking if your actions are okay with the other players, and doing something else when they say no, then it isn't your character who's an rear end in a top hat. Of course, if you are doing all of that and they're not calling you out on it, that's on them. I had a guy doing that, but because I and the other players in my game were a bunch of passive-aggressive little nerdlings, nobody told him that he was being a prick until the game was pretty much over anyways.
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Feb 12, 2012 21:30
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Psalmanazar posted:I just overheard some people talk about how their DM hands out Xbox style achievements for cool stuff characters do. Also one of them just said "As a furry" and another said "as an anime fan" to start their statements. They are also apparently running a My Little Pony themed game. I am going to start doing that thing bolded. And continue to not do the thing from everything else in that story. I already hand out extra XP for that kind of thing, but some pre-defined achievements (some that they know about, and some that they don't) can't hurt at all.
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Feb 27, 2012 00:52
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So, a few moments of fun from the DFRPG. The PCs are a couple of shapeshifters from a family of shapeshifters, a police detective who learned Evocation from the city-god of the Twin Cities, and an off-brand John Constantine in a modified setting: the White Council is much less hands-on, and the Wardens are basically a boogeyman. The two shapeshifter PCs are being pursued by some evil cultists, who are trying to blackmail one of them into killing someone - the 'someone' in question being a protrusion into three-dimensional space of the primordial principle of deception and malice. Cop Caster decides to figure out what he is by opening up the Sight, allowing him to see - and remember perfectly forever - what this guy actually is! Bearing in mind that things were going well up to this point - no hostility or anything - he mentions that he's doing this, and I hand him a few brief notes on the overview of this extradimensional monstrosity's appearance, and a note with how much Stress he's going to take if he doesn't take some kind of consequence to allay it. He opts to take a Severe consequence, -6 Stress, keeping him just on this side of conscious, and has his character scream and dash out of the meeting. The others naturally blame the entity, and run after him. The brilliant part comes in when they catch him. They ask him what he saw, he looks at me, and I say, "Go on, tell them what you saw. It's etched in your memory perfectly." He then proceeds to improvise it's appearance, based on my fairly skeletal notes that I'd passed him. It was originally supposed to be vaguely draconic and shadowy in nature, but he extemporized that into some bizarrely intriguing quetzal-type creature and managed to really nail the sense that what he was describing was, while horrific, not the worst part of it. The player had been pretty quiet on the whole IC speech thing - he'd say, 'My character greets everyone, and sits down', and so on - and so this sudden IC monologue on the cosmic horrors he'd see was just a moment of  and 
FrozenGoldfishGod fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 12:05
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Axelgear posted:Honestly, I don't see how all that's in any way unusual for a game using Graceful Wicked Masques. 
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Mar 16, 2012 01:38
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I was playing Psychonauts earlier, and it reminded me of a really awesome Mage campaign I was in. The basic premise was Psychonauts: Mage Edition. Our group is employed by an Awakened fortuneteller to help exorcise the inner demons of various individuals. We're assured that there will be a reliable artifact to get us in and out of the various levels of the Astral, and that non-Mind magic will work more or less as normal in the various minds we enter. This was, the ST later admitted, just so we didn't all build Mastigos. There's me, playing an Obrimos made man who's in this for the money; an Acanthus who literally believes that if he plans things out in advance, his Fate magic will fail, played by a guy who can take a character concept that sounds like That Guy's character, then make it work and actually complement the party setup; and a Thyrsus, played by a doctor friend of ours who always plays the sneaky-type characters. Our first assignment is to help our extremely over-the-top employer (bright purple robe, pointed hat, and curled-toe boots at all times in his shop. Heavy Egyptian-style eyeshadow, complete with Eye of Horus pattern on both eyes. No facial hair at all that we can see. Extremely fake 'Arabic' accent) with a personal friend of his who's having some problems. He sets us up to go into her astral space, using some magic incense he claims he made. We go in, and things immediately go wrong. Virtually everything in her mindspace is adorned with Atlantean characters and imagery, and the various mental constructs we encounter are much, much stronger than they should be. (Our ST did a good job of rolling this out, though: we were still stronger, but there was a strong sense of 'this shouldn't be this difficult' over the one fight we got into.) So we assume that she's a Mage, or will be a Mage at some point in time. Well, Mages go crazy and need a mental cleanup crew, so we do the job: eliminating a particularly nasty mental construct. We realize fairly quickly that a straight-up attack is going to be beyond us; if a relatively minor subconscious defender (or so our Acanthus, the only member of the group with Mind magic, assured us) gave us so much trouble, a fully-fledged mental construct was going to be beyond us. So we found out that the other mental constructs liked the Atlantean imagery; while they didn't tell us in so many words, the magical glyphs were empowering them. What made Lisa so disruptive is that she was basically trying to erase them - effectively, the client had her own internal Banisher, trying to get rid of her power. We figured out from this that 'Lisa' was this mage's desire for normalcy and self-doubt all wrapped up in one destructive package. So we lured 'Lisa' out, and convinced her that we were going to help her get rid of the Atlantean writing. It took a lot of talking by the Thyrsus, but she finally agreed to step into a 'portal' that we claimed was going to lead her to the source of the writing. It led her to where the Acanthus and I had drawn pretty much every subconscious defender we could find. Recognizing that Lisa was a greater threat to their continued existence than we were, they proceeded to destroy her while we slipped out of their mindspace. When we returned to the room where the incense was burning, feeling pretty good about helping a fellow Mage overcome their self-doubt, our employer's assistant (not Awakened, just a Sleeper he kept around for appearances) called up to him that he had a regular inbound. He left, but he'd left his wallet sitting out on the table. My character, being the type of mob crony who has a 'code' that he pretends makes him better than other cronies, picks it up to take it to him - but, being a Mage, he still has the good sense to look inside. Might as well get any info he can on this employer, right? The name on the driver's license is Lisa. And the face, while less heavily-made up, is undoubtedly the face of our employer - and while less idealized than the face of 'Lisa', is similar enough to make us all jump to the obvious conclusion.
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Jun 8, 2012 06:36
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Captain Bravo posted:While I don't understand how the "suppressing her magic" thing fits into it, basically the employer was Lisa, made up to look like a flamboyant dude. That's why he mentioned early on that the guy had no facial hair. She couldn't grow it. That came up a bit later in the campaign. We fixed some more problems, played it straight for a while - but with 'Lisa' gone, our employer became increasingly erratic. Ooops. Turns out that when you're a reality-bending wizard, a little self-doubt is actually a really good thing. At least, that was our initial thought. So, we broke into the shop one evening, using my character's mob connections to get his hands on a guy who could break us in through the mundane security. Between the Acanthus and my guy, we managed to get through the wards without (as far as we knew) tripping any of the more supernatural security measures. We get the incense - we've seen where he keeps it - and as we start burning it, the Acanthus casts a spell to guide us into the proper mind. It's completely different. The mental constructs we knew are gone, the Atlantean writing is everywhere, and the architecture of the buildings (representing the basic structure of the mind) is completely inhuman. We do some investigating, and it turns out we were completely wrong about our employer: he's not Lisa. He's some kind of Atlantean relic: a psychic weapon, designed to possess anyone who meets certain parameters and neutralize them. Thing is, Lisa was a Mage who met those parameters: as far as we could tell, she was descended from an Atlantean mage-king who was an enemy of our employer's creator. When she Awakened, he was activated and sought her out via the Astral. But he had a harder time of it than he remembered. After all, the last time he had been active, the Abyss hadn't existed, and magic was much, much simpler to use. So he employed a cabal of stooges to dive in and help him out - and then to help him weaken the minds of other potential targets, so he could strike at them if and when they Awakened. At this point, we're freaking out, and then our employer himself appears. This is the first time we've seen him in an Astral form, and it's obvious immediately that he's not human. He appears to be a human figure composed entirely of Atlantean characters, and we can feel him preparing to cast some kind of spell at us - so we book it back out to the larger Astral spaces, then back to our own minds, where we promptly wake up and run out of the store as fast as we can. And that's where that session ended.
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Jun 8, 2012 20:06
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