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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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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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Dwarftossing reminds me of my very first character, Garret the Generic Halfling Rogue. We had just cleaned out a dungeon and found the treasure chamber at the end, but surprise, it was trapped with some magic dust that gave you CON damage over time unless you made a Fort save, which I blew. So the others have a load of possibly trapped loot on their hands, with Garret being the only one who can find traps worth a drat, and he's only half conscious. His friends immediately grew concerned. Ranger: "Dammit Garret, get moving, there's two chests that need checking." For the loot, of course. Garret: "gently caress you I am literally dying" Wizard: "This is no good. Are you strong enough to pick him up" Ranger: "Sure. You thinking what I'm thinking?" Wizard: "Yep. Alright Garret, we're just gonna sweep you over this pile of gold, okay, and you tell us when you find something unusual." Garret: "You sons of bitches!" Ranger: "Yeah yeah look just go 'gently caress you' once for traps, twice for no traps." So they used me as a trap detector as one would a dowsing rod. And I blew my remove trap roll, triggered another trap of the same making, and of course failed my Fort save again, getting me down to single digit HP. The others were fine. Ranger: "drat. Garret buddy, you okay? Still one chest to check here." Me: "From the crumpled heap of halfling moaning on the ground before you, a trembling hand slowly rises and extends just one finger."
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Feb 15, 2012 08:49
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Kosmonaut posted:You talking about the picture with the teenagers sitting around sticking daggers into their hands and rolling human bones and poo poo? I wish I could find it. Gaming experience: it turns out that when you negotiate with an elder dragon, you really should bring more to the table than "we may know people who might be willing to enter their own deals with you, but that's, like, totally their decision, nothing to do with us, what no we won't bring them to you." Otherwise you can easily end up entering a different deal altogether, namely "do whatever the dragon tells you or get the gently caress eaten." My players have to work on their negotiation strategies.
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Feb 27, 2012 09:37
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I play with physicists and chemists. Once our DM described a strange material, "like metal, but transparent" and got in reply a long explanation about what exactly it is that defines a sustance as a metal or makes it transparent and how the two properties are incompatible. He thought about that for a second and said, "that's all well and good but this is my world. So: you found this transparent metal. And it smells faintly of peppermint." e: he himself is 100% guilty of the engineering thing though.
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Mar 7, 2012 14:26
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Apologies, I need to vent. I'm running a paragon tier 4E PbP game and someone brought in a totally new to RPGs player. I said, awesome, roll up a character, hope this works out with it being a paragon game and all, the system can get complex. She writes up a seriously good if a bit grimdark backstory with lots of hooks, including one which I immediately latched on to for a main plot. It really is good. First battle rolls around and the new player happens to get in the line of fire, her character gets pretty beat down within a few turns, bloodied but by no means close to death. I receive a huge pissed off e-mail from the fellow who brought her in about how this isn't fun for new players and "hey, if you wanted to sour a new player on the hobby, good job." I think about that, and realize I actually forgot about an ability she had that would have made the fight play out way differently, so I reply saying "hey okay, I was a bit worried about that, and I did gently caress up overlooking this ability, so I'm okay with it if we roll this fight back. It's the tutorial fight anyway, poo poo happens. But still man don't go off at me like I'm planning to haze the newbie, you know I don't do that and that's pretty low of you to even mention." So she rejoins, we roll back and the fight goes alright. Second fight, the cleric casts a spell that can make any hit a critical hit. No one makes use of it. I post the monsters' next actions and get an IM from the same guy saying they didn't see this ability, could we make one hit of theirs a critical retroactively. It's not unreasonable but I wasn't quite feeling it at the time, so I replied, sorry man, but it was right there, as in Cleric quoted the wording verbatim and no offense but you gotta read what your fellow players post. Reply is "well okay, but that's not exactly newb friendly. Yeah, new player says thanks for your support towards newbs." Now I'm honestly starting to get a bit pissed at them, thinking what, now every time things don't go quite her way they're gonna hit me with the "hey you're a bad DM who's out for newb blood" stick? gently caress that and also gently caress sarcastic cheap shots in rule debates among friends. But he drops the issue and so do I because I'm not in the mood to argue about elfgames over IM. Later that same fight she posts some actions that would provoke an opportunity attack. Two other players react to that opportunity attack on their turns. Then she comes in saying no, there's a class feature that means her action didn't provoke the OA. Which is perfectly true and completely valid but now we gotta roll back 2-3 turns again and could have avoided it if she'd noted that class feature in her initial post. It's not a terrible incident on its own but together with the others it's starting to get seriously grating and I'm definitely not feeling the whole campaign anymore.
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Mar 16, 2012 20:41
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Really Pants posted:it's a horrible time to bring in somebody who's completely new to pen & paper RPGs Section Z posted:I doubt something like "I use the bard's reaction encounter power on the attack my fighter just botched" would fly in most games. I'm gonna have them start on combat blocks, I think. That and a rule like "no rollbacks, post everything the others need to know on your turn, and read everyone's posts". Yawgmoth posted:Secondly, that guy's a double rear end in a top hat for both bring a total newbie into a pbp and acting like such a douchebag because his friend's character got bloodied.  Yeah hindsight and all that.
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Mar 17, 2012 08:40
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I introduced the Deck of Many Things into my game and we're just now finishing the big storyarc that spawned from that, five or six levels later. The actual effect for the player was wholly unremarkable (save for being the absolute worst case of bad luck I've ever seen - he was at highest concordance with the Deck and ended up with three ruin cards, having had to discard almost all the positive cards during drawing to boot), but you can give NPCs readings, and so he did at every chance he got. One of the NPCs was an Efreet sultan in the City of Brass, whose reading meant he would gain the enmity of a powerful being from another plane. The sultan thanked the party for the warning and off they went. Several sessions later they are off on some adventure when they get sendings to the tune of "oh god help aargh." They hurry to the origin point and find a major city getting absolutely leveled by a small army of fire archons, sent by the sultan to give the entire material plane a message: if you're planning to come after me, think about this, and reconsider. Efreet don't gently caress around. And now they're just about to confer with the High Court of the Fey about this situation and then off to the City of Brass. To negotiate with the sultan. Because once they completely hosed up negotiations with an elder dragon, and apparently the first thing you do after that is try the same thing on the one kind of creature that is even more notorious for being hard to negotiate with than dragons.
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Mar 22, 2012 14:59
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Ultimately this is something you're going to have to talk to the group about, what kind of game everyone wants etc. and if it turns out everyone except one guy is perfectly happy with a game that's low on combat then this just isn't the right group for that one guy. But if you still want to game and hang out with him maybe you can start a combat-heavy secondary game to run every now and then, too. For your current situation, though, I can easily see something like, there's a faction within the gnomes or the kobolds who can't be dissuaded from war no matter how good a diplomat there is, they're ready to start one themselves if they need to, and they're going to need to be dealt with violently.
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Apr 16, 2012 14:45
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My recent run of Cairn of the Winter King went kind of off track. It's supposed to be a straight dungeon crawl with about 10 encounters and a few minor sidequests. My guys managed to skip the entire dungeon, then joined forces with the end boss, only to rethink it after a few months and straight up assassinating him in the dead of night with very little trouble in a semi-epilogue. I guess there were a number of things I could have done to get things back on track but everyone had fun and we got through the thing in one session. Good times.
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Apr 23, 2012 07:52
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I don't see that taking any less long with 12 players.
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May 9, 2012 11:48
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12 PCs vs. 61 minions. Whoever has area attacks makes large holes in the army, whoever has single-target attacks mops up survivors. That would even work very well as an illustration for one system vs. the other, especially since 4E has a difficulty system built in. 61 would go above the recommended number and probably still be easily and relatively quickly resolved. e: dude if you use only minions you can just say "number of PCs x 4."
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May 9, 2012 12:06
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Well it's not really fun, but it'd be more fun in 4E than in drakenkällare or whatever they call it in Sweden. And let's face it, once you have 12 PCs on the table with an appropriate amount of enemies, your encounter is a tabletop wargame. Although with the 60 minions, if you have anything in the party like a wizard with Stinking Cloud, you can probably call it right then.
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May 9, 2012 14:05
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Nah I think that was largely us speculating how it would go. But splitting the group is definitely a great idea, I mean 12 people come on.
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May 9, 2012 17:19
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It is Paranoia, but it had the same effect on the session as Monty Python. I wish there was a way to run games with a Monty Python atmosphere. Not just catchphrases from Holy Grail, the real deal. Probably impossible by definition.
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May 24, 2012 14:30
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I just reread some of my older posts and I realized something about my game. Backstory:My Lovely Horse posted:My players hosed up negotiating with an elder dragon because they weren't prepared to offer him anything more than "people we know might want to make deals with you, but it's totally up to them." My Lovely Horse posted:My players are off to negotiate with an efreet sultan about him stopping his attacks on other planes. The one kind of creature with better negotiation skills than a dragon.
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Jun 5, 2012 08:50
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Suleman posted:In one, and only one known case, a parrot was chosen.
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Aug 20, 2012 19:26
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Some of you may remember the story I told in one of the previous threads about my buddy who's a tremendous world-builder and decent DM but a few times got really angry about his character not performing to the absolute optimum. I recently played a game with him again and this time he actually got into a bona fide screaming-and-then-crying fit that forced us to abandon a marathon session we'd all been planning for a month and made the chillest man in the world yell at him, when, and this really is the entire reason, he felt he had no decent options left during the last fight. Partly, as he later said, because it was late and he'd been having a backache and job worries, but mostly, as I avoided saying later, because homeboy has huge glaring psychological issues that make him unable to bear the thought of disappointing anyone and therefore rendered him unable to say either "sorry guys, can't make the game" or "I think I'm getting too tired to carry on, can we call it a day, or else you'll have to play on without me" or even "hey I know I said I was okay earlier on but I'm more tired than I thought" at any point. I suppose I'm putting this here as a cautionary tale because I'm planning a new campaign and prior to this I'd thought, dude seems to have his poo poo together these days and always has good ideas, I should invite him. He apologized about 500 times and was his usual self the next day (in case you're wondering, yes, those two things are closely correlated) but nonetheless I am now not inviting him. Nice guy, no fun at all to play D&D with. Remember my tale if you know someone like that and you probably do. Serious scorpion/frog poo poo going on there.
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Jan 10, 2013 18:56
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These just got posted over in the comic strip thread in BSS. I think we can all relate.  I need a hat like that.
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Feb 4, 2013 18:10
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Ridiculous bluff checks, you say? I'm sure I've told this before, but not in this thread and the old ones are long archived by now, so here goes. In the very first campaign I played in, it was us, a rag-tag bunch of plucky adventurers, versus an order of religious zealots, the Iconoclasts, who always seemed to be one step ahead of us. We were both looking for the same set of artifacts, they for nefarious purposes, we, poo poo, I dunno, for cash probably. Anyway we'd gotten wind that one was hidden somewhere under a major temple in what amounts to the cultural, if not political, capital of the continent. We knew the Iconoclasts had a strong presence in that city and we therefore had to find an inconspicuous way in, which through a process of thought I cannot retrace led to us parachuting out of an airship right over the middle of the city. Strong winds meant we'd be separated and would have to regroup once on ground (we realized this after we jumped, naturally). My Arcane Trickster master thief managed to land on the roof of city hall and, waste not want not, started getting to work on the diamond-studded weather dragon they had there ("Anything valuable up there?" - "Not really. Couple of frisbees." - "Come on, surely there's something?") before joining the others, but was interrupted by a guard and had to make a daring escape. Joining the others in an alley we realized that Talar, our ranger, was missing, but having no way to contact him we decided to make for the temple, hoping he'd have the same idea and not murder anyone important on the way, or if he did, at least make it into a distraction. We threw open the doors of the temple and this is what we saw: a couple of priests and a massive congregation of believers, gathered around the very nice fountain they had for an altar, the very altar that hid the entrance to the artifact's hiding place, all staring towards the hole in the ceiling, from which Talar dangled by his parachute, struggling to get free. Clearly the next thing anyone said would decide the fate of our mission. "Good people, please make way for us simple clerics of, uh, water, that we may practice our holy sacraments. Brother Talar, how diligently you pray! Do let us help you get down." Helping our buddy down was a matter of some simple spells, and opening the secret passage a matter of a simple water-based puzzle, all while the congregation looked on dumb-founded. But just as we were getting ready to go down the high priest stepped forward with a stern look on his face. The jig was up. "Here! Who's gonna pay for that roof, then!" "Uh... we are most dreadfully sorry, just contact the Holy Order of Water, courtesy of the Iconoclasts, and you will be reimbursed fully. And now we really must be off. Very quickly indeed."
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Feb 7, 2013 21:11
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The whole limb removal dickery theme reminds me of a short and snappy one from my very first game. Our ragtag bunch of adventurers had found a community of highly proficient psions, friends in a hostile city. The gate to their compound had a special trick: it couldn't be opened but if you walked straight towards it you'd be teleported through at the last moment. As a rely-on-your-wits street rogue kind of character, that ranked among the ten most powerful supernatural things I'd seen in my life. First teleport ever, to boot. So it seemed natural to me to say "wow, this is awesome, I'm gonna turn around and go through another time or two." So it seemed natural to the DM to call for a Reflex save to avoid stumbling and breaking my arm on the cobblestones, and have the psions treat the broken arm with their usual methods, i.e. chop it off and make a new one grow, which happened without:
e: some time later we got into a situation where the fighter was forced to have a trap chop his own leg off to save the rest of the party from certain death, but he immediately received a cybernetic new one that functioned in every way like his original one, not worse, not better. My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Mar 5, 2013 20:29
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This one time we had a potentially volatile situation on our hands. Two powerful trade guild leaders were set to marry and we didn't really give a poo poo until our own ship's navigator broke down drinking, because he knew one of the leaders from way back and she had always been dead set on marrying a young captain who a few years ago mysteriously disappeared. He swore this had to be a marriage born from politics and the other leader must have had a hand in it, but without proof he could just sit there and watch. Well, we weren't gonna have our buddy sit there and get depressed over this. Also when he drank his navigating went to poo poo. At a distant third there was the matter of not letting someone marry the murderer of her fiance I guess. So we went and stole a few letters from the young captain to the guild leader proving absolutely everything beyond the shadow of a doubt that had been kept from her by Dastardly Other Guild Leader. One problem. These people were high up in society. We couldn't dream of just waltzing in there with the letters, she was busy with wedding preparations and guild business, and even if we could have, the Dastardly Leader's men were all around the place and would surely take the letters from us and disappear us if they got wind of what we were up to. Neither could we sneak in because her quarters were heavily guarded. We were up all night debating ways to solve the problem, acutely aware that the wedding came ever closer and that our navigator had ordered a crate of rum. With dawn approaching, I sat up and said, "guys, we're overthinking this. They're letters. Pop one in the mail with a note telling her where to meet us for more info, mark it 'personal' and we're golden." Our DM paused for a second, looked at me and said, "You really do have a knack for bypassing whole adventures with one completely reasonable solution, you know that?" One cancelled wedding, one reward and one public trial that saw the Dastardly Leader go pirate with what few loyal men he had remaining later, and we rejoined our sober navigator and had him point the way to the next adventure. Really quickly because now there was a pirate with a grudge around somewhere.
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Mar 12, 2013 22:16
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I remember something like that. We were in this castle and someone had put a cursed word in it, so strongly cursed that each individual letter had its own detrimental effect and of course they were all hidden separately in the weirdest places. And in this castle, we had to find hidden objects. It was the epitome of gotcha traps but in context, it worked and was a lot of fun, in a slapstick sort of way. "You enter a dusty room. Looks like no one's been here for years. You can't see much beyond that, there are heavy curtains drawn closed." "Well, I walk over to the window and draw the curtains open." "Good thinking, we need the light... actually waitshitit'sgonnabeonthewindow AH poo poo CURSED AGAIN, you idiot." (In hindsight it's very likely the DM just had us stumble around super careful not to look at anything and whenever we started to relax he'd put a letter in the next location anyone'd search. It's what I would have done.)
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Mar 18, 2013 22:41
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Nucular Carmul posted:e: Just in case it isn't clear, I'm sure someone will ask, the movies being referenced there were Kickass, Snake Eyes, Ghost Rider, and Face/Off,
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Mar 20, 2013 17:51
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Once our DM had us explore - or really, retrieve a key from - an old tomb that he described as "long ago stripped of anything that had any value, except for one large bronze statue of the entombed, probably no one has been able to move that." We perked up, looked at each other, and he just sighed and put his adventure notes aside. Took us a few hours of planning and organizing when the key retrieval was supposed to be a 15 minute flavour thing - there weren't even any monsters in the tomb or anything - but drat if we didn't get that statue to town and got a whopping 800 gold for it.
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Mar 20, 2013 21:22
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That in turn reminds me of when I played Roosevelt, the quarterstaff specialist (he did speak softly, too), and our DM, who had a habit of playing fast and loose with the mechanics, included a very nice quarterstaff for me in a loot pile. One day I got distracted while levelling up, idly compared my equipment to the item creation chart and worked out that that staff alone, according to the wealth-by-level chart, was the equivalent of the entire possessions of a character 5 or 6 levels higher than Roosevelt was. Worked out fine because he played that fast and loose with everyone, by the way, we had a bit of a laugh about it when I told him and that was that.
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Mar 20, 2013 22:39
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My first DM also had the "this NPC is my old character" thing going on. That DMPC didn't hang out with the party all the time but:
Now that I think about it, he had me put this guy in the way of the party so his DMPC would swoop in and save them, again. Oh god the shame. Second event happened during the last session. We'd agreed to segue into another campaign under a different DM that would take place on a completely different plane. To bring this about we found a former ally of our DMPC who'd just returned from that plane very badly injured. Took her to our room at the inn and went to get DMPC, whose first words as he saw her bloody and beaten in our room was "what have you done to her?" Let me explain for a second. This was a common thing for NPCs to do. Try and cast Calm Emotions on a panicking villager, "oh no he's putting a curse on us." Saving villagers from slavers, "how do we know you're not with them." Enough for another post. So when his DMPC did it, again, I had enough and my character, up until this point a man who kept to himself, told the DMPC he hoped his friend would get better, but to go gently caress himself, and he'd be downstairs at the bar and then return home, in case any of the group wanted to say proper goodbyes. End of the story is, I made a new character for the new campaign who was outclassed in every way by the ex-DM-now-regular-PC, the ex-DM turned out to be unable to keep cool over events like missing with an attack roll and half dropped out, half was dropped out, I'm still not sure on the specifics, and the new campaign was bollocks and fizzled after two more sessions. e: a different thing that happened with this DM is that he told me the other day he was starting a campaign centered on politics and prejudice against the beastmen from the wastelands, and every PC would have to have a template, and I don't know what came of that because I am now in Rio and still running away My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Mar 22, 2013 |
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Mar 22, 2013 10:13
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Why am I not playing Ghostbusters right now, at this moment, and also forever. More games need Look Around You gags implemented in them, as well.
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Apr 18, 2013 20:19
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If you define "knock out" loosely it can be very realistic. Goblin takes a fireball to the face and drops to 0 HP, he will spend the next five minutes rolling on the floor, enough time to mop up his buddies. You just have to communicate that to your players clearly so they don't waste time trying to coup de grace him because "he's not literally dead or unconscious, that means he could get back up any second".
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Aug 8, 2013 11:23
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Two Headed Boy posted:So far they've used it on:
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Sep 9, 2013 17:33
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I reckon 5.
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Sep 9, 2013 18:03
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Straight up human centipede, yo. Maybe without the poo poo part.
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Sep 10, 2013 06:56
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They're forbidden to use that letter from then on until they reach the appropriate clearance. Naturally it is mandatory to hand in a written field report free of errors after the mission.
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Oct 12, 2013 21:44
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DM is a dick but shooting down the flying carpet is a bit of a poo poo plan, too. It's a magic item, its capacity to act as an airfoil isn't the issue here.
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Oct 18, 2013 19:17
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SpiritOfLenin posted:Good to see the RPG tradition of doing Really Dumb Decisions And Getting Away With It lives on. I told her upfront, these fights are generally to a KO, the audience might take that the wrong way. And her reply is, doesn't matter, he's just a zombie and I'm mad at him, his head comes off. Now here's a sizable crowd who have all come to see the one-night-only appearance of a familiar face against the undefeated mysterious newcomer and are hoping to see some intense fighting, often there's blood but that's just part of it all you know, and rarely there's a broken bone, and now there's that familiar face ripping her opponent's head off and roaring as she hold it high up in the air, and sure enough a panic breaks out. Suddenly that cage doesn't look all that stable anymore to anyone. In the midst of people fleeing the arena the party collect first their barbarian and then their winnings and then get the hell out of there, because they're already on so-so terms with the local underworld and they will definitely not appreciate this. My group is usually very big on avoiding any risk at all so that was really refreshing.
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Oct 24, 2013 12:00
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I can't take credit since it's from Mother 3, but I humbly submit "magypsies", although it really doesn't solve the basic problem. e: "castholes" My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Oct 28, 2013 |
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Oct 28, 2013 10:05
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Well apart from the specifics I wouldn't want my players to go into an encounter and learn the lesson that "if we don't take the time to cast Detect Magic, we have a better chance of getting stomped." That just leads straight down the path towards half-hour preparation routines before every little conflict that drain half their resources before one attack roll has been made.
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Oct 31, 2013 21:47
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I was roped into the very worst D&D 3.5 game I ever played yesterday, and I'm including the times we attempted to play straight through the Diablo II-based hack and slash campaign and the time one player halted the game by having something of a breakdown. We were told to make PHB only characters for a very combat-heavy adventure to the tune of 7-8 encounters, which was fine with me for a one-shot. Made a rogue and figured I'd be a melee damage dealer. I'd have to set up a lot of flanking but that sounded like the right kind of light tactical play I thought this was going to work out to be. We did play the whole seven encounters over something like 11 hours and here's how often I did get to use the one thing I'd be able to do in combat: exactly once. Flesh Golem. Undead enemies. Enemies with displacement. Plant enemies. On one of the two occasions there were in fact enemies on the board that could, in principle, be sneak attacked in the first place, I got charmed before I got into position and missed any chance at it. It's not like the other characters fared any better between magic immune enemies and the ones with 50% concealment - no other system, I think, does "something exciting happens, PSYCHE NOTHING HAPPENS" as well as D&D 3.5 - but I did feel the rogue was in his own special circle of hell there. To wrap it up, the last encounter of the night was a rugby game in which we would, as explained by an NPC in advance, not allowed to attack any opponent directly or manipulate the playing field, which amounted to "basically don't cast any spells at all" which thrilled the evocation-focused sorcerer to no end. That one could have been fun but the DM opted to not tell us the actual rules by which we'd simulate a game of rugby and left us to figure out things on the fly. We went in with no idea what kind of action any rugby-related move might be or indeed what good tactics would be (if we were into sports we wouldn't be playing D&D I guess). The DM had it all worked out of course and the opposition steamrolled us with great tactics, at least until 1-2 rounds in when the DM lost track of her initiative system. It went on for two more hours after that. Basically the climax of the session was a whole different game from what we sat down to play that happened to use some of the same stats and whose rules we weren't allowed to stray from without being told what they actually were. And this was the same DM who as a player regularly grinds my game sessions to a halt when there's a combat but she doesn't want to play a combat right now and tries to do something "outside the box" to avert it, and when that doesn't work there are complaints about being railroaded. loving never again will I play this barely baseline functional mess of an RPG system nor any combat-heavy one-shots under this DM.
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Nov 3, 2013 21:55
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We did win the rugby game. Eventually and after two hours of actually being sick of it and pondering to just suggest to call it a night. The sorcerer actually fried four opponents with a lightning bolt specifically so the referee would take her out of the game. Last time we played a combat one-shot in this group constellation the DM specifically said "don't play rogues, they're not banned but I really don't recommend it if you catch my drift." This time she said no such thing, so I thought, alright, this time it's fine then. Actually I even asked before the game and she said "well, there are undead, but there aren't only undead, you'll be alright." Turns out she'd, for example, forgotten all about concealment negating sneak attacks. I probably could have dealt even with sneak attack-immune enemies in every encounter but there were only sneak attack-immune enemies in nearly every encounter.
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Nov 4, 2013 08:51
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 13:49 |
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I rather liked my character concept for the recent unsuccessful 3.5 one-shot. It was Velvetpaws, the group sorcerer's cat familiar. To anyone but the sorcerer, he was very clearly a scruffy guy wearing cheap felt cat ears; the sorcerer would insist her beloved familiar was turned into a human by a rival but Velvetpaws ("Just call me Val. Please.") was pretty certain he was just lying low from the local thieves' guild after a botched job and had luckily found the one person in the world who was worse at recognizing a disguise than he was at disguising. But then again, dude could climb and jump like nobody else and had a tendency towards acting disaffected and going after small enemies so who knows, really.
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Nov 11, 2013 09:04
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