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Best experience just happened. It will pale in comparison to some of the others, I guess, but it's pretty cool. Two of my friends and I have been gaming since we were 8, and gaming together since we were 13 or so. My one mate's wife has played with us a few times, and my girlfriend hasn't played before (RPGs, that is, we've been doing regular boardgames for a year now). We haven't played any tabletop RPG for about 3 years, apart from a brief foray into 4th ed (hosed up by using Keep On The Shadowfell, which isn't a terrible adventure, but the combats are pretty dull). We're in our 30s now, and started on red box OD&D. My mate said on New Year's Eve that he was going to run a new 4e game as his new year's resolution, and we played tonight. It was wonderful. He managed a really classic D&D feel in 4e, which is accessible to his wife and my girlfriend (in that they don't have to learn a million arcane rules just to play). There were rumours of an evil cult, an investigation, and a short dungeon crawl with two longish encounters and a puzzle. The whole thing only took 4 hours, and that's with three people not familiar with the system and two people who've never played 4e, one of whom has never played any RPG. The DM used puzzle pieces from Mansions Of Madness, but mixed up the mechanics (the rune puzzle, if you're familiar with it, but doing it in the "wrong" order resulted in a small burst of necrotic damage and the puzzle resetting). The encounters were tough but acheivable - I burned through most of my healing surges, my action point, and all my encounter/daily powers by the end, but nobody died - mostly due to great positioning by the newbies. I had heaps and heaps of fun, it feels good to be gaming again, and we're going for fortnightly games until this adventure is finished, a short break while I gear up the sequel which I'm DMing, and then fortnightly again until that's done. Then we'll see if we want to go to a different system or campaign.
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Jan 14, 2012 15:49
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Sionak posted:Later still, they made me a red wooden box containing fake dynamite and a lighter, with glass that reads "IN CASE OF SHOGGOTH, BREAK GLASS." You should be proud that they loved your game to the point where they got you stuff related to it! My Hackmaster group got me a skull-handled dagger with which to cut PC-kill notches into the top of my (handmade wooden) GM's Screen. I got 7 notches just in the Little Keep On The Borderlands module, which everyone in that group still regards as the best adventure we've ever played (except one guy, I've posted about him before though). Our other GM was given a wooden staff with a wooden skull on top of it to carve kill notches into. For extra humiliation, he'd make you carve the notch when your character died. Edit: drat that tab must have been open for hours... I see that you are happy with your prop. As you should be, because it is awesome.
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Jan 20, 2012 06:38
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It's not pokemon, but I'm thinking of adapting Mage into a Harry Potter game. Set at Hogwarts during World War 2. I'm thinking of playing it grimdark and seeing what hilarity emerges. Knowing my players, they'll ignore the Dark Nazi Wizard guy (Grindesomething?) completely and start a wizard / muggle currency exchange scam and possibly also an arms-dealing ring selling artillery pieces to wizards and avadakedavra charms to muggles). Edit: Or possibly I'll just use FUDGE instead and not worry too much about rules.
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Feb 10, 2012 16:17
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I'll start thinking about it then  I've got too many game projects in the works right now, so something will get dropped though. I've got a generic 4e dungeoncrawl that I have to finish because we're already playing, Deadlands in FATE that everyone's super excited about, a D&D-by-editions retrospective (I'm gming 1e and 3e, my mate is doing OD&D and 2e), a Dread game in space with zombies, and now this... I really need to start managing my game making time, because I'm feeling a bit snowed under. Edit: I'll ask a question here, not intended to start an edition war - what level would be best to showcase 3e? We're doing level 3 for OD&D and 1e, and level 6 for 2e. Our group (purely on personal preference) never liked 3e much and so didn't play enough of it to know where the sweet spot is. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Feb 12, 2012 |
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Feb 12, 2012 01:55
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I had to ask a player to tone it down, and it was depressing, since the character was awesome. Rugn Stonethrower, one legged one eyed dwarf. A former drill sergeant who took up clericing when he lost his eye and leg and was disembowelled, and was saved by priests. He was rude, flatulent (his guts never got stitched up right), bossed people around, and was utterly unmotivated by treasure or reward. All he wanted to do was defile/desecrate temples to evil gods. He'd drag the party off mission to assualt The Temple Of The Snake God just so he could piss on the altar. He wouldn't even steal anything, since it was all "tainted with evil", although he didn't mind if the others took everything that wasn't nailed down. He'd also negotiate loudly with NPCs (from merchants up to kings) in a very well done "drunken scotsman" accent, punctuated with fart noises made with his hands and/or armpits. He thought is was a great character, I thought it was a great character, one out of the other four players thought it was a great character, everyone else was annoyed. So I talked to him and he toned down the very-religious-farting-drill-sergeant act, to the general detriment of my fun, but it kept the game going. Edit: Oh, also, he was big on Following The Law, he just thought it didn't apply to people actively involved with worshipping evil. That was usually hilarious - he'd peacebind his weapons in the city, pay all tolls and taxes and tithes, be polite(ish) to authority figures, and then sneak out at night to desecrate the Temple Of The Dark God and piss in their unholy water. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Feb 13, 2012 |
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Feb 13, 2012 00:51
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Last night was a mediocre 4e session with some fun parts. We're trying to stop some cultists from unleashing The Chained God, and we tracked the guys who stole whatever artifact they need through a forest last session, to an elf village. This session, it turns out they burned the village down, and ruined whatever magic wards the elves had in place, so it was full of orcs who we killed. The cultists were after The Sword Of Avandra, which the village lost years ago, and which will definitely gently caress up their ritual if someone found it. Since it wasn't there, they torched the place and headed off to their mountain to summon their god. Of course, we found out where the sword probably was, and went off to get it. It was in The Dread Valley, where we suspected there was a dragon. There was. We met it near its hoard. I was all for just fighting it, but the others wanted to negotiate. The DM all but said "this is a combat encounter", but people were foolish, so I went along with it to see where it would go. I offered to leave my sword for the sword we needed, then after we'd used it, I'd bring its sword back and it could keep both swords. Dragon said my sword wasn't very nice, and anyway it didn't believe me. The warlock tried to engageit in a riddling contest, but it said it didn't riddle with inferior intellects. Then it told the fighter that it would trade the sword for his armour. In spite of my protests, he stripped his armour off, and the dragon attacked him. I (ranger) snuck/ran around to the hoard and found the sword while the cleric and warlock frantically tried to defend the fighter while he put his armour back on (he didn't manage it). I got the sword, got grabbed up and carried into the air, broke free, activated my bracers of defense, fell without taking much damgage, hit the dragon as hard as I could and ran away. I forgot we were on a plateau and I couldn't eaily get down. A hard combat ensued. I was pretty awesome, but only because our cleric's really good at her job. Warlock did well too, and fighter mostly just stood there taking damage, which I guess is his job anyway. I went down 3 times and got to feel awesome getting a heal, popping back up, and smashing the dragon, getting hit again, popping back up, etc. We eventually drove the dragon off, and the fighter convinced everyone that we should spin his idiocy into "took my armour off to prove to the dragon that I wasn't scared, and then beat it easily". It should be fun when he tries it, since I'm planning to let everyone know what really happened. Oh, and the sword's poo poo anyway, unless it has some sort of hidden power. So, not a great or a lovely experience, just notable for the actual story. On a major upside, the DM is finally listening to me about MM3 stats being better. Edit: I'm expecting the dragon to come back as a recurring villain. Since there are only two sessions left before it's my turn to GM, perhaps I will get to use it. Should be fun, especially i I can convince the fighter to take off his armour again. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Feb 19, 2012 |
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Feb 19, 2012 02:08
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Yawgmoth posted:Agreed. I've had characters of mine in games that I run, but they were more "here are some NPCs you might meet and they might get involved if it makes sense" than "this is the guy I played before I started running this game, look how awesome he is!" Yeah, I've done this sort of thing a few times, and it does work if you do it carefully. It's just that it's not usually done carefully. Two examples that worked: In my very first 2nd edition campaign, I used my old Ranger guy from a friend's campaign as one of the main antagonists. He was killed in the previous campaign, but was raised by a necromancer, became the necromancer's apprentice, and constantly harassed the party. The had a pretty  moment when they realised who he was. I think they ended up throwing him off his own tower. In my second Hackmaster game, the surviving PCs from the first campaign owned a little pub in a town that the new PCs were using as a base. They were all hacked up, missing limbs and stuff (hence the new campaign), and they'd spend their days serving booze, drinking booze, and telling everyone stories about killing orcs and beholders and saving the kingdom and stuff. Their magic weapons were all hung up over the bar, and the severed head of the first campaign's primary antagonist was preserved and hung up on the pub sign (the pub was called The Villain's Head). The fighter, who still had all his limbs but went mostly insane, ran a little warrior training school out the back, called Crazy (someone's) School Of Valiant Heroes.
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Feb 21, 2012 02:06
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Splicer posted:Send them to a dungeon with nothing to steal in it. Strongly hint that someone else already stole it all and that all the clues required to find them are scattered around the dungeon. Did that, players thought it was awesome. The PCs tracked down the guys that stole "their" loot. They found them in a tavern boasting about how they'd killed this and that, stolen the other, and defeated the bad guy. The PCs confronted them with a convoluted explanation of, essentially, "we saw it first, you fuckers", then killed them all and were chased out of town by the watch. They didn't even get to keep the loot. One PC, wistfully glancing back at the now burning town and slaughtered adventurers, peasants, and guardsmen, just said "my stuff is still in the stable, but we can never go back, can we?" I also used to frequently have someone steal their horses and baggage train while they were in the dungeon. They'd then chase down the theives and kill them. I thought it was boring and predictable, but they loved the gently caress out of it, even to the point of deciding not to hire guards because "it's more fun when we don't". That's not really the sort of game I like to play in, but drat if those guys don't love it. If I try to do complicated plots or intrigue, they get bored and start looting and burning everything. I'm thinking of doing a Vikings game (not sure what system) just so they can loot and burn to their heart's content. They'll fight peasants, other vikings, and later on, armies that are trying to stop them from being vikings. I don't think I'll need any actual monsters.
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Feb 22, 2012 04:55
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Dareon posted:My group would joke about doing that (Same group that joked about ditching the plot to become wandering minstrels, if you happen to recall my previous posts on the subject), but the one time I felt they were serious, I nipped it in the bud by saying "I want a fight or two that's not connected to this grand plot myself, but we are not leaving this town in ruins in order to set up a bandit farm!" Oh, look, don't get me wrong, they wouldn't attack the guy trying to involve them in the plot, or storm the palace for no reason, or whatever. They'd just decide that raiding the Thieve's Guild or bullying the local wizard or smashing up pubs was way more fun than trying to find the daughter of Archduke Whoever. Give 'em what they want This usually happens after they talk to me about wanting more plot and less sandbox. Then they'll get distracted and I'll make something up on the fly and they'll have a blast with it. Then when they find out about it they're always all "AlphaDog, why don't you plan things out, you could make even better games if you'd plan more!"  An example that actually happened: Orcs are raiding outlying towns in the west. A secret cult exists in the midst of high society. A dragon has been sighted in the south marches. All of these are planned adventures. The PCs decide to investigate the secret society. Their second lead takes them to a guy who's a highup in the Thieve's Guild (the plot involved them finding out that most of the ruling class were involved in the cult, and they'd have a few ways of dealing with that). Anyway, they decide that the Thieve's Guild needs checking out. Then they decide that the Guild is either responsible for the cult, actively encouraging it, or worse than it. They raid the Guildhouse and chase the Capo through the streets and then the forests, tracking him to his secret hideout and burning it down (none of which was planned). They entirely forget about the cult, and head Northwards into the mountains for reasons of their own. I reskin the black dragon to red and they find and fight it, barely escaping with their lives, and running to a different city where the campaign heads off in a different direction (they've decided to become crime fighters instead of monster killers, it's cool and it goes on for months). When they found out about the other bits of plot I had planned, they were slightly pissed off. Sometimes I think they WANT to be railroaded and just told a story with a few branches. I tried that once and they hated it, so 
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Feb 25, 2012 02:12
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Yawgmoth posted:I would tell them "I do plan but you guys always go off and do crazy stupid awesome poo poo instead of what I plan. Would you rather I just railroad you towards the plot?" That's the discussion we had, and it turned out well These days I just set up an area with lots of crap to do and let them do their thing. I have various fleshed out encounters and locations I can just place wherever, and if they come up with something like "I reckon the lady of the manor is involved in the bandit attacks!" it turns out to be true-ish (might be her handmaiden ot her son or whatever, but since they've decided to investigate something, it's worth investigating). If they ignore the manor completely, no big deal, I'll just use the exact same location and NPCs somewhere else later on. Bandit hideouts, dungeons, and things like rings of standing stones with fell guardians are awesome for this stuff, since if they never went there, they don't know what it was supposed to look like, and if I want it to be cultists of Orcus instead of bandits or trolls (depending on what they're interested in), it's not a hard change to make.
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Feb 25, 2012 05:37
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Yawgmoth posted:You are the best DM, please run a game that I can play in. I actually can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not  Some people really hate that style of gaming. 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've been sorta doing the bolded bit for years. Tales of your exploits spread, and suddenly you're not "Regdaz" anymore, you walk into town and people are calling you "Regdaz Dragonslayer" (or Kingsbane, or The Traitor, or The Chicken Hearted, or whatever). I might start getting them to write down cool stuff they did in the style of xbox acheivements though, or set them tasks for official titles, like stopping the chief bandit then being able to call themselves "Protector of the King's Highway". (Edit: that will be hilarious once they accumulate several titles, like the bit in A Knight's Tale). Playing a game where you pretend to be pony fans fans playing a game about ponies would be kind of cool, but I get the sense that's not what you mean. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 07:16
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Kosmonaut posted:
Nah. More like you freeform or act out the being-a-pony-fan part while playing an actual game about ponies. Since I know jack and poo poo about my little pony, I can't comment on how you'd actually do it. You can do the same thing with AD&D by playing the game-as-written while pretending to be awful grognards (and have arguments about obvious rules, note-passing to the DM, stealing the treasure before other PCs arrive, stupid poo poo with portable holes or immovable rods, whatever). Or Vampire: The Whateveritisnow while pretending to be super edgy goth kids. Or RIFTS as terrible anime fans. It's hilarious with the right group, but if you get someone who is actually like that and they realise that everyone's mocking them... well, to be honest it just gets funnier.
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Feb 27, 2012 08:33
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: My character whines and rolls a die.
: Okay, roll the dice to see what he gets.
: My character clops with you and says "thus, the learned garner more appreciation for many of the show's subtleties."
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Vampire Player: The Masquerading As A Force Of Darkness When You're A Pimply Fat Nerd.
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Feb 27, 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. This one?  That was actually the inspiration for me and a friend creating a very very rules-lite WoD type system and a series of mini-settings. Gamer: The Embarrassment. Pensioner: The Complaining. High School: The Cliquening. Sportsfan: The Drinking. Goth Band: The Bloodied Sadness Of The Eternal Dark. And so on. We played a few. They were kind of funny, especially the Pensioner one. Then we discovered Everyone Is John and just played that instead, often with a previous agreement on theme. Edit: Somewhere, I have a PDF of the rules and some of the "settings", it has lovely lineart and everything. I'll try to find it to upload. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 09:46
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No splatbooks or anything. I think the format was 2 pages of rules, 2 pages of skills/abilities, and then one page per "setting", which would have been specific rules (A pensioner may not have a Physical stat of more than 2, but get "go off on a tangent" as a free skill, that sort of thing) and a few adventure ideas. We were talking about trying to sell the PDF if we got enough settings, but there's really only a limited number of these things you can look at before they're not funny any more. -- A gaming story: We played Deadlands, after several abortive attempts to get started. I pulled whatever special card you can draw during creation that means you're actually undead. I played an undead huckster (spellcaster), and I unintentionally cheesed the system. I took a spell that let me reload 2 bullets each round, and I carried 2 sawn off shotguns for loving up anything that got too close to me. That meant, in the end, that without using any magic except that minor reload trick, I could fire 4 shells int eh first round and 2 shells every round thereafter for some ungodly amount of damage as long as I was close to the enemy. Being undead, I couldn't be "winded" easily (winding is like being temporarily hosed up by damage and unable to act), so it turned out the best tactic was to cast some sort of shield-type thing, then just charge forward and blaze away with my shotguns. The Gunslinger PCs would sit back and pick off any enemies that tried to run away from this small irishman with the magically reloading scattergun. If they got too far away, the Mad Scientist PC would cut them down with his steam powered gyrostabilised sniper rifle. It was entirely unintentional, and extremely hilarious, especially since I'd built the guy as a sneak-thief-gambler-wizard not as a tank. If I recall correctly, the GM ended up dropping a steam engine on me, or it might have been an ironclad. I was sitll "alive" under there, but since the other guys couldn't figure out how the get it off me, they had to leave it, and me, there. So I rolled up a giant drunken irish priest who did the exact same thing except with shield spell, strength spell, and a magic (holy?) club. The huckster was unintentional, but the preacher man was entirely planned. The GM from that game has promised to get me back when I get my Deadlands/FATE game up and running. Deadlands is awesome, but I'm sure we weren't playing it "right". VVVVVV You, on the other hand, are doing it exactly right. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:31 on Feb 27, 2012 |
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Feb 27, 2012 10:13
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Yawgmoth posted:I'm being sincere, you honestly sound like an amazing DM. I don't think I am, but if I am, it's due to having amazing players. That, and playing lots of stuff with them like De Profundis and Everyone Is John and Baron Munchausen, where you basically just improv everything. D&D isn't really my "thing", although I do enjoy it. Also, you need to lay out setting/genre/feel expectations before each game. Are we doing heroic fantasy, swords and sorcery, occult investigators, scifi, space opera, monkey cheese zombie killing, chinese martial arts, historical fiction, whatever. Everyone needs to be on the same page before you start (like, if you want grimdark conan, nobody can really be a wizard - if someone has their heart set on being a wizard, leave grimdark conan for another time). If your players won't work with you, you can't run a good game no matter what. Gaming with much the same group for nearly 20 years helps, too, since you know what everyone wants out of each game, and players (and GMs) are willing to compromise this time and get something closer to their ideal game next time. One of my guys likes super generic "kill orcs and accumulate gold pieces" D&D, so we play that a couple of times a year (we're running a D&D retrospective for him in the coming months, doing one hack'n'slash adventure in each of OD&D, 1e, 2e, 3e, and if we're still interested, Hackmaster, Pathfinder, and 4e - there will be 2 or 3 GMs running the games, so it should be pretty awesome. I've drawn 1e and 3e unfortunately, I would have loved to run OD&D again).
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Feb 27, 2012 17:44
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Yawgmoth posted:This is one reason I say "okay I am planning a <style> game, make <descriptor> characters. You'll be starting in <wherever>, so have a reason to be going/staying there and wanting to do <vague idea of opening plot>." Works well; I don't look like a jackass, players have a little bit of agency in how the game starts, everyone is happy. The other DM in my group handles this stuff very well. We usually don't start games at first level or whatever the system uses as the usual start point, but this works even then. Instead of "you're all sitting around in a bar and...", the start works like this: Pre 1st session, usually via email 1: Discussion of genre and system (Fantasy, D&D). 2: Discussion of plot-driven/sandboxy/dungeon-crawl/hybrid 3: Discussion of general gist of game (wilderness exploration) 4: Discussion of general setting (A town in the woods, near the Northen Frostlands) 5: Discussion of everyone's preferred roles/classes/background, mutual decisions on who's bringing what to the table. Usually, newer players are asked to pick their roles first, so they get to try what they like and the more experienced players pick complimentary roles. If they don't want to, then the experienced players will pick first and suggest (never require) roles for new players. 6: Discussion of relationships between character (old friend from wizard school, fought with him in the second legion, childhood buddy, whatever) Then everyone goes away and makes a character based on what's been discussed. New players are encouraged to ask for assistance and suggestions, but are never told "do this thing", only ever "one good way of doing it is like this". First session, 1: DM runs a series of encounter vignettes displaying "how things got to this point", if you die here you are knocked unconscious instead. This usually takes about 2 hours to get through, and is half the first session. Sometimes characters meet up here, sometimes they already knew each other but it's the first time they adventured together. Often, the DM will ask a player "what was the worst thing that happened when you fought the Evil X of Y?" and run the vignette about that, with everyone getting a shot at suggesting part of the backstory. 2: Adventure hook, sandbox information, or dungeon entrance is presented, adventure commences (second half of first session). I suspect that a lot of "worst experiences" are avoided by doing things like this. I played in a couple of games where the GM went "just show up with a character, use these splatbooks and this setting guide", and they were all clusterfucks. Edit: As an example of how good this system is, one vignette was fighting off bandits who'd destroyed a merchant caravan. The DM asked a (brand new!) player what she found in the wreckage that was really cool, and she said "the cargo manifest". Everyone's jaw kind of dropped, because usually people say "a magic sword!" or "an evil amulet!" or "the prisoners we were looking for!", but the DM ran with it, and the PC examined the manifest, which revealed discrepancies compared to the goods left on the carts, and a big part of the game ended up being busting up a smuggling ring. I don't think he planned that, but gently caress if it wasn't awesome. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Mar 1, 2012 |
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Mar 1, 2012 10:22
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On the other hand, playing as a sidekick, young apprentice, or little brother can be awesome. If, that is, everyone agrees to it and the less-able character is maybe a level or two behind at most. I can see why it's usually a disaster.
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Mar 4, 2012 05:12
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Doc Hawkins posted:They could be of equal or higher "level," as long as their abilities are still in-theme for brash youth. For sure! Some people just like the idea of a slightly underpowered hero who will catch up in a month or two. I guess they get a good feeling out of being the (not too far) underdog - I'm not trying to say that playing "brash young fighter following his hero around" is impossible if he's the same level as his hero, just that some people prefer it. Hackmaster did an interesting take on this. You don't get to start a new PC at party level if you die. What you do get is the ability to have proteges, characters who follow you around, hold the horses, help during ambushes, etc. Your protege must be a level below you or more, and you kind of funnel a little of your XP to them (the system accounts for this). When your main guy dies and can't/won't be resurrected, you "activate" one of your proteges as your new main guy. You want to keep your protege as highly levelled and equipped as you can, in case Regdaz The Mighty falls into a bottomless pit and all his stuff is unrecoverable. Guest players can even "activate" someone's protege to use for the session they attend, gaining full XP and everything (and even becoming a regular PC if the player decides to join the group). There are better ways of handling this stuff, but Hackmaster is the original grog-appeasing "gently caress the new edition" version of D&D, so it's great for those who enjoy that sort of thing. I'd never try to use a similar system in 3e or 4e, it would be dumb and people would hate it.
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Mar 4, 2012 07:57
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Remember, Hackmaster has a lot of ridiculous elements that are there because they needed the game to be a parody to get the license to use AD&D stuff. I wasn't holding it up as a paragon of design (it's not), and I certainly wasn't suggesting anyone try to play it with RAW, because it's downright terrible if you do that. My best ever campaign was Hackmaster's Little Keep On The Borderlands - I handwaved most of the stupid stuff and we played it as "better AD&D", which it's quite a good system for. Since every single player in the group was an avid 1e/2e player, it worked really well. I don't imagine it would work at all if you'd never experienced those editions though. -- From that campaign: Various limbs were removed in a fight, and when the party went to get them reattached at the Cathedral, the thief sleight-of-handed the limbs so that he got the warrior's brawny left arm instead of his own. The warrior (in character) didn't forgive the thief, and after much wrangling, the thief agreed to pay the warrior 5% of his earnings in perpetuity. I ruled that stats were unaffected, but even so, the thief then had the arm covered in offensive tattoos so that the fighter wouldn't want it back. The fighter spent the next few months lifting weights every night so he was symmetrical again. Edit: Oh, and the thief would buy any treasure-horde crowns, tiaras, chains, bracelets, anklets, etc from other party memebers, so that when he went out on the town in the evenings, he could, in his words, "roll pimp stylee".
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Mar 4, 2012 10:37
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Doc Hawkins posted:Those stories sound respectively bad and good in ways that are independent of the use of Hackmaster. Everyone enjoyed it, and that's the point, really. The first story would have sucked if we weren't playing a game that's absolutely set up for stuff like that, and which everyone knew the flavour of ahead of time. I truly, truly agree that if you played with a new group who did stuff like that and they didn't tell you, it would be awful.
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Mar 4, 2012 12:25
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Exculpatrix posted:... I knew a player like this. The solution, in the end, was to stop inviting him to game night. I hope it works out better for you though. The fun for that guy was being a contrarian rear end in a top hat in a setting where he felt that people weren't allowed to call him on it ("but it's in character for me to constantly attempt to betray everyone, steal from them, murder them in their sleep, sell them into slavery, whatever, but not in character for them to retaliate"). Edit: He didn't like Paranoia, because people would betray him all the time. When another player pointed out that he should love the game because that's how he played every other game, he went on about character knowledge and metagaming and stuff in a really weird not-argument that he wasn't like that at all. -- Notable experience from years ago. We were playing 4e, back when it came out. One player didn't like the idea of 4e very much. He wasn't/isn't a grognard (or indeed a very avid gamer), but he did like 2e and hadn't played 3. He made an eladrin wizard, picked pretty good powers and stuff, had an interesting backstory, and I thought everything would be fine. He wouldn't move in combat, and only used the same at-will power every round. For a whole session. When someone asked him what he was doing, he said that he didn't have any decent powers so there was no point doing anything different and this game sucks I can't do anything and can't we play WoD instead, or Shadowrun, or Star Wars, or risk, or xbox, or poker, or literally anything but this stupid game? We still have no clue what his deal was, it's like he was determined not to have any fun whatsoever, but it had nothing to do with edition wars or anything. It's not even that he didn't like 4e, he just wanted to do something other than what everyone else wanted to do, and wanted them to stop what they were doing and do his thing instead. Any of his things, as long as he got to pick. I haven't spoken to him for a couple of years now, because he'd get like that with everything, not just games, but the first time any of his friends noticed was with that 4e game. You couldn't even go to the pub with him, immediately after arriving he'd want to leave to go to a venue of his choice, even if he'd picked the first venue. Edit: To clarify that the players in those experiences are different guys. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Mar 7, 2012 |
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Mar 7, 2012 08:34
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w00tmonger posted:My best experience was riding in the backpack of the party's Barbarian. Pocking enemies with my polarm wielding halfling. I played in a game where the halfling wizard lost both his legs and ever after rode in a specially constucted frame on the fighter's shoulders. The fighter would run around and smash people while the wizard would rain burning death down on distant foes. There was talk of transferring the fighter's soul into a war elephant so that everyone could ride him into battle, but he didn't like the idea of having a trunk. The halfling had the option to get magic peglegs, but decided not to because he was having too much fun. Edit: Crowning moment of that game was the fighter facing down the BBEG, saying "Say hello to my little friend", and hurling the shielded halfling at him. Edit edit: My friend says I misremember, the halfling was shielded and set himself on fire in mid flight. AgentF posted:"If those air elementals really wanted to be free they'd work harder at it. They'd pull themselves out of that airship by their bootstraps." Air Elementals are so lazy and poor that they don't even have boots and thus have no bootsraps with which to pull themselves up. It's not that when you're a being of sentient breezes you have no use for boots and indeed they just fall though you, they're just really lazy and don't want to improve themselves. They should be more like the Earth Elementals, who are inherently valuable because they contain gold. We need to go back to the Earth Elemental Standard and stop giving handouts and benefits to the lazy kinds of elemental who have no inherent value whatsoever (except providing clean power, but gently caress clean power, Fire elementals are good enough for us!) Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Mar 9, 2012 |
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Mar 9, 2012 06:58
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Splicer posted:I would play in that game. So would I, but Golden Bee sounds like he had a boring DM with a boring adventure. There's nothing wrong with a game about re-killing the undead, but fighting skeletons, skeletons, magic skeletons, skeletons, big skeleton sounds boring as gently caress if there's nothing else going on. One time, we fought skeletons that kept getting back up. We didn't figure out the trick, and we all got killed. Then the DM sulked because it should have been obvious. gently caress's sake, if the players try three or four things, let the last one work in the nick of time. -- Let me tell you about Steve as a DM. Steve was a grognard in the days of 1st edition AD&D and is probably still a grognard, but I haven't spoken to him for 10 years. I've talked about Steve As A Player before, but he was a bad DM too. According to Steve, some rules were The Word Of Gygax Never To Be Questioned, and some rules could be bent or circumvented but still never broken. Character creation had to be 3d6 in order, but he was extremely generous about stat-increasing items. You never got what you wanted though, you'd be playing a fighter and get a wisdom tome or something, because All Magic Items Must Be Rolled For, but on tables he designed himself. You'd fight generic enemies, and occasionally there'd be enemies you had to run away from, but no indication of what the encounter was all about. "You see some orcs" "How many?" "You can't tell" "What are they doing?" "Standing around" "Attack!" "200 orcs come streaming into the cavern, led by a couple of giants" Steve wanted to run a high level game. But The Word Of Gygax prohibited him from starting at anything other than level 1 (I have no idea if that's an actual rule). His solution was to start the game and then almost immediately say "You come across a badly wounded Red Dragon. It has one hit point left and is unconscious. You quickly stab it to death. Gain 57,381xp and this big stack of treasure and (random) magic gear". I guess the rule about never advancing more than one level at a time could be safely ignored. He also once did an "outdoor dungeon", with a series of twisting paths and clearings in the underbrush "that's too thick to pass through". One of the players was a druid, and you can see where that's going. Apparently he sulked for hours because The Word Of Gygax allowed the druid to run right through his dungeon walls and he couldn't say something like "no, you can't, they're dark magic" because it wasn't in the rules. He once had a player roll up a character in the middle of a session because his other character had died. This was still AD&D, so there was meticulous kitting out of the character (with a ten foot pole, hammer, spikes, two waterskins, one with wine for washing acid off things, etc - all necessary because Steve would check your sheet for things like "belt pouch, empty" if you wanted to carry stuff that you found after he arbitrarily rules that your backpack was full). Then Steve introduced him as "A naked man falls from the sky screaming. When you shake him into consciousness, he has 2 hit points left" because he couldn't figure out how a dude would be in that place, so "a wizard must have sent him here". Now, that could be great comedy if there was any sort of humour behind it, but Steve was just being a dick because he could. I only played with him as DM three times (the dragon time, the druid time, and one other time), but some of my friends kept on going back for years. I have no idea why.
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Mar 9, 2012 13:17
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Splicer posted:I refuse to believe Steve is real(I do actually believe you but you get what I'm saying). He sounds like something from a comic book or a parody. I insist upon a physical description to complete the image. Haha, you won't believe me, he really was a caricature. Steve was about 5'9" tall, rotund, mid brown hair in a scrappy ponytail. He was neckbearded, sometimes goatee'd. Even in high school he'd try to grow a beard over the holidays. He always wore these awful denim shirts, open with a t-shirt under them (not stained though, he wasn't a disgusting neckbeard). I actually learned a fuckload about DMing from Steve. I'd think about what he'd do, and not do that. As a player... well, "Steeeeve! Nooooooo!" is still a catchphrase in my main group when someone is doing something fucktarded. My little brother, who would have been around 10 in the early 90s when we knew him, also had a friend Steve, and when I would mention Steve, my brother would say "good Steve or gently caress-knuckle Steve?" He was actually in my parent's old address book under F, as "gently caress-knuckle Steve". My parents thought it described him pretty well, having met him for all of 10 minutes one time. I'm getting slightly angry just thinking about him, and I last saw him in probably 1998. robziel posted:"I cast fireball at the darkness." This sort of thing is why it's worth gaming.
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Mar 9, 2012 15:52
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One Tall Fellow posted:Ah, I didn't mean to make it sound that bad. Campaigns would make it three, sometimes four weeks before being scrapped. Even the last one lasted two weeks, so it was only somewhere between 24-30 characters. We were slow learners. It makes a lot of sense that you were 13-14 at the time, too. I think every gamer sticks with bad games at that age, either in the hope that they will improve or because hey, socialising. For me it was a bit of both of those things - I socialised in sport clubs and other areas but my close friends were all gamers, so if they wanted to game I would go along. It took until our late teens to actually understand "no gaming is better than bad gaming". The evil game sounds awesome, being a cartoon villain every once in a while is very appealing. Jerry sounds like a dick. Edit: I've sometimes run terrible games, where something that sounded fun turns out not to be that great. Or worse, where I wasn't on the same page as the players as to what they wanted. I know about this because everyone lets me know, often at length. It wasn't like that when we were 14. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Mar 10, 2012 |
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Mar 10, 2012 00:05
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Dareon posted:Another was just a dude who kept rolling abysmally whenever he tried to do anything. He hit maybe once in five rounds of combat before getting horribly stuck in a wizard's spell (save ends) for the other five. Reminds me of the first AD&D game I ran. I'd DMed a fair bit of red/blue OD&D, but for some reason (I would have been 13 or 14 at the time...) I decided to wing it less and try to stick to the rules. Except I gave everyone max HP at 1st level, because it's bad if you don't even in OD&D. 4 sessions (4-8 hours each), and one poor guy has had his character killed 5 loving times. I actually had the balance about right (well, for AD&D anyway), Ben was just really unlucky. He got hosed up in combat twice, one of which was a one-shot, he got poisoned twice, and once a ghoul paralysed him and the party ran away. He was playing fighters and clerics, too, so that shouldn't have happened. He'd just roll terribly and die. I learned from that. Ben thought I was pissed off at him, but I was just trying to run the game as written. Turns out doing that sucked back then and still sucks now. We talked about it and were cool, but he had a terrible time for those few sessions.
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Mar 12, 2012 06:42
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A metal plate with a handle and with 20 lightsabers welded so they're sticking out of the front.
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Mar 12, 2012 14:30
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We just finished out 5-session 4e game. It was pretty awesome, but I won't talk much about it because it was fairly generic and designed to introduce two people who'd never played 4e and one person who'd never played any RPG at all, tabletop or otherwise. The DM did something interesting with the final section of the adventure, and I will talk bout that, because even though he can be a bit railroady at times, and a bit "nope, that's not possible", he's a good DM with good ideas. Synopsis: An artifact is stolen. The theives are using it to summon their god (Tharizdun The Chained God). They have made off toward a mountain. We track them to a village they burned because they were looking for a sword that would stop Tharizdun. We recovered the sword from a dragon. We scaled the mountain and came up on where the ritual was happening. And then there were some non-standard encounters which were cool! EDIT: We were 5th level throughout this adventure, that's probably worth knowing. The last encounter before the boss fight was with the theives. They were another party of adventurers, but because we'd tracked them so well, they were out of action points and daily powers (we found this out after the game). We fought them, and the first one we got down into low-hp sacrificed himself on the altar, with the artifact growing larger as he did so. We frantically tried to block them from getting to the altar, but only managed to stop one of them (each NPC sacrifice gave the boss-guy some temp HP in the next bit) The final boss fight was in three phases. The first phase was a pretty atandard solo monster fight, and was about the same as solo monster fights tend to be (although he had a cool defense against push/stun attacks that would damage you and throw you back / rope you in so that you weren't adjacent but were still in his nasty aura). The boss was the artifact, grown to giant man-like proportions. It was an OK fight. When we defeated that form, we were thrown into The Chained Void (allowed to spend one healing surge, too). Mithril chains wrapping a black prison vault and stretching off infinitely into all directions. Skill challenge involving getting to the prison and trying to reseal the broken lock. We failed pretty bad here, but I got to feel epic sprinting along the cahins and carrying everyone to the center (they kept failing to get anywhere). Then they immediately failed their arcana/religion rolls to re-lock the loving thing and it blew up, hurting us pretty bad. At this point, the DM allowed us to recharge an encounter power (would have been a daily if we'd succeeded) and to spend healing surges. Final phase, back on the mountaintop the Avatar Of Tharizdun, no longer human looking, had been entirely released from its prison. It has a shift attack that allowed it to pass through you and damage you as it did so. It had plenty of stuns and the same nasty aura. We won, but just barely. I (ranger) was down, the fighter was down, the warlock was bloodied and prone but still firing, and the cleric was out of everything except at-wills and was also bloodied (and the player was stressing like hell trying to get people back up). Now, it's a generic story, sure. But the three-phase boss fight, although very WoW-ish, was cool as gently caress. Everyone had a great time, but especially the warlock (the brand new player), who in the final two rounds got to badly damage the boss, got knocked prone and bloodied, then escaped a grapple, teleported away, and fired the spell which killed the BBEG. The best thing? The new player said, after the session "I'm going to buy some books and run a game of something". She had such a good time that she's thinking of DMing after playing just 4/5 sessions of D&D. Phased boss-fights should be more of a thing. The DM and I are discussing how best to do them in future. Edit: All the sword did was ignore the damage resistance of the boss, which wasn't loving us anyway. It had a daily power that added some to-hit, but the fighter gave it back to the elves in the end because his sword was better. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Mar 13, 2012 |
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Mar 13, 2012 09:55
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Section Z posted:EDIT: My personal cannon is that The Force watches out for it's special snowflakes signature weapon rights, and is actively working to make non-force users look bad if they try. Poor Star Wars Kid, the real cruelty is The Force let him live. My personal canon is that the Empire are really just the laser sword copyright police.
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Mar 13, 2012 18:27
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Edit: Beaten while replying. I guess that's the end of that terrible line of speculation.
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Mar 15, 2012 17:38
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Splicer posted:Of course ideally the GM would have had the Mayor stand back up, expose his true, but badly injured, form, shout "Haha, you don't know! You don't know who you are!" and then fly out the window/teleport away/suicide. Well, yeah. My players once decided that they'd killed the orcish elite guards, so no point attacking all the other orcs, right? We'll just threaten them a bit until they leave the area. Wait, the DM (me) previously made a big deal about orcs respecting and following strong leaders, and we actually saw an orcish leadership challenge that was a fight to the death. And we've just killed their best warriors... so... (You can see where it's going. All that stuff was flavour text for "orcs are a brutal barbarian warrior culture", but since they're interested...) "Yeah, the remaining orcs aren't running, but they carefully lay their weapons down, hilt facing towards you. They look at (huge fighter guy) expectantly". Instant orc army. They went back and took the town over in the next few sessions. They had fun planning attacks and sorties and siege weapons, and I like improvising, so win-win. We ended the game after that though, because everyone lost interest with the unintentional gimmick.
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Mar 16, 2012 06:11
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Colon V posted:What you can do next time is make them an elite strike force in their own army. Give them missions and encounters that they have to handle, and how well they do can have a fairly major effect on how well their army does. We've done "part of an army" too, with amost that exact setup. It was OK but not especially memorable. From memory, they infiltrated behind the lines like commandos and had fun loving up supply lines to weaken the opposing army, and then held a pass until reenforcements arrived, and then led the counterattack that won the war. Fun, but no really outstanding moments. The "hold the pass" was the best bit, because they and their men knew they only had to last a couple of days until the main army got there, and they also knew exactly how bad the enemy were hurting for supplies, so it was tense and tactical, but they didn't have to win, they just had to not lose for a while.
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Mar 16, 2012 06:21
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Aufzug Taube! posted:I don't see how anyone can relax in a pig sty, let alone be comfortable enough for a gaming session. Well... it's easy enough if you have a mental illness. When you stop caring about yourself, well, things go to poo poo. I game with mentally ill people, and quite often it's gaming that's the thing that keeps them motivated to not live in filth - they're embarrased to have people over unless they clean regularly. gently caress that guy though, he's an rear end in a top hat for giving a dude a filthy cup.
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Mar 20, 2012 05:41
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Colon V posted:That's... actually kind of heartwarming in a way. Thanks man We've been a close-knit group of friends since high school. Gaming is something that wwe can always do together even when someone's completely unmotivated to go anywhere. It's great. Mind you, playing Everyone Is John with 3 out of 4 players being legitimately insane can get
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Mar 20, 2012 13:38
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evol262 posted:Presumably there's some other reason they like this guy. Often there's not, and it's the only game you can find. (Steeeeeeve  )-- I put a Deck Of Many Things in my game once, it was a terrible idea. The first card imprisoned a PC on another plane. I realised I had hosed up, and asked if they wanted to wind back and I'd put some other item in instead. The player who's guy was imprisoned was passionately against the idea. He said he'd play as one of the hirelings and they had to go and rescue his main PC. So we had an adventure in Baator where they busted him (and a couple of hundred other unlucky adventurers) out of prison. But it derailed the game and I still feel like an arsehole fo putting an item in the game that can instakill people. Edit: missed a new page, sorry.
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Mar 22, 2012 02:10
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One of my players was fond of using Web and then setting it on fire. It worked pretty well. Also, back in the 90s, my party was being chased through a series of canyons by a dragon. It couldn't fly (canyons too narrow and deep), so it was chasing them on foot. I had described the rock arches and stuff overhead in an effort to make them realise that the canyons would be a good place to hide. The wizard said "I wait behind a rock just under an arch", and I couldn't figure out what he was up to until he uttered the amazing words "I cast Enlarge on the dragon". So yeah, it was wedged in there until the duration was over, and they got away. They went back much later in the game and killed it, because those fuckers bore a grudge. Edit: I have no idea if it was legal in rules-as-written, but how could a DM deny an escape plan that awesome?
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Mar 24, 2012 01:59
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ImpactVector posted:I was thinking more that he'd headbutt the goblin as it's holding the knife up to his ear, so the headbutt is what actually takes the ear off. I think this is the best way to go about the situation - propose something that means you got to be a badass as you lost your ear. If the DM has a problem with that, then he's being lovely. To be more detailed: I don't think the DM is being lovely yet. I've done similar things to characters' backstories, and the reaction is usually "He took my loving ear? I'm going to kill that little gently caress, but slowly!" It's a matter of play style, and it only makes him lovely if he does things like penalties to listen checks or refuse to alter the story so you get to be a badass while you lose your ear. Edit: if it was my game and I did that, and a player got huffy, I would take everyone's ears, and the BBEG would be collecting ears for the ear god, and you'd kill him and his earwax-golem minions and get your ears back, and then you'd fight the avatar of the ear god (vulnerable to sonic attacks), and the treasure would be magical prosthetic ears that gave you a listen/perception bonus, and everyone would laugh their asses off for a couple of sessions in the cochlea shaped Dungeon Of The Ear Collector shouting "WHAT? SPEAK UP!" at each other whenever there was a discussion. Further edit: It would only work because my players know I'm not going to be a douchebag. I wouldn't do it to a group that I hadn't played with a lot. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Apr 11, 2012 |
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Apr 11, 2012 05:44
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Doc Hawkins posted:Too cookie-cutter. Obviously, each would have a different disability and a unique fighting style to match. Hackmaster, then? Or not. You could have Schizophrenia Man, who confounds enemies with rambling conspiracy theories. Paranoia Man, who cannot be surprised and knows what, like, everyone's up to, dude. Bipolar Girl, who works and fights in a manic frenzy for 6 hours and then sulks for a week afterward. Body Dysmorphic Woman, who replaces her arms and legs with monster limbs on a regular basis. Bulimia Boy, who is a hulking hurler in the worst way. And their mascot, Multiple Personality Disorder Girl, who is sometimes a girl warrior, and sometimes thinks she's a mascot dog. Together, they form the Institutionalised Inquisitors, fighting the evil Dr. Healthy Brain Guy, who doesn't actually have any actual powers at all but always wins because the Inquisitors can't actually get anything done ever.
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Apr 11, 2012 08:41
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My Lovely Horse posted: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. That's a good solution for the current situation, I think. The end of the first bit is an excellent idea - people can compromise on one game and other people can compromise on another, and everyone gets what they like at least half the time. My group's interests range from Everyone Is John and Baron Munchausen to Dread to Hackmaster to 4th Ed D&D to literally playing 80s Red Box D&D or Tunnels And Trolls. We play various styles of 4th ed D&D, from rules-loose storygaming to "tactical battles with trips to a town for more equipment". Not every player shows up to every game. There are probably 10 people who we game with, and apart from 3 of us, nobody shows up to every single game. There's something for everyone, but very few people like everything. Some people loving hate Dread, and for other people the prospect of moving miniatures around a grid is loathsome. Some people enjoy both. Maybe the people in your group who aren't into combat in your current game will really have fun in a game that's based around "fight everything every day forever" if that's the entire premise of the game and there's no expectation whatsoever of diplomatic solutions. Trying to shoehorn everything into one campaign is usually difficult, but you should be able to make it work for a while - long enough to get a combat game started for the combat loving dude.
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Apr 16, 2012 15:01
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