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I'm part of a D&D 3.5 campaign run by a friend of a friend. It's a trainwreck of a game run by an RP- and anime-obsessed girl in her late 20s who still acts like a teenager. It's more of a "funny" bad than anything else, so I don't mind hanging around and playing along to see how it ends up. The players are: Me, playing a tribal half-orc Barbarian/Horizon Walker Bob, my and the DM's mutual friend, playing a human Wu Jen (Asian-inspired spellcaster) specializing in fire magic Lacee, playing a catfolk rogue Brandi, the DM, with her DMPC, a *~super-hot~* half-drow swashbuckler who runs at the first sight of combat Highlights so far include: -Being attacked by 3 Hill Giants at once. Bob traps them inside a Wall of Fire spell shaped like a box, so they have to choose to rush through the flames and take a bunch of damage, or be slowly roasted alive. Two of them die rushing out of the wall, while the third charges at Bob, only to be killed by my attack of opportunity as he runs past me. We're then attacked by two more Hill Giants that we apparently didn't see despite Lacee having Spot and Listen skills through the roof. One of them charges at her (being the closest), attempting to bull rush her back into the Wall of Fire that's still there. Her 5-foot tall catgirl somehow manages to overpower a charging giant and stop it dead in its tracks. -The DM instituting a rule that rolling a "super-fail" (Two natural 1s in a row on an attack roll) means you hit a random other creature on the battlefield as your weapon slips out of your hands. It's an automatic hit that rolls damage with all the modifiers your original attack would have had. 10 minutes into the session, I end up killing Bob in one hit with a botched leaping power-attacked charge. We manage to talk her down to him being left at one HP, since hurling a 12-pound sword nearly 70 feet directly behind me is borderline impossible even with my character's strength, and even intentionally trying to throw the thing would only get it 50 feet at maximum. -Starting a wildfire the size of the central US by casting Fireball in a grasslands during a dry season, killing thousands. -Railroading leading us on MMO-style quests. Our second session was almost entirely made up of going to a bulletin board, seeing what goblin/orc/kobold army was massing nearby, kill their leader, bring back his head/ear/sword and receive reward. If any of us tried to leave town on our own, the guards would stop us and ask why we were leaving without the rest of our group. No matter our response, they'd get suspicious, cast Hold Person on us and throw us in jail until the rest of the party went to pick us up. Several sessions in, we still don't have much information on whatever plot may be going on, besides "big army of giants is gathering in the mountains" but we're not allowed to investigate it without the guild's permission, or else we'll be paralyzed and thrown in jail until we, in a Zone of Truth, agree to not investigate it until we're allowed. So despite being railroaded every step of the way, there's no apparent destination in sight. -DMPC constantly and shamelessly flirting with every other character in the group, male and female alike. Attempting to knock him unconscious with the flat of my sword led to me getting hit by a lightning bolt from nowhere during a clear, sunny day. -DM's response to any easy encounter is "more of them appear." Combine this with the fact that magic is relatively rare in this world, so magical healing costs are extravagant, and you get my Barbarian who's been at less than half HP for nearly two in-game months. -The descriptions of all the major NPCs begin with "He looks like <comic book superhero>, except..." -Brandi moved away a few months ago so we've done most of the campaign with us at my table and her on webcam. She's not interested in learning how to use Maptools or IRC or anything. And now it seems her husband may be joining us as well, so it'll be her and "Jay" at her end and everybody else at another. Recycling Centerpiece fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Jan 29, 2012 |
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Jan 29, 2012 16:43
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 18:18 |
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Yawgmoth posted:And why the hell haven't you said "hey guess what, you're not here anymore so we're just gonna play with the people who left, go find another group to play City of Anime Heroes with"? Because her moving away gives you an engraved invitation to tell her to gently caress off. Eh, it's not so bad. Only a few hours every other Sunday. Plus she and Bob are good friends and Bob's been my best friend for like 20 years so I'm willing to put up with it for his sake. quote:As for seeing how it ends, this really seems like the type of game that "ends" when the players get sick of purposeless fights and fetch quests, or when the DM decides she wants to go back to throwing kobolds and hobgoblins at the party instead of tracking down things with a high enough CR. Yeah, probably. Only time can tell.
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Jan 29, 2012 19:56
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Here's a story I was recently reminded of: a D&D 3.5 campaign one of my friends wanted to run, based on the MMO Guild Wars. Not a terrible idea; the world is fleshed-out as hell, and he was fairly new at DMing so we gave him a pass on it. Not much different from using Forgotten Realms or Eberron or whatever. Overall, it wasn't so bad for the first dozen or so sessions, but he just couldn't resist two traps of newbie DMs: "it's not my fault you're too weak", and overpowered Mary-Sue foe who only keeps us alive for his amusement. We were given orders to help defend a base from an army of Charr (reskinned Orcs), with less-than-subtle hints that our best bet was to sneak away from the walltop and come in from behind to pin them against the walls while the generic soldiers picked them off with arrows and ballistas and whatnot. We agreed that's a good idea, but the army (somehow) showed up before we were aware of it so they got first turn. He had all the enemy mages go on the same count, which happened to be first, for simplicity's sake. 8 wizards all fire Enlarged Fireballs at where we were standing (for a total of 56d6 damage, average 196) from 1200 feet away, killing all of us instantly before we were even aware of them. We obviously complained a bit, so he decided we could start it again, but letting us go first this time, while saying it's not his fault we didn't make our saves. Even if we had, only the Paladin would have survived taking even half damage from that. A few sessions later, he decided to stray from the game storyline and start making up new stuff. Joy. A large group of bad guys are guarding an altar we need to reach, so the Druid shapes into a bird, scouts the area, and reports back. We spend about 10 minutes real-time formulating a strategy against such superior numbers and finally come up with a plan. We burst from hiding, throw out some battlefield control spells while the physical types shoot down anyone who managed to escape. End of round 1, we're feeling good about ourselves and drooling over the experience and loot we'll get for beating such a difficult fight. Suddenly a guy waltzes in from the other side of the battlefield, throws down a couple 9th level spells, killing all the enemies in one turn, destroying their bodies and the altar we needed to reach to reclaim something they were going to sacrifice. Then he turns and teleports away. DM rules that there's no loot because the corpses were destroyed and we get no experience because we didn't really do anything and also we failed our mission to reclaim the McGuffin. Eventually, a new player comes in who's familiar with the setting, so he and the DM sit down in private and discuss the character's backstory, motivation, and ties with the local seemingly-good group of templar-type guys who've conquered a third of the continent in the name of peace and unity. There would be tons of good characterization, as he learns his order is actually worshipping evil guys and his reactions to that. He makes a Sorcerer who focuses on buffing the hell out of himself, turning into a Hydra, then going apeshit with 8 attacks per round. Shortly after he's introduced, a large group of undead attacks the camp, headed by the supercaster Mary Sue. Guy goes through his buffup routine (having no idea who this guy is or what he can do), and runs over to the caster, thinking that the undead will disperse if the leader is killed. Caster throws a Prismatic Wall on top of him as he charges, forcing Sorc to make 7 borderline-impossible simultaneous saves, or have lots of bad stuff happen. As he was rolling them, the DM kept saying "I really hope this doesn't kill you. It would really be a shame, since you're tied in with the story so much." After failing each and every save, he ended up as a dead insane hydra statue in another random dimension. DM actually called him out on not metagaming enough. He's gotten much better as a DM once he learned he's better at a more free-form world, where he spends more time adjudicating the players' actions than forcing plot on them. Sometimes that works, but not really with him. That game ended when one of the players had to leave (who incidentally was the DM of another story I posted in the old Bad Experiences thread).
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Aug 17, 2012 22:32
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A few nights ago, I played a couple sessions of a D&D 3.5 dungeon crawl the DM made up as we went along. No deep story or anything, just a group of people sitting around a bar when someone asks us to kill a dragon for him. He'd been chasing this white dragon for years, but it runs off when he's just about to kill it. Years of cranial trauma have rendered it nearly a vegetable, but it retreated into its heavily trapped lair where the guy can't get to it. Our group doesn't have anyone capable of handling traps, and the DM says not to worry about it. We agree, and head out. At the lair, we find two entrances: a natural cave entrance, and a manufactured service entrance or something about 50 yards away. We try the main entrance first, but it's got a very obvious, hard-to-avoid pressure plate, which our adventurer senses (the DM) tells us will drop a shitload of rocks down on us. We back out and check the side entrance. The service entrance is an unadorned path leading to a room where we find a gelatinous cube. None of us can remember exactly how tough they are (we're 3 level 6s, it's a level 3 encounter), so we devise a plan to beat it without any danger. The warlock shoots it with warlock blasts, and pulls it all the way to the main entrance, where he manages to lure it onto the pressure plate and gets it crushed by a shitload of rocks. DM applauds his ingenuity and we move on. We cut down the dragon's minions, make quick work of his half-dragon half-ogre son, and reach the final hall into the deepest part of his lair. Somehow, he managed to fill a 60-foot long hallway with 36 arrow slits per 5-foot square, all set to fire and reload when someone sets foot in the hall. The paladin jokes maybe we should have "pressured" the dragon's son into telling us about future traps. We muse about how the dragon's pretty much retarded and maybe we can lure him out somehow. The warlock again takes the spotlight by cutting off the ogre's head, sticking it on a pole, and using Warlock Powers to float over the floor and up to the dragon's room. He puts the head-on-a-stick around the corner and, quite badly imitating the ogre's voice, says "hey dad i killed some adventurers out here. you should come and help me carry all this loot. don't worry, i turned the trap off" while the rest of the party (in the same bad ogre voice) starts agreeing. "yeah check out all this stuff they had. gold and jewels and is that an ice sculpture? we're white dragons and stuff, right? we like ice sculptures." His work done, the warlock floats back to the rest of the group to wait and wonder if the dragon would notice there were 3 different voices, none of which sounded like the ogre. DM's almost laughing himself out of his seat as he describes the dragon excitedly running out of the room, headlong into the traps, where he gets pincushioned by his own inexplicable trap. Normally we try and organize these grand epic stories spanning time and space, but maybe we'll start doing more of these "hey i'm bored, pull out the mat and dice" games.
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Feb 23, 2013 22:08
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I've played almost all the typical character archetypes in my D&D group, but never had as much fun as I did with characters that focus on skill, knowledge, and ingenuity rather than combat to get through situations. Unfortunately, our group has one, often two, people who's answer to most encounters is to stick a sword in it. So while I have the Charisma and Diplomacy to talk my way into the BBEG's lair, the Barbarian and Warmage are throwing a wrench in that plan by blowing everyone up. So my usual DM decides to set up a solo scenario for me. Playing a level 1 homebrewed Sniper class from Minmaxboards, I focus on stealthy sniping and roundabout ways of solving problems. I've recently joined a group that does assassination, espionage, etc, and the way they typically give assignments is by leaving a small note somewhere you're bound to see it. I wake up one morning to find a note saying "Guard Captain", along with the school symbol meaning "he's got more details, don't kill him." I find the guard captain, and he explains a hugeass wolf is messing with the livestock of a well-respected plantation owner. As my guild is basically the plaything of the nobility, whom this guy gives supplies to, it's my job to kill it. I meet with the owner and he says it's a worg, not a wolf, but I say whatever they both bleed the same. I spend the next few nights staked out in a tree near the goat pens waiting for it to show up. Eventually a goblin sneaks up and starts messing with the lock to the pen. I nonlethally shoot and tie him up. I spot the worg way out in the distance storming off in a huff. I can't possibly catch him or hit him at that distance so I let him go. Next morning I bring the goblin to the owner and explain what I saw. He cuts the thing's head off, says good job keeping it away but that's hardly a permanent solution. A few nights later I'm back and see another goblin messing with the lock again. I shoot to kill this time, worg in distance gets pissed and slinks away again. Next night, I see another goblin, same deal, but this time I let him open the gate. He runs off like a bat out of hell and the worg comes in and I shoot it. He quickly grabs a goat and starts trying to run back through the gate. I jump out of my perch, slam the gate shut, then run back up the tree, shooting it every opportunity I get but rolling poo poo for damage. Worg tries to make a couple running jumps over the fence and eventually makes it, with about 2 HP left. Next morning the owner lends me a farmhand with rudimentary tracking skills, and we follow the blood trail to a cave where a dozen or so goblins have taken shelter. I ask why we don't just call the militia on them, but there are enough to form a risk to the militia and the plantation owner doesn't want that on his conscience. There's no way I can take on that many and the worg, so I decide to set up a trap. A neighboring farm is owned by Barlowe, a semi-retired gnome spellcaster/alchemist, who uses the farm as a means to fund his research. One of his discoveries is that a type of poison can be used to grow larger and faster crops. The goblins ignore him for the most part because he's got several huge guard dogs (which unbeknownst to them are illusions). I ask if we can use his farm as bait, since the goblins would love to get their hands on his stuff. He jumps at the chance, but is wary due to the risk to his farm. If I can get him a cheaper source of the poison he uses, he'll let me use it as bait. His normal source is a pixie who uses its woodland knowledge to distill poisons from plants, and often uses illusions to disguise itself as more menacing creatures; and who has also starting charging much higher amounts. I have no idea where to go about getting poison, so I leave a note saying "I need a source of Nitharit poison" in the same spot the note to see the guard captain was left, figuring that I'd be followed by the guild wondering why I haven't killed the worg yet. When I check back later, a new note is left with the name of a shady dealer. It turns out it's the pixie, and I explain the situation, that Old Man Barlowe found a legal use of the poison, and convince the dealer that he can sell the fertilizer version legally, letting him open a bigger, more prosperous shop that isn't the size of an outhouse. A deal is struck. I return to Barlowe with the good news, and we forge a plan. We'll put out the word to the goblins that Barlowe and his "guards" will be away from the farm for one night, and that he's coming back with more security, so if the goblins want to raid, that will be their only opportunity. We'll put on a big show of Barlowe pretending to get into a carriage/wagon/whatever and riding off, while he actually slipped out through a false bottom and snuck back inside to help with the defense later. We'll round up all the local farmers and merchants and farmhands, have them set up traps and ambushes, and basically bludgeon the goblins to death with torches and clubs and whatever while I deal with the worg. The first step is to get the message to the goblins. They're a small band of primitive, almost childlike, isolationists who never leave their cave except to raid for food. I get a ratty old cart and fill it with random junk from town: pieces of broken mirrors and stained glass, door hinges, a couple wooden mugs painted bronze, etc. I wheel it up to the cave and make trade offers, but they don't go for it, saying they want food. I come back a few days later with some salted meat, and they allow me in to see "Boss," which turns out to be the worg. It leaps up onto the cart to attack me, but the lovely thing falls apart under its weight, and I bolt out as soon as I can manage. I yell back that I just want it to stop attacking the plantation, and that if it really needs food then Barlowe's farm will be unguarded ten nights from now. I turn and run away and head home. That's where the session ended, but it's already turning out pretty cool. Next time, I'll be gathering up an army of peasants and rigging up a farmstead with booby traps.
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May 30, 2013 06:02
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You know some DM out there is using that as his unkillable railroader DMPC. And it also chooses to take the form of an 8-year old catgirl.
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Jan 3, 2014 15:02
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I missed DMPC chat by a few pages, but hell it's always DMPC time. And our friend Bob has good DMPCs. We once visited a village which seemed to be stuck in a time loop. The villagers would just repeat the same day over and over. The only other person there who was aware of this was a passing elven bard, who got himself half-stuck in the loop. He still had his free will, but would wake up in the village inn every time he fell asleep, no matter where he was. We figured out the cause of the loop, some kind of cracked crystal ball in an old wizard tower nearby, but couldn't quite figure out how to get the bard unstuck. The four of us unanimously decided we hate him for no real reason, and abandon him to his fate. A few ingame weeks later, we're in a tribal jungle village, about to be sacrificed to some giant monster, King Kong-style. The head priest reveals himself as the bard, who starts explaining how he got out of the village and why he's a shaman of a jungle tribe, but we just tell him to shut up and sacrifice us already. A freaking T-Rex lumbers out of the trees, ready to eat us. The rogue slips his bonds, cuts ours loose, and we cast Hold Person on the bard and run, leaving him alone on a raised platform with a hungry dinosaur. We later find ourselves shipwrecked on a small island. In a cave by the seaside, we once again find the bard, flailing around in the grip of a giant octopus. He begs us to help him, and that he knows of a secret teleporter on the island that will bring us back to the mainland. We shrug and say we'll figure it out, and walk away without even drawing weapons. I think that was the last time we ever saw him before the campaign fell apart. Thokk was Bob's first 3.5e D&D character ever, a by-the-books half-orc fighter. Greataxe, fullplate, 3 intelligence, etc. Due to his DM believing that +x on a piece of gear meant that it was intended for characters of level x, Thokk is kitted out with +8-12-equivalent gear across the board at level 11. Figuring "why waste an already-made character," Thokk showed up here and there throughout whatever game Bob was running, always as a non-combat character thank god. Whenever Bob needed an NPC he hadn't put any thought into, like generic guards or whatever, he'd eventually pull out the Thokk sheet. He'd usually be a nice guy, answer in broken English whatever questions we had, and that was that. In one game, Thokk ran a failing little general store near the center of town. Nobody ever bought anything, because he was 7 feet tall and wore his jet-black spiked fullplate all the time. We felt bad so we vowed that we'd go to him for any supplies we might need, no matter what. After an adventure in the sewers, the halfling rogue needed a new outfit. He went in the back room and returned with a child's pink frilly ballet outfit, with tutu, tights, and flat-toed slippers. She started to complain, then he showed her all the pockets sewn on the inside to hold whatever thievery things she might need, somehow without being noticeable from the outside. She took it and we went about our business. There were a few other things he sold us that were half-blessing half-curse, but the only other one I can remember is the animated polar bear-fur cloak, who could barely move but was perfectly happy to let us wear him as long as the wearer ate fish once a day. A few days later, the tutu gets torn but she's getting tired of everyone making fun of her so she just wears her leather armor over her underwear and leaves the thing balled up in the corner under the bed at the inn. We leave town and go investigate bandits or something. We find them on the road, and due to a series of bad rolls, are on the verge of death. Bob's trying to come up with a way to give us some kind of advantage, when the rogue speaks up to try and help him out "Uh hey I see dust up the road the way we came. Looks like someone's coming to help." Bob takes the prompt and tells us we hear vague shouting. We and the bandits both stop to watch this approaching dust cloud, until we can make out what's being yelled. "YOU FORGOT YOUR DREEEEESSSSS" as Thokk comes barreling down the road at top speed, holding a tattered pile of pink silk in front of him. The bandits panic and run, and we get ourselves patched up. Rogue sighs and thanks him for bringing it back, and he heads back while we continue on to wherever. Since then, everyone in our group who DMs has used Thokk as a shopkeeper whenever possible. He's dumb and loud but (according to his character sheet) has 29 charisma somehow so we just can't bring ourselves to not love him.
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Feb 1, 2015 06:24
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 18:18 |
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I'd been wanting to run Dungeon World for my group for a while, and we finally had a chance. Made a quick one-shot that could dovetail into a full game if everyone seemed to enjoy it, based around the starting area of Might and Magic 7. Essentially, rich old guy holds a scavenger hunt on a small island to find someone worthy of inheriting his lands, though in reality he's just trying to get rid of the burden of running a neutral town in the dead center of a warzone and making it into a "test." I need to work on my on-the-fly 7-9 resolutions but otherwise things went pretty well. What makes this story thread-worthy, though, is that the game contained an abandoned but working cannon, a wand of fireballs, and the Witch's exploding potions...and they didn't use any of them. I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed of my players. Granted the wand would only be given to them if they agreed to an as-yet-unnamed favor in the future and they didn't like the thought of that, but still.
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Dec 8, 2015 03:17
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