General Category > RPGs
Anecdote Megathread
Alethea:
This past week I ran the second half of Think Before Asking for my players - two of whom are completely new to RPGs. By the time they found the Oracle, one player in a scurrier morph was anxious and refusing to come out of the top hat the octomorph decided he was carrying around for the scurrier to ride under. The player with an otomorph was riding the edge of crossing the trauma threshold - he really shouldn't have snapped those neotechnics' necks. Much like in the podcast, one of the players contacts the Oracle and asked how come the bomb(s) hadn't gone off yet. The stress of the answer slammed her over the trauma threshold. She picked echolalia.
There may have been some cackling on my part at this point. ;D
TMayesing78:
I thoughtlessly put an adamantine door in a dungeon. (It was a pathfinder game.) I probably shouldn't have been surprised but my players almost immediately left the dungeon to get the tools needed to chop the door out of dungeon and transport it to market so to speak.
Unfortunately for them I had two weeks to consider the problem.
First I introduced the idea of overhead. They had to cut the door up and get it formed into ingots. Then when they tried to unload the material, they found their profits rapidly declining, due to a glut on the market. Unfortunately this infuriated at least one of my players who walked out at one point. He came back for the next session but still I thought I was being reasonable. He felt I was was just being antagonistic.
clockworkjoe:
the player was a jerk but you kind of dropped the ball - that much adamantine is of strategic importance. Any reasonable kingdom will take great efforts to secure it - players want a payday, they can get it if they can lug the damn thing to ye old allied kingdom so the court wizard can buy it and enchant a hundred swords for the order of knights. Of course ye olde evil kingdom will send mercenaries to steal it and ye olde jerk kingdom will send agents to buy it from the PCs at a higher price - of course they will use the adamantine to make enchanted swords to fight ye olde allied kingdom.
trinite:
--- Quote from: clockworkjoe on May 13, 2015, 03:07:05 AM ---the player was a jerk but you kind of dropped the ball - that much adamantine is of strategic importance. Any reasonable kingdom will take great efforts to secure it - players want a payday, they can get it if they can lug the damn thing to ye old allied kingdom so the court wizard can buy it and enchant a hundred swords for the order of knights. Of course ye olde evil kingdom will send mercenaries to steal it and ye olde jerk kingdom will send agents to buy it from the PCs at a higher price - of course they will use the adamantine to make enchanted swords to fight ye olde allied kingdom.
--- End quote ---
Ross has some good ideas. I think the trick is, players think of wealth as a form of scorekeeping. But past a certain point, a big enough source of wealth stops being scorekeeping and starts to be a plot driver. Just like a +1 Ring of Protection is just a stat boost, but the One Ring of Power can drive a whole campaign.
You can also get some more plot ideas by thinking about how that adamantine door got there in the first place. How did the dungeon builder pay for it? Are there more doors down there? Was the door just a loaner from a powerful devil prince who had extra doors in his adamantine hell-fortress and rented them out? Do the dwarves have an ancient claim on the door since it was made from adamantine stolen from them 1,000 years ago? Is the door the remains of a sentient adamantine golem, crushed into a door shape to save on smelting costs, but still conscious?
TMayesing78:
Wow. I was happy just dropping the price from the glut on the marks. Now I'm embarrassed I didn't think about it a little more. Both you and Ross make great points.
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