The Role Playing Public Radio Forums
General Category => RPGs => : Tadanori Oyama August 31, 2010, 07:07:01 PM
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Episode 48's story about Aaron's original character concept for Dark Sun (a warforged) got me thinking about fun ideas with major holes in them.
Post characters who seemed good but had major flaws in their design, either mechnical or story, and either how to fix them or just rip on them.
I see a huge hole with a warforged in the Dark Sun setting but it isn't the one Tom, Cody, and Ross picked out. Warforged are designed with little metal in their bodies (their natural armor bonus is +2 in 3.5, it's not even as high a bonus as studded leather). Warforged are mostly wood and leather with stone and metal elements holding them together. Eliminating the metal elements is a pretty minor narrative adjustment (though it does still leave the problem of wood). And using the materials Athas has on hand for warforged sounded awesome. Bone-forged would be fucking metal and I don't care what you guys say.
The hole I wanted to jump on was that warforged are alive and self aware because of complexly webbed enchantments, which makes them walking active spells. A warforged on Athas should be drawing energy all the time, it'd be like a Defiler who wanders around casting small spells constantly.
You totally should've made Aaron play a warforged and forced him watch as his mere presence blighted the world around him.
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I haven't check, but maybe you know. Do zombies and other undead defile? I would think they would be similar to Warforged. I do agree warfored are animated. They don't eat, etc, so the power to operate must come from something and if that something is magic they might defile. What if the amount of magic is constant, but very small? Or they run on psychic energy?
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Your probably right. I don't claim to be an expert on how magic works in Athas. I know alot about Eberron (ergo my warforged rant above), but I never played Dark Sun. There are warforged based around psionics (psyforged) which might actually work in Dark Sun.
I just think that making Aaron play a race that sucks the life out of the world around him would be funny.
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This is one a player of mine tried to make that was particularly terrible for my current 4E game. It was a Warforged who was actually a man in a robot body, which was an okay concept. It's what he wanted to do with it that was so awful. Basically, he wanted to play a different character at first that was searching for his actual character, who had been deactivated and hidden away to keep him from being used as a weapon against his will or somesuch. Again, a bit odd, but okay.
The real problem was that he wanted, no, INSISTED, that the only way for his actual character to be reactivated was for his temporary character to not just sacrifice his life, but his IMMORTAL SOUL. When I asked him why the guy needed to sacrifice himself, he insisted that there needed to be 'equivalent exchange' to bring a life back. This of course was not only a complete ripoff of Fullmetal Alchemist, but completely against the magical system of D&D, where, with enough money, you can just pay a Cleric to bring someone back from the dead.
Not only that, but he insisted that the temporary character wouldn't WANT to sacrifice himself, and the players would be forced to MAKE him do it so his uber-badass character could save them. I tried to convince him that this would never work, because the party was majority Good-aligned, so they wouldn't damn an innocent man to lose his soul just to save their own skins, and even if they did, there was no way in hell they'd be willing to travel with the robot that apparently runs on the souls of the damned afterward.
Eventually, I managed to talk him into having all the self-sacrifice stuff happening before he even met the party, as that was the ONLY way his stupid concept would work, but he ended up quitting the game shortly thereafter anyway. I imagine it was partially because he couldn't play the Mary-Sue he wanted to, and also because he couldn't stand the setting. You should've seen how pissed he got when he found out you needed to have a license to delve into dungeons there. ;D
There was also the guy who wanted to play a kid in Monsters and Other Childish Things where his monster would be a succubus slowly draining his dad's soul and planning to do the same to him one day. It wasn't a completely bad concept for a dark game, but when the other characters were Troy and a moose-ataur version of Rowsdower from The Final Sacrifice and an expy of Edgeworth from Pheonix Wright with a demonic butler, he wasn't really fitting with the tone of the group.
As for myself, I had a character for a Mage game who wasn't terrible exactly, but, well, was a bit too nuanced for me to handle, so to speak. That, and he was overly angsty in his background, as it was my first WoD character.
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but when the other characters were Troy and a moose-ataur version of Rowsdower
bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
that player did good
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but when the other characters were Troy and a moose-ataur version of Rowsdower
bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
that player did good
He's actually Dogfish on these forums. And he had the character down perfectly, throwing in lightly whispered Rowsdowers in whenever he was nervous. He definitely stole the show.
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but when the other characters were Troy and a moose-ataur version of Rowsdower
bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
that player did good
He's actually Dogfish on these forums. And he had the character down perfectly, throwing in lightly whispered Rowsdowers in whenever he was nervous. He definitely stole the show.
I think that may just be my favorite MST3K episode. And awesome thinking on the moose-bit...
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Thank you. If I recall his powers were Hockey Hair (as defense and attack I believe), Booze Breath (an area attack with burning I believe), Charge of the Mountie and Drifters Know-How as a useful shared ability.
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Thank you. If I recall his powers were Hockey Hair (as defense and attack I believe), Booze Breath (an area attack with burning I believe), Charge of the Mountie and Drifters Know-How as a useful shared ability.
And this just makes it that much more awesome. Congratulations sir...
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I think that may just be my favorite MST3K episode.
I went ahead and added it to my Instant Queue. It looks fantastic.
My story involves a character in the last campaign I ran. My PCs had all started out as decent people who were tempted to serve a demon in exchange for the fulfillment of their deepest desires. Over the course of ten or fifteen games, many of them had devolved into remorseless killers, and there was a serious PVP situation brewing as each of the corrupted characters angled for power against the others. A friend of mine who had been away at college during the bulk of these games came home long enough to attend a session or two, so I suggested that he play a character who was similar to the people that my regular PCs had been before they dabbled with infernalism, a sort of benchmark character who could serve as a reference point to illustrate how far the group had fallen. He dreamed up Charlie Webb, a NYC detective who was sort of a Monk ripoff in that he was looking for his dead wife's killer. He was a good person with a chink in his armor: he would give anything to learn the identity of the man who killed his wife. The character sounded pretty solid--at least enough for a two-session appearance--but when I tried to introduce him to the game, we had to retcon a whopping five times to prevent the other PCs from killing him almost the moment they laid eyes on him. Part of the problem was the way the player handled the roleplaying, as his character was very pushy about nosing his way into the PCs' affairs and refused to back down when they threatened his life, but in hindsight, introducing a character like that was a terrible idea. It proved my point, but it wasn't fun for anybody involved.
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The Final Sacrifice is one of the better MST3k episodes.
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The Final Sacrifice is one of the better MST3k episodes.
I just watched that and am trying to write up a Road Trip side adventure loosely based on it (and ideas in this thread) now.
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The Final Sacrifice is one of the better MST3k episodes.
I just watched that and am trying to write up a Road Trip side adventure loosely based on it (and ideas in this thread) now.
You are a gentleman and a scholar
kudos good sir
kudos
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There was one time two players in a friends Star Wars game who rolled droids...One was essentially an easy bake oven, as all she did was dispense cookies out of her cude shaped chassis, and the other made a sex droid who continuously did an impersonation of the washer-humping robot from Robot Chicken.
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They should have teamed up with the Rancor Jedi and the Sarlac Monster.
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In the Hunter: The Vigil game I just got started in one of our players wanted to be a recently returned army sniper from Iraq with PTSD and severe alcoholism who seldom leaves his apartment except to buy liquor. He also "knows kung fu", is "great with guns", and owns no firearms.
We tried to run through some hypoteticals of how the other characters, a paint/webcomic artist, a civil engineer, and a minister would interact with him. Best thing we came up with was we'd go to his house looking for guns which he doesn't even have. Eventually we managed to convince him to make his character less isolationist and the game was able to actually function.
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Call of Cthulhu characters, both by the same guy, for a Masks of Nyarlethotep game. The rest of the group included a Starlett with an interest in the occult, a wealthly playboy who fancied himself an adventurer, and a professor of archaeology at Indiana Jones University. (No, it's not really where he taught. You get the point, right?)
Firstly, after hearing that it really was an investigative-heavy game where fighting would not be a frequent occurrence, he created a gun toting russian/irish mobster with nothing but combat skills. He spoke very little english, was barely literate, and for some reason had a number of "chivalrous" character traits tacked on for interest I suppose. He was the star of several sub-plots, including the "Mystery of Why the Fuck did you Dynamite that Apartment Building?" and "The Case of Why Did you Shoot A Bunch of British Houses With a Thompson?". His final moment was in the middle of thousands of evil cultists when he decided to toss a stick of burning dynamite onto the main stage. He was in disguise, but I pointed out that throwing something while surrounded would instantly give him away, no matter how ridiculous his stealth roll was. He did it anyways.
Then, to fix things, he created a navy seaman who was for some reason being held captive in cairo by the cultists. Since he was an officer, he decided his skills should be focused on leadership and ordering people around, but that he "gives orders, he doesn't actually do stuff. So he won't have any kinds of useful skills, just Leadership and Inspiration and such." He walked immediately into the group and said, pretty much verbatim, "I'm a great leader, so you need to listen to me." They tolerate him because of his player halo, but his (again) complete lack of any investigative skills has made him very few friends, and "I try to inspire X with my inspiration skill" (where X is some sort of inanimate object or inappropriate situation) has become a running joke in game. Because you have to laugh to keep from crying.
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This is an experience that I had with the only M&M game I have ever played in.
A friend of mine has this girlfriend you see, she fancies herself a "serious" role-player. She lectures us about how our games don't feature enough character interaction and how her chat room RP is sooo much better than anything we could come up with, but she was willing to deign herself to show us how to role-play. Her boyfriend invited a small group of us to play with them. We bit the hook he threw out and decided to show her what was up. Before I started role-playing I had a creative outlet of writing a Super Hero comic based on a team of heroes my friend and I created in City of Heroes. So two of us from that team decided to run with those characters, we tweaked the back stories a little to fit his universe and we were off. With literally 20 issues worth of back-story plus our on respective origin comics to play off of we were ready to describe our incredible characters to them.
I have already digressed a bit in describing our characters so I will sum up our characters. A billionaire Mutant who created a Tech suit to enhance his own powers, and a modern day Inigo Montoya with a Katana and a Tech Suit of his own.(Vengeance Inigo not Drunk Spaniard Inigo)
So we have tons of material to work with and she seems surprised at the level of detail we are packing on. So when it comes to her turn she describes to us, the most ridiculous character this side of the Invincible Hammer Wheel.
Her name was Lola, and she was a 20 somthing with insane amounts of strength, Billions of dollars, a bag of holding with every weapon imaginable in it, every damn knowledge skill you can possibly buy points into, a robot sidekick that was impervious to damage, and had the same amout of skills as she did, an attack yo-yo, and special armor that looked like a catholic school girl outfit, completing the package of retardation was the fact that she hadn't aged a day over 14.
This is compounded by the fact that she in real life looks like a 14 year old girl.
How's that for "serious" role-playing?
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sounds like she is breaking the rules too - idk how that is rules legal for any reasonable number of points
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sounds like she is breaking the rules too - idk how that is rules legal for any reasonable number of points
Yeah her boyfriend was the GM so when we asked about it all he said was "Don't worry about it I double checked it already." So in a PL 7 limit game with PL 8 power points she probably had somewhere north of 200 points floating around.
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sounds like she is breaking the rules too - idk how that is rules legal for any reasonable number of points
Yeah her boyfriend was the GM so when we asked about it all he said was "Don't worry about it I double checked it already." So in a PL 7 limit game with PL 8 power points she probably had somewhere north of 200 points floating around.
By whoring up her points with flaws and drawbacks she might actually have been able to pull of what you describe her using within the system. But that probably gives her more of a rules lawyer attitude than I'm thinking she actually has. That pretty much proves it's breakable but whatever. Frankly it's much easier to cheat and with complex point buy systems you'd be less likely to get caught.
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sounds like she is breaking the rules too - idk how that is rules legal for any reasonable number of points
Yeah her boyfriend was the GM so when we asked about it all he said was "Don't worry about it I double checked it already." So in a PL 7 limit game with PL 8 power points she probably had somewhere north of 200 points floating around.
By whoring up her points with flaws and drawbacks she might actually have been able to pull of what you describe her using within the system. But that probably gives her more of a rules lawyer attitude than I'm thinking she actually has. That pretty much proves it's breakable but whatever. Frankly it's much easier to cheat and with complex point buy systems you'd be less likely to get caught.
As far as I could tell she didn't have any drawbacks, unless looking like a 14 yr old is a 100 point drawback.
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I have another good one.
This one was about a year ago, a little before my Mutants and Masterminds game. It was a game of 3.5 DnD in Forgotten Realms. We had a pretty eclectic group Dwarven Thundertwins, a Air Gensai Rogue, A Human Beguiler(ME :) ) an Elven Cleric, and a Human Monk.
This story is about the Monk.
Or the man behind the monk rather.
He ws experianced at roleplaying and although I didn't know him well I was excitied to see what he would come up with, he decided to play a Monk of Illmater and he tacked on the ever so exciting Vow of Poverty. All these things are pretty normal staples a person will run into here and there, the Monk of Poverty is something I had seen done very well in the past but I was concerned that his last 4 characters being Barbarians would modify his Roleplaying a bit.
I was half right. His role playing was modified, however it was modified by him smoking a ton of pot before he came inside and started trying to "negotiate" with someone, they shook hands and his power to detect evil through a touch went off, a feat that allowed him to touch an evil person for Dex damage, another one of those Sacred feats. The damage is visable due to ice crystals forming on the person. At which point he promptly punches the guy in the face. When asked why he did it his answer was "I didn't want him to freak out."
As a bonus we captured a woman who was super evil and he wouldnt let us take her armor and sell it.(Granted this was good role playing but it was enchanted full plate damnit!!)
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There was also the guy who wanted to play a kid in Monsters and Other Childish Things where his monster would be a succubus slowly draining his dad's soul and planning to do the same to him one day. It wasn't a completely bad concept for a dark game, but when the other characters were Troy and a moose-ataur version of Rowsdower from The Final Sacrifice and an expy of Edgeworth from Pheonix Wright with a demonic butler, he wasn't really fitting with the tone of the group.
I just ran into this today. I'm playtesting a MaOCT scenario, and the players wanted to make new kids/monsters for it. One of them wanted to make the polar opposite of his character in Road Trip (Winston, the rich kid), and submitted to me this:
Sal was born to a prostitute on the streets of Atlanta, GA. His mother abandoned him in a garbage can and walked away never to look back. A passing indigent, Ramone, picking through the trash found the baby boy and felt pity for him. He cared for the boy and raised him as well as possible under the destitute circumstances.
It eventually goes on that a crazy homeless man shoots Ramone in the face point-blank, describing the horror in some detail. A couple days later, Sal gets his monster and together they kill the maniac.
Similar to the OP, this could have been a good character for a darker game, but the scenario we're playing is called "Cultbusters!"
Fortunately, I talked to him about his character, and he agreed it was a bit dramatic for the scenario.
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I'm going to throw myself under the bus on this one...
I once made a 3.5 Wizard who was Neutral Good and had a personal problem with wizard spells that killed. He abhorred violence and would try to avoid it at every pass. So...naturally the character's spellbook was filled with traps such as grease, color spray, polymorph, stuff that makes shields, stuff that makes walls, etc. It drove the group up the fucking wall, but was actually really fun to play.
Oh, and the character's passion in life was to try and modernize magic and create magical items that all people could use to enrich their lives. Why stop at the sunrod or waterproof matches? He carried a cooking pot everywhere with him that was self-heating on magical command. He'd say stuff like "Just think of it guys, what if we were able to create bags of holding for moving companies..." or "Stop telling me I'm stupid, just imagine what a wand that constantly cast "Goodberry" would do for the children in the wastes."
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I'm going to throw myself under the bus on this one...
I once made a 3.5 Wizard who was Neutral Good and had a personal problem with wizard spells that killed. He abhorred violence and would try to avoid it at every pass. So...naturally the character's spellbook was filled with traps such as grease, color spray, polymorph, stuff that makes shields, stuff that makes walls, etc. It drove the group up the fucking wall, but was actually really fun to play.
Oh, and the character's passion in life was to try and modernize magic and create magical items that all people could use to enrich their lives. Why stop at the sunrod or waterproof matches? He carried a cooking pot everywhere with him that was self-heating on magical command. He'd say stuff like "Just think of it guys, what if we were able to create bags of holding for moving companies..." or "Stop telling me I'm stupid, just imagine what a wand that constantly cast "Goodberry" would do for the children in the wastes."
This isn't a bad idea. This is great RP'ing. It would have been perfect at the RPPR table.
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Kinda the opposite of the trope Reed Richards is Useless (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ReedRichardsISUseless)