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Topics - doctorscraps

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RPGs / Tournament Scenarios
« on: July 13, 2011, 04:58:08 PM »
So...let me spin a yarn for you about what's going on in my 4th edition campaign, and what I was thinking of doing...

So, a Kingdom has lost it's Royal Champion in the end of it's last war, but the only real remnant they had to bring back was his magic sword. Once it was enshrined at the temple in the capital city, it was found that it could no longer be moved, it's weight beyond that of a mere mortal. My players have tried to move the sword themselves in usual player curiosity, but of course, to no avail. They're only 3rd level, and none of players have done anything that the spirit bound in the sword would find worthy enough to allow one of them to wield it.

Besides that, bad mojo is starting to move in the world, old gods and dark forces making their move and all that. The people of the kingdom are afraid, and the previous royal champion had been a sort of inspiring figure of courage and bravery. The Queen, the Champions lover in life, receives visions that it will be her choice to decide whom the inheritor of the Champions mantle, as the right to wield the magic sword, will be. So, my plan was...is that she decides to hold a grand melee tournament to decide who of her realm is the bravest, and the strongest, capable of leading her people in the dark days to come.

Granted, the players could enter this tournament as a group...but there can only be one Champion. There's only one magic sword. If only one person enters, what do I do with the other players? I imagine I'll have the one person enter and everyone else will just have to spectate during matches, or everyone will enter, and then I have to deal with butthurt players upset that they got beat out by their companions.

So then, how would you guys approach a tournament-like scenario like this?

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RPGs / Rage quitting a campaign is a lot like losing your virginity...
« on: April 02, 2011, 09:21:53 PM »
--Afterwards, you feel akward, maybe a little unsure of whether or not you were a little rough, and not entirely sure if you can look certain people in the face the next day.

Oh, yeah, before I forget to mention...Just rage-quit my first DnD campaign about an hour ago. In my defense, it was an Asshole DM who loved to point out that every course of action was the wrong one, and loved his clusterfuck battles where minions would crawl up our ass, and BBG's who would resurect them as soon as we cut down half of them.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is a difference between being challenging and testing the mettle of your players, and mashing your thumb on the Asshole Button like a coked up monkey. No gaming is indeed better than bad gaming.

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RPGs / 4th Edition- Player wants to play as an animal
« on: January 29, 2011, 12:20:01 AM »
So...Here's my situation.
A player of mine just came to me with a question about a character for my flagship 4th edition game. She wants to play as a Leopard, or similar animal, but alas, with the core three books, I do not see how I can make this possible for her.
Is she SOL, or has someone actually done this...?

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General Chaos / Doctor Scraps to Gamers- Shut the [censored] up!
« on: December 14, 2010, 12:26:37 AM »
The latest article in the Fractured Transmissions Blog has FT's very own Doctor Scraps lets off some steam about his feelings about Gamers and their needlessly demanding habits.

http://fracturedtransmissions.blogspot.com/2010/12/gamers-need-to-shut-hell-up.html

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Thanks to Cody Walkers work in "Dodge Ball to Save the Planet" as superhuman Martin Van Buren, the character has taken a life of it's own amongst my friends.

It all began when my brother introduced me to a game they simply called "The Game", where you tell a story based around everyone playing each other in a situation, where you draw cards, and depending the card drawn, you have to do terrible terrible things to either yourself or another player...the last one standing by the ending of the deck of cards being the winner. Naturally, there was a lot of Chuck Norris, Morgan Freeman, and Neil Patrick Harris cameos...

Then...one fated session, I went first, and dammit all if I didn't drawn a King of Spades. Meaning I had to do something really...really bad to myself right off the bat. It had to be bone jarring, it had to be blood splattering...
So...I had Curtis the Blonde Asshole run me over in a red sportscar, accompanied by Former President Martin Van Buren. What escalated afterwards was a fight breaking out between Curtis and my brothers character and into a Cheese-Cake factory...Where Chuck Norris just happened to be enjoying some Cheese cake.
My turn again...
And thus, Van Buren locked eyes with Chuck Norris, and they commenced to do battle with one another in an epic free-for-all, fueled by some yet unspoken grudge held against one another.

Since that session, I have gone on to use Former President Martin Van Buren on many occasions in many RPG's, even going so far as to plan a book, detailing the adventures of Former President Martin Van Buren, the Cosmic Warrior, as he journeys across the stars in a space-faring spanish Ghalleon with his buddies Captain Jake the Whizpan, and his stalwart apprentice, Brian the Sexsaber.

In short...Thank you, Cody...You have inadvertedly given birth to the destroyer of worlds.

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RPGs / The Event Situation System
« on: August 27, 2009, 12:18:08 PM »
An excerpt from my blog just recently...Lemme know what you guys think.


So two nights ago, I revisited an old idea back when we were working on an RPG system. You know what one of the biggest pains in the ass for a GM is? Enemies. If you do not have a big grid-map with the little miniatures out on the table, it is really easy to get confused on who's attacking who, where they are, who's got how much health left...It's a hassle! After a while, the GM starts knocking bad guys off so he doesn't have to deal with them anymore and get the game moving again.
So--Two nights ago--Old idea. The Event Situation System-- Take the sort of system you would have for a fighting game...the Player Party has one meter of health, we'll call this the Morale, and the Enemy side, whatever you have over there, has their own meter, called the Event Health. The object of this style of combat is to deplete the other sides meter with whatever abilities you have, which gives you a bonus to your roll versus the over sides defense DC.
My reasoning for wanting to work with such a system is to provide a means of having really outlandish styles of combats or high risk situations without having to draw up a huge catalogue of NPC's and their stats. So with my idea, the Event Type has it's own stats...for instance, taking on a platoon of soldiers would have different stats than escaping a horde of rampaging Rhino's.

I keep thinking "Simplicity" when it comes to coming up with your own RPG's-- But in reality, I think complex is more fun. More to do equals fun to me. Games that are just straight combat endeavors tend to be boring for me. I'm thinking of a game where a player can also go out on his own in conjuction with his party, and...build houses...craft items...go into business for himself...get really drunk...go into politics...and still save the world from nuclear holocaust or demon lords.  A game with an alcoholic stat! A porn star prestige class! Being able to wield a little dagger between your toes! Yeah...that'd be awesome...

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RPGs / Anecdote: One-Upping Tom's Gun-Rape story
« on: June 23, 2009, 10:58:59 AM »
So here's one for the books...About a week ago, I ran a game of Trail of Cthulhu, a case involving a curse passed down from father to son, in which once a son is born, the mother dies in childbirth, and the father becomes a hideous creature, the result of some faustian pact made long ago.
The story begins with an old man found stabbed to death, the only clue leading to a small home where a blind pregnant girl is being taken care of by her brother, since her husband has run away, for reasons unknown.
The players track down the husband, who is in the middle of his transformation into the creature. They kill him, only then to discover that he was killing certain individuals for key ingredients in a means of breaking the curse for good. Instead of trying to find some means of saving both mother and child, they opt to cause a miscarriage by having the mafia member of the group to beat the living shit out of her with a baseball bat.
"She'll live, just gonna kill the baby and end the curse." She reasons, as though that makes me anymore understanding of their decision.
I refused to role-play out the end-result, merely stating with a hint of contempt in my voice that the scene ends with her leaving with a baseball bat over her shoulder, whisteling Zippety-Doo-Dah while en route to deliver a Baseball-Bat-Abortion.
I then made everyone else roll stability checks for their heinous way of thinking.

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RPGs / Project 15
« on: June 11, 2009, 11:33:11 AM »
A bit less than a year ago, my group and I tinkered with the concept of writing out our own RPG book/PDF, a little something we simply referred to as Project 15 (Which may or not be the final name as of this writing). However, many questions arose after some heavy contemplation of picking the project back up where we left off~~
For instance~~
~Is there a form of copyright on dice systems?
~What options are there for putting the game out on the open or free market?
~How much would a person have to spend to have something published?

If I can get these answered, I believe Project 15 can commence.

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RPGs / Rehabilitating the Bad GM (and why I now hate KOTOR)
« on: May 28, 2009, 04:33:21 PM »
~~I have been the GM in our group for a good number of years. It's a role and art that I'm proud to have as a hobby, however I'm not so full of myself to deny someone else a turn at the head of the table. In fact I welcome it. If there's one thing I love, it's being one-upped. I've found that the best way to cure an inflated ego, such as mine became over time, is to have someone do me one better, to inspire me to perfect my own craft.
But this topic isn't about me and my delusions of gaming grandeur as a GM...This is about my friend~We'll call her Frustrated Gamer Chick, or FGC. FGC has been my sister in all but blood since my second year in college~A little firebrand of a dame who clicks with me in a manner that we both love women, and can make filthy jokes to one another without social akwardness. She is also the munchkin in our group~I said she was a firebrand, and for a reason. She hated to lose on any level. She also had a hard-on for anti-hero character templates, and was extremely fond of the old "Triple-Cross", always opting to try and join the Enemy faction so as to destroy them from within at the apex of the campaign.
So when she asked me if she could try her hand beind the GM screen, I was a little surprised, but as I said, I'm always willing to see if someone can put me in my place at the craft. Her weapon of choice was the same as mine- Star Wars Saga Edition. I had wet my teeth and honed my abilities on the Revised Core Rule edition years before, and we were only both truly understanding the new system~ From the available library at the time, she chose the Knights of the Old Republic campaign guide~ And this is where it began a gradual decent into medicority.
We rolled our characters...A Miralukan Jedi, a human Jedi, An Aleena Soldier, a Human Noble, and myself, a Khil Noble named Cthulhu.
The trouble became obvious after the first few sessions~ We were a band of individuals after the Dark Wars aiming to find and rescue the remaining Jedi Masters in a bid to rebuild the Jedi Order under the leadership of Revan~ FGC had gone according to accepted canon that Revan was a good guy, but the Exile had gone Dark Side, however they now worked side by side for the same endeavor. The rest of the NPC supporting cast featured an array of KOTOR characters from the video games, who all had legally changed their names to "Mary Sue", and all behaved in a similar "don't question my authorita" fashion. We weren't even allowed to fly the ship ourselves.
Being a Noble, I was not entirely built as a Combat class, but quickly was pigeonholed by the NPC's and the situations at hand into a combat role~ Leading to Cthulhu laying face first in the dirt many a combat session, only escaping death thanks to Saga Editions Force Point expenditures.
Sessions often went as follows~
-Congregate before the all powerful Revan and his entourage to recieve their next mission.
-Go to planet related to missions (spending way too much time on inside jokes during the hyperspace journey)
-Go to a cantina~ Apparently former Jedi Masters take to the bottle real easy (The Ram Khota Corralary)
-Return to ship for our pre-boarding bad guy ambush.

Once that particular story arc was finished, it only degraded from there...I stuck around just to see how deep this would go before it imploded on itself like Malachor 5 after the activation of the Mass Shadow Generator.

I gave up Cthulhu for another character~ Lenny, the Kel Dor ex-sith infantryman, trying to see the campaign through fresh eyes. The next story bit was a Dead Space homage~~However, the dear girl felt that if you're going to do a homage, that means you need to do it exactly the same as the source material. So she supplied us in-game with the same weapons as Dead Space, however she didn't bother writing out their stats, and hand-writing the monsters stats herself in such a way that only a Destiny Point spend or a critical dice roll would suffice.

Finally, it arrived at our current stand-point~~A slow grind to level 20 to prepare for the final battle with the BBG and his cronies. We are currently at level 12. Most sessions follow what I call the "Meet and Beat". We set out on Sandwich Runs (see below), doing little trivial matters until eventually, one of the BBG's makes a cameo appearance to kick our teeth in (again, only a critical or Desiny Point will suffice at our level) before strolling off whisteling while we scour the ground trying to find where our kidneys had dropped.
Then I learned the real source of the issues: The bland and sudden combat, the lame plot hooks, etc~ FGC didn't actually read the campaign guides she had amassed. In fact the only time she opened them was to find equipment and enemy stat blocks. All the information she had was what she had gleamed from the KOTOR video games...We weren't played Star Wars tabletop, we were playing a pantomined version of the Video Game.

So I came before this community to try and seek assistance so that I may try and take this poor, misguided soul under my...no...OUR wing, and teach her the true merits of the Gamemasters art. I don't want her to stop GMing~ I want her to learn. Where do we begin?

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