Messages

31

RPGs / Re: This is the quest that never ends

« on: December 15, 2010, 12:02:18 AM »

Unfortunately, Doctor Frued is currently in rehab for cocaine addiction.  You must find the famed wizard and addiction specialist Dr. Drew of the Grand Hermetic Order of Hermetically Sealed Hermits from Hermes. 

I nearly cracked up laughing in front of my supervisor and general manager.  Nice one!

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RPGs / Re: Role Playing Game Achievements Thread

« on: December 14, 2010, 11:01:34 PM »

33

RPGs / Re: HIGH SCHOOL ROLE PLAYING GAMES

« on: December 14, 2010, 10:53:56 PM »

you have some asshole players

I second this.  How do you not call a doctor to classify this guy as mentally incapable?

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RPGs / Re: This is the quest that never ends

« on: December 14, 2010, 10:52:27 PM »

In order to frame the advisor for corruption, you will need secret information about him from the one person he trusts - your mum.  But whenever she talks about him, she always ends up spiralling into overtly sexual anecdotes, which you can't stand to hear.

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RPGs / Re: Anecdote Megathread

« on: December 14, 2010, 10:03:09 PM »

Marines are built to survive - which actually makes your average gung-ho charging player a little more validated in his decision to go balls first into combat, firing guns wildly at friend and foe alike.  I'm still undecided on whether this sort of behaviour actually needs any more encourangement...

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RPGs / Re: Anecdote Megathread

« on: December 13, 2010, 03:47:04 AM »

Well, although I have many years of anecdotes I could dredge up, I feel the need today to share a few short stories from the one-shot I ran at MacquarieCon four times over the last weekend.  I also ran it with a test group a month or so before, so I have run it a total of five times.  And although those five games shared the same plot, the same characters, and the same goals, they could not have been more different.

The basic tenet of the game was this - a group of five mages have heeded the call for help from an archmage, whose last living relative on earth is in danger, and he wants her kept safe.  He'd do it himself, but he is over 400 years old, and if he sets foot on earth, reality will slap him into pasty ancient goo.  His relative was a girl working in a vault complex in Sydney, which was under threat of robbers, and she had been taken hostage.  Free the girl, keep her safe.  That was the ostensible goal.

I say ostensible goal, because there was, as in all my con games, a twist - the mage did not in fact care in the slightest about his great great great grand daughter.  But she had a ring, which was a powerful artifact which anchored his horizon realm to the earth.  However, only one of the mages knew this (the monk whose avatar was the ghost of Bruce Lee).  Well, that's not entirely true.  One of the mages in the group was a member of the nephandi - that group of evil mages who wants to end reality - and knew that the ring was a powerful device that could aid in massive destruction, and figured this had something to do with it.

The ring's power further complicated things, by preventing any sort of correspondence teleportation or scrying into where it was held.  And what the hell, to add a further complication, the robbers were all vampires - insane Malkavians who were holding the girl hostage to get the attention of the archmage, because they wanted help dealing with the technocracy, and figured he would come or at least send some mages if they put her in danger.  And one of the mages in the group wasn't actually a mage at all, but was a ghoul of a vampire who was an enemy of these Malkavians, and he used blood to perform magic-like feats to spy on the mages for general occult information.

Okay, so it's complicated.  But here's a summary of how each group who played this game sought to solve their problem.

The first  group, the control group, ran almost like clockwork.  They researched the building and the situation.  They teleported into a subway toilet, and walked to the scene. The police had already turned up to the scene, so they pretended to be police (undercover, since they were dressed so strangely they may as well have been the Village People) and got access to the CCTV in the vault and found out the robbers' demands.  They decided to go in and negotiate with the robbers, found out they were vampires (the ghoul hid himself to make sure they didn't recognise him) and agreed to help deal with the technocracy and help them loot the vault.  The vampires then basically proceeded to break the masquerade, make sure all the CCTV caught it, then tipped their hats to the magi and said, "Well, they'll be here soon.  Have fun!" and walked out the door.  A technocrat came with a HITMark and a few others, a massive magical fight ensued, in which the nephandi was given the ring by a trusting member of the cabal and told, "Keep it safe!" Yoink, she made good her escape and a few months later the world was ended.  Yay.

The first game I ran at the actual convention took a slightly different turn.  The group decided to do absolutely no research on the facility, teleported onto the roof, and took the fire escape down, but found it didn't go to the basement where the vault was, and used spirit magic to make a deal with the fire alarm not to set off when they opened the door, if they promised to set off all the alarms in the building within 1 hour.  They charmed a beat cop with magic, told him to ignore them, then snuck into the vault complex.  The ghoul used dominate on the vampire with explosives forcing it to stay still, before they blew a hole in the wall, incapacitated the other vampires with a swarm of wasps and fire, and then told the hostages to run.  They found the ring, which was safely snatched up by the monk.  The nephandi then proceeded to summon a horde of spirits to attack his companions in an effort to get the ring, but had his top half disintegrated, and so the ring was made safe.

The second game followed a similar beginning to the first - they ignored doing any research, teleported onto the roof, and went down the fire stairs.  But it didn't even bother them that they didn't go to the basement - they used matter magic to redesign the building and put in a fire stair to the basement.  They then installed a secret corridor to the room with the hostages, whilst the nephandi spirit walked into the vault to get behind enemy lines (and stole the ring while in there).  They froze the exploding vampire in time, stormed in with guns blazing, took out the other two vampires, before the nephandi grabbed the girl they were there for and escaped out the front door and into the hands of police.  Thinking they had all done incredibly well, the monk went into the vault only to find the ring gone, and wondered where it was.  The nephandi then won the game by accidently using spirit travel with the ring, thus tearing a hole in the gauntlet from Sydney to Colombia and allowing the denizens of the umbra to flood the earth, killing all humanity.

The third game had only three players, who did their research and decided to try and sneak into the  vault through the airconditioning system.  One player sought to turn themself into a cockroach, and succeeded in getting everything but the size right, and so snuck into the vault as a five foot tall cockroach.  They then decided to enter the vault by dressing up as pizza delivery boys and snatched the hostage they wanted from the scene, trapping the vampires behind bullet-proof glass doors as they ran.  The enraged vampires proceeded to quite horribly annihilate the other hostages, which the magi saw on their PDA which tapped into the CCTV, and felt bad - so they used magic to set off the explosives, destroying the whole building, and causing the two buildings either side to fall over onto the wreckage.  THEN the nephandi decided to turn into a cockroach and sneak into the vault (now buried under three buildings' worth of rubble), while telling the monk through a mind link that she was a nephandi and she was going to get this ring, and he should totally join her.  He responded by reaching into her mind and pulling out all thoughts to do with the ring so that, by the time she had the safe deposit box open, she couldn't remember what she was doing there, and so just took the ring as a trinket, and traded it to the monk in return for his promise to help her end the world.

The final game at the con involved five people who wanted to make sure everything went off without a hitch, and so planned for - I kid you not - two and a half hours.  They researched, they planned, they schemed, they looked at the clock and saw they had 30 minutes to complete this caper, and they managed to kill the head police negotiator, get subsumed and trapped in a safe deposit box by the spirit of the vault, turn the water sprinkler system into holy water to melt the vampires to puddles of goo, and basically forget about the hostages.  The nephandi locked himself in the vault, found the ring, and attempted to call his nephandi brethren through the spirit realm to tell them he had the ring and to ask what to do next - but botched, and accidentally got speaking to a werewolf, who appeared, tore the nephandi to tiny bits, and took the ring somewhere safe.

One thing that always bemuses me about con games is how you can prepare something (like the whole subplot about the vampires wanting help against the technocracy) and the players never even come close to stumbling over it.  I mean, four games, and no-one thought to find out what the vampires wanted?  Two of the groups didn't even do any research on the vault complex, and so missed out on the cool video I had prepared.  Oh well, such is life.

37

RPGs / Re: The Most Scared You've Been at the Table

« on: December 12, 2010, 10:40:42 PM »

I can't really pinpoint a time where I've been scared as a player (although I played in a Werewolf LARP at a con once where the DM started by tying us up and blindfolding us... freaky much?).  But I have scared the bejeebies out of my players in a good old-fashioned D&D game.

The players had to cross a field.  That's all.  The field was full of goats.  Harmless, right?  But once they'd all climbed over the fence, they realised the goats had stopped their meandering, chewing on grass, and casual bleating.  They were all now staring directly at the party.  Everywhere they went in the field, the goats were staring, silently, watching their every move.  As they pressed on, a single goat stood in their path, and let out a low, gutteral "Baaaaaaaah."  The characters decided to circle around that goat.  That's when one of them got butted in the back.  No damage, just an angry butt.  The character turned around, and there's a goat, silently staring at him.  They keep moving, and another gets butted, followed by the deathly "Baaaaaaaaaaaah."  When they would turn around to see what butted them, they would get backbutted by a different goat.  But every time they turned to see the perpetrator, it would be standing there, silent, or occasionally baaahing with malice.  They broke and fled the field.  It never occurred to them to attack, or do anything really.  The idea of being attacked by goats was too overwhelming.

Good times.

38

RPGs / Re: HIGH SCHOOL ROLE PLAYING GAMES

« on: December 12, 2010, 10:25:22 PM »

I just finished running the same con game (2nd ed Mage) four times at a convention this weekend, and I had this exact problem in one of my sessions - with two extremely loud players shouting out what they wanted to do/thought about the situation/random crap - every time I finished a sentence.  The other three players looked a little flustered, and one (who was probably the best roleplayer I had that weekend) was quite quietly spoken, and found it hard to get himself heard.

Now, it just so happens I had this same problem a few years ago when I ran a superhero game based on  a system called Kill Puppies For Satan.  So I invented an object called "The Edge".  Basically, it was like an initiatve marker, and every time your character performed an action, you had to pass on the edge to the next player. And whenever a social situation occured in the game, whoever was holding the edge was the person who had first option to talk.  If they didn't want to talk to that person, they could just pass the edge onto whoever they thought should do the talking.  It worked pretty well, although it did make the players feel a little like children (that's what they get for acting like children).

Anyway, I ended up basically having a 'virtual edge' in my mind for this mage game - when I would announce something would happen, as soon as I'd finished, I'd point at one person and ask them specifically what they wanted to say about it.  Helped a little at least, and I hope made the players all feel a little less like primary school children.

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RPGs / Re: This is the quest that never ends

« on: December 12, 2010, 10:13:17 PM »

However, the only way you can slay a clockwork guardian is with the enchanted Switzer Pick, kept in the Grand Neutral Fortress on Mt. Deathice. You'll have to convince the Eternal Neutrals to break their vows to acquire the pick.

Of course, the Eternal Neutrals cannot break their vows without formal confirmation from the Watcher, so you must travel to the Library of Eternal History to get the Watcher to fill out oath rescindence form 11A(b)(iv), confirming that they can break their oath.

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RPGs / Re: Recurring Oddities

« on: December 09, 2010, 07:17:08 PM »

Ahhhh, yes, I have a similar experience when a player in one of my games uses the "speak with plant" spell.  It's incredible how little a plant knows, but how much they like to talk.  In my games, trees always speak slowly, so, so, slowly, and of course they don't see anything, they don't hear anything. It's just one of my little ways of frustrating the hell out of players.  Very often after doing it, they ask, "Why the hell would you even want to talk to a tree?"

And yes, they get similar responses from speak with dead, speak with animals - I never make it a pleasant experience.

This also makes me want to mention something I've just started doing in my games, but I will definitely do frm now on because of how well it has worked.  If you are familiar with the "augury" type spell, I've always wondered how to give responses that are in keeping with the feel of the spell.  You know that the spell description suggests that answers will be truthful but not blatant (things like "great risk holds great reward").  Well, recently in my new world, which has a pantheon of gods I'm quite happy with, one of my party's clerics performed the augury spell, and asked the question, "If we go into that sandstorm, will we be safe?"  Her cleric worships the goddess of creation, and it came to me that rather than just giving a bland spoken answer, I could have the god respond in keeping with its place in the pantheon - so her staff budded with shoots of green leaves, and they were left to interpret what that meant.  Later on, when they found a phoenix egg trapped under a large plate of glass, they were going to smash the glass and dig it out, and she asked the goddess, and there was an eclipse - and they took that as "touch and die".

Of course, the other cleric in the party worships the god of justice - so I'll need to be a little more creative, but I still love the idea, as it's given me a great way to deal with this spell and bring the whole spiritual aspect to life.

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RPGs / Re: Recurring Oddities

« on: December 08, 2010, 10:10:23 PM »

i should put kender in my D&D games

as target practice

fuck kender

Personally, I find kender have more personality than halflings.  Halflings are bland by comparison.

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RPGs / Re: Recurring Oddities

« on: December 02, 2010, 12:36:54 AM »

In pretty much any D&D game I run, regardless of world or setting, you will find a chain store of taverns which cater pretty much exactly to your average adventurer - crappy food and drink at reasonable prices, dirty but not scummy, the place where high and low society would go to find someone to do their work for them.  Every single time, they have a shingle out the front with a carving that looks almost but not quite entirely unlike a boar.  These establishments are called "The Dodgy Pig."  In any of my D&D games, a player can go to any reasonable sized town and say, "We go to The Dodgy Pig" and you'll find one - it's as pervasive as a fantasy McDonalds.

Just like in every D&D game I run - unless specifically requested otherwise - there are never halflings, there are always kender instead.  I just love the kleptomanic little rascals.

In every World of Darkness game I run, you will meet characters based on people I met at high school or university, and they almost always hold similar roles in my games as standard NPCs.  A ghoul who is pretending to be a mage?  That's Luke Bonser.  Merchant banker who collects gold bullion?  James Caldwell.

Also in WOD games, you can generally tell whether your characters are ever going to succeed, or the game is going to be me constantly foiling your schemes and the plot leading to your inevitable demise, based on who is Prime Minister of Australia.  If it's a Labor PM, you're in the clear.  If it's a Liberal PM, then weep into your drink, because the Technocracy/Sabbat/Camarilla/insert bad guys are going to ruin your day over and over again.  That is one my players have never cottoned onto, happily.

In my Mage games, people who work for 3 Mobile are always technocrats.  As is anyone with a bluetooth earpiece.

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RPGs / Re: Possibly offensive ideas to use in your horror games

« on: December 01, 2010, 11:48:33 PM »

I suppose it depends what you're going for.  To use the terminology that the RPPR guys used in their Halloween podcast, offensive stuff usually only goes so far as creating revulsion.  For that, I find you rarely have to go past looking at history to find plenty of things the modern person should find repulsive - whether it is rituals of initiation that require mutilation of various sorts, old punishments that make you cringe, cultural mores that have changed over time (the treatment of women and children and minorities has utterly transformed, for example), even the results of good old deprivation and poverty stood beside incredible wealth is pretty offensive.  Just take any number of historical practices and tweak them for setting, and bam - offensive.

If you're going for something really terror-inspiring though - that gives the characters a sense of lack of control, of the sense of lingering fear but not really jumping out and going "Blah!" at any given moment, I think the infection idea is a fantastic one.  Perhaps the next step is to start fiddling with the idea of contagious mental illnesses? When the group of characters can't agree on what they've seen, or what it means, and have to start asking which one is crazy, and what to do about it - I can see some terror being involved there.  Or perhaps rather than being contagious, the mental illness could be stigmatised and those with it could be treated harshly and horribly.  I can see that as being pretty offensive.  "You're on antidepressants?  You must be killed/neutered/lobotomised!"

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RPGs / Re: HIGH SCHOOL ROLE PLAYING GAMES

« on: December 01, 2010, 10:38:58 PM »

It was my high school group.  It was fun back in the day, but I expect better from players these days.  I would crucify a lawful good paladin who did such a thing these days.  No fast-talking out of genocide.  But I'd never say they weren't fun times.

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RPGs / Re: HIGH SCHOOL ROLE PLAYING GAMES

« on: November 29, 2010, 12:20:58 AM »

The paladin in that game really was the star of the show.  From using his high charisma to get out of awkward situations, to combining a ring of blinking and a sword of sharpness (several lost limbs in the party later...), to attempting to "break a door down quietly", to tribal genocide and mass deforestation, he always had a unique view on how to get things done.

Now THAT, on the other hand, sounds like crazy fun. Any chance we could hear more about the tribal genocide and/or mass deforestation?

Well, since you asked so nicely, how could I refuse?

Both instances actually took place at more or less the same time.  This was at the time that the paladin (his name was Gildor, by the way) flew his amethyst dragon to Oz, a desert land inhabited by independent tribes, and famous for the big rock, and a place called The Bush (basically, a parody of Australia). 

The paladin had it in mind that he would "evangelise" to these simple, tribal people, as a service to his goddess, and expose them to the awesome glory of Gond (yes, there is a god in Forgotten Realms called Gond.  This is a different, female, trickster Gond).  He had heard the stories about the big rock, and indeed it was quite impressively large, and red, and surrounded  by desert.  He could see from the back of his shimmering amethyst mount a few small groups of native inhabitants - after all, there was little blocking their vision for miles in every direction.  But how could he get the message out to them of the good news of Gond?  Then his cunning mind had a plan.

He looked around for a suitable writing implement.  The best thing he could find was a rather scraggly tree, the only one that he could see for miles in the sparseness of the sands.  He ordered his dragon to pluck it out, and to take it over to the big rock.  Ahh, he seemed to have the attention of the locals now who, upon seeing a dragon uproot the only bush in their entire realm (hence it's name, The Bush), which they considered sacred, were shocked.  Their shock became outrageous anger when the dragon proceeded, at it's master's command, to use the uprooted stump to carve into the only other landmark of their lands, the giant rock, "Worship Gond! Gildor was here" in giant letters across its face.

He then waited as the crowds of local tribal people came towards him, expecting to answer their questions about this new and mighty goddess they should worship.  Instead, it seemed that the pressing issue on their lips was the recent de-forestation of an entire continent, and the defacing of their two most sacred places - The Bush and The Rock.  In fact, they didn't want to talk so much as act.  With their simple, bone spears, they pointed and prodded and yelled and gesticulated wildly in their local tongues.  Of course, like all good missionaries, Gildor could not speak the native dialect, and so he just proceeded to nod and smile, before setting fire to the uprooted bush in case they were having separation issues.

This was the final straw for the natives, who began poking their spears at the armoured holy knight upon his dragon mount.  "Ooga!  Booga! Spear!" was pretty much how the paladin translated their angry ravings.  Growing sick and tired (and bored - patience was not a  virtue of his) of their idle threats, he decided to give them a show of what Gond's power was like, and replied, "Ooga!  Booga!  Breath Weapon!", indicating to his dragon that it should, as it were, fire into the crowd.  A sonic boom erupted, bodies flew, and as the dust settled, the entire nation of Oz stood depopulated - no more bush, no more tribesmen, and a defaced national landmark.

Dusting his hands, and announcing that his work here was done, he spurred his dragon to flight, and returned home, telling his party compatriots that he was successful in his mission - which was to punish the unbelievers of Oz.  That's what he set out to do, right?