Episode 45: Of Dice and Men

[Dogfish]

Listening to this reminded me of two things. One of them had happened earlier that week and the other is a 4th ed. game I was a player in that made my ears bleed.

In the last session of a friends Eberron campaign I came up with a way to meet a dragon-esque creature before it could do a fly-by attack. We had been travelling in a caravan, it was coming up behind us and I (being a paladin) had a mount riding ahead. Seeing it would take 2 rounds to get close enough I did two actions. First; I split the front axel of the caravan dropping it down to be like a ramp. Second action, ready to charge off of the ramp at the dragon.

This clearly caught my GM off guard but he's good at what he does and allowed it. As soon as I hit the thing I made my mount go back to the celestial plane so it didn't take falling damage and the GM ruled my lance had stuck into it and that I was desperately hanging on.

To do this I merely had to make an attack roll, a ride check (he later said he wanted to include a jump check for my mount but it had around +10 anyway) and several reflex saves to keep hanging on to the creature.

I also wanted to try and get on the things back and stear it's plummeting massive corpse toward the party, he put it down to reflex saves again but I failed them.

That's my example of someone dealing with player zanyness well.

Here's my example, similiar to the Star Wars super-guard story, from a 4th ed. D&D game.

Our party was trying to gain passage onto a boat in which we believed a hostage was being kept that we needed to rescue. The problem was there were 4 guards at the gang plank. My character had fairly high charisma so I try and go up and convince them I'm the new customs officer for the port and need to make a routine inspection. Failed my roll but they just brushed me off. Then the wizard comes up with the idea to use ghost sound to make it sound like someones saying inflammatory comments about the guards from behind some bushes. Two guards go looking. We threw a couple more ideas around, eventually looking like we were settling on simply hiring a boat, going abreast their ship and climbing up the side. This is when the GM intervenes, has a rogue-ish type NPC come along, whisper for us to follow him and ends up just immediately slaying the remaining two guards.

This game was pretty rail-roaded and that was just a beginning sign.

[ArtfulShrapnel]

I have played Shadowrun. Overly complex plans are the core gameplay experience.

In one case, we needed to sneak into a corp compound to physically access a computer bank. It was a training facility for mercenaries and such, so the hacker came up with the idea of getting us all interviews for whatever it was we did. That way we didn't have to really disguise our identities, and we were able to bring some of our basic gear in with us. We were permitted to bring our guns if we needed them, but no ammo. To solve this problem, my rigger/engineer retrofitted a missile as an ammo transport rocket, broke into a building across the street, and set it up to home in on our location when I hit a button. The mage had his own set of things he was putting together, and the hacker was busy setting data bombs all over the easily accessible nodes.

Setting all this shit up took an entire session. Watching it all explode into chaos took about 20 minutes.


Also, to expand on the anecdote. The GM was fairly new, but his old GM was exactly the same as he turned out. I stayed as long as I did because I was trying to coach him along, and help him improve. I was passing him good GMing resources, and attempting to work with him on issues that were messing up the game. At a certain point though, I decided it wasn't worth anymore of my time. He didn't listen and wasn't really concerned about the players' experience at a basic level. He didn't seem to get it.

As Tom put it, the game was for him.

[Tadanori Oyama]

I have played Shadowrun. Overly complex plans are the core gameplay experience.

True dat. I love it. It's like building a house of cards knowing that you'll knock it down soon and loving every moment of it.