Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[40 Year Old Boomer]

"I just did a time skip where the next session was everyone playing a rescuer sent to find the original party and once an original character was rescued, the rescuer died somehow in the next scene."

The impression I'm given is an evening is spent with brand new characters battling their way to the old characters, and then the new ones are pre planned to be arbitrarily killed by the GM.

Yes, I ran it by them and they loved it. Maybe I should have been clearer. If they didn't want that, we would have done something else. I was up front and told them they'd be one shot characters. The alternative would have been a mess in that the surviving members of the "original" party (4 out of 6 of the first original party ended up in orc cookpots at level 3) were all separated from one another while balls deep in enemy territory all because one player decided to try to swallow the idiot ball and choked upon it.

 

[MaxPayne]

Yes, I ran it by them and they loved it. Maybe I should have been clearer. If they didn't want that, we would have done something else. I was up front and told them they'd be one shot characters. The alternative would have been a mess in that the surviving members of the "original" party (4 out of 6 of the first original party ended up in orc cookpots at level 3) were all separated from one another while balls deep in enemy territory all because one player decided to try to swallow the idiot ball and choked upon it.

Well that's pretty reasonable. I've been in too many games where the GM just kills retainers artificially with no die rolls or clearly rigs defeat despite outstanding luck and tactics that it triggered my nerd ptsd and I assumed the worst.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

Well that's pretty reasonable. I've been in too many games where the GM just kills retainers artificially with no die rolls or clearly rigs defeat despite outstanding luck and tactics that it triggered my nerd ptsd and I assumed the worst.

That I can understand. I always run a fair table and if the players steamroll the encounter or come up with some crazy plan that fucks over whatever I had planned, I'm actually delighted. Unfortunately, that particular campaign ended a year later after one of their "brilliant" ideas backfired horribly and ended with all but one party member smeared across the landscape after trying to fight a bunch of frost giants, their thralls, two giant ice golems, and a storm giant sorcerer all at once. The monk did manage to escape with a large enough chunk of the bard that he could theoretically be resurrected, but the only high level cleric nearby was one of the aforementioned smears.

 

[MaxPayne]

That I can understand. I always run a fair table and if the players steamroll the encounter or come up with some crazy plan that fucks over whatever I had planned, I'm actually delighted. Unfortunately, that particular campaign ended a year later after one of their "brilliant" ideas backfired horribly and ended with all but one party member smeared across the landscape after trying to fight a bunch of frost giants, their thralls, two giant ice golems, and a storm giant sorcerer all at once. The monk did manage to escape with a large enough chunk of the bard that he could theoretically be resurrected, but the only high level cleric nearby was one of the aforementioned smears.

Brutal but pretty epic, and at least they avoided a complete TPK. If the bard ends up getting raised he'll have some epic tales/songs about the the fallen party

 

[MaxPayne]

The topic of player agency brings me back to this time I played an NWOD changeling game where NPCs would fill us with aggravated damage if we talked down to them or did their quests wrong. No dice rolls or initiative you just had one health box left. We started getting very drunk each session and ended the game by stealing a plane and "nine elevening" the antagonist hunters headquarters. We managed to escape the stolen plane as it went into the building and then we're surrounded by a different chapter of hunters that captured us. No dice rolls. The pissed off GM said we were torturered forever in their labs. The end.

In another WOD game with a different GM I spent a bunch of merits at character creation on having maximum retainers. We showed up at an old subway tunnel taped off, surrounded by vans, and guarded by guys in cleaner jumpsuits. I had my retainers go forward to talk to them as a distraction while I snuck around and the ref just says the cleaners pull out AK47s and kill all your henchmen. No dice rolled. The game fizzled out not too long after.

I've had some shit GMs

 

[AnOminous]

Its fucking hilarious, heres the tagline-Fish people are, first and foremost people, you bigot.

0HP Lovecraft is a god. Possibly an eldritch god.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

0HP Lovecraft is a god. Possibly an eldritch god.

Meh, aside from The Gig Economy (which is amazing) and two or three of his short stories, he's not that great. God-Shaped Hole is up its own ass (pun not intended) with vulgarity for its own sake, and the gimmick in Don't Make Me Think makes the whole thing almost unreadable. And that's not getting into the fact that the man is an unironic BAPist.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

The Laundry Files RPG always amused me for having an entire set of mechanics for fighting it out with the Laundry bureaucracy for your requisitions.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Meh, aside from The Gig Economy (which is amazing) and two or three of his short stories, he's not that great. God-Shaped Hole is up its own ass (pun not intended) with vulgarity for its own sake, and the gimmick in Don't Make Me Think makes the whole thing almost unreadable. And that's not getting into the fact that the man is an unironic BAPist.

Ehh I really enjoyed DMMT once you get over the hump the emojis really add a ton to the story.

 

[A Useless Fish]

"ALONG THE ROAD TO EVERYWHERE is a post-apocalyptic roadtrip tabletop role-playing game. It sets the aesthetics and ideals of the Beatnik and Hippie movements of the mid 20th century against the backdrop of a vast, magical wasteland. It’s relatively low-key and role-play focused, dealing with ideas of community and regrowth. Part of the idea is to tell the stories that happen between larger stories—between dots on the map."

Along the Road to Everywhere.pdf

drive.google.com

Looking at the above, you wouldn't think a game with a setting like this, and an attitude like that of the pretentious faggots that wrote it, would be any fun.

I thought that, but when one of the guys in my Wednesday group suggested we try it as a break in our Greek Myths campaign (I am proud to the point of hubris for the way it’s going: I might give a retelling at some point, if only for my own records), since a couple of the guys would absent for a couple of weeks due to Real Life, and we didn't want anyone missing anything. I read the intro and felt disgusted with the attitudes of the people who made this, but I wasn’t running the one-shot, so whatever. I picked the Dreamer Class, and since I couldn’t imagine a person in this setting, I used my buddy’s lack of anime-knowledge to play as Shinji Ikari. The other guys there though did know a thing or two. They knew at once who he was.

Fuck me, the session was fun. There were car crashes, cannibalism (Shinji cooked a guy into bacon strips), cults, and a fantastic music score from one of the other PCs who had selected a Class that uses a magic mixtape.

At the end of it all, I found out something that made me laugh: I was the only person who read a word of the introduction, the philosophy of the game, or even any of the fiction. Nobody in my group gave a shit. They just wanted to try a road trip game with wacky powers. It went so well, in fact, that we did something I have never tried before.

We did a round-robin. The game would continue, but every weekly session would be DM-ed by a different person in the group (there are five of us). Mixtape would run the next, and then it was my turn, and then our player who has actual ADHD, and last it was our buddy who had never run a game before in his life, but wanted to prove he could do it since he’s doing Game Design in college, and wanted to some practical XP.

Spoiler: The Round Robin or, The Road to Fucking Madness

Mixtape’s game was incredible. It was a legit roadtrip where we met all kinds of weird characters (a man who was made of hats, a stand-up bunny made of candy etc,), and killed and ate about half of them. He actually integrated The End of Evangelion into the Plot, and established that our world was post 3rd Impact! XD

My session, I decided to go full batshit. I had read The Third Policeman, and At Swim-Two-Birds by Flannery O’Connor, recently. The dude’s a fucking’ nutcase. My session involved The Party getting kidnapped by Shinji, who dumped them off in the valley where The Third Policeman takes place. They spent the session trapped in a world of another Dreamer, who was a shitty writer holding his characters hostage while forcing them all to have weird sex scenes with sentient bicycles. I actually worked on giving them this monologue. My Irish accent is apparently very bad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQK_gPv8E7U

They were only able to escape when they led an army of Zombies and Red Indians in an epic battle against townspeople and bicycles. There was a bike-nado. A dude got eaten by the moon. The Party managed to get the three magic writing implements scattered around the valley, which they needed to defeat The Author (who was indestructible due to being God, here). This involved them writing a convoluted story about him being beaten half to death by an EVA made of bicycles, which then threw him into space!

ADHD guy’s was bizarre, but awesome. He swore after I went all I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream on them, that he was gonna kill Shinji. I told him to fucking do it, and made a back-up. Everyone was back in the car after their kidnapping with Shinji. We had our daredevil drive like a maniac along a cliff edge until we found a town which was having its weekly jet-pack explosion festival. This led to a series of strange events which culminated in island hopping, evading a death fog, and then catching a magic goldfish which offered us a wish in exchange for its life.

Before anyone else could react, Mixtape wished the magic fish would kill Shinji.

It leapt at him, but here’s the thing about Dreamers: they have a power that lets them alter reality so it resembles that of a dream. Physic am my bitch, in other words. Shinji exploded into an eldritch abomination made of mouths and eyes as the fish grew to the size of Ramiel and tried to eat him. Shinji tried to eat it back. ADHD ruled that after they both took off into space to try and smash each other into stars that they were both out of play, having become an Ying-Yang of Evil and Good at permanent War with one another. I said this was fine, and had my new character step from around a corner: Dom Pedro II, The Emperor of Brazil.

We carried on in an underwater train, had a chat with the Goddess of the Oceans, and somehow talked her into opening McDonalds, and then a mall. By doing this, we had brought free trade and Capitalism back into the world! Was that the objective? ADHD couldn’t remember, and said fuck it. Then we all got drunk in a nearby bar and kicked a bunch of locals in the nuts.

Newbie was the last. It turns out he’s a very talented motherfucker, and has the potential to be a great DM. The Party was caught up in a new End Time, where the whole world was being devoured by dark, pitiless void. We fled into a bucket (running-gag) where we found a set of doors that led us around previous parts of our completely insane storyline. Newbie loves Omori, and it showed. We had to gather items from a literal bucket list while meeting and talking with NPCs and some new weirdos we had met previously. We discovered that God, after millennia of observing the wreck humanity had made of His world, was deleting fucking everything so He could start again. That would include deleting us.

Fuck that shit, said we! Let’s go kill God!

Gathering some former friends, characters from our first D&D game, and all of ADHD’s previous character (another running gag was his characters kept wandering off and getting lost – this resulted in the guy with serious concentration problems trying to run 3 very different characters with super powers), as well as a chicken named Steve, we grabbed the sun, cracked it open, and went inside the void to face God.

Turns out God is Evil. He also has a name.

Shinji Ikari.

The Boss fight was fucking insane, and awesome. Everyone had to use their wacky powers in tandem while Shinji used his, in a dark world made of flesh. I was asked to do my Shinji voice, in-between pretending to be a Brazilian Emperor with a Brooklyn accent. Eventually we beat Shinji to a pulp, while Mixtape went on this long, curse-filled monologue about how much he fucking hated him. He then had to repeat it all because his Discord cut out.

Eventually, after we had reduced Shinji to a quivering, crying little bitch we beat him to death with some shovels. While doing this we made sure to tell him over and over again that he was a little bitch, and that nobody liked him.

We had won! God was dead! Yay!

Turns out God is necessary to the universe existing! Whoops!

Reality promptly exploded.

We all then eventually woke up, as our characters were all in a hospital. Turns out a bunch of young men, and an unhinged old man who thought he was the Emperor of Brazil had been involved in an elaborate coma-fantasy which they had all shared. The last scene involved us all being a bit freaked out. Eventually we were all brought into speak to a doctor, who was…

And that was it. That was the end of our round-robin. Newbie did a stellar job, and this even leads into his own plans for DMing for us. I said he loves Omori, so he wants to experiment with a game much like the ending of his one-shot, where the PCs alternate between real-life characters, and those who exist together in a shared dream world. I am excited for it (and repsring my role as a crazy man who thinks he’s a Brazilian Emperor), because he clearly has the talent and dedication to pull it off. Before that though, we have to finish my Greek Myths game, and then Mixtape’s planned robot-zombie apocalype game, and our hippy-friend’s space adventure epic.

I met these total strangers nearly two years ago on Roll20. There’s five of us, and we all share an ambition to be great DMs. I cannot believe how lucky I was. I feel like I won the lottery.

What’s the moral of this story?

It doesn’t matter how faggy or pretentious the people behind a game system are. They can’t make you do shit. With the right group, there’s no limit to your fun!

Also, has anyone else here ever tried to do a round-robin game of an RPG? How did yours go? Was it anywhere near as batshit insane as my experience?

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

Why do you have three line breaks between each sentence?

 

[The Demon Pimp of Razgriz]

The main issue with alignment is that, barring some mental issue, no one is evil but acting out of self interest for either short term or long term. Burning orphanages should only be done if you get paid/kill future Hitler.

Oh, there are most definitely evil people in the world. Serial Killers and sociopaths/psychopaths are a thing. The Nazis were a thing. People can be capable of great acts of consistent evil and cruelty. Its true that most people aren't card-carrying villains who go around openly proclaiming their villainy. Most people who do evil try to justify it in some way or make excuses for it. But alignment isn't supposed to be based on how someone perceives themselves.

 

[King Dead]

Update from this week's session: thanks to some really good rolls on our part (and really bad rolls on the DM's part), we managed to kill the sea hags. I had really shit rolls to stop being scared, so my bard got knocked down for a bit of the fight, but it worked out in the end.

As it happens, my DM is not actively trying to wipe us over and over. After the fact, he told me what his plans initially were for the encounter: if they'd been higher in the initiative order, the hags would have put us all to sleep and plucked the eye of one of our guides to do hag things with, and would have left us alone afterward. But we surprised him by actually killing them off, so that worked too.

Amusingly, my friend wanted to stop playing his sorcerer and switch to his backup wizard, so he had him run up to one of the hags and try throttling her. Somehow, this didn't kill him despite his whopping 8 HP. My bard (who was his friend and traveling companion in our backstories) was excessively confused by this course of action. Later that day, we came across an ankylosaur just minding its own business, and the sorcerer went up to it and tried to pet it. He rolled a 19 on the Animal Handling check, which was just one shy of the DC required to pass, and it proceeded to hit him with its tail for 17 damage. Instakill.

My bard is now traumatized, but on the bright side, he also has increased motivation to stop the Death Curse so he can bring his friend back.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

Ehh I really enjoyed DMMT once you get over the hump the emojis really add a ton to the story.

I couldn't get past the hump myself. I get why it's there, but I just find it insurmountable. I can only tolerate the prose in short bursts. In point of fact, I still haven't finished it. By the same token, I find the vulgarity of God-Shaped Hole (which I have finished) similarly disagreeable, albeit for very different reasons. I fully understand the premise and the themes, but ZHP dives into them with, dare I say it, entirely too much gusto.

 

[ZMOT]

Why do you have three line breaks between each sentence?

kiwifarms version of reddit spacing

formatting quirk from copy&paste does that when posting has a hissy fit

Additionally, the setting is primarily going to be in/around a major city; given the modern-day time period, that means we're also going to be putting a LOT of wokeshit stuff into the game. For instance; dealing with a lack of policing, guns and supplies being risky and difficult to find, etc. It's certainly interesting, seeing how all the shit in the modern day would end up affecting a cosmic horror story.

you could also crib stuff from the secret world mmo, pretty sure someone wrote an unofficial splat at some point since the setting is just too ripe not to.

it starts with someone setting up a black goo bomb in a tokio subway turning everyone into cosmic horror zombies, and that's just the first 5 minutes.

The law and chaos element goes to methodology, though, which is somewhat different. Also there's a difference between neutral and true neutral (although almost nobody actually legitimately plays true neutral right). It's just a shortcut for general temperament. Especially in games where characters die frequently, there's not much point in developing a detailed background for a character (like the system in Traveler) when they're as likely as not going to die in the next couple hours of play.

Even in a game with character longevity, you can either chuck the alignment system entirely or just use it as a starting point if characters are going to last long enough to need development.

I've looked a bit more into it, and paizo's approach goes even further than I expected.

in pf2 deities have edicts and anathema, for example golarion's goddess of troons: https://2e.aonprd.com/Deities.aspx?ID=11

Edicts
bring power to outcasts and the downtrodden, indoctrinate children in Lamashtu’s teachings, make the beautiful monstrous, reveal the corruption and flaws in all things

Anathema
attempt to treat a mental illness or deformity, provide succor to Lamashtu’s enemies

at first I assumed they gonna apply that on a more macro scale for an adventure etc, as in "start shit in absolom, see what happens" etc.
turns out apparently every character now sets them for themselves at char creation, so instead of "pick one of those 9 boxes and interpret it however works best for you" it's now setting an outlined concept that makes it clear for everybody how a character is supposed to behave, in the same way it already applies to clerics and champions.
also a nice way to filter more tards with a list like that, ngl.

dunno what to make of it yet, but I think I'm gonna like it. and I'm pretty sure I saw that idea before, can't remember which system it was tho.

paizo might gonna apply effects to it from the get go, but I guess they gonna leave it open (since it would be hard to put in RAW) and just let the GM decide what happens or how it affects the character. I can already hear people complaining about that tho just like aid and recall knowledge...

for completion's sake, here's what happens if lamashtu likes you or you piss her off:

Spoiler

Minor Boon:
Lamashtu’s touch mutates a part of your body. You gain either an unarmed Strike that deals 1d6 damage or one that deals 1d4 damage and has the finesse and agile traits. Whether the attack deals bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing damage depends on the mutation. If the unarmed Strike replaces a limb, you can still use the mutated limb for its original functions. Lamashtu chooses the form and function of your mutation.

Moderate Boon:
You spread Lamashtu’s nightmares everywhere you go. You can cast confusion once per day as an divine innate spell.

Major Boon:
Lamashtu uses your body to birth a new monster, regardless of your gender. Once per day, you can spend 1 minute to birth a monster determined by the GM, which rips its way from your belly. The monster’s level is up to your level and it does as it pleases, following Lamashtu’s will, though it doesn’t attack you unless you have lost her favor. You are drained 3 from the ordeal.

Minor Curse:
Horrid visions torment your mind, overlaying reality at inopportune times. You treat everything around you as if it was concealed.

Moderate Curse:
Lamashtu marks you as prey. Any creature with imprecise or better scent can smell you from 100 × the usual range of their scent and can’t shake the feeling that you smell like prey, so they might attack you even if they would normally avoid attacking creatures of your ancestry. This smell doesn’t magically compel their action, and the scent of prey doesn’t overcome a deeper bond such as that with an animal companion.

Major Curse:
Your dreams are an unending stream of nightmares. You need 16 hours of rest to try to get enough sleep to recover resources in daily preparation that normally require an 8-hour rest, and even then, you must succeed at a DC 15 flat check to do so, and you are still fatigued on a successful check.

 

[2LtMashengo]

Major Boon:
Lamashtu uses your body to birth a new monster, regardless of your gender. Once per day, you can spend 1 minute to birth a monster determined by the GM, which rips its way from your belly. The monster’s level is up to your level and it does as it pleases, following Lamashtu’s will, though it doesn’t attack you unless you have lost her favor. You are drained 3 from the ordeal.

That sounds kind of shit. Her divine gift monster in 1e followed your orders at least, even if it died after a week or so.

 

[RA-5C Vigilante]

I got Pathfinder Kingmaker on sale because I wanted to try it out, and I looked into the lore before playing.

As someone who barely knows anything about Pathfinder, I have to say that Andoran is the gayest, most pathetic pandering faction I have ever seen in an RPG. "They're like medieval-era colonial America, but they akshully HATE slavery, and they have a black president and a woman president, and they run around freeing slaves, and they also love freedom, and they (muffled dick-slurping noises).

I'm a lame cunt who likes generic medieval fantasy settings, so throwing America-expies already triggers my gag reflex, but the fact they so obviously compensate for "evil" IRL history just seems so fucking retarded. And the fact most of the world is still mostly medieval or early renaissance, their late 18th-early 19th century clothing style with high-collars and tricorns drives my autism up a wall.

I love Colonial and early American history, so it's not a bad idea, it's just why is it in a world like fucking Pathfinder?

 

[2LtMashengo]

their late 18th-early 19th century clothing style with high-collars and tricorns drives my autism up a wall.

I love Colonial and early American history, so it's not a bad idea, it's just why is it in a world like fucking Pathfinder?

The kitchen sink aspect of Golarion really ruins it in some ways. If you thought their style of dress was bad, you should see what they put in Ustalav.
Running Strange Aeons it feels wrong having a medieval party run around a city where the locals dress like we're playing CoC.

 

[Agent of Z.O.G.]

The kitchen sink aspect of Golarion really ruins it in some ways. If you thought their style of dress was bad, you should see what they put in Ustalav.
Running Strange Aeons it feels wrong having a medieval party run around a city where the locals dress like we're playing CoC.
View attachment 5104008

Lovecraft and Howard were pals so it's totally cool to bring your conanesque barbarian(Oh wait, Pathfinder 1, I mean conanesque caster) to mingle with the steampunks.

Speaking of Hastur, I recently realized Delta Green's grand Impossible Landscapes campaign has the same "gameplay" design as Undertale's nice route.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

Keep us kiwifarts updated nonetheless.

Surprise, surprise, they didn't show up. A great time was had by everyone else.

And that's your mistake. Quit being a cuck & don't let pronoun retards come to your gaming session. You are creating your own problems.

Nah, I believe really strongly in giving everyone a chance at a table, even a dangerhair they/them (actual mtf trannies, who ruin absolutely everything, are an exception, as I consider them to all be sexual predators who like forcing people to participate in their humiliation "kink").

I've gone to the trouble of setting up a physical space in which real humans can interact with each other, not some Discord bullshit, because I want to leave the internet for a while. If you automatically exclude every person who is not politically in step with you, you are just recreating the hugbox/echo chamber group dynamics that inevitably fuck up online communities on sites like Reddit and Twitter and give their users adult onset autism. Yes, there is a risk, but that's how real life is sometimes.