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- Nov 4, 2020
Give them a group of reliable contractors that eventually eclipse the party in power and influence and reap all the benefits of the work. Then have them boss the PCs around.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
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- Aug 17, 2022
Probably got mentioned somewhere else, but:
@Adam and Dice Scum have finally reviewed (part of) Coyote & Crow! Expect Part 2 possibly next week!
@Adam and Dice Scum have finally reviewed (part of) Coyote & Crow! Expect Part 2 possibly next week!
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I've had pre-written adventures where the party instead just ignored it, wandered off, and did completely different stuff entirely. My serious campaigns generally had a good amount of world-building done, though. I had hundreds of index cards for NPCs and other things, with descriptions of their personalities, motivations, goals, their basic stats, etc. even for places they were never intended to go, so there was always something to do, although it became a bit emergent at that point.
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- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
If I ever manage to fit "shard of the actual Devil" into my campaign his rules will boil down to "roll a d6, check table for how badly he fucks you up and subtract the same number from his power pool. to see if the shard collapses in on itself".
They'll have a chance to toss a grenade at the summoning circle before that happens though,
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
In short, in their attempt to pretend they are making a society free from the white man, they reinvent a crappier greek city state with the worst of Roman Republicanism and the fucking mafia. Even with their efforts to lie about diversity they cannot escape or reference actual native city states or customs if they could try.
Also their setting literally cannot work the way they want to on any level whatsoever; six hundred years will not get you to sci-fantasy starting from a stone and early copper age society; the Purepeche only would rediscover the secret of bronze (it happened once or twice before but was lost due to a lot of reasons) like around the same time the Spanish came, maybe like a century before. The only thing we learned is how to count and how you'd invent the base 12 system. And off stream Cahokia was much more awesome than these clowns ever could have described them. Let me show you:
A reconstruction of Cahokia the city. At its peak it actually was larger than several medieval cities, such as London and even Paris.
A take on a soldier the Cahokians fielded, as it was documented there was a proto-army akin to other early Bronze era states. They used wooden armor that their descendants suchs as the Chickasaw, Caddo, and Choctaw partially can recall.
Unironically the natives north of Mesoamerica suffered their own version of a Bronze Age collapse like a century before the diseases flooded in via contact with Spain and Portugal. When the settlers came in, they were mostly dealing with a post apocalyptic society when we're talking about the Mississippi basin.
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- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Daily reminder that 100 years after Cortez, the population of central america had only declined by about 10%. It was not some massive black plague kill-off, it was a reduction in birth rates over time.
One thing I've found that helps with this I've found is just telling the party
"Look this is a module, I'm running a module because I think it'll be fun and it reduces the work I've got to do. I'm not going to railroad you but you do need to stay mildly on target. If I'm putting you on a ship and there's a sea map with 20 islands, don't decide to become farmers."
This sort of thing is incompatible with "durable heroes". The consequences for selling someone out should be bloody vengeance as the person they sold out, or their allies, comes to take revenge or silence the squealers.
Have the faction they are sucking up to pawn-sacrifice them against another faction. The beaten,bloodied survivors should have incentive to start trying to take them down.
> got me wondering if there's just something deeply wrong with them and our education system is just producing people whose only way of thinking is to work via authority and others with no self-reliance whatsoever.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. The reality is much worse.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I fairly often played this kind of character in one-off situations where I'd be playing a GM's foil that would otherwise have been an NPC. And yes, they usually did get killed, most often by the party. I'd generally play them as obnoxiously as possible since part of the challenge was that you actually needed this asshole for some reason, and killing him prematurely would close off the route to victory.
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- Nov 4, 2017
I told you niggers. SJ games is on the bad side of the wire.
They went woke, tranny-sucking, and TDS a while ago.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Goddammit. I can't believe these people of all the game companies turned into troonsuckers.
RIP in piss.
I will still remember them as the company that kicked the Secret Service's ass in court.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Post where I go over them losing their shit about Roe v Wade.
They shill for woke, and do merch runs to fund raise for woke, and ban you from the company forum if you don't like it. Steve Jackson hates you now, sadly.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Sure, it will. Just gotta get conquered by white people first.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Bronze was really the inception of civilization, because it needed copper and tin, which generally didn't occur in close proximity to each other, but was vastly superior to just copper.
So there was a huge incentive for civilizations who had either of the two but not the other to cooperate with each other. They could trade copper and tin and then both of them would have bronze. They could then use this technological superiority to beat the shit out of the ape civilizations that couldn't cooperate enough to get these metals together.
Well, that and beer.
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
The weird player didn't show up because I forgot to tell him that we were meeting this week, but we did have a couple of new players, father and son. The son was clearly an actual autist but he was fun and matched the energy of the group. His character disguised himself as a guard, walked into a smithy, and pretended to be inspecting the swords before bum-rushing the spellcaster overseeing the works and shoving her into a pool of molten iron - not fun for an elf!
The dad seemed to be a little sharp with his son, chastizing him for being detailed when describing his attacks and making too many TV references, which was baffling to me since the session started with a nearly half hour conversation about TV shows and movies we've watched recently. Maybe he had to nip some spergy behavior in the bud before it spiralled out of control, I dunno.
The autist player I mentioned above had the really great idea to grab a bunch of iron arrowheads out of a crate and throw them in the face of an elf who was chasing him. I improvised a satisfactory solution (six attacks with a d16 vs the enemy's 15 AC - one actually hit and burned the guy's face).
The dad seemed to be a little sharp with his son, chastizing him for being detailed when describing his attacks and making too many TV references, which was baffling to me since the session started with a nearly half hour conversation about TV shows and movies we've watched recently. Maybe he had to nip some spergy behavior in the bud before it spiralled out of control, I dunno.
My rule is that you can go anywhere and do anything you want, but if you want to push things way off course you're going to have to deal with glitches in the Matrix - inconsistent rulings and delays - as I rummage through the rule book or just announce that I'm winging something and will come up with the "right" answer before the next session.
The autist player I mentioned above had the really great idea to grab a bunch of iron arrowheads out of a crate and throw them in the face of an elf who was chasing him. I improvised a satisfactory solution (six attacks with a d16 vs the enemy's 15 AC - one actually hit and burned the guy's face).
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I would always have modules waiting if they'd go get them. And at least a few of them had stuff in them that would come get you if you tried just ignoring them. This always seemed to happen.
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- Dec 13, 2022
Were you playing at home? This group meets at a FLGS and I only have so much room in the bookbag I use to carry my gaming stuff to the store in.
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- Aug 23, 2018
My rule for modules is half of that. I do what @Ghostse does, saying that "the adventure is X" and giving them freedom to do whatever they want provided it's within the adventure parameters.
I've had players try to do the "too clever too boring" DM trolling strategy and both times they regretted it.
The first was during a horror game where they tried "hurr durr just phone the police and wait" strategy only to find themselves unable to give accurate directions, and noticing the room they were in was a dead end. They quickly realised just hiding here was going to be a death sentence and so decided to call the police AND escape under their own initiative. The second was during a spy game where they decided to abandon the mission with minimal objectives instead of trying to catch the villain. I let them do it, but the players complained that the ending was abrupt and anti-climactic. I think they learned that day that it was their own fun they were sabotaging.
On the topic of having modules at the ready. While not exactly what you're refering to, I do have two modules in my back pocket ready to go should a game be required short notice. The B/x DnD adventure Treasure Hunt (N4), and a Savage Worlds adventure called Mutator. Both are fairly system neutral and are simple enough to run from memory, though they don't plug into existing campaigns well.
Treasure Hunt has the PCs as slaves shipwrecked on an island. There are a small number of locations and chances are the PCs will only visit some of them. There's also a built in timer in the form of the island sinking. Mutator has the PCs kidnapped and put into the hospital from Silent Hill. It's just some wards and hallways with monsters and a mad scientist at the end. I don't even need monster stats as I can make them up on the fly, or they're widely available online.
I've had players try to do the "too clever too boring" DM trolling strategy and both times they regretted it.
The first was during a horror game where they tried "hurr durr just phone the police and wait" strategy only to find themselves unable to give accurate directions, and noticing the room they were in was a dead end. They quickly realised just hiding here was going to be a death sentence and so decided to call the police AND escape under their own initiative. The second was during a spy game where they decided to abandon the mission with minimal objectives instead of trying to catch the villain. I let them do it, but the players complained that the ending was abrupt and anti-climactic. I think they learned that day that it was their own fun they were sabotaging.
On the topic of having modules at the ready. While not exactly what you're refering to, I do have two modules in my back pocket ready to go should a game be required short notice. The B/x DnD adventure Treasure Hunt (N4), and a Savage Worlds adventure called Mutator. Both are fairly system neutral and are simple enough to run from memory, though they don't plug into existing campaigns well.
Treasure Hunt has the PCs as slaves shipwrecked on an island. There are a small number of locations and chances are the PCs will only visit some of them. There's also a built in timer in the form of the island sinking. Mutator has the PCs kidnapped and put into the hospital from Silent Hill. It's just some wards and hallways with monsters and a mad scientist at the end. I don't even need monster stats as I can make them up on the fly, or they're widely available online.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Most of my games were at home with actual irl friends. As were the ones at college. There was also a small but fairly active local community of players, so I almost always was playing with people I already knew.
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
So many people here are slaves of 5e that it would be impossible to set up an ongoing game only with people I know.
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2018
As I like to state, if your nonstandard tactic amuses me or makes good sense, I will probably let you try it.
And if it works, you will be rewarded, because I like it when people come up with original solutions.