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- Dec 13, 2022
At the last game I ran, me and the players stopped playing for at least five minutes to see if there were any suspicious cleric spells that Jesus didn't cast (speak to the dead was the only one iirc).
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
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At the last game I ran, me and the players stopped playing for at least five minutes to see if there were any suspicious cleric spells that Jesus didn't cast (speak to the dead was the only one iirc).
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- Nov 4, 2017
Wow. I just can't believe people had a half-page discussion exploring a tangent about that isn't the Gooner Beholder's Gay Ray or how GWS has once again shit on fans or how big of a fuckfest Trench Crusade is. Big yikes, how can we allow the thread to get ruined like this. r/atheism MODS?!
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- Nov 4, 2020
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Oh man. I have this assignment in class, a 2000-word essay.
"You need to address the following in your essay:
> A project made by people who are incompetent and refuse to implement a solid business plan
> How it was further ruined by meddling of additional parties
> The project failing to have a clear sense of vision and no hope of delivering on its premise
> Other issues about how it will fail to unseat the current dominant company in the industry
> Any easily forseen problems the project will have due to incompetent and unprofessional behavior (delivery, time lines, driving off potential customers)
> Don't forget to carry water for them fluffing Muslims."
But how the fuck will I ever stretch that topic to over 2000 words?
"You need to address the following in your essay:
> A project made by people who are incompetent and refuse to implement a solid business plan
> How it was further ruined by meddling of additional parties
> The project failing to have a clear sense of vision and no hope of delivering on its premise
> Other issues about how it will fail to unseat the current dominant company in the industry
> Any easily forseen problems the project will have due to incompetent and unprofessional behavior (delivery, time lines, driving off potential customers)
> Don't forget to carry water for them fluffing Muslims."
But how the fuck will I ever stretch that topic to over 2000 words?
Jackpot.
Tom Bombodildo
kiwifarms.net
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- Mar 22, 2016
Too late to really join in the conversation, but all my theology and philosophy classes (at a Catholic institution) referred to the author of Corpus Dionysiacum as Pseudo-Dionysus to distinguish him from the actual St. Dionysus the Areopagite. He was (most likely) a Greek Christian monk of the late 5th to early 6th century. There's a number of reasons it's near impossible for the Corpus to have been written by the historical St. Dionysus and I don't think any learning institution of any denomination says as such nowadays.
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- Nov 4, 2020
Nah, continue with the derail. Everybody debating theology is posting on a higher level than I am and providing a bigger contribution to this thread than I ever have.
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- May 25, 2024
Personally I would prefer it be kept to Deep Thoughts especially if people are going to start making value judgements about the correctness or otherwise of the theological content of these books.
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- Dec 28, 2014
I had a couple AD&D scenarios derailed by religious sperging, but it wasn't arguing, it was swinging swords at each other.
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- Jan 18, 2017
If you've run Horror on the Orient Express or Masks of Nyarlathotep, is it just expected that investigators will have to go through multiple characters throughout those mega-campaigns or are they developed to not totally wreck them immediately? It seems like there are plenty of opportunities from what I've read of them for PCs to get wrecked early and often in them so I'd be curious if it's like an AD&D thing where you're expected to go through PCs and not get overly attached.
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- Dec 28, 2014
I have done Masks and there were two total party wipes and multiple partial party wipes. That was a definitely brutal one. I loved how it had actual physical props though. It added to the sense of realism.
(They never sent the entire organization into one of the many scenarios there were in that campaign.)
They won, eventually, but it was definitely a massively awful campaign that made everyone say "let's play anything but Call of Cthulhu now."
This is definitely a thing but there was a much-beloved character who died to an incredibly stupid trap after having survived years of this campaign where even I was shattered and all the players were and I just ended the session immediately so we could process it.
I don't really think you can do an RPG if there's nothing on the table emotionally.
Other than maybe tabletop wargames which tend to be pretty unemotional, like the old Avalon Hill games.
Paradox Mystic
kiwifarms.net
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- Oct 19, 2024
There is a youtube group called "Into the Darkness" that does a lot of Call of Cthulhu campaigns and similar games like Mothership and Kult. They did a playthrough of some of Horror on the Orient Express, and while I think most people had pretty low character death counts there was one guy who had bad luck so he was on his fifth or sixth character. I think at some point they made it a running joke where it was a family that kept sending new family members to try to avenge the deaths of the others.
I've seen people get torn up emotionally because of what happened to the characters in the long term like characters who became somewhat iconic dying.
On the flip side I've seen people who change their characters basically once a month then they act shocked when there is a feeling of lack of investment because other players don't want to spend their time trying to build something with a character that will vanish on a whim. They also get passive aggressive because storytellers won't give their characters roles that require responsibility and long-term investment ect.
Tom Bombodildo
kiwifarms.net
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- Mar 22, 2016
This is the biggest out-of-character/player conflict I've seen at tables. Sort of a culture shock between high-death and low-death tables. Low-death players and GM trying to drag a high-death player kicking and screaming into giving a shit about the story and roleplaying or the high-death player just doing deliberately dumb things that will get them killed when everybody else at the table doesn't actually want to derail the story to introduce and absorb a new character into the party.
Those examples are a bit one-sided; I'm sure a low-death player at a primarily high-death table is frustrating too. But being a low-death player and GM, that really seems to be where friction occurs.
Paradox Mystic
kiwifarms.net
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- Oct 19, 2024
It's part of where communication and reading the room helps. I've been on different sides of it cringing because there was too little difficulty and cringing when they are too difficult. I've seen players that just want their characters to sit on the sidelines and chat aka what some people call campfire or coffeeshop rp, and I've seen other people that make more proactive characters that want to massively change the setting for better or worse and gamble recklessly
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- Dec 28, 2014
I get this concept to some degree, but I usually tried to play CoC as a high-death table but where the party did everything possible to make it as low-death as possible. Someone always died, sometimes the entire party, but in most campaigns they literally saved the world by doing it.
But stuff like this could get dark to the point nobody wanted to play it, and then we'd go into something like Stormbringer, also a high-death game, but play it for laughs instead. Every PC was a cartoonishly evil villain, there were throwaway NPCs for muscle, and then at the end of every session, once they got the MacGuffin, everyone tried to kill each other.
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- Sep 3, 2014
Oh fuck these players in particular. I had to deal with one of these fuckers the first time I ever GMed and that shit was insufferable. He'd whine and demand to change whenever his character faced any form of hardship, which due to him wanting to do things out of his niche, was usually once every couple sessions.
I understood the first time, since he was new and the other That Guy forced him to play a combat character. I became a lot less understanding when the fucker demanded to swap back after his talking character turned out to not be good at combat. He did this so fucking often.
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- Nov 4, 2017
The other one, and pathfinder grogs are the worst at this (or at least the ones I've encountered) is they want to try out the new Reddit Approved game breaking build.
(Author's note: anyone playing pathfinder 1e after 2016 is a grog. Sorry not sorry)
I had a PF grog who would build characters hyperfocused for the the situation they were in, and then as soon as that situation changed, would "get bored" and ask to roll a new one. And as you said, would get a little grumpy when after his 3rd character I didn't bother making him any plothooks and everyone else was doing shit with their contacts & character arcs.
He eventually chimped and soft-ragequit (tl;dr - there was a gelatinous cube with 3 skeletons inside it so the party sees three hovering skeletons advancing on them in formation; it was dark and the lvl 4 party failed their perception checks to notice the cube, they attempted a arcana check and found no magic. Grognard took his character and charged around, trying to get into the gap by the skeletons, only to find himself Cube'd becasue he charged right into it (I gave him saving throw to pull back at the last minute. The dice wanted him in the cube), and being MOST displeased about that. He more or less refused to participate for the rest of the session and then sent an email bailing on the game, after I texted him to see how he was doing.
which saved me the trouble because dude was either going to talk about what was up his ass or get booted)
But in between, we were not playing pathfinder, he kept trying to do Pathfinder stuff; assuming AoO happened on pathfinder conditions, do pathfinder dirty tricks, etc.
Which normally I'm flexible about that sort of thing and will say "You can't do X, but lets say you did Y which is like game mechanic Z, so you'll roll this sort thing" but because he and another pathfinder grog refused to parse non-pathfinder rules, I was holding to RAW until they de-paizzo'd their brains, which they never did.
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- Dec 28, 2014
I would never put up with that bullshit. I often ran high-death campaigns where PCs would die in nearly every session and have NPCs around so instead of just having to leave, people could take over an NPC and make a character for the next session, but I can't imagine putting up with idiots who would deliberately get killed just to get out of having their current character.
I'd just send anyone who did that shit home.
(Also I generally use the grog term positively and don't associate it with this kind of activity. My kind of grog would pick an insane build but then relentlessly stick with it even when it got hard.)
Paradox Mystic
kiwifarms.net
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- Oct 19, 2024
@Ghostse
It helps to know if the game is intended to be serious roleplaying or something different. I've seen people at various D&D clubs that have different styles in mind. You can really tell who just wants to break their record for most damage rolled and speedrun their way through adventures vs people who want some immersion. I remember in one game at a gaming club a lolsorandom teen was annoyed because the party clerics mentioned "Let's not commit any crimes while we're here especially since there is probably avatars of Gods spying on us at the moment." and the rest of the party agreed avoiding committing crimes was a good idea at the time.
Also some people definitely are of the mindset if anything goes bad for their character they need to make a new one, like "Oh my character at AnOminous' game has a broken leg (or a magic curse depending on what is appropriate) and half the people in the story hate him now? I better make a new character!" even though getting healed and fixing your reputation could be good story potential. Some DMs love to pull the trick of having a sleazy NPC roll up who says "I can fix that for you...of course you'd owe me a favor though..."
It helps to know if the game is intended to be serious roleplaying or something different. I've seen people at various D&D clubs that have different styles in mind. You can really tell who just wants to break their record for most damage rolled and speedrun their way through adventures vs people who want some immersion. I remember in one game at a gaming club a lolsorandom teen was annoyed because the party clerics mentioned "Let's not commit any crimes while we're here especially since there is probably avatars of Gods spying on us at the moment." and the rest of the party agreed avoiding committing crimes was a good idea at the time.
I've seen people get their character killed off because they were upset about something OOC like a new player was annoyed their last PC was killed for randomly intimidating some guards and getting chased, so they showed up to a party as their new PC and started a fight with some of the other PCs.
Also some people definitely are of the mindset if anything goes bad for their character they need to make a new one, like "Oh my character at AnOminous' game has a broken leg (or a magic curse depending on what is appropriate) and half the people in the story hate him now? I better make a new character!" even though getting healed and fixing your reputation could be good story potential. Some DMs love to pull the trick of having a sleazy NPC roll up who says "I can fix that for you...of course you'd owe me a favor though..."
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- Dec 28, 2014
I had a role where I'd get to guest PC in other DM's campaigns where my whole purpose was to a complete dick and try to provoke the rest of the party to kill me but was necessary to the campaign, for knowing something about the MacGuffin or otherwise making it a lose condition to kill me.
Everyone, including me, would clap when the party finally did get to kill me. Or not, if I escaped and got to return again as a recurring asshole.
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
Time to travel with Dice Scum to the terrifying land of Milwaukee By Night! Experience the terrors in a large Midwestern metropolitan area (no, not those ones).