Activate Judgment of Judging
It’s been some time since Inquisitor’s daddy issues came into play. I guess maybe it’s still a sensitive topic for her. Of course, the real progenitor of today’s comic has nothing to do with drow. Rather, it’s all about adolescent dragons.
If you’ve gamed for any length of time, you’ll have come across certain phrases. I’m talking about fan-favorites like, “There’s no wrong way to game,” and, “If everyone is having fun then you’re doing it right.” Yet despite the popularity of these ideas, you’ll still find plenty of critics eager to explain why your house rules, preferred edition, and character concept are all trash-tier choices for dumb idiots who are dumb. How to explain the discrepancy?
Aside from the fact that there’s a little bitchy dark elf in all of us, I think it has to do with confirmation bias. We all experience this hobby at our own tables and with our own groups. That’s a highly individualized experience. The personalities of players, relevant story beats in the narrative, and even the venue can make a difference. And what happened to work for your group in your particular circumstances is by no means universal.
My go-to example for this phenomenon is secret note passing. That experience is going to look very different at a physical table, in a play-by-post forum, or within a virtual tabletop. How well it functions as a device is subject to factors beyond ‘my group likes cloak and dagger PVP’.
Here’s another example. I’ve got a buddy who loves randomness in gaming. Dude lives for wild magic tables and wands of wonder and anything with a % chance of turning you into a chicken. I’ll never forget the look of disappointment on his face when our group voted down critical fumbles. I can list the arguments against as well as most gamers, and I did so at the time. But after the session ended he confessed that, “Some of the funniest moments from when I used to play with my dad were in the crit fumble charts.” No amount of math is going to argue that away.
Here’s my point. If you’re at the same table as another player, you’ll have to resolve your differences. If you’re designing your own system, you’ll need to make lasting mechanical decisions. But when you’re on an internet forum talking to strangers about what works at their table, remember that it’s their table. And just because hero points, or crit fumbles, or we-play-drow-as-always-evil works for your group, it doesn’t mean it’s going to trickle your fellow travelers’ fancy.
So in the interest of understanding context, what do you say we talk about our groups’ idiosyncrasies? What about your party is weird? What distinguishes you from a hypothetical “average gaming group?” Sound off with your table’s most peculiar peculiarities and eccentric eccentricities down in the comments!
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The guards spotted Inquisitor and Drow Priestess together, back when they first met, and just jumped to the wrong conclusion, didn’t they? ^^;
Fantasy racism is such an ugly thing…
What, you mean this is some kind of sequel to this one?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/natural-allies
I mean… Maybe. >_>
I do wonder what divine force is giving Inquisitor her powers.
Same as every other inquisitor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/2hwrpy/serious_inquisitor_hat_question/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body
So Inquisitors are basically Jaegermonsters?
Jaegermonsters don’t lose their powers.
They get a penalty for losing the hat and a bonus for the extra motivation to get a new one.
I‘ll leave it to the rules lawyers to allocate these.
Always has been 😛
Think of an inquisitor without hat. Say a media, say any madia in which that happens.
No hat, no inquisitor 🙁
Only one of the three members of the Spanish Inquisition had a hat, two if you count the aviator cap+googles combo, but Cardinal Fangs hooded robe certainly does not count.
Bet you didn’t expect anyone to bring up a counter-example
Who even is Cardinal Fangs? o_O¡
And how a member of the Spanish Inquisition would have an aviator cap? o_O
With this classic sketch and all shall become clear (you’ll need to wait through a short bit of set-up but it’s worth it, the entire clip is less than 4 minutes.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAxkcPoLYcQ
Oh right, I forgot the comment section did that with video links, and now the video is all cut off, and ruined.
You can still open in youtube from there. Also i know Monty Python more from reputation than from experience 🙂
My inquisitor didn’t have hat, though.
Oh. So you mean you had an inquisitor-themed fighter…?
There’s a joke in our group: “RPG Horror Stories is our Tuesday.”
I’d like to clarify that it ISN’T LITERALLY TRUE. There’s some effed-up real-world stuff that gets talked about in that site, and (thank God) that’s about as far from our group as you could imagine. We’ve all been friends for years, and all of my closest, most trusted friends are in my game.
What it IS meant to indicate is that we do lots and lots of things in games which the community tends to get rather judgey about, including but not limited to:
Darkness. It’s nobledarkness, not grimdarkness, but the key element in this nobledarkness is definitely the blood rather than the bloodline, if you catch my drift. I don’t like caricatures, so the world is fairly verisimilitudinous in the darkness-light balance, but it’s tipped to a point roughly equivalent to Europe in World War 2. All topics are permitted in-game, and all actions except for any form of sexual violence are permitted by the players, though personal codes and alignment can of course impose further limits.
Evil PCs. Lots of ’em. We’ve got devil-cultists, demon-childer, ruthless dictators and xenophobic murderers. One of the PCs, leader of a major sub-faction of the antagonistic force of the campaign (who you’d be mistaken to think are worse than the main protagonistic one, but this guy’s certainly trying) is an elvish supremacist… and most of the other Elvish characters only disagree with him because his vision of supremacy involves him at the head.
Three sessions ago, we started a War Crimes tracker, and it’s currently at seven.
Balance? Pshaw. Levels of characters range from 12-22 amongst mortals and up to 48 amongst deities – and yes, some of the PCs are deities. Homebrewed material, weird items and odd combinations are allowed essentially without concern for balance, and limitations are placed on these things based only of the game world’s metaphysics, not the original rules. This is, it has to be said, incredibly freeing, creating a rough scale of power but also a constant sense of threat for even the most powerful.
PvP! If it wasn’t obvious so far, players are frequently in conflict with each other. Often, that’s political. Sometimes, it’s physical. It’s always amusing to watch a score and a half of characters scheming rings around each other. It’s never produced a really feel-bad moment, because everyone accepts it as part of the game, and sometimes it creates delightfully confusing bits where three or four plans run headfirst into each other.
I could go on and on about pc defeat, powerful NPCs intervening, the perpetual state of split-party even amongst allies, but I think that’d start to bore people after a while. Point is, my group breaks a whole lot of the rules, and if you showed it to the population of r/dndnext they’d describe it as a horrendous edgy cringe-fest from any kind of broad outline. It isn’t, though. It’s an exploration of certain themes, and I’ve watched my friends become more emotionally invested in it than they ever were in a mundane heroic quest style of game. The timeline is immense and in-depth, hundreds of hours of work have gone into worldbuilding, there’s an in-depth economic system and it’s generally far from low-effort, but most importantly the players and I enjoy it no end. Two of them have even commented (separately!) that I’ve entirely ruined “normal” D&D for them, which is very sweet.
Point being, with player permission of course, go do your own damn thing! There really is no right way to play except for the way everyone enjoys.
We learn the basic techniques first so that we can break them properly. I don’t think that the things you mention would work very well as a table at Adventurer’s League. But you have a devoted group who, by slow degrees, have come to accept and enjoy certain conventions specific to this game. It’s like an experimental film: fundamentally different than a summer blockbuster, but not really trying to be one.
This is the only one that I question. ‘Limitation’s based on the game world’s metaphysics’ strikes me as an awfully fancy way to say ‘If your character is broken I’ll nerf it with GM fiat.’ That seems more freeing for a GM than for players.
Of course, I suspect that assessment is unfairly judgmental on my part. And I do like the idea of maintaining a sense of threat, even at high level. Can you give me an example of how this works in practice?
I’d never thought of my campaign as an arthouse film before, but I’m not displeased at doing so now 🙂
Of course! Firstly, I should be clear that I don’t nerf characters who are broken, because we don’t really have a standard for broken. Rather, there’s a specific and fairly codified set of rules on how magic and reality work in the world, based on the pulse of energy along “fundamental threads.” Whilst it prevents a few truly ridiculous things, or makes them harder, it can also be exploited for player advantage… especially for those very high-level characters who might lose out in other areas, and sometimes to devastating effect.
I should also clarify that I do vet homebrew, and the most game-breaking thing ever to almost happen in the setting (which essentially involved a jupiter-sized orb of vampiric mist flying through the void at several million mps) was done entirely within the rules.
That out of the way, then – example! This is a hypothetical, using two real characters from the game in an imaginary – but entirely possible – situation. It should illustrate the advantages of the system from every direction.
The King of Shapes is pretty damned terrifying. Part-fey, part-elf, all deity, he is a schizophrenic mess of power capable both of accessing the fundamental substrata of the universe (the Threads,) and of wielding immense psionic and magical power. He is also, however, cursed, the result of an altercation with a dying Dwarfish high priest, to eternal formlessness, ironic given his name. This curse is woven into the Fundamental Threads of his soul, specifically commingling the Earth and Water threads and shielding them in a thick coating of energy. It’d be impossible to disentangle those threads and lift the curse without killing him – thus, the metaphysics places specific limits on the use of Remove Curse, whilst contributing to interesting options in play and requiring less outright fiat than would normally be needed.
The King is a level 48 character, with two divine ranks to boot, but he’s scared of the character sat in front of him.
Carrion Frost is a level 21 character, a paladin/inquisitor, and in fairness to the King, a damned scary guy. He’s built up a mystique of fear around him over the course of the entire campaign, one only aided by his repeated returns from apparent certain death and total lack of mercy. Still, he’s not really on the God-Killing level.
Or is he? The King’s player knows roughly what level Carrion is, but he doesn’t know exactly what armaments he has. Could he be wielding the fractal hammer Gudslaug, having taken it from the stone king Deraugh? Perhaps he’s retrieved the Spear of Silence, weapon of the primordial void once held by his ally Llyros Tamydan and lost to the King’s pawn/friend Hadroch? The immense power of these artefacts means he has to show some caution.
Meanwhile, the combinations of abilities that Carrion possesses have a similar effect. Might he have that one trick up his build’s sleeve which could tip the balance? What about allies? Should he try to attack him through the Threads, projecting into his mind before he gets too close? Carrion’s willpower is legendary, and that might be a contest where the god has a serious chance of losing, but does he want to simply give up on one of his most effective tools? Perhaps he should send in his minions – but then, that might be exactly what his foe wants, a chance to do serious damage to his enemy’s army whilst the King sits back out of concern for himself.
Hmm… perhaps start with some negotiation.
In other words, the fact that there are weird combinations, abilities which punch above their level, and that balance is never ridiculous but sometimes skewed means that people can get a definite sense of “I should be frightened to x extent here,” but there’s always a chance that an upset, maybe phyrric, maybe substantial, could occur. It’s freeing, and maintains the nobledark sense I discussed, because players feel like they can make risky decisions if they want to with a chance of it working out sometimes, and also because it opens up opportunities for roleplay and interaction with a feeling of slight parity over a huge power gulf. Less fighting and more negotiating, with the odd pinch of fighting thrown in, is far more fun for all concerned, we tend to find.
Hope that answers your question – I’m aware I’m quite tired and the words keep drifting all over the place, so feel free to follow-up on anything I missed.
I think of it like criticizing 2001 for not being an exciting action adventure movie. That’s not what it’s trying to do. If you go in thinking that’s what a sci-fi film has to be, you’re going to have a bad time. But worse, you’ll miss out on experiencing a unique artistic expression on its own terms.
Same deal with judging someone else’s campaign by your own standards.
Couldn’t agree more!
Not even slightly!
Is it a Madoka kind of thing, where horrible stuff happens but the story has an overarching positive message?
As in the real world, ideologies of racial supremacy are rarely more than an excuse to claim more power for oneself and one’s in-group.
I kinda wish there was a better way for groups to experiment with TRPG scenarios beyond the standard dungeon crawl. I suppose I could just design and run something different on my own and see if my group enjoyed it, but that seems like an imprecise and highly-fallible way to go about it.
The definition as I use it is: Bright v. Dark is the content, Noble v. Grim is the level of agency. 40k is Grimdark because not only is life shit, you can’t shift even one ten billionth of the shit before you die, probably horribly. In my setting, one person in the right place can make a big difference, and the world doesn’t have to be crap eternally – if people can bring themselves to put their personal concerns aside, they really can make a difference, for good or ill.
On the racial supremacy note – exactly. I’m very fortunate to have a very politically interested group with a lot of characters between us, so we’ve really been able to explore such dynamics – dictatorships, racism (which is a much more sustainable belief in a fantasy world where you don’t even have to rely on pseudoscience to prove that racial categories exist and are inherently different, even if none are actively superior,) anarchism, proto-capitalism… we’ve had it all, and three players plus myself are fairly well-educated on the theory of these sorts of things, which just adds to how interesting it is.
I agree – I’m fortunate to have a dedicated close friend-group, but none of my other groups over the years would’ve been easily convinced to do anything like this. I guess the way to go is just to come up with some weird ideas, pitch them to various people and then, if something gets 3-6 bites, design it with player input, to ensure they get what they expected from the world.
I wish I had a group like yours—they sound like cool people, doing neat stuff with D&D that you can’t get at the local game shop.
I mean, you can’t do any gaming at the local game shop recently, but you know what I mean.
They are pretty great, I’ll freely admit. Not looking forward to when we’re all done with uni and life starts getting in the way.
Fifteen years on, my friends still consider the silliest thing I ever did as DM to be our best gaming moment. It was a Middle-Earth campaign using this weird variant-SPECIAL system that I copied from the Fallout PnP game and kept adapting to every setting we wanted, the relevant part being that it used a lot of percentile rolls.
So here’s my friend, trying to cross the top of the giant Rauros waterfall on foot. It was Anduin’s low season and my friends really, really wanted to explore the craggy island in the middle that Aragorn says no one has ever set foot on. Because of the difficulty, I had him roll repeatedly to see if he could make it across (with a rope, the idea being to try to set up some sort of bridge).
About halfway across he rolled percentile 1. I ruled that a rock had shifted under his feet, and that he was swept over the falls. He asked whether he should roll anything for damage or just start a new character. To be honest, I wasn’t sure: the rules didn’t really cover falling off a giant waterfall and there wasn’t a skill that would immediately help to roll against.
I tried my best impression of Watto from Phantom Menace and suggested we let Fate decide: roll another D100 to assess in broad strokes how good or bad the outcome would be.
99.
I ruled that he was dumped on the shore below the falls, miraculously unharmed and with a live carp in his pants.
“No man has ever set foot upon it. Did I fucking stutter?”
–Aragorn, probably
In our main D&D campaign, we’re just now beginning an XCOM/Fire Emblem like gimmick in our campaign, where each player has multiple characters and those characters are different levels, with the caveat being that there’s a limit on how many get sent on each mission and they can’t use any one character for everything, both because a lot of these are happening concurrently in-game, and because in-game the characters have no desire to be run ragged like that.
In the FFG Star Wars game I run (few members of my D&D group + my brother and sister), I’ve had a GMPC for ages, with him being one of the few constants as we hop between the timeframes of the different movies. Outside of Clone Wars era stuff he takes on a sort of Gandalf role. I’m even planning on proposing a campaign where it’s the sequel trilogy’s events and they play those characters, but he replaces the old man at the start of Force Awakens.
I maintain that GMPCs are great just so long as they help the PCs feel like cool dudes. The second the GMPC takes center stage and starts making decisions for the group, all that negative stereotype malarkey seems to come with it.
I’ve always wanted to run a FE/XCOM-style TRPG. Probably on an Internet forum or something, but maybe that’s just because I know how to make something like that work thanks to playing Einsteinian Roulette on Bay12 back in the day. It just seems like a great format to have a bunch of little conflicts with a single overarching storyline, possibly with a whole bunch more players than you could get otherwise.
This situation and conversation would be vastly different if Magus was the one behind bars.
What do you imagine the dialogue would look like?
Exchanging advice on ‘proper’ humanoid bondage/imprisonment (for purely bounty hunting reasons, of course). Or swapping stabbing tips. Braiding of hair may be involved.
Complaining about the quality/security of their imprisonment in different ways.
Magus asking about ‘genuine’ Drow lore, culture, history or biology (which Drow Priestess creatively embellishes).
Priestess trying to enlist Magus to the matriarchy.
Drow Priestess being physically sick/mentally tortured by the beam of sunshine and rainbows that is Magus (especially if she has psychic magic to peer into her mind).
The duo attempting different / conflicting escape plans.
The duo cooperating to escape and exchanging numbers / becoming secret BFFs.
Drow Priestess discussing her escape/crimes, unaware Magus is there willingly (especially if Inquisitor’s the owner of the dungeon).
I swear to Gygax, ima do a fan fiction contest one of these days….
My, look at those beautiful knees… and arms stretched upward looking almost natural…
Careful, at this rate, you’ll be starting to draw actual ELBOWS in no time.
The feet… less so. When your foot is smaller than your mouth and shorter than the thickness of your thy, you know you’ve spent WAY too much time on that exercise bike.
(Not blaming, Laurel. Feet are notoriously difficult to draw properly.)
All the better to stick your foot in your mouth.
NEVER!
Give me noodle limbs or give me death!
I drew elbows for years on Chorus of the Neverborn and I refuse to do so any longer! 😀
Elbows is what you get if your artist accumulates too much resonance 😀
Having played both a Neutral Good half-drow Magus knight with a longsword and a “Neutral” (Lawful Good + Evil-leaning Chaotic Neutral) 13-year-old drow brat with super-strength who throws greatswords at people and has an elf ghost stuck in her head (pictured here: https://i.imgur.com/QHPMvh4.png ), I am a firm advocate of moving the race beyond their two PC stereotypes. (Now that I think about it, drow worm their way into basically any campaign I’m involved in, though never quite in the standard form – they’ll be an organized magic-science-focused military; a group of oddly chill backstabbers obsessed with evolution through artificial selection; an oppressed and impoverished minority after losing a colonial war; or paranoid dictatorship citizens who keep their heads down and whose leaders are enthralled with secret alien technology and are engaged in shadow wars with the Elfluminati. I guess I just find the standard-issue drow society to be so unstable and self-destructive that they are hard to take seriously as antagonists. Especially if their leaders all are wearing lingerie.)
On the subject of group oddities, one of my group’s is probably (similar to Isildur above) the prevalence of GMPCs. It mostly started as a “we need more PCs for a full party” thing, but it’s kind of a staple of our games now. We trust each other enough that the GMPCs function as perfectly normal PCs, with as much involvement as any other PC (though they tend to speak last in roleplaying and puzzle-solving). We also have a weird form of “soft” PvP with secrets and plots behind each other’s backs, but not really in a malicious way, and not usually to betray the party. (EXCEPT THAT ONE TIME, but she changed her mind at the last minute.) We also tend to have a relatively low amount of magic in our parties and adjust challenges accordingly. Status effects that don’t wear off over time are pretty rare, as are save-or-die effects (“save-or-be-incapacitated” is fine, though), because we rarely have a Cleric who can fix them, so they become very annoying. The games tend to have a very low lethality – I have literally only witnessed one PC death in my entire career as either a player or GM (though a few close calls), and I’ve only seen resurrection magic used this very week (on an NPC – behind half the party’s back, by the way). We also tend towards a low number of decently tough encounters per day, rather than dungeons where you fight a dozen things, because we move kind of slowly and it would take forever to accomplish anything otherwise.
Oh, yeah, and we also have an oddly sci-fi bent to our medieval/Renaissance fantasy. Between firearms, magic nanites, Lovecraftean entities, robot-like constructs, alien spaceships, psychic fungus, colonialism and modern-ish politics, our games don’t particularly resemble the high fantasy baseline. (Now that I think about it, I’ve literally never seen a dragon in-game.)
It’s empowering lingerie! Seriously, it gives them stat buffs. 😛
GMPCs, low lethality, few encounters per day.
That’s quite the list of “thou shalt not” if you look at it from a what’s-popular-in-the-forums standpoint. Do you ever look at those threads describing the evils of these decisions and begin to feel uncomfortable with them?
Thief: “Is that a Sports Bra of Alluring Charisma?”
Drow Matron: “Yes, as a matter of fact it is. +6. What unfashionable thing are you wearing, a diamond corset?”
Thief: “…Maybe…”
Uncomfortable with my group’s decisions, not really. Uncomfortable with the forums/videos? Sometimes.
On encounters-per-day, I am actually following the difficulty guidelines by making the few encounters above the APL CR. It helps that we usually don’t have full casters, so the “Wizard uses his two highest-level spell slots and then the day is over” issue doesn’t really come up. I feel the story benefits of moving the plot along and having each fight actually mean something make it worthwhile. (These fights also tend to be long and have a lot of enemies in them, often in multiple waves. I see it as a “quality over quantity” approach to encounter design.)
On low lethality, this is partially my doing and partially the players generally being sensible and lucky. I do sometimes pull punches (recently, for example, a PC had to make a Reflex save to halve damage or he would be killed, and I was prepared to secretly reduce the damage I had rolled if he failed (he passed) because he was a Level 6 in a roughly CR 11 encounter and so it wouldn’t be a “fair” death), but not that much. Through a mix of good sportsmanship from the players and some stagecraft on my part, we have maintained the collective illusion of peril without requiring any special steps to enforce it. In the classic forum example of a player jumping their character into lava because they’ve concluded the GM will always bail them out, I wouldn’t jump a shark for them (though I might offer a rewind out-of-universe) because they aren’t TRYING. If players are trying to play the game right, they are entitled to a few bailouts now and then. And personally, as a player, I’m there for the story and solving mysteries and problems – I’ve never felt the dreaded “we didn’t really win this because the GM let us win” feeling, since you can ONLY ever win if the GM allowed it. (Which they should, since that is where the fun comes from.) Overall, I think the core reason behind the low lethality is similar to the low-encounters-per-day’s cause – we play story-focused games, and maintaining character continuity helps the story. (Resurrection can be done, but if it is common or rote I feel that is far worse for immersion and sense of peril than deaths being uncommon.) I think it also helps that many of my encounters use sub-optimal but flashy tactics that make the players feel like they are in danger when, mechanically speaking, they really aren’t. “Metal man grabs your face and prepares to throw you off a ledge” is much scarier than “Metal man used Power Attack slam for 15 damage”, even if the grapple is less likely to down a PC (and the ledge isn’t high enough to kill you). With tough boss monsters, I prefer to make them durable or with tricks that make them hard to bring down, rather than having them do huge piles of damage.
The only one where the “popular” opinion has really bothered me is GMPCs. I absolutely recognize that they can be a serious problem if done poorly or for the wrong reasons (a property conveniently shared by LITERALLY EVERY OTHER GM tool), but the tabletop advice community tends to treat it as an inherently toxic thing to never be done, which I think does the advice-receiving community (particularly newbies) a disservice. A while back I watched a video entitled something like “4 Reasons A DM Might Use a DMPC”, when a more accurate title would have been “4 Psychological Flaws Your DMPC-using DM Might Have That Explains Their Aberrant Behavior.” At no point did it reflect on any good reasons to do it, nor how it could be done successfully. As someone who has not only enjoyed playing GMPCs but watched my players cheer at the character’s successes (because they feel ownership over and solidarity with her), I feel that some rookie GMs and low-player groups have missed out on some great fun over the years because of the community’s strict orthodoxy on the subject.
I guess my last forum heresy is that I’m a very linear GM. I plan things out way in advance and use a lot of tricks to guide/manipulate the players to experience the story how I intended. That’s not because I’m obsessively controlling or anything, but because I’ve arranged the events and information in the way that I believe will maximize player enjoyment. And I am, if I may say so, pretty good at that. I make adjustments as the players do unexpected things and I never say no to a plausible-sounding solution, even if I hadn’t thought of it. I’m linear about situations and problems, not solutions and decisions. It helps, once again, that I have good players who want to follow the main story instead of running far off the beaten path or trying to break things because they can. And from my experience as a player, I would much rather play in a linear style game than a super-sandbox.
Hey, you remembered the diamond corset. Nice!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/hoarding
I’m running a GMPC at the moment with a awakened dancing poodle street performer bard. It’s a two player gestalt version of Curse of the Crimson Throne, and my players need that little extra oomph of action economy.
Just last session, he won the “identify the magic item” contest against one of the PCs. But the way he phrased it was, “Ooh! I think I know this one. Can I guess? Tell me of I’m right.”
The PC gets to remain the main character in the interaction. And even if you have a fun moment fo your GMPC, it’s all about helping the PCs rather than showing them up.
So in a word: yes to GMPCs. No to OP main character self inserts.
Quick note for the Inquisitors of the world: Stereotypes are not perpetuated by stereotyped individuals fitting the stereotype, they are perpetuated by outsiders accepting the stereotype. Drow Priestess could be an ordinary spider-apathetic cleric, but the racist high elves would point to something as benign as pointing out that spiders eat worse bugs to prove that she actually does fit the stereotype.
Put the blame where it belongs—to the elves up high, not the dark-skinned ones down below.
Damned outsiders… Daemons ruin everything!
We do things our way. We customize the rules. We use our own setting. More than rules books we use guides 🙂
Ah. The Barbosa approach.
I understood that reference 😀
No dice! Kermit is way more famous than Barbosa. You’ll have to come up with much more obscure references to work your way out of the doghouse. 😛
Who was kermit again? 😛
https://media1.giphy.com/media/ZQBH5pvoyiZSE/giphy-downsized-large.gif
Don’t worry i got you good news. I know that Kermit thing is. It’s La rana Rene. That is how is called in Spanish. Still after consulting lots of people only know it by name and think its either from a song or commercial 🙂
A bit late, but I’ll throw my two cents in.
I mostly play WoD stuff; just what my groups like the most. We try to stick to the books where possible… until we don’t. The most obvious example was the Homebrew Hunter game.
That game required Co-GMs for 6 players as what the PCs didn’t know was that each GM controlled a different universe and they were swapping consciousnesses between these universes as they slept. They were a mostly pure mortal with one supernatural trait to worry about until they started randomly getting more because they were picking up power from between the universes. Trying to wrap their heads around what was going on was hilarious and people loved it.
To add to that, I wrote up pamphlets of in game propaganda for their organizations, I drew complex maps that never got used, I wrote details for each world and kept them separate and threw in as many jokes as I could. I’ve run that game twice with different people and had a blast both times.
The fact they are willing to trust me to run such things is probably the biggest oddity in the group.
That game reminds me of a campaign concept on my list that is almost certainly too complicated to use. Basically, the party finds a portal to a couple of alternate timeline versions of their world. Most of the timelines are in some amount of trouble, so the PCs try to help by intentionally jumping back and forth, bringing allies from one timeline to fight enemies in another, dealing with or even fighting their alternate selves (which means I’d have to leave gaps in the plot until I know who the PCs are and what their alternate selves could be like) and overall making a giant mess of things. It would be so hard to run, but so amazing if it worked.
So I gather that there was a “main GM” controlling the meta plot?
Did any of the co-GMs ever try to implement a story element that would interfere with the meta plot?
Just the two of us. We really tried the co-GM thing and made a point of never interfering in the other’s world save if they asked for advice. What we did to make this simpler was make three organizations of Good and each took one with the third written in as “filler.”
I’ve been on of the GMs for both versions but the other one changed. We made a point to devote our planning time to discussing character powers but each world’s plots were only loosely connected if that. The basic meta plot of the first one was there was one BBEG who could also move back and forth and was trying to manipulate both sides of the organization to effectively figure out what was going on. More of an evil tendencies BBEG, he was designed more as an investigative challenge to pierce why the organizations of good were slowly taking darker steps. This was more the other GM’s thing than mine but “darker places your org is going” is an easy thing to do. Reflecting this, the other GM had the more CIA org while I had more of the Army org; the plots I sent them on were more “eliminate/capture this threat” while he generally sent them for clues.
The second one we decided to focus more on the Setting’s BBEGs, aka the Kaiju that had tried wrecking the world. In a 3rd world, they won and were trying to conquer all other timelines because they know nothing but war. They were sending agents with the same powers as the PCs to try and open the dimensional doors. In that one I had the CIA group and the new GM had the Army.
In both cases, this was the overall meta plot and it was easy to keep “in line” if you will. The players kept challenging the meta plot because they were experimenting with their nonsense and the world. The GMs also kept skype/discord open the entire time and filled in details as needed.
However, in the first one my other GM was certainly more take control than I was and I was more in control in the second one. It never came to blows but there were arguments. End of the day, it was their world and this was mine.
The players loved it though so it was all good.
I used to run with critical failures. They’d have to be confirmed, like a crit, with a missed attack after a natural 1 having some negative effect. I didn’t have a table, I just made up effects on the spot: drop your weapon, fall prone, provoke an attack of opportunity, whatever fit the situation best. When I announced the next campaign was going to no longer have critical fumbles, I saw all my players sigh in relief.
Aside from that, we do currently have 1 PC who will quote – and sometimes argue with – the narrator. That being me, the GM. He does so in character. He is also somewhat crazy, being a halfling swashbuckler/warpriest of the Lantern King. Since there’s also a psychic in the party, the other PCs will sometimes be treated to his seemingly one-sided tangents via telepathic bond.
Do you guys tend to enjoy the meta halfling, or does the shtick wear thin after a while?
My response to other players who advocate for unnecessary bad things to happen to our PCs – such as critical fumble tables – is generally:
You should lead by example!
That is, if you want critical fumble tables, and are convinced they are fun, then voluntarily make you character – and only your character – subject to them. That way, you get your fun, and maybe convince the rest of us we should adopt your ways (you won’t, but feel free to try). Most of what happens on most critical fumble tables does not require mechanical changes to a game if the player of the subject PC is willing. For example, “loose your next attack/turn” can be implemented as the player simply choosing for their PC to not take it. Similarly “Fall prone” could be done by the player choosing for the PC to fall prone, since no movement is required. A broken weapon could be implemented as the player choosing for the PC to voluntarily cease using that weapon ever, or until it “can be repaired”, etc. “Hit an ally” could be replaced with deciding that the next attack will simply target one’s self, as there is no rule against that, and because most likely no one else wants to be part of their nonsense. Since the effects of critical fumbles are usually bad, and the game it not designed to regulate self-inflicted bad things, generally a player can implement most of a critical fumble chart against themselves with no rules alterations.
I’ve made this suggestion several times when other players advocated for critical fumble tables, but I can not recall a positive response. That is a pity, because while I do not want any such thing imposed upon unwilling players, it would be mildly entertaining to observe another player voluntarily inflicting this upon themselves – and I think they should be allowed to do so – and if they really believe it makes the game better, then stand by that!