Credulousness
So there we were, hot on the trail of a chaos cult. It was a vaguely 40K themed Pathfinder game, so there were certain unsavory elements at play. Suffice it to say that the cult’s front was a house of pleasure. After our valiant heroes resisted the advances of the bordello’s chaos-tainted tarts, we decided to head into the seedy establishment’s sub-basement in search of its rumored demonic mastermind.
We ended the session there. Our GM’s parents were coming to visit, so we assumed that the game was off for a week.
“Nope,” said he. “Game on! Also, my dad is going to be a guest player.”
I’m not sure I’d want my parental unit to guest star in a Slaanesh-fueled romp through a house of ill repute, but that wasn’t my call to make. We met daddy dearest’s kobold rogue the next week. She was loitering in the whore house kitchens, and sort of glommed onto the party in the way that drug-addled kobold rogues will do. Being a long-time player, Dad-kobold (we’ll call her Dadold) took up her natural place at the front of the party. Of course she found the trap. Of course she failed her save. And of course it was a waves of ecstasy spell.
“You’re basically in a state of constant orgasm for the next 10 rounds,” says the GM to his own father. Imagine the coo of a pigeon, but higher-pitched and more sensual. This is the sound we were treated to for the next 60 seconds. I had no idea female kobolds were capable of such utterances. The memory will haunt me to my grave.
All of the above was just the first room. As we grew to know Dadold, we learned that she was a strangely literal creature.
“Better luck on the next trap,” we said. “Just keep checking for ’em.”
“OK,” she said.
My dude noticed her jump over a step and keep walking. Happily, I succeeded at my Sense Motive check.
“Dadold? Was that step trapped?”
“No,” she said. “It was very trapped.”
“Were you going to tell us?”
“You told me to check for traps. Not to tell you about them.”
We enjoyed several other interactions of this kind in the next several chambers. The door was not locked. Dadold picked it anyway because we’d told her to open all locks. There were monsters moving about beyond. How was Dadold to know that she was supposed to warn us about them?
“Look,” I said. “If we want to get out of this alive, we all need to work together. Just make sure and tell us if you spot any danger.”
We arrived at the boss chamber. It was a horrible tentacle monster, because of course it was. Dadold rolls high on her initiative.
“Look!” she cried. “A dangerous monster demon thing! Pass turn.”
My blood pressure managed to survive the evening, and Dadold retired from the campaign and flew back across the country. There were many lessons to be learned from that night around the gaming table, but I think the most important was this: If you’re obliged to deal with a literal sort of PC, make sure that you phrase instructions clearly. Sarcasm is lost on certain creatures, most especially trolls.
Question of the day: Have you ever dealt with griefing at the gaming table? Was it all in good fun? Was it frustrating? Is there a way to tell the difference? Let’s hear it in the comments!
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a bimonthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
I just want to say that I love how much of an anti-villain Necromancer is. She just wants to be liked! She plays with “dolls”! She worries about the well-being of her friends! Really, she would be a classic example of the White Magician Girl archetype if not for, you know, forcing an abominable facsimile of life upon deceased children in blatant defiance of morality, gods, nature and common sense.
Homegirl doesn’t need common sense. She’s got fashion sense!
HadACookie, was the cookie tasty?
The cookie is a lie
Noooooooooo!!!!!
No blog post?
As a Fiend death is a minor inconvenience to Succubus. If you kill her outside of her lower plane of choice she just reforms at home with a bad hangover.
Technical difficulties have been un-difficultied. Those responsible have been sacked.
Who was responsible? If it was you, wouldn’t you have to fire yourself? Imagine the paperwork!
Of course, it was most likely the computer. But then, you’d have to hire the computer to fire it, and how could you hire a computer? It wouldn’t even be able to write a signature.
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
I keep meaning to make a comic about you, but I suspect it would lead to a silly place.
I think the closest I’ve had comes from a certain player who always likes to make characters with… unusual personalities. I’ve mentioned before the dwarf luchador wrestler Monk with 8 CHA and INT who believes he is an eagle despite all evidence to the contrary, and the Halfling Paladin/Cavalier who shouts orders that no one wants to follow and constantly unintentionally sexually harasses every man, woman, nongendered being and inanimate object he interacts with. In the player’s defense, the harassment thing is as much genuine unintentional innuendo and the rest of us intentionally misinterpreting his attempts at formal language as it is actual player intent. His tendency to refer to other characters by descriptors instead of names (“Skinny Girl” “Elf Woman” “Flaming Cat Man”) and the way he describes his use of Lay on Hands (“I rub her bicep”) don’t help.
Anyways, there was one time when we were trying to solve a murder mystery, and were questioning the victim’s father (who had earlier been aggressive enough that the cops had put him in a cell until he calmed down). The father already had a serious dislike for our party’s other Sorcerer (not the Kitsune one), given a long-ago incident in which that Sorcerer tried to seduce the father’s other, not-dead daughter. Despite my warning, the Sorcerer comes along when we go to question the father and the father flips out, accusing the Sorcerer of killing the dead daughter and of “fornication”. EagleMonkGuy hears this, thinks about it for a second, and then grapples the Sorcerer, having been persuaded by the father’s words. My Magus tries to deal with this in an admittedly escalatory way by hitting the Monk for nonlethal damage with a morningstar. (Incidentally, that was the first successful melee attack I’d ever made, because my rolls make Thief look lucky.) The Monk replies by Stunning Fisting me (I make the save, actually), and the Sorcerer runs off to get the guards. The party Cleric, incidentally, is in the other room spending 15 minutes in prayer in order to get the spell Calm Emotions to use on the father, and her player is busy rolling her eyes at this whole thing. The guards show up and the Monk’s player tries to talk his way out, but the Sorcerer’s player (who was reasonably okay with the events, OOC) concludes that there is absolutely no way that his PC would let something like this slide, especially since the Monk joined the party like yesterday, and only because the local tavern owner asked us to keep him out of trouble. So the Sorcerer demands that the Monk be thrown in jail for assault. As a result, the whole situation was rewound by joint player-DM decision and none of those events are canon, meaning that my first-ever successful melee attack was not only nonlethal and against a teammate, but was also retroactively erased.
This player is indeed a fun guy to play with and is very good at optimizing his ludicrous builds so that they work well, but sometimes his silliness gets the better of him. He also claims that he’s always wanted to make a character with a psychological need to plug any hole he sees (which seems to include people’s orifices), which I believe falls firmly in the “quirk that is not endearing and in fact is quite inconvenient to everyone” category.
And that’s the real trick, isn’t it? If you’re trying to walk that line between amusing and annoying, you’ve got to make sure you’re reading the table correctly. The real bugger is that the same quirk could work well for one player and poorly for the next, all depending on that thousand-and-one minor social considerations that only make sense at the table rather than in print.
Quick litmus test though? If it’s so disruptive that you’ve got to retcon the session, maybe that’s a good indicator that you should pull back a bit.
We only had to retcon 5-10 minutes of stuff, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. He got better at managing his comedic idiocy after that, having moments like the time he followed footprints into a river, swam into the river, found more footprints on the other side, and then took 20 on a skill roll (I forget what it was) to try to deduce what this meant, while still in the river. As you well know, taking 20 takes 20 times longer than it would normally, so the GM ruled that he spent 20 rounds floating down the river in order to deduce that the thing that left the footprints was, in his words: “IT’S AQUATIC!!!”. So that kind of thing generally went over better.
He still had some issues from time to time, like the time he ate a recent-Fireballed zombie rat (like any proper eagle) and IMMEDIATELY got a rare necromancy disease. By that point, though, he generally tried to make sure that his stupid stuff only ever hurt him, and not anyone else in the party.
And I know this player was involved in a much more rowdy game on a different system where he and his other friends could unleash their full crazy awesome/moron frat boy selves and beat things up with their own limbs and shoot giantesses in the groin (that is a specific incident that he mentioned more than once) and stuff like that. So reading the table definitely in effect there.
“Was that step trapped?”
“No it was VERY trapped”…
Did you just get dad-joked?
I think you just got dad-joked…
None of what you said sounded particularly “trollish” to me.
If he was a vet player, then he may have just been in character, and not trolling. I personally kinda wonder what one of his usual sessions was like…
Had you been given warning about him, or had time before a big encounter to get to know the character’s quirks a little more, I think you might have a different view on them…
I haven’t had a game with a troll in it yet (at least not the kind lacking regent and a weakness to fire).
I have heard about players who play Chaotic Stupid, very poorly. Stuff like killing important NPCs before they can give the party valuable intel, because character reasons… those games didn’t last long from what I recall, sadly…
I dunno, man. Leading the party into a trap and not telling them about it seems like trolling to me. It’s pretty cut and dry in my book. Whether or not it was funny and entertaining is another matter.
Yeah, I’ve dealt with griefing, once.
I was a player in that campaign. It was the DM’s first campaign (he had only done one or two one shot before to get his feet wet). Among the players was the guy who had introduced him to D&D. And man, that guy was a handful.
It took me a bit to realize this, but his favorite thing was to make characters that would first keep all the attention on themselves (i.e high charisma; even when using classes that have literally no use for charisma, it would be his highest stat) and then give those characters “quirks” that made them at best extremely annoying, but more often than not actively detrimental to the party. In this particular example, he had decided to play a pacifist.
Now, this CAN work. If you do it well and the whole group is okay with that. However. First of all, he didn’t tell anyone until game night, of course. Then he picked Psychic Warrior (a Fighter with Psionic powers – this was 3.5) as a class, which, you know, is quite an odd choice for a pacifist but whatever; and then he made his character not just a pacifist, but a “lover of all life”. This meant that he would FORBID us from killing anything. A-NY-THING. He almost attacked my character when I bagged a rabbit while we were lost in the wilderness with no food left. He got mad when another player picked a flower. A goddamned flower. And the whole campaign revolved about us being trust into an incredibly hostile world where intelligent races have only one city left, and everything else outside of this city wants to kill you.
We tried to approach this like adult and talk to him. After a bit of discussion, it became very clear that 1) he was perfectly aware of how annoying he was being and 2) he had no intention to stop. He said he would try to tone it down, so we played another session. He didn’t tone it down. So we restarted the campaign with a new player who had been interested in the game, and we didn’t invite him again.
I just don’t get why someone would act like that. D&D is a group activity. Griefing other players is a good way to end up without a group, and thus not being able to play.
The thing that bothers me here is the mean-spirited intent. It’s not like pranks or willfully obtuse characters can never be amusing. But to include them in your game for the express purpose of actually annoying your fellow players… That just seems like you’re engaging in bad faith. Why would anyone want to play with that guy? What results to they even expect?
Yup. That’s exactly what my DM and I wondered. Guess we’ll never know because we don’t talk to that guy anymore.
It is a great day when you can find new ways to troollish your roleplay companions. I have been taking notes and the only thing i can say is that my companions will hate you all, so thank you very much and keep going.
What evil have I unleashed upon the multiverse?
Nice job breaking it hero 🙂
I think you’ve already heard about my grievance with chaotic stupid barbarians, and they’re exactly the wrong type of simpleminded that tempts me to engage in live action PvP. The types who can’t seem to do anything for a minute if it doesn’t involve smashing something, and in their convoluted minds they will figure out how to smash something against all reason and logic because “hur dur that’s my character”. And because that is their character the GM allows and defends it while we, a various collective of good to neutral types, have to tolerate because the worse evil one can commit is disagreeing with eachother.
Has your GM heard about the geek social fallacies?
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
If you’d given me ten guesses as to the general nature of the blog post for this comic…. I would never have guessed anything close to that. It was a tale both horrifying and hilarious.
I’ve certainly been on the receiving and giving end of some friendly griefing. Hell I’m 99% sure every human on the planet ever has done the “let’s be literal to the point of annoyance” gag. It’s an old favorite for a reason.
The reason being that humans are really annoying twerps I guess? =P
As for the question asked. Interestingly that kind of thing can’t be good fun without also being frustrating (since that’s the source of the fun there), but on the other hand you can certainly do it wrong very easily and be frustrating without being any kind of fun. In general the way to tell the difference is whether or not people (other than just the person doing it) are amused.
Few expect the sensual coo of the middle-aged white dude sex pigeon.
We have a player who really role-plays out his 8 intelligence and 3 wisdom quite well, and (In-character) believes himself to be the brains of the group. Most of us are fine with the antics and have a good laugh, however one of our players is quite a smart, logical guy, and just doesn’t see the humour, frequently getting annoyed at 3 wisdom and his plans to build a throne room for his best friend, Gerald the potato.
Now I need to invent a tribe of barbarians that have names like “Three-Wisdom.” Other tribesmen include “Int-Dump,” “No-Cha,” and “BAB-Brainz.”
At least has 8 INT and 3WIS on the sheet. We have one that has 13 and 14 of each and still plays like if it were 8 and 3 and OOC and IC thinks is really smart (and as i’ve heard from people that have known for longer has always been that way): it is facepalming in each session, because while i have nothing against comedy, more like i prefer it, the campaign has a serious tone and i play a logical guy, which makes harder to roleplay under those circumstances and try to find why IC we do not kick that PC.
I had someone I’m not certain if it was their intention to troll or not but they got firmly on my nerves. The player in question was our cleric in 5e (a system I’ve become less fond of as I’ve learned about it.) who worshiped a god or goddess of death. With that in mind our cleric refused to heal us if we went unconscious because it was against the natural order, the trouble (besides that) was that he wouldn’t heal beforehand instead focusing on dealing combat damage.
His characters core beliefs contradicted with my desire to not die.
I dunno, man. This is actually a tough one in terms of gamer philosophy. I mean, you wouldn’t have a problem with a fighter or a wizard not healing you. Writing “cleric” on your sheet doesn’t automatically make you the party band-aid. On the other hand, if you’re literally losing your character so that another guy can RP… Actually, come to think of it we talked about that one over here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/frickin-laser-beams
“It was a vaguely 40K themed Pathfinder game, so there were certain /unsavory/ elements at play.”
Of course Slaneesh isn’t savory, Slaneesh is /spicy/!
I’ll see myself out.
ಠ_ಠ
Wow. She must really be heartbroken over Paladin to not fix her mascara yet. I mean, it’s been what? 20-something strips? Girl, get waterproof stuff already.
It’s a mark of her enduring vendetta. Also, it’s metal AF. \m/ -_- \m/
I can see my own dad acting like Dadold, and if he made a character like that I’d blame nobody but myself after that first incident (with the possible exception of “pass turn”). But then again, I know my dad well enough to expect him to do stuff like that; I don’t know if I’d treat a stranger the same.
I think it’s the right thing to do