Sharing Information
So there we were down in the Underdark. We were getting our butts kicked by a pair of aboleths, and the TPK was looking pretty dang imminent. That’s when the party bard gets a brilliant idea: Let’s try diplomacy!
The dude manages to make a killer Persuasion check, and he actually calls a truce with the aboleths to negotiate. A few minutes of talk-to-me-in-another-room conversation goes by between the bard player and the DM before they come back to the table.
“Good news, guys! I’ve got it all figured out. Lay down your arms.”
We lay down our arms. That’s when the aboleths make a bee-line for the convoy we were supposed to be guarding. The sound of splintering timbers and swearing dwarves can be heard in the distance.
“What the crap did you tell them?” demands the paladin.
“Oh wow,” says the bard. “I sure didn’t expect… I mean… What a shame, you know?”
The dwarves were dead when we got to their boats, as were a couple of long-time allies that had been travelling with them. Insight checks fly back and forth. Harsh words are spoken. Had the bard sold out our allies? Was it really a case of telepathic miscommunication between man and fish monster? There were accusations levied, lines drawn in the sand, and lots of good drama all around the table. It was a fun breaking of the fellowship moment, and it came about because of the way the bard played the moment. There was hidden information in play (i.e. What were the terms of the bard’s negotiations?), but in my mind this is the good ending for “holding back information” scenarios. We didn’t know what was said in the other room, so we were able to explore that uncertainty in a dramatically interesting way.
Unfortunately, I think it’s far more common to get the bad ending. This happens when GMs give important info to one player, expecting them to share it with the rest of the party. Lord Dark Bad is invading your beloved homeland! The next phase of the adventure depends on you guys trying to stop him! But players are funny creatures. Give them that kind of narrative power and they’ll sometimes decide to hoard it, savoring the moment’s aroma like some kind of sommelier dragon. The world turns on their decision. The game hangs in the balance. Will they tell the others or let the good folk of Pipsy Hollow burn?
For me, this kind of thing is a mistake on the GM’s part as much as the player’s. If you’ve got some big-deal info to drop on the party, don’t rely on communicative players. If your story absolutely needs the players to know THE THING, then find a way to get them that info. Have a backup plan. Have a backup plan for that backup plan. Because if your adventure depends on the PCs finding that all-important clue, they will absolutely find a way to overlook it.
By the same token though, if you’re a player, I think it’s a bit of a dick move to sit on information just ’cause. Sure it makes you the temporary focal point of the story, but the emphasis ought to be on temporary. Share your info so that the whole group can react to it. Otherwise you risk annoying Wizard with your smugness. And Wizard knows fireball.
Question of the day: Have you ever seen a player refuse to share plot-relevant information? What was the big-deal secret, and why did they hoard their info? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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X.x So many times it isn’t actually funny. We were playing some Homebrew Setting for Anima: Beyond Fantasy. My Mage had found a strange black book that should have probably been bound in human skin and assassins had been dispatched after her for it. The Ranger is informed of this by shadowy, past-life like dreams. He tells no one.
Same game, two assassins later. We are recovering from the fight with one of the assassins (the warrior was very wounded, I was out of Mana from blasting the critter and healing the warrior.) We go to sleep, leaving the Ranger on guard.
The Ranger: “I try to hide so that I can’t be seen immediately while I’m keeping watch.”
GM: “you camped outside of the forest, so how far away do you go to get a good hiding place? The treeline is a good fifty feet away.”
Ranger: “That sounds great.”
GM looks down at his notes, looks back at Ranger, looks back at his notes, flips through the rulebook. “Oh…okay. Can you see in the dark?”
Ranger: “Not better than a normal person.”
GM frowns. “I see. Make a Notice with a…-80 penalty.”
Ranger rolls, calls out some low number.
GM: “You notice the figure dart from the shadows and into the campfire too late to stop him from stabbing Aria.” GM turns to me “Aria, you wake up with a burning pain in your side and a reptilian looking man standing over you holding a bloody dagger. Everyone roll Initiative.”
It is a constant thing from this player, to the point that GMs stopped giving him information and the party stopped trusting him to be our scout or eyes. I don’t think he ever picked up on the fact that he was never allowed to scout alone after that.
And my wizard didn’t know fireball, but she knew Lightning Bolt. And she was also the healer.
Did he ever explain why he makes these choices? Like I said in the blog, my theory is that it has to do with a sense of narrative control, but I’m not totally sold on that as the only explanation.
He never explains it even when asked. I am convinced that in his case, he believes he is roleplaying and “in character” to not tell people. I don’t understand why, since my character is the only person who kept him from being murdered when he turned bright red from being hit with Salt…on a boat full of superstitious sailors…who thought (Somewhat rightfully so) that he was a demon…but…
It wasn’t so much plot-relevant info as it was my character was born as a prophet from a cult that worshiped an Ancient Red dragon. His (mostly him, though partly mine) whole thing was he kept it a secret while trying to spread the faith. For him it was entirely benign (he was Chaotic Neutral bordering on Chaotic Good. He wanted to help people but he got mean when pissed.) as his view growing up was seeing it as inspiring and helpful. It was unfortunate that his father, the Red dragon, was just using them to spread his influence as he found out later.
My character got called out a few times for being sneaky in his trying-to-be-helpful way that backfired most of the time.
When you’re building this sort of thing into your backstory, it’s tough to make it to play out the way you envision. Just too many variables in the campaign to judge whether it will work out. As far as I can tell, it’s the sort of thing that requires the support and understanding of the group to even attempt.
It was more like the DM just has this boner for sadness and tragedy. He revealed and played out my character’s false beliefs so well that my depression got worse. Sure I can connect to my character and RP very well but at the cost of it being too connected.
In a campaign i’m in we’re doing the exact opposite in a way we basically know everyone else’s ‘big character secret’ and ‘ability’s’ in the game metagame and char wise i believe….-roll20 game, and oh its dnd 5e so yeah-
Okay to explain, in a campaign im in the entire world’s gone to well the pooper. And the gm recently has given the fighter to stop time as a boon due to him sacking his soul 5 sessions or so ago in order to get one of the pieces of the mcguffin we were looking for to “save the world/go back in time”. (Cue back to the future references :P)
GM: “Alright you can stop time once per day, -yes the 9th level spell- but if you ever tell anyone about this meta game or in game you lose the ability. Got it?”
Fighter: “Yeah i got it, proceeds to tell the group about his ability 10 minutes later
GM: ….”You lose it.”
Gm later told me he expected it to be 2-3 sessions before he blurted it out. TO say the least, his requirements of us as the players hit a new low.
The funny thing is that at this point in the story we’ve hit that barrier that separates meta gaming to “the party constantly knows what everyone else is thinking.”
Apart from that, in game the campaign? Well. i’m sure you will have a few reactions as were very “blargh everyone else, lets go full choatic neutral”…..Here are a few of our exploits.. 😛
-Robbing the mcguffin that was keeping a literal army of demons at bay from killing a civlization of harpies. The harpies later got invaded by a giant army and rather than attempting to help we ran away as a demon gloated to us later.
-Forgetting about the fighters literally given army by the gm and attempting to do our objective by ourselves without any npc help. (oh also we had 2 of 13 of the mcguffins, even then we died like flies)
-Sending the fighters -resistance- army away to god knows where. (we most likely will never see them again.)
-Casting a plot powered device of meteor swarm on the capital to make sure noone ever finds out. “NOONE MUST KNOW VISCOUNT, KILL THEM ALL!!!”-Necromancer wizard as he summoned an army of the undead while I called god to smite some fools
-As a good note, helping
-Using a army of the undead to kill a secret organization that knew about the mcguffins.
-….Slaying a dragon and later unleashing an army of eldritch abominations onto a human village. (were trying to solve this one atm)
….This campaign was meant for us to be big heros as we went from place to place smiting evil and taking names and collecting the mcguffins while generally having a huge power boost…..It’s turned into a weird version of darkest dungeons in tone atm.
Oh also as a little note heres the cast of the party that’s trying to go back in time and save the world.
Fighter: Our ‘neutral good’ fighter who tortured a tiefling in front of a bunch of kids and fed him a cookie later…He had a change of heart later and sacked his own soul to get us a mcguffin our current ‘level headed’ of the party. Has infinite spell slots although he’s only a eldritch knight. Got it when he sold his soul to a eldritch god.
Wizard: A chaotic neutral wizard who has the power to raise a giant army of the undead given a month or two. Is using his army so we can fight a eldritch army 😛
Ranger: That’s me, Grimdark edgy monster slayer who through the power of edge managed to survive being thrashed around by a level 18 monstrosity. I sport a rapier and a +3 bow and also plenty of rolls to be edgy. I’m the most good inclined according to the gm
Palidin: Person who forgets to roleplay but is able to parry a giant titan sword final fantasy style. Forget’s about her oaths and lets us do things that were probably not suppoed to. ‘Torture, mass extinction of a civlization etc.’ A very weak voice of reason but reminds us of the objective.
Barbarian: 2nd ‘good char’ of the party helped me to convince a fairy to give us a mcguffin and helped her reconcile with her past. 😀 Currently got in a fight with a black dragon because the dragon asked him to kill her/dragon.
Overall we’re slowly making the transition from ‘do the objective, **** everyone else we have a world to save’ to big hero’s. It’s a fun campaign but one that makes your eyes bug out when the edge lord has to be the voice of reason 😛
It’s a fun campaign to say the least and it’s a fun campaign. Gm is more than willing to cooperate and enjoys it also although is a bit frustrate at times when the fighter complains.
The way I see it, an inability to keep metagame knowledge a secret isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s knowledge that, by definition, exists outside of the game. When a GM tries to tie that into the game mechanically you’re in for blown expectations. Sounds to me like that’s exactly what happened.
In a way, campaigns been pretty fun so far. in other news our session just happened and it turned into a epic 5 hour battle between us and a buffed up eldritch kraken that had the ability to time stop and cast up to level 9 spells. 😀 FUN! Here are few highlights
Me: “Is there anyway i can insult it? I call it’s mother a *****”
GM: “In what language do you speak it?” prepares to say it doesent work
Me: “Celestial!, realizes he gained a new language a level ago N-NO WAIT DEEPSPEECH I REMEMBERED I GOT THAT LAST LEVEL!”
cue gm snickering for a moment
Gm: “You do so and you hear a booming voice in your mind and you feel that the thing is trying to rip your soul out of your body. Make a WIS save, DC 18 or bad stuff will happen.”
cue me rolling a 22
GM: “You succeed, you feel something creep in your mind but you fight it off, anything else you do?”
Me: “I INSULT IT AGAIN!”
this continued for 2-3 rounds while the party tried to battle the 800 health kraken. Eventually i stopped but not before i pulled a monty python series of insults. 😛 *
While during this the wizard was casting a mcguffin buffed up versions of his spells so 18d4 magic missiles were cast and 8d6 firebolts were used against the thing while I shot arrows that dealt 20 dmg on average while our barbarian did something….Very special
Barbarian: “How far is the distance between me and *hubertus the 8th apostle/kraken
GM: “30 feet or so.”
Barbarian: “I refresh my rage and try to leap the distance” makes his check
To make a long story short the barbarian made his check and boarded the creature and started hacking his way inside to it*
later cue the creature it’s on its last legs/tentacles 1/4 health remaining
GM: “Alright it casts timestop, gorthaw/barbarian your unaffected as your inside the creature you have no idea what’s going on what do you do?”
Gorthaw the mighty/barbarian: “What do you think? I hack my way into its eye, i’m not trying to cleave it away. No i’m cleaving my way inside it!”
GM: muttering to himself and rolling dice to determine whether or not it has poison blood “Get past it’s 23 ac and every hit you get is a crit. SHOW ME BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!”
Gorthaw the mighty/barbarian: rolls a series of crits that brings it’s health from 90 something to -10
GM: “You kill it, as you cue bloody desc as he hacks his way to the brain or etc killing it.
cue after fight
GM: “Congratulations! You killed a optional boss!!! You all hit level 7.”
Me: “What’s amazing or slightly annoying is that their’s 7 more of them!”
GM: “….Well you don’t know that, dont forget 9 or 10 or something anyway did you really think this campaign was gonna be easy?
It’s a fun campaign to say the least! Hard as hell when everyone gets knocked off their ass in fights but everyones enjoying it 😀 I can start to see CR level 26+ as our bosses from now on. -keep in mind everyone had +2 magical items and buffs up our ass in health and abilities, so yeah…I really gotta get a commission of the party one day o3o
Sounds gonzo as hell. Good on the GM for giving you the game you want.
Reminds me of my first ever campaign. Or rather, cam-PAIN. I was an edgy Black Dragonborn Warlock named Drakoss Deathscale(it was my first character and i was going through my edgy phase…). We were going through a ruined city wrecked by wild magic and magic bombing due to a war between the High Elves and all other species(think Thalmor from Skyrim, but they got their asses handed to them on a flaming platter), searching for a magic toolkit. I took the lead after our Kobold decided to try and read the map and failed, so I was up front. I started some suspicious scraping noises as we were coming up to an alley, so I stopped and asked if anyone heard it. Our two rouges did, and one of them, the infamous Momo, heard even more. So, as his first evil action out of many to come, succeeded in a Deception check to make me believe that it was probably nothing. He also snagged ALL of my health potions in order screw me over even more, without me knowing.
Then It hits me. He lied.
Want to know what also hit me? The blunt side of the axe of a Skeleton Minotaur, dropping me from 25 hp to 2 hp. Did i mention we were all Lv.1?
And guess what this asshole did? He fucking laughed. In and out of character. This whole time I had to watch in horror as he screwed me over. This was also his very first session. Albeit he gave me back one of my three health potions after I realized they were missing, but kept the rest and my character never found the others. To this day, he still keeps screwing me over and just thinks I’ll forgive him. Considering killing off his character in our current campaign, as, trust me, he deserves it for everything he’s done.
Firends don’t mind whammy friends. I suggest gaming with your friends rather than dudes you hire out front of “That Guy Depot.”
Sup. Sorry for the late reply. If your wondering why I have two names its cuz when i posted this I was using a different laptop and forgot my name. Ooga Booga = Papa Nurgle, just to clarify. To be honest, he was once a friend, currently, no so sure, due to some shit he’s currently doing to mess with us. We even tried abandoning him ffs. He’s also played the murderhobo tabaxi and Momo, so that should go to show his type of character. He’s currently abusing my character (physically and mentally) by:
-Throwing a chair at him immaediately after seeing him(excuse: “I lost my memories, he looks scary, hur dur)
-Punting me out of my bed, results in me slamming into a wall(excuse: he wanted me to wake up, rolled Nat 20. Could’ve just poked me instead)
-Punching my arm with an explosive gauntlet(excuse: we were in a pitch black room and I accidentally grabbed his head, but HE COULD STILL FUCKING HEAR ME)
-Insulting me constantly(Excuse: Im a big scary dragonborn, go figure)
-Insulting me for getting smashed through a wall by a big as fuck zombie, then mocking me for smashing more walls to find secret entrances in the necromancer’s tower
-Partially blaming me for losing our wounded teammate, even though while he should’ve been watching him, he followed me and our rouge up after we cleaned an entire floor of zombies, including the big guy, then spending ten minutes arguing with me.
After all of the trauma my guy has been put through, he expects me to take it up the ass and deal with it. Thankfully, due to something stupid outside of the game the happened between him an a new player(hint: romance), he pissed her off pretty badly that’s he’s using ‘work’ as an excuse not to come. Thank Nurgle. Hopefully he doesn’t come back. Even though I thought he was a friend, if all he does is ruin one of the few things I enjoy, he’s no friend to me.
Yeah man… If he’s a friend outside of game, awesome. Go get a beer and shoot some pool or whatever. But that doesn’t sound like much fun in-game. Probably a good call dropping the dude.
Well, obviously my previous story about bow thievery applies here. My GM also deals with haunts and stuff by taking a player out of the room and telling them of a vision they saw, but I think that’s more so that when the player tells the rest of the party, it is slightly inaccurate (being second-hand knowledge).
In a more relevant example, the one 5e campaign I did had a sequence when the party was in some sort of dream state (due to proximity to literal magic mushrooms). There were two stages to this: In the first one, anyone who walked into the circle of mushrooms (there was a dead guy in the circle, to lure us over there) would become compelled to lure the other PCs into the circle. My character (the paradoxical-sounding “cowardly tank”) was guarding the rear, and became suspicious when the rest of the party not only tried to lure him over but refused to come out of the circle when he asked them to come near him (“I’ll go over there if you come over here first”). When the GM concluded that there was a stalemate (I was actually about to try and use the spell Command to make one of them leave the circle), the mushrooms exploded into spores that knocked us all out. (I did get a 1d4 of inspiration to use on anything for “winning” the confrontation.)
When we woke up, we were in a weird church place, which had, among other weird things, a baby on an altar and a demon statue. Each of us had had an individual vision of “a version of yourself that you trust completely” giving us some information and an objective (of course, contradictory with one another), as well as the instruction that something terrible would happen if we told anyone. My character was told that there was an angel trapped here that would give him great power if he freed it by killing the demon that imprisoned it, and that he’d be sent away without reward if he told anyone. Our paladin was told that one of his partymates had been replaced by an imposter, who wanted to release the demon by killing an innocent. I’ll get to the other two in a second. Some exploration, confusion and paranoia later, the paladin told us about his vision (as his was the only one that didn’t say he couldn’t tell anyone), and concluded that one of us wanted to kill the baby. Once again, however, my character’s “flaws” came to his rescue. First off, he wasn’t the brightest guy, so it took him a while to figure out that the vision wanted him to kill the baby with the weird knife he found in his pocket. By that point, he was already suspicious of the whole situation. More importantly, his vision didn’t tell him that he HAD to kill it, merely that it was the right thing to do (to free the angel) and that he would be rewarded for doing it. But when faced with the prospect of manipulating or fighting the rest of the party, he chickened out and gave up. Instead, he had the rest of the party grab onto him and then told them about his vision, in the hopes that if he was sent back home like the vision said, the party would come with him. Nothing happened, but that just proved that the visions were untrustworthy.
Eventually, the party concluded that this was a dream state of some sort, and that they should kill themselves to escape. They did so, with the bard delaying his death ever so slightly to achieve his objective – be the last one to die. The wizard also achieved her goal (which I believe was either to keep party members from killing each other or to get everyone to kill themselves – I need to check my notes), and both the bard and wizard got inspiration dice as a reward. (The PCs woke up next to the mushrooms.) But I got the satisfaction of having a flawed character foil hostile plans via his flaws – not once, but twice.
It’s always strange when a GM tells you how you feel. If you “trust the vision completely” then we’re into mind whammy territory. Knowing how to deal with that as a problem solving exercise seems like a matter of guesswork to me.
“Give them that kind of narrative power and they’ll sometimes decide to hoard it, savoring the moment’s aroma like some kind of sommelier dragon.”
Okay, this is pretty darn good. Kudos!
Everyone lucks into a good one every once in a while. 🙂
More like I set this up. I was GMing a (FASA) Star Trek game for a girl I met on Boardgamegeek, who never role-played before. And as her home was only just over an hour away, I made an appointment with her, asked some of my friends, and she asked some of her friends, and I did a RPG session for them. We decided on Star Trek, as she is a real trekkie. And I made her the captain of the ship. So I set up the session, telling her that her ship is on routine patrol, and then she gets a message. I ask her: Do you take the incoming message on the bridge, or in your quarters/meeting room away from the bridge? She decides to take it away from the bridge, and hence away from the other players. We step into her hallway, and I give her the message: Colony in danger, closest ship, get there and help. She gets time to ask some questions, but after all info is given, I tell her the contact ended. And we step back into the room. Where she goes on to give orders, like changing course, and preparing for rescue mission and stuff, but without telling what the message was all about. After a few minutes it becomes clear to her that the rest of the crew is slightly curious, and a little miffed about the fact that she does not share the info.
And this is where I explain, to both her and all the other first time players, that this happens sometimes in RPGs, and that it is the player/character who has to decide if, and when they want to share information. And that there are games in which very little is shared, for both plot and (character)personal reasons (Paranoia, WoD), and other games in which information is far more freely shared. And as she is a trekkie, she now had to decide what the characters in the series would do, and why. As Star Trek is far more an info sharing game then some others I know and play, she then proceeded to share all the info on the mission, which resulted in a happy crew, who then where able to solve the whole situation.
Being a captain is tough. When you’ve been appointed leader of the team, knowing how to step into that roll without cutting off other players’ agency is tough for even a veteran player. Kudos for guiding her through!
She wrote a session report about the whole thing on Boargamegeek: https://boardgamegeek.com/article/6281906#6281906
I’ve seen characters withhold information quite frequently (playing games like Paranoia, any of the old World of Darkness games, or Dark Heresy means that’s pretty likely), but hiding things from other players is less common (given a good group where you trust people not to metagame).
That said, I’ve been in a Shadowrun game where our Face (who was also stealing party funds, secretly-from-the-players) decided not to let the party know that they had info from a contact that a mission was more than expected (e.g. someone from the megacorp calling the mission on the megacorp). When the deal looked like it was finally ready to go south, our Face just made sure he wasn’t in the line of fire. We survived… barely. (It all worked out in the end, when I had to leave the game due to moving. Another character had learned what was happening, told my technomancer/spy right around that time. So, my technomancer hacked/stole all the Face’s credits, used them to set a bounty on his head, then left town with a friendly farewell and notification to the rest of the team.)
In a Vampire: the Masquerade game I ran a couple years ago, one of the players (a Nosferatu with dreams of becoming Prince in the unstable city the story was set it) found out during investigations of some of the repeated attacks on the city were not actually because the Sabbat (the enemy sect) was so strong that it was launching an invasion, but instead because someone was feeding the Sabbat information. The player kept this secret for a session or two, before sharing with the other players. The character never told anyone, until he made a bid for the position of Prince in a big gathering (to hurt established candidates); it didn’t work out for him, but he got real close.
The Shadowrun player just seemed to like to feel like he was pulling the wool over people’s eyes, screwing them out of a little more money. Only the GM knew that was happening until pretty late in my part of the game.
The Vampire player wanted to try and find out the whole story by himself, then bring it to the party, but when a few rolls (done separately) didn’t turn up anything, he decided to share with the other players.
As may be apparent, I am a big fan of secrets from characters, but I tend to be very suspicious of secrets from players. Roleplaying is a game everyone does together to have fun, so it’s something you should enjoy together. A long-con or plot-twist can be lots of fun, but it should be done in the spirit of making the game more fun for your fellow players as well.
Well said! In your Shadowrun example, it comes down to one player instituting a form of PVP while no one else wanted it or even suspected that it was happening. The Vampire stuff was at the service of more than one player’s selfish gratification, and so it blossomed into interesting repercussions. Very cool stuff. 🙂
Ugh. This was a long time ago and I forget the exact details but our party was travelling in a wagon and our DM asked us to make a perception check. 5 out of 6 party members rolled under a 5 and the rogue rolled a natural twenty. The DM took the rogue aside to share some information with him, they returned to the table, and play continued as normal. What the rogue neglected to mention was that he heard the shuffling movement of something else with us in the wagon, and so several hours and a dead character later we asked him why the hell he didn’t tell us what he heard. Apparently he’d forgotten it the moment he sat back down at the table. It was one of many frustrating experiences with that player, who hardly payed attention except when he got a chance to kill another player for their gold.
I know there are a lot of different ways to enjoy gaming. I really, REALLY don’t understand some of them. Like… Why are you even there if you’re that disinterested?
What is Oracle doing in the background?
http://startupbook.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/palantir.jpg
Of course. Thank you Colin.
Hey you’ve had Mythos stuff in several uploads.
Is there going to be a character based around the Mythos?
Also is there going to be a physical collection at some point?
Hmmmm… We’ve already got Oracle there, so Pathfinder’s Dark Tapestry stuff probably won’t work. We just revealed that Warlock’s patron is Archfey in the last Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic, so no help there. Is there a Mythos-based class that you’re thinking of in particular?
As for the physical book, we’re up over 250 comics now, so we really ought to put something together. No idea what that’ll look like at the moment, but you better believe we’ll be crowing about it when it happens!
Sweet! I love the art, jokes & story of this. When I see that I’ll definitely be jumping at the chance to buy a copy. I’d love to see a full adventure or short vignettes if that ever crosses your fancy.
As for Cults, Muhuhaha!
…
Ahem, excuse me. There are a number of classes that could work. I will put links below. The Mesmerist Cult Master with it’s Mabuse-esque personality, the Warpriest Cult Leader who’s got (a dagger in) your back, the Possessed Shaman & his Dark Tapestry Spirit Animal are always giving spiritual guidance, the Occultist has several archetypes that could inform him of the Mythos, and of course the Archivist which already uses lost divine esoterica to further their own knowledge and those of their peers.
Hope I didn’t overload you, I just opened up my files for character concepts and this is what my up to date Mythos stuff held.
http://archivesofnethys.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Mesmerist%20Cult%20Master
http://archivesofnethys.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Warpriest%20Cult%20Leader
http://archivesofnethys.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Shaman%20Possessed%20Shaman
http://archivesofnethys.com/ShamanSpiritDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Dark%20Tapestry
http://archivesofnethys.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Occultist%20Curator
http://archivesofnethys.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Occultist%20Occult%20Historian
http://archivesofnethys.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Occultist%20Reliquarian
https://dndtools.net/classes/archivist/
Well then. I’m not sure if you’re on the Patreon, but we do have a monthly vote-for-the-next-character-class feature. I’ll see what I can do about inserting a few Mythos options into the queue in the next couple of months. 🙂
It is on my list now that I have an income again. I’ve been wanting to support & see the other ridiculous content you’ve been putting out.
Grats on the gainful employment. 😀
Ridiculous content indeed! It’s been a lot of fun doing girdle of opposite gender jokes with Fighter, the poor busty bastard.
Playing a GURPS campaign I created that was set in the far future with a mash-up of the Fading Suns universe, with some Firefly, and whatnot mixed in I had a player that way, waaaaay, overshared and changed the course of the campaign considerably.
The party was running a Serenity-like ship (totally not inspired…really) sometimes inside, sometimes outside, the law. The main governmental faction was heavily present, but really not super oppressive: The Imperium of United Known Worlds vs the Free Worlds Confederacy.
Anyhoo, party proceeds to do an emergency exfiltrate from a space-zombie infested planet. As they are jumping through hyperspace one of the characters who likes to press buttons wanders into the engine room…and proceeds to do an emergency engine-shut-down. Oh no. They wind up calling for help and get picked up by an Imperium cruiser.
On board said cruiser is an agent of the Imperium Special Investigative Service (ISIS…but this was in 2011-2012, so it was cool still. And it’s icon was a jackal…because they got their Egyptian gods mixed up…and I couldn’t come up with a good enough acronym for Anubis). Cue the character who is a former confederate bio-weapons engineer (BIG no no, but he’s the party’s doctor/scientist) getting interrogated. (Again…totally not inspired by the Firefly episode…yes I’m awesome!) He proceeds to tell the NPC his whole background story, exactly what they were doing on the planet they weren’t supposed to be on, what they found…on and on. The ISIS agent was just sitting back confused how she got so lucky to have such a dumb mark.
He realizes what he’s doing and mid-sentence goes “…and I realize I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.” And she replies, “No…you really shouldn’t have been.”
Players asks to retcon it…but it’s already made the quote-wall, and the rest of the players have just been sitting, mouths agape staring at him watching him crash and burn. I’ve been sitting there quietly trying not to break into laughter as he was very eloquently explaining everything and really getting into it. I refuse to allow the retcon, but he’s cool with it and it becomes a defining moment for the party who…low and behold…now find themselves working for Imperium Intelligence.
Sometimes you get into character and go on autopilot. We call those times “awesome.”
Also, good on ya for keeping a quote board. Anything especially juicy on yours?
I got one I think applys. I was playing a half-orc scold? (fighter-bard). We hear a scream. I’m the first to get there. Find a orc just killed a man. I roll and realize he is totally feral so I just kill him. The rest of the party wanted to question him and demanded to know why I killed him. I just walked out of the room and suduced the now widow wife into my bed. The women in the group were very mad at me. But I played my char true. I suduced about half the town in two days.
Scold
noun US archaic
1.
a woman who nags or grumbles constantly.
synonyms: nag, shrew, fishwife, harpy, termagant, harridan
That’s a hell of a prestige class.
I think i had only one case of this:
We had to enter a building which we were told the person we were tasked to find was kidnapped to. We were seven PCs.
To get to see how we could enter in the building we could go left or right, so we put an easy plan using our large amount of players:
– The PCs with flying should check around to see how the specifics were, mainly general aspects of the building, and specifically the roof and upper floors.
– The ground guys got divided in two groups made by one sneak mechanically proficient PCs tasked with see what entrances the building had and come back to report.
– There was a third group kept in the back to check if there was someone spying on us and keep an eye on the other two groups so we weren’t really split. To make things easier there was already someone tasked to follow each exploring group and report back to the main.
So, one of the exploring groups find something in front of the main entrance which was an important clue (the guy we needed to rescue was not on the building and that had a clue on where and by who he was taken). They pass on checking it and together with one of the flying PCs, instead of reporting back, jump over the wall, try to open a closed window without tools doing lots of noise and when they cannot, break it and enter, with guys prepared to ambush them fully awake and ready due to both noises.
All hell breaks loose and the third group and the link between them and the trespassers panics and begin to act out of character to save the two Leroy Jenkins PCs (i was on the other explorer group, clueless in-character till out of character i tell them how to make obvious in character (yell) they were under danger (and to stop the other players from playing out of character)).
Due to all of that we all forget about the clue (the guy who found it forgot to tell us, we forgot out and in of character to ask him specifically about that) and were busy doing things inside as one of the Leroy Jenkins characters chose to use a sonic bomb to both to call for help in character instead of just yelling and to survive, which also alerted half the city haha but the DM did not tell it was that big of a sound so we didn’t hurry and were caught by the city guards. On the other side the DM was internally facepalming till we accidentally (and probably with DM roll fudge) found another clue (it was an official for beginners campaign so it had three)) before the guards came.
The poor DM seeing it was his only way to move things forwards insist on us using that last clue, even if it was vague, till its obvious is a key plot clue to even the most oblivious, and railroads us in a way to make it impossible to miss the objective of the clue, even if it wouldn’t be hard for it to take many hours if this where real life.
After the session, he tells me that he foreshadowed to my character information that would make obvious how important that first clue was, and I was all surprised because i never heard it: what happened is that there is usually lots of racket on that group and it wasn’t the first or the last time we missed some information because of the noise, even when sitting closest to the DM.
So it was several instances of information not being transmitted or reaching destination in different ways. A good laugh and facepalming session.
From there i have put special focus into asking things to other players and the DM of that group, while making it too not much out of character, and asking the player if his PC was going to tell me the information and which, to be sure the information got passed and that the rest of the players got reminded of it, both in and out of character.