Tales from the Dorms: The Questors of Wey-Talleigh

null0trooper wrote:

If by "playing nice", you mean "let the GM know what you're planning now" and "be cool with what actually happens next", sure. You know you have a great idea when the GM buries his face in his hands and no one else at the table knows why.

Well, you should always let the GM know why you're doing something or not doing something else, if he's got to know. Not everything all the time but if it's going to be unusual, sure. Otherwise you're not playing an actual character. Even the act of making a perception roll or whatever the equivalent is is something your character often won't know. Like my one friend who was playing a "dumb muscle" type and we're in a room where one wall had a huge mirror on , so instead of knowing or being prepared for the people on the other side of that mirror, he just went up to it and did the whole "fix your hair" thing.

Stacking templates can be fun or a rules hack. 3.5 had a +20% XP penalty from multiclassing too much. In "Living FR", dude I once played with rigged it so his character wouldn't gain any XP at all, and so always played at the tier he wanted, picked up lots of swag, and never had to be retired. I was caught between admiration and horror, tell the truth.

As for "playing nice", a lot of it is knowing what an application of a spell or ability CAN do and choosing not to. For instance, White Wolf's Mage game, where just a basic acquaintance of Chemistry and / or Physics means you get to break the 't because it's more fun to figure out cool stuff you can do and what's the point of "winning", anyway? I mean, one Vampire game, one guy went in as a Tremere using modern tactical weapons and gear; just exposing the weaknesses of that system in the worst way; Storyteller resorted to having a clan elder curse him so the stuff wouldn't work. Heavy-handed, but I guess he did what he had to.

Only time I really pulled out the stops was when GM killed my wall of fur build. I'd done a sorcerer who didn't do anything except summon and buff, but boy could I summon and buff. Killed deader than dead in the teens, which in D and D pf is where it gets really lethal. Next character was a Tinker Gnome pistolero built to have as many attacks as possible. I think I said to myself, "fine, you don't want a nuanced character, lets see how much damage I can do". Over 300 points of damage one round, didn't even get half of the monster's hit points. It was that kind of campaign. Funny thing was, it was a really fun character, too. I just started with ranged touch from guns and as many ways to get multiple attacks with them as possible, and it was two levels of Bard Juggler (so as to have a "free" hand so I could always reload), five levels of Gunslinger Pistolero to know how to use guns and add Dex to damage of every hit, and then the confluence of six levels of Monk Sohei and three levels of Fighter Weaponmaster because the ability is the same so you can do a monk flurry with pistols now. Because the range was so short, I also had to ride a wolf, because riding and some feats are one of the only ways to move and full-attack in pf. So instead of having this one-dimensional slayer, I got this trick-riding, juggling, trick-shooting, little character who I had a blast with.

ghoti wrote:

I mean, one Vampire game, one guy went in as a Tremere using modern tactical weapons and gear; just exposing the weaknesses of that system in the worst way; Storyteller resorted to having a clan elder curse him so the stuff wouldn't work. Heavy-handed, but I guess he did what he had to.

I quite clearly recall one mixed WW LARP in which a Virtual Adept attempted to stake a low-gen Tremere elder - using a toothpick and high Correspondence. The VA ended up not only needing heart surgery himself to remove the toothpick which had somehow been reflected back to him, he ended up with a large amount of Paradox which would come back to bite him shortly afterwards.

(This was the same chronicle in which I played Alexis, the hyperactive Orphan mage whom I originally planned to join the Sons of Ether, but somehow she ended up in the Cult of Ecstasy , instead.)

But then, sometimes a GM doesn't have to play things fast and loose in order to hose the players; sometimes they do it to themselves. In another Vampire LARP, an entire Sabbat pack was unable to take down a single ordinary human for fifteen whole rounds, simply thanks to a mix of poor planning and bad luck. What was supposed to be a simple grab-and-drain left the licks in worse shape than when they started.

ghoti wrote:

Stacking templates can be fun or a rules hack. 3.5 had a +20% XP penalty from multiclassing too much. In "Living FR", dude I once played with rigged it so his character wouldn't gain any XP at all, and so always played at the tier he wanted, picked up lots of swag, and never had to be retired. I was caught between admiration and horror, tell the truth.

Race: Driztan (not-a-drow dark elf built for the DM's campaign setting, -2 STR, +2 DEX, -1 CON, +1 INT, LA: 0)
Applied template: half- brass golem (+12 STR, -2 DEX, +4 CON, -6 INT, -6 CHA, DR 10/adamantine, +13 natural armor, LA: +4)
Dragonblooded draconic (+2 STR, +2 CON, +2 CHA, +1 natural armor, LA: +1)
for STR: 25, DEX: 17, CON: 17, INT: 11, WIS: 13, CHA: 10, AC: 39 w/shield

... on a 5' 0" Ranger with the Scent special ability and Maze at level 15, 1/day
... who's Immune to Spells, spell-like abilities, and supernatural effects, with exactly two exceptions that match up to the two most common arcane attacks.

Did I mention he weighed 620 lbs.? In Equine, that's 620 lbs. of OH, HELL NO.

The GM and I decided he was the test monkey for the Gnome Tech being prototyped for some sun-dwelling noble who was injured in the same battle.
He started with 9 hit points that couldn't be healed by even an indiscrete cleric.
Guess who couldn't be hasted either?

Then we remembered the goblin wizard in the party who loved fireballs (and later, fire shield, wall of fire) with an almost sexual passion and a one in six chance of deciding to nuke the people she was with, on general principle. Now she could just fireball Hank whenever she felt like it, and everyone else would thank her!

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For one mixed WW LARP, I decided to bring in a Kinfolk. The setting was South Florida. Let that sink in.

null0trooper wrote:

Then we remembered the goblin wizard in the party who loved fireballs (and later, fire shield, wall of fire) with an almost sexual passion and a one in six chance of deciding to nuke the people she was with, on general principle.

We found Megumin!

I read over some of the LARP stuff; it looked a bit more restrictive than the tabletop version. Would have done it if there was a group, but as with a few things back then, I was limited in time and / or resources.

Really liked the premise of designing your own spells and / or effects that was in Mage; less so the whole "Mother may I" aspect. As with a lot of WW games, they didn't seem to realize the implications of a lot of their stuff. There have been deconstructions of that game elsewhere, but suffice it to say your default group is on the wrong side of everything as far as human wellness and well-being. Also, most people in so-called "First World" nations, let alone "developing" ones actually believe in magic (whether they call it miracles or faith or psychic phenomena or martial arts or whatever) which means Paradox is just whenever your Storyteller decides it is. It doesn't play nice with relativity, either; once you know that the Earth is a spinning ball and that everything is in motion, then Correspondence has to account for this somehow, and motion becomes a subset of that instead of Forces; or else kinetic energy is an overlap. Also, Mind v. Life; modern medicine says the brain is an organ and everyone who ever used a substance to alter body chemistry knows they're not really separate even leaving alone states like dementia and other mental conditions. Like I said, mother may I in so many respects.

Anyway, in Vampire tabletop game I remember this one relatively low-level Tremere ritual, called if I remember right "deflection of wooden doom" to make a stake disintegrate before it can paralyze you. It's not unreasonable for an elder to come up with and use a version of that which would do what the one in your campaign did. Thaumaturgy is the big rules hack in that particular game, mostly because it's cheaper than any other discipline to buy during a campaign, and there were a few very helpful rituals you could only know or design if you had it as well. Thus that one guy's schtick: have in-clan access to two useful disciplines and the rules-hack discipline, and if you've got rivals or vampire hunters or whatever, you're loaded for bear too.

This forum seems to eat some parts of my posts. I was trying to stay on topic mostly. There used to be this false dichotomy between so-called "roll players" and "role players". The former of whom are all about just designing for mechanical advantage, and the latter of whom are all about "concept" instead. You may still see traces of this in places.

I hardly ever start with "concept" when I build a character; it's very similar to how I do roles on stage. The script is your guide, the story is what occurs and motivates your relation with other characters, everything else is up to you. You're constrained by physicality onstage, similar to how you're constrained by your stats in a game. I once had this small role with a big vocal solo that led into a dance number. I'm a great singer, less good of a dancer. Spent a couple hours or so worrying, until I had the epiphany that I'm in a TAVERN. So, modified my solo very slightly, and in the number afterwards, it's not that I'm a crappy dancer, I've just had a few

Neither playing to or playing against type is wrong; you should just be aware of it. Start basic or just start with something that would be fun or funny. My above pirate started off just as how to do a 5e "backup tank" cleric with the tempest domain; became a cliche, but still a fun character in the adventuring party. My "wall of fur" build was about how many critters can I put on the board at once and how can I help the party this way (some weeks you never know who's showing up and like I said earlier, it was THAT kind of campaign). I saw the rules hack in PF of using "self" targeting arcane spells on a pet (there's even a minor caster class devoted to this), and of course a lot of useful buffs that don't get used that often for various reasons. Celestial servant feat gives your pet the celestial template (you have to be an aasimar though), and sylvan (fey) bloodline sorcerer gives you a pet. Then I think it was "infernal" sorcerer that gave you summoning bennies, and I had "Little Nicky"; angelic bloodline, mixed fey / infernal power. Topped it off with the archetype or feat that let me use religious focus instead of spell components if the focus was more valuable; got tons of roleplaying opportunities. And originally it was just about having a good pet and a lot of pogs on the board.