Tabletop Community Watch

[Shaka Brah]

View attachment 2766552I shared this with Wraith earlier but I don’t know what are youse guys thoughts? /tg/‘s unfinished Suffering chart. What speds lmao

The references make it look like someone from pre-2010 /tg/ is making it.

 

[Corn Flakes]

*rocks hands on the last charge*

I'd disagree with that last one, but eh. It's the Paladin of a religious order likely facing a foe deemed worthy of death, so roleplay wise it's cool. It'd be like a Knight of St. Cuthbert yeeting the Necromancer that wrought havoc in the county; they could possibly be redeemed, but honestly sword to the head works just as well and with less effort. Besides, point 2 and 3 would definitely merit their death anyway in any society worth a shit.

It's almost like you can disagree with an action and let it slide or something. I mean the homonculi you guys seem to run into can't, but a good chunk of people should be able to.

Another thing is that a character will do whatever the player controlling them intends for them to do... but if it's out-of-character or otherwise reprehensible the character is not free from the consequences of their actions. For example, if a Knight of St. Cuthbert starts getting a bit too execution-happy, the rest of the order might get a bit suspicious or at least unhappy with him. Meanwhile, a full Evil party is great fun, but part of the fun is finding ways to be complete bastards while avoiding the consequences of their bastardry. Either by guile, stealth, or just simply overpowering anyone trying to go after them.

As my GM loves to say, not every consequence results in HP being lost.

 

[Fictional Character]

Anyone who uses that term unironically is such a faggot that two queers fucking at a gay pride parade will stop having sex to hate crime him when he walks by.

Seriously, what is it with other people wanting to play your characters for you?

"My paladin's going to tell the orcs 'you have five minutes to prepare yourselves to meet your god."
"NOOOOO! THEY SURRENDERED! YOU'RE LAWFUL GOOD!"
"They have been found guilty of heresy, burning villages, raping white halfling virgins, and being orcs. The sentence is death."
"YOU CAN'T DO THAT!"
DM>"Actually, he can."

There's a fight with a couple of bandits in the introductory adventure to Pendragon, the ultimate game about being a knight. When my group did that adventure, we accepted their surrender and took them as prisoners to our liege lord. Who promptly had them hanged and looked at us like we were crazy for taking them prisoner. We learned from the experience and from then on only accepted surrender from people who could be ransomed or had noble extenuating circumstances. IIRC, the GM notes for that adventure are pretty explicit the point of that encounter is to teach the PCs to not spare the lives of lowlife criminals.

 

[Kabuki Actor]

I shared this with Wraith earlier but I don’t know what are youse guys thoughts? /tg/‘s unfinished Suffering chart. What speds lmao

That does NOT look like a 10/100.

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

That is the problem with a lot of the new players. They can't separate the character from themselves.

If their character takes an ass kicking or receives consequences for their actions, it isn't the character, it's an attack on THEM personally.

That's why I'm pretty careful nowadays with my roll20 campaigns.

And as far as evil parties are concerned, you can have a LOT of fun with them in ways that you don't even get into intra-party fighting or really evil stuff.

One I ran recently was an all evil party. They were scumbags from the slums. Drug dealers, smugglers, muggers, pimps, the whole nine yards. The group had a great time. They were just bonded together over the fact that they were slummers, the guards hated them, everyone was racist toward them, and a kobold gotta get that shiny, ya?

Someone came in to replace a player we lost and tried to convince everyone to do good things, not live in the slums.

These were 10+ level characters, with deep black market and organized crime contacts, contacts with nobles, contacts with crooked guards. They had gangs, cultists, all kinds of stuff. The whole city was swept by revolution every 6 months (I modeled it after Paris during the Terror and threw in some Bolshevik Revolution), it was after a major war, and it was everyone for themselves.

Oh, yeah, and they had seven of the nine jam recipes and had defeated the Demon of Endless Tormenting Gluttony once and were ready to do it again.

They quit because the group 'wasn't what they were looking for and the game had promise but they couldn't see it'.

They got honestly offended at people having fun being big time gangsters and mobsters.

OH, for a fun thing: Use the old 1E AD&D followers charts when they hit the right level and take the Leadership Feat. Not just a single henchmen, but shit like "100+3d10 Bowmen" stuff and translate it over.

The kobold alchemist had a full blown drug production, smuggling, distribution system complete with thugs, henchmen, bribed judges and guards. The players loved it.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

That is the problem with a lot of the new players. They can't separate the character from themselves.

If their character takes an ass kicking or receives consequences for their actions, it isn't the character, it's an attack on THEM personally.

That's why I'm pretty careful nowadays with my roll20 campaigns.

And as far as evil parties are concerned, you can have a LOT of fun with them in ways that you don't even get into intra-party fighting or really evil stuff.

One I ran recently was an all evil party. They were scumbags from the slums. Drug dealers, smugglers, muggers, pimps, the whole nine yards. The group had a great time. They were just bonded together over the fact that they were slummers, the guards hated them, everyone was racist toward them, and a kobold gotta get that shiny, ya?

Someone came in to replace a player we lost and tried to convince everyone to do good things, not live in the slums.

These were 10+ level characters, with deep black market and organized crime contacts, contacts with nobles, contacts with crooked guards. They had gangs, cultists, all kinds of stuff. The whole city was swept by revolution every 6 months (I modeled it after Paris during the Terror and threw in some Bolshevik Revolution), it was after a major war, and it was everyone for themselves.

Oh, yeah, and they had seven of the nine jam recipes and had defeated the Demon of Endless Tormenting Gluttony once and were ready to do it again.

They quit because the group 'wasn't what they were looking for and the game had promise but they couldn't see it'.

They got honestly offended at people having fun being big time gangsters and mobsters.

OH, for a fun thing: Use the old 1E AD&D followers charts when they hit the right level and take the Leadership Feat. Not just a single henchmen, but shit like "100+3d10 Bowmen" stuff and translate it over.

The kobold alchemist had a full blown drug production, smuggling, distribution system complete with thugs, henchmen, bribed judges and guards. The players loved it.

One of my big complaints about 3E was how badly it fucked over hirelings and followers.

Also, while I tend to regard a lot of evil campaigns as 'look how edgy we are', doesn't mean other people can't play them

 

[Smoke Manmuscle]

Another thing is that a character will do whatever the player controlling them intends for them to do... but if it's out-of-character or otherwise reprehensible the character is not free from the consequences of their actions. For example, if a Knight of St. Cuthbert starts getting a bit too execution-happy, the rest of the order might get a bit suspicious or at least unhappy with him. Meanwhile, a full Evil party is great fun, but part of the fun is finding ways to be complete bastards while avoiding the consequences of their bastardry. Either by guile, stealth, or just simply overpowering anyone trying to go after them.

As my GM loves to say, not every consequence results in HP being lost.

This is one of the reasons I love GMing Shadowrun. My players quickly figured out that the amount of inconvenience caused to a Corp is directly correlated to how many resources they will expend hunting you down. Steal an experimental item and research? Not too much is going to be devoted to finding you. This is the cost of doing business in the 6th world. Kill 3/4 of the scientists, and burn down the entire secret lab? You better bet your ass they will be looking for you. And not picky on what happens when they find you.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

This is one of the reasons I love GMing Shadowrun. My players quickly figured out that the amount of inconvenience caused to a Corp is directly correlated to how many resources they will expend hunting you down. Steal an experimental item and research? Not too much is going to be devoted to finding you. This is the cost of doing business in the 6th world. Kill 3/4 of the scientists, and burn down the entire secret lab? You better bet your ass they will be looking for you. And not picky on what happens when they find you.

When my group played Shadowrun that was something I had to drill into some of the other players' heads. No, we don't kill/maim the asshole son of the senior vice president of some division of Ares Macrotechnology. We just blow up his brand new car. And do it again every time we had to deal with that reoccurring pain in the ass. Especially when we somehow got hired to save him from kidnappers. It never got old.

 

[EnemyStand]

This is one of the reasons I love GMing Shadowrun. My players quickly figured out that the amount of inconvenience caused to a Corp is directly correlated to how many resources they will expend hunting you down. Steal an experimental item and research? Not too much is going to be devoted to finding you. This is the cost of doing business in the 6th world. Kill 3/4 of the scientists, and burn down the entire secret lab? You better bet your ass they will be looking for you. And not picky on what happens when they find you.

It's always funny when people from some Pink Mohawk commie LARPer's game show up for a real game of Shadowrun. I literally had a dude I shared a table with who was confused when we yelled at him for turning one of Ares' corporate offices into a bloodbath because the ebil Megacorp deserved it, we're comrades! Row Row, fight the powa!!!! He was even more confused when fucking Firewatch showed up a week later at our hideout and we handed him and the loot over in exchange for the rest of us being left alone. He got super confused when afterwards we were talking about how lucky we were the target wasn't MCT or Saeder-Krupp, because that probably would have been a wipe. Then he got huffy and left when we told him to stop fucking around and play real Shadowrun next time.

 

[Airbrushed Van Art]

it's an attack on THEM personally.

To be fair, I've met plenty of GMs and players who used a gaming session to express their anxieties, beefs and stressors from real life.:

• GM who was jealous that a girl was flirting with another player than than him and started being super aggressive to the party.
• Player who was going through a messy divorce and played his PC like a violent, raping misogynist.
• Player who had a real bad week at work and passive-aggressively took out his insecurities on the other players (started PvP for nearly nothing).
• Player who got angry that his carefully crafted Samurai one-trick-pony kept on missing his attack rolls and got mad (in real life) when an NPC villain laughed at his character.

 

[Wallace]

It's always funny when people from some Pink Mohawk commie LARPer's game show up for a real game of Shadowrun. I literally had a dude I shared a table with who was confused when we yelled at him for turning one of Ares' corporate offices into a bloodbath because the ebil Megacorp deserved it, we're comrades! Row Row, fight the powa!!!! He was even more confused when fucking Firewatch showed up a week later at our hideout and we handed him and the loot over in exchange for the rest of us being left alone. He got super confused when afterwards we were talking about how lucky we were the target wasn't MCT or Saeder-Krupp, because that probably would have been a wipe. Then he got huffy and left when we told him to stop fucking around and play real Shadowrun next time.

That reminds me, someone should review Hard Wired Island sometime.

 

[Adamska]

That reminds me, someone should review Hard Wired Island sometime.

• A wealth system that tracks the financial burdens placed on you by the capitalist system you live in.
• A cybernetics system that doesn't dehumanize you for installing augments.

Well fuck, that might be something I have to look at given some of the lines just in the promo.

Speaking of podcasts, it's Hannukah still, so tonight we, or maybe just me, are going to be reading Doikayt, the Jewish RPG... yes this is real.

 

[ExplosiveTeddybear]

That is the problem with a lot of the new players. They can't separate the character from themselves.

This exactly. They forget they are playing a role, in a role playing game. It's how you end up with goodie-two-shoes mary-sue non-binary pan-romantic wheelchair-bound overweight bards who can't play their instrument. It's fine if that's what you want to play, but if it's literally just you inserted into the game. It's gonna cause trouble 'cause you'll never agree with anything happening to you that you don't agree with, and if you have a bad GM, they'll coddle you and you end up having a thoroughly mediocre experience, instead of the grand epic adventure where the GM tries to (mildly) fuck you over at all times to keep things interesting and challenging.

 

[Shaka Brah]

Well fuck, that might be something I have to look at given some of the lines just in the promo.

Speaking of podcasts, it's Hannukah still, so tonight we, or maybe just me, are going to be reading Doikayt, the Jewish RPG... yes this is real.

When I saw that pop up on my feed I was confused wtf the new episode was even about. I had no idea that game existed.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Well fuck, that might be something I have to look at given some of the lines just in the promo.

Speaking of podcasts, it's Hannukah still, so tonight we, or maybe just me, are going to be reading Doikayt, the Jewish RPG... yes this is real.

It would rock if we had an RPG set in the Maccabean Revolt, where you can either roll as one of the Jewish rebels, or a member of some Greek force sent to quash them.

 

[Shaka Brah]

It would rock if we had an RPG set in the Maccabean Revolt, where you can either roll as one of the Jewish rebels, or a member of some Greek force sent to quash them.

It's called Maccabees and Menorahs and it's a mini RPG from 2016. You use dreidels to decide success obviously.

 

[Baraadmirer]

This exactly. They forget they are playing a role, in a role playing game. It's how you end up with goodie-two-shoes mary-sue non-binary pan-romantic wheelchair-bound overweight bards who can't play their instrument. It's fine if that's what you want to play, but if it's literally just you inserted into the game. It's gonna cause trouble 'cause you'll never agree with anything happening to you that you don't agree with, and if you have a bad GM, they'll coddle you and you end up having a thoroughly mediocre experience, instead of the grand epic adventure where the GM tries to (mildly) fuck you over at all times to keep things interesting and challenging.

Let's not forget that in the more crunchy fantastical games like D&D, characters have a tangible risk of dying, so being too attached to them, like self-inserts, is a habit that needs to be stopped as soon as possible before someone has a meltdown.

 

[Ghostse]

The kobold alchemist had a full blown drug production, smuggling, distribution system complete with thugs, henchmen, bribed judges and guards. The players loved it.

That last bit right there. If the table loves it, and the GM likes running it, the game is being played correctly.

Also, while I tend to regard a lot of evil campaigns as 'look how edgy we are', doesn't mean other people can't play them

I tend to be very meh on running evil campaigns. Firstly because usually even a good campaign, they are still players and get up to some pretty evil shit. The other issue is having an effective plot-consistent limiter for their Ids.

Usually I like to do length-limited "Dirty Dozen" scenarios where they've got some sort of minder or a ticking clock on the task to keep them marginally on-task.

To be fair, I've met plenty of GMs and players who used a gaming session to express their anxieties, beefs and stressors from real life.:

• GM who was jealous that a girl was flirting with another player than than him and started being super aggressive to the party.
• Player who was going through a messy divorce and played his PC like a violent, raping misogynist.
• Player who had a real bad week at work and passive-aggressively took out his insecurities on the other players (started PvP for nearly nothing).
• Player who got angry that his carefully crafted Samurai one-trick-pony kept on missing his attack rolls and got mad (in real life) when an NPC villain laughed at his character.

Yeah as I've gotten older I've had issues with people being stressed out at work and losing their cool in session because they got dealt some consequences for their actions or the party wants to do something they don't and the player not being able to unpack that.

Another thing is that a character will do whatever the player controlling them intends for them to do... but if it's out-of-character or otherwise reprehensible the character is not free from the consequences of their actions. For example, if a Knight of St. Cuthbert starts getting a bit too execution-happy, the rest of the order might get a bit suspicious or at least unhappy with him. Meanwhile, a full Evil party is great fun, but part of the fun is finding ways to be complete bastards while avoiding the consequences of their bastardry. Either by guile, stealth, or just simply overpowering anyone trying to go after them.

As my GM loves to say, not every consequence results in HP being lost.

I have a couple of players from another GM who ran... not exactly a monkey cheese campaign, but very much more of an improv theater/storygame sort of table. And the fact their actions have lasting consequences, or the fact that deciding "we're going to inflitrate the bad guy's fortress by pretending to be his soldiers" as you are at the door of the main guys' fortress with zero leg work having been done to learn anything about how his evil organization operates doesn't result in characters who are good at pretending to be evil guys, is coming as a very unwelcome surprise to them; "What do you mean I'm supposed to take notes and not just dictate events that I decided on the spot?".

Actions have consequences. And sometimes, if you did something the NPCs around you appreciate, you LIKE the consequences.

 

[Corn Flakes]

To be fair, I've met plenty of GMs and players who used a gaming session to express their anxieties, beefs and stressors from real life.:

• GM who was jealous that a girl was flirting with another player than than him and started being super aggressive to the party.
• Player who was going through a messy divorce and played his PC like a violent, raping misogynist.
• Player who had a real bad week at work and passive-aggressively took out his insecurities on the other players (started PvP for nearly nothing).
• Player who got angry that his carefully crafted Samurai one-trick-pony kept on missing his attack rolls and got mad (in real life) when an NPC villain laughed at his character.

That's a fair point. Still, if the person doesn't make it a habit most of these things can be excused. Life can be frustrating, after all. Just like people rage at videogames when they lose, so can the dice prompt anger.

I have a couple of players from another GM who ran... not exactly a monkey cheese campaign, but very much more of an improv theater/storygame sort of table. And the fact their actions have lasting consequences, or the fact that deciding "we're going to inflitrate the bad guy's fortress by pretending to be his soldiers" as you are at the door of the main guys' fortress with zero leg work having been done to learn anything about how his evil organization operates doesn't result in characters who are good at pretending to be evil guys, is coming as a very unwelcome surprise to them; "What do you mean I'm supposed to take notes and not just dictate events that I decided on the spot?".

It's like these people's entire understanding of the world comes out of Saturday morning cartoons. And even in those cartoons you usually have someone who's actually competent enough to pull the plan off.

Actions have consequences. And sometimes, if you did something the NPCs around you appreciate, you LIKE the consequences.

Nothing feels better than helping a random NPC the GM only meant to be there as set dressing ("you ride by a villager trying to extricate his cart from a ditch") and they turn out to be helpful later. Even if it's minor, like the villager being related to the local town leader and the party rescuing them resulting in a minor extra reward for whatever problem they show up in town to solve. Makes the world feel more alive when NPCs have relationships and intent.

 

[Newman's Lovechild]

I shared this with Wraith earlier but I don’t know what are youse guys thoughts?

Thoughts:

- I don't know what these are supposed to achieve. Memberberries? Turning literature of a sort into spreadsheets? Bragging about how much nerd media you've consoomed?

- where do they find the time? Are these made by NEETs?

- Who's that guy at 10/95? I see him in kiwi avatars and keep thinking 'George Takei's dad'.

- Pratchett deserves more suffering than that.