EleventySeven
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- Aug 11, 2023
In my home-game version of the setting, I made him more powerful by giving him the Einherji as an army of his own to compensate. War is the natural state of mortals, after all.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
- Start date
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2017
What is “bad”? Because truth be told, I’d rather game with a lolicon, a furry, a theater kid, or a hardcore /pol/ack (all of which I’ve had good games with, there just needs to be boundaries) than a troon, simply because troons are just that much of an obnoxious fun dementor. Despite my grandparents’ escape from Cuba, I could probably see myself gaming with a socialist or communist too as long as they’re not bringing up politics. It’s all about what flaws and how many flaws you’re willing to tolerate.
Henri Barbusse
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2022
It's also about cutting your losses. If the group doesn't work for you, then quit the game. Not everything has to work out right from the start, but there comes a point where it's pointless keep trying. And that point is different from everyone. It's not just about troons, theater kids, etc. I've been in games with people I get along with fine outside a game, but playing ttrpgs with them is miserable for me and I didn't expect that. If a game feels like a chore, it's miserable for the person who thinks that way and it's miserable for the rest of the table. I'm willing to try a lot of different games with almost anyone, but if it doesn't work for me, I'll try to leave with as little fuss as possible and with the least amount of disruption for the rest of the group. And I don't mean quit the second there's lull in the action or something like that. If I haven't enjoyed a session in a while and talked it over with the GM and it doesn't look like things will get better, I won't force myself to be in a game I don't enjoy for the sake of being in a game.
I spent six months in a game with a GM who played favorites and got upset every time a character he didn't care about tried to show some initiative. I was stupid enough to get into another game with that GM. I spent a year in a different game where once my character died, I realized I didn't accomplish anything at all over that year and didn't make another character, even though it was a system I love and that's hard to find games for that last longer than a month. If I was smarter about quitting instead of trying to make things work, it would have saved me a lot of grief.
God of Nothing
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- Joined
- Aug 31, 2016
A lot of the lesser pantheons need pruning. The mock Egyptian one is a start. Geb's personal cumdump somehow achieving godhood despite doing nothing being one of the most grievous cases. Nocticula already embodies the exile/outsider domain while Gyronna and Callistria have the two versions of spurned angry woman covered. I am fairly certain everyone forgot Achaekek existed at all.
EleventySeven
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 11, 2023
This I agree with. I went with my meta-plot in the background of essentially Armageddon round 1 to explain the death of a lot of the gods I didn't like/feel like living and the few new ones I came up. Like killing off Sarenrae to raise that eagle god of the sun up to Greater deity status, splitting Nethys in half, fixing the demon lords/archdevils, pruning a lot of the less important pantheons by having Golarion get partially scoured, etc. All to say, don't be afraid to make major setting alterations if you can manage the fallout.
As for Achaekek, I know @2LtMashengo is a big fan of playing Achaekek worshippers/related characters. He's played at least two at my table. One a mantis druid and the other an Achaekek-worshipping Hellknight signifer. So he's got fans even if he's more obscure. Plus, he's one of the few true deities with a stated avatar in pathfinder.
God of Nothing
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- Aug 31, 2016
On one hand, I like the idea of there being a large range of lesser gods to convey there is something greater and horrifyingly unknown out there in the greater universe. On the other hand, what's the glamour of godhood when literal who pirates and used cumrags can achieve it? I'd kill off and replace Urgathoa for being the most self-contradicting god ever (hedonistic excess and too dead to feel it, make it make sense my nigger) and write off Iomedae's pointless dragon-fucking ass entirely alongside the rest of the fodder. The only being worthy of being the righteous crusader war god is Ragathiel. And Cayden is an unfunny reddit joke.
EleventySeven
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- Aug 11, 2023
I just replaced Iomedae with St. Cuthbert. As for the horrifying unknown, I introduced something subtle there with teasing the cthulhu stuff. In my version, Desna is the one Elder God who likes life and so is similarly insanity inducing in many ways, although she tried to mitigate that when interacting with mortals. But it's enough to hint at something mysterious in a horrifying way about her and the stars at large.
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2021
They wrote Urgathoa as a goddess of undead in general, but she mostly reads like she should be restricted to vampires, ghouls, and the like. To some degree Pozzo must've understood this, because her divine gift is to turn the PC into a vampire. Joins the hedonism with the undead rather nicely, as the ghouls do for gluttony.
God of Nothing
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- Aug 31, 2016
Exactly. The problem is last I checked vamprisim and ghouls don't originate from anything even related to Urgathoa's brand of. She's not the first vampire or the first ghoul. She's supposedly just the first undead. Kabiri and Zura both exist as their potential progenitors. Bitch either needs to drop that aspect or merge with the others for it to make sense.
strawberry15
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2023
Deryl the fishboi was my fav. my only character created by 3d6 in order. as a fighter who lacks str to wear anything heavier than chainmail, i loved levelling him up all the way to level 4, where he was killed by a faggot player who read deathcloud scroll to my face and closed the door because he thought it was funny.
Anihaspar my lvl 18 Abjuration wizard in dnd 5e peaked when my DM decided that it would be whacky if the barbarian player was the BBEG and CR30 all along. He killed everyone but i managed to survive and because the barbarian lacked ranged attacks i kited him by fly+ cantrips lol.
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2019
I don't get the part about them taking longer, do you just add more encounter cards if they do stuff other than searching or is it more of a byproduct of adding more cards as they progress through the quest?
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Depends on how much of a "game" you want to make the search and how important to the session
For a specific example this was a megadungeon and I added in a "Oregon Trail" aspect to get them to balance survival skills & rations with combat skills and weapons so there would be well-rounded characters instead of just combat autists.
So except for the initial 3-card deck where each card pulled represented a day, each time a card was drawn it was a 2 hours of searching, or 4 cards per day, with an option to press your luck and draw upto 7. so the party was on a timer and wanted to get to their goal in the fewest number of "hands"/"Days" possible.
(in summary of the mechanics which I was adjusting on the fly because I pulled them out of my ass: If the party searched "carefully" they could draw 2, avoid 1 [mostly. "bad" suite Jack/Queen/King/Ace were unavoidable bad but resolved with the other card]. Once per day they could have the Ranger draw and he got to draw 3, avoid 2 and could place an unavoidable Bad card back on top of the deck.
Players could also search "rapidly" and draw three but had to resolve two, with additional bad events if they were searched rapidly. This was a little overly punative and players stopped rapid searching, especially because I gave them a bit too much time.
They had the option of searching 3 additional times per day, but this cost extra water and food and they only got to draw one card; some of the bad cards were exhaustion or injury which would fuck with the party's ability to draw cards so it was very bad to not have the option to toss those cards. I also had a CON check early on but that was overly punative so I dropped it)
After around a week the party would attract the attention of local bandits (specifically: There was a bandit timer and it would tick up every day with the possibility of ticking up twice per day if the party drew cards that would later on be Bandit encounters) and they also had a rival faction who was behind them and if they took too long would also start searching - meaning if they took too long eventually the search would happen twice as fast. This never ended up happening so no idea how that would play out.
So each time they hit a goal, the deck would get reshuffled and altered - mostly cards added. But the final search for the tomb entrance itself, lots of boon cards got removed.
Also some cards would add/remove cards from the deck (or from associated random tables). Like one of the "boon" events was they had the option to buy off one of the bandit captains to take his men and leave - it cost them gold, but the next bandit card pulled would be removed from the deck. One of the bad cards I had labeled as "oasis dries up" - which would have the next two Boon cards removed from the deck. So next time the deck shuffled those cards wouldn't be there.
So after about hour with chatting and snacking, the party entered the megadungeon a little worse for wear.
If I was doing it over again I would have made things either more interactive or less - there were only a few cases where there wasn't a very clearly defined "right choice" with the cards, and I was doing most of the card draws (so that I could 'correct' the results since this was something I'd back-of-enveloped and didn't know if it would descend into a party death orgy) so there wasn't over much for the players to do other than listen to me use the cards to tell them about their seach for the tomb, and if I could have known ahead of time if they'd choose to press their luck on a given day, could have largely been done before session. Or more interactive so the players had more to do and better choices/more ways to influence the deck. Basically needed to turn it to something done between sessions or up the player engagement. I was more confident towards the end and had players taking turns pulling cards and that helped engagement.
like I said, this is a work in progress.
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- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Most of my PCs were deliberately annoying and not hugely developed because the whole point of them was they'd eventually get killed by the rest of the party. They were literally brought in to annoy everyone.
I have a favorite PC that basically defined a CoC campaign I ran though. My bud who was the main player in the campaign wanted to have a lot of guns. In CoC. Most characters in that game are nerds, eldritch scholars and the like, librarians even, just wimps.
I'm good though, why? Why does this guy have lots of guns? He's Russian. Wait, how does just being Russian mean lots of guns? He's Russian organized crime. Okay. Nice idea. So why? Why isn't he in Russia? The Bolshevik Revolution. He had to flee. Okay, so why would he still have guns? He was allied with the White Russians. That's why he had to flee.
Very nice backstory. It developed into he took his connections and set up his own mob in the U.S. with a heavily armed group and access to arms dealers and what was left of the cartels selling arms to the White Russians. His group was wiped out by a heavily armed group of cultists.
So the original party was the remnants of that group, who basically were all incredibly devoted to the U.S., and absolutely detested Communists. And they had access to as many guns as they wanted. Even after that original cadre all died (fairly typical for CoC), they retained their connections, so even the nerds and accountants and librarians who later joined had as many guns as they needed.
This is one of the better things where letting a player explain why "I just want lots of guns" ended up really well.
It turned the campaign into a Roaring '20s gangster drama + eldritch horror campaign.
Sargon's wife's son
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2019
One of my PCs was a guy from this one part of the wastelands from Florida who is the xenophobic scientifically advanced isolationist civilization in post apocalyptic Florida I have no idea why I gave him a southern accent I just did didn't even fit where he lived.
He basically was part of the ruling class but he was also considered a living weapon who could talk to animals and control them if he concentrated hard enough he had a companion of a bald eagle that he would have swooped down with land mines and drop them on his enemies I also trained the bird to just fly up to people who were carrying guns because he was a melee fighter and just snatched their guns out of their hands and fly off.
I still say that his bald eagle which he called patriot didn't deserve to die in such a fashion but he eventually got one that was basically a mutant that had higher strength that I covered in armour.
Eventually also got a giant mutated bear and a giant mutated fire breathing duck.
It also became a running joke that the mercenary company headquarters that the party formed would constantly have the windows broken out when he called all of his beasts to come to him
He basically was part of the ruling class but he was also considered a living weapon who could talk to animals and control them if he concentrated hard enough he had a companion of a bald eagle that he would have swooped down with land mines and drop them on his enemies I also trained the bird to just fly up to people who were carrying guns because he was a melee fighter and just snatched their guns out of their hands and fly off.
I still say that his bald eagle which he called patriot didn't deserve to die in such a fashion but he eventually got one that was basically a mutant that had higher strength that I covered in armour.
Eventually also got a giant mutated bear and a giant mutated fire breathing duck.
It also became a running joke that the mercenary company headquarters that the party formed would constantly have the windows broken out when he called all of his beasts to come to him
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2023
Been having fun playing DND with my friends but I have a really difficult time acting as another person, and not having my normal personality slip in. Idk maybe I'm just bad, but then again it's my first playing DND.
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2024
Now see, individually they're bett-not as bad as a zippertit. Together I'd imagine the line between the 4 and a troon starts to blur a bit. I've played with enough furfags (as rare as that is) as well as seen enough on how troons act generally to know that if furfags and troons were an evolutionary line they'd be less than a century apart
>I'm not good at doing something I've rarely ever done before
My man it's A-OK. Do it in brief moments until it's second nature, extend from there.
Brotherman that is a fine idea, I'm saving this and tweaking it when I get the chance to.
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- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Been playing for 15 years and don't act. You're fine.
Revelator
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2024
Can confirm: played a one shot CoC with a an actual racist. My character was a Jewish doctor and my friend's was a black boxer... you know, to poke the bear. The game ground to a halt for 15 minutes as the racist guy flipped out over black boxer being able to go on a college campus in the white part of town. We still laugh about it.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Since people seem to like my primordial sludge of a concept I'll bloviate a bit more:
The base idea coalesced around concepts from this article:
Author talks about Stranger Things and the Stranger Things 5e cash grab, but only tangentially so keep reading. He talks about those things more in generality and there's some gold in there as he describes a sort of D&D themed Cube.
I've had thoughts about doing a geomorph dungeon crawl of the sort described in the blogpost (draw cards to place random rooms, but the Rooms have persistence between crawls) but I need to find a group who will do more than a one-shot since handling it in a rogue-a-like fashion is key to getting the players to understand what's happening.
I'm also still lacking a good framing that would explain why the players keep leaving and re-entering. (I've had thoughts of when the players find the "next level" there is a mechanism to freeze to existing level.)
Anyway other notes about the desert exploration:
- I also drew inspiration from Forbidden Desert ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/136063/forbidden-desert). For those unfamiliar, you need to explore a stretch of desert (random each game, made by 24 cards [5x5, minus one]) that was an abandoned research facility to find airship pieces before the shifting sands and sand storms bury you or you die of thirst.
- I thought about trying to add a mechanic of letting players explore by themselves or with the party. Basically: players would form search groups. Groups would draw Members cards or Members + 1 cards and resolve one. So with 4 players they could form 4 groups that would draw 2 cards, or 2 groups that would draw 3 cards, or one group that would draw 5 cards. Players basically would need to balance skittering off willy-nilly makes the deck draw down nearly twice as fast, but sticking together gives you better odds of avoiding hazards.
I dropped the idea because I was sure the carddeck would already have balance issues and this would make it worse. Plus I didn't need to encourage the party to split before the game truly started, and opted instead for a "push-your-luck" mechanic. (not that these would be mutually exclusive and I think the ideal would be to combine them)
Also there were issues with "global" events like sandstorms. Which becomes a problem if there is a "sand storm, lose a turn" but you already resolved 3 players' searches.
- Since I was using normal playing cards used a suit to represent categories. Diamonds were boons & progression help, spades were bandits, clubs were Environment hazards, and hearts were resource cards (oasises, find some desert antelope to eat, etc. Stuff that slowed/reverse the desert erroding the party). Jokers were goal cards.
If I was going for "high-interaction", given the resource cards weren't super helpful or game changing, it might have been better turn those into "wildcards" that could be good or bad, depending on things like chance or a skill check (i.e. CON/END check to see if you're able to dig deep enough to find water, or maybe a clue, otherwise you just end up exhausted.) Also if I was sticking with playing cards I might have combined multiple decks and split the suit's affects. I.e. Instead of Spades being bandits, maybe 2-7 are environmental hazards, 8 through Ace are bandits and just have there be multiple instances of the 5 of spades.
(that would also allow for event progression like I talk about later).
For jokers, I had Black Joker be a small goal and Red Joker be a Big Goal. That is, if they got the black joker they'd move to the next progression marker. If they drew the Red Joker, they might get some extra benefit. (didn't have anything set in stone there, just "extra benefits"; I had considered even letting them skip a progression).
- Exhausted/Injured. This was a low-level 4e game, so "injuries" cost a healing surge when they'd enter the dungeon (there were boons that would heal/negate injuries). Injuries healed the next day (unless taken during push-your-luck, then they'd be injured the next day). [this was mixed; I'd maybe have had 'major' and 'minor' injuries. Adding in letting the players split efforts would have made this more meaningful]
If more than half the party was injured, they would draw one fewer cards. Injured players also couldn't heal exhaustion.
For exhausted:
Since I had the party stick together, they had 4 "Exhaustion points" one for each uninjured player. If two people were exhausted, they couldn't push their luck [bad idea, should have worked out another cost since pushing-luck was one of the few player driven decisions and there was a fair bit of exhaustion-causing stuff]. If everyone was exhausted, they would lose a whole day to recover [this was good, But I messed up execution by them lose 24 hours right then so they'd just start drawing again at the same "time" the next day. I think if I had it to do again, I'd have them finish off their day and then lose the entire next day. And provide for multiple points of exhaustion per player]
They could not draw for a two hour block to "rest" and heal one point of exhaustion [bad idea, it should have been more costly but maybe more infrequent; I think maybe allowing for multiple levels of exhaustion and taking a day off heals all of them; adds to the "push your luck" nature]. If someone got injured, they would be removed from that day's exhaustion pool. That is, if you had 3 party members exhausted, and someone got injured, now the whole party was exhausted and they'd lose a day. [this mostly worked out; my party was perhaps overly timid and I think maybe adding in the "you can stack multiple exhaustion levels, and one day of rest heals them" mechanic would have made this more important)
Additionally cards would do things based on player state. One of the cards was "Bandit Ambush" where exhausted players were injured (too tired to run to cover quick enough) but anyone not exhausted was able to scramble out of the way.
-Bandits were always hit-and-run harrassers, focused on whittling down the party, so there never any need to bring out a map our do more than a single attack roll for each side. Bandits mostly focused on "attacking" the food/water supply levels.
- Improving Player engagement, I think another thing that would have helped player engagement was... the deck was virtually all narrative. I had vague notes about things like "natural hazard" "sand storm" "you find an oasis" "wandering trader", but I think maybe doing some sort of things like "You find a half-buried statue eroded by the wind and sand" and letting them come back, excavate, and maybe get a reward (or maybe they wasted time), but it would a choice they made and not pure random chance. I.e. Revisiting a discovered oasis was a big ask, but I'd just say "the oasis is barely more than damp sand, you are lucky to get a couple of quarts of water from it, any further attempts to exploit it would clearly be in vain" - but it would have been more fun to have locations be created the players could return to adjust how the deck plays out.
But again, that's something else that would need balance.
Another thing I wanted to expand was.... event progression. So the party before the Bandits located them, the party got hints they weren't the only ones in the area: They saw figures on the horizon, found traces of campsites, some of the Oasises had been turned into quasi-wells. Cards that would trigger bandit encounters later on, at that time were just escalating warnings they weren't alone. So I'd want to do more with that - maybe the "Sand Storms" get worse, or if theres more of them they start covering Oasises, etc. Maybe things that only trigger if other events have happened.
I really was trying to get away from "pure randome chance" and into something that reflected the party's situation.
Sort of to the earlier point about the oasis, maybe have some sites with their own progression trees or even decks; or have an "explore" deck for searching and and "exploit" deck for leveraging stuff they've already found.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
In my eyes, roleplaying isn't exactly the same as acting, at least in the context of playing an RPG. It's somewhat expected that you're not going to be putting on an accent, coming up with unique turns of phrase, and things like that, especially since it's all spur of the moment. All that really matters is that you know what your character is like and do your best to stick to it. It's all made up anyway, so as long as you're not calling attention to it, nobody should care if your medieval knight is talking like a modern dude.
Honestly, everyone's first characters are almost always "themselves but in a fantasy setting." Developing a character and learning how to roleplay it is a skill you pick up as you go. Between sessions, you might try practicing roleplaying by yourself. Determine some basic personality traits of your character, then think of some random scenarios and play out how you think they'd respond to it. Hopefully that will help you feel more comfortable during your next session.
And if anyone at your table is expecting you to act like one of those Critical Role faggots, then that's their problem.