TTRPG Thread

[Kelpie]

I just started a new DnD 5e campaign last night. Our DM homebrewed a lot of the stats for our characters, so that we could play unusual things. For example, we have a robot halfling, a gunslinger elf, a sentient construct, a fallen angel with amnesia, and my own character, who is a giant, bipedal wolf-person.

Our very first active session, we repaid this hard work and generous encouragement of our creativity by completely derailing our DM's whole plan for us.

Spoiler: Our DM Is In For A Hard Time • show

My character and the angel were already friends and traveling together. All the rest of them came to the starting point -- a market square -- separately. Three of these characters strike up a conversation, which lasts maybe ten minutes before the DM says, "An airship flies over the square, drops ropes, and sky pirates descend on the square and begin attacking and looting." A fight follows, of course, and that's most of the session... but when it's over, the DM says, "The city guard arrives and places all of you under arrest." Arguments are made, none of them work; basically the city guard lets pirates and raiders run rampant and demands protection money from the citizens to keep them safe, and we bungled that up so now we're in trouble.

In meta terms, the DM wants us all in jail together so we can get to know each other and be given some kind of group quest to clear our names or otherwise get ourselves out of trouble -- this is what's supposed to bring all of us strangers together to make a party.

But none of us wants to go to jail.

So the halfling robot says he's going to run across the square and jump in the well. Rolls high and pulls it off, much to the DM's surprise and minor annoyance. Another character thinks that's a great idea and tries it too; he also pulls it off (his first crit all night), even though he spent the entire actual fight trying and failing to run away.

Then my angel buddy decides to lie her backside off and try to convince the guard that I, the wolf-person, am royalty and she's my bodyguard. (This is absurd for several reasons. One, she's super vulnerable and obviously nobody's bodyguard. Two, I'm a huge, tanky fighter and obviously don't need a bodyguard. Three, my race doesn't even have royalty.) Natural 20, plus some ridiculous modifier on top. The guard buys it 100%, apologizes, and calls me 'your highness'. Me and the angel are free to go. We leave immediately before the ruse can fall apart.

So instead of six adventurers bonding in a jail cell, our DM has two characters in jail, two down a well, and two on the loose and booking it out of that town. The DM ended the session and congratulated us on breaking his opener.

We all acknowledged that we are the worst. But we had so much fun doing it. 

This is a 100% percent accurate description of what it's like to be a DM. Which makes me think of another story...

Spoiler: "52 goblins" • show

This was the first campaign I'd ever run, and about half of the players had either never played before or were relatively inexperienced. I was running them through the Sunless Citadel in the Forgotten Realms so that in my first experience I had everything I needed. They had made friends with the kobold clan that lived in the citadel, and were making their way towards the goblins. They did not make friends with them, and killed the goblin warriors/anyone who was fighting. Eventually, they got to the goblin great room, where all of the women and children were. The lady goblins didn't immediately fight, but were going to if they messed with the kids. I rolled to see if any of them spoke common, and one did so they started talking to her.

They were understandably unhappy that their husbands and brothers had been murdered, but the one goblin that spoke common wasn't dumb and tried to make sure her people didn't die. The players were fine with just leaving them there, but the problem was, they knew that as soon as they left the kobolds would come through and finish them off. So they decided that they were taking them with them. 52 goblin women and children. They didn't know where they were going with them, but there was an inn/halfway house in town run by a monk named Mao who was renowned for her kindness (one of my old characters), so they figured they'd take them to her.

After navigating 52 goblins out of a gigantic ravine, they took this group of goblins back to a town that had be raided in the past by the very same goblin tribe. The guards were not happy. After arguing with them for a while, they managed to get one of them go get Mao. She came out, took one look at the gaggle of goblins and was just like what. So after she's super confused they're like they can work for you!!! In the inn! IT'LL BE GREAT!!!! It isn't great. The inn isn't that big. She has three employees and that's really the only room she has.

I have set into panic mode at this point. They have 52 goblins. Where am I going to put 52 goblins. I didn't want to kill them, because at this point that just seemed really mean and unnecessary. After some frantic mind-racking where I tried to look calm but I'm sure I didn't, I remembered the first campaign arc I ever played where Mao was my character. We had been in Lonelywood and there was an orc tribe we were supposed to kill, but instead of doing that we made a treaty with them, and Lonelywood and the Orcs still live in peaceful cohesion. So Mao brings up this town, but says that she doesn't know if they would actually take in a third party or not, it'd be difficult to negotiate.

Two of my players were there for the original Lonelywood peace treaty and they got HYPED. They 100% wanted to bring the goblins to Lonelywood so that's what they're going to do now. Mao placed the goblins under her protection and threatened anyone who dared bother them so now there's a camp of goblins outside town until they finish the Sunless Citadel and sail down the river with them.

So basically they took my plans, ripped them into tiny little pieces, and scattered them to the wind. But hey, that DMing for you and I figured it was going to happen, I just didn't think it would happen so soon.

[Jethan]

I just started a new DnD 5e campaign last night. Our DM homebrewed a lot of the stats for our characters, so that we could play unusual things. For example, we have a robot halfling, a gunslinger elf, a sentient construct, a fallen angel with amnesia, and my own character, who is a giant, bipedal wolf-person.

Our very first active session, we repaid this hard work and generous encouragement of our creativity by completely derailing our DM's whole plan for us.

Spoiler: Our DM Is In For A Hard Time • show

My character and the angel were already friends and traveling together. All the rest of them came to the starting point -- a market square -- separately. Three of these characters strike up a conversation, which lasts maybe ten minutes before the DM says, "An airship flies over the square, drops ropes, and sky pirates descend on the square and begin attacking and looting." A fight follows, of course, and that's most of the session... but when it's over, the DM says, "The city guard arrives and places all of you under arrest." Arguments are made, none of them work; basically the city guard lets pirates and raiders run rampant and demands protection money from the citizens to keep them safe, and we bungled that up so now we're in trouble.

In meta terms, the DM wants us all in jail together so we can get to know each other and be given some kind of group quest to clear our names or otherwise get ourselves out of trouble -- this is what's supposed to bring all of us strangers together to make a party.

But none of us wants to go to jail.

So the halfling robot says he's going to run across the square and jump in the well. Rolls high and pulls it off, much to the DM's surprise and minor annoyance. Another character thinks that's a great idea and tries it too; he also pulls it off (his first crit all night), even though he spent the entire actual fight trying and failing to run away.

Then my angel buddy decides to lie her backside off and try to convince the guard that I, the wolf-person, am royalty and she's my bodyguard. (This is absurd for several reasons. One, she's super vulnerable and obviously nobody's bodyguard. Two, I'm a huge, tanky fighter and obviously don't need a bodyguard. Three, my race doesn't even have royalty.) Natural 20, plus some ridiculous modifier on top. The guard buys it 100%, apologizes, and calls me 'your highness'. Me and the angel are free to go. We leave immediately before the ruse can fall apart.

So instead of six adventurers bonding in a jail cell, our DM has two characters in jail, two down a well, and two on the loose and booking it out of that town. The DM ended the session and congratulated us on breaking his opener.

We all acknowledged that we are the worst. But we had so much fun doing it. 

Priceless. 

[Solokov]

Got another one.

Spoiler: GG guys you broke Time itself • show

Featuring: the dragoness shapeshifted into a moon elf ranger
The human half troll barbarian.
The druid of indeterminant species, may or may not have been a bugbear.
The two gnome rogues.
The drow cleric (my character... also secretly a shapeshifted shadow dragon) who was raised by moon elves that escaped their slavery.



I don't even remember if we were using a module or not for this... but I think the place was called brightstone keep... generic keep over top of some mines with a volcano area... pretty neat and all. We were going in to hunt down a twin set of necromancers and totally broke that encounter, they were supposed to retreat further into the mines and we kinda crit decked the first twin to death and I in my infinite wisdom used my new raise corpse spell on the one twin, and the first order I could come up with was "[expletive] thy brother!".... and well.. you know .. spell casting, orders and phrasing are a thing.


So we wander down into the mines itself because the legless dwarf king the twin necromancers were keeping prisoner told us that to break the curse minding him there we needed to destroy a glowing rock of some kind.

Obviously we split the party with I and the Ranger finding our way to the volcano area and finding an emerald dragon egg (we'd already found two others earlier in the campaign and had determined that  by the end of things everyone in the party would have a young dragon companion.)

The rest of the group managed to find the rock the dwarf was talking about and instead of breaking it, rolled it through a suspicious looking portal. They exited out the way we came in while I and the ranger left out the top of the volcano after having a heart to heart with a bronze dragon.

Group get's back together we find magic is shorting out, dragoness and I head back to the town we were dispatched from to brightstone keep to check in with the priest, take shelter in a cave from a "knife storm"... yeah literally raining knives, like out of adventure time. Find out the cave is occupied by another dragon... the great grandfather of them all io... dragoness has another heart to heart find out somehow we're in a timeline where io never split into two, my character is desperately hoping io does not drop the secret my cleric is a dragon as well (dragons of the material plane don't like shadow dragons IIRC.. she already didn't like him because he was a drow.).

And out characters somehow make it to the town to find that no only are we in a different timeline but have also been catapulted foreward in time about 50 years, somehow the old priest is still alive and details that the party rolling the magic stone through the portal may have put us in the alternate timeline, but the brightstone keep has weird time things going on with it anyway and that while we were in there time for us slowed while time outside remained the same.

I may also be missing details.. I vaguely remember an explosion as a result of smokepowder mixed with druegar ale... but that may have been another campaign.

[Aierdome]

Oh my. This thread is amazing 

I've got a story from the first time I ever tried being a game master. The system is GURPS, for the record, and the world is science fiction with robots.

Spoiler: Ask before you act • show

So the players are a group of mercenaries, and they're in a restaurant meeting with the client. Suddenly, they're ambushed by a pair of guys wielding the most powerful weapon in the game. This is when I realize that making a weapon that you have to roll 24d6 for is not only ridiculous, but it will turn everything it hits into a cloud of fine pink dust, which is exactly what happens to the players' client. The players understandably flee and go to the train station, as the train is the only way to get to and from the spaceport, and their ship is docked there.

On a train, they hear an announcement that the authorities are investigating a shooting in the restaurant, which makes them panic slightly. A moment later, a pair of robots get on the train and start checking everyone's train tickets. The players react to this by pulling out the heaviest guns in their arsenal and blasting the ticket controllers into smithereens. Other passengers panic, the train is stopped, the spaceport is on a lockdown and every police bot in the city is out for players' blood as they think they're the people who shot up the restaurant. Generally speaking, the situation sucks.

Shortly afterwards, as they're making their way on foot, one player wonders:

"Wait, if the train is the only transport between the city and the spaceport, how did we get into the city in the first place?"

Me: Well, you bought the train tickets, obviously.

"So we still have them?"

Me: Yep.

A moment of pause.

"Please don't tell me they're still valid."

Me: They're still valid.

Much cursing ensues.

[Ragnarok]

*resurrecting*

I've joined two sessions: one of Starfinder (literally Pathfinder IN SPACE) and one of Necessary Evil (a Savage Worlds supplement).

Spoiler: Starfinder • show

As usual, our group is collectively insane. The most notable are the manga-obsessed Lashunta adolescent with a propensity for hitting things in melee while on fire, the android mechanic whose drone looks exactly like her, and my own character, an operative who while incredibly dour (to the level of 'TTS Rogal Dorn') worships the Vesk (our enemies) god of conquest, Damoritosh.
Our party is rounded out by a CQC-centered halfling operative (who is utterly nuts), a human soldier with a propensity for explosives, an android technomancer, and a dwarf mystic.

Thus far, we've adopted a sewer aberration (an Otyugh) as a mascot and gotten it levels in soldier as a ship's guard, killed countless Vesk, our mystic took Harm Undead and proceeded to kill everything by healing her teammates, my operative literally made the Lashunta poop himself in fear with a glare and followed it up by stabbing a turret to death, our halfling is apparently a space-heroin addict, and we have a pack of robots, one of which is a dog with a flamethrower mouth.

Spoiler: necessary evil • show

Everything in these campaigns is supposed to be ridiculous- we're playing supervillains fighting alien occupation after all.

Highlights of the insanity include the entire team dying due to being abandoned on the microscopic level, our bosses always being food-themed mad scientists (our GM has a thing for horrible puns), the person who killed the team last run abandoning her character to Dracula because, quote, she wanted to bang the hot vampire, unquote, my new character one-shotting a giant fish with a pistol (7d6 damage, which in Savage is pretty terrifying), and general buffoonery.

[Noodles]

I'm currently in several DnD groups but in one of them the party bard just learned the spell "enemies abound" which essentially makes one creature absolutely dead convinced that everyone they encounter is out to kill them (for a minute, if they fail enough saves), causing them to attack at random among the people you can see. He's gotten really good at hitting the boss or other particularly scary enemies while they're in a group of others, and the DM hates it because now he has to run like three separate fights that don't contain a single pc

[Purple Wyrm]

Does Gloomhaven count as an RPG?

I've just started a campaign with some friends. Our party "The Guardians of the Gallows Tree" consists of a Brute named "Ug", a Mind-Thief rat-man named "Skeet", a Spell Slinger who (for no apparent reason) goes by "The Nameless Terror" and my own Tinkerer who I have shamelessly christened "Kier Fiore" (after the character from Thrilling Intent).

I've renamed all my abilities to Thrilling Intent references, so I heal the other characters with refreshing cans of "Keer Energy Drink", I'm equipped with "Sneakiers" instead of boots and my harmless contraption - which is supposed to be something like a wind up mouse - is instead a robotic duplicate of myself named "Mecha-Kier".

I at least am having a ball

[amaranthineamusement]

Pssst, if anyone wants to get into RPGs but doesn't have a group IRL, I'm starting a murder mystery rp over at the rp repository.

--> https://www.rprepository.com/g/cityofglass

It's a sci-fi noir world with crime, mystery, and a lot of fun. ;^) Posting this here cause I figured people might be interested, although the thread is maybe a little dead.

It's not very heavily dice based, but there's enough in there that I'd call it an RPG homebrew. Everyone's welcome!

-Am

[Solokov]

Pssst, if anyone wants to get into RPGs but doesn't have a group IRL, I'm starting a murder mystery rp over at the rp repository.

--> https://www.rprepository.com/g/cityofglass

It's a sci-fi noir world with crime, mystery, and a lot of fun. ;^) Posting this here cause I figured people might be interested, although the thread is maybe a little dead.

It's not very heavily dice based, but there's enough in there that I'd call it an RPG homebrew. Everyone's welcome!

-Am

I'll check it out.


Got another one from long ago.

Spoiler: YOU MISSED.....WITH THE CEILING! • show

Featuring:

A classless dwarf. (chaotic neutral)
My drow rogue (chaotic neutral)
An overpowered pixie barbarian (chaotic good)
A wood elf ranger (lawful good)
and a half elf cleric. (lawful evil)


So this one was during the transition to 5.e where things got weird, so we decided to do a standard fare dungeon crawl to clear out the local kobold infestation. Kobolds... so many kobolds.

Turns out the kobolds were supplicants to a red dragon who was not very fond of guests. Well the pixie got iced literally in the first round of combat so my rogue decided to bounce and through a combination of good rolls, some climbing gear and drow levitate began climbing stright for the ceiling of the cave.

Dwarf decides to throw rocks at me for being a coward and somehow the cleric and ranger are holding their own against the dragon.

Three rounds later my rogue is now nestled into the stalactites in the ceiling and am kicking a big one loose that's over the dragon. I'm told to roll a D4 and literally roll the only result that left the dragon unscathed.

Drawf lands the finishing blow the next round (which was nice because the DM was being an ass and wouldn't let us know if it was bloodied or not.)

I get a hard time for missing withe the stalactite and contributing absolutely nothing to the fight. The moment I land after floating down from the ceiling, the floor collapses under us because the stactite punched straight through into the cavern below. Turns out the dragon had a big sister living in the next cave down. Dwarf rolls to seduce the dragon and crits ends up becoming the dragoness's consort right then and there and they consummate the union (like I said, classless) while the party tries to get some sleep and figure out how to heal the pixie with the cleric being out of spells and no one having any potions and her hovering about two negative hp away from death.

[Rhynerd]

If there’s still any life if that thread I might be interested in giving it a shot.

For now, I’ve been playing some 40k RPGs as of late. Our group got together for the second edition of Dark Heresy as the following:

Spoiler: show

-Two Psykers, one being a veteran player who uses the same psyker for everything and the other being a new player who thought being a psyker would be fun. Both of them were named Echo.
-A Praetorian Gaurdsman Captain named Barnaby
-Edgar Kevo, my hive hanger
-A tech priest Chiurgeon with a name that goes like Shiv
-A late edition Vostroyan Firstborn priest

We ran through a core rulebook campaign long enough to get fed with up and have the inquisitor solve the case himself, and then solved a series of strange murders among a guard regiment on a planet only starting to be relcaimed by humanity.

Now we’re playing Rogue Trader, and here’s our crew so far:

Spoiler: show

-The Priest became the Rogue Trader, who’s a bit of a xenophile.
-I became the ship’s Navigator. A somewhat mutated daughter of a nomadic family, and possibly “the straight woman” of the group.
-Echo the competent psyker remained Echo the competent psyker.
-Captain Barnaby was recommended by the Inquisitor to become an Arch-Militant and join our crew along with Echo
-The Less competent Echo became Grog, Evil Suns Freebootta Ork with a dream of becoming a mekboy
-Shiv became a voidmaster who I haven’t gotten the name of yet.

Our ship is a small raider called the Carpe Noctum, which is both resolute and Haunted. Some notable members of the crew include:

Spoiler: show

-John Goodman: a demonic entity who lives up to his last name.
-Hazel: a techpriest explorator who finds herself cleaning up after Grog’s repairs.
-Navi: a cousin to my navigator who is horrible at finding the astronomica but excellent in guiding ships through the power of spite/cussing. She’s also somebody you don’t wanna fight.

We’ve only had two sessions so far but we’ve had a bit of a silly time helping some techpriests in one session and hunting pirates in anoher.

[Solokov]

-John Goodman: a demonic entity who lives up to his last name.

Please tell me your game master plays him as a straight up carbon copy of the real life John Goodman.

[Rhynerd]

I don’t think he’s played straight up as the actor, but then again we haven’t really spent much time together.

[RanVor]

Hi, fellow Minnions!

Just yesterday I went through hell to get Icewind Dale 2 running on my laptop, even going as far as to reinstall Windows (it didn't help). But I somehow managed to prevail and that means it's party creation time! And the party will be SSSS-inspired because of course it has to be.

And this is where it gets complicated.

Basically, even a semi-faithful recreation of the Crew in any D&D-based game is insanely difficult. There is, for example, an alarming lack of a sheep herder class. But it would be dumb to give up now, after all I've done to get the game working, right?

So here I am, asking for advice. The aim is to recreate the Crew in Icewind Dale 2 as faithfully as possible class-wise. (Not race-wise, though. Playing only humans would be boring.)

What do you think? How would you recreate the cast of the most wonderful comic on the Internet in Icewind Dale 2?

[Purple Wyrm]

I'm not specifically familiar with Icewind Dale, but presuming it's a standard AD&D setting then if you don't make Lalli an Elf and Tuuri a Halfling, then you're doing it wrong

[Mebediel]

I'm not specifically familiar with Icewind Dale, but presuming it's a standard AD&D setting then if you don't make Lalli an Elf and Tuuri a Halfling, then you're doing it wrong

Seconded. I'm not familiar with Icewind Dale either, but here are some (very uncertain) guesses for what the characters could be based on D&D:

Sigrun - Half-orc?????, barbarian?
Mikkel - Human, cleric (for healing)
Tuuri - Halfling (like Wyrm said), rogue (best fits her role as mechanic, I think)
Lalli - Elf (also like Wyrm said), ...not sure if either druid (for the mage part) or ranger (for the scout part), but I'm leaning toward druid. Sorcerer might also be a good option?
Emil - Human, fighter
Reynir - Half-elf, wizard