The Game-Master discussion thread

I've never had cooperative players, so I just create the campaign 100% from the ground up, and then try and pigeonhole in character specific material at the last moment if the campaign lasts more than a few sessions.

Pretty much want Tomu said. Trying to get my game group to do something other than kill shit/each other is almost too painful to deal with.

In my case, it's more of an issue that my players tend to be distant in between sessions, and because online play tends to be a bit slower than offline play (no idea why), I don't have the time to discuss character backgrounds and settings with everyone mid-session.

I almost wish I had your problem. One of our sessions went rocketing off the rails because the characters all decided to come quietly when ordered to do so. As a direct result of this, I had to create an entire third faction in an ongoing gang war in the span of about 12 seconds.

TGD will probably have that problem.

I'm going to assume you are joking there, sir. :D

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Eh, 50/50

One of the advantages of using a non-gold based rewards system ("Potential" in my current campaign) is that you can arbitrarily award "treasure" for doing things that otherwise wouldn't correlate to earning treasure. For instance, in a number of encounters coming up in my campaign, the P Cs can earn bonus "Hidden Potential" by pushing, pulling, or sliding enemies into hindering terrain or even off cliffs!

Of course, they don't know what will cause them to gain hidden potential ahead of time or anything, or how much they stand to gain.

>Slidespam Psion/Wizard hybrid gets ALL DA TREASURE

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

Don't be silly, everyone knows you can't use Forceful Push to slide enemies into hindering terrain.

And the first encounter isn't even about forced movement so much as they have to protect NP Cs from dying horribly.

That being said, I suppose that the niftyness of "P Cs competing to see who can throw the enemies off the cliff first" is probably a bad idea, so I'll just average Hidden Potential across the entire party.

edited 24th Apr '12 6:05:44 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

But... but I was going to do this!

Do you HAVE any forced movement powers? 'cause if not, see if you can find any :P

So, one of my players, you see, he's silly, 'cause, he picked up a utility power that works by making a bluff check against a target's insight.

But the most fun part is, he's not even trained in bluff! It's hell-arious! (Cause he's a Tiefling and the power is Hellish Gaze)

But it's a potentially useful power, so I'll probably just assume that's an oversight and assume he'll redo his skills slightly.

I don't think you need to be trained in bluff to bluff. After all the only thing your doing is lying.

It's a utility that explicitly works by comparing itself to the insight of a target.

In other words, it's like taking a power for which you have a -5 penalty to attack whenever you use it.

To be perfectly fair, my untrained bluff is 14.

It could be 19.

Or is it 18?

Actually, it could be 22.

Mura: -flips the bird to veterinary science with one hand and Euclidean geometry with the other-

No one is taking Skill Focus.

Guh.

I need to ask advice for monster design, but Kyle is in this thread, so I can't do so securely. Damn!

Incidentally, it's fun building soundtracks for campaigns.

Pretty sure I eventually need to use this song.

edited 30th Apr '12 9:54:23 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Game night went well. I made the entire group's collective asshole pucker up by having one of the characters get callously and arbitrarily wasted. of course, he came back to life in the next scene due to his making a deal with a True Fae - and promising not to mention it, so no one got legitimately mad.

The characters had just gotten captured by a group of Loyalists who were planning on selling them back to their Keepers. Unfortunately only four of the five characters actually had listed bounties on their heads *

. The following exchange resulted...

Loyalist: "Unfortunately, I have no need of you."

Kai: "That's...not good."

Loyalist: "Not for you." (pulls pistol, shoots him in face)

At that point he turned to the rest of the group (who were at this point staring at me open-mouthed) and said, "Anyone else feel like being superfluous?"

Apparently while I was out on the porch with the dead guy roleplaying out what occurred at the moment of his "death", the other GM's comment was "I used to do stuff like that. Damn, I've gotten soft!" I took it as a compliment.

Sometimes to get respect, you just gotta say "fuck it" and shoot someone in the face.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

My last campaign had Raise Dead as a mechanic. So of course I had an enemy that had the ability to-if the party didn't play well-dish out enough damage to take the Slayer down to 0 and then Coup de Grace his ass in a single round.

Fun fact: It had a PPC that did something like 20d8 damage (maybe 20d10 I don't remember) that recharged if it started its turn with no one adjacent, but moreover, it could spend an AP in order to make that attack at the start of its next turn, and if it hit, it was an autocrit (also, +10 to hit). The catch? It can't attack while prone.

They figured out how to keep the thing prone for most of the encounter, but since it gains an AP whenever it drops someone to zero, the started seriously hurting near the end. It was pretty fun.

Anyway, the point I'm getting at is, I'm no stranger to punishing players for bad play. Puzzle Boss a hoy!

Oh, I wasn't so much punishing him as I was giving him a choice. I told him out-of-character that he was free to not take the deal and have his character die if he wanted to roll another...he didn't seem very attached to his concept or engaged with the game, and I was basically offering him the choice of A: offing his character and making a new one or B: keeping the character he had, and adding a plot hook to it. He chose to keep his character, and now he has a very dark secret he cannot share with the other children. *

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Ha, cool.

It was also totally awesome to see a table of players with the same "did he just fucking DO that?" looks on their faces.

Bear in mind that, other than the target of my plot hook, these are all people who've been gaming for a really long time (25+ years in one instance), so getting that kind of reaction out of them (and having it not be negative) is kinda hard.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~