Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

I know it's a wide topic and all, but I'm surprised we don't have one, and even if there is one buried under all the billions of different threads, I'm surprised it isn't still afloat. I understand RP hilarity and all, but I figured we could have general conversation here.

Anyways. Talk D&D, Battletech, Warhammer 40K, Call of Cthulhu, whatever, here. Classes you've made, campaigns you've been in or run, etc. Here's a couple of my stories, thoughts, and inquiries to start the engine-

I'm one of those people who doesn't have the aptitude (or lack of social life) to learn eighty-billion different roleplay systems and cocktail them into one single, massive, personal super-system that other strange people seem to use. An example would be my cousin, who mixes Fallout with Battletech in his campaigns, which, while fun to play, is unceasingly hard to master.

I normally get stuck with GM. Check that. I always get stuck with GM. This is because I consider D&D a game to be played with friends, not with strangers, so I'm always going to be the last person to respond to something like this pinned on a billboard in the local comic book shop-

Elminster, Wizard of the Fabulous Order, herebye dareth yon brave adventurers to brave his dank dwellings and dungeons. Bringeth thine own rulebooks and do not tarry beyond 12:00 PM saturday next week.

Anyways, the reason I get stuck with GM is because all my friends know I have the fantastic (and simultaneously enslaving) ability to make up at least partially interesting stories on the spot, such as "Dark Elves have stolen Santa's golden candy cane of "Summon Monster IX," go get it."

But there is a good thing about being stuck with GM. You have this intoxicating feeling of power. One of the things my players generally hate me for is, after they get some amazingly overpowered build, (such as one person who found a class that can make virtually infinite sneak attacks and never be seen at all and I, being unwise in the way of game breaking, did not realize this upon immediately looking at the class), I like to think of the one situation where it's absolutely useless, such as when they're lit by faerie fire from a pesky evil druid. Who somehow found himself on a pirate ship. So after grumbling under their breath, they have to fight and even potentially take damage like a normal person. Ironically, we were fighting fairly low level baddies who didn't pose much challenge at all, but it scarcely mattered to the said grumbler (Who shall hereafter be called "Sir Blazington") who was continuing to talk about the horrid infraction the next day.

I then realized that alot of rulebooks say to make lots of house rules. Realizing I couldn't make a druid every encounter, I decided to plain nerf the class. Skipping all the schematics and making a long story short, he had to make checks with skills rogues don't have as class skills, which was extremely amusing on my part. He grumbled about this, again, well into the day after. For a second piece of irony, He has passed the check the only time he has needed to thus far anyway.

On slightly (and only slightly) more serious notes, one of the things that annoy me as a GM are people who do not have fun until they have found the one build that is always stronger than all the others, thus making me use stronger monsters for him that eat the rest of the party alive. Anyone know how I can either similarly endow my players with such amazing feats of game-breaking, or perhaps convince this mad balance bomber to actually pick a class based on its role-play ability and not its statistics?

And also, I'm wondering if anyone has word on what D&D 4.0 will be like, and if programs like Fantasy Grounds will be able to adapt to the new system. I really don't want to have to continue playing 3.5 when a newer (and potentially more balanced) system will be on the loose. And anyone know if the goddamn books will be cheaper?

I might be able to get some info on D&D 4.0 from a friend. Also it is nice to have a thread to talk about 40k and other non video games

Eh, from what I've heard, they're moving D&D further into the territory they've started to delve with 3.5 -- fewer skills and more cookie-cutter characters with little besides a level number to distinguish them. But I'm a D&D hater, so maybe I'm not a good source of information (I broke my oath never to play again simply because I'm playing a game of incredibly modified Cyclopedic, a variant of 1st ed, where the magic and combat systems were completely reworked from scratch). I used to joke that they'd have only four skills in 4th ed -- doing things, thinking things, saying things, and sensing things. That's not true, but they still cut down the skill list by something like six. (Granted, some of those skills needed to go. "Use Rope," I'm looking directly at you.)

Personally, I'm frustrated by the way D&D tends to play up the antagonism between player and GM. One of you is always trying to outdo the other -- they want a broken class, and you want to TPK (that's sure how the Greyhawk Core Mods felt when I was playing RPGA). Too much hack and slash, not enough roleplay (and I'm from Dyvers, where you actually could solve problems through roleplay ;)), but that's part of D&D's roots as a dungeon crawler. I've always been preferential to the way other systems played it out; you and the players are working together to tell a story. And in the end, it's their story. Too many young GMs end up railroading their players because they want to tell their story rather than the story the players are telling. The GM section in West End's D6 StarWars was very good, and the GM section in Fasa's Mechwarrior Second Edition remains one of my favorites ever, simply because it has such a wonderful example on setting atmospheric scenes.

Bah, I'm ranting. Let me get back to things.

I end up GM'ing a lot, largely because I enjoy painting a world. For the past five years I've been running a SpyCraft/SpyCraft 2.0 campaign (don't get me started on SpyCraft 2.0, you'll be listening to me rant all night, suffice to say, I'm very unhappy with it, mostly because they are finally releasing one of the books I've needed for the past three years and we scheduled the switch from 1.0 to 2.0 based on the original release date of said book, three years ago). I've been blessed with some fantastic players that are quite happy to take an idea and run with it. Their collective minds come up with far more intricate and convoluted explanations for things than I could manage. Which is perfect for a "world-wide conspiracy" themed game. :)


You've already found the solution -- you change the game. Find the weakness to the class and exploit it in such a way that the other players aren't heavily penalized. The most important note is that you need to make sure nobody figures out that's what you're doing. Say you're dealing with someone who's playing 3.0 and found the trick to giving themselves a 10+ threat range. Okay, fair enough -- now we have an evil liche rise and start causing trouble in all the grave yards. Most characters are going to have 18-30 threat, if they're lucky, so they won't care much, but your broken player just lost himself that huge advantage. Toss in a few living necromancers once in a while to keep him happy and he won't even notice that the campaign is filled with monsters that are immune to his break. Simply dealing with a combat monster for whom you can't compensate? Shift the part into a situation where roleplaying the solution is strongly encouraged. The enemies are too strong to be brought down except by guile and teamwork or the players find themselves in a city where deaths will be investigated and the players can't hide. What stops any normal person from solving all their problems with violence? Those same factors can reign in a broken character. If you're really concerned, elbow hard on their weakness, make them nearly useless for a few sessions, and then quietly take them aside and tell them that you'd be willing to give them the opportunity to retool their character a little, because it looks like they're not having as much fun as you want them to be having, but the campaign's going to keep going in this direction for a while. If you can get them to take the bait, reward them for the shift in direction, throw them some really cool things or events (interesting NPC friends for instance -- nobody forgets those, and striking up a friendship with an interesting NPC is a great reward that has exactly as much impact on the game as the GM decides it does). Eventually, they'll get into the new character more than they were into the broken one. Give any player the occasional chance to do something truly incredible and cinematic, and you'll keep them hooked through even the most dull grinding parts.

I'd better leave off, this is getting way too long, and if I keep going, I'll end up telling you about the Haunted House, and that'd also take all night. :D

I suppose I should talk about my only extended amount of time as a player in any of my campaigns.

My cousin had been collecting all sorts of crazy heroquest maps, battletech miniatures, etc. for quite a while when finally he noticed I had a stack of D&D books that, at that time, had fulfilled the hugely important job of collecting dust. So he puts that together with the fact that I have an old Mechwarrior 4 box laying around and says "Hey! Wanna try battletech?" I'm starving for any kind of campaign, so I say "Sure."

Now, people tell you solo campaigns can never be fun- this would be where they were wrong. My cousin is the type of person who will have you doing everything from the stat-crunching mech-fights to the almost Myst-like puzzle solving, such as the beginning of the campaign. Sure, I shot a few LRM 10's, but when it came down to it, the real fun was trying to figure out the weird mysteries that were going on. And I had the feeling that he wasn't just making things up on the spot- everything had the feel of a carefully woven story, not a "I need a plot twist NAO," uncreative GMing.

Battletech has always appealed to me through the flavor of it's scenarios (when people actually decided to make use of it's huge extended universe).

I always felt better knowing that I wasn't just attacking a random piece of high ground just because I thought it would make great real estate, but I was assaulting Hill 429 on the planet Randus IV. If I succeeded in capturing the hill, I would be in a better position to defend against raids on the Kilgore Munitions factory, because if that happened to get blown sky high I would have to start conserving my missile and projectile weapons, which would probably force me into a guerrilla warfare campaign ect. ect.

At any rate, tabletop BT pretty much died to me when I ran out of people to play with (they apparently grew out of it), so I've been stuck playing MegaMek and text-based MUX's.

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