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mindflenzing — RPG The Jack Traven Doctrine
Published: 2012-11-21 21:48:45 +0000 UTC; Views: 2987; Favourites: 26; Downloads: 9
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Description
R.P.G. (Ransack People's Gold) is the tale of four D&D/Star Wars/RPG players and their DM, who wishes he were a player. These intrepid players are, from left to right:Kenneth, the over-achieving, yet under appreciated DM.
Adam, the guy who has a theater background but needs a girlfriend.
Barry, the munchkin power-gamer with a bad case of arrested development.
Josh, the straight-laced guy who just wants to play the game.
Kassi, Josh's homicidally-minded younger cousin, whom he regrets inviting.
A few weeks ago I got the privilege of watching another DM make a boneheaded calculation in negotiations with the party. Years ago, I learned the hard way that desperate/angry PCs tend to make very aggressive decisions that do not look like what your typical action movie hero does. I had to explain to this DM that angered players are always one poor scene choice away from uttering Captain Ahab's famous line, "From Hell's heart I stab at thee." As a player I have had PCs shot the hostage, murder "untouchable" villains in broad daylight, and detonate explosives on their own persons when the DM has so graciously provided my character means, motive, and opportunity with no reasonable (to the character) alternatives. As a DM you must realize that hope and the threat of additional loss are the only thing that can keep most players from going Liam Neeson on you. Remember, the dramatic death of a character is hardly loss to that PC when he kills the man who is trying to destroy the world, orphaned him, and most importantly destroyed is prized weapon.
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Comments: 84
I learned very quickly that monologue is a three syllable word meaning: "Buys the PCs time to aim for called shots."
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Sounds like these types of DM's are trying to beat the players rather than play with them.
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When you run Intrigue you have to. The point is that the baddie is always one step ahead of the heroes until the very end. The problem arises when the players are a step ahead of the GM and trick him into committing to some detail that he cannot go back and change (like a nearby jet engine being on, or the villain's underwater lair not having sealable bulkheads throughout).
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Ah, I see. I only play PbP games and haven't been brave enough yet to try an Intrigue game. I have heard some stories about bad DM's who'll just retcon everything to make sure they're always right irregardless; sounds positively infuriating.
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This is why you want to lead the DM on and then turn his emphatic ruling on his own head as quickly as possible. I.e., "So we don't get a bonus for him liking us? He does not like us? He's not even neutral towards us? So what he's hostile towards us? I shoot him because my code allows me to kill hostiles whether they are armed or not."
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Players playing players playing characters? Sounds complicated lol
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Yes, but only when the DM knows that you know that he knows.
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Never underestimate a player's ability to try to use force to solve their problems. Many a time I've seen players decide infiltrate = eradicate, recon to see if raid is required = raid to see if recon is required, diversion = nuke etc.
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To gamers, Occam's razor is a dagger with bonuses for slitting throats and penalties for stabbing and throwing.
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Yes, I can imagine some of my players assuming that. That's given me an idea for an in-game joke.
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I DM a game called Demon Hunters (equal parts Men In Black, Constantine and Devil May Cry) that is designed to be played in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way. I was thinking about doing a story involving smuggling of relics, with one of them being a blade called Occam's Razor, which is only with wielding when the character is fighting in the most efficient way possible (making it useless for the players 
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Ooh, I like the sound of your campaign.
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Thanks, it's based on [link]
I ran it occasionally with my players and it proved to be very popular and has now been one of my longest-running games.
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Sounds like a fun concept. Coretex is not my favorite game system (despite being the only system with an official Firefly game) but it would probably be a lot of fun.
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I find it a good one for newbies, but I understand it has it's limits. Still a very fun game. There's been a lot of fun characters created for it.
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I like savage worlds, it's easier to understand the rules but it's character flaw system is less robust.
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I've had some fun games of Savage Worlds (Deadlands in particular). I find adding new traits and spells easier in Cortex though.
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I really like Deadlands. I'd love to play it again someday.
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I agree. Annoyingly my DM for that game has moved elsewhere.
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Mine moved to Maryland. It broke up one of the more eclectic gaming groups I've ever been in.
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Throw them a couple of actual, "not what it looks like" NPCs whom they kill and then fall right into the real villain's clutches sans any allies and they start asking questions first. That or they start using nonlethal methods of taking em down first and sorting them out later.
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I was always a fan of the idea of "not what it looks like" NPCs then the villain offering the "heroes" a job. ala "You guys are ruthless, you smoked a petty theif over a misunderstanding. Are you looking for work?"
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The wolf in sheep's clothing villain is perfect to use in conjunction with the not what it looks like guy. I love tricking the heroes into working for the villains. It tends to nip vigilantism in the bud, or at least make them think real hard before doing things that cannot be undone.
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Really, the whole party should get an Alignment change after that. XD Good guys would at least have an arrow ricochet off the wall and hit the guy.
Then again, Kenneth needs to take some lessons in how to make villains "untouchable" before the PCs decide to ramsack them. Learned how to do that the hard way... XD
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The only character in the party whose characters are "good" is Josh and he spent the last panel just rolling his eyes and sighing.
Kenneth is a mix of my own lessons learned the hard way and that of DMs I've played with (don't look at me like that, I'm only responsible for some of the horrors unleashed on my DMs). I learned long ago that if you dangle biscuits before the PCs they will take your arm off.
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Pfff. XD So he's more the "Going with the flow" kind of player.
Understandable. XD And yes on that lesson; you dangle biscuits, chances are they will take your arm off. Learned that lesson the hard way. @_@ Had to reset an entire campaign because I was left with a stump of what once was my right arm for that game.
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That or a babysitter.
One of the biggest lessons is not to be generous. I had a DM who let us have anything we wanted. By the end of session 2 we had consolidated three groups of pirates into a fleet and had spaced two NPCs and their cargo when we got jumped by imperials.
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My favorite version of this situation is when the DM tries this on a high level disillusioned paladin. My dwarven paladin for many years, just before being ascended as a god himself, faced Olidamarra in a duel, which the goddess thought would end when she threatened to use a weapon of incredible power on Moradin. Hilariously, my DM had forgotten that my paladin had changed his diety to self-worship as part of his ascension path. Conversation went something like, Olidamarra: "I wll take that which you hold most dear, your beloved creator god!" Me:"Meh." *Smack!*
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My DMs have begun to suspect that I write NPCs into my characters' backgrounds just so the bad guys will stand still long enough for me to line up a shot.
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I wish my group was a bit more like this - they once killed 30 soldiers to avenge one gnomish barmaid!
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Better than locking up and burning down an orphanage the villain took over and had just gone back into, assuming all the orphans were either already dead or as good as dead. But then when the heroes arrive a little too late once too often they start doing things like dynamiting all the mine exits and leaving the villains to suffocate.
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Wow. That's ruthless!
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To be fair, what we knew about him is that he's a rich ultra sadistic schemer who hires sociopaths, did not want the orphans as hostages, and had been doing whatever he had been doing to them for weeks. Most of us figured that if we found them alive they all beg us to kill them, and possibly not out of human mouths. The DM was mortified when we decided that a man who does things that would make the Jigsaw Killer queasy to adults would do not nice things to children.
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Makes sense. What where the characters races/classes? Any paladins in the party?
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It's a swashbuckling game so all human and no classes. We have a guttersnipe, a pirate, a knight, a priest, and a scholar. The priest is a soldier, and the knight is a zealot. It turns out the urchin is the closest thing to an idealist in the group.
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Strange. I'm surprised the knight, priest, or scholar aren't more idealistic.
In my group it's the warlock and the wizard who "act up." Always seems that arcane casters go down the path of evil more than the others.
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The scholar is being hunted by the Inquisition who want to execute him and his fellow scholars for advancing science, he's already had to kill many of them and go into hiding. The Priest watched his sister torn apart by beasts, became a professional soldier and then became fed up with a senseless civil war and became a priest, but he's still an efficient military man at heart. The Knight, who is known as the "White Beast of Dietrich," is an unwanted noble child who was thrust into the life of a warrior by a death in the family and whose devotion to duty is such that she killed her own lover when he betrayed the order.
The only character who did not have a traumatic backstory was traumatized by the GMs and we think her poor little sister is suffering from PTSD and we haven't heard her speak in some time.
I find that most characters built to deal damage are less moral than those whose damage output is nominal. If you consider total damage output/round that tends to put your Evocation Wizards, right along with Sorcerers, Warlocks, Barbarians, Greatsword Fighters, Two Weapon Fighters, Backstabbing Rogues, etc.
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Wow. Amazing backstories! The knight seem's pretty ruthless. What's his alignment?
In 4th ed D&D, I find the "controller" classes (wizards, psions, warlocks) to be the players who act the most ruthless. My group's got 3 "strikers" (all rangers, myself included), and the're some of the more "upstanding" characters.
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There is no alignment in the game we are playing, 7th Sea, but if she were in D&D she would be Lawful Neutral. Most of the party is fast, clever, and glass jawed. The knight has the only kind of armor that is effective against firearms which effectively gives her damage resistance. She is also the toughest character in the party by 50% before that and has learned an ancient technique to ignore pain. Since she has to play the meat shield for the rest of the party this sort of thing is essential. She can shrug off injuries that would cripple anybody else in the group and regularly gets bumrushed by half or more of the baddies.
In addition to being the damage sop she also can rival or sometimes eclipse the pistoliers for damage with her zweihander (essentially the greatsword's answer to the pike). She regularly cuts men in half with a single well placed blow and scythes through goons like the grim reaper. To add to her ferocity, she wears the skull of a mythical beast she slew as a pauldron.
What makes her interesting is that the whole invincible angel of death thing is an act. She rushes off after fights with horrible injuries that she lies to the group about all the time. Most of her body is covered in scar tissue and even her face is marred with deep wounds. She had to learn how to swing a monstrous blade despite being an average sized woman with limited upper body strength and tends to rely on full body attack motions that require very good balance and rehearsed attack forms to make up for decreased ability to overcome inertia on the weapon.
She wanted to be a dancer not a warrior. But family tradition dictated that there must always be a knight from her house in the order at all times. After her father's crippling injury and her perfect brother's death in the civil war, she was recalled from exile to take his place. She only lives to fulfill the obligations of her blood and her name and believes that an honorable death is the only way to be released from those obligations. The only hand staying her from total recklessness is that of her squire.
The two of them look like identical twins but are not related by blood. Her cheerful companion is something very "other". The girl is able to live in the black forest where only monster dwell and sings songs in a tongue that none can identify. And the creatures of the black forest seem quite eager to have her back. But the knight does not ask why because she has no interest in finding reasons to reject her only real friend.
High damage tends to trigger something in the brain that encourages violent behavior. Most of the low damage controllers I've seen: like lockdown invokers, enchantment wizards, and zone druids tend to be more calculating, where aoe invokers, evocation wizards, and beast druids tend to have fewer scruples.
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Bar wenches? Kill them. they're only want to sleep with the elf, anyway, remember? ([link] )
Facebooking this.
(Last night our team of superheroes spent four hours going to the bank, to take out money from their legitimate bank accounts. Shoot the teller, already!)
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I always find it funny how players love to lavish time on boring and unnecessary scenes that aren't meaningful to their characters and then their ADHD kicks in during interesting or exciting story scenes.
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I went barmaid because it would be an NPC they would have willingly interacted with as opposed to the villain kidnapping a family member since smart players avoid having living relatives the villains can use as leverage. I'm envisioning the heroes being underground trying to stop the villain at a water source or maybe at one of his hideouts. But then I did not set the scene since it was already pretty wordy and the setting was not necessary to get the joke. I only threw in the Inn name for kicks because my players groan at my having that Inn in every game I run.
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in joke.. my PCs like throwing molotov cocktails
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I learned never to give my players explosives unless they are in situations where those start to look suspiciously like just enough rope to hang yourself.
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hahah but we made them ourselves!
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I'm glad my players don't attempt to jury rig their own weapons, much.
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hahahahah!
my brother make a juryrigged "Stormbringer" health/soul sucking black blade and had his priest of Chaos weld it... ofcourse he ran thru crying "Blood and Souls for my Lord Arioch! Arioch! Blood and Souls for my Lord Arioch!"
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