D&D: THAT person in the group

[MorganL4]

Yeah, for my group it was Butters our wizard, ( yes we have a guy in our group nicknamed Butters last name is Butterworth) And he managed to get his hands on a rod of wonder http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/rods/rod-of-wonder

This rod turned out to be a rod of summon pachyderm with 3 or 4 exceptions; EVERY time it was used it shot out either an Elephant or a Rhino. There was one point when he was literally flying through the air in some small town firing elephants at hobos........ (the rolls were legit by the way which is what made this nutz on a whole other level)

For the final game of the campaign in an attempt at killing another player character he opened a portal to an alternate dimension, the targeted player made his save, but my wolf (I was the druid) and the wizard, (yes he sucked himself in) got sent to a plain of pure darkness devoid of gravity. You can imagine how this made me feel seeing as that wolf and I had been together since level 1.

So yeah EVERY group gets that person. But does every group have a cleric that refuses to heal anyone but himself so that the druid has to do it?

 

[prigdishnak]

There was one guy in our group. -.- Who unfortunately was the DM/GM. He made a point of rolling everything randomly that he could. Some of that is okay, but not for absolutely everything. And yes, I do mean everything. Our 'Elminster' as we referred to her in that she would often show up at random instantces of the game and 'test' us. Was a female minotaur wizard/ninja/cleric who made a point at slashing at the backs of characters only to cast Heal on them when they were nearly dead. And she was apparently Lawfull Good. She had a name but I dont recall it now since five minutes after her introduction we (the players) immediatly started to call her The Mino-Whore. -.-

And that was just the start of it. Since apparently the leader of every major power in the world was run by what was effectively the same portly male figure with a little mustache and a considerable interest in getting a randomly selected character into bed.

Then there was the Giant Ape incident in which every single other word out of this guys mouth in describeing the animal was 'huge incisors'. TO the point that after we had killed it he actually had them fall out of the creatures mouth.....'because that is what happened'.

So awhile later our Half-Orc paladin is killed by an Ogre-Magi. IT happens. *shrugs* Suddenly! *dramatic music plays* A druid appears offering to reincarnate our deceased friend in return for 'an item of significant natural importance'. Yep, the ape fangs.

Now we have a Lv 13 Badger Paladin.....oh joy. I swear he fudged the role that on purpose.

But I havent even gotten to the worst part. @.@
Our Female Halfling-Rouge was played by a guy who in my opinion ran a daily risk of altering weather patterns by walking to fast. :3 6"10' I think. Which is fine. ^^ Except that he was actually able to roll for his stats 4 20s! And 1 14, which he put in wisdom. To 'compensate' Mr. Almighty here (the GM), no he thankfully did not insist on us calling him that, decided that she was a Cursed Godling incapable of wielding weapons or armor. So after she is able to effectively walk out of a 30+ bandit ambush, with a dexterity of 26 by then it came as no surprise to anyone, she attempts to rescue us. Resulting in killing the bandits! By burning down their forest dwelling....by burning down the forest. o.o The entire forest. Sure resourcefull for her player since he had no weapons and wasnt allowed to take Unarmed Stirke since 'that counted as a weapon'. But really depressing.

We thankfully finally left at level 17 when The Mino-Whore contracted rat-wereism and wanted us to help her. This is someone who has attacked us about 4 dozen times now and each time made the entire party look like 1st levels trying to get a giant saddle on the Tarrasque. And has offered no actual help despite claims of Lawfull Goodness. After our Rouge was able to easily talk our badger paladin into 'scouting for possible traps/ambush/whatever', we had ourselves a little barbeque. :3

None of his story made any sense at any point what so ever. Only reason we were even letting him DM/GM is because we knew he would go beserk otherwise.

 

[Malyc]

@Morgan: Yes. Either that or they have a cleric that fancies himself a fighter and only heals when the battle is finished...

 

[Xangba]

Well our "that guy" tends to be all of us at one point or another. One of my friends though purposefully made a paladin when we had both a chaotic evil wizard and rogue, just so he could try and stop us from doing whatever we planned. He met a quick end involving a flaming dagger to the back, but not before we tortured him. Our wizard once set him on fire to "make you burn anybody that tries to grab you." Come to think of it I think we both became "that guy" over the course of it. It was more like a game of paranoia than DnD lol

 

[Launcelot111]

My friends and I all got along wonderfully when we played DnD, but that's just because we hated our DM with a fiery passion and united against him. Not because he was a bad DM (he wasn't a good one though), but because we all genuinely disliked him as a person and in retrospect it's unclear why we accepted him as a DM (probably because he was the only one with any DnD experience or books). Anyway, his whole deal was to make up some completely senseless and self-indulgent story which we all ignored, but he also made an arch-nemesis for us which was engineered through ages of scouring the rulebooks on his part to be quite literally undefeatable or even damageable by the combined forces of our low-level (not to mention inexperienced) party. He would flat-out kill us if he felt like it. For some reason, this same cruel and terrible DM was very permissive with what he let us do, so we took the opportunity to ruin his game at every turn

A list of some of our offenses
-Realizing that holly leaves are listed as weightless and free in the rules and insisting that we are constantly supplied with the weightless equivalent of 10000 lbs of holly, which can still be used to suffocate or crush people somehow
-Insisting on being accompanied by a herd of buffalo which we could stampede at will
-Dousing important story items with alchemist's fire (essentially liquid fire) the second we receive them
-Insisting on questing for the rod of seven parts (self explanatory), getting the first part, and then promptly ignoring the rest of it despite ruining many in-game relationships to get it
-Building a character dedicated to learning languages and then trying to talk people to death
-Playing as a half-dragon who carries an iron maiden at all times and spends his free time hiding in back allies "juicing" people
-Dousing each other with alchemist's fire while they slept (we loved alchemist's fire) and then successfully rolling to convince them that someone else had done it
-Upon introducing another friend to the group, we decide to throw our gnome wizard at him, which killed both immediately
-Insisting on playing as Colossus of the X-men

All the while, our DM just let this nonsense go while incessantly insisting that we play a "real" game of DnD

 

[CrazyBlaze]

I've never experienced "That Guy" before, however I have stumbled across the most amazing "That Guy" story in all of existence. Ladies and Gentlemen: Old Man Henderson

Spoiler: Old Man Henderson: The Prologue

Waffle House Millionaire 07/06/10(Tue)06:26 No 10966503

I hate de-railing a thread on accident. Who wants to hear the Tale of Old Man Henderson, the character who 'won' Call of Cthulhu?

Anonymous 07/06/10(Tue)06 27 No.10966512

I do

Alright then, I'd like to start by saying that the GM was a bastard that had it coming. Bullshit tactics to make everyone go crazy like a d6 with only 5 sides. No story, no reason; lose 10 sanity. The others continued to allow this faggotry. We were playing a modem day setting, with the other players being a college professor who found a couple of stray pages of a copy of the Necronomicon and wanted to find out just what the hell it was, a detective who was investigating a missing persons case connected to the local cult and a local athlete (I think it was football) trying to find out why some of his friends seemed so distant lately. And then... there was Old Man Henderson, who was never given a first name.

Old Man Henderson was already a little crazy, and blamed his life's misfortunes on Vietnam.
He never went to Vietnam, he was 12 in 74. (And I will be fucking amazed if anyone gets that reference.)
Old Man Henderson wore combat boots, cargo shorts, and an open-front Hawaiian shirt with a wife-beater underneath.
He was dyslexic, and had a lesser case of Schizophrenia. allowing him to assume that the reason he saw crazy shit was because he WAS a little bit crazy.
He had a grizzly adams beard and wore his hair in a mohawk.
He never took off his aviator shades, for any reason.
He had a stuffed parrot on his shoulder named Rupert that he constantly asked for advice, while ignoring the other party members as convenient, assuming they were hallucinations.
He had a Automatic combat shot-gun he knew how to use.
He also had MEMORIZED the anarchist's cookbook. He started the game with a pre-existing hatred of religion, cutlery, and books.
His motivation was that he thought that the cult had stole his lawngnomes; while he had actually donated them to a charity auction, got high, and forgot about it.
Most importantly, he had a 320 page backstory that justified EVERYTHING, from his casual knowledge of physics to his ability to speak Portuguese flawlessly.
You can just imagine the sort of Shenanigans that character was involved in.

The point to having such a long backstory was three-fold.

1. to ensure the GM would never actually read it and
2. Since he would never read it except for in excerpts I pointed out to justify things, I could re-write and change things around completely at random without anyone noticing and MOST IMPORTANTLY
3. Convince everyone that I was serious about this character, and that it wasn't simply the game wrecking bullshit that it was.

Dickish yes, but he really did have it coming.

First outing of the group. The Detective was spying on the building of the cultists with a camera. The Jock was parked nearby, waiting for the group to let out so he could snoop it out The Professor had joined the cult to try and gain information.
Old Man Henderson very calmly parked his car, got out holding the shotgun in clear view of anyone who happened to be looking (in this case, the detective and the Jock), strolled up to the front door and kicked it in.
While everyone just kind of stopped in shocked silence for a moment, he leveled his shotgun on the lead priest/cultist guy and yelled "MUCKLE DAMRED CULTI 'AIR EH NAMBLIES BE KEEPIN' ME WEE MEN!?!?"

Did I mention that he had a nigh-incomprehensible Scottish accent that came and went as he drank and/or as amused me?
The leader couldn't understand my simple request to return my lawn gnomes (literally, you think what I typed is hard to understand? imagine it being slurred at you by a drunken Scotsman), he assumed I was trying to cast a spell at him in an elder tongue and summoned a shoggoth by murdering one of his fellows.
One Molotov And about 20 rounds later, the Shoggoth is dead, as is the cult leader, the Professor (he made the mistake of trying to make peace-maker mid murderous rampage) and about 10 assorted cultists.
Old Man Henderson then pissed on the Shoggoth's corpse, got back in his battered '92 Buick Century, and went home. The whole event was over in about ten minutes game time and nobody thought to get the Buick's plates.
The building burned down shortly, along with about half the written plot, and every lead either of the other surviving players had. The GM called a break then to figure out how to fix and/or work around what I just did.
It only got crazier from there.

Anonymous 07/06/10(Tue)07.36 No.10967215

I must have more, good sir!

Waffle House Millionaire 07/06/10(Tue)07 37 No 10967237

Typing up the full exploits of Old Man Henderson would take too long, can I just give you the highlights reel?

Anonymous 07/06/10(Tue)07.38 No.10967240

I will settle for that

Waffle House Millionaire 07/06/10(Tue)07 47 No 10967295

All Right-ey then
Some of his finer moments include:

* Dropping a Yacht onto a penthouse suite owned by Cthulhu Cultists.
* The stealing of said Yacht from cultists of Hastur, thereby starting a cultist gang-war.
* The Tanker truck incident,
* and my personal favorite: Hell on Ice.

Which one do you want to hear about first?

dashingbastard 07/06/10(Tue)07.48 No.10967307

Dropping the Yacht.
Lets take it from the top.

Spoiler: Old Man Henderson: Dropping The Yacht

Old Man Henderson, with his erstwhile companion Jimmy (the Jock) and his Friends William Brocklaw, a once humble bartender (The now dead Detective's player. Old Man Henderson burned down his bar on accident and blamed it on the cultists. One bluff check later and he in the Posse.), and Simon Breckenridge, British Spy (the Professor's player, now six characters in. And yes, they were more or less all killed by Old Man Henderson).
Old Man Henderson had discovered that there was not one cult to the Elder Gods, but several. This complicated his search for his gnomes/crusade. He decided to enlist help in making the problem solve itself.
Using his contacts, Simon discovered that a Influential Cultist of Hastur was coming to town to try and figure out how an Avatar of his god was killed. (More on this in the tanker truck incident.) He also located the exact dock on which he would be landing his boat.
Jimmy, meanwhile discovered the home of the head of the local Cthulhu cults was at a penthouse suite downtown. A plan was hatched.

Old Man Henderson used all of his cunning to steal a Military Cargo Helicopter (read: Shoruyken'd the pilot and flew off), and hid it in an abandoned warehouse.
Jimmy, and Will set up a VERY EXPENSIVE surround sound speaker system at the docks, while Simon made and planted a lot of smoke bombs.
That night, the Yacht pulled in, and we made our move.
Right as Simon maneuvered the Helicopter over the docks, we set off the Smoke bombs and activated the Speakers.
On one side: A fifty piece marching band playing 'God Save the Queen' at max volume, and on the other the audio from the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan.
Imagine, for a moment what being on the dock would have been like.
Utter. Fucking. CHAOS.

I jumped down from the Helicopter onto the boat, and rigged it to lilt out of there. During the course of which I ran into the cultist guy and Ninja Kicked him in the head, knocking him tail-over-teakettle and off the boat. I later learned that he broke his neck in the fall.
Damned convenient, otherwise he might have have been able to ID me. We then lilted the boat out of there, switched to out secondary audio on all sides (My Heart Will Go On - Celine Dion. I was in a vengeful mood, gnome stealing bastards.) So when the cultists finally got the smoke to clear their Yacht was gone, their leader dead. And Celine Dion was stuck in their heads. Not the best of days.
Then we went across tow, in a stolen Military Cargo chopper, carrying a 40 foot yacht, and 'parked' the helicopter above the penthouse, with the yacht about 80 feet above it. Then we cut the line, jumped out with our parachutes, and watched the yacht ruin a dinner party while placing bets on whether the military would save the chopper, blow it up, or if it would just hover there until it ran out of fuel.

Spoiler: Old Man Henderson: The Tanker Truck Incident

Now, time for what will forever be known as 'The tanker truck incident'. Notice 'The' is capitalized. This is because no matter what incidents in the future may involve tanker trucks, this is the definitive one.
It started out innocently enough, Old Man Henderson left the stakeout in a van outside the evil cult's meeting place to go get some hooch. The only people now there are the Detective, and James Fink (the professor's second character). Jimmy was gone because it was a school night (Old Man Henderson was a bad influence, but damned if he didn't have the kid's best interests at heat.)
The cultists see me leaving had a very distinct appearance, after all. (VERY USEFUL in scoring TPKs.), and discover my friends spying on them. The detective gets a pretty GAR death, and James dies like a *****. But not yet.
I'm on my way back, walking along. The Detective and James had been brought inside as part of a ritual to give Hastur an avatar in our world (he had been banished, and the only way he could come here is via a loophole). He could only use people who knew he existed and had thwarted him thrice as a host, and then he had to make them drink the life-blood of their closest friend to make the binding permanent. In case you're wondering, permanent binding = GAME OVER.

The first part of the ritual was completed, but before Hastur could take control, the detective broke James' shackles and he tried to run.
He made it as far as the street, when the detective (now Hastur) caught up with him, part demon-form.
Now where this church (for lack of a better term) was located, was at the end of the road on a T shaped intersection. There was a gas-station about three blocks away, which is where Old Man Henderson was while this was going down.
Old Man Henderson sees the shit hit the fan, and steals a half-full tanker truck that WAS refilling the station's holding tank.
While I bring the truck up to ramming speed, I toss a 12 lb block of C4 in the passenger seat and rig the detonator to the airbags.

Old Man Henderson then took a bracing shot of whiskey, jammed a knife through the gas pedal, then jumped of of the truck onto his heelies. Yes, he modified his combat boots to have heelies. I swear to god I had not planned this to happen, the heelies just sounded like something fucking ridiculous and in character.
He watched the truck ram the detective into the church, the blew him and all the cultists to Kingdom Come. The truck also killed James by running him over.
That's when the back-trail ignited, fire going all the way back to the gas-station and destroying it; continuing my streak of accidentally destroying anything that might lead people back to Old Man Henderson.
I took a moment to call Jimmy.
"Henderson here. Figured out what the nasties are weak against."
"What's that, Mr. Henderson?"
"Point blank annihilation."
'click'

Spoiler: Old Man Henderson: Hell on Ice

Waffle House Millionaire 07/06/10(Tue)09:04 No.10968068

Does anyone care If I throw up Hell on ice? It's my favorite of the bunch, but if nobody cares I'll save it for later.
Almost forgot to mention, there was a bar right next to the gas station called 'the Homble Revelation', which was the one that Will had owned.

Anonymous 07/06/10(Tue)09 08 No.109681 18

fuckin' do it you crazy son of a *****

Anonymous 07/06/10(Tue)09 09 No.10968126

For the love of god MORE.

Okie-doke. We were in the endgame, with zombies and shoggoths chasing us I managed to get Jimmy disappeared, so it was Old Man Henderson, Simon and Will going to the final strong-point we had an abandoned hockey stadium.
On the way there, we had rammed through a small home-and-garden store in our truck. And when we arrived, we started barring the doors and windows, when I noticed something. Our trip through the store had netted us a passenger- a single lawn gnome.
Somehow, I knew right then that this was it. No lucky turn of fate, no Deus Ex Machina... Old Man Henderson was going to die. But I'd be damned if it wouldn't be the best fucking last stand ever.

I then revealed to the GM that Henderson was a world champion figure skater, hockey player, and golfer.
The Backstory of Doom got one final use.
We had got almost all of the doors barricaded, but the zombie/shoggoth army kicked in the last door and got Simon, Will was pulled off the Zamboni after he manage to throw the Crate onto the ice.
The crate full of exploding hockey pucks.
Lasted a couple of minutes while blasting Bust A Move (Young MC) before the situation resolved into totally fucked I switched to the next track as I yelled "HASTUR HASTUR HASTUR!" The next track came on, it was the Canadian national anthem, which Old Man Henderson began to sing proudly, at the top of his lungs.
I then threw out the three pieces of knowledge that marked Old Man Henderson's Blaze Of Glory.

1. Calling Hastur's name 3 times will summon him, but only if the one who is truest foe at the time calls it. (Guess who.)
2. When an elder god is summoned from beyond, they suffer a sort of summoning sickness. They're still unbelievably strong, but can be killed FOREVER if you hit them hard enough.
3. The building had enough explosives wired to make Michal Bay blush.

And that my friends, is the tale of how Old Man Henderson won Call of Cthulhu.

More. Give us more. Old Man Henderson is awesome.

Yeah, for my group it was Butters our wizard, ( yes we have a guy in our group nicknamed Butters (last name is Butterworth) And he managed to get his hands on a rod of wonder http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/rods/rod-of-wonder

This rod turned out to be a rod of summon pachyderm with 3 or 4 exceptions; EVERY time it was used it shot out either an Elephant or a Rhino. There was one point when he was literally flying through the air in some small town firing elephants at hobos........ (the rolls were legit by the way which is what made this nutz on a whole other level)

For the final game of the campaign in an attempt at killing another player character he opened a portal to an alternate dimension, the targeted player made his save, but my wolf (I was the druid) and the wizard, (yes he sucked himself in) got sent to a plain of pure darkness devoid of gravity. You can imagine how this made me feel seeing as that wolf and I had been together since level 1.

So yeah EVERY group gets that person. But does every group have a cleric that refuses to heal anyone but himself so that the druid has to do it?

Thats jokes. I laugh at those villagers who got hit with elephants.

 

[Rottweiler]

I was 'that guy'...but mainly because I tried to be the Smart Rogue.

Examples:

"Okay, the Hill Giant is starting to come down the spiral staircase at you."

"Is there a railing on the staircase?"

"No. And it's a 200' drop down the center of the tower."

"Okay, I scatter my bag of marbles on the stairs in front of the Hill Giant."

"...you have a bag of marbles?"

"Yep, it's there next to box of caltrops, whisk broom, hinge oil, and 150' of twine."


In our games, we had...ways...of dealing with the game-breakers. Like contact poison in the loincloth.

 

[pffh]

@Morgan: Yes. Either that or they have a cleric that fancies himself a fighter and only heals when the battle is finished...

In 3.5 at least in combat healing is suboptimal and it is better to just do more damage to end the fight and thus reducing the total damage taken. Besides the cleric is better at being a fighter then the fighter class and shouldn't really be confined to the role of a healbot (and neither should the druid that has class features more powerful then whole classes).

A list of some of our offenses
-Realizing that holly leaves are listed as weightless and free in the rules and insisting that we are constantly supplied with the weightless equivalent of 10000 lbs of holly, which can still be used to suffocate or crush people somehow
-Insisting on being accompanied by a herd of buffalo which we could stampede at will
-Dousing important story items with alchemist's fire (essentially liquid fire) the second we receive them
-Insisting on questing for the rod of seven parts (self explanatory), getting the first part, and then promptly ignoring the rest of it despite ruining many in-game relationships to get it
-Building a character dedicated to learning languages and then trying to talk people to death
-Playing as a half-dragon who carries an iron maiden at all times and spends his free time hiding in back allies "juicing" people
-Dousing each other with alchemist's fire while they slept (we loved alchemist's fire) and then successfully rolling to convince them that someone else had done it
-Upon introducing another friend to the group, we decide to throw our gnome wizard at him, which killed both immediately
-Insisting on playing as Colossus of the X-men

All the while, our DM just let this nonsense go while incessantly insisting that we play a "real" game of DnD

Well if this is sort of game you enjoy you might want to look at the crafting rules and the cost of quarterstaffs.

Crafting time is dependant on the cost of the item being made and quarterstaffs are free. This means that you can craft an infinite amount of quarterstaffs out of thin air in literally no time.

SUDDENLY QUARTERSTAFFS.... MILLIONS OF THEM.

This also works with slings.

 

[VoidWanderer]

Back in NZ my THAT guy always rolled Elven Wizards for the Knowledge skills. The cliched destined to be all-powerful master of magic due to [insert prophecy here]. What made it worse was when DMed a campaign his Wizard (now being Level 100) was the literal embodiment of all magic, whose death and rebirth formed the Age of [Whatever]. And he used this guy as the one who would get the 'lesser' people to do the little things like story quests.

 

[Naeras]

Rogue: "I check for traps" *rolls dice*
DM: "You uncover a pit full of spikes in front of you."
Nutter: "I push rogue into the pit."
Rogue: "NO YOU FUCKING DO-"
DM: "Rogue is pushed into the pit" *rolls dice*
DM: "Oh dear."

Rogue now rages as all shit. Everyone else is laughing their asses off.

edit: another guy, while we were playing a Star Wars RPG, ran out of ammo during a gunfight. He then said he picked up a rock and threw it through the window in the second floor.
The DM proceeds to tell us that the guy hiding in that room yells "GRENADE", jumps out of the window and (after a dice roll) breaks his neck and dies upon landing.

 

[karloss01]

We had a crazy druid player who rode a giant gorilla who he had an "intimate" relationship and also like other animals to join in on the fun, most of the time it was forced. Right at the beginning of the campaign he decided to rape the pack mule which died of shock and pissed off the player who spent his gold on it.

He died by my character?s hand who was being mind controlled by a vampire, cleaved both him and his ape with a single swing of my greatsword.

That is the funniest thing I've heard all day, jesus I can't stop laughing. What did the other party members do when he was ummm "intimate" with the pack mule?

pretty much this

Spoiler: MS paint for the win

just pure silence while the cleric player raged at the druid. we then made the druid carry the luggage.

 

[ArmorKingBaneGief]

My friends and I all got along wonderfully when we played DnD, but that's just because we hated our DM with a fiery passion and united against him. Not because he was a bad DM (he wasn't a good one though), but because we all genuinely disliked him as a person and in retrospect it's unclear why we accepted him as a DM (probably because he was the only one with any DnD experience or books). Anyway, his whole deal was to make up some completely senseless and self-indulgent story which we all ignored, but he also made an arch-nemesis for us which was engineered through ages of scouring the rulebooks on his part to be quite literally undefeatable or even damageable by the combined forces of our low-level (not to mention inexperienced) party. He would flat-out kill us if he felt like it. For some reason, this same cruel and terrible DM was very permissive with what he let us do, so we took the opportunity to ruin his game at every turn

A list of some of our offenses
-Realizing that holly leaves are listed as weightless and free in the rules and insisting that we are constantly supplied with the weightless equivalent of 10000 lbs of holly, which can still be used to suffocate or crush people somehow
-Insisting on being accompanied by a herd of buffalo which we could stampede at will
-Dousing important story items with alchemist's fire (essentially liquid fire) the second we receive them
-Insisting on questing for the rod of seven parts (self explanatory), getting the first part, and then promptly ignoring the rest of it despite ruining many in-game relationships to get it
-Building a character dedicated to learning languages and then trying to talk people to death
-Playing as a half-dragon who carries an iron maiden at all times and spends his free time hiding in back allies "juicing" people
-Dousing each other with alchemist's fire while they slept (we loved alchemist's fire) and then successfully rolling to convince them that someone else had done it
-Upon introducing another friend to the group, we decide to throw our gnome wizard at him, which killed both immediately
-Insisting on playing as Colossus of the X-men

All the while, our DM just let this nonsense go while incessantly insisting that we play a "real" game of DnD

That's really the best game I've ever heard of. I love how it was specifically Colossus, did he ever get really pissed at your guys' shenanigans?

 

[Leadfinger]

Well to be fair if your not familiar with CoC it's hard to really "get it", sitting in an unoccupied throne is a typical way to proceed in many adventures, and frankly even when in CoC it uses a lot of pulpesque trappings. The game has such a crazy high body count because it can be very hard to know exactly what the right way to proceed is in some cases, and I've actually seen groups paralyzed with indesician because everyone was concerned about doing anything.

For example in CoC it can sometime be tricky to decide who is going to read a book to figure out how to proceed, because most books come with SAN losses, sometimes quite high, and sometimes can even screw with things like your POW rating, and it gets worse if you need to cast spells from inside one of those books.

It can be a hard game to run because people trying to keep their characters alive and sane can be indesicive, but ones who really start to "get into it" will oftentimes effectively be Kamikazes when they realize death is inevitable and try for the most awesome deaths possible while moving the plot along.

You can easily move from extremes where nobody does anything, to ones where everyone sort of does anything and a lot of the foreboding goes out of it because nobody cares anymore.

It's awesome when players are horrified when someone's eyes are turned into ever bleeding sockets from reading a book and getting some really mind blowingly bad roles. But then a couple of sessions later whenever someone reads a book you start getting suggestions from the players about how their PC should bite it, and actually kind of hoping they will fail the roll...

Of course my problem might be that I wind up GMing too many horror games, and so people wind up getting kind of jaded to my style.

Well, CoC is a little different than most other RPGs. For example, in CoC when you see a cyclopean stone throne with strange non-Euclidean geometry, you don't sit on it. If you find a tome covered in tanned man-skin, best not to attempt to read it in the field-bring it back to a properly equipped research institute. If you find a mysterious artifact, a flute for example, don't attempt to use it. You kinda have to pick it up for later study in the aforementioned research institute, but you don't want to touch it for a moment longer than you absolutely have to. If you find a strange painting, no matter how oddly compelling the grotesque landscape depicted may be, by no means should you stare at it. And finally, spells that help the party are all well and good, but if the spellcaster should start cackling or muttering about how "Your puny minds can't comprehend my awesome power...," or, "I could crush you like the insects you are...," the other palyers are going to put him down right quick.

 

[Sangreal Gothcraft]

Well i play Neverwinter Nights for around....8 years now, had lots of THAT GUYS and GALS, I have a huge list..... Half Dargon Demi gods who are complete ass holes, Vampires walking in Sunlight and not caring because he was special, CG Half fiends who was a Paladin. Evil Celestials who became evil without any rp>.>. i got a huuuuuge list, some are quite funny, other are just face palm worthy. Though only character i stuck with was a Half Fiend rouge who slepted with everything and would steal people's pants and sell it for alcohol. I never really made a serious character, Except for an Aasimar Cleric of Kelevmor.

 

[Therumancer]

[]Well, CoC is a little different than most other RPGs. For example, in CoC when you see a cyclopean stone throne with strange non-Euclidean geometry, you don't sit on it. If you find a tome covered in tanned man-skin, best not to attempt to read it in the field-bring it back to a properly equipped research institute. If you find a mysterious artifact, a flute for example, don't attempt to use it. You kinda have to pick it up for later study in the aforementioned research institute, but you don't want to touch it for a moment longer than you absolutely have to. If you find a strange painting, no matter how oddly compelling the grotesque landscape depicted may be, by no means should you stare at it. And finally, spells that help the party are all well and good, but if the spellcaster should start cackling or muttering about how "Your puny minds can't comprehend my awesome power...," or, "I could crush you like the insects you are...," the other palyers are going to put him down right quick.

Yes and know, having played it and GMed it I will say flat out that your arguement doesn't hold weight in many scenarios, and the game is designed that way, especially in published adventures.

That artifact is oftentimes needed to advance the plot, typically in CoC your in the middle of a tomb, abandoned house, or in the boonies surrounded by half breed monster rednecks. The information in that flesh covered tome, or the melody played by that flute, or the door opened by sitting in that throne being the only way to advance the plot and successfully defeat the scenario. You might for example need to sit in the odd non-elucidan throne to be able to raise an alter out of the ground, with a book and a flute on it, where you need to read the book to learn what to play on the flute to deal with the creature chasing the party down, running away for research being impossible because of a magically sealed 30 ton stone slab sealed the tomb shut and can only be opened by defeating the aforementioned monster.

Or in simple terms your looking at a ton of mandatory san loss, plus a bunch of POW loss, and someone basically has to fall on those grenades.

Now yes, in scenarios where you can fall back to say Miskatonic University to do research on each new discovery, that's not a bad idea. However when your say in another country that your characters can barely afford to travel through, or locked in the constraints of a terrifying area, that's just not plausible, and since most adventures are "investigations" that generally start by heading to such locations, your pretty much screwed and have to make do with the resources at hand.

 

[cjspyres]

Well i play Neverwinter Nights for around....8 years now, had lots of THAT GUYS and GALS, I have a huge list..... Half Dargon Demi gods who are complete ass holes, Vampires walking in Sunlight and not caring because he was special, CG Half fiends who was a Paladin. Evil Celestials who became evil without any rp>.>. i got a huuuuuge list, some are quite funny, other are just face palm worthy. Though only character i stuck with was a Half Fiend rouge who slepted with everything and would steal people's pants and sell it for alcohol. I never really made a serious character, Except for an Aasimar Cleric of Kelevmor.

....Chaotic Good....Half-Fiend....Paladin? Does somebody not know how to play? At least the Evil Celestial would make sense, if they'd have made a backstory.