Krisam's page

I'm just kind of impressed by the people who say, "you don't have to play LG in a particular way!" and then they turn around and chide the OP for not playing his CN character a particular way. :P

Also, chaotic =/= automatically crazy, stupid, evil or ruthless. Acts of kindness aren't necessarily out of character... though what the OP describes sounds more like the character is fed up with the paladin than really concerned about the prisoners.

If the other player is OK with it, I see no reason why the OP's character shouldn't cause trouble for the paladin however he sees fit. Interesting RP could stem from it.

YMMV.

I just want to say that I think everyone's scenes are really awesome. High-quality RP all around!

@Amestri: Heh, I thought the 'mystical words of power' sounded very Calishite in nature, so long as you don't read them backwards. I love it when people write out the mystic whatsits, I think it adds something to the game. Though sometimes, all you can do is write, "-and then they spoke the arcane words to do (whatever)." Same way with prayers when you're in a hurry. LOL

I kind of turned that around in my homebrewish alt-FR game. In the Moonsea there, they worship the Dark Gods, but they basically get lied to - they don't think they're evil, just harsh in response to a harsh world. So Loviatar, for example, takes on the suffering of her flock, and teaches wisdom through painful experiences. Her clerics flog themselves in return for donations to the church, sending the pain of those donated for to Loviatar through their own suffering.

For another example, Bane is seen as a savior, rescuing the flock from false gods who would make them too weak to survive in their harsh environment. His "might makes right" rule comes naturally to them because their whole culture is based on it. And submitting to authority (Bane's authority, of course) both strengthens his church and makes people work together more in a chaotic frontier, ensuring more little Banites eventually.

I don't have any experience twisting the Golarion gods this way, but I'm sure it could be done. Because, who wakes up and goes, "Welp, gonna worship a crazy evil god from now on."

Because of reasons.

Artists take note!

Never include any description or text that tells players how they feel, act, etc. Don't ever make players feel like you're reading them a novel and they're along for the ride, rolling dice from time to time that really don't matter because your story will turn out the way you want regardless of the player's actions.

SO MUCH THIS. I've had some bad DMs, but the ones that did this were the most irritating. If the players wanted to be reading a novel, they would read a novel. My particular "favorite" example is a DM I know who constantly defaults to, "suddenly you're no longer in control of your body, and you do X bad things. And you like it!" Which is not only lame, but also insulting.

"Suddenly you wake up and it was all a dream" adventures I also personally detest, along with "reality isn't what you've been playing in for the last x months!"

Having NPCs then waltz in and easily do what the PCs were failing to do (sometimes using the exact same actions, like talking to NPCs that abruptly change their tune with no magic involved) is also bad. Or having NPCs dictate to the PCs what they should do, or worse yet, enforce their will in ways the PCs can't fight back against or get around.

Arbitrarily nixing solutions/actions that should either work or fail entertainingly is another bad idea. (Example that happened to me: For some reason, evil fire giants live in an underground rift very close to an underground lake. Like, a few meters away (I don't know either). You have to get past them (not in the rift, but past it), and they're way above your APL. Sneaking flat out will fail, as warned by the DM. Using the old Dig spell to dig a funnel for the water into the rift fails for no reason too. Not "Doesn't dig a channel wide enough to drown the giants quickly enough" or similar reasons; the spell just fails.)

/rant

TL;DR:

• hijacking characters
  
• "it was all just in your head/a dream"
  
• have NPCs succeed where the PCs fail
  
• have NPCs dictate what PCs choices are
  
• don't give players a chance to come up with something unusual (or just disallow actions that should be possible for story reasons)
  

Shifty wrote:

TanithT wrote:

As to PC on PC rape being PvP, this is true. That doesn't address the issue of players raping NPC's in a gratuitous, totally non plot advancing way, when they are told they can't actually rape anyone's character. I don't want to play at that table, and no amount of game mechanics is going to fix that for me.

And neither does anyone else, which is why I suppose I have seen it precisely 0 times, ever. Nor has anyone I have ever met claim it has happened to them, only ever nebulous tales that start "This one time, at a games con, apparently..." and only ever from people on the internet.

So thats hundreds of tables just for me, and hundreds more for my friends, all of us with two to three decades of gaming and going to games conventions, and not one incidence of this happening.

Pretty good odds then of it not happening.

Are you claiming that the women in this thread are just making these incidents up?

That is certainly what it sounds like to me. It makes me angry, and sad. I think I've had enough of this thread. There are obvious posters who make it unpleasant to read.

Whoa. I've been reading this whole thread, and I've been at it for hours. I didn't get all the way through yet, but I really wanted to add my experiences to the mix before I have to turn in.

I live in Denmark, and sexism isn't something I experience on a regular basis. That said, there are a few things that have happened while gaming...

All of these are obvious ways of how NOT to keep a female player (or in the last case, ANY player), but there are little niggly things too, which have been brought up by others. Things like being spoken over and ignored when you have ideas as to what the party could do in a given situation. Dumb blonde jokes as a staple of your joking. (I'm not blond, but the vibe can be unpleasant anyway. Maybe if some of the dumb blondes were men...) Unwanted advice every time you make a move. Lots of other things, some of them hard to formulate for me, that basically say "Deal with it or GTFO."

Right here on the Paizo forums, someone once mentioned that her character was against the church of Erastil because the church placed women as subservient to men. She was pretty much shouted down by people getting in a twist over her position, in her own home game, on a FANTASY RELIGION. Feminism was brought up in a negative light ("Hyuck hyuck, those damn feminists, what will they think of next"). Things like that make it harder to want to participate.

Most of the gaming I do now is online, with a smaller percentage being with my face-to-face group of friends. If I were to be lured back into gaming face-to-face with strangers, an all-female group would definitely alleviate most of the concerns I have with doing so. Don't get me wrong, female groups can have bad chemistry or styles or whatever, but I don't think the most egregious of the behaviors I've experienced would originate with them, simply because they don't automatically see another woman as "other" and therefore fine to treat as an object of gaming-at rather than a member of gaming-with.

For the record, for those who were interested in that, when I first got into gaming Dragonlance was a horrible bore. I leapt right at the Forgotten Realms, though. I think it was primarily because of the fiction I read about it, the terrible, terrible writing notwithstanding. It was fun to actually be able to step into the world a book had described, and affect things there.

I like the combat aspects of gaming as much as my male friends do; I can never help but suspect that claims of women naturally liking less combat, rather than being socialized not to engage in it, is gender-essentialist nonsense. The only caveat to that is that online combat is so, so slow that it's preferable to avoid it when possible, just to avoid boring your players to death.

Okay, one last anecdote:

Whew, that got long, and now it's REALLY late. I just want to say thanks to TanithT, Alice Margatroid and all the other gamers who are helping women find a voice in gaming.

I'm not applying, but I just wanted to say that I love the way you've set up motivation for character submissions. Very nice indeed.

Hey there jasonwire. GrumpyCelt seems to have dropped out, so I guess we can squeeze you in. :) What kind of character did you have in mind?

... I don't plan on any decision adversely affecting the paladin. We're there to have fun. If he has fun cracking open kobold eggs and killing them so they don't turn evil, so be it. If he has fun bringing them somewhere where they can be raised with love, so be it. If he has fun cooking them and eating them with ham and potatoes, so be it.

What's the point of playing a paladin, then, if there's no moral choice to be made? Might as well be playing a fighter, or some other class. I'd be disappointed if I chose to play a paladin and then found out that my choices had no consequences.

I'm not a very experienced DM, so this is interesting for me... which is to say: dot.