Aslaug's page

I feel like I'm sticking my head in a noose by saying this ... but I don't see this as being a problem that should have escalated to this level.

However, I also acknowledge that not all groups function the same way.

PvP is an integral part of any game I run. That's not to say that it should necessarily happen, but if there is a reason for it, then it happens. I do not block the players from engaging in it. If they agree beforehand that they won't do it, I'll accept this as their wishes, but I will politely and vocally disagree.

PvP is a very useful tool, and it does not necessarily result in player death. Any action taken by one character to the detriment of another can be classified as PvP. Whether this is stealing, ratting someone you character doesn't like IC out to his arch enemy or the city guards in case he's done something wrong, turning around In Character and punching his toon in the face to start a bare-knuckle brawl because he did something that ticked your character off or yes ... having your character draw a weapon and trying to kill the offending git, are all viable actions in character because they are all things that could legitimately happen.

You play a greedy character, you say ... someone who would try to nick stuff from the other player characters.

Sure, then you play such a character. I've had that exact thing happen in several of my groups and yes, it can lead to hurt feelings when the other players can legitimately see that they are being scammed or stolen from, IC, but frankly, they are taking something that should remain In Character and letting it bleed over into Real Life, and that is never cool. Such players need to learn how to differentiate between IC and OOC, and not to equate the actions of a player character with the actions of a player. Because my character steals and murders, does not mean I would steal and murder.

So I would have no issue with a character being played that way.

However ...

If you play a character who actively acts to the detriment of the other party members, you have to be ready to face the music and you have to be ready to accept the direct consequences of your actions. If one of the other characters notices you stealing and decides that you're not worth having around, then tough ... deal with it. You made the choice to make a character who would do that sort of thing.

One of the, in my personal experience, most annoying tropes in RP is the idea that "everyone in the party loves each other like brothers and sisters". That we're all "best friends evah" and that consequently, you should accept everything the others do without protest.

Why don't you just make clones of each others' characters, then? Even best friends can argue. Even best friends can fall out and stop being friends. Marriages fall by the wayside, lovers leave one another, family disowns family. Why on EARTH (or on any fictional game-world of your choice) would this be different In Character?

Here's a counter-question for you:

You ask what you should do. Whether to make a new character or return with the tiefling and hash things out.

What I want to know is: why should the rest of the group accept the tiefling back after he basically starts his relationship with them by trying to steal from them? They don't even know him yet. For all they know, In Character, he just turned himself into an enemy.

In fact, why should ANY group EVER have to simply say "Oh, that's a player character. That means I can't tell him I don't want him around anymore"?

Of course your character can tell another player's character that. A character is perfectly free to act contrary to another character's best interests.

But doing so means you have to be prepared to deal with the fallout afterwards.

If you and your group can't figure out a way to separate IC from OOC, and that you therefore worry that this will lead to hurt feelings IRL, you have a serious problem right there. One which you need to work on before even considering playing with them again. Because THAT is a one way road to ToxiCity.

If you, as a group, feel that the only way to continue playing is to make an arrangement in which no character is ever allowed to do anything to hurt, upset or offend another character, then make such a deal and honour it, and see if you can continue to have fun that way. If you can, then more power to you.

But unless such an arrangement was already in place, the druid is acting like a spoiled brat by taking an IC issue OOC.

Roleplaying is a game. Nothing else. Nothing we do In Character should ever be allowed to bleed over into a Real Life context. It does not sound like your group is aware of this.

** spoiler omitted **...

Being the person running the game Nearyn is referring to in his spoiler, I can only say that yes, it works well. There were a few issues early on, but the main issue isn't with the characters in question running around butchering people wholesale for the fun of it ... but the fact that they wouldn't see a moral problem in doing so.

They don't do it because it'd lead to more problems than it's worth, and because they don't want to see their comrades get into trouble, but to them, life is cheap, even worthless, by its own merit, but also that life can have value if it is lived for a reason and with purpose.

Nearyn once explained their take on life as this:

Imagine two similar situations, where either of the twins have an city guard disarmed, down on his knees and begging for his life.

The first guard pleads for his life, saying "don't kill me, I don't want to die", and the PC asks him "Why shouldn't I kill you?". The guard replies to this: "I'm not ready to die yet. I've got so much life left to live".

That guy's dead the very next second. There's no immediate reason for him to live on.

The second situation plays out identically, but the guard replies to the "why not?"-question by saying "Because I have a wife and three children, who have no way of sustaining themselves if I don't provide for them."

That guy would be allowed to run. Because the twins' beef with HIM does not extend to his family.

Of course, if their beef with the guard was bad enough, they'd still kill the second one too ... Chaotic and all that ... but that's the general gist of it.

Evil characters can certainly work in a party. It depends entirely on the exact outlook. A CE or NE murder-hobo would not work well in a group of LE paladins, that goes without saying ... although I'm sure Nearyn, cheeky sod that he is ;), would still argue that he could make that work, because he's like that.

From tonight's Legacy of Fire-session.

Grumpy, arrogant and snobby wizard looks around a room which has just seen two successful, consecutive fights against capable enemies, then to his comrades, then to the corpses of the dead on the floor, before stating in a complete deadpan:

Derailing a thread?

I think that's disrespectful in and of itself. The statement, that is ... not the act.

Conversations, written or spoken, rarely stick to one topic for any length of time. A person starts a thread to get an answer, and may then have to sift through loads of answers on unrelated topics because:

Person 1 asks question.
Person 2 replies strictly to the question asked.
Person 3 replies and uses a metaphor or a bit of personal experience to illustrate his point.
Person 2 takes umbrage with Person 3's example and replies to that.
Person 4 tries to answer the original question.
Person 3 replies to Person 2's upset blurp.
Person 5 now takes umbrage with person 2 taking umbrage with Person 3.
Person 4 is now confused and tries to get the thread back on topic.
Person 1 comes in with a follow-up question.

And ... so ... on.

Unless we want to mandate that no one can answer a question in any way except purely factual and without the use of illustrative language, examples or metaphors, we can't expect threads to stay on topic. They will eventually get derailed and that's part of natural conversation.

However, it's obviously best (not to mention required by Paizo's board rules) to stay reasonable and polite to one another, while always bearing in mind that we are dealing with a written medium here, and things get lost without voice inflection and facial expressions.

What I am angry at is the politically correct bullcrap that keeps us from having discussions as mature, rational, capable adults. We do not need to hide ourselves away and you and no other should feel afraid of saying something wrong. If anything, I hope this shows why trying to be overly sensitive is a veritable minefield in its own right. I'm tired of nonsense like trigger warnings. I'm tired of not being able to talk about the unique circumstances of transgendered people in D&D/Pathfinder/fantasy-mish-mash. I am not, however, tired of your metaphorical voice. It deserves to be heard.

I want to marry your brain, Ashiel.

Thank you for saying this.

Political correctness is all well and good in some instances to avoid the worst excesses of hatred and prejudice being thrown in people's faces, but an adult, serious conversation is going to be required if that underlying prejudice is going to be dealt with anyway.

What I, personally, happen to be tired of are the benevolent overprotectors, who are so desperate to shield and guard a minority, to which I myself happen to belong, from a conversation that might help de-mystify people like myself.

There are two ways of being forced to stay in the closet, folks, but NO ONE wants to talk about the second one.

The first one, of course, is the classical one where people's hatred, vitriol, bile and rank prejudice keeps someone from "coming out" in the first place, due to fear of being shunned, humiliated, physically hurt or even killed.

And then there's the form of closeting, where well-meaning friends and family who are aware of the closeted person's gender identity and/or sexual orientation (since the two things are unrelated), fight tooth and nail to keep that person in the closet, for fear of public retaliation against their loved one, when that person comes out at some point.

Trust me, there's little difference in how hurtful the two things are in the end, even if the second option is well meaning and, at least in some parts of the world, a matter of life or death.

I've never seen what Paizo is doing as tokenism. I've seen it as a statement of intent, to make inclusive games where as many people as possible would be able to find at least one important, fictional character to mirror themselves in.

Personally, as I've said before in this thread, I don't bring up NPC sexuality willy-nilly. If it is plot-critical or if the PC for some odd reason should ask (or, in the case of a few dawgs in my group, even make a pass at an NPC) then it becomes relevant.

Otherwise, meh ... why bother with it?

Sexuality is, with the exception of a few lechers and outright rakes, rarely something people display in public. Some people make very loud declarations of their heteronormativity in some situations (young males sharing a sixpack of beer or young females gossiping spring to mind, though such individuals are by no means the only ones to do something like that) but speaking from bitter, personal experience ... that kind of loud, public statement may very well be a load of bovine fecal matter, wrapped up in a fallacy and giftwrapped with lies.

And take it from someone who's walked many thousands of miles in those shoes ... being trans does not mean you want everyone to prod and poke you about it all the time. It's not a grand, political statement ... it's a matter of survival.

I applaud Paizo for not pandering to the ever-shrinking minority of players who want to shove all LGBT-people back into a closet and keep them there until they can find a convenient way to burn it with those people still inside it. I applaud Paizo for not only wanting to be inclusive but to be adamant and public about it.

People can shout "tokenism" as much as they want. I don't see it as such, and people always retain the option of running their games differently.

But to me, and to several friends who also fall into the LGBT-bracket and who also play, it is simply important to know that the company whom we pay for the books we use to play these games, is on our side.

I've never used one of the iconics in any game I've run and unless they come up as a part of an adventure path I'm running, I never will. I don't treat the iconics as actual NPCs to run into, but as examples of character types and classes. I don't really see that changing. Consequently, whether an iconic is LGBT or not is secondary. The point is, LGBT people exist and have existed throughout human history in our own world. They exist in my version of Golarion as well, as presented to my players. Good and bad. Villain and hero. Ordinary people and extraordinary. They're there, and they face the same everyday problems that everyone else faces, and in some parts of the world, they face a lot more problems.

I want this to be clear and I want it to be known, because I want LGBT players to feel accepted and welcome in the groups I run, just as I need to feel accepted and welcome in the groups I play in. I want a bisexual player to know that if she wants to make a character in my group I've got no problem with the character being bi as well because that'd be the most natural for the player to portray. I want a gay player to know that if he wants to make a gay character, he's welcome to do so and I am not going to make it problematic for him ... although I would tell both players that there is still homophobia in Golarion.

It's not a perfect world, after all.

I think, if I should boil it all down to the essentials ... I just don't understand why this is an issue to adult, sensible people. Why other people's sexuality or gender identity can ever be a concern for anyone else baffles me no end.

I confess ... despite saying earlier I had nothing to confess to ... that I am not a fan of half-elves and half-orcs.

I'm in fact not a fan of any half-anything races. Why don't we have half-dwarves as well? Why don't we have half-elf-and-half-dwarves (dwalves?) or half-orc-and-half-gnomes?

If you can mix humanity into anything, why can't you mix anything into anything else? Is it because we, as humans, are so awesome that we can just be the blank DNA slate that anything can be mixed with? If so, as I said, why no half-dwarves or half-halflings?

I have other problems with half-elves and half-orcs as well, but I'll leave those out because frankly, mentioning them would be invariably be misconstrued as inflammatory.

I confess to nothing! NOTHING, I SAY!

*takes blue pill and tries to stop foaming*

also probably should throw in the generic "orientation doesn't equal sex". You can have gay npcs in a campaign with no suggestion of sex, just by having the bartender have a husband instead of a wife, etc.

Extremely important note.

One should also, since the original question included the transgendered community, be aware that gender dysphoria does not equate sexual orientation in any way. There are transgendered people who are gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual and another other subgroup you could probably think out there. And believe it or not, one of the most transphobic groups out there come from the rest of the LGBT-community, who will go to fairly long lengths to point out to a lesbian transwoman that she's not a real woman, or a gay transman that he's not a real man. It's vicious and it's all the more hurtful when it comes from people who should be allies to these individuals.

That said, I count myself as a member of the LGBT-community as well, and consequently, they are a part of my games.

That being said, I do not believe in the use of the "token gay best friend"-trope, and I would be just as likely to portray a gay man as an utter git, as I would a straight man. The LGBT community has every bit as much propensity for being bad-guys as anyone else.

The main thing is that no one in my stories are bad guys because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. These things are non-issues unless they come up naturally in conversation. My current group of players have met a total of two homosexuals, one bisexual and one transgendered character in the campaigns I'm currently running and none of them know, because it's never come up.

If it does, I fully expect some raised eyebrows and "OH!! Ohhh, okay. Aha. We had no idea! No problem, bring the wife next time"-moments.

But honestly ...? I don't think it'll ever be necessary.

That being said, I try to portray social acceptance or lack thereof of the LGBT-community in a realistic way. Some people will shrug and go "meh, none of my business", some will start frothing at the mouth and scream blue murder (and then try to commit said murder themselves), and a fair few would probably go all fan-girl-like and start fawning all over the unfortunate individual subjected to it (straight people who declare themselves "fans" of homosexuals on account of sexuality always struck me as really weird ... I'm not a fan of straight people because they are straight, but because they've done something worthwhile. But that's just me being weird I guess).

The world is rarely an all-accepting, all-benevolent place. I long since stopped believing in the inherent goodness of humanity and I don't see why it would be any different in a fantasy-setting.

Individuals are generally nice, openminded and accepting.

People, however, are swine.

Scratch that. Pigs are nice too. I like pigs. Especially bacon.

People are meanspirited, evilminded and selfish.

I've taken part in or run my share of disastrous game sessions over the years. I hope I never have to experience that again, but one can never be sure.

Here's something to remember, though, Tinalles:

It's just a game.

And yes, that's annoying and frustrating to be told, but it really is that simple. It's just a game. You shouldn't be so frustrated that you end up punching the walls or crying. No game is ever worth such an amount of heartache. It's all fiction, and while it's fun and while people can form some kind of attachment to NPCs or their characters, it's important to always be able to step away from it.

I can sit there at the table and feel my throat constrict and my eyes well up, because of the things my characters experience. We often invest a little of ourselves in our characters, to make them better and of course it's uncomfortable when something bad happens.

But it's still just a game.

And we all make mistakes. Yeah, so ... maybe you shouldn't have told "Bob" the big reveal. But you were put on the spot in a stressful and difficult situation on very short notice. You handled it to the best of your ability in that situation.

It didn't work out the way you could have hoped, sure ... but in the end, its something you can learn from and, from the looks of it, you did.

I'd say that leaves you in the positive in the end.

Don't let a game impact you that strongly, though. It's unhealthy and it makes you doubt yourself needlessly and without reason. Anybody could have made a similar mistake. Or a much worse one. But no one got hurt, except some fictional characters. That makes it a learning experience, but nothing more.

So ... don't beat yourself up over something like this. Or the wall for that matter. And don't lose sleep or tears over it.

It's never, ever worth it.

Kalindlara wrote:

TheAlicornSage wrote:

thejeff wrote:

thegreenteagamer wrote:

Wait...wait...

...when did they add a Q?

What's the Q?

Queer. Questioning. I've heard other possibilities that I don't remember.

There are other letters too. There's QUILTBAG, but I don't know what all of those are for. Intersex? Asexual? U?

Why not just say "Sexually Nonstandard" and be done with it?

It's not always about sex, or even sexual preference.

Plus, "Nonstandard" contributes to a culture of othering... and we certainly don't need any more of that about the place.

Sex can mean gender just as often, so everyone of the letters that I actually know, would fall under that in one way or another.

Also, you are dividing groups as being outside the normal in anycase. If you didn't, you wouldn't be referencing a group at all, instead you just say "Some people..." and that be it. By giving a name or in any way describing a select group (such those that fall under lgbt... whatever), you are inherently including a division, even if only for the sake of making a discussion easier.

Therefore, how is my suggestion any different?

"Nonstandard" grates my ears and in this case my eyeballs, not so much because it's exclusionary (which I agree it is), but because it carries negative connotations along the lines of "you should be standard. Why are you not standard? Be standard! I demand that you're standard!"

It is probably not meant that way but it is the kind of word that can be used as a sledgehammer.

The same goes for that another recently added expression to the whole argument, namely "gender nonconforming".

"CONFORM! I AM TELLING YOU TO CONFORM! BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!"

That's all I hear when someone uses that expression. When you include a negative, such as "non" in a word, it automatically takes on a subtle, negative meaning, even if it was not intended to.

That said, fitting more than one letter in the whole string of LGBTQIA-whateverelsehasbeenaddedsinceIcheckedlast, I am seriously looking forward to the day when it's not necessary to use these labels any more and we can all just use "human" or "person" and genuinely not give $0.02 about what set of genitalia someone was born with contra what they dress and act like, what gender someone we know falls in love with and whether someone enjoys all genders equally.

Quite frankly, I look forward to the day when the "gay best friend"-trope on TV isn't necessary anymore, and we can have a genuine villain in a movie again, who just happens to be homosexual, without anyone feeling a need to protest, because that character's sexuality is a total non-issue.

We're not there yet. Not by a long shot.

LGBTQIA-people have the exact same propensity for being total creeps as everyone else. We're not somehow magically incapable of being horrible to other people ... even to each other, perhaps especially that in fact ... but in today's society, it's impossible to acknowledge this without being accused of some kind of bigotry, and for good reason.

The amount of genuine bigotry out there is still massive. People still get beaten up and even killed simply for being gay. People still get fired from jobs because of their gender identity. People are thrown out of their homes for it. People are shouted at in the street. Estranged from their bigoted families. Treated like third rate citizens, never mind second class.

We do not need more exclusionary words added to the dictionary, just like Kalindlara said.

What we need is to arrive at a place, where bigotry has been eliminated or at least marginalized to such an extent that it is considered utterly socially unacceptable, but when even major political parties almost everywhere in the world can make hay about, and gather huge amounts of votes on, their bigotry, there is still a very, very real problem.

Hence why words such as "nonstandard" is a problem because they will be picked up and used to beat people with by aforementioned bigots. It's happened over and over and over again already. Any snifter of an opportunity to treat LGBTQIA-people badly is seized upon.

Consequently, we can't have a homosexual villain in a TV-series. Because it'll be used to demean and harass. And hence why I hope we one day reach a point where such a villain is possible. Because that'd mean we'd reached a point in society where it could be done without being used by large swathes of the population as "proof" of the evils (however fictional the character might be) of the LGBTQIA-community.

After being on the receiving end of that kind of hatred for generations after establishing itself publicly, the LGBTQIA-community can't really be faulted for being wary and extremely conscious of anything that can be used against us. We're the ones who have had to face the hatred and the bigotry and tried to make our lives function anyway. Most of us manage. But that doesn't mean we should accept terminology that can be used against us, even if the terminology was not meant negatively initially.

As a firm believer in baconology, I must protest the notion that no meat isn't necessary. While I acknowledge that some people can sustain a sad, desperate existence in such a manner, I believe "life", as in the complete package, MUST include bacon.

There is no such thing as too much bacon.

There is no such thing as a dish that won't be made better by bacon.

Even pigs will eat bacon and enjoy it, and pigs are very intelligent animals. We can learn from pigs. Eat bacon!

Bacon is awesome even when dipped in chocolate or used as a breadbasket. Bacon is good whether crispy or soft.

Bacon, quite simply, is.

Followed closely by cheese. Because cheese. Mmmh. Cheeeeeese.

Now combine bacon and cheese and you have perfection. Except bacon is already perfect, so it's perfection squared.

Now I want bacon. And it's an hour until lunch break.

WAAAAH!

The Alkenstarian wrote:

Thymus Vulgaris wrote:

Hey there, you seem to be in a bit of distress. You should do something about that.

I honestly don't mind MLP. I don't love it, but I also don't mind it. I do mind Pinkie Pie. A lot. She's super annoying, and I don't see how anyone can stand her.

I'm not falling for that one again. You guys have made me click random links to pony-related things for the last time. THE LAST TIME, I SAY!

*Foams and fumes*

You're evil. Downright evil!

Hey, not all of us. I agree that it was rather unkind. Not all of us do stupid stuff like that.

Well, for the record, Thymus Vulgaris is one of my RL players. She's one of those evil creatures tormenting me on a regular basis with pony-related nonsense. She's not the worst of them, but she's certainly involved.

It's a pink pony conspiracy. It's a flagrant and deliberate attempt at driving me stark, raving mad (except I'm already there so it's doomed to fail). It's designed to make my life miserable with squeaky voices and horrible animation.

ARGHH ... It's a ponyspiracy, and I'm suffering under it!

I have an irrational hatred of MLP in any form. It admit it's irrational. Entirely so. I have no wish to change it. It makes my blood boil in a distinctly uncomfortable and bad way. It makes me froth around the mouth. It makes me go on lengthy tirades ... and with that, I mean I could rant about my utter loathing of the concept for hours, while going increasingly bugeyed and my voice goes hoa ...

I'm not going there. That's like serving the MLP-brigade my head on a silver platter.

I gnash my teeth when confronted by it, to the point of getting a headache. It gives me irritable bowel syndrome if I have to stomach it. It gives me nightmares overrun by legions of squeaky-voiced, badly animated ponies! I wake up drenched in cold sweat, fighting back the armies of magical friendship while I try to disentangle myself from the smothering duvet of fluffy ponydom.

It's traumatized me ... to the point of wanting to claw my eyeballs out and puncturing my eardrums so I never have to listen to those awful squeaky voices again ever!

And my players are teasing me mercilessly with it, the low-down rotten gits.

I hate them. Just a little bit.

Not the ponies. I hate them a lot.

Drop out of his 3.5 game. Do not put up with it. Tell him that you don't want to play in that game anymore and leave it at that. Don't tell him that it's because of his BS unless you actually want him to know that. You're not obligated to tell him. Simply tell him you're not having fun.

If you're lucky he'll be so pathetic about it, he'll drop out of your group as "revenge". Both problems solved.

If it doesn't, minimize his impact on the game by giving him less air-time, and then play a dragon realistically when he finally goes hunting.

As in: dragons are awesome, terrifying, murderous creatures that can outperform just about anyone. For one thing ... dragons fly. At quite high altitudes. They have breath weapons that they don't need to land to use. Don't let him fight the dragon on his terms. Play it in a way that would make sense for a super-intelligent creature that has access to abilities he can't dream of. Make it stay at a distance from him, while flying, casting spells when it's not using its breath weapon. Make it do fly-by attacks. Have it grapple him, pin him and then lift him up to a height of two miles before unceremoniously dropping him. If he can somehow fly himself, the dragon is likely to be by far the better flyer anyway.

Or, of course, you could simply let him know that you're running the game for the entire group, not for his ego's sake, and tell him that he goes off to hunt a dragon and then continue to run the game for everyone else. Seven or eight game sessions later, you can then inform him that he's found a hostile dragon. It is a Great Wyrm, and it's just eaten him. What does he want his new character to be named?

I have precisely -zero- tolerance towards egotistical players and I see absolutely no reason to dance to their tune. Egotistical characters can add a great dynamic to a group, but egotistical players are the bane of fun.

Between games, while talking about how to introduce a new character to the campaign:

Player 1: "I say it's not going to be that easy, considering where we are."

Player 2: "And I said ... WHAT ABOUT, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S!"

All other players: *Groan*

GM: [Sternly] "I'm writing that one down! You're losing XP for that one. That was absolutely terrible."

Player 2: "NOOOOOOO!But we're not even playing?!"

All other players: "We want differentiated XP! This isn't fair on us."

GM: [Even more sternly] "No, you all have to suffer for his bad puns. The Bad Punnage Spell-list is restricted, and only the GM is allowed to use it."

Player 3: [Hopeful] "What if I take the Amateur Punslinger-feat?"

GM: " ... "

All other players: [Pregnant and tense pause]

GM: "Okay, you just got your XP back."

All players in unison: *Sigh of relief*

Player 2: [a moment later, very sadly] "But that was my line ..."

GM: "You lost it. That's your punishment."

Player 2: "Awww ..."

Low-level group is fighting a corpulent goblin boss with high AC, and the group is finding it tough to hit the little blighter.

Player 1: "How can a fat little green git like him be so damn hard to hit!?"

Player 2: "He's acrofatic."

I must add three nameless goblins to this page. Three poor, sadistic Licktoad goblins who sadly passed away in spectacularly inept fashion.

Imagine ye this:

A room, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, occupied by three angry goblins, one of whom was armed with a rocket, and all three of them carrying dogslicers.

Enter, stage left, a gnome and his talking chicken. The gnome is the group's easily-embarrassed shaman, who didn't think quickly enough and opened a door in the Licktoad-village without sufficient backup nearby. Ergo, one gnome is now facing three goblins.

One of whom is armed with a rocket. This is important.

The goblin with the aforementioned boomboom lights it up and points it at the shocked gnome in the doorway, whose chicken scurries to get out of the way since it's got no great wish to be turned into chicken a' la goblin. However, the rocket has a 1 round firing delay. So, while he is waiting for the fuse to burn down, his mate, swinging his dogslicer, runs up to the doorway, wanting to be a great goblin hero, by cutting down the terrible enemy in front of him.

He promptly rolls a 1 on his attack roll.

The dogslicer imbeds itself in the crossbeam over the door, and the handle snaps off. The goblin in the doorway is now totally disarmed, confused and he's got a friend pointing a rocket with a rapidly burning fuse at his back.

The third goblin in the room, realizing what is about to happen, breaks down in hysterical giggles at the impending splatter.

Next turn, the gnome regains his faculties and understanding what's about to happen, ducks sideways to get cover behind one of the wickerwork-and-goblin-poo walls in the hallway beyond.

The rocket then goes off. The goblin holding onto it, doesn't know he's supposed to let go, so he gets scorched by the exhaust flame before finally losing his grip.

He then rolls a nat-20 on the attack roll.

He confirms the crit.

Moments later, the gnome in the hallway beyond, finds himself covered in wickerwork-and-goblin-poo wall, which he bravely holds up, doing his best Hulk-impersonation, to prevent his talking chicken from getting squashed, all the while all three goblins in the room have ceased to exist.

Not even enough of them remained that the group were able to gather up their ears for a reward back in Sandpoint.

To make matters even more hilarious, the group's catfolk rogue just came around the corner in time to see the explosion, and immediately believed that the gnome was the responsible party.

The gnome is now officially the coolest thing since catnip in that catfolk's world.

So yes, I want to add three nameless goblins, who provided enormous hilarity with their extremely gory deaths.

Hey everyone.

This came up in another thread, and it's made me think about my own attitude.

The issue on hand, as the headline says, is psionics.

Let me explain my own personal stance her:

I don't allow Psionics in my PF campaigns. Ever. I have flatly rejected character concepts from players as soon as the word "psionic" was even brought up. I've had one player try to explain the idea to me in a circumspect kind of way, hoping he could sell me on the idea before he brought up the word "psionic" and it did sound like a pretty solid concept ...

Until the word "psionic" was mentioned, at which time I told him to please do something else.

Now that I think about it, this actually surprises me. I don't normally hold with putting too many restrictions on players (a few can be in order, in terms of class, race or archetypes I suppose, depending on the campaign), but by and large, I want people to play something they have fun with.

However, the flavour of psionics simply feels like someone is running fingernails down a blackboard or grinding a fork against a plate nearby.

In the school of RP that I was raised in, psionics was a sci-fi concept, and magic belonged in fantasy-settings, and never should the twain meet. Then someone came up with the brilliant concept of making a grimdarkdarkdarkgrimdarkgrimgrimgrim sci-fi setting, calling it Warhammer 40k, and suddenly, the lines got all blurry. Suddenly you had classic psionics, but you also had chaos sorcery, and I never properly reconciled that in my own mind.

But here's the thing:

I'm not sure if my hard-line stance on this issue is the right one. I'm at least not sure if it's the right one for me. However, I just can't seem to bend my head around the idea of psionics in a fantasy setting without getting a headache and feeling like someone's trying to insert a large, round peg in a small, triangular hole.

So I'm going to throw the ball up in the air here, and ask what all of you have to add to the topic. I'm simply hoping for input that'll help jog my ongoing, mental gymnastics-routine on this issue. I'm not saying I'll change or I'll stay with how things are now. But I'm hoping to hear people's honest opinions, pro and con, when it comes to psionics.

Thank you.

The Alkenstarian wrote:

DrDeth wrote:

Simon Legrande wrote:

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

captain yesterday wrote:

I can't make it more then 5 minutes into the Matrix before I have to shut it off.

Can't really shun you for that. I've seen it precisely once, when it first came out on VHS. I wasn't impressed.

I loved all three, but I'm willing to admit that they were only slightly above average as sci-fi movies go. That being said, I'm a philosophy buff and the underlying ideas that the movies are based on elevated them for me.

Matrix I was a great special effects action film, as long as you didnt stop to think about the silly concept.

Get out of my brain, DrDeth. You're not paying rent, as far as I know!

Sorry, it's being this whole Evil Dark Lord thing, you just can't stop reading peoples minds, they're like peanuts... in many ways....

;-)

Mmmmmh ... peeeeanuts!

*Homer-Simpson-Donut-Drool*

Simon Legrande wrote:

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

captain yesterday wrote:

I can't make it more then 5 minutes into the Matrix before I have to shut it off.

Can't really shun you for that. I've seen it precisely once, when it first came out on VHS. I wasn't impressed.

I loved all three, but I'm willing to admit that they were only slightly above average as sci-fi movies go. That being said, I'm a philosophy buff and the underlying ideas that the movies are based on elevated them for me.

Matrix I was a great special effects action film, as long as you didnt stop to think about the silly concept.

Get out of my brain, DrDeth. You're not paying rent, as far as I know!

Christ Scott I will never understand why you find it so hard to believe people didn't like the ending of ME 3. It was depressingly one note with no real influence from everything you'd done to that point. We've seen better, even from bioware themselves.

I'll take a page out of your own book and go:

"Christ Ryuko I will never understand why you find it so hard to believe people do like the ending of ME 3."

The sad fact is, we all want something different out of the games we play. I have been utterly disappointed in some games that were highly acclaimed, as well. Because what I look for in games likely isn't the same as what many others look for.

But to winge on about how terrible a game it was and how this means the next game is going to be flawed before any of us have even seen a minute of actual game content yet, let alone have any real clue as to what the story is going to be like, is as clear a case of entitlement as I've ever seen with regards to computer games.

Major software companies do not make products for the consumers. They make products for their shareholders. I've said this before and I'll doubtlessly say it again but having worked in that world, I can tell you that the ONLY interest major software companies have in consumers ends precisely once money has changed hands and you've purchased their product. After that, any interest on their part is purely for show. They'll sell their next product as well.

If you didn't like their last one, they won't even blink if you don't buy it, because frankly, they're not beholden to you, nor do they owe it to you.

They owe their shareholders annual profits, and nothing more.

And they'll make those profits even if you didn't like their last game.

Darth Vader

The rebreather, the iconic sound of a lightsabre being turned on, and the sheer, menacing presence of utter, utter evil ... all add up to something so perfect, not even the prequels could ruin it, and that's saying something ...

Fair enough.

Still doesn't eliminate the needless goggles, shoulder length rubber gloves, predilection for vests, and ridiculous moustaches that would make a hipster die of envy.

*Eyeballs*

Goggles are the proper sign of a truly deranged mind. Goggles cannot be underestimated. They're so uncool they've come out the other side covered in frost, that's how cool they are! Plus they come in handy if you get caught in an unforeseen summer blizzard or if you walk along the sidewalk and accidentally fall over into a swimming pool.

Also, waistcoats and vests are fantastic pieces of clothing. Where else would you keep your pocket-watch but in your vest-pocket, designed specifically for that sort of thing?

However, the rubber gloves and the moustaches I agree with you on. They're just silly.

My favorite ... well, I've had so many great experiences with GM'ing that it is hard to choose, but there's one I always go back to as a go-to story.

It's more than twenty years ago, and it was back in the heady glory days of Vampire; The Masquerade, 2nd edition. Around where I lived, you would be hard pressed to find roleplayers who did not participate in at LEAST one V;tM-campaign, perhaps more and perhaps some of the other World of Darkness-games as well.

Somehow, I had managed to get myself entangled with a mixed group of players at the local roleplaying-club. Some were very experienced, others were comparative striplings in the hobby, and I had let myself be convinced that I should try to run that most dangerous and reckless of campaigns:

"Make yourself as a World of Darkness mortal".

People in the group were thrilled at the prospect of actually playing themselves in their own city, where they knew all the locations better than they ever could in some far-flung American setting (this was in a city in northern Denmark, mind you ... plenty of werewolves baying in the suburbs).

When everyone's character was ready, I told people I needed to get something to drink but I'd be right back. I left the room, waited fifteen seconds or so, then STORMED back in, flustered and waving my arms around, declaring I was really sorry but I couldn't play anyway, because something tragic and very personal had just happened (remember, this is WAY before anyone except the top 1 percent of the 1-percenters had cellphones, but no one questioned where I got that information).

My players sat there dumbstruck as I rushed out of the door. They had no clue whether this was for real or not but apparently, most of them thought that was the case and were starting to pack up their character sheet and dice when I reentered, arms crossed over my chest (a symbol used in LARP World of Darkness, to show "I'm not here, ignore me and continue playing"). Only a few of the players were familiar with this symbol, from having played LARPs of that nature but I took a chance that they'd catch on, and one of them fortunately did.

Instead of packing up, he instantly declared that he thought something must be horribly wrong, and that since my Real Life apartment was only a few hundred yards away up the road, they should all go check to see if I was okay.

To MY astonishment and surprise, he then got up and picked up his overcoat, and told everyone to come with him.

Thus was transformed what was supposed to be a normal, tabletop version of the game into a semi-live-action campaign where we literally walked the entire city thin over the course of the next year. We'd USUALLY end up in the same café every time, once the players had visited whatever places they wanted to go to that night, and we would continue playing while there.

Now ... no one had actually told the café-owners about us wanting to do that, and I was concerned we'd eventually get told to take a hike. This WAS the early 90's ... no one knew much about RPGs back then. But instead of being thrown out, we were welcomed every time and after we'd gone there maybe five weeks in a row, on schedule on a specific evening, a waitress came up to us with a tray full of drinks, telling us they were complimentary and that the ownership hoped we'd continue to come by with our "impressionistic theatre-troupe" for many more weeks because business picked up due to us.

When she said that, everyone at the table got deathly quiet and we started looking around and up, and we realized that we had maybe forty people listening in from other tables on the first floor and ground floor.

I don't think any of those players or myself for that matter, had ever been so obscenely self-conscious, but at the same time it was just unbelievably cool. There we were, a bunch of teenaged and early-twenties roleplayers, getting complimentary drinks because people thought we were actors and actresses.

I admit ... that one still puts a smile on my face.

I enjoy GM'ing more, but occasionally, a campaign comes up where I can make a character that I simply fall in love with. Something fresh and new and entertaining.

But overall, on a general basis, yes ... I prefer GM'ing to playing as well. I like the subtle difference in creative energies involved in GM'ing as opposed to playing. You don't have to think of your own character and nothing else, you have to think of all your NPCs and the entire world in which the game is played. I like the mental gymnastics of that.

Neither of these are one-liners per se, but they came up during tonight's session of Jade Regent.

Firstly, the party is in a location with very cramped interiors and many, many doors. Because of the limited space in which to move, they quickly end up splitting up the party, scattering in every direction and checking each their own area.

One of the characters opens another door and looks into a hallway which, lo and behold, contains yet more of these things, and the player bursts out in an annoyed exclamation, to which one of her fellow players immediately and without the slightest hesitation, in a loud and suitably epic voice, says:

"One does not simply walk into more doors!"

The rest of the party, myself as the GM included, groaned loudly enough to wake the dead at the bad punnage, to which the player, still in the same epic tone of voice but even louder, exclaims:

"I AM UNDERAPPRECIATED IN MY TIME!"

----------------------

Earlier that same evening, the players had just arrived in aforementioned cramped location, and one of their number, a gunslinger, had sought higher ground in order to get a better vantage point both for scouting and shooting (house rule in my campaigns says that high ground is high ground, and you get +1 to hit on ranged attacks if you have high ground as well). She looks around and suddenly, through a doorway, she spots an enemy lurking. Immediately, her real life boyfriend who also plays in the group (he's the underappreciated one, incidentally) shouts out:

"QUICK, YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO!"

The rest of us, listening in on Skype then hear a loud *slap*, and the female player declaring:

"WAAAH! I'm a victim of peer pressure!"

Her boyfriend then, in the saddest, kicked-puppy-voice ever, counters with:

"I'm just a victim ..."

-------------------------------

Disclaimer: No roleplayers were harmed during the course of this session but any resemblance to existing people is both intentional and deliberate.

I think it's a matter of perspective, really.

I don't have the slightest problem with players who want to build powerful characters. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing you have a well-designed character who can reliably take on something truly viciously nasty and still stand a reasonable chance of surviving and even succeeding. I think that's an absolutely fair and reasonable thing to want in one's character. After all, as players, we put a certain amount of work into them (some more than others, admittedly) and we would like to see that we've done well.

That's not min-maxing, in my book. Min-maxing is when you create a character as a gimmick, without the slightest thought to creating an interesting personality or even the vaguest, most distant attempt at some kind of believability (I'm not a fan of the word realism ... here, I'm throwing my super-realistic fireball at you! Now duck!)

Worst scenario I've ever faced with a min-maxer, which forever taught me to avoid that kind of player, was a mate of mine, back in the early days of the D20-system, who bought every book he could lay his hands on to create a character with one specific goal in mind.

He wanted to be the physically biggest and the physically strongest that he could possibly be, and he wanted it to be combined with as high a number of attacks as he could squeeze out of the system whatsoever.

The campaign was largely played with his character being active only in combat situations. He didn't have a personality and he brought literally nothing to the table except the fact that at level 21, he had, I believe +64 strength-modifier.

And, mind you, this was entirely legit. He could show us every feat, every rule, every comma, every rulebook, every ... bloody ... little ... thing ... to allow him to have a character with +64 strength-modifier at level 21. This WAS back in the days of "epic levels", but that makes no difference.

We were about to hit the last boss of the campaign, which turned out to be a kind of dragon encapsulating all five chromatic aspects in one, souped up with some idiotic stats and a ludicrous amount of magic. It had a challenge rating somewhere between a God and Moronic. Most of the players were a bit uneasy about it, because our GM at the time was the type who really didn't like to lose. And he most certainly saw roleplaying as a contest between him and the players. We were all prepared for a TPK and had even talked about how we'd handle it if it got to that. The player with the +64 strength-modifier character just told us to relax. He had it in hand.

When we finally reached the dragon, we promptly rolled initiative. Mr. +64 came first. He then proceeded to level 8 attacks at the dragon, using every feat and every magic item he had purchased, after drinking a couple of potions, and smashed the dragon to atoms in a single round of combat. He did somewhere over a thousand points of damage ... in one round of physical combat. Don't ask me how, this was many years ago, but it was above board, it used the rules to the utmost and even the GM who hated losing had to admit that it was all in order.

The rest of us simply looked at each other, packed up our dice and character sheets and left. We did not return to that group and Mr. +64's player was genuinely astonished at why we felt something was wrong. After all, he had only used the rules.

What he completely failed to grasp was that his gimicky character had contributed pretty much nothing in terms of RP up until that point, and when we got to the intense, horrible boss-fight, he basically turned the entire affair into a solo-display, leaving everyone else in the group utterly useless and pointless.

Again, we all expected to lose quite badly against that dragon, but we also expected to at least make a properly heroic, epic last stand and maybe in the end collapse the ruins we were fighting in, killing the dragon along with the whole group or something suitably heroic like that. We expected to not be made completely superfluous at the end of a long and epic journey.

Instead, the entire group except one character stood there and watched as the greatest monster that up until that time had been created, was struck down before the rest of us had the chance to even move.

And the player to this day does not understand why no one wanted to play with him after that. He really, genuinely believes that what he did was the coolest thing ever, and every attempt at explaining to him that the rest of us felt completely useless is met with blank denial. After all, all he did was follow the rules.

That is min-maxing at its worst.

It leaves players who are not walking rules encyclopedias looking like a bunch of lemons. It turns some players into walk-on extras in a movie in which they should be one of the main characters.

Playing powerful, well designed characters is fine. Building something solely for the purpose of milking the rules system is only fine to the person doing it, but to those who have to be the bit-players in that movie, it sucks.

*Enters Thermonuclear bunker*

I did not care for Firefly.

*Arms the entire US nuclear arsenal and points it at Soilent*

*Realizes it's not enough and hijacks the Russian and Chinese arsenals as well*

*still doesn't think it's enough and goes to find a spoon*

"Why a spoon, cousin? Why not a knife, or an axe?"

"Because it is DULL, you twit, it'll hurt more!"

The Alkenstarian wrote:

I still don't get why some people are so upset about the ending of ME3. I thought it was sheer, utter brilliance.

Sure, one of the endings is probably going to be considered canon. I don't care which one. This isn't a continuation of the original trilogy anyway, but the start of something new.

I'll miss Garrus and the Normandy most of all, I think. Best and most loyal follower in any game, ever, and the best looking ship in computer gaming history. Just my $0.02, of course.

Because it negated everything you DID FOR 3 ENTIRE GAMES and just presented you with 4 choices that were in NO WAY WHATSOEVER modified by what you did over ~130 hours of gameplay.

I know that's the general argument, Hama. I've seen it many times before. I just don't see why this is a problem.

I still don't get why some people are so upset about the ending of ME3. I thought it was sheer, utter brilliance.

Sure, one of the endings is probably going to be considered canon. I don't care which one. This isn't a continuation of the original trilogy anyway, but the start of something new.

I'll miss Garrus and the Normandy most of all, I think. Best and most loyal follower in any game, ever, and the best looking ship in computer gaming history. Just my $0.02, of course.

The Alkenstarian wrote:

I think we all get used to creating characters in a certain way after a while, and stick to it. But one thing I do see an awful lot of with your method, is dithering. A player comes up with what they think is an amazing character concept, based on mechanics and class features with bells and whistles on. Two days later, after declaring that THIS is the character that player is going to make, and everyone else in the group starts preparing for playing with such a character, the same player comes back with a NEW character with bells and whistles on, that he or she wants to play because wow, awesome. And two days after that, it's a NEW character ... and ... so ... on.

Oh yeah, I've totally seen that too. I believe I've avoided doing that myself, but I can think of folks in my group that didn't figure out what they were actually playing until the day the campaign was starting.

Which can be really annoying when you're the GM and trying to integrate them into the plot.

Thank you! Precisely! Being a GM and trying to prepare for something like that is ... argh ... plus argh ... with a side of argh and argh for desert! A lot of your plans go straight into the dumpster.

The end result is that I've stopped making plans for characters by people I know who does this, until the game is 3 to 5 sessions deep, and the character is integrated into the group.

I've already mentioned this story on another thread, but it's perfect for the topic, so I'm going to bring it up again.

Years ago, in a rolemaster campaign with a GM in love with his crit-tables, I played an elven dervish. A dervish in that game system is a martial artist, who gets to choose which crit-tables he or she rolls on when they inflict a critical hit with their socalled "deadly dances".

The GM didn't like me much, which today I find hard to blame him for, and more than once did he try to find a way of offing my character. I think, in retrospect, he probably wanted me to leave the group but couldn't bring himself to ask. Back then, I wasn't exactly the somewhat-lovable-on-a-good-day-and-in-the-right-kind-of-lighting-creep who sometimes hits the "enter" key while hotheaded and without proofreading my own stuff that I am today. I was just a creep.

So, during a sojourn through a some thick woods where we had been warned that hostile creatures lived, including a band of very angry centaurs (a downright nasty kind of beasty for low level rolemaster-characters for those who don't know), we came upon a clearing and was promptly attacked by ... you guessed it ... the band of very angry centaurs.

We were outnumbered very badly, and the centaurs so overpowered us that it beggars the imagination. Something like fifteen of them and three of us, and each of them could probably have beaten at least two of us rather handily.

And lo-and-behold, the chieftain of the tribe decides that my elf looks the most dangerous, and charges her.

I looked at what to do, used my "deadly dances" ability, and because I enjoyed picking different, but not necessarily the most effective, crit tables for every roll I made (which is entirely doable in Rolemaster, the system of ten thousand crit-tables), I ended up picking a fragmentation crit table. I figured that at least I hadn't done that one before and if I was lucky, I might get a fun hit in before going down.

I then rolled 98 on the dice. In Rolemaster, you use D100's and if you roll 96-00 you roll again and add the result to the first roll. IF you roll 01-05, you roll again and subtract the results. If you then roll 96-00 on the NEXT roll, no matter if you rolled high or low, you continue to roll and either add or subtract. In the end, you add your skill level.

I rolled again and rolled 96. And so on.

I believe I ended up with a crit in the mid 300's if I remember correctly. Most things die very, very messily at a crit of 100.

To which the exasperated GM declared that my elf saw the oncoming monstrosity, used a nearby rock to get good leverage before jumping into the air and doing a spinning kick in the process, before connecting with the sternum of the centaur's upper body. Since the crit I had rolled up -literally- said that whatever was affected "to pieces", the GM ruled that my elf's kick connected, sending kinetic energy into the upper body of the centaur, and the fragmentation effect meant that the human part came off the horse-bit at the bottom.

Which meant I had, as the only player I've ever actually heard of, managed to unhorse a centaur.

The rest of the tribe surrendered, made the elf their new chieftain and the campaign was discontinued shortly thereafter, leaving my dervish in charge of a vicious tribe of dancing centaurs.

Dawg Has His Day: And then recover to nail each in turn and have them fighting over him for the rest of the campaign.

[Hey ... it's fantasy, remember?]

Nice turnaround there ... except I'd call that a ruddy nightmare!

Oh, right ... I think I have found some that may actually get me shunned at last (well, more than I am already).

I do not believe in happy endings. Hollywood movies, by and large, grate my nerves for this reason. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the occasional happy ending, once in a blue moon and when the stars are in conjunction, but I prefer most books and movies I watch to avoid it.

I love dystopias. I do not believe in the goodness of humanity ... I think if there's one thing we've comprehensively proven over the course of written history, it is that we're really not very nice as a species considered and consequently, I do not see us moving towards a Gene Roddenberry'esque version of Space Communism ... although his utopian vision for the future is attractive in almost every way ... but more towards a "1984"/"V for Vendetta"-style society, where fear is the primary driving force behind our actions.

I like computer games that do not have happy endings for the same reason. I actually believe that the gripe against ME3's ending, where tens of thousands of people moaned about how it wasn't a happy ending and that's what they wanted, based on all their hundreds of "good" choices throughout the trilogy, fully legitimized the choice made by the game designers and writers. Grow up. War isn't pretty. People die horribly, alone and abandoned, even after doing everything right. So good on the game designers and the writers for daring to stick it to everyone's expectations of Captain Awesome standing on a pile of enemy corpses waving a flag over his or her head while the world cheers. I think I would have lost my lunch if that had happened.

I think the Game of Thrones television series stinks. I think the alterations from the books are so destructive that I can't bear to watch it any longer. It literally gives me a headache.

Despite my strong affection for grim, dark and grimdark, I thought Breaking Bad was just about the worst pile of television fecal matter I had ever had to endure. I wanted to take Walter White out back after about fifteen minutes of the show and give him the Ol'e Yeller-treatment to spare the world the indignity of his continued existence. If he had been a real person, his death would have elevated the world's average decency-level by a small but measurable amount.

I ... can't ... stand ... musicals! May the person who invented the idea rot forever in a dark, dank, stinking pit of misery and horror! But I love the opera. I think it's the difference in music styles. "Tosca" makes me weep with the beauty of the music, whereas "Phantom of the Opera" makes me want to pick up something heavy and hit people with it. Repeatedly.

I believe that the old saying warning us that the best ways of losing friends is to discuss religion or politics with them, or to lend them money, is a load of hooey. I strongly believe it's a manner of common courtesy and that only people with a distinct lack of manners can't talk politics or religion with their friends, since differences of opinions should not be an automatic disqualifier in terms of forming friendships. If I wanted to live in an echo-chamber where I only ever heard my own opinions repeated ad nauseam, I'd stagnate as a human being. I like being challenged on my beliefs. I may not change them in the end ... but I can at least listen and hey, if the argument is good enough, I might even change my stance. It's happened before and will doubtlessly happen again.

There ... now shun me, dammit! What does it take to get some decent shunning around here?

@ Toz: I find that class features can help immensely with inspiring a character.

(And I cannot in good faith ever recommend playing a character if you don't like the character's underlying mechanics.)

My character creation process usually starts with "what class do I actually want to play" and from there goes "now, what would be a neat character who uses this class?"

Or in other words, I start with wanting to play a class, and then I shape the class into a character that fits with the campaign and party.

If the class itself isn't fun for me, then that's going to prove detrimental to whatever character I'm trying to play that has that class.

Interesting take on it. I know several players using the same approach.

I can't get into it. I just can't see the attraction, personally. For me, character generation always starts with a mental image. A person. A situation that helped define them. Perhaps then a race, to fit the mental image. I add at least the rudimentary outlines of a personality and some history to that character and as that happens, I usually end up with two or three classes that seem logical, and I end up choosing from those.

The only times I start with a class, it's usually because a specific need has to be filled in a group, but it always seemed awkward to me and like I'm going about the character creation process the wrong way.

Mind you, wrong way for me, not necessarily for anyone else.

I think we all get used to creating characters in a certain way after a while, and stick to it. But one thing I do see an awful lot of with your method, is dithering. A player comes up with what they think is an amazing character concept, based on mechanics and class features with bells and whistles on. Two days later, after declaring that THIS is the character that player is going to make, and everyone else in the group starts preparing for playing with such a character, the same player comes back with a NEW character with bells and whistles on, that he or she wants to play because wow, awesome. And two days after that, it's a NEW character ... and ... so ... on.

It's a bit like the boy who cried wolf, in that respect, and after a while ... and this is something I've seen many, many times over the decades ... people stop listening to this player's ideas and answer mostly in monosyllabic expressions of "yes", "no" or "Erh?". The rest of the group starts planning future, possible synergies and perhaps even teamwork feats or how their characters might know one another, interact or get along, but the ditherer is excluded from this, not out of spite or malice but because the other players feel "Meh, two days from now, it's going to be another character anyway, so I'm not going to commit my character to anything."

In the end, the game is about to start and all too often, this type of player ends up having to go with their latest idea, thought up within a few days of the compaign starting, meaning they have very little time to prepare and think up personality and character depth, compared to players who may have spent several weeks slowly building up a full personality for their characters.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, because whatever works for each of us is what we have to go with. But it's an observation I've made, and it does tend to lead to much less fleshed out and complete characters, based less on "who" and more on "what".

The up-side is that many such players, of course, are far more familiar with the mechanics of their character and will therefore be better prepared for anything involving rules.

So ... both methods probably work, with different people.

Kicked Dawg - Be the only male in an otherwise all-female party, hit on all of them and get rejected by every one of them, and have at least one of them get physical about her rejection.

DungeonmasterCal wrote:

I still love the song "Total Eclipse of the Heart". Not exactly a gaming confession, but a confession nonetheless.

I don't see how this would get anyone shunned.

Curse you two! Now I shall have to shun you mightily. I now have Bonnie Tyler stuck on my brain which is only marginally LESS annoying than having Kim Carnes stuck on repeat in my head!

I'm a child of the 1980s and I DO NOT miss the music!! With the possible exception of Eurythmics, because Annie Lennox' voice ...

And then only sometimes. Maybe.

ARGH! GET OUT OF MY HEAD, BONNIE!!

I have no inherent problem with furry or scaly races.

I have a problem with people playing furry or scaly races as "cute" or as anime ripoffs.

I have a problem with the insane amount of new classes and archetypes being released all the time.

I do not believe in buying and owning every book released for the game. I want to keep it minimalistic as much as I possibly can, because frankly, rulesplaying takes a seat five or six rows back from roleplaying in my groups.

For the same reason, I do not agree with people min-maxing their characters rather than focus on creating interesting people to play. An interesting character can be very powerful, but if the entire character concept is based on a feat-string, I lose interest in them almost instantly and I feel no particular obligation to accomodate the player of such a character. The players create interesting characters for the benefit of themselves, their team-mates AND for the benefit of the GM who has to tell a story for these characters and if they can't be bothered to make an effort, then neither will I.

I have no problem whatsoever with Player-Versus-Player confrontations, combat and even deaths, although I strongly prefer that there is a valid IC reason for it, and I am an absolute believer in causality; if a player does something monumentally stupid, or something morally or legally reprehensible, and they don't take care to conceal this, it WILL come back at the most inopportune time imaginable, armed with a set of teeth to shame a great white shark and it WILL take a sizeable chunk out of their hineys.

I do remember liking one fictional kender.

Oh ... my gods.

Are you implying that some kender are not fictional? PLEASE inform the relevant government authorities where you found this pestilential race of creatures, so we can quarantine it IMMEDIATELY before some of them escape to make life miserable on humanity!

The Alkenstarian wrote:

A person who cannot feel fear has very little reason to understand some very basic moral concepts such as "thou shalt not force people to walk slowly into machine-gun fire from prepared, enfilading positions" (I'm looking at you, Field Marshall Haig and General Rawlinson), and at least in some cases (or should it be Somme cases, considering the example above) it would make such a person incapable of understanding the concept of fear in others, which could lead to downright psychopathic behaviour, which is a personality disorder where the subject is incapable of understanding the validity of other people's emotions.

Why should Haig have felt fear? After all, *HE* wasnt the one that was gonna be machinegunned down. He could sit there, fat and safe and senile in his cozy office miles from the front lines, and play tinsoldiers with other men's lives.

One of the bravest things I ever saw portrayed was Black Adder's "over the top" finale.

Amen!

I still get a lump in my throat from watching that. It is everything you don't expect from Blackadder, and that's why it hits so damn hard.

Sharing dice is another. Seriously, no one has dice?

*Hisssssss*

I've spent years breaking in my dice. I've gotten them used to rolling well by threatening them with three hours in the freezer if they don't do as I tell them. I've had to drive them with rod and lash to phear me greatly and muchly and therefore do everything in their little plastic, resin and metal hearts not to offend me, and now you're suggesting letting someone uninitiated touch my dice?

Let alone USE them?!?

Get thee behind me!!

Ixnay on touchy dicey, kay?!

Being 'immune to fear' as a game mechanic has nothing to do with whether you're afraid or not, and everything to do with retaining control of your actions despite the fear you feel.

Oh, you still feel fear when Cthulu turns up and wants to know why you're wearing his dressing gown, reading his paper and in bed with his wife. But you are not magically forced to run away.

When you run away, it's because you want to...!

Thank you! This is a very old beef of mine, and I'm glad to see someone else interpreting the rule in this way. Immunity to Fear does, in my opinion, not make you incapable of feeling fear at all. A person who cannot feel fear has very little reason to understand some very basic moral concepts such as "thou shalt not force people to walk slowly into machine-gun fire from prepared, enfilading positions" (I'm looking at you, Field Marshall Haig and General Rawlinson), and at least in some cases (or should it be Somme cases, considering the example above) it would make such a person incapable of understanding the concept of fear in others, which could lead to downright psychopathic behaviour, which is a personality disorder where the subject is incapable of understanding the validity of other people's emotions.

However, "Immunity to Fear" DOES allow the subject, through sheer willpower, strength of character or faith (or both), bloodyminded determination, magical means or outright divine intervention, to ignore the consequences of fear, including compulsion effects ... even from magical effects.

But to say that a paladin cannot experience one of the most primal and necessary emotions on the entire spectrum ... I don't buy that.

Plus, in my humble opinion, it make a paladin tougher by a factor of, I dunno ... lots and lots, carry the lots and add lots ... LOTS! To actually feel the sense of dread washing over you that makes an entire army turn tail and run when a flight of red dragons land in front of their lines and start to inhale, and yet having the courage to not run away ...

That's epic.

Ok ... here's a new one from tonight's session of the Legacy of Fire-campaign I'm running, once again involving Player Wrong. Before anyone thinks this is a case of rampant machismo, it's worth pointing out that both the player and the GM are female and that the male players went deathly silent when this one was ... ahem ... fired off ...

Character 1: In the Arab city of Cordova, there were two miles of public lighting in the streets when London was a village...
Character 2: Yes, you were great.
Character 1: ...nine centuries ago...
Character 2: Time to be great again, my Lord.

This just happened today. Note that we had an open window facing the street in real life.

We encountered a dire boar, and the first thing that happened was that it charged my barbarian. It dealt a lot of damage, so the DM and I agreed that it would be sort of cool if my character got her side impaled by its tusk. I then retaliated by entering rage and giving it a round of claw/claw/bite, with one of the claws being a crit, sending it into negative hit points. We then agreed that the barbarian had clawed it so hard that she got her entire hand buried in its neck. The dire boar of course kept fighting because of its Ferocity, but was soon finished off by the party's slayer.

Me, OOC: I want to roll something to see if I keep standing or am dragged down with it as it falls, since it's in me and I'm in it. What should I roll? ... Wait, that sounded wrong.

Other player, OOC: Double penetration!

Unknown voice from outside: Double penetration!

And more from the same player ... let's call her Player Wrong, and the person initiating this conversation Player Innocent.

The situation is, that the party's half-elven ranger has just seen his more or less psychotic sister abducted right in front of him, by a shadowy deamon, presumably dragging her off to some gloomy, doomy dungeon somewhere. Half-Elven ranger has gone to bed with a bottle of schnapps under his arm, helpfully served to him by a friendly and smiling gnoll bartender (reason enough to be concerned in and of itself).

Player Innocent: "Did he just take a bottle to bed?"

Player Wrong: "Yeah well, he did just lose his sister, I guess he needs something to suckle on ... wait, that sounds all wrong!"

Henceforth, Player Wrong shall be known as Player Wrong. Because wrong.

*facepalm*

The Alkenstarian wrote:

Take a page out of one of the worst nazi scumbags' playbook and do a Josef Terboven.

He was the Reichskommissar for Norway and a thoroughly despiccable character in every conceivable sense of the word (he once tried to obtain permission to arbitrarily execute 10.000 randomly selected Norwegians as payback for a particularly effective piece of railroad sabotage committed by the Norwegian resistance).

When the war was finally lost, Terboven grabbed the corpse of his chief of police, a bottle of alcohol and a 50 kilo box of dynamite, and went to his tiny airraid shelter in the garden of his headquarters, where he sat down on the box, with the corpse at his feet, drinking the entire bottle of alcohol and then pressing the detonator.

Due to the compression of force within the bunker, he was struck not only by the initial explosion (which would certainly have killed him outright) but by every rebound from every wall, from the ceiling and the floor as the force of the blast ricocheted back and forth many times.

He was thusly one of only a handful of people who can truthfully be said to have been blown to pieces more than once.

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy either.

He got off too easily. He should have lived to have been tried, forced to face and be condemned by his accusers and then either have been shot or imprisoned for life like Hess.

I couldn't agree more. He should have stood trial and been convicted like the living refuse he was. But my whole point wasn't that it was good that he took his own life, only that since he did so, it was an extremely efficient way of doing it, and frankly, I can't think of anything more macho (a term I have a hard time associating with anything positive to begin with) than sitting on a crate of dynamite, with your dead mate at your feet, while getting drunk and pushing the detonator.

But yes, he should have stood trial, and yes, he got off -way- too easily.

The one time I played a successful kender, it involved her getting her backside kicked once too many times for inappropriate inspections of other people's property.

She had a fairly high wisdom score and wasn't TOO shabby in the intelligence-department either, so she sat down and put two and two together.

She formed a partnership with two other kender, both of a nautical persuasion, in creating a trading company.

Due to the other two kender being of nautical persuasions (one was a fisherman and the other sailed on a trading ship ... he was their bilge-rat), the company became the Kender Fishing Consortium ... or the KFC for short.

My kender was placed in charge of trading with people. Basically, it was a matter of trading up and only two rules were enforced:

1) she only bartered. Item for item. No coin involved. Coin is boring.
2) she had to be allowed to see what stuff people kept in their bags or carts or purses for herself.

That way, I managed to create probably the only kender ever, who had people voluntarily opening their bags to let her look in. She was also remarkably un-annoying.

I think I just played kender all wrong.

Lord Snow wrote:

But anyway, and more importantly, I can see what you mean about the movies not being newb friendly. And obviously tastes differ. The bottom line is that to me science fiction is about much more than fancy explosions in zero g. Star Wars, for example, is a very well defined world. It's silly and nonsensical and simplistic, but it is a distinct setting. My fears from Abrams is a project leader for the upcoming movie is that if it feels anything at all like the new Star Trek films, it would suck out a lot of the magic in Star Wars. I *want* a goofy story with lines like "Use the Force, Luke!", one that is action packed but also filled to the brim with imaginative locations, a story with a galaxy-wide scope yet fraught with personal drama. Bad Jedi philosophy, a sense of adventure... If all that we get is some space fights like in the Star Trek movies, well, that's just not Star Wars.

One thing that astounds me is that I actually care about these movies coming up. I loved Episode one, Rolled my eyes at Ep 2 and hated Ep 3. I was so sick of anything and everything that had to do with the Clone Wars time period that my love of Star Wars pretty much shriveled up and died. I figured anything else that Lucas did with it... I just wouldn't care.

Finding out that Lucas was out... Disney (of Avengers, Muppets, and Pirates) was in... and it was set in new territory with the old cast?? I can't believe how geeked I am about this. It could still suck and then the apathy will come back, but now I feel like a kid again thinking about this.

Personally, I never dove in as deep into Star Wars Lore as a couple of my friends did (I didn't in Star Trek either... just a baseline fan for plenty of years) Watch the movies, play the rpg games, didn't get into the bazillion novels or tech specs or anything...

Star Wars to me always seemed the more superficial of the two franchise. They really did set the stages for fiery explosions in the vaccum of space and laser swordfights.

Star Trek...

To be perfectly honest, the main reasons why I thought I-III were so bad was

a) Little Orphan Ani
b) Jar Jar Binks
c) CGI overload rather than practical effects
d) Jar Jar Binks
e) Hayden Christensen, may his backside itch and his arms be too short to rea ... ooh, wait, he got his hand cut off in the second movie. Too soon?
f) Jar Jar Binks
g) The utter, utter, UTTER ineptitude shown by the collective Jedi Council
h) Jar Jar Binks
i) The stark, endless, horrific parade of plotholes and self-contradictions "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" and lo-and-be-smegging-hold what the Jedi do throughout the ENTIRE prequel trilogy (examples: love is bad. Questioning authority is bad. Blindly following authority is bad. Eating fast food is bad. Having self-confidence is bad ... yeah, that one is going to create amazing Jedi padawans, "ehm, did I do this right? Oh no, I mustn't think I'm doing it right, that's the path to the dark side", having fun until you're officially a jedi master is bad and even then you should only ever do it if you're killing a rebel general where no other Jedi can see you because, you know, bad. )
j) Jar Jar Binks
k) Midi-Chlorians
l) Jar Jar Binks
m-z) JAR JAR SMEGGING BINKS!!!

If you can take the pure, distilled awesomeness that is Brian Blessed, a man so awesome he farts thunderclouds and belches rainbows while climbing Mount Everest without climbing gear at the age of 148, and it is still not enough to save the race of Gungans from becoming a travesty of utterly Imperial proportions, because of Jar Jar Bloody Binks, you know you've got something really, really vile on your hands.

That said, I loved the two new Trek-movies specifically because they were reboots. Trying to recreate the feel of the old movies would have fallen hopelessly flat. Creating something new and giving it a fresh flavour was an amazing idea. And when the new Spock got the old Spock's heartfelt and sincere seal of approval, it's gotta be good enough for me.

On that note, I am pretty sure that JJ can do something good with the new Star Wars films. Because practical effects. Because Han. Because Chewie. Because Luke and Leia.

Because NO JAR JAR GORRAM BINKS!!

The Alkenstarian wrote:

Ashiel wrote:

KenderKin wrote:

DM Under The Bridge wrote:

Just as some people can play kender and some can/should not.

No, let's be real here. GMPCs are one thing, but nobody should play kender. They exist as a food source for more highly evolved species, albeit as junk food.

Nahh, too high on the cholestorol. Same as halflings or gnomes. Too much cuteness packed into a tiny package=insane cholestorol-count.

Eat elf, the other sweat meat.

Ew. That is quite possibly the grossest thing I've ever heard about elves. (but I believe it)

You know ... that's why I've been warned against typing anything for forum use just as I'm on my way out the door in the morning to catch my bus to work!

Sweat meat ...

Yeah, that's a thing now. I'm going to have to ... yuck ... eat that and live with it ...

*rolls over flat and surrenders with a bared throat*

KenderKin wrote:

DM Under The Bridge wrote:

TriOmegaZero wrote:

DrDeth wrote:

But certainly there can be Bad DMPCs and Good DMPCs.

I agree!

I am also in agreement.

Just as some people can play kender and some can/should not.

No, let's be real here. GMPCs are one thing, but nobody should play kender. They exist as a food source for more highly evolved species, albeit as junk food.

Nahh, too high on the cholestorol. Same as halflings or gnomes. Too much cuteness packed into a tiny package=insane cholestorol-count.

Eat elf, the other sweat meat.