godfang's page

Not at all. Probably closer to Log horizon, but instead of being trapped in the game, I show the contrast of how easy life is in the MMORPG and how depressing it is in the real world, thus escapism.

I did have a fakeout at the end of the first session where an npc claims he can't log out, but it turns out to just be lag.

You're probably right about the mental stats though, but should they use the character's skill rank or the avatar's?

I play on Roll20 and there's a ton of female players I found. My current campaign is an all girl party (Not intentional, it had two guys before it, but they flaked out)

So I'm doing a game about virtual reality mmorpg in a dystopic future. The theme of the game is the danger of escapism and I rp both the party's life inside the game as well as outside of it. My issue is that, I originally had them make two sheets, one an npc class character for their real life character and then one non npc class character to use as their in-game avatars. This posed a few problems

1. Some players want to play characters who are different in real life and in-game (ex. a charismatic type person who enjoys playing big dumb barbarians) and this wasn't a problem until we realize that when your in-game avatar performs diplomacy, it should still be the person talking, therefore using the stat of the player

2. When attempting knowledge checks, should you use the int modifier of the player or the avatar? Logic says the player, but then it means your dumb barbarian doesn't get penalized for dumping int stats.

How would you guys do it? Do you use two character sheets for the avatar and the player, or do you stick with one? (Therefore not allowing players to play in-game avatars that are too different from their real selves)

I had players in Roll20 play a few sessions of my campaign, rant about how much fun they're having, then dissapearing completely. It gets very confusing

Well, the group is split into two. Half thinks it shouldn't be allowed, the other thinks it's fine. I stated that I won't tolerate it, but I just wonder if i'm over-reacting and wanted outside opinions

So this happened earlier. I was dming a game online on R20 and one of the player is very quiet, I asked if something's wrong, the player said they're distracted because they were typing on this other session they were playing.

I got offended because I thought it was disrespectful to do so, but some of the other players said 'it's no big deal'.

So, am I crazy or should people not play two pathfinder sessions at the same time? It clearly slows down both games and doesn't give enough focus on either

godfang -

I can't quite put my finger on it, but the things your are talking about seem awfully familiar to me. As if I remember another poster here who would talk at great lengths about, "weak, frail, loli, strange, hyper-sexualized," characters.

I wish I could remember who that other poster was. The two of you would probably have a lot to talk about, I suppose.

Oh, it's not a forum person. It was someone over at roll20. I'm sure both are inspired by simmilar genres though

I don't actually think it's possible to have a Mary Sue in an RPG. You can have characters who are OP and Min Maxers... people who aren't so great at the RP... but the Players don't really have the power to create a Mary Sue. Players are still bound to the dice rolls.

You need DM Fiat to accomplish that. We had one DM NPC character who traveled with us for an adventurer who the entire plot revolved around and she had all the answers and solved the problems and killed the big bad despite being the 'helpless princess' trope. She was a new DM so I cut some slack there... but that wasn't a very fun game.

There have been a LOT of characters who show up where the Players talk about how great they are... then they fail their rolls. That's just kind of natural. Everyone wants to be awesome... but Mary Sues tend to go beyond that.

Good point, it's much easier for a DM NPC to be a mary sue.

I once had a DM where no matter what you do, you'd hit a wall, and his npc would come and bail you out.

Being shy, and yet at the same time charming, inteligent and at the same time ferocious.

Being a innocent and at the same time extremely sexual, frail and feminine but at the same time herculean in strength, being shy and awkaward but at the same time charming, it all seems pretty sue-ish to me. It's like you pretend like your character has flaws but at the same time completely negate them with contradictory traits.

It's kind of like how young adult protagonists are often described as 'not attractive' but everyone is attractd to them

But maybe I have a different understanding of what a mary sue is @_@

Well...That's not really his fault lol

So, worst mary sue/gary stu character/npcs you ever played with. Go.

Mine are

1. A rather anime looking paladin with angel wings, described as. Shy, charming, inteligent and often go into a berserk state.

2. A victorian era lady who is described as 'Frail, pretty, polite and innocent' but has very high str stat, runs around with full plate armor, and has an extremely high sex drive. Is immune to fear but scared of mundane things

3. A...12 year old loli girl who is timid and afraid of loud noises. Is a barbarian with extremely high dps and hp

i thought slashing grace no longer allows flurries though? If it does, that sounds super nasty

So here's the deal. I have a character I really like, and when i'm playing with my friends, the character is pretty good. But then i started playing with a different group who are very combat min-max oriented and I start feeling underpowered.

They told me that I should change my classes because it's not optimized, but the class was chosen because it fits the background to a T. I'm no good at min maxing, so I was hoping you guys can help me make this character optimized.

Here are the rules
-20 point buy
-must have 1 level in brawler at least
-is dex-cha (or dex-int) based
-uses a light blade
-is a tanky front liner
-paizo only feats
-human
-non spellcaster
-lvl 4

I'm open to any suggestions, i used to go daring champion 3 brawler 1, but I just feel so outclassed by the party's alchemist and magus.

godfang wrote:

Are they just less popular?

I run games in my homebrew setting which is a gothic horror victorian era-esque world and it baffles me how many players seem to find it confusing.Most of the character applications seem more suited for traditional fantasy

examples:

'my character is a barbarian working as a mercenary to whatever king hires him'

'I play a knight whose job is protecting a castle from foreign hordes'

'I play a bard who goes from one village to another to play his lute in taverns'

Or when I do non european medieval fantasy settings(middle eastern, japanese, chinese, indian, etc), people always brings in characters who are westerners travelling to the region, some refuse to play locals.

Are most fantasy fans just stuck on Tolkien-esque middle earth style type of settings?

Pick a trope and you'll find someone stuck to it. It's the nature of the thing. This also applies to someone who insists on playing the samurai in a world where they do not exist.

Part of it is due to the fact that people don't know the cultures and don't want to run them badly.

Oh, man. This is very true. I am currently doing a campaign based on the crusade era middle east and someone asked if he can play a half-western-half-japanese wandering samurai named 'James Lee'

I thought he was joking, but uh, turns out he was playing it serious.

I also had a player (who was chinese) and in every game no matter the setting, he insists on playing an Arian with a german name. Middle eastern, Feudal Japan, you name it

godfang wrote:

Are they just less popular?

I run games in my homebrew setting which is a gothic horror victorian era-esque world and it baffles me how many players seem to find it confusing.Most of the character applications seem more suited for traditional fantasy

examples:

'my character is a barbarian working as a mercenary to whatever king hires him'

One issue specific to Pathfinder is that the system, itself, does not work well with more "civilized" settings. Remember that Pathfinder is basically some light role-playing bolted onto a fairly detailed miniature-based wargame. If you strip combat out of the Core Rulebook, you lose about half of the pages. If you strip "investigation" out of the the Core Rulebook, you lose maybe a page.

This makes it rather difficult to run Victorian-style gothic horror, because the standard tropes are a) you're not allowed to solve problems by beating on someone or something until the problem goes away, and b) that woudn't work anyway. The same issue applies to most classic and non-classic Chinese fiction (see van Gulik's Judge Dee series for examples), and even a lot of the Brothers Grimm. ("And then Cinderella said 'Eff that, Stepmother, I'm going to the ball anyway! Roll for initiative, b*tch!'")

Basically, if you're not set in a really combat heavy genre, and specifically melee combat, Pathfinder isn't a good choice. So, that works for classic European fantasy, Arthurian romances (as long as you ignore the 'romance' bit; use Pendragon otherwise), Hong Kong action films, Dragonball Z-style anime (not even all anime in general), and some myths from all over the world (Hercules, the Monkey King, Cúchulainn).

I heavily disagree with this. I think pathfinder is a very flexible and diverse system meant for many different settings.

that's why you have classes like the investigator or archetypes focused on social situations. There really is no wrong way to play pathfinder as long as the players enjoy it.

My players in a couple of different groups really enjoyed an medieval Eastern European / Russian themed setting I used for some 3.5 campaigns.

Lots of remote villages deep in pine forests, wooden churches with lots of icons, numerous monasteries, barbarian, centaur and orc tribes coming out of the steppes to raid.

The scimitar replaced the longsword as the most commonly found martial weapon, armour had different look and feel but mechanically stayed the same, many people wore big fur coats and hats, sleighs were seen as a means of transport in winter.

No game mechanic changes or house rules were needed at all but it made a refreshingly different flavour from the norm.

What did help was googling some images of old buildings from that area to show as pictures when people visited a monastery / castle etc to help give the right frame of reference and always having a few randomly generated names ready to use in my notebook so that the random NPC they chat to is a Grigori or a Agnieska, not Bob or Sue.

This is some very good points. Just changing the name of people or city alone is enough to give a different cultural imagery. Music also helps

Ah yes, japanese fantasy is certainly the second most popular theme. Perhaps because Anime and Western Cartoons are what most people grow up with, so they draw most of their inspiration from there?

History is something most people get into when they're older, beyond their formative years

People find it easier to play something forvwhich they have some cultural anchor point or commonality.

I can tell you this isn't entirely true. If you go to asia (say southeast or south), and you look at the dnd games going on there, it will most likely be a medieval europe setting as well.

Hm, let's see.

I confess to facilitating the demise of a player character I was DMing for because the person was becoming disruptive and I didn't feel like kicking him off

I confess to getting really emotional for weeks after a bittersweet ending to one of my campaigns.

I confess to creating a gothic horror campaign that turned into a jane austen simulator....which turned into a harlequin romance/erotica simulator

There will always be more DMs than players because it takes a special mindset to be a DM. Not everyone can find the enjoyment in writing a story. Hell, not even all roleplayers enjoy being part of the story and only want to sit around to wait for combat to start (you know the type)

Being a DM requires time, effort, skill and the ability to enjoy watching people play out the story you wrote. That's not something everyone has

Are they just less popular?

I run games in my homebrew setting which is a gothic horror victorian era-esque world and it baffles me how many players seem to find it confusing.Most of the character applications seem more suited for traditional fantasy

examples:

'my character is a barbarian working as a mercenary to whatever king hires him'

'I play a knight whose job is protecting a castle from foreign hordes'

'I play a bard who goes from one village to another to play his lute in taverns'

Or when I do non european medieval fantasy settings(middle eastern, japanese, chinese, indian, etc), people always brings in characters who are westerners travelling to the region, some refuse to play locals.

Are most fantasy fans just stuck on Tolkien-esque middle earth style type of settings?

Hi all, I'm looking for players for an upcoming campaign I have. It will be done in roll20 on weekends. Here is the listing

https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/52724/of-new-ways-and-old

I think GM Feral was rolling through a scenario in text only mode, took about 5 hours.
Look him up in the Flaxseed Lodge.

^this was the message, basically i play on virtual tabletops, but instead of using voice I use text. I should probably consider pbp though

Hello, I hear you guys do text based games? I've been looking for one with no success and was referred here

@michael: well, with a virtual table, this part is pretty easy

Oh hey,someone in simmilar timezone! Do you have skype so we can chat more?

So i'm having some difficulties getting into PFS. There are some games online, but very few are willing to do text only (Which is what I prefer)

I'm willing to play and to DM, but I don't know where to start. Anyone can give me pointers? I tried roll20, but again, no one wants to play text only. My timezone is GMT+7 and I'm free most nights on weekdays and all day on weekends

This is something I do a lot with my gaming groups, everybody takes turns dming an episodic quest (and we also roleplay the downtime) in between sessions. It's really fun and it allows everyone to play without too much pressure (and the dms get to play as well).

I find that there are problems to this format however, and while not all dms are prone to it, there are a few..repeat offenders. Sometimes it's shameless and transparent (thus easily fixed) like one time, a dm made a quest in which his player character (which he plays when other people are dming) became an npc and was given a bunch of soldiers by another npc. The other dms talked it out and we agreed to retcon it (much to his displeasure)

Sometimes though, it's quite..subtle. People would try and manipulate other players in indirect ways, like, there was this love triangle between character A, B and C. Player C dmd a quest in which an NPC talked to A and tried to convince her to leave B for C. Unlike the first example, this one is somewhat legal because it doesn't really break any rules of the game, but is it ethical?

I think dms should always be fair and try to focus on the story, letting the players do what they want instead of trying to shape things to their design, but the line often blurs, especially when you're both a DM AND a Player.

Have you guys ever tried this format? Do you think it's possible to do it without ever having bias?

I'm starting to read the widow wore gold, and wow, the first chapter really caught my attention XD I love the prose, it is very fun to read due to its wit. Will definitely follow this one.

I'm starting to write down side stories of my pathfinder character. It's set in a victorian-era fantasy world and focuses mostly on his life. Check it out if you'd like and I'd love some feedback/comments :D

http://thegrapplingminstrel.tumblr.com/post/119337122376/the-mangled-prince

...Glory hole lock? So like..you have to find a party member willing to stick their reproductive organ through a keyhole?

Speaking of ninjas, I had a GM once that had a whole village ignore a pc when he tried to talk to them. The player asked 'why?' and he said 'your passive stealth is too high, and you have hide in plain sight'

Capitalism Ho!

I wonder though, how many DMs here have anime/japanese influence in their games, that seems to be a pretty reliable source of 'off the wall moments' (I have a DM who constantly makes the BBEG 8 year old girls carrying giant weapons)

I had a player went 'I sense motive on the bridge to see if it's safe or not', but that might be the language barrier at work (since english isn't our native tongue)

Hello, I would like to change my thread name into something more fitting for the forum, perhaps 'Times you aren't sure if the DM is still sane'

Here is the thread. If the name is fine, then no need to change it.

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2s9it?Times-you-arent-sure-if-the-GM-is-on-crac k-or

Thank you :D

Newbie question, how do I rename the thread? .__.

What's wrong with it? Any suggestions?

@Goth Guru: The dm insisted on 'no backsies' despite it clearly being an error?

I'm sure we've all had that moment where the DM does something so off the wall, you weren't sure if they were being serious or not. I have some crazy friends and at one point, I never even considered their GMing to be odd (I just kinda got used to it because I know what their preferences/hobbies are) but damn, looking back, I wasn't sure they weren't on crack. Here's a few top ones.

1. I have a friend (Let's call him..um..Dude 1) who was a big fan of anime and pop culture in general. Often times, he'd watch or read something, then feel the need to shoehorn it into the setting regardless of logic. We were once playing in a feudal japan fantasy setting, he read a manga called 'Love Hina' which is about a guy running a girl's dorm while trying to enroll into university...Lo and behold..Our party ran into an inn with literally the same characters from the manga, and we had to try and get them to enroll into Tokyo University..uh

2.Still Dude 1! After watching transformers: Dark side of the moon, he decided to bring optimus prime (not even a name change) into our steampunk setting, claiming it to be 'ancient technology'. Then, we uh, had to go to the moon on a rocket to fight the BBEG.

3. This is a different dude named dude 2. Dude 2 is big on Korean culture and at one point, in a high fantasy setting (which did involve dimensional hopping), he had us wander into the set of a korean gameshow called 'the running man' where they pit celebrities against each other in silly games. He then had about 10 npcs (actual korean actors) show up and acted out the gameshow by himself as everyone watched in confusion

4.This one is about a guy named dude 3. Dude 3 likes to include uh..sexual situations in his game, which wouldn't really be odd to me..If only it didn't involve human wastes

Also, I'm not exactly a GM, we take turns GMing episodic storylines (Which is a different source of problems altogether, but I'll keep that for a different thread)

Lol, no no, you didn't kill the thread. I kept checking back to see this thread but there were no responses in the past, so I stopped looking.

Perhaps the biggest factor in his problem is that he wasn't a pen and paper roleplayer to begin with, he was in these forum written non-system roleplay where everything that happens needs to be discussed and agreed upon by all players, which is why he considered my girlfriend's character hooking up with mine despite being enggaged (let alone the political implication in the victorian setting) to be 'rude'.

I did tell him once that in most pen and paper systems, things just..happen in the spur of the moment, either due to player decision or even dice rolling, but he didn't accept that, saying that it's just ethics to not ruin other people's romantic storyline.

Also, this openly gay friend is starting to seem bisexual. <-I don't see what you mean here though, straight men can roleplay as females too, females can roleplay as straight males, and so on.

I believe that, despite my initial iffiness in watching my girlfriend roleplay a relationship with a dude i hang out with constantly, I made the best of the situation and channeled it into an interesting storyline (of my character finally moving on by throwing himself into his project of replacing coal with a new arcane power source), but ever since his freakout..I don't know, I just feel like all parties involved got burnt.

I hated how my girlfriend asks that we keep our storyline a secret so we don't offend him, which, I think is silly. It's not like we did anything wrong that we have to hide around, I mean when he was roleplaying with my girlfriend, I dealt with it, why can't he deal with this one? I do understand that my girlfriend is tired of the drama and is just trying to prevent further arguments.

The campaign is ending this week, I'm just really glad to put it behind us.

I play many different type of characters across the alignment spectrum and classes, but no matter what I play, no matter what they began as, they end up learning unarmed fighting somewhere along the way (if they weren't an unarmed fighter from the start).

It probably reflects on my obsession with martial arts and MMA :P

Even my bard characters ended up punching people in the face

Hey all. I've been looking for a place to discuss my roleplaying problems (read:dramas)but have just recently stumbled upon the Paizo forum (odd, seeing as how often I play/dm pathfinder games). After reading how supportive and open minded people are in this forum, i thought I'd give it a shot.

My online rpg group loves romantic storylines. It is always one of the big part of any of our campaigns (we roleplay the downtimes extensively, even outside of sessions) and you often get 2-3 couplings between pcs/npcs each campaigns. This is due to many factors,I believe, such as an almost 50-50 spread of male/female/gay/bi/etc players in our group as well as using virtual tables to play (hence you're looking at the PC's pictures instead of the player), many of the players also came from play by post non-system roleplaying boards, so they very much enjoy character interaction more than combat/dungeoncrawling.

This is most often extremely fun for most of us as it provides a deeper roleplaying experience that can be pursued independent of the dm (we take turns dming episodic quests) but, sometimes, it causes an unhealthy ammount of drama, as the title of this thread may have implied already.

Sometimes, you have more than one PC romantically pursuing one other pc/npc and this gets ugly. It leads to people bickering or being passive aggresive (which is sometimes funny because all three players are often straight males)and I can recall one case of a player hitting the DM because the DM's NPC tried to give cpr to his character's romantic interest (Yes, I don't play with that guy anymore)

I've been involved in some of these and they never really bothered me because, well, it's just a roleplay, but recently something happened that bothered me greatly.

I started dating a friend of mine who I met through a 4th ed dnd game (I always thought she was a guy because she roleplayed a teenage boy when we first met, but when we met in a star trek convention, she turned out to be this really pretty girl). In our latest pathfinder campaign, we played a romantic triangle between her character, mine and a friend of mine's.

I played the part of the spurned party and I was perfectly ok with that at first, but then as time goes on and she and my friend started roleplaying their romantic relationship (Which includes sex and marriage), I find myself feeling bothered, especially when they discuss it in front of me, so I spoke up about it but made it perfectly clear I don't want them to change the way they roleplay. My girlfriend and friend convinced me that I'm being irrational (And, really, I was)and that I needed to get over it. It was just a gay dude and a girl roleplaying a romantic storyline (which I do a lot as well)

Eventually, after a long storyline filled with drama and romance, a plot twist happened and my girlfriend's character changed her mind. My friend then freaked out, saying that we're both very rude to 'ruin his romantic pairing' and thus ruining his enjoyment.

I found it to be a very hypocritical thing to do. I gave him the chance to roleplay the way he wanted, even when it bothered me, but when the situation was reversed, he insists that me and my girlfriend were being rude. Along the course of the storyline, he even tried to subtly affect the story to his advantage (either as dm or outside the game).

It slowly became a pattern with him, everytime something happens to his 'pairings', he gets really angry and defensive, saying he 'worked hard' for them, but really, shouldn't everyone be free to roleplay the way they like?

Is it impossible to roleplay romantic storylines without drama? In my opinion, conflict between characters who want the same thing is normal, this should be no different.

Sorry for the long post and I hope I can get some feedbacks :)