godfang's page

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.

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

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.

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

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

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)

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 :)