Every so often, my group has the obligatory attack of the 90s anti-hero, wanting to get their metaphorical Kratos (God of War, not Tales of X series) on and basically not be the 'good guys' in the traditional sense. While not always on the scope of Magnificent Bastard-ry, there's been lots of fodder for future villains, unscrupulous ally NPCs, and plot twists/hooks a-plenty. Unfortunately, every so often there's an idea that, no matter how compelling it might be, I don't allow it in game for any number of reasons, though I find myself wanting to write the scenarios up regardless for sake of the mental challenge.
Certainly, there's a regular theme of 'bad game wat do' on certain other sites, but usually it's due to certain levels of awkward typecasting of player behaviors, or as an excuse to poke shamelessly at other flaws held by player/GM, codified as 'That Guy' threads. In this case this thread is for ideas that in the right hands might be awesome/silly/entertaining, but that your group just would not be able to handle in any plausible way.
In my case, the most recent version was due to wanting to spork one player's love of the Dragonriders series, leading me to want to give them what they had been more or less pleading for - deeper 'mental bonds' between characters and their steeds/companions/whatever. This almost, and I repeat, ALMOST led to the spawning of a sort of side-campaign where the Gods are as much crazy as they are to be placated rather than worshiped. The conceit was that the deities would be incarnations of the Forum Warz archetypes, converted to Fantasy tropes, and the paladins would be of a sorority equal measures Blue Rose cliché meets the Dragonriders of porn, with all the glee that accompanies the most horrid of slash-y fanfic writers. Effectively, the Goddess of All Things Paladin-y was a overenthusiastic confused Pernfangirl.
To most of my players it would have been a horrible punishment - for the player in question it would have been a dream come true. Including the smuttier aspects. While it pained me to put the kibosh on the idea, I know it would have been a group-breaker. Especially if my SO had heard, as she'd have rolled a Cleric or Oracle of the 'Trolling' God, with the curse being manifested as an equivalent of the GURPS Odious Personal Habit - Practical Joker with a side order of Compulsive Liar.
...so. General Remorseful Veto Discussion?
Two of the most entertaining games I have participated in have been of the non-heroic/evil guys/anti-hero variety.
The first one I was the DM in a 2nd edition game that took place entirely in one large city and the surrounding area, and the players were all members or affiliates of a local thieves' guild. The Complete Thieves' Handbook and the 2nd edition ruleset was awesome for such a game, but I think it would be much more difficult to pull off today.
My personal favorite was a game in which I was a player; the game was set in the Forgotten Realms (3.5e) and the entire party consisted of evil characters who were all members of the Zhentarim organization. Struggling with the heroes of that part of the world while trying to do our part to help bring about a military and economic stranglehold on the region was a lot of fun. Trying to walk the tightrope of being effective, yet not so effective that we would draw unnecessary notice from those higher up in the organization was even more fun.
Interesting discussion. Lets see...
Probably one of the worst games of this type that I've played in was a home-brew world that my (now) ex-girlfriend's bosses boyfriend dreamt up. Knowing I was an avid gamer I got the invite to join, along with a few friends. What I didn't know was that this guy was the self proclaimed "master of horror" and decided to try his best to disturb, disgust, disquiet, and about every other "DIS" word you can think of. What followed was a romp thru every horror cliché you can think off. Evil cults, cannibalism, ancient evils, you name it. None of this would have bothered me if it was done well. Instead I got to skip around a world of b-movie plots, and over done descriptions of every bump and blood pool,,, In a word, DISappointing.
As far as odd, interesting ideas that I've had for games, and never been able to do? Probably the top of my list is running a Vampire: the Masquerade game with the players playing Sabbat. I like the concept of the sect, and the ideology behind it. Up until now I haven't felt I've had a mature enough group to run one. Well, at least one that didn't end up being a cluster@#$% of violence and bloodletting. Now that both I and my players are older I'm thinking about it again... assuming I can drag myself away from Pathfinder for long enough.
Interesting discussion. Lets see...
As far as odd, interesting ideas that I've had for games, and never been able to do? Probably the top of my list is running a Vampire: the Masquerade game with the players playing Sabbat. I like the concept of the sect, and the ideology behind it. Up until now I haven't felt I've had a mature enough group to run one. Well, at least one that didn't end up being a cluster@#$% of violence and bloodletting. Now that both I and my players are older I'm thinking about it again... assuming I can drag myself away from Pathfinder for long enough.
I have run such a game, for about 6 months. The great thing about OWOD was that even bad guys like the Sabbat have a wonderful selection of bad guys. And trying to do horrible things is not always easy. At first the players really ran with the bloodlust, and it kinda creeped them out. Which was pretty interesting. Then I made sure that their actions had consequences, after killing their 3rd cabbie none of them would stop within 4 blocks of their place.
The game background was pretty simple. The group were a newly formed coven in the bad part of St Louis, I picked a city none of us knew anything about. They then got into a fight a gang of Anarchs and the Followers of Set that were supplying them with drugs. It was the mid 90's, and I got a lot of inspiration from Tarantino movies.
It was fun, but the group was made up of old friends. That is pretty important with these types of games.
As far as odd, interesting ideas that I've had for games, and never been able to do? Probably the top of my list is running a Vampire: the Masquerade game with the players playing Sabbat. I like the concept of the sect, and the ideology behind it. Up until now I haven't felt I've had a mature enough group to run one. Well, at least one that didn't end up being a cluster@#$% of violence and bloodletting. Now that both I and my players are older I'm thinking about it again... assuming I can drag myself away from Pathfinder for long enough.
I say if you are diving into that pool look at Freak Legion (fomori) or Path of Screams (Barrabi Mages). The "Mature Audiences Only" books WW (under the Black Dog Press Imprint) put out were actually really quite good for exploring some serious themes.
Fun with thieves guild antics and Being in the Zhentarim™
Zhentarim are awesome, and a game where everyone's a member makes for a hell of a romp, in my opinion. While I play such games humorous, it tends to be a very dark humor, especially in the context of survival being almost as much of a reward as pay due to the sheer density of megalomania frequently present in the higher-ups.
DISastrous gaming and bloody good times!
While not big big on most of the WhiteWolf WoD stuff, I ran a few games of oWoD using GURPS, and quite frankly reveled in the playing of vamps losing buckets of humanity all at once, by treating it not at narm, or as scream-bait, but as deliciously horrifying dissonant activity for some, Tuesday for others. The cavalier attitude only served to accentuate what monsters they were, and while the players enjoyed it immensely, it also left all of them vaguely nauseated at their own behaviors...which required next to no prompting from me. I just let them indulge their pet id-beasts, and watched the results with feigned impartiality.
Truthfully, they were all sick puppies in the extreme, but it was purely in character, and demonstrably so. This is why I love my group, for all their weird foibles.
Teenagers from outer space, Vampire, and Pleasure Device +3s
TfOS is a good one-off, though I'm more partial to just going BESM or TOON for that scope of silly with a slice of innuendo.
As for me, I can run a Pleasure Device +3 game with no qualms over the internet OR face to face, and have; though there's always a pre-game meeting and disclaimer (read in full legal disclaimer announcer voice) about what content will be present, and a vote it taken for where on the sliding scale of serious to silly it will be. MOST of the time my group wants slaying, smut, and ADVENTURE! on a mostly-serious scale, which is to say closer to Record of Lodoss War than The Slayers. They even succeed at behaving themselves on that front, not going for gag genitalia unless it's done for genuine characterization purposes (i.e., someone played a genuinely overcompensating barbarian who had the constitution in theory, and the 'attributes' in general, but while he could last all day and night in combat, got a bit...overenthusiastic...in the boudoir for one, and a chaste cleric who was a Brother Whatawaste, also known as He Whom Centaurs Envy), but even with sexuality not being remotely taboo, there's still ways that they manage to squick themselves and each other (said priest player not taking the advances of one size-queen character well at ALL, in part due to the in-character traumas that drove him to his oaths in the first place, and the fact that a bit of 'no means yes' confusion from the size-queen lead to a moment of OOC drama).
Hmm, the 90's anti-hero game... Not playing the good guys for once... Seems to be every single game I wind up in. Seriously, I'm the oddball because I tend to make Good-aligned characters. It's a rarity I get to play a campaign where we're the "good guys" and we "save the day". Imagine if the X-Men were comprised entirely of various Wolverines, Deadpools, and even Spawns, and somehow Spider-Man got dropped in. I'm Spidey.
I once found myself running a game with 4 PCs:
Seeing the recipe for disaster witten on the wall, I quickly contrived a geographic split for the group and then made two campaigns out of it, which then alternated weekly sessions: "odd" numbered weeks were for the ranger and bard (they picked up a CG elven wizard as well); "even" numbered weeks were for the barbarian & evil wizard (and a black dragon cohort the barbarian acquired). Was angling towards the ranger's group being sent to bring the other group to justice, but never quite got that far along.
Hmm, the 90's anti-hero game... Not playing the good guys for once... Seems to be every single game I wind up in. Seriously, I'm the oddball because I tend to make Good-aligned characters. It's a rarity I get to play a campaign where we're the "good guys" and we "save the day". Imagine if the X-Men were comprised entirely of various Wolverines, Deadpools, and even Spawns, and somehow Spider-Man got dropped in. I'm Spidey.
With my group, I tend to end up either the Lawful Neutral of the group ("By the book, by the rules, for weal or woe - mine is to enforce them, not change them.") or Mr. Anarchy (Borderline LOLRandom), since I tend to not really play evil characters unless I'm DMing. I've found that I can do evil VERY well, but I don't necessarily favor it. Flipside, I like to do very very very not-nice things to characters for sake of story; it's a shame that the group has made it a deliberate point to make sure that the evil sorts I do create end up deader than dead for either their crimes, their plots, or a simple 'they are evil they must die' aspect. Then again, I am also prone to making my villains Affably Evil sorts...maybe even Evilly Affable.
The last Spelljammer game I ran the players (who all decided on pirate as the theme of the campaign as soon as I suggested the game) basically kidnapped an entire town of farmers/herdsmen from the backwater end of a planet to operate the asteroid based giant hamster ranch the players had started.
Reminds me of one of my favorite DragonStar games from a while back - a black dragon of the most hedonistic nature, with one personal planet comprised of nothing but the spawn of many of his trysts and experimentation...with the PCs hired to 'prune back' some of the enthusiastically reproducing results. That's right, the PCs were effectively pest control for a planet covered in the byproduct of dragonspawncest. The logic didn't dawn until after they had spent about a month on the planet. When it finally clicked the players were only mildly squicked...until one of the past encounters came back to mind where they'd been eating something they'd killed on the planet.
Fridge horror ensued. I grinned.
I once found myself running a game with 4 PCs:
A CG elven ranger;
A CN dwarven bard;
A CE half-orc barbarian; and
A NE human wizard. Seeing the recipe for disaster witten on the wall, I quickly contrived a geographic split for the group and then made two campaigns out of it, which then alternated weekly sessions: "odd" numbered weeks were for the ranger and bard (they picked up a CG elven wizard as well); "even" numbered weeks were for the barbarian & evil wizard (and a black dragon cohort the barbarian acquired). Was angling towards the ranger's group being sent to bring the other group to justice, but never quite got that far along.
While I like this idea, I've had the most success with this sort of thing when I set games in motion online, and play two separate PbP groups against each other, especially when they don't realize it. One I had wanted to do, but never got around to, was involving a pair of competing monster hunting parties, working for rival factions in a town. One wanted the monsters for purposes of attempting something reminiscent of the manga Claymore - the others wanted their own personal zoo-harem. Neither group was exactly what you'd call good, but their respective contact-people were benevolent enough to pass for some form of neutral. Both parties would have grounds to believe their respective opposing employers were the evil group.
Bollywood Drow campaign.
It would have a sideways caste-system ranging from Eilistraee to Lolth.
Every class would have backup dancers in some form as a class ability.
I'm still not sure if shelving it was a good move or a mistake.
...I have the weirdest bo-
*blink*
That is made of win and awesome and so help me I'm gonna STEAL me the heck outta some of that.
I've had an idea for a while to run a planeshifting campaign in which the PCs are all mercenaries in the Blood Wars. They can pick their side - demons or devils - and are free to keep their loyalties fluid (thought there could be consequences). Bad guys vs. bad guys seems to make the more squeamish players a little less hesitant to indulge their dark side against the foe.
True, for the most part, but this also makes them a bit more leery when they realize that they can give back as much as they get...
ESPECIALLY the seemingly-helpless succubi, and the distinctively not-helpless mariliths.
I've had an idea for a while to run a planeshifting campaign in which the PCs are all mercenaries in the Blood Wars. They can pick their side - demons or devils - and are free to keep their loyalties fluid (thought there could be consequences). Bad guys vs. bad guys seems to make the more squeamish players a little less hesitant to indulge their dark side against the foe.
Once upon a time, in the long, long ago, I was asked to play in a game run by a friend of mine. Seems he'd made a game from a hybrid of Gamma World and Star Frontiers with a heavy dose of his own house rules. He'd gone pretty Monty Haul and one of his players was mowing down everything he threw at the guy with his death ray. He asked me to temporarily come in and take the guy out.
I listened to the back-story and the guy's rampages and decided to make a robot bounty hunter. I was pretty much a cross between Boba Fett and the Terminator. During the next session I tracked the guy down, attached my ship to the PCs' with grapple shots, boarded them, and proceeded to shoot my way through the ship to the bridge. I got through the doors and the player in question blasted me with his death ray...to no avail. While it was lethal to organics, it was useless against an artificial life form. I leveled my blasters and prepared to tag my quarry.
Then the guy crumpled up his character sheet, sat down, and began bawling. A complete breakdown. You'd have thought he just saw his whole family gunned down before his eyes.
I was too freaked to keep playing. I handed my sheet to the GM and told him he could finish up from there. Never gamed with that particular group again.
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One of my favorite games was one in which the players played utterly evil heroes. The premise was that only those without moral restraints could do what was necessary to save the world from total destruction. The PCs managed to keep Xoriat (a.k.a. the Far Realm, Dark Tapestry, Cthulhu, etc.) from breaking into the material plane, but only because they lied, stole, and cheated their way to the top, where they could assassinate any of the popular, high-level politicians involved in the cthulhu-cult-type conspiracies. Every time her motives were questioned, the party's face, an assassin, would simply state "How can I rule the world if it's destroyed? I'll save it and then take it for myself!"
Another game I am running has the PCs as Sith apprentices in Old Republic era Star Wars. No left-handed heroism this time, I'm just giving the players the opportunity to go to town on the setting and vent.
However, one issue my group has run into a few times is agreeing on tone. The aforementioned games are going well, but another "evil PCs" game a few of my friends took part in took a bad turn when one of the other players missed the memo about the game being "comedic stereotype" evil, and crossed the moral event horizon...several times in a session. It didn't work out so well when the party was 4 Saturday morning cartoon villains and a full-out cthulhu cultist.
Most of the group of players I regularly played with had no concept of superheroes; several attempts at running super games for them were pretty much a disaster that didnt follow the supers theme at all. Of course one or two would be good heroes; then the others were just looking for something to kill and didnt give a crap about laws or justice or anything and super games have a different rythmn of scenarios and type encounters; but they missed it all.
One, didn't realize how badly I'd @FredianSlipped earlier in reference to Pern.
Two, another game I'd wanted to run, but never could get the right group together for it, was one that was inspired in part by miscellaneous fairy tales as well as a certain h-manga with kemono themes - the side story, of sorts, was about a villainess protagonist who was on a quest to become human to be with the man she'd fallen in love with, and was ruthlessly determined to achieve this end no matter how many lives had to be taken to achieve it. The main problem I ran into was that, out of my female gamer set, there were a greater number who would rather play victims than predators; I had hopes of it being a number of monstrous females all working together, loosely, on the same goal, with moderate to even chances of backstabbing between them.
Thirdly, there's another homebrew I'm playing with that supposedly cribs a bit from the Avatar: TLAB setting (which is odd, given I've never watched any of it save maybe one episode), but only in regards to elemental magic being the driving force in two of the major cultures in the setting, with Air and Water comprising one society, Fire and Earth the other - the latter group inspired by the Aztecs, the former more by Olmecs, Inca, and both heavily influenced by Ancient Astronauts. A floating magitek city over a volcano, heart sacrifices to the God at the Heart of the Volcano, and a very nonstandard way to gain the partial-elemental template (surviving three rounds with one's heart ripped out causing the aforementioned deity to replace the organ with a fist-sized sphere of magma, and changing the 'sacrifice' to a native ousider, eyes becoming pits of flame, and overall becoming equivalent of a fire genassi) were part of it, but at the core was the fact that the main protagonists were a racial group that could only be described as The Nicest Polynesian Necromancer Halflings you'll ever meet. Their goal was to bring more souls to the world; what they didn't realize was that if they did this, they'd cause an ice age by crashing a comet into the planet.
Still tempted to make use of those at some point.
Interesting discussion. Lets see...
As far as odd, interesting ideas that I've had for games, and never been able to do? Probably the top of my list is running a Vampire: the Masquerade game with the players playing Sabbat. I like the concept of the sect, and the ideology behind it. Up until now I haven't felt I've had a mature enough group to run one. Well, at least one that didn't end up being a cluster@#$% of violence and bloodletting. Now that both I and my players are older I'm thinking about it again... assuming I can drag myself away from Pathfinder for long enough.
I have run such a game, for about 6 months. The great thing about OWOD was that even bad guys like the Sabbat have a wonderful selection of bad guys. And trying to do horrible things is not always easy. At first the players really ran with the bloodlust, and it kinda creeped them out. Which was pretty interesting. Then I made sure that their actions had consequences, after killing their 3rd cabbie none of them would stop within 4 blocks of their place.
The game background was pretty simple. The group were a newly formed coven in the bad part of St Louis, I picked a city none of us knew anything about. They then got into a fight a gang of Anarchs and the Followers of Set that were supplying them with drugs. It was the mid 90's, and I got a lot of inspiration from Tarantino movies.
It was fun, but the group was made up of old friends. That is pretty important with these types of games.
Played in a Sabbot LARP for years! It was fantastic and honestly makes Cam look boring. Our game was part of the OWBN org so we could also travel to other games with our characters talk about some good Cam city raids! Plus our STs always had something cookin, BSDs, infernalists, hunters, Cam, sect defectors, Giovanni, Pentex, don't forget the local and federal law enforcement, and lots of internal player driven conflict and politics. My fav and still current character is a Tzimisce. FYI a sabbot group isn't a coven its a pack, sounds like a solid plotline.
I'm currently playing in a game where we certainly have a neutral to evil bent on alignment.
Most of the group is chaotic neutral, while my character is neutral evil.
The first session we were just sent out to recover a crashed air ship. Fought a bunch of demons got the air ship and headed back to our guild hall. Found out on the way an army was amassing to attack our home city. Now that would cut deeply into our profit margin.
So like any good group of not good guys, we decided the best way to solve this problem was by starting a war between the original country and one that we were not involved with.
We did this, by first staging and undead attack on a town. During which we looted everything of worth. Then by going to another town posing as a member of their own army and giving warning of the attack.
The next session we infiltrated a rather closed off country to steal another air ship, as they were working on getting an air ship navy of sorts off the ground. We took the only completed one that they had.
The next session we took a contract from the leaders of a Lawfull Evil human only country, and I mean xenophobic human only. Mind you we are all not human races, and most of us rather weird. Such as the half minotaur bunny hengeyoki, the feral changeling, the raven winged unseelie human, and the killeran. The contract is to capture the man who assassinated the last king trying to set off a rebellion.
We haven't captured him yet, but we are close. Our group is rather violent and greed driven, and what makes it funny is that I'm the only evil char and the one who is always trying to get the others to talk first kill second.
I have just added a new game to my Do No Play group list, due to the fact that it was a sort of random meet-and-greet set, and the problem was that it was a group that was heavily suffering from the GrimDerp™. Bearing in mind that I am not exactly a fan of Game Workshop or the WarHAMS©, the group was comprised of the most archetypical of the neckbeardly sorts (which frankly I don't mind) who segued more often into 40K references than most gamers veer into Monty Python quotes.
I could have lived with that.
There were two people who kept whinging about wanting to switch to Warhammer Fantasy, even though the request had been for a Pathfinder game by the GM. Evidently, the advert was not completely cleared with all of the group (I was the newcomer, the others knew each other but hadn't anticipated the game being outside their usual comfort zone), so they showed up with different expectations.
I could have lived with that too.
The problem, however, was that one person insisted on playing what amounted to a Druid of Slaanesh. Which is to say, If Lamashtu Had More Succubus-like Tendencies™.
Smutmonger that I may be, there is a way to do that right...and then there was that game.