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Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, Other TTRPGs

violett

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I was very much the same way when I was in middle-school.
But, I discovered that the happiness of embracing and playing D&D and Magic:The Gathering openly filled me with a profound satisfaction that transcended (or at least held-at-bay) the fucking shitty hell of school.


I had an extremely hard time at school, but playing D&D at lunch and after school made it tolerable.
We used to play D&D after school for several hours - because some kids always tried to beat us up after school, so we out-waited-them by playing D&D for hours.
I never told my mom, we all lied and said we were in a Math club. It worked because we were incredible at math, or our moms loved us.

My son likes fantasy fiction which is probably what draws him to playing D&D. He hasn't had any trouble getting along in middle and high school. I think his main issue with playing D&D is losing popularity status within a certain peer group. The only time hes ever been threatened physically is when he formed a bond with a girl (as a freind) and then told her things in violation of "the guy code" betraying one of his freinds. There was never an actual fight (my son is not a fighter). It only happened one time. He learned his lesson. My son tends to seek out freindships with girls. Almost all of his closest freinds have been girls, actually. He has maybe three guy freinds. The last time he had been away from home for a while and came back there was a porchful of crying girls waiting to hug him. He thinks hes a pimp, lol.
 

Totenkindly

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Kind of annoying -- this is twice now that I have made a character for an online game session with this ENTP guy, and he bails after running the first session or two. So all the players have been left in the lurch twice. There won't be a third time. I don't want to invest in another character-creation session and have the GM bail because he suddenly thinks of the Next Exciting Thing that he'd like to do instead.

[Then again, I should have known better.]

Which is a shame, as I had made a monk character that would have been fun. She's a vanaran -- I mentioned her here before in terms of alignment. But I gave her two levels of unarmed fighter / brawler to get her BAB up, then switched to monk Master of Many Styles/Quiggong... and also gave her an amulet with Guided on it so that she could use her Wisdom modifier for unarmed hit/dmg instead of STR, which is good since monks are a MAD class (multiple attribute dependent)... so the more you can cut down on the dependence, the higher you can raise the most important stats.

So here is a discussion of game mechanics and style use by an MoMS monk:

 

Dannik

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My son likes fantasy fiction which is probably what draws him to playing D&D. He hasn't had any trouble getting along in middle and high school. I think his main issue with playing D&D is losing popularity status within a certain peer group.

Does chasing popularity bring happiness?

For me, playing D&D in school was a way to express my real self - and I found that my real SELF was accepted in that world.
We were a specific culture that was profound and substantial :
we were Nerds, close-knit and strongly-bonded.
But at the time I didn't realize we were nerds-
I knew I was picked-on and bullied terribly,
but the bullshit-society of school was immediately forgotten when I was with my friends.
We Were a group of friends who were full of happiness and excitement to be together,
The fact that we played D&D was not important;
it was that we felt at home and free and comfortable together.
We never questioned that we were committed to each other - by not being afraid to be true to our fucking-ridiculous-dumb-selves we were mocked and bullied mercilessly,
but together we were an unshakeable Colossus, a force of nature.
Together we shaped the world, and we made memories that are Dearest to me.
Together we were Beautiful.



Also, the dumb bullshit Status and embarrassment of school means NOTHING as an adult.
My current D&D group (we have been together for 10+years!??) consists of:
- a Theoretical-Mathematician who runs a research Lab,
- an Assistant District Attorney (Lawyer),
- a Child-Therapist,
- a Computer Engineer,
- and myself, an Artist.
 

Totenkindly

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Not sure what the entire occupational makeup is for my main group, but the majority of folks are well-off working in IT / computer science or in telecommunications. (A year ago, we had a military / med-school student.) And, most interestingly, we also have a first-grade teacher who also does some special needs work, I think.
 

Passacaglia

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Kind of annoying -- this is twice now that I have made a character for an online game session with this ENTP guy, and he bails after running the first session or two. So all the players have been left in the lurch twice. There won't be a third time. I don't want to invest in another character-creation session and have the GM bail because he suddenly thinks of the Next Exciting Thing that he'd like to do instead.
Ugh, my sympathies. PBP has a way of magnifying peoples' natural flakiness.

I tried to do PBP a few times, both as DM and player, but I finally realized that I just couldn't handle it. Even when enough people stuck to a game to keep it going, the pace was just too slow. Like watching a movie in slow-mo. Just...ugh, so frustrating!
 

Totenkindly

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Ugh, my sympathies. PBP has a way of magnifying peoples' natural flakiness.

I tried to do PBP a few times, both as DM and player, but I finally realized that I just couldn't handle it. Even when enough people stuck to a game to keep it going, the pace was just too slow. Like watching a movie in slow-mo. Just...ugh, so frustrating!

Yeah, one issue is that he refused to establish a reliable process by which players could present their moves (as in "bite-sized pieces") so there wasn't a clear sense of how long turns were or how big an action could be. As you note, who wants to spend 12 hours putting in a turn that says, "I take a swing at so-and-so" and about 7 days later you might have finished what amounts to a real-time 10 second combat?

It would make more sense just to give broader instructions for things like combat (versus roleplaying): "Here is what my character will do in a given situation -- their standard attack, standard defense, and their stats. Contact me if something unique happens in the fight that you think I might want to change my input over." That way the GM can resolve a combat quickly.

Standard interactions / interactions with NPCs are not as bad in PbP because you again can either do the "chunk" approach or you can "simulate" a faster interaction in the assigned "scratch thread" [where players discuss ideas and organize actions], then upload a finished dialogue to the permanent thread when finished.

But yeah -- if we had had a J type versus an EP running it, we might have done better. Someone to set and conform to a standardized process.

But man, he flaked out after only two real turns or so, and before any combat ever occurred. Just flaked. He was more enamoured by the technological exploratory design of machinery he had created for the game setting.

EDIT:
yay, I'm reading discussions to see if there are ways to streamline.
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?750683-Issues-with-Play-by-Post
 

violett

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Does chasing popularity bring happiness?

For me, playing D&D in school was a way to express my real self - and I found that my real SELF was accepted in that world.
We were a specific culture that was profound and substantial :
we were Nerds, close-knit and strongly-bonded.
But at the time I didn't realize we were nerds-
I knew I was picked-on and bullied terribly,
but the bullshit-society of school was immediately forgotten when I was with my friends.
We Were a group of friends who were full of happiness and excitement to be together,
The fact that we played D&D was not important;
it was that we felt at home and free and comfortable together.
We never questioned that we were committed to each other - by not being afraid to be true to our fucking-ridiculous-dumb-selves we were mocked and bullied mercilessly,
but together we were an unshakeable Colossus, a force of nature.
Together we shaped the world, and we made memories that are Dearest to me.
Together we were Beautiful.



Also, the dumb bullshit Status and embarrassment of school means NOTHING as an adult.
My current D&D group (we have been together for 10+years!??) consists of:
- a Theoretical-Mathematician who runs a research Lab,
- an Assistant District Attorney (Lawyer),
- a Child-Therapist,
- a Computer Engineer,
- and myself, an Artist.

I understand this, but I doubt telling him to be true to himself is going to make any difference. He plays D&D online and thinks its funny and strange that most of the people he plays against are grown men who have to go when its time to put their kids to bed. I don't think its fair to attach stereotypical labels those who enjoy playing fantasy fiction games. Interestingly enough, he is very pro-gay equality and has no problem voicing his stance on that particular issue.
 

Totenkindly

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Well, Sumiko (I mentioned her before) got herself another follower last week. So the time has come. I'm going to crack the group up tomorrow night (or irritate them as much as I can, in character).

Sumiko is now choosing to call herself "Sumiko Psychus, Her Grand Percipience" as her title for her personal cult. She is bequeathing the title Psychus (her surname) to her worthy followers, who now shall be called Psychus <name> (for example, if the guy's name is Darian, he would be "Psychus Darian") rather like Darth Vader received the title "Darth" from his master.

Her cult will be called the Percipiens.

Of course, she's still in the adventuring party. But now she's going to have all these followers following them around or checking in to make reports while the party is within earshot, kneeling and calling her "Her Grand Percipience" and she'll be calling them Psychus this and that and sending them on tasks and introducing herself with her full title whenever they meet new rulers as if she's the lord of a large empire.

I feel like a Skeksis! (she's a tengu -- a humanoid raven)

iGdYy6w8nsOsl.jpg
 

Passacaglia

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[MENTION=22409]Sultan of Beans[/MENTION] reminded me of my enduring fondness for Planescape in the alignment test thread, and now I'm curious what others' favorite settings are. I'll start:

I bought my own favorite, Planescape, back in my early naive years of gaming, when I assumed that each D&D supplement was part of some grand and carefully crafted fictional multiverse.* I instantly fell in love with the artwork, the cant, the little stories that began some of the monster entries, the philosophical tone of the setting (factions!!!), and though I'm no longer naive enough to think that much of anything in TSR D&D is carefully planned, the 'big picture' aspect of PS still appeals to me. And although many of the multiverse's details offend my OCD sense of symmetry, I love the idea of a setting which ties all of the game's conceits and settings [sort of] into one grand tapestry.

*I owned everything from the Complete Ninja's handbook to the Skills & Powers supplement, not necessarily because I wanted to play a ninja with sub-ability scores or anything, but because I thought these books were vital parts of 'the big picture' of the D&D game multiverse. Rather than just fun stuff that game writers wrote because gamers would buy them.

Sadly I've never met a DM who ran Planescape, and to my own shame, I've never run more than a few sessions of Planescape. Partly because I have trouble writing really fun adventures; I think of D&D from a setting-logistics PoV, rather than from a story PoV, so I tend to discard a lot of fun ideas because 'it doesn't make sense' or 'that's not likely at all!' And while I love PS' philosophical theme, I also love hack 'n' slash gaming, so there's a part of me that feels like I could never do PS justice. Sadly, PS may be one of those things that I enjoy reading more than I'll ever enjoy doing. :(
 

Totenkindly

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I never got to play Planescape either, it came out during my "off years from gaming" I think... Although we do do things on alternate planes of existence.

Pretty much all of my campaigns have been homespun stuff, so I haven't really done much out of the actual mileau books. The closest i've come is doing the "Legacy of Fire" arc in Pathfinder, which has been okay.

...Oh, in other news, Sumiko is Neutral again. It didn't take long to backslide from Neutral Good.

 

Passacaglia

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That's an awesome use of memory modification! Kinda sick, but awesome. All hail Her Grand Percipience!

(I've played and DMed almost all homebrew stuff too, though at some point I want to play all the way through some module or AP. I once played through part of The Red Hand of Doom until that group split up, and the memories are fond...)
 

Totenkindly

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Another funny Sumiko story.

 

Passacaglia

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*whistles*

A great wyrm! Where did Sumiko get those soulstones again? They're part of the campaign plot, right?
 

Passacaglia

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In other news, someone named Jim Kang created a named level generator that's more amusing than I thought possible...

Named Level Generator

The Passacaglia class uses a d10 for hit dice (3 hp/level after 10th, in usual old school fashion), and caps out at 21st level and 5,145,000 XP. It goes from Lesser Passacaglium at 1st level to Associate Pass. to Intern Pass., and through several other titles. A passacaglia lucky and skilled enough to attain 18th level achieves the esteemed title of...

 

Totenkindly

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*whistles*

A great wyrm! Where did Sumiko get those soulstones again? They're part of the campaign plot, right?

That was a story in itself. The GM also basically "tosses in stuff" but sometimes we probably don't follow down all the possibilities.

We were on our way to a city that was mostly populated by demons or the demonic. (Don't ask. But the city had only two rules, and if you broke them, they were potentially punishable by death: Do not interfere with another being's pleasure, and no angels allowed within city limits. You can see how that could make city life unpleasant when you're surrounded by beings who could be more powerful than you, with chaotic evil impulses.)

Anyway, we ran into a lich on our way there, and he wanted us to find the being who stole his staff and return it to him. We agreed. the thief was a catfolk, and he also ran a store selling soulstones and other items. We went into the city and found his shop and were scoping it out, but he sensed we were up to no good and picked a fight with us, so there were a few ugly rounds but we killed him and locked the doors to ransack the place. We found a number of normal soulstones. Sumiko found his stash in the store. Then we found a secret door into the basement and found some more stuff. Then we found ANOTHER secret door that led into a small cramped sub-basement, and Sumiko went down alone at first and found a cache of soulstones, and that's where she acquire the stone with the monadic deva and the stone with the umbral dragon. The party didn't really know she had those for some time.

That's also where the strix failed his Will save and was forced to release the demon lord of magic, which made him his bitch and eventually resulted in tragedy for Angel Town weeks later. When the demon lord was released, he basically exploded up through the store, leaving a massive pile of rubble there and with the surrounding buildings.

And that's where Sumiko's first thrall popped out his head and led them to his underground lair, before the authorities could arrive.

...

We just leveled up to 11, so I'm a cryptic 8 / thrallherd 3 now. I'm stepping up my game; I'm going to take Master's Voice so I can speak to my underlings, and I'm going to start sending them out into the world now in pairs to preach the impending evil as well as the goodness of their Mistress, Her Grand Percipience, to try to drum up support. My cute little Mormon-y thralls, bwa ha ha ha.
 

Luke O

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I would have been one of those types of people who would have loved playing D&D but sadly everyone I knew growing up was very not interested in that sort of thing. Or just hated me :)
 

Totenkindly

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We did our Roll20 game friday night, after a lull.

We're 6th level. We have two pieces of this stone that we need the third for, in order to travel the planes. We tracked down the last piece, it was being held by a crazy fire wizard (he set his own tent on fire when we entered, just to show off) and an articulate ogre with a large warhammer.

They demanded the stones and said they'd let us live and even serve them -- we could come along on their interplanar travel, if we want. (At that point, the guy in our group holding the two pieces swallowed them, to make them harder to take.) Our overall perception, after prolonged discussion, was that they really didn't want to kill us if they didn't have to, but they might accidentally strand us on some other plane of existence if we went along because they were both bonafidely nutso.

So our wizard flew over them and we attacked. (They were more powerful than us.) The one guy hit their wizard with a water blast, he failed his save, and went down. Our wizard got off a group haste, and everyone immediately charged their wizard and basically curbstomped him before he could cast anything, and after 1.5 rounds he was down for the count. The ogre was heartbroken and stepped in swinging with his 10' reach. The rogue and me (I'm playing a TWF fighter, wakizashis) took a few nasty hits in the melee that ensued, but the ogre went down after two rounds. Yeeesh. Glad that went okay, though.

... whereupon our wizard stripped everything down, even to the degree of people's fillings, and stuffed them in his magic bag. *headshake*

I just thought the whole wizard-stomping thing was funny, though. Everyone knew he was a glass cannon and couldn't be allowed to get any kind of spell off.
 
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Totenkindly

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And so I just THIS e-mail conversation (shown only in part) with my GM, regarding Sumiko's future as potentially undead:



My main response was, "How can I *not* do this? In what other campaign will I have the opportunity to play a high-level psionic thrallherd tengu lich?" Help.

EDIT: Welp, here's what that will look like, in one more level:
 
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Totenkindly

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Last night's session didn't really have any fighting. However:

 
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