Things My Character/I Can No Longer Do In RPGs

[Dlover]

But with the other one only being one foot shorter, they're essentially both giant lizard monsters, so "resident kaiju" doesn't sound quite right.

[Theonewhoisodd]

Hold up is nobody else slightly worried that a large 1 ton lizard can do sneak attacks?

[Dlover]

Curious, but not worried. I'm guessing he has chameleon powers or something.

[Godbot]

Hold up is nobody else slightly worried that a large 1 ton lizard can do sneak attacks?

I was assuming he's the "walks around in broad daylight with a greatsword and does sneak attack damage sometimes" kind of rogue. But the idea is definitely a lot more fun if he isn't.

[kurik]

Well, everyone basically has large weapons just about. I may have altered the meta slightly when I built my guy. But no, everything he can do is because of the classes he took and his insane skill checks. The sneak attacks are from a class ability, it's a homebrew based on something from some book, I don't remember all the details but I okay'd it at the time along with a majority of the group that get to vote on such things.

I think he has to make a spot check=enemy's AC to be able to deal his full damage but his perception is like 30 something so that's basically a given

[Amara]

Wow this grew while I was MIA. o.o

As for large things with sneak attack damage... I did once play a 'thug' style rogue. We had someone make the mistake of mocking him for how unstealthy he was and how he could never possibly pull one over on someone / be a rogue...
He clocked them over the head, stole everything in their pockets, and walked off.

As for things I'm forbidden to do.... Not much has happened recently! Haha
I'm no longer allowed to taunt the knight at threat of another 1/month 20d6 lightning damage, but having SURVIVED that, I don't think there's much stupid left readily available for my wizard. Well actually, from the most recent session...

- rolling two 20s in a row on cooking checks does not make me a world renowned chef.
- walking out in to the woods alone in the middle of the night is stupid and suicidal, even if I AM fae-blooded, and I am to refrain from this in the future.
- 50 platinum is not 'paltry' and should not be a standard 'sorry for capturing you and tying you up' apology fee.
- I should not HAVE a standard 'sorry for capturing you and tying you up' apology fee.
- the wizard should, in the future, REFRAIN from releasing captives the instant the knight is no longer looking.
- my alignment is bizarre at best, and I should refrain from speaking of it as it makes the GM's head hurt. He was convinced I was in fact closer to CG than N...then I tortured a vampire by breaking both his knees and dragging him up a spiral staircase. He just isn't sure anymore.

[Godbot]

- I should not HAVE a standard 'sorry for capturing you and tying you up' apology fee.

What, do they want you to stop apologizing? Thugs and brutes, the lot of them! Clearly they need an upstanding fellow like you to be their moral center.

- Trying to stop a meteor with a touch spell is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.
- Taking over the yakuza by killing the entire yakuza is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.
- Saving Seattle by destroying Seattle is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.

[Arch Lich Burns]

Wait what? Care to explain the metor?

[Dlover]

Okay, how exactly did that last one work? Destroying it doesn't sound like saving it.

[Amara]

What, do they want you to stop apologizing? Thugs and brutes, the lot of them! Clearly they need an upstanding fellow like you to be their moral center.

Ahahaha, it's just it KEEPS happening. People get tied up. The other party members get sent off with Elevar meant to guard the captives. ...Elevar sets the captives free. Over and over again. Granted, there's a good reason for setting them free each time, but it's practically a runing gag at this point. The latest was fantastic.

Now, for full visualization purposes... Our knight/cavalier, Jack is a short, stocky little anthro racoon. In full plate. He's 5'4, and MAYBE hits 130lb soaking wet (sans armor.) Elevar, our wizard/Loremaster, is a tall, somewhat heavyset sun elf. He's... also, for whatever reason, the most charismatic and talkative member of our party (disregarding Lani, because NPCs do not count). ...and we have both a knight and a swashbuckler. We've given up questioning this.

► Show Spoiler

We were in the remnants of an old military base that the forest was doing its best to reclaim, investigating...based entirely on, yes, the knight trusting in Elevar's "the forest seems uneasy." We soon found blood, blood biography was cast, (we're still rolling with 3.5's alt rule that lets you leave slots open to prepare spells later,) and we found out that the blood was spillt from another Procyon, Jack's race. ...moreover, she'd been tortured. That was really all either of the boys needed to hear, and they were soon charging off trying to find her. Enroute, they heard voices. Elevar was able to recognize the language being spoken as Undercommon, and the pair started to creep up to investigate. More accurately, the elf started to creep up. The clinking clanking knight sort of stood there a moment. "Undercommon? ...undercommon?" Elevar eventually drew close enough to see the two speakers in a side room. There was a drow and a human. They seemed to be having a pleasant conversation, didn't seem immediately hostile, an--"Undercommon? Wait. DROW!" CLINKCLANK.
Yup they noticed Elevar thanks to that.
"Who the hell are you?"
Elevar got just enough time to say, "I am Elevar Ongluth, a--" when the knight came charging in. The drow was...tackled over a table, and in to a wall. He was in short order stunned, out of breath, and unconscious. "--and this is my fuzzy cannonball." This left only the human to deal with, who promptly drew his weapon in a panic. Elevar didn't want to hurt him, so he did what was clearly the only sensible thing. He turned the man into a squirrel. He then proceeded to roll a handle animal check (nat 20,) and told the newly fuzzy little guy in sylvan that he had peanuts for him if he'd sit still and behave.
Elevar spent the rest of the encounter with a squirrel chilling on his shoulder.
The drow? We tied him up alongside two guards Jack had...also coldcocked earlier. Elevar, thankfully, had the forethought to actually cover their mouths so they couldn't speak (because letting them cast would be...bad,) and we headed off on our way with a squirrel on the wizard's shoulder.
The remainder of that encounter? Well, we broke about three lycanthropes out that were also being tortured and experimented on, rescued the procyon girl, accidentally lit the ENTIRE BUILDING ON ICE. (Yes, on ice.) Elevar got to torture a vampire, WITH a squirrel still on his shoulder, and after fled with our captives.
After talking to the drow? ...he and his (still squirrel) friend had recently found out about their employers' ongoing torture/experimentation...and they'd been about to do something about it. They would have helped us. Oops. After apologizing profusely (dear GOD was I an ass to this drow prior,) Elevar somehow won...the drow over, we had a place to stay for the night, and once we'd reached said safe place, we let the poor squirrel be a not squirrel anymore.

- Trying to stop a meteor with a touch spell is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.
- Taking over the yakuza by killing the entire yakuza is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.
- Saving Seattle by destroying Seattle is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.

I...

Wait what? Care to explain the metor?

Yes. o-o

Okay, how exactly did that last one work? Destroying it doesn't sound like saving it.

Yes, I need to hear these stories.

[Wolfie]

Apparently my character is not allowed to get into personal relationships with NPC's.

We just had an NPC declare his love for my character right before he shoved a dagger in her side to sacrifice her blood to the blood magus trying to save all our lives from the hoard of angry black soul things that just erupted from the half-sentient, magical wall.

And then we woke up with the warning that the future we just saw would happen in three days.

I don't wanna get ganked!

[Theonewhoisodd]

~~~Someone's gonna diiieeeee!~~~

[kurik]

If you're smart, it'll be that NPC

[Amara]

Not technically something they can never do again, though something I'll design encounters with the realization they MAY do in the future, definitely.

I'm sort of proud of my party.

Last night they fought a basilisk. They defeated said basilisk with...a door. The door had been jammed, and the rogue decided to use his knife to remove the screws to take the door off its hinges. The ranger then decided to brace the door so it'd fall back on to him, with him supporting it. They then manage to wake up said sleeping basilisk.
The ranger manages to succeed on knowledge rolls to know what's on the other side of the door (aided by them finding... 'statues' nearby,) as his favored enemy was magical beasts.
He then decides to charge the basilisk.
With the door.


...and rolls a 19, succeeding in pinning it against the wall. WITH THE DOOR. It was brilliant. Somehow the basilisk failed its rolls to get free the entire fight, and he managed to hold it in place. Bloody brilliant.

I'm never going to let a creature be in direct path of the door AGAIN without there being good reason for it, but I will definitely give them that one.

[Godbot]

- Trying to stop a meteor with a touch spell is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.

- Taking over the yakuza by killing the entire yakuza is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.

- Saving Seattle by destroying Seattle is probably not a great plan, even though it worked.

I...

Wait what? Care to explain the metor?

Yes. o-o

Okay, how exactly did that last one work? Destroying it doesn't sound like saving it.

Yes, I need to hear these stories.

Oof, all right. This is gonna take some explaining.

The Context

► Show Spoiler

So the campaign is in the Shadowrun setting, which takes place after magic suddenly returns to the world, resulting in society collapsing and the appearance of spellcasters, mutants, spirits, and so on. Earlier in the campaign, the party accidentally blew open a ley line running through Seattle, which caused magic to flood out of it and engulf the city in an impenetrable cloud. Also one of our party members sort of became the new Seattle ley line, and got crazy magic powers. (And yes, this is the same game that got interrupted by an in-character tabletop RPG, where the whole calzone thing happened.)

My character is Dr. Ben Angstrom, a physicist who was hired by Obama's America's government (you have to say the whole thing) to investigate this whole magic thing. Funding ran out, the government collapsed, and all of the other scientists quit to fight for their survival, except for Angstrom, who dismissed them all as hacks who were just in it for the money and set off on his own to be a nasty genius science hobo. (HeÔÇÖs also a troll. HeÔÇÖs the smartest troll in the world, which makes him about as smart as a smart person.) The party recruited him to help with the Seattle cloud. Turns out, it was plugging up a hole in the ley line, which if unplugged would cause all the earth's magic to drain out, rendering it uninhabitable to all forms of life. Oh, also there was an asteroid called Harbinger heading en route to Earth, which wasn't great, since Obama's America's space program was long gone.

So we were now in Tokyo for some reason, and the main antagonist, a former player character named Pete November who screwed us over and left the party, was trying to kidnap the guy who had become the new Seattle ley line and do crazy magic experiments on him, in an effort to turn him into a portal into Seattle, killing him in the process and giving Pete some unique business opportunities. It also would've made the Seattle cloud leak out, unplugging the ley line, but he didn't know that. We would've told him but he was already trying to kill us super hard, so we didn't have much choice but to kill him first. Unfortunately, he was holed up in the headquarters of a postapocalyptic megacorporation he'd allied himself with (Saeder-Krupp, run by a dragon named Lofwyr).

How We Took Over the Yakuza

► Show Spoiler

So we needed an army to fight his, and we figured the best place to get one was the yakuza, which one of our party members already had an in with. We just needed to get him to the top of the ladder. As is characteristic of the party, we tried a lot of things at once: one group went off to join the yakuza as moles, and one person from that group spent the whole time communing with zoo animals, who it turned out owned very small amounts of yakuza stock options; another few of us went with an NPC (a friendly old lady who owned a giant robot) to kill the yakuza boss, and the next guy who took charge, and the guy after that, and the guy after that, and so on; and one of us put up posters about a yakuza election, to plant seeds of doubt that we weren't putting our guy in charge by killing everybody above him, but rather the yakuza had elected him democratically.

Anyway we killed like six dozen guys in the span of an afternoon.

How We Stopped a Meteor

► Show Spoiler

So we had our army of terrified yakuza, who I'm not sure ever really caught on that the head position of the yakuza was "cursed" because we kept killing them in broad daylight, and we assaulted Saeder-Krupp's headquarters. We confronted Lofwyr, who decided to give us Pete November since he was kind of shitty anyway, and Pete turned tail and fled.

Into fucking space. With a space shuttle. He used his teleporter to escape from the building and he got in a spaceship that he had somehow and he went into fucking space.

We were all very excited about that.

So we bargained with Lofwyr, who gave us his own space shuttle, which he'd acquired from an old defunct space program, and we chased Pete November into space and it was stupid and awesome. It also meant we had a run-in with Harbinger, which was awfully close to Earth now - close enough that Pete was channeling magic from it and using it to fire lasers from the space station at us. That got me thinking, where was the magic coming from? Was there a spirit living inside of it? And if so, could our shaman talk to it?

Turns out yes and she could, but the spirits (plural - tons of them, actually) were too alien for them to manage any sort of communication. So we were at a loss for what to do, until I realized I had one spell on my list that I had never once used. It was called Analyze Magic, and it could tell us a lot about the asteroid, the spirits that inhabit it, and what we should do about it.

It was also a touch spell.

So the other mages and I piled out of the ship in our space suits and levitated our way on over to HarbingerÔÇÖs surface, beating back malevolent territorial space ghosts as we went. While all this was happening, another group left the space shuttle, boarded the space station Pete had escaped to, and had a big dumb sword fight with another former party member, who had been cyborged up and mind controlled into playing bodyguard for Pete.

Meanwhile, weÔÇÖd landed on Harbinger, I used my ChekhovÔÇÖs spell, and discovered that the meteor was one giant ley line. Not like paths of magic, like a solid ball of magic-infused rock, several football fields across. It was also teeming with spirits that we definitely did not want to allow onto Earth, so one of us started performing geomancy to try and cleanse the meteorÔÇÖs weird nasty space magic and make it into the good, wholesome Earth kind. (But not before I took a sample.) The shaman fought off the spirits while I channeled magic from the meteor to keep powering up the party more and more until finally, we managed to cleanse it. Which cut off power to the space station, making it start to fall out of orbit. With our party members still inside of it. Who had just discovered that some of their space suits had been torn during the big dumb swordfight, and that they only had enough intact suits for two people to return to the ship.

How We Saved Seattle, and How We Stopped a Meteor Pt II

► Show Spoiler

The space station and the asteroid were now both plummeting towards earth, and our space shuttle was chasing after the station, trying to get aboard the party members weÔÇÖd chosen to save. It also meant it couldnÔÇÖt also save us. But we were all mages, Harbinger was full of magic for us to harness, and IÔÇÖd powered us all up to shit. WeÔÇÖd be fine.

Our stealth mage cast an obscenely powerful levitate spell, to slow our descent. My support mage cast an obscenely powerful armor spell, to protect us from burning up in orbit. And our shaman used our proximity to Seattle to summon an obscenely powerful and titanically huge ghost of a former party member whoÔÇÖd died there, and she fired giant magic death lasers from her revolvers at the EarthÔÇÖs surface, to slow our descent.

The space station crashed into Detroit, with PeteÔÇÖs archnemesis (sheÔÇÖd been wounded in the fight) pressing his face into the window and yelling at him triumphantly.

The space shuttle somehow managed to land without incident, with the surviving party members safely aboard.

And we dropped the newly cleansed Harbinger on Seattle, smashing through the impenetrable cloud, plugging up the ley line, and saving ObamaÔÇÖs America.

(On a side note, we bailed out prior to impact, and rode the levitate spell through the atmosphere to wherever it ended up taking us, as long as we survived. It turned out to be in the rainforests of Brazil.)

So thatÔÇÖs where our season ended, and we took a couple months off to clear our heads and take finals and whatnot. New season starts tomorrow.

[gamecreator]

Wow, that was awesome!

[Dlover]

That... Is incredibly confusing, but awesome nonetheless.

[Godbot]

- The warden does not want to see me dance.

- The crazy reclusive elf sorcerer does not want to see me dance.

- Dancing is just going to make the unicorn angrier.

- I am not going to stop dancing.

[Dlover]

How could dancing make a unicorn angrier?! This is preposterous!

[Arch Lich Burns]

Well if they do not dance then they are no friends of mine.

[Godbot]

Well, we were trying to kill each other at the time.

[Arch Lich Burns]

Well at least you did the safety dance.

[Amara]

To my players...
- no more bombs
- no, you CANNOT get over 600 d6 of damage. Again. No more bombs!
- no, dumping several gallons of flaming oil on them is not going to do the same amount of damage as the bomb you set off.
- NO MORE BOMBS


And as for my last session as a player, though it was months ago,
- I am to refrain from opening containers without checking for traps.
- I am to refrain from opening containers at all.
- I am to let the raven open all containers forever more.
- the barbarian saying something didn't hurt is not a good gauge of whether or not it actually hurt.
- our knight screaming from the same experience is.

We wound up on the plane of metal. We encountered desks and other objects LITERALLY JUST TRAPPED WITH PINS TO STAB PEOPLE'S HANDS.
My poor wizard has been slathered in blood block by now, and has now transmuted himself to prevent bleeding from speeding up metalization. So we have...until his transformation ends and he stops technically being a (diamond) earth elemental to GTFO of the plane of metal.

[Amara]

I get forbidden from lot of things, whenever I get to play...

- yes, I need to contact a certain extraplanar being. I probably could (should) have found a better way of doing that than climbing on to the tavern roof, and setting off fireworks in the sky to spell out "HEY ASSHOLE" in glittering letters.
- It worked
- That it worked is irrelevant
- But to be fair the DM shouldn't have let me have ALL the firework spells if he didn't want me using them.

- "FOR SCIENCE!" Is not adequate reason to relentlessly pursue a construct project when I had insufficient knowledge of constructs to successfully complete the project.
- Yes, it IS my fault that a rampaging toaster golem happened
- It is also my fault that the inn nearly burned down
- I am henceforth forbidden from making toaster golems
- that the barbarian is now TERRIFIED OF TOAST is not funny when he is an innkeeper and thus surrounded by toast on a typical day at breakfast time.
- I am also forbidden from deliberately inflicting future phobias upon the barbarian.

- I am not allowed to cite 'operant conditioning' as a plan of action for how to handle the barbarian.
- I am not allowed to deliberately condition the barbarian.
- if I am forbidden from operant conditioning, it should be common sense that I am especially forbidden from classical conditioning.

- I am not allowed to make an army of simulacra to handle all my research for me.
- Even if I CAN afford it.
- Even if I'm making simulacra exclusively of myself.
- I am not allowed ANY simulacra of the barbarian.

- I am also explicitly forbidden from using operant conditioning on alternate reality versions of myself.

[spiderwrangler]

- "FOR SCIENCE!" Is not adequate reason to relentlessly pursue a construct project when I had insufficient knowledge of constructs to successfully complete the project.
- Yes, it IS my fault that a rampaging toaster golem happened
- It is also my fault that the inn nearly burned down
- I am henceforth forbidden from making toaster golems

This sort of behavior, however, is perfectly acceptable in my Girl Genius based Surviving Castle Heterodyne....