March 2012
13 posts
11 tags
"Fuck it. Fireball."
One of my groups of players and their long-time characters (3-4 years) found themselves investigating strangeness in a region that they determined was caused by a spell caster. Wizard weather, crop failures, animals changed in form, all sorts of oddness.
In true murder hobo form, they climbed up to said spell caster’s mountain fortress and broke in through the cellar, confronting sladdi...
12 tags
The Head of Venca
(This is a gaming classic)
Many years ago (back when we all were still playing D&D), I ran a game where I pitted two groups against each other. Several members of Group One came up with the idea of luring Group Two into a trap. You remember the Hand of Vecna and the Eye of Vecna that were artifacts in the old D&D world where if you cut off your hand (or your eye) and replaced it with...
8 tags
There's an arrow for that!
One of our friends was really excited about the adventure he had spent all week preparing. So we all eagerly sat down to play.
After a rather interesting intro we faced off against a group of hobgoblins in a cave and dispatched them easily enough. All of a sudden, on a cliff above us however, appeared a drow priestess in full battle garb.
She declares us her slaves and starts casting.
*roll...
9 tags
C4 Killer
I went through a phase where I would play Demolition on MW3 and instead of using semtex or frag grenades I would use C4. When I would reach a corner, wall without ceiling, a small room, or a flag where I knew an enemy would be hanging around, I would throw the C4 and hit the detonator ASAP. I’d rack up not only single kills, but double, triples, quads, and—in a few...
7 tags
Penny Arcade on Vin Diesel
(Source: Penny Arcade - For the Vin)
10 tags
On the mortality rate of players
I’ve been running a weekly Call of Cthulhu game wherein each session is a self-contained investigation. A few weeks ago, I had 2 new players in the session who had played DnD before, but never CoC. The immediate difference is that CoC decides to take the track that bullets are very deadly and people take a while to heal from injuries.
Typical gun damage? 1d10.
Typical Investigator...
13 tags
Wandering plot hook
A few years ago, I was running a D&D 3.5 steampunk pirate campaign (yes, I know, -so- 2007). It started at 1st level but one of the players had wanted to play a “Shepherd Book\Priest with a Past” that would really only work if he started as a Rogue, and then multiclassed to Cleric later on. So, rather than stick the party without a healer for that vulnerable first level, we...
7 tags
Flaming BEEEEEEES!
I think my only intriguing story was in World Tree (very strange but interesting furry RPG).
Improvisational magic is a crude, childish, style of magic with a hilariously complicated system of rolling. The game was big enough I had also been dubbed co-GM in charge of magic. Unfortunately, power leads to corruption, and I nudged the GM to use some suggested optional rules in the book that gave...
7 tags
A Flawless Plan
A couple of years ago, my group started a Spycraft game. The game was pitched as a hardboiled, hard sci-fi, Neuromancer-style cyberpunk game. We have the best equipment: Personal stealth wing suits, laser-guided micro-missile-firing guns (which were basically soundless, 8th generation night vision goggles with smart-linked HUDs), we have it all. To a man, all of our characters are...
10 tags
Stephen Colbert on D&D
GameSpy did a nice interview with Stephen Colbert back in 2004 on his experiences with gaming—Dungeons and Dragons, specifically. Here’s the full interview, but I particularly liked this first segment:
No board — just dice, just probabilities. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my schoolwork. We...
10 tags
Read the label...
Long ago, in the early 1980’s, our AD&D group was wandering through a dungeon and came upon some loot. Included was a vial with some indeterminate liquid in a very fancy container. We all passed it around, sniffed it, putting a drop on our finger, drop on the tongue, but we couldn’t reach a conclusion as to what was in it. Of course no one had any Identify spells - those were...
8 tags
8 tags
I want to be a fire mage!
I had rolled up a mage who specialized in fire. Not just magic, but also performing with it, throwing it, spitting it, smashing vials of it…I spent a lot of gold getting gnomes to engineer oil/spark delivery systems to augment my fairly low level character with great aspirations. I had starry eyes thinking about that day when I would have fireball.
But mostly, I threw oil on things and...
