Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

HAHAHAHAH! THAT'S HILARIOUS!

Nevertheless. He's fired.

I was in a live action game, my first. It was a tavern game where someone's garden is set up as, well it's pretty obvious. I was very nervous so even though I was a tavern wench, I spent most of the time hiding in a corner when I wasn't needed. Sad, but true. The first incident happened when there was a barfight. The "corpse" ended up in the pool. The greatest thing that happened, however, was when one of the soldiers ended up with a spell cast on him that made him dance uncontollablly. He ended up stripping and falling into the pool.

Poor Draad . I feel for you.
I recently GMed a live action vampire game. In the end, the players come upon the staked body of the prince (me) and have to decide what to do with it (and the antagonist hovering over me). I had to stay still for 45 minutes while they talked and eventually fighted, and the worst part was that as everyone was too hot (we had brought movie set lights) they kept opening the balcony door. Thing is, i was on the floor directly opposite it and it was drafty as Hell. I did not want to break the mood by getting up and shutting it, so i ended up with a severe headache and a cold next morning. Good thing they liked the live, their compliments kept me from staking them for real.

I have got to get a ticket to Greece to see this stuff.


(Of course the seven hours of jet lag would suck a bit.)

The King has spoken!

Draad's GM shall be fired...out of a cannon.

*His Lordship bows to His Majesty*

If they are that serious, they should be charging admission!
- Bun

Okay, here is another one for folks' amusment...

Sometimes, the dice clearly favor the heros, other times the villains/monsters, and sometimes they just toy with you....

A six-person group of ~6th level characters has bedded down for the night, and the GM decides to throw a "minor" night encounter of five Giant Apes (think apes of unusual size, not King Kong) during the third watch to give the PC's an early alarm clock. In the broad light of day, the PC's would deal with such monsters in a couple of rounds without breaking a sweat, but this night things were a bit different. The apes sneak up on (critical success on stealth) the the mage who was the watchman at the time, get the drop on him, but roll absolute minimum damage. The mage screams his head off, but only the cleric wakes up (critical failure on perception checks for the sleepy heads). The cleric is rapidly engaged by the apes, but neither party can hit the other (abysmal rolls on both sides). One ape runs over to the still sleeping burly fighter in heavy plate mail armor and begins to jump up and down on her (like the old Sampsonite luggage commercials), but doesn't hurt her that much . This goes on for a round or two until the party rogue finally wakes up... sort of. He grabs his sword and attempts to roll out of bed, but instead manages to wrap his head up in his blanket (critical failure on tumbling), and then proceeds to fight with his blanket for almost 10 rounds (lots of abysmally bad rolls). Likewise, the mage continues to get beaten up (one finger at a time), the cleric continues to (clumsily) occupy the three (equally clumsy) apes, but finally the fighter does wake up from her deep sleep (before it becomes permanent), and the cacophony of combat finally rousts the last two of the heros.... but the strange clumsy-field continues unabated and the best that the party can do is to drive them off into the night after 20+ rounds of combat. Nobody pursues.

Said team avoided Apes like they were plague carriers after that night, and whenever the party ran into similar Apes the "clumsy/low-damage field" would kick in (but never as bad as the first time). And yes, the team bard-wanna-be was forever talking about the time the "Apes made Monkeys out of us"...

-Bun

OK, this aping around was a cartoon - worthy scene .

As for the movie set lights, yes, we were that serious . My cousin is a cinematographer so we had access to a lot of equipment, plus she made us some small videos as clues (3 hours of shooting for a 3,5 min vid... argh!). We used 5 locations and started sending clues a month ago. It was exhausting but at least they liked it.
We are planning another one for November, so maark, feel free to brave the jet lag .

For my return to this thread, allow me to offer you the most amazingly awful and non sensical gaming session of my life ...

A few years ago our group used to have one "RPG weekend" per year. During 48 hours in a more or less remote location we would play RPGs and alternate GMs thus we had something like 4-6 different games in one weekend.

One year a newcomer joined us for this weekend, it was a guy one of us met in a convention earlier this year, seemed nice enough and had invited for the weekend.

When the newcomer's turn to be GM came, he told us he would have us play a game of his creation : "The Chronomancers"...

In the Chronomancers' setting, a wizard tried to breach the boundaries between the "fantasy" (elves, dwarves etc) and the "real" world and when he did, everything mixed. To fix his error, he tried to go back in time .. and then everything for the past and the future mixed too ! Then the world started to "shift".

Every random period of time from a handful of second to a couple of days max, everything is sent in a random location, at a random date.

Everything ...

That means that at one time you are fighting a tyranosaurus in medieval spain along a cosmonaut and a dwarf and suddenly the world "shifts" and you find yourself in a modern New York taxi, sitting next to an elf and driving away from an unholy alliance of spartans, cyborgs and samurais. Oh.. major landmark shifted too ... Actually the only things that did not shift away from you was what you were wearing.

Yes, it is just pure nonsense. Worse, he didn't pass it off as a "comedic, action, brain-forbidden game" but tried to make a genuine working universe.

Let's try something ... See if you think like the GM by checking your answer to a given situation...

Situation:
You find yourself teleported directly in front of a gun shop, what do you do ?

A: Knowing that at any moment you can find yourself with cannibals and orcs in a futuristic Tokyo, you pillage the shop, cramming as many weapons and ammo in your backpack, praying it will be enough and that you are not just teleported in the middle of the ocean

B: You go behind the counter and man the shop, welcoming and serving customers and putting any earned money in the cashier's box until you are inevitably teleported somewhere, somewhen.

Yeah well according to him, B is what happens.

(about oceans, yes in theory the street should be covered in past and future, fantasy and real fish flapping around but strangely that didn't happen)


Well ... it was his turn to be the GM so while we were more than skeptical we agreed to give it a try.

One had to leave the weekend's festivities early so there was only four players :A pair of dwarven brothers, an elven sorceress and a lizardman from the future (in the future humans are lizards, GM's decree).

The adventure started with the characters sitting in a tavern (original...) in medieval France when Merlin (...) appears and ask them to recover the Philosopher Stone.

It turns out that Merlin and a few others (Circe, Morgan the Fay etc) are "Chronomancers" and are 1) responsible of the mess 2) capable of moving through time and space as they want.

Questions arise immediately mainly "Why don't you get it yourself since, unlike us, you are not doomed to be teleported somewhere else at any time?", "Why do you want a money maker instead of something that might help fixing this awful mess ?" and "Since you are not fixing it, why should we not kill you for causing it in the first place ?"

The GM has answers to none and yet because we are very nice, we accept the quest. Merlin gives the characters some magic medaillons that doesn't prevent them from teleporting but at least make them teleport to the same destination in time and space and tells them they have to find secret chambers in the egyptian Pyramids for clues about the Philosopher Stone's location. The Pyramids had, of course, been teleporting all over geography and history as well.

... and thus began the most railroading game ever !

The GM simply teleported us where he wanted us to be as in this game there is no point in starting to walk anywhere since you will "Shift" before getting there unless you have a plane or teleporter nearby. Along the random Shifs, we encountered a couple of his uber plot-armored Chronomancer NPCs (who were all generally fooling around).

The session went like that :

1) meet chronomancer, get told where and when the pyramid is
2) wait until to be teleported to the right location and time
3) solve the riddle, get piece of info
4) repeat

We had to do this three times (same riddle each time). By the end of the first, the elven sorceress and the lizardman (me) were the only ones trying to solve this awful scenario as fast as possible, the others had abandonned.

Finally we found the stone, Merlin poofed into exiistence and ended the scenario.

Liberation at last !

PS: I saw the GM in the train the following year and he told me he had plans of making a Chronomancer "multi-tables" at a next convention. Poor poor unsuspecting groups ...

Fun.

I could have a similar kind of fun by reading the same three chapters of a very boring book over and over and over again.

But I won't.

sounds like it haspotentul to be an interesting scenario, it was just bad GM'ing that made it go wrong.

I hope it did not dampen down the rest of the weekend for you .

In my experience, whenever the GM suddenly starts time-traveling/dimension-hopping, it means that he or she is burned out and it is time to start another campaign with a different GM so that the current one can take a break and recharge....

- Bun

Oh i agree. Still there are settings that allow you to hop around and turn out to be a good solution, if you are running out of challenges. First time i felt burn out, i cast my players into Ravenloft. It turned out well, and they spent five levels in the various demiplanes. Second time around, they got Planescape. Now every time they hear me whine about how tired i am, they desperately search for a Dimensional Anchor spell.

Another story that happened to us: we have a player who is a bit reserved about sex, and he had just introduced his Asimar sorcerer character into the party. There is also another player, playing a rogue who specializes in potions and also in making people's lives a bit too interesting. At some point he brew some stimulation potions (think of liquid viagra) and gave one to the female ranger. The Asimar asked what it was, and the unholy alliance of ranger and rogue told him it helps with the battles. They did very well with their bluff rolls as well.

As they are outside the dragon's lair getting ready for the fight, they ask him to down the potion. Now the player who enjoys doing things by the book tries to weasel his way out of it. He says he will keep it for later, examine the potion etc but we accuse him of metagaming (when in the history of rpg was a player offered a magical item before a battle and said "thanks, i will think about it"?). The chaotic neutral sorcerer assures him it is good for their kind, and the rest of the players cast accusing glances at him for metagaming.

At that point, the party's Lawful Good cleric gets up. He sees that there is something going on, and asks to examine the potion. He rolls 20s in both Alchemy and Sense Motive checks. He looks at the tricksters severely, and then looks at the poor Aasimar who is filled with hope.

"I checked the drink" he says.

The sorcerer nods.

"Ya, drink it, it is safe" the cleric says, and walks away.

Needless to say, the dragon was not the only one who got buggered that day.

I had one GM who turned the tables on us players by running an invitation-only, super-hero genre game where the character you were given was the exact opposite of what you normally ran. He made everyone really stretch their roleplaying skills ( while the GM relaxed and recovered his strength):
* (male) Player who loves options, avoids leadership Super-strong and tough female character, and the only one of the party with social and leadership skills. Romantically interested in the master villain.
* (homosexual male) Player who loves non-lethal attacks and variable power levels Male character "of the House of the Sad" with several wives in tow and a single attack that is the most powerful in the game (with no "stun" setting, of course)
* (female) Player who loves talking and negotiating with her opponents Male "Wolverine" type character that goes berserk in combat
* (male, caucasian) Player who normally favors female characters of even temperament African, Male character with telekinetic abilities. Male supremacist, and a recovering Black supremacist. (Note that the nominal group leader is female and caucasian)
* Etc. Etc.

Lots of fun (mostly), but everyone was (mentally) tired after each game trying to stay in character while (somehow) making progress on the main plot... and the (Evil! I tell you!) GM just kept snickering all the time...

- Bun