D&D, oh how I miss thee!

[walkertexasdruid]

Do any of you still play D&D? I wish I did. I have not played since last March. The married couple I was playing with decided they did not want to play with me anymore. I guess it was for the best, he turned out to be jerk. Somehow I was expected to read his mind and make sure I did not do anything that annoyed him. By the time he got around to telling me what was on his mind it was already too late, he was already ticked off at me, for some pretty stupid things that most normal people would be alright with. Oh well, that is life. Anyway, I guess this thread is a tribute to the good memories I have of playing this game.

A long time ago I had a friend who managed to die in some rather unusual fasions. One particular incedent, he was onboard an abandoned pirate ship. He found a skeleton in the captain's cabin and he decided to attack it, though it had not moved or gave any indication that it was an undead enemy. He rolled a critical miss, punched a hole in the side of the ship, sunk it, and drowned. He somehow died in similar situations on a regular basis, but he kept trying. :raise:

Does anyone else have memories of D&D or other role playing games that they think about from time to time? I would love to hear them. ;)

[Aldurin]

I finally gave up on DnD here due to apathy from all potential DMs and caved on going to the Giant in the Playground forums for that stuff.

Found a campaign and I'm gonna go nuts with a Dread Necromancer build I've been going with for a while (it's open world around one city with all PC's operating independently, so I'm gonna go chaotic evil and raise anarchy). Idea is zambies of all shapes and sizes, and then anyone who puts up any resistance gets reminded that I'm a caster, too. I guess what may happen is I may align with some of the other evil PCs or gain the attention of the good guys. Either way the road to shenanigans will be paved with blood (hopefully not my own).

And damn, you got one unlucky friend for stuff like that to happen. You should suggest that he try to do a run with a Wild Mage Wizard, just to see how crazy of a death he can have.

[Ryong]

I still play DnD 4e every sunday, but lately we stopped for a bit to play Shadowrun.

All my characters in DnD 4e have been petrified at least once, it's incredible. Some time ago, we went fight some sort of magical flying golem, supposed to tire us out. In a single turn, each player rolled a crit. It was fantastic.

I'll say that most of the shenanigans happen in a Dark Sun campaign we play, mostly because everyone's constantly near dead and I have a character that can swap places with a nearby ally every 5 minutes, which leads to ridiculous situations, like trading places with an ally at 2 health - we were 7th level so he had about 60 hitpoints maximum - who bluffed to tell me he was fine and then I proceeded to use a magical taunt to call enemies towards me - and then they fell in a cliff.

[RobinStarwing]

I've actually never played but I had wanted too. :)

[Shyria Dracnoir]

Same situation as Robin for me.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

I renounced D&D when i found pathfinder and dethroned the horrible king with a flying lariat. Aint no metaphor there. Right off the throne. Proclaimed myself king and first decree was renaming the new domain The Ringland. Became king of The Ringland.

That was some odd months back and havent had a chance to play again.

Good times. Good times.

[Nikose Tyris]

I've been desperately wanting to run games and the RP games club has me running Exalted and Mutants and Masterminds

[PyrosNine]

Pyros is playing the Pathfinder game, and it is my first real foray into pens and papers (and smartpads) gaming beyond leafing through a Exalted book Krylo sent me.

I am currently playing with a group that a classmate invited me to join, and now there's a long haired vain pyromaniac witch (a male witch at that) wandering around Magnimar with a ferret.

So far I have gotten the entire team 300 xp points by acts of awesome, including sparta-kicking one of my own team members into a filthy pit so I could shoot a goblin in the head with a crossbow for hitting me in the chest with a bag of feces. Rolled a crit, boom headshot.

Somehow I have managed to be the most effective man in the party without ever actually casting any real spells or hexes, and the other party members consist of a min-maxed Death Cleric gnome with an OP skeleton minion and too much money, a custom character Fae Corgi (a talking dog?) that is somehow related to a Pathfinder equivalent of the Shadow Broker from Mass Effect, and a dumb Ninja.

The second most effective person in the party is an unarmed Ranger with cannibalistic tendencies who always grapples with and then attempts to eat our opponents. He has a 80% instant kill percentage.

Last session, we leveled up, and I only now just got my fire spells.

[stefan]

FATE is a far more fun system to screw with that doesn't rely nearly as much on obfuscated minutiae and rolling for every-fucking-thing the way DnD and its bastard hellspawn do. After my first game of Dresden Files I dropped the d20 format more or less entirely, and I wholeheartedly encourage you all to do the same.

[Aerozord]

What little hope I had for a face-to-face RPG were dashed when I finally got a job. My schedule is so unstable its impossible it makes scheduling impossible. The only thing I know is I wont work past midnight, but by then most are asleep for their more stable work day

[walkertexasdruid]

I also played Marvel Universe for a while. I had a mutant named Headshot, and he was better with guns than Bullseye. He could make a killshot with a sniper riffle from a mile away, and could teleport a mile at a time. He also had fast healing and radar sense which enabled him to detect everything within a fifty foot radius. This was all at level one! I should have given him some melee ability because w/o projectiles he was in trouble. I should get that game for myself, it was fun. :D

[Professor Smarmiarty]

I'm putting together a Call of Cthulhu game for when I get a regular place to live. It going to be sweet- Cthulhu gonna eat everyone.

[walkertexasdruid]

I'm putting together a Call of Cthulhu game for when I get a regular place to live. It going to be sweet- Cthulhu gonna eat everyone.

It might be fun to go insane and die horribly.

[Locke cole]

I've got a nice group at college, runnin' a 4E campaign in an interesting homebrwed world.

Basic setup is that there's two neighboring countries, right? One's all goody-two-shoes Paladin land, wherein our characters were, as agents of the law, supposed to avoid lethal force whenever possible and let the law run its course and all that. The other's a sort of bloody despotville, run by a freaking lich king. Twist is that the two places are actually the same country, and the dichotomy is artificially created by the guys in power. Eventually, our guys in the "good-side" campaign became spies who were given authority to travel to the other country to keep the balance when needed. This is all paraphrasing on my part, of course. It's a bit more complicated than that. Our first campaign involved the Hand and Eye of Vecna. Our second campaign took place with different characters, within the other side of the country. You will not believe how many uses our party's de facto leader found for drugs, torture, and human trafficking.

Two campaigns later, and the big secret got out, so there's a good deal more turmoil in both places. Oh, and one of our previous characters has become the Big Bad, so there's that.

It's pretty fun, though I find myself having trouble doing any good roleplaying. I seem to have a problem writing a character who doesn't just act like me.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

I used to be like that. Got boring. Take a silly concept and just run with it as seriously as possible. Like my barbarian luchador.

Or a rogue that looks and acts like danny devito. Juat roll with the wacky shit and take it seriously.

Hilarity will ensue.

[Aerozord]

I used to be like that. Got boring. Take a silly concept and just run with it as seriously as possible. Like my barbarian luchador.

Or a rogue that looks and acts like danny devito. Juat roll with the wacky shit and take it seriously.

Hilarity will ensue.

like in exalted where I played a twilight artificer that only used food based weaponry. Gotta love your main weapon being a 6ft party sub dubbed "The Hero"

[Locke cole]

I suppose I can give that a shot. My character's so nondescript at the moment that I'm sure I can swing some off-the-wall thing into the concept.

It wouldn't be out of place. First campaign, one of the characters was a psion that acted like a child, and talked to a floating gemstone like it was alive. Called it "Billy". There was a backstory to that one, as our current characters learned the hard way in a battle with that character.

Or another guy whose Ranger is pretty much exactly Old Snake. Also, all his characters are named after pharmecuticals and drugs.

[walkertexasdruid]

My main problem is that I cannot play evil characters, I try but they end up being chaotic good. And I usually end up being the "Party Clown". My favorite character was a halfling rogue named Tass that was a combination of Tasselhoff Burrfoot and Vash the Stampede. You guys can imagine what he was like. I also have trouble playing serious characters as you can tell. ;)

[Aldurin]

Whelp, just started my first hopefully-doesn't-die campaign. Basically it's an open-world sandbox setting focused around the capital of a kingdom in strife. The interesting part is that everyone starts out solo and acts from their own exclusive perspectives (so players only get very minor hints to what others' characters are in the main thread). Many people seem to be set out to gain power or bring order to the warring nobility, but me . . . eh, I just want to watch the world burn.

Which is why Dread Necromancer is so perfect, since that's a class that has great social stealth early on, with a strong disguise ability and some spells to hide alignment and such. So far I'm just scouting out the area to see where it would be best to set some undead loose without revealing myself, while being able to mooch off of the XP gained from all the civilians that fall victim.

[CABAL49]

Playing two campaigns of 4e. One where I am an aristocratic cannibal monk and one where I am a Dragonborn Sorcerer were we have subjugated a new contenent and are training the natives into an army to take control over our homelands.

[walkertexasdruid]

I did play a Fey'ri sorcerer named Ahlren, who was a guy that was actually a girl that thought she was a guy. His/her shape-change ability was used so often that he/she was not sure what he/she was. I will not go into all of Ahlren's exploits, but lets just say was very close at times with most of the PCs and NPCs. He/she did eventually befriend a cleric of a long-forgotten diety so that he/she could gain power over the world. Ahlren was probably the closest to a villain that I ever played.

[tacticslion]

So, I've not been around for a while, mostly because I've been really busy (and I'm still likely to be more lurking than anything else), buuuuuuuuuuuuut...

I'm currently running a solo game for my wife. This is for several reasons:

1) I'm now the proud owner of an extremely rambunctious, running (literally) 15-month-old. He's terrific... and everywhere.

2) There are approximately zero people in Ocala we know - asides from ourselves - who are interested in playing or have time to do so.

3) My wife currently had too much on her plate to run our other solo campaign in which I was the player, considering how much work it's been to get her classes sorted out and her drama shows prepped (she's a teacher).

4) I suck, badly, at any sort of long-term online gaming. Like, very badly. Short term, I'm pretty good with, but long term: nope.

Anyway, I'm still busy plotting and planning and prepping for possible future games, but here's some memories I've got of ye old games:

* In one game I was running, there was a sorcerer who was... not a team player, let's say. Named himself "Cheezecake the Venerable" (later shortened to just "Cheeze") and had a Yak as a familiar that he later Awakened and permanently polymorphed into a human obsessed with the fact that she was actually a cow (this would prove excessively useful to the group later, for... rediculous reasons).
- The actual player himself was accidentally invited into our group, because everyone thought he knew someone else, and only after he left were we all like, "Hey, who's that guy?" and everyone went, "Wait, you don't know, I thought he was your friend!")
- That fun memory aside, his character was certainly Chaotic (note the capital "C"). For example: he died and was reincarnated so often (and was proving so draining on the party funds, yet still turning out shockingly useful and people were having fun), that finally I just decided that he eternally reincarnated every time he died. Further oddness arrived when he kept reincarnating into the same creatures over and over again, to the point where I just ruled he had a specific cycle (in order): Duergar, Troglodyte, Halfling, and Half-Orc (repeat). The first time he'd reincarnated as a Troglodyte, his stench inhibited his own companions, until the other mage managed to petrify him, later in that session throwing the statue into a room with reversed gravity and unpetrifying him in the middle of a bunch of drow (which worked like a charm).
- He kept attempting to hit all the characters except my wife's character with fireball, but, as she was the only one who didn't have spell resistance, and she didn't have evasion, she was the only one that ever got hit (he was apparently terrible at rolling to overcome spell resistance against his own party). He would then "make up" for it with use of prestidigitation to creature fake flowers and chocolate (that instantly vanished if you actually tried to eat it or do anything with it).
- Or that one time he thought he could "help" the poor, slaughtered clerics of Lathander (god of sunlight and healing)... he had a spell that could "fix that"... called animate dead (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/animateDead.htm).
With all of this, he was valuable (and fun) enough that we enjoyed having him in the game. Good memories.

* Same game, the other mage, a wizard named Cervan. Fervent Worshiper of Mystra, had a Shadow Weave version of Spellfire for some reason, and eventually became a Shade (he wanted Mystra to have the Shadow Weave instead of Shar). Ah, the Shenanigans. He started off true neutral.
- That one time he opened up a sex-change shop with use of Polymorph Any Object.
- That one time he got laws forced through in a particular city that required a festival in Mystra's honor, and attempted (though not terribly successfully) to get an orgy going.
- That one time he decided to make an underwater base, and - after making the necessary preparations on himself - teleported to the bottom of the ocean, and opened up a gate on the floor of it... without first remembering to create an actual base. He then immediately teleported away with little more than a "Whoops!", forgetting - again - to close the portal (dumping out huge amounts of the Inner Sea into the elemental plane of air).
- That one time he got Geased/Atoned by the ruler of Halruaa (a country) and spent ten years in a swamp negating the Shadow Weave. He became lawful good. Then he traveled back in time to before he did anything in Halruaa, but left well enough alone, afraid of what might happen if he interfered with himself.
- That one time he successfully level drained a female cleric of Shar to death and burned the body with fire, and then had her reincarnated (as a wood elf), and had her magically and mentally tortured and mind-altered by some Thayans until she became a fervent worshiper of Mystra ("Mystra is the Better One"). She eventually became his cohort (he had the leadership feat). He later had a child with her. And then simply forgot about all the people he was leading, teleporting away one day never to return.
- That one time he attempted to take over the castle of the Kesson Rel after it had been dropped into the material plane (and Kesson had been apparently "killed" by Erevis Cale and Drasek Riven - they left shortly thereafter). This was, of course, shortly after he'd become straight-up chaotic evil and decided to worship Cyric. He was shortly thereafter intimidated (and diplomacied) by the rest of the group into surrendering a powerful evil artifact he'd stole (the "Crown of Horns"), and was shortly thereafter chased away by the not-really-dead Kesson Rel.

* Or then there was the time the svirfneblin (a kind of ugly underground gnome) psion managed an epic psionic power to gather 1 million svirfneblin in the Raurin, and then get all of them to use their summon elemental feats at the same time, effectively summoning the Raurin desert itself, which then, at his direction, walked through the inner sea and out at the Vilhoun Reach (half a continent away), before heading into the Astral Sea.

* Or then there was the time that the half-giant barbarian kept dying in probably the most ridiculous ways. Seriously. I swear I really, really wasn't trying to kill him: in fact, the opposite! He just kept dying! (I'm pretty sure my dice at the time hated him... also he kept being the first - and only - to walk into instant death traps, that weren't initially supposed to be instant death traps, but because of the actions of all the players together, had become so).

* Or then there was the time that the party found an old malfunctioning teleportation device and decided, "hey, let's hit buttons randomly and see what happens"! One run-in with a randomly rolled 12-or-more (I've forgotten now - I want to say "24-headed", but I'm not sure they go up that high, and I really can't recall for sure) pyrohydra later, and the party was mostly dead, only able to live because my wife's character had invested in a greater ring of fire protection (due to the fireballs that had kept hitting her and no one else), and managed to grab ashes of each of her dead comrades into little labeled vials and flee before she could be finished off.

* Or the time when they created a god with epic magic, blacked out, woke back up in the world with no idea what, exactly, had happened, and went "huh, that was weird" and proceeded never to investigate again.

There were so many memories from that one campaign alone, I'd take forever recounting them, but those are just a few that spring to mind. Those guys were crazy, but great, and it was a fantastic campaign all-round. Oh! I almost forgot!

* Or that time when that one guy (who was a friend of a friend) showed up for, like 2-3 play sessions (I can't recall now) and played a happy-go-lucky human Rogue for one of 'em, but quickly changed up for a super-thief Halfling Harper. Ever since that day, not one person who ever played in that campaign can ever see a Halfling again without saying, "I check my pockets!" immediately and frequently afterwords.

(Crowning moment of Awesome for Alton, the Halfling Harper and thief extraordinaire who couldn't roll less than 20 on a d20 if his life depended on it [when he woke up after being knocked unconscious and was temporarily caught and stuck upside down in a bag of holding, after having robbed most of the NPCs, party, and town blind]: "Gah! Wuh? Where am I! Agh! I check my pockets!" *big grin slowly dawns* Cheerfully: "Oh! It's all the stuff I stole!" He proceeded to get out shortly thereafter, and was never seen again.)

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Returning home I have been having chats with my friends about all their crazy concept campaigns they have been running in a mega-world of Sigil (a live action '24' campaign, a series of Christmas tales- the 12 slays of Christmas, adventures of the Christmas friends- a Hairy Mcclary style rhyming tale where every DM description was in whismical rhyme, and Adventures in Radio- a journey into sonic) so I've been inspired to start work on a Cthulhu campaign (spoiler: Cthulhu eats everyone) which I'm going to run till I head back to Britain. Also a new campaign world in case I ever get proper internet again.
Cthulhu campaigns are the best. Currentely they are all Private Eyes in 1920s, busting normal cases with the odd strange things behind closets they havne't found yet. But they are spending lots of times running newspapers and writing fake newspapers is the best- I have running stories about a two-headed girl and a dispute over river naming running in the background which allow me to put light luaghs in a heavy game. Also you can hide clues for future campagins in the background of the paper and see if they notice- so far none.

E: Also trying out Google Hangout, its pretty good actually with all the DnD add ins.

[Magus]

I'd love to play it but lack any real life friends to play it with, plus I'm basically not going to spend any money on the materials.

Doing it online would be great, I know you guys do some of that in the chat, right?

[Professor Smarmiarty]

If I ever get not-deported then yes.

[Tev]

I've been helping my girlfriend with a game she's running for a gamer girl coven she formed from classes when she went to go get her Masters in Library Science.

Basically the party is part of a secret society based out of something akin to the Library of Congress and Warehouse 13 that is tasked with finding lost tomes and artifacts of great power and cataloging them within the library's secure confines. She's been trying to slip in references to various popular book series like Fable Haven, H.P. Lovecraft, and even some Twilight (sparkly vampires are too funny to fight sometimes).

[CABAL49]

I won a Cthulhu game once because of a technicality.

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Was the technicality you burnt all the books and hid the dice?

[tacticslion]

(Or is it Necro-foo-foo? That one just sounds strange...)

Anyway, it's appropriate, because this is about that one time when my character became worshiped as a living god because he created a Well of Life with a 5,000-plus caster level (and thus was able to raise up to 25 people (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/w/wish) at a time, who've been dead for up to over 50,000 years (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/r/resurrection) by using magic item chicanery (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/wondrous-items/h-l/ioun-stones), and creating infinite wish (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/outsiders/genie/efreeti) machine (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/s/simulacrum), by using relatively low-level (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/planar-binding) chicanery (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/scrolls). Note that though I linked to the PF rules site, we were running under the 3.5 rules at the time, where this worked better.