One time in a Star Wars game, one of the characters (himself ironically a problem GM of the “My Mary Sue NPCs will solve all the real problems!” school) wasn’t paying attention because people were ignoring his needs, as he was the one criminal type in a mostly noble Rebel group.
On a raid, while sulking, he perked up when he heard someone mention a transport full of proton torpedoes. Reasoning he could sell those for a hell of a lot of credits, he asked where it was, and was told "parked outside the station, grappled to the hull, next to the reactor. As the rest of the party was using said transport as an improvised station-cracking explosive.
He spacewalked out to it, having not bothered to listen to the “why it was there” part.
And his first roll to power it up registered that something had a missile lock on him, specifically one of the bombers associated with the party. The following dialogue ensued:
“Aran, why are you locked onto my shuttle of stolen goodies?”
“Te’lar, why are YOU trying to fly off with my improvised explosive?”
The confrontation ended with the bomber’s pilot shooting to kill when he got bored with the arguement. And much to the joy of the rest of the game, I lovingly described Te’lar’s last microseconds riding four hundred torpedoes into the void.
He turned out okay after a week to cool off, and all was well.
Note also that this was the star wars game where the party included an insane ewok with higher than allowed INT and a vocabulary that consisted of “yub yub, motherfucker”, two competing bounty hunters, and a samurai from a technologically regressed world who’d just finished forging armor and swords out of the crashed X-Wing’s hull plating when the Rebel rescue teams showed up and that’s how he ended up out there.
Oh, man, this really does make me want to retell the story of the hanging. It is one of my more memorable rpg experiences over the years. It involved a one-legged boy whore, livestock, and a halfling’s spontaneous death. I am sure I havep posted about it elsewhere before, but I just can’t seem to find it.
That reminds me of my best tabletop PVP. The game actually turned out that people wanted to play races that were opposed to each other, so half the players ended up as on the human side and the other on the alien race side the Dungaerians, which were Predatorlike.
So I was pit against a guy who I used to be close to but wasn’t as much anymore. Basically the most forceful personalities in the room were me, the guy on the other side, and the GM. Another guy was playing a Merc pilot who was flying for me. He lost his ship, so as a Commander in the human fleet, I was able to get him another one. As such I was able to design his ship. The ‘feature’ I didn’t tell him about was the remote access to his ejection module.
In the heat of battle, he turns on me, so I space him. He got so pissed. He was like, “You can’t just make stuff up like that.”, and the GM told him that I had put that into the design from the beginning and there was nothing to be done.
This sounds like a problem with the GM. Did the GM ok giving a 3rd level character huge powers?
I didn’t allow a player to play in one of my games because of something like this. ‘If I can’t have X I’m not playing!’. ‘Goodbye.’ He was shocked that wouldn’t cave to his demands. I had another player try to get all kinds of weird and nutball things for his character, and followed each denial with pages of whining. Set a precedent that whining or demands get met, and they do it whenever they can.
A situation like that is just too unbalanced, and ruins the fun. I’ve seen games ruined because one player was way too powerful, or was the obvious focus of the game (a wagon wheel game).
Whining? Is that how he motivates your characters?
It’s probably worth differentiating between regular min-maxers, and those who will try and enforce it on everyone else, and will lecture you how you, in their mind, should be playing. As someone who’s absolutely NOT a min-maxer, you don’t have to tread that far across the line to get on my nerves.
Of course, being the idiot I am I went ahead and married one :smack: He’s not that bad though.
The flip side is playing with a mixed group. It is hard playing in a group with an optimized character when another PC has taken Improved Toughness three times. It is very easy for such a player to feel marginalized because his character is not really pivotal, and the DM has to balance challenges way above his capabilities. The game is supposed to be fun for everyone.
We take group character creation pretty seriously to avoid this. No one should feel either stifled or alienated. I am not going to lecture anyone else how to play, but I might suggest alternative and more effective builds that would meet another player’s rp goals while ensuring that his character can keep up with the group. If the person is not interested, that’s cool, but don’t say I didn’t try to help. Not everyone enjoys character building very much, and since I do, I figure everyone wins.
Yeah, I’ve been that character ^^’ (A missionary in a d20 modern/future game–not particularly combat oriented). Of course, it was the week I had to leave early that they realized one of my abilities was actually really damn useful :rolleyes:
BTW, holy water is only useful for fighting zombies if you’re trying to make the floor slippery.
Yeah. About every 6 months the group gets so bad I just have to vent. Sometimes the games are great. Other times, some player has decided to be an idiot, or a jerkass, so bad that it ruins the game. Other times, the GM starts to kneecap me and piss in my soup.
I’m beginning to think (also judging by some subtle reactions he made to comments I made) that he’s deliberately doing this because I’m the only player with any sort of goal. The others (mostly) will blindly do anything that crosses their mind. I’m more focused. I make characters who don’t just “happen” to have vast combat skills or magic powers. They came from somewhere and generally have a fairly specific goal in mind. When a mission starts, they figure out ways to accomplish the mission.
Some people, like the Commando who abandoned me to die and then got to loot hundreds of thousands, if not millions, worth of gear, don’t. And the Gm indicated that he noticed, and was in fact being hard on me for the sin of not being an idiot. The Commando’s player, for instance, gets away with everything, up and including literal-in-game murder, because the Gm doesn’t bother to punish him. He wont’ write up a character but always convinces the Gm to do it. So the character can never die or be seriously inconvenienced for more than 10 minutes. If that happens, the player goes insane and starts killing random NPC’s.
smiling bandit Sounds like this guy is ruining your enjoyment. Tell the rest of the players that you won’t play with this guy anymore, it’s not fun so there’s no point in coming to play because it’s supposed to be fun. Either everyone will come with you or they won’t, and you need to find a new gaming group.
I don’t understand why you spend so much time playing this game with this group, because you clearly are not enjoying it.
Roleplaying should be fun for both players and GM; the adventures should be interesting and give players a chance to show what they can do (both individually and as a team).
The rules should be clear, the combats balanced and the treasure suitable.
It’s pointless to have endless monsters only defeated by ‘deus ex machina’, or claiming to be the best-ever character.
If you want to prove something, play chess.
You don’t seem to have any of the above and there seems no prospect of any improvement.
I’ve been with the same group for 29 years.
We’ve kept going despite our jobs moving us hundreds of miles apart.
We take it in turns to DM; we have an agreed additional extension rulebook and we all stick to it.
There are no hyper-characters and we work as a team.
The best sessions include laughter and excitement and everyone getting out their diaries for the next one.
Because we’re supposedly friends IRL. And because while I know of other games, they either don’t have openings or they are vastly worse. I wish I was kidding!
There used to be a games shop where people could meet, play magic, roleplay, wargame, everything. It closed, another one opened. It was bought out by some fools who couldn’t run the business, decided to move it way far away from the college campus. It died a quick death, unsuprisingly.
Ah. Then I’m suffering from selection bias; I only ever seem to see you whining about gaming, but that’s probably because you vent about your bad experiences here and you don’t start threads about your good experiences. Some of us need the Boards for that.
As for me, I’ve largely stopped gaming, overtly because I have no time for it anymore thanks to starting at UCSD–but the double secret reason is because I no longer enjoy it. The people I game with now just don’t provide the kind of entertainment that the raucous bunch in high school did. It’s all interpersonal drama–between the players, not the characters–and high-stakes flakery.
Congratulations on keeping a group that you enjoy most of the time, then. Carry on.
Much (virtually all) of the problem comes because of group mismatch. We have a couple players who fundamentally don’t want anything we usually deliver, and have a tendency to wreck things up for others. To be honest, virtually all of my bad gaming experiences come from one person.
This latest thing was just a case of the GM railroading me into crap, primarily because said problem player jerked me around.
Promise me no OCD Dungeon Tortures and I might even show up.