Well, we thought of it the second time around, after we bought a new lens out of the party funds.
That one got destroyed when we left the place unguarded while exploring a local cave system, and some bandits set fire to the lighthouse.
After that, we bought a lens, hired an engineer, and a bunch of guards, and some carpenters to fix the burned out shell of the lighthouse.
All in all, I think that module resulted in a net loss for the party. We’re just lucky we were able to talk the Duke out of fining us for the merchant ship that crashed on the rocks while we were dicking around with getting the lighthouse fixed.
Speaking of ancient firearms, this reminds me of a 7th Sea player of mine. When I told him it was a Renaissance setting with musketeers and such he was dead set on playing a guy specializing in firearms. No problem says I, there’s even a couple “swordmanship” schools specializing in just that. So, first session, he unveils his character, a Montaigne nobleman who has a pair of lovingly crafted handguns, silver plated, engravings all over, reinforced grips for pistol whipping, everything. Very proud of these here guns he was.
First combat, he opens up on a bunch of mooks, and is very satisfied to dispatch half a dozen guys with just two balls (7th Sea. Roll with it.). Comes round 2 and he goes “ok, I reload and shoot on the next bunch of mooks”. Nooot so fast, bucko. These here are Renaissance handguns. They’re not six-shooters. Takes over a dozen rounds to reload these babies, 20 IIRC. Each. He wasn’t happy at the idea of sitting on his hands for 40 rounds, but then his character was also pretty damn min-maxed and single-focused - he was a great shot, but a mediocre regular fighter.
So for the rest of the campaign, whenever the group faced guys with guns, he’d loot them and load them between combats. It became a running joke: whenever his character had some free time, you’d know he was somewhere quiet, industriously loading guns. He started out with a bandolier of handguns, then two, and when even that wasn’t enough he opted to tote around at all times a potato sack filled to the brim with loaded guns.
Classy ? Not as such, no. Effective ? Yup. Dangerous ? As fuck. Though in retrospect I think the impromptu rules for negligent discharges I made up for the sack were a bit too harsh - he killed at least three horses and one wine cellar over a single trip.
That was suggested by my DM as one use for all of the gold I’ve been hoarding in WFRP. We were in Nuln, a centre of industry, and he’s all, “You know, you could always get some firearms…” tosses me the supplement
I think he wanted to have some fun with the misfire rules - he’s a glorious bastard like that. In Dark Heresy he once rolled initiative for some enemies that weren’t actually in the room, just to screw with our heads. The room was empty apart from a corpse and her liberally-spread viscera, so we were pretty nervous already, and I decided to take action. I shot the corpse in the leg, confident that there was something hiding inside, or possessing it, or maybe it wasn’t even a corpse and was waiting for us to kill us.
Nope, turns out it was just a corpse. Of a local dignitary. Now with a shotgun wound that was clearly done after she was dead. Try explaining that to your superior officer. I think I went with, “Yeah, Eldars are crazy, eh?” trying not to draw attention to the shotgun strapped to my back.
Ridiculous NPC story. Due to my scrawly handwriting, a party I was DMing for met up with a dirty druid. I had a nice wander list for the foresty area they were travelling in and one of the most unlikely encounters was with a questing druid. I’d written this down as wandering druid. Only when I looked to see what the roll meant I read the der as a k, so my wandering druid became a wanking druid – yeah in UK slang that meant they had just caught a lonely druid masturbating, coming red faced out of the bushes as one of the players put it. Just as the laughter was dying down someone suggested he had only been communing with nature.
Druids have had a bit of a funny reputation in our games ever since.
That’s pretty awesome. It seems like in some of the high seas historical adventures I’ve read, people who like to shoot handguns keep a boy on hand during battles whose sole job it is to hand them loaded guns and reload the empties.
I just remembered a near-miss moment of my own from a convention game. It was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG scenario with the principal cast - the monster of the week could steal people’s reflections - and in so doing, make them susceptible to mind control. He could also use the stolen reflections to disguise himself or others.
I was playing Xander, and we’d reached the climax of the scenario, when we were confronted by what appeared to be a violently-inclined group of our loved ones. I checked with a borrowed pocket mirror -
“No reflections! It’s really them, we can’t hurt them!” And then the lightbulb clicked. “Or, possibly disguised vampires. Anybody got a spare cross?”
I never fudged dice rolls, always rolled for things that should have been rolled for. But I did roll dice occasionally just for noise… to provide cover for legitimate rolls. If the only dice rolling had been when things were happening, it would have been a signal to players to be watchful (or even, as Double Foolscap thought, to start shooting). As it was, I rolled a couple dice from time to time for no reason, and was therefore able to make all the real secret rolls with no one the wiser.
Reminds me of this video by Lou Zocchi explaining the very phenomenon. He’s defending his blemished dice, which comes from individually clipping the dice.
Everyone has to clip off their die. Most companies use the rock tumbler with course material to remove the blemish, dip in paint, tumble again, and then tumble with a fine material to polish off the blemishes from the previous tumbling. This creates inconsistent dice with rounded edges, varying sizes, and other abnormalities to make it biased to certain sides. You end up with lucky and unlucky dice, depending on the die.
Ironic that Zocchi would lecture against oblate dice, especially while wearing a shirt showing one of his d100s. His Platonic dice might be fair, but his d100s aren’t.
But what about when … the Rules Lawyer actually understands the rules better than the DM, and isn’t looking for loopholes, but simply wants the rules to be applied correctly? That’s the situation I found myself in when I played D&D.
A coworker invited me to join his established 3.5 Edition D&D group, and I happily agreed because it’s a game I’d wanted to play for years but either didn’t know anybody who played or didn’t have the time. The DM was an “older” guy (late 40s, early 50s; the rest of us were in our 30s) who had been playing and DMing since 1st Edition in the '70s. He and the other players walked me through things for the first few sessions until I was able to acquire my own Player’s Handbook. When I got my own PHB, I rigorously studied that book, cover-to-cover. My only goal was to catch up and learn the rules so that I wasn’t slowing the game down with a steady string of “now what do I do?” and “how do I do that?” questions.
Once I had done that, and had joined the official D&D forums where I could get clarifications on rules I didn’t understand, it didn’t take too many sessions before I realized that this experienced DM had done little more than “skim” the 3.5 rules. While the players were all trying to play by the 3.5 rules, the DM was making his rulings based on a confusing mishmash of 1e, 2e, and 3.5e rules, as well as horrifically misinterpreting many of the 3.5 rules.
The first problem I noticed was that the dual-wielding ranger (played by another new player who didn’t know any better) was insanely overpowered. The DM had so badly misinterpreted the dual-wield feats and the various Cleave/Greater Cleave feats that the party would walk into a room filled with half a dozen enemies, and in a single round this ranger would literally mow the entire bunch of them down. By comparison my same-level fighter, on his turn, could step up to an enemy (if there were any left alive after the ranger finished) and go “Whack. Whack.”
I did the simple math and figured out that, with the way the DM had interpreted the dual-wield rules/feats, by 16th level this ranger would be getting 16 attacks per round, before his Cleaves were even figured in, and aside from the OP-ness of that we’d be looking at this ranger’s every turn taking 30 minutes or more just to roll the dice for each of those attacks. I finally had enough, and after consulting on the forums to confirm that my reading of the rules was correct, I pointed out the problem. And even then, I had to step the DM through the rule word-by-word (basically, explaining the grammar of the wording) before he finally saw what I meant. Naturally, the ranger was disappointed that his power was now cut in half, but he acknowledged that he had been entirely OP.
The next rules problem was revealed when I noticed that I always ended up playing the wizard/sorcerer/other squishy spellcaster because nobody else wanted to. I thought that was odd, because I’d always heard that D&D players loved playing wizards. I soon discovered the reason, though at first I thought it was just that the DM had a bug up his butt about spellcasters. Eventually I figured out the problem was that he was applying 1st Edition rules to spellcasters, with the effect of completely crippling them. For example, in his apparent skimming of the 3.5 rules, he never noticed that the vast majority of spells no longer required a “full-round action” to cast. So, for example, I’d try to move 10 feet so I could get line-of-sight on that enemy hiding behind the pillar and cast a spell at him, and the DM would tell me I couldn’t move and cast on the same turn because “casting a spell is a full-round action”, and once I’d moved I’d have to wait until my next turn to cast the spell. And then, of course, before my next turn came around he’d move that enemy out of my LOS… I’d spend entire encounters being unable to do much of anything because of this. And don’t get me started on the way his complete ignorance of the difference between 1E Concentration Checks and 3.5E Concentration Checks left spellcasters almost completely unable to function in combat.
There was also the problem of his blind adherence to the “logical tactic” of “take out the wizard first”, even when the wizard had deliberately dressed in ordinary traveling clothing instead of wizard robes and carried a sword instead of a staff, and otherwise did nothing to obviously advertise he was a wizard. Nope, it’s logical to kill the wizard first, even when there’s no logical reason for these random ambushers to know who the wizard is. But that wasn’t a rules issue.
Eventually, I just decided to bow out of the game. I wasn’t having fun, and I didn’t want to end up being the dick who argues about everything and holds up the game all the time, so I just left gracefully.
I was playing a young, impulsive, impatient, low-Wisdom sorcerer. The party had entered the building where the bad guys had set up shop. We found ourselves in a medium-sized, empty room. As soon as we entered, the door slammed shut and locked behind us, and a handful of hostile creatures materialized and attacked us. We killed them, only to have another batch materialize. Repeat. Repeat. We were getting frustrated, because we needed to get to the room’s other door to continue further into the building, but these constantly-reappearing monsters weren’t going to let us.
But we finally figured it out. Along the back wall of the room was a series of small wooden cubicles, each with an open doorway (but no actual door). The cubicles were dark inside, but we eventually figured out (don’t remember how) that there were evil clerics inside those cubicles who were summoning these monsters faster than we could kill them. We really needed to take out those clerics, but we couldn’t get line-of-sight for ranged attacks or spells, and the veteran players in this group had an unhealthy aversion to melee (more to do with the DM, again, but I won’t go into that here).
So my young sorcerer eventually came up with the perfect solution: Fireball! Yup, wooden structure, confined space …
It worked - the fireball instantly killed the summoned monsters and the clerics in their cubicles, and of course knocked most of the party into negative hit points, including my sorcerer himself. The only one still moving was the rogue, who’d made his Reflex save. He was able to administer healing potions, and then we had to get out of there in a hurry before the now-burning building came down on our heads.
