D&D Misadventures
So on a forum I read regularly there is a sub-forum for stories about RPGs you have played in or run. I am recounting a campaign from a couple years back that was full of some of the most outrageous crackity-crack from any game ever. Some D&D knowledge might be helpful to understand specifics and subtleties, but the story, reproduced here, should be entertaining nonetheless even if you haven't played D&D and are just familiar with the tropes of fantasy roleplaying games.
So the group I've been gaming with for years now--most of the people involved work for the same software company. A friend of a friend twice removed (or something) wanted to run a tabletop game. Seasoned tabletop veteran, been gaming since the late 70's or whatever, yadayada. We actually played OWoD Vampire for a while. That was interesting, but demonstated that Old School DM was more than willing to play fast and loose with the concept of rules. I chalked that up to "WoD is bad, fuck the rules." I don't care if we're playing fast and loose with the rules in WoD because the rules are awful and are essentially completely MTP anyway, so if the MTP is fun, the game can be.
Anyway, OSDM wants to run D&D next. Offers to run 3.5e in his campaign world, which has apparently seen years of previous play, including epic-level play. Mention of the Epic Level Handbook is always concerning (because it is full of terrible mechanics and it is not sane or balanced at all), but hey, it might be fun to play D&D with OSDM, because while it has some awful rules here and there on the whole it's an entertaining game and I don't mind a little old-fashioned fuckery in my D&D. We're sitting around after an afternoon of board gaming and he announces that we should roll our stats. Okay, rolled stats, 4d6 drop the lowest x6 rolls. Not the worst thing ever...I guess? It's old-school, and I've had players roll stats before instead of doing the more modern point-buy option. I roll pretty averagely, a bunch of 12s and 13s and a single 17. At least it isn't roll in order. Guess I'm playing a caster so I only need to be good at one main stat. I was going to do that anyway.
We're allowed to use anything from core and anything we can get specifically approved. OSDM is evidently okay with us using Pathfinder classes (D&D 3.5's successor, published by Paizo). We get some warning signs here:
1) The PF cleric is "broken" because it has AoE healing instead of turn undead. Regular clerics only. What. (This is not OP at all. Also, clerics can cast any spell they want in this setting for no reason; clerics normally have to select which spells they want to cast a particular day in advance.)
2) We're only allowed to have one elf in the party, and they have to be a specific type of elf.
3) No one is allowed to play a druid or a monk, due to some handwaving about the setting and possibly both of them being too powerful. (Druids are insanely OP. Monks suck.)
4) Duskblades (a fighter-mage class that channels spells through their weapons) are OP because they have both full BAB and spellcasting. (They are so not.)
5) Critical fumble tables. Extensive critical fumble tables.
6) Some whacked-out prayer mechanic where you can roll 3d6 for long-shot odds of surviving imminent death and an equal chance of pissing off the gods and being impossible to resurrect.
The setting includes races that are borrowed from the RPG setting "Earthdawn" (although I didn't know that at the time and only found out later), windlings and obsidimen. Obsidimen are stone golem people and are not playable. Windlings are like pixies or something and are the master race for most applications: Fly 60' perfect, +2 to all saves, tiny size, +6 DEX and +2 CHA in exchange for -6 STR and -2 CON, with no level adjustment. Also, there's a fair bit of elf-wank. Elves have the ability to sense other elves like the goddamned Highlander, and elves have "generations" based on how far removed they are from the prognenitor elf; each member of the first six generations of elves is specifically named in the setting writeup, and older generations get better stats and a bunch of arbitrary abilities, including bonus feats (not off a specific list, just bonus feats).
I've played and run a lot of 3.x, and while I don't always have the patience to dumpster dive endlessly for theoretical optimization, I know the game fairly well. Our other players include:
Z, a seasoned 3.x optimizer.
J, another seasoned optimizer who's played a lot of 3.x.
E, who is fairly good at analyzing games to build effective characters, but who doesn't have as much direct 3.x experience (although he'll take advice from others readily).
Wally, who has played 4e but no 3.x.
Character-wise, we end up with a lot of character concepts people have "always wanted to play" but didn't feel were good enough for a "real" game--the thought being that if nobody pushes optimization it'll work out.
Z playing a windling Pathfinder sorcerer with some blasty bloodline, intending to go cleric and then into mystic theurge: "It's an extremely shitty character class, but maybe it'll be good enough." Also, he takes Vow of Poverty as some kind of twisted experiment. (Vow of Poverty is dumb. You theoretically get inherent bonuses in exchange for being able to own no property or magic items. The bonuses hypothetically compensate for having no magic items. They don't.)
J opts for a human crusader.
E plays a gnomish Pathfinder alchemist. Bombs. Lots of bombs.
Wally rolls a human factotum intending to go chameleon, which is like playing a character who can change classes every day but is not particularly good at any one thing. This is probably a terrible choice for a new player because it is all about abusing dumpster diving to be (sort of) awesome, but he really likes the jack-of-all-trades thing thematically and is prepared to get advice from the more experienced members.
I throw together a human Pathfinder summoner as a half-joke because there's a place in the setting full of volcanic calderas called "The Land of Mist" and playing "a summoner from Mist" strikes me as a great game reference. My eidolon takes the form of a quadrupedal lizard with pounce and claws, with the idea being to morph it into a dragon as more evolutions become available.
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So our first session has us on a boat toward a floating city on the coast of the sea. We fight some merfolk. It is at this point that we discover that we are not ever going to be fighing opposition with 1 HD or less and Z's sorcerer manages to contribute absolutely jack shit with sleep spells. For whatever reason I have not summoned my eidolon pre-fight and since it takes a minute to cast I improvise with a fiendish octopus. When we reach the city, we discover the following:
1) The city is blockaded because there's some political problem going on and merfolk are dicks. Merfolk monopolies on waterway use have effectively shut down travel. We have to make climb checks to get over a wall to sneak into the city, 1st-level D&D "nobody can do anything!" in full effect as we fail climb checks and some of us nearly fall to our deaths in session one.
2) Nobody can swim, and OSDM is going to run this shit "by the book," so we are very likely going to drown if we try. This is actually a huge problem because the city is criss-crossed by canals at least 10 feet wide (so forget jumping them) and there is no way to get anywhere without crossing them.
3) Our party has an NPC hooded wizard who is basically not talking, but who has decided to follow us around. He is apparently like 20th level or higher, but constantly sandbagging. (SPOILERS: He turns out to be a Big Deal Immortal Elf.)
We get functionally stranded on an "island" with an inn in the middle of the city and discover that some people have been using long planks of wood to make temporary bridges and cross the planks. Dude offers to sell us his plank of wood for some outrageous price. We kick his ass and take it instead. From then on whoever was awake on watch (yes, in the middle of a city) was assigned to guard our fucking wooden plank lest somebody steal it while we were all asleep. We are given basically zero direction as far as what our characters should be doing, so I start reaching for classic sandbox hooks and suggest that we ICly search for mercenary work or wanted posters or something so that we can accomplish basically anything and maybe gain some levels and loot and quit suffering being first level because man that shit is terrible.
Doing some standard adventurer shit and clearing out bandits we grasp at threads of a plot involving the city's criminal underworld that rapidly becomes irrelevant because the merfolk are economically choking the life out of the city for some reason. Politics! Corruption! Someone claiming to be a specific awesome immortal elf is allegedly at least in part responsible, and the big reveal is that said immortal elf is not manipulating the government because HE'S THE NPC IN OUR PARTY (gasp) and therefore we must...do...something. As characters who are maybe 3rd level with basically no magic items, no real reputation, and no personal badassery we are pretty much powerless to impact BIG POLITICS PLOT but somehow we gain a foothold in the Thieves' Guild and are planning to start some kind of revolution by revealing the corruption of...man, I don't even remember. REVOLUTION. WE WERE GOING TO START ONE.
We are like 3rd level and we get in a fight with like four or five rogues that are all at least 4th level and all of them have enough ranks in balance that grease is useless. Somehow we win due to glitterdust and stinking cloud being awesome. Blind and nauseated enemies are easy to kill. We get some REAL TREASURE and there are lengthy arguments about how Vow of Poverty works. OSDM is totally willing to let Z's character receive favors like spells cast or consumable items from the church in exchange for tithes. Z is like, "no, VoP does not work that way" and we do some bullshit involving calculating Z's character's share of the treasure which we must summarily set on fire by giving it to priests.
Then all that shit about revolutions goes out the window and never gets revisted because we start working for an Adventurer's Guild that hires people to go do random adventurer junk and they want us to go to a mountain and get magical metal that is liquid at room temperature. They will pay us exhorbitant sums (like 1000gp per ounce, which is great, because we don't even have 1000gp between us) to recover said magical metal. So we leave the city!
Next: We travel to a mountain, almost get murdered by elves, and find no magical metal because OSDM wants to run an old-school module he converted that contains no magical metal but has lots of rooms full of demons.
So the group I've been gaming with for years now--most of the people involved work for the same software company. A friend of a friend twice removed (or something) wanted to run a tabletop game. Seasoned tabletop veteran, been gaming since the late 70's or whatever, yadayada. We actually played OWoD Vampire for a while. That was interesting, but demonstated that Old School DM was more than willing to play fast and loose with the concept of rules. I chalked that up to "WoD is bad, fuck the rules." I don't care if we're playing fast and loose with the rules in WoD because the rules are awful and are essentially completely MTP anyway, so if the MTP is fun, the game can be.
Anyway, OSDM wants to run D&D next. Offers to run 3.5e in his campaign world, which has apparently seen years of previous play, including epic-level play. Mention of the Epic Level Handbook is always concerning (because it is full of terrible mechanics and it is not sane or balanced at all), but hey, it might be fun to play D&D with OSDM, because while it has some awful rules here and there on the whole it's an entertaining game and I don't mind a little old-fashioned fuckery in my D&D. We're sitting around after an afternoon of board gaming and he announces that we should roll our stats. Okay, rolled stats, 4d6 drop the lowest x6 rolls. Not the worst thing ever...I guess? It's old-school, and I've had players roll stats before instead of doing the more modern point-buy option. I roll pretty averagely, a bunch of 12s and 13s and a single 17. At least it isn't roll in order. Guess I'm playing a caster so I only need to be good at one main stat. I was going to do that anyway.
We're allowed to use anything from core and anything we can get specifically approved. OSDM is evidently okay with us using Pathfinder classes (D&D 3.5's successor, published by Paizo). We get some warning signs here:
1) The PF cleric is "broken" because it has AoE healing instead of turn undead. Regular clerics only. What. (This is not OP at all. Also, clerics can cast any spell they want in this setting for no reason; clerics normally have to select which spells they want to cast a particular day in advance.)
2) We're only allowed to have one elf in the party, and they have to be a specific type of elf.
3) No one is allowed to play a druid or a monk, due to some handwaving about the setting and possibly both of them being too powerful. (Druids are insanely OP. Monks suck.)
4) Duskblades (a fighter-mage class that channels spells through their weapons) are OP because they have both full BAB and spellcasting. (They are so not.)
5) Critical fumble tables. Extensive critical fumble tables.
6) Some whacked-out prayer mechanic where you can roll 3d6 for long-shot odds of surviving imminent death and an equal chance of pissing off the gods and being impossible to resurrect.
The setting includes races that are borrowed from the RPG setting "Earthdawn" (although I didn't know that at the time and only found out later), windlings and obsidimen. Obsidimen are stone golem people and are not playable. Windlings are like pixies or something and are the master race for most applications: Fly 60' perfect, +2 to all saves, tiny size, +6 DEX and +2 CHA in exchange for -6 STR and -2 CON, with no level adjustment. Also, there's a fair bit of elf-wank. Elves have the ability to sense other elves like the goddamned Highlander, and elves have "generations" based on how far removed they are from the prognenitor elf; each member of the first six generations of elves is specifically named in the setting writeup, and older generations get better stats and a bunch of arbitrary abilities, including bonus feats (not off a specific list, just bonus feats).
I've played and run a lot of 3.x, and while I don't always have the patience to dumpster dive endlessly for theoretical optimization, I know the game fairly well. Our other players include:
Z, a seasoned 3.x optimizer.
J, another seasoned optimizer who's played a lot of 3.x.
E, who is fairly good at analyzing games to build effective characters, but who doesn't have as much direct 3.x experience (although he'll take advice from others readily).
Wally, who has played 4e but no 3.x.
Character-wise, we end up with a lot of character concepts people have "always wanted to play" but didn't feel were good enough for a "real" game--the thought being that if nobody pushes optimization it'll work out.
Z playing a windling Pathfinder sorcerer with some blasty bloodline, intending to go cleric and then into mystic theurge: "It's an extremely shitty character class, but maybe it'll be good enough." Also, he takes Vow of Poverty as some kind of twisted experiment. (Vow of Poverty is dumb. You theoretically get inherent bonuses in exchange for being able to own no property or magic items. The bonuses hypothetically compensate for having no magic items. They don't.)
J opts for a human crusader.
E plays a gnomish Pathfinder alchemist. Bombs. Lots of bombs.
Wally rolls a human factotum intending to go chameleon, which is like playing a character who can change classes every day but is not particularly good at any one thing. This is probably a terrible choice for a new player because it is all about abusing dumpster diving to be (sort of) awesome, but he really likes the jack-of-all-trades thing thematically and is prepared to get advice from the more experienced members.
I throw together a human Pathfinder summoner as a half-joke because there's a place in the setting full of volcanic calderas called "The Land of Mist" and playing "a summoner from Mist" strikes me as a great game reference. My eidolon takes the form of a quadrupedal lizard with pounce and claws, with the idea being to morph it into a dragon as more evolutions become available.
------------------------------------------------
So our first session has us on a boat toward a floating city on the coast of the sea. We fight some merfolk. It is at this point that we discover that we are not ever going to be fighing opposition with 1 HD or less and Z's sorcerer manages to contribute absolutely jack shit with sleep spells. For whatever reason I have not summoned my eidolon pre-fight and since it takes a minute to cast I improvise with a fiendish octopus. When we reach the city, we discover the following:
1) The city is blockaded because there's some political problem going on and merfolk are dicks. Merfolk monopolies on waterway use have effectively shut down travel. We have to make climb checks to get over a wall to sneak into the city, 1st-level D&D "nobody can do anything!" in full effect as we fail climb checks and some of us nearly fall to our deaths in session one.
2) Nobody can swim, and OSDM is going to run this shit "by the book," so we are very likely going to drown if we try. This is actually a huge problem because the city is criss-crossed by canals at least 10 feet wide (so forget jumping them) and there is no way to get anywhere without crossing them.
3) Our party has an NPC hooded wizard who is basically not talking, but who has decided to follow us around. He is apparently like 20th level or higher, but constantly sandbagging. (SPOILERS: He turns out to be a Big Deal Immortal Elf.)
We get functionally stranded on an "island" with an inn in the middle of the city and discover that some people have been using long planks of wood to make temporary bridges and cross the planks. Dude offers to sell us his plank of wood for some outrageous price. We kick his ass and take it instead. From then on whoever was awake on watch (yes, in the middle of a city) was assigned to guard our fucking wooden plank lest somebody steal it while we were all asleep. We are given basically zero direction as far as what our characters should be doing, so I start reaching for classic sandbox hooks and suggest that we ICly search for mercenary work or wanted posters or something so that we can accomplish basically anything and maybe gain some levels and loot and quit suffering being first level because man that shit is terrible.
Doing some standard adventurer shit and clearing out bandits we grasp at threads of a plot involving the city's criminal underworld that rapidly becomes irrelevant because the merfolk are economically choking the life out of the city for some reason. Politics! Corruption! Someone claiming to be a specific awesome immortal elf is allegedly at least in part responsible, and the big reveal is that said immortal elf is not manipulating the government because HE'S THE NPC IN OUR PARTY (gasp) and therefore we must...do...something. As characters who are maybe 3rd level with basically no magic items, no real reputation, and no personal badassery we are pretty much powerless to impact BIG POLITICS PLOT but somehow we gain a foothold in the Thieves' Guild and are planning to start some kind of revolution by revealing the corruption of...man, I don't even remember. REVOLUTION. WE WERE GOING TO START ONE.
We are like 3rd level and we get in a fight with like four or five rogues that are all at least 4th level and all of them have enough ranks in balance that grease is useless. Somehow we win due to glitterdust and stinking cloud being awesome. Blind and nauseated enemies are easy to kill. We get some REAL TREASURE and there are lengthy arguments about how Vow of Poverty works. OSDM is totally willing to let Z's character receive favors like spells cast or consumable items from the church in exchange for tithes. Z is like, "no, VoP does not work that way" and we do some bullshit involving calculating Z's character's share of the treasure which we must summarily set on fire by giving it to priests.
Then all that shit about revolutions goes out the window and never gets revisted because we start working for an Adventurer's Guild that hires people to go do random adventurer junk and they want us to go to a mountain and get magical metal that is liquid at room temperature. They will pay us exhorbitant sums (like 1000gp per ounce, which is great, because we don't even have 1000gp between us) to recover said magical metal. So we leave the city!
Next: We travel to a mountain, almost get murdered by elves, and find no magical metal because OSDM wants to run an old-school module he converted that contains no magical metal but has lots of rooms full of demons.