I like to keep a oneshot in my back pocket ready to go in case of stuff like that. Use to be that we'd pull out a board game, but nowadays we're too far spread out to play in person so our games are online.
So we were playing in our GURPS sword & revolver homebrew setting, when our party finally made it to the island of demihuman abominations.
Our that guy (human male daggerflinger) player then went straight to the local beastfolk brothel.
However, instead of picking one of the Vixen girls available (or ar least a vixen girl (male)), he decided for a *urgh*... human prostitute...
Needless to say, we sentenced him to 24 hours of 12 inch pegging for his homosexualry and exiled him afterwards
>sword & revolver homebrew setting
I've considered such a thing before but came to the conclusion that no one would use swords in a setting where revolvers are an option, how do you pull it off? I know the rest of your story is shit that never happened but that part isn't related to it so it might be true.
There was still a place for melee in WW1 or the wild west.
In GURPS you can shift it even further by making the monster more resistant to piercing damage, or mostly melee. A horde of zombies isn't gonna be stopped by 20 people with revolvers, 20 people with swords might do it.
Depends how big the horde is and how well your guys know how to use their weapon of choice. Melee is generally a bad plan against any amount of zombies that can swarm you, unless you change things up with maneuvering or chokepoints or something of the like. 20 guys with melee I would hope are at least passingly familiar with the concept of formation fighting.
In a vacuum, if you assume revolvers with six shots each and no reload, your revolver guys can kill a theoretical maximum of 120 zeds before they start pistol-whipping skulls open, presuming they can maintain distance, and twice that with a single reload. The question you have to ask is whether your 20 guys are each fit enough and dexterous enough to kill six to twelve zeds each without getting dragged into the horde and devoured, or otherwise bitten.
Also, is the sword all they have, or do they have a shield as well, or any other armor? If all you need is to stop bites, a coat of chainmail will do it well enough, just get a helmet, gauntlets, and something for your legs. Hell, a gambeson would stop bites flat, the issue with that is just gaps in coverage.
Presuming a unit of 20 well-equipped medieval footmen with basic competence and enough chutzpah not to break at the first sign of undead, they could probably fight until exhaustion. Getting outflanked means they get brought down, getting brought down means it's only a matter of time before you're either bitten, torn apart, or crushed under the weight of hungering undead. Getting exhausted means the same. If they were to hold a choke-point, say something five men across, and keep cycling in blocks of four, they could likely go until their discipline breaks or the zeds get lucky, though it's quite likely they'd end up barricading the choke-point with dead zeds before the end of it.
Point in favor of your gunmen, the melee guys are going to die fricking instantly if a mega-horde shows up, World War Z style. Gunmen can maneuver better.
It was actually a somewhat common thing among European officers in colonial settings, like the British Raj. Two-handed weapons got in the way of giving orders but a sword can be used as a stick to direct movements. The reason they used swords at all was many of these colonies had hostile forces that mostly used melee weapons so needing to defend yourself in close combat was an actual concern. Parry, then shoot the attacker.
Put fantasy creatures into the mix and I could see melee weapons lasting much longer as mainstays in combat, if for no other purpose than screening.
>but came to the conclusion that no one would use swords in a setting where revolvers are an option
Then you are very ignorant of what 'revolvers' were in their early history.
He tried playing a murderhobo in Tales of The Loop. Spent the most of all three sessions in town jail and he even had the audacity to complain about it and that that his 11 yold nerd can't murder people. What he didn't spend in jail he spent on fricking up the investigation and we lost. We've spent one of these three just unfricking what he did in the previous session.
>11-year old murderhobo
Sounds like That Guy watched too much shounen anime. This game is still on-going? Has the GM talked with That Guy about these problems?
>PC is just a misanthropic hornball forever and also tries to moralize about how everyone should be like them >player also doesn't fricking pay attention and misses a bunch of important shit
No real horror stories, I just hated the character and was sick of the player. He couldn't understand why my moralgay PC had such a problem with the bandits who were cutting the limbs off of randos for fun (because he just read past that part), but then the PC would turn around and throw a tantrum because we were trying to evict some mice from a robot we wanted to reactivate.
He was just moronic and his PC liked animals (because he was playing a ranger). He wanted her to be the sad-sack, world weary adventurer saw things how they really were and retreated into nihilistic hedonism but she had the self preservation instinct of a gnat and knew jack and shit about the setting despite supposedly living there all her life, so she just came off as a bimbo junkie.
Like the character in question. >be nihilist >make fun of everyone else for caring about anything >we actually shouldn't bother doing X because what's the point? Helping people and building a better tomorrow is a spook. >really you guys should follow my example.
I had no clue why she was even in the party tbh
A long-time friend of mine got super religious after his dad passed away. He started pushing more of his religion into our games not long after that. I mean stuff like introducing totally-not-the-Christian-God (TNCG) into our setting as a sort of overdeity that died for your sins. It's a typical D&D-esque setting in that there are multiple gods with each god having their own afterlife for their own worshippers. The TNCG's church That Guy has added to our setting believes there's an afterlife beyond the afterlife, where everyone who was born again in the TNCG's name goes (even if their soul was destroyed), which runs counter to all our previously established lore about death, souls, afterlife, etc. The TNGC's church could be wrong... but it's still strange to have them there at all. Plus, That Guy keeps introducing more PCs and npcs (we have had many campaigns and oneshots together, all taking turns as GM and player) and who are members of the TNCG's church, so the faith is growing inside our shared setting.
That's whatever though, I guess. I can put up with it, and That Guy has acknowledged that the TNCG he introduced is analogous to the Christian god but isn't meant to be literally the Christian God in an "biblical crossover" kind of sense.
What's bugging me more lately is that he has started leading each of our sessions with a prayer. He doesn't expect us to pray with him, but it's making me more and more uncomfortable when he does stuff like that. It's fine for him to be religious of course, the issue is that all of this is making it harder for me to see where the line between fantasy and real life is. I'm not sure anymore if/when That Guy might take an IC criticism of the TNCG from a PC (for example) as a personal attack on his actual OOC religion from a player.
If this was just some rando, I'd drop him from my games. But That Guy has been my friend for over a decade, longer than I've played TTRPGs.
>What's bugging me more lately is that he has started leading each of our sessions with a prayer.
I don't think there's any way I could not make fun of him for doing this if he were my friend. Sometimes you have to bully a friend for his own sake.
Crack a joke about how you're going to start a church where they believe in an AFTER after-afterlife, where people's souls go if they die inside the after-afterlife. See how he reacts.
I am Christian and this guy needs to be bashed until he stops. I hate this shit so much, it becomes bagage like being a chud a troony or commie, everything has to be spoiled by the new idealogue. Some Christians are more like ex smokers tbh
Your friend is apparently taking his dad's death extremely hard and is suffering from a fair bit of trauma.
Try actually talking to him about it. Let him know that it isn't his faith that's the problem, it's entirely how it affects the game.
There was this one guy who had no idea that Turks are known as *the* genocidal culture in history. He was genuinely surprised to find that some people find unapologetic hatred of elves unsettling, also. You can accept a lacking education. You can't tolerate hate sinks.
>elves >master race
What are they masters of, wood carving and fart huffing? The noble dwarf is the true master race. Honorable, humble, crafty, and favors a hearty meal and drink.
>regular assortment of elven advantages >typically little more advanced or better off than humans somehow
Sounds like they squander their potential more often than not. Can't see much about these frick-ups to be jealous of.
>He was genuinely surprised to find that some people find unapologetic hatred of elves unsettling, also
what the frick am I reading. Anon, I think you might be that guy in this situation
Player tried to use a mind control potion on an entire city of goblins.
Our GM had a rule that a natural 20 was a success no matter if the action was possible, unless it was god-tier territory. So it was technically possible for a thief to use a mind control potion and get full, total and permanent control over a full city of goblin. But a failure would make the PC braindead.
The player rolled a natural 20 and the game was over in the first 20 minutes of the first session.
We spent the rest of the time using the goblins to wage war on nearby kingdom using Chainmail.
The GM was pissed, he spent weeks on creating the adventure, NPCs and maps.
We had more fun than in any other campaign/adventure just because we were the ones actively creating the 'adventure' as we played instead of trying to beat the GM's plot.
Yes. I was the player who rolled a natural 20. Good times.
Which one? >gm who was only running to try and get with the girl he liked, played obvious favourites and thought rape donkeys were a funny joke >player/gm who ended up causing a fist fight, and who was so toxic that no-one in the group had an issue with kicking him >player who turned out to be a closet furry >player (furry one again) who cheated hard at 40k and tried to manipulate things to his advantage
I dont know how else to explain this but its come to my attention that the two women in my group are massive fujoshi that cant write for shit or interact with anyone but one another, and their primary source of enjoyment is having their characters sneak away to tongue wrestle.
Oh bonus points that every other session one of them makes up some contrived reason for them to get into an argument so they can "break up" so they can kiss and make up later.
Its not exactly magical realm but its close and just as exhausting.
I'll randomly add that people dunk on men who roleplay female characters because "this is totally anons fetish"/"this is a sex thing." Never had that problem with male players. Women playing male characters though? Its almost always been a sex thing. They always just make their Ideal Partner, I Can Fix Him, or Edgy Badboy With Tragic Past (but always a heart of gold.)
Pray for me anons
I'm a woman (not a troony) and I started playing as a male character only so that I wouldn't accidentally end up just playing myself. I intentionally drew him as kind of ugly (not full on ugly bastard, but somewhat big nosed, lanky and angular).
Over time, I couldn't help but start fetishizing him anyway and now I spend a lot of time using ChatGPT to generate stories in second person where I get fricked by my PC.
Good thing I'm not a fujoshi, my games just continue as normal, the other PCs are all male so my dude just interacts with them normally.
But I think I accidentally developed a fetish.
I'm sort of new to ttrpgs and to this specific board, so I genuinely didn't expect it.
But after playing some mini campaign where one pc accidentally flirted with some old guy (bad choice of words) and then went all out on it, the equilibrium between funny and uncomfortable as hell was delicate.
Fetishes, sex and romance really should stay out of the games.
Not necessarily a game I was in but one of our players was a barely closeted furry. Not quite open about it but it was very obvious. That Guy was fine and perfectly capable of playing well provided he stuck to normal characters. Dude was a genuinely good player as a guardsman in 40k.
It turned out things got a bit creepy if he was allowed to play any kind of fursona.
My friend allowed freakshit and also allowed one other player to joke about their character sleeping with a goliath. That one-time slightly bawdy joke was apparently the chink in the armour the furry needed to start making NSFW art of his characters and coming up with weird IC relationships.
I have to see this crap on my social media, unfortunately. I taught that guys GM how to GM, and everyone from our RPG circles knows that. It reflects badly on me and pisses me off that he'd make such a rookie mistake. It's bad enough that the GM even entertained the thought of playing 5th ed.
Pic is the relic I'm giving to the GM to solve the problem.
Furries aren't real, I decided this years ago and never looked back. If someone tells you that's what they are just laugh and laugh because, no, that's just a maladaptive behaviour, you can't *be* a furry
>party is a group of fugitives on the run >come across an empty cabin off a country road >player attempts to break into it so we have a place to stay/hide the night >rolls really high >GM says he can't manage it, the lock is too advanced >player visibly annoyed, shoots the window >bulletproof glass >begin heated argument about railroading >other player and I try to no avail to defuse the situation >GM eventually just decides to spoil the campaign and just tells us that the cabin belongs to a secret agency from the setting and is the entrance to a larger, underground base - it's sturdier than it looks because it's not actually made of what it appears to be. It was only there so we could make a connection later and come back to it >player: "Well, how was I meant to know that?" >player continues to make passive-aggressive remarks about how our choices don't matter for the rest of the session (he always made these kinds of comments whenever anything miffed him, could never let something go) >GM cancels the campaign a couple days later because he's "not feeling well" >problem player runs his own campaign a few months later >gets annoyed whenever we stray from his intended plot progression >is noticeably harsher on former GM compared to others
We tolerated the guy for a while after that but eventually we couldn't take his childishness and self-centered attitude anymore. That's just one of many other similar stories about the guy.
The GM would have been better off remarking that, yes, this was HIGHLY unusual for a cabin and an obvious anomaly, couching it as a mystery to solve instead of a bullshit obstacle so he didn't have to spoil things.
yup let's just never talk about anything again because its all fake or will be put on reddit or low quality youtube channels. you are so scared of having your stories monetized that its killed you in an anonymous space. you are but a dead man walking.
>WFRP: player refused to read the rulebook or setting primer and kept trying to use DnD 5e rules for everything >Cyberpunk: player started b***hing halfway through a session about how he was "bored" and "can we play something else" because we'd been doing investigation and social interaction instead of fighting. everybody else was having fun.
That's about the worst of it, which makes me pretty lucky I guess
Some players can't be helped in that situation, but I can't help but think that the second problem can be remedied. Obviously an ADHD or a brainlet, so provide something to keep them stimulated. Music, props, a personal touch to their character, or a mechanical advantage in combat for playing nice for the rest of it.
one time this newer player brought meth to one of our sessions, we thought it was yayo until we each did a bump. he told us after and we kicked him from the group. fricking junkie bring that shit to our game.
We had a really good college D&D group where everyone was the perfect type of well adjusted closeted nerd that really got into tabletop and were great at roleplaying. We'd play all the time in dorms or our rented houses and we would munch out making really elaborate dinners or ordering up buckets of chicken and pigging out on snacks and booze all night. We all stuck around the city after we graduated too and our (willingly) forever DM inherited his aunt's huge house so we had tons of comfy nights there.
Then within the span of two months three of those dweebs bought dogs and started bringing them to the DMs house. They would piss and shit everywhere, fight each other for real, bark incessantly at nothing, jump up on the table to try and steal food off plates or even right out of people's hands, chew everything they could get their mouths on, whine and whimper when they were bored, guard couches and growl and nip at people who tried to sit down, etc. These buttholes didn't train them at all properly and refused to leave them at their homes because it would be "too traumatizing" for these shitballs.
After a few months our DM lied and said he wasn't able to host D&D anymore from being too tired from his job. In reality he invited those of us without dogs and some other friends to new game nights instead.
It sucks because we really liked those other guys but they all had redditor mental illness pet owners get and just refused to accept nobody but themselves liked their heckin good bois. Once about a year later one of them heard about our session and asked to show up and our DM flatly told him no mutts and they got in a bit of a fight about it.
>started bringing them to the DMs house
Just how vapid, thoughtless and egotistic one must be to bring an animal to someone else's house unasked?
Thank goodness no such people are in my circle.
>guy joins group >seems like mild sperg at first >turns out to be huge sperg who freaks out a lot >have bantz making fun of his character >he gets steamed >later in dungeon he is critted by ogre to 0 hp >not even dead but he freaks out and pounds the table and storms off >later learned he went upstairs and smashed one of the GMs chairs >is banned for 8 months >comes back >major battle, I'm DM now >combat starts, he rolls two 2s on his attacks on his first turn >another player makes minor joke >he flips the frick out and screams FRICK YOU then throws his d20s into the minis knocking over 3 or 4 >storms out and is gone for over an hour >returns and acts like nothing happened >he comes out as a transsexual a month later >another player refuses to call him a girl when he looks nothing like him >gets kicked >another players makes the mistake of renting a room to him >he basically uses his transgender status to leverage complete tyranny, threatening to report him for discrimination if he does shit about it >tells player he can't have his girlfriend over to the house he owns while trans is there, bevause a heterosexual relationship offends him >still plays on game, makes caustic comments on other players tiny mistakes >still isn't on hormones yet but honestly now I hope he does start taking them so he stops raging so much.
>GMing a campaign is about being a dystopian fascist cop trying to wrangle in a town for the authority faction >it's subtle about the themes and I want my players to do what they feel is right >two of them are cops and the last one is just playing a robot dog >one of them was in jail due to fricking up really badly in a case and getting someone who was innocent stabbed to death before the fascist regime started, but is now being used due to his ability to shoot people >the other cop is is someone who witnessed a terrorist attack and is straight laced >the first thing straight laces does when he gets to the town is shit on every other cop for being unprofessional and takes control >he gets upset when he realizes this behavior isn't liked by the NPC cops >clams up >jailbird takes the leadership position when something dangerous starts happening >straight laces tells me 3 minutes before the next session that he can't play due to some rule he came up with to avoid playing too many TTRPGs
NTA, but how is making NPCs have a reasonable reaction to hostility punishing, exactly?
The choice as who was captain wasn't given by me but decided by the three players. He wanted to have it more than the other two did at the time.
If he continued to demean people in that way there would be harsher consequences but at the time it was a general bad mood that could be improved through better action.
I've told this story in the past but it applies here too.
this is how my players turned a fun game into an outlet for their racist beliefs.
I'm DMing curse of Strahd 5e.
the players get lured into barovia by the vistani and soon meet Ireena. so far that's pretty standard.
soon after, when the possibility of having to take down Strahd comes up my, my players start talking about how "foreign entities have no right to interfere with the political stability of a sovereign country" (their words not mine) and instead start to focus on the Vistani. start addressing them as "parasites" "societal cancer" "subhuman vermin" (and here is were I start to realize these are dangerous red flags).
the adventures proceed with them actually bringing Ireena directly to strahd in exchange of assistance to deal with the vistani. I couldn't have that happen since they're technically allied with Strahd so my players drafted, and I kid you not, a "nonagression pact" with him in all vistani related matters.
they then proceeded in rousing the population of most town and villages to purge the land from the "parasitic vermin" and basically killed and destroyed all the vistani they could reach. my players often even let the word "gypsy" skip out revealing their true colour. when I finally tried to confront them about it they seemed bothered by my stance and attempted to justify by saying that their own home countries have real issues with Roma people (my players are Serbian, Romanian and Hungarian). this has left a very sour taste in my mouth and ruined CoS for me.
People who get weird about people not liking gypsies have never been around them. They're not an oppressed racial minority, they're just a pack of weird buttholes
>"foreign entities have no right to interfere with the political stability of a sovereign country" (their words not mine) >serb, romanian, hungarian The racism against gypsies is part and parcel for them but this line right there proves they are simply clear cut morons. Steer clear of anyone from said countries who talks about "sovereignity from outside forces", dead giveaway.
State Sovereignty has been an underpinning concept in international relations for nearly 400 years. Discarding it would lead to the normalization of actions ranging from assassinations and regime change to territorial conquest.
>Discarding it would lead to the normalization of actions ranging from assassinations and regime change to territorial conquest.
So, the shit America's been doing for most of a century?
Yes but in the case of said countries it's just a huge red flag of taking so called """right wing""" political talking points at face value. Obviously it's way more nuanced but filtering people based on this is a safety net to pretty easily not end up with the situation anon posted originally.
>find a 5e game though the /r/lfg subreddit >find a group running out of the abyss >rules for rolling stats say "roll 4d6 7 times drop the lowest" >think this means drop the lowest d6 out of every set of 4 >join the first session >what sounds like a 13 year old girl starts talking >she's playing Zoro from One Piece >not a character based on them, literally them. like she named her character Zoro >some weird busted homebrew class called "swordsman" >notice that people have really high rolls in the roll20 >eventually we're given a belt of frost giant strength by some fishfolk >we offer it to the 13 year old >she doesn't accept it because her strength is already over 23 >realize that 4d6 7 times drop the lowest means drop the lowest out of the 7 4d6s, so people have stats at 20+ at level 4
Ideally, you simply play with your IRL friends/table through discord.
Alternatively, you go to non-/tg/ related internet communities you happen to share interests with (vydia, comics, books, shows, a popular streamer circlejerk; hell, even same-fetish homosexuals do work surprisingly often) and invite them to hang out in a voice chat, and play once you get to know some of them good enough.
Going to the the lfg threads both in Ganker, Reddit and Discord isn't always a bad idea, but you already experienced how can that go wrong first hand. At least on Ganker you get a 50/50 chance of getting a decent table, or one full of pretentious spergs in multiple ways.
/tg/ isn't the kind of place you actually look for friends or players. The density of autistic weirdos to humans is too skewed towards autistic weirdos.
They appear time to time, though they usually don't last long. You could always make an opening post yourself if you don't feel like waiting.
/tg/ isn't the kind of place you actually look for friends or players. The density of autistic weirdos to humans is too skewed towards autistic weirdos.
It use to be that /tg/ would have regular gamefinder threads but the community here changed.
>perma gm for my friends >burnout, school, just wanna play the game >one friend finds a group, decide to go with. >group seems alright, 3 other dudes to make a crew of 4 with the host gming >first few sessions don't actually session, just make a char and end up bullshitting for a few hours >place is a dungeon, grimy and messy, ttrpg stuff everywhere along with garbage, empty cans, gnarly bathroom >attend for the promise of dnd to come >gm finally reads enough of CoS to run the first part >Slow grinding progress to get through anything, since the table is always bullshitting, drinking, smoking cigs and weed >gm inevitably gets too fricked up to continue about 2 hours into each session >one of the players sizes me up and says "I could probably kill anon if I needed to." >gm keeps cracking the most painfully unfunny jokes english can manage and cackling at max volume >other player who didn't remark about killing me stops attending >the only other player who kept combat moving >wtf am I wasting my time at these sessions for >stop attending >friend tells me a few weeks later he left too >gm just kept getting drunk while the other player ripped a bong every 30 mins
Campaign ended for me at level 4. I can enjoy crude jokes, drinking and smoking at the table but if that's all there is, what the frick just drop the pretext of gaming and hang out. It's a shame too, since the GM had a resin printer and a huge collection of quality minis and terrain. Oh well.
The fricking war in Ukraine turned half the table into That Guys in under a week. Previously, having players who're well-read and knowledgeable about geopolitics was a huge boon, because it meant I could weave in some some more obscure ideas that they'd pick up on and pass down to the less interested members, fostering discussion without requiring a GM exposition dump. The problem is that now everything is parsed through this filter of Liberal International Order vs Multipolar Authoritarianism. One player is less of an issue, because he doesn't instigate, but if he's goaded by the real troublemakers he'll launch into an impassioned defence of national sovereignty and democratic institutions. The real issues are the reddit-tier, unironic NAFO contributor who CONSTANTLY attacks anything traditional or authoritarian, and the "Russian" (his family fled from it during Stalin's post-war purges) who completely ignores the actions of Russia and blames everything on the CIA and Ukrainian aggression. The second the heckin' NAFO doggo intentionally misconstrues an innocuous statement and makes a crack about, say, wanting to get paid by the ultra-conservative theocracy which looks like Imperial Russia if you squint really hard, the "Russian" either launches into a defence of authoritarian shitholes as being trad and based or simply becomes a whining, sullen child for the rest of the session.
I know this group is going to implode soon, or if one side wins the war, but I'm going to stick it out because the good times are great and outweighs the constant tension between just two of them.
Wow, you like in a microcosm. Pretty cool. This is also why the rule 'we don't talk religion, money, or politics' exists, because even people who agree, or at least agree to disagree, or otherwise will get along; can sink a social atmosphere into the fricking depths of hell from which it can not recover.
It's probably too late for that now. But consider it in future.
>the Russian in my group got fricking drafted
He's still alive but obviously he can't play and is in a fricked headspace. Told us he got shelled once and having convos in English even over Discord is a big risk for him.
I was looking forward to our PCs butting heads about shit, too. Every day I pray Putin wisens up for two goddam seconds and sends his dudes home.
I'll support either side in that war so long as the Ukranian people string Zelensky up on a public square for genocide. I'd do the same for the Russian people stringing up Putin and his cronies for their role in it.
This is a game from years ago: >Friend GMing for the first time with current group >His GM joins as a PC >Takes advantage of my friends naivete and creates a character from third party shit >Character is OP af >Soloing entire encounters with shadow beasts and shit >I start RPing my character to be bored by every encounter cos he's just watching this dude annihilate whole groups of enemies >Minor thing, but this guy never asks to do anything just says "I'm gonna do this" then rolls the dice without checking if he can >After every session my friend and I discuss how fricked it all is
Unfortunately cos of the history of the group my friend didn't have the gumption to tell them they were being buttholes so I ended up leaving by saying they needed to respect him more as a GM and stop being such buttholes.
Every time I think about it I hope it worked out in his favour.
He didn't show up. He was the GM.
I like to keep a oneshot in my back pocket ready to go in case of stuff like that. Use to be that we'd pull out a board game, but nowadays we're too far spread out to play in person so our games are online.
same, what an butthole
I was even willing to be the replacement gm but he say he will show up and didn't again, everyone gaved up after that
So we were playing in our GURPS sword & revolver homebrew setting, when our party finally made it to the island of demihuman abominations.
Our that guy (human male daggerflinger) player then went straight to the local beastfolk brothel.
However, instead of picking one of the Vixen girls available (or ar least a vixen girl (male)), he decided for a *urgh*... human prostitute...
Needless to say, we sentenced him to 24 hours of 12 inch pegging for his homosexualry and exiled him afterwards
>sword & revolver homebrew setting
I've considered such a thing before but came to the conclusion that no one would use swords in a setting where revolvers are an option, how do you pull it off? I know the rest of your story is shit that never happened but that part isn't related to it so it might be true.
Scarcity and/or romanticism. There was a dude who went into battle in WWII fighting with a bow and arrow, a claymore and a set of bagpipes after all.
Energy shields & anti-shield melee weapons. Putting anti-shield tech into projectiles is possible, but too expensive to be viable
There was still a place for melee in WW1 or the wild west.
In GURPS you can shift it even further by making the monster more resistant to piercing damage, or mostly melee. A horde of zombies isn't gonna be stopped by 20 people with revolvers, 20 people with swords might do it.
Depends how big the horde is and how well your guys know how to use their weapon of choice. Melee is generally a bad plan against any amount of zombies that can swarm you, unless you change things up with maneuvering or chokepoints or something of the like. 20 guys with melee I would hope are at least passingly familiar with the concept of formation fighting.
In a vacuum, if you assume revolvers with six shots each and no reload, your revolver guys can kill a theoretical maximum of 120 zeds before they start pistol-whipping skulls open, presuming they can maintain distance, and twice that with a single reload. The question you have to ask is whether your 20 guys are each fit enough and dexterous enough to kill six to twelve zeds each without getting dragged into the horde and devoured, or otherwise bitten.
Also, is the sword all they have, or do they have a shield as well, or any other armor? If all you need is to stop bites, a coat of chainmail will do it well enough, just get a helmet, gauntlets, and something for your legs. Hell, a gambeson would stop bites flat, the issue with that is just gaps in coverage.
Presuming a unit of 20 well-equipped medieval footmen with basic competence and enough chutzpah not to break at the first sign of undead, they could probably fight until exhaustion. Getting outflanked means they get brought down, getting brought down means it's only a matter of time before you're either bitten, torn apart, or crushed under the weight of hungering undead. Getting exhausted means the same. If they were to hold a choke-point, say something five men across, and keep cycling in blocks of four, they could likely go until their discipline breaks or the zeds get lucky, though it's quite likely they'd end up barricading the choke-point with dead zeds before the end of it.
Point in favor of your gunmen, the melee guys are going to die fricking instantly if a mega-horde shows up, World War Z style. Gunmen can maneuver better.
It was actually a somewhat common thing among European officers in colonial settings, like the British Raj. Two-handed weapons got in the way of giving orders but a sword can be used as a stick to direct movements. The reason they used swords at all was many of these colonies had hostile forces that mostly used melee weapons so needing to defend yourself in close combat was an actual concern. Parry, then shoot the attacker.
Put fantasy creatures into the mix and I could see melee weapons lasting much longer as mainstays in combat, if for no other purpose than screening.
>but came to the conclusion that no one would use swords in a setting where revolvers are an option
Then you are very ignorant of what 'revolvers' were in their early history.
Rifle and sabre is literally a blanket term for post Napoleonic, pre industrialisation warfare, tells ya what
A sword and revolver is what most cavalrymen went into battle with during the victorian era
He tried playing a murderhobo in Tales of The Loop. Spent the most of all three sessions in town jail and he even had the audacity to complain about it and that that his 11 yold nerd can't murder people. What he didn't spend in jail he spent on fricking up the investigation and we lost. We've spent one of these three just unfricking what he did in the previous session.
I hope that player was banned from the table.
>11-year old murderhobo
Sounds like That Guy watched too much shounen anime. This game is still on-going? Has the GM talked with That Guy about these problems?
>PC is just a misanthropic hornball forever and also tries to moralize about how everyone should be like them
>player also doesn't fricking pay attention and misses a bunch of important shit
No real horror stories, I just hated the character and was sick of the player. He couldn't understand why my moralgay PC had such a problem with the bandits who were cutting the limbs off of randos for fun (because he just read past that part), but then the PC would turn around and throw a tantrum because we were trying to evict some mice from a robot we wanted to reactivate.
Sounds like his character was a proponent of the NAP and an ANCAP
He was just moronic and his PC liked animals (because he was playing a ranger). He wanted her to be the sad-sack, world weary adventurer saw things how they really were and retreated into nihilistic hedonism but she had the self preservation instinct of a gnat and knew jack and shit about the setting despite supposedly living there all her life, so she just came off as a bimbo junkie.
>everyone should be like them
like who?
Like the character in question.
>be nihilist
>make fun of everyone else for caring about anything
>we actually shouldn't bother doing X because what's the point? Helping people and building a better tomorrow is a spook.
>really you guys should follow my example.
I had no clue why she was even in the party tbh
Not "ruined" but definitely "has made awkward":
A long-time friend of mine got super religious after his dad passed away. He started pushing more of his religion into our games not long after that. I mean stuff like introducing totally-not-the-Christian-God (TNCG) into our setting as a sort of overdeity that died for your sins. It's a typical D&D-esque setting in that there are multiple gods with each god having their own afterlife for their own worshippers. The TNCG's church That Guy has added to our setting believes there's an afterlife beyond the afterlife, where everyone who was born again in the TNCG's name goes (even if their soul was destroyed), which runs counter to all our previously established lore about death, souls, afterlife, etc. The TNGC's church could be wrong... but it's still strange to have them there at all. Plus, That Guy keeps introducing more PCs and npcs (we have had many campaigns and oneshots together, all taking turns as GM and player) and who are members of the TNCG's church, so the faith is growing inside our shared setting.
That's whatever though, I guess. I can put up with it, and That Guy has acknowledged that the TNCG he introduced is analogous to the Christian god but isn't meant to be literally the Christian God in an "biblical crossover" kind of sense.
What's bugging me more lately is that he has started leading each of our sessions with a prayer. He doesn't expect us to pray with him, but it's making me more and more uncomfortable when he does stuff like that. It's fine for him to be religious of course, the issue is that all of this is making it harder for me to see where the line between fantasy and real life is. I'm not sure anymore if/when That Guy might take an IC criticism of the TNCG from a PC (for example) as a personal attack on his actual OOC religion from a player.
If this was just some rando, I'd drop him from my games. But That Guy has been my friend for over a decade, longer than I've played TTRPGs.
>What's bugging me more lately is that he has started leading each of our sessions with a prayer.
I don't think there's any way I could not make fun of him for doing this if he were my friend. Sometimes you have to bully a friend for his own sake.
Crack a joke about how you're going to start a church where they believe in an AFTER after-afterlife, where people's souls go if they die inside the after-afterlife. See how he reacts.
I am Christian and this guy needs to be bashed until he stops. I hate this shit so much, it becomes bagage like being a chud a troony or commie, everything has to be spoiled by the new idealogue. Some Christians are more like ex smokers tbh
>Have greybeard GM
>Literal, actual theologian
>The gaming room has a crucifix and pictures of Mary on the walls
>He doesn't do any of that stuff
Your friend is apparently taking his dad's death extremely hard and is suffering from a fair bit of trauma.
Try actually talking to him about it. Let him know that it isn't his faith that's the problem, it's entirely how it affects the game.
Why are you so offended by a player praying?
he's not offended, he just said it made things awkward. Leading the sessions with a prayer is fricking weird.
Shalom
Murderhobos in Cyberpunk RED.
Enough said.
I hope they were swiftly and brutally MaxTac'd into the pavement.
Way back in the day there was a weird guy on sup/tg/ who started jerking off over a dead orc's body with no prompting. He got kicked fast.
funny how much the board changed in 10 years
I’m literally crying wtf this isn’t why I come here I come to argue about nogames stop this
In part 2 he fricks the shit out of his mom.
this is the most fakest redditest shit I've read so far this year
Ebbin wholesome level 10000 post homosexual
And you needed to express you're a bitter homosexual out of the blue because?
Nta but those people literally exist just to provoke you, it ain't worth it dude
There was this one guy who had no idea that Turks are known as *the* genocidal culture in history. He was genuinely surprised to find that some people find unapologetic hatred of elves unsettling, also. You can accept a lacking education. You can't tolerate hate sinks.
The Turkish hate Elves?
Are the Armenian people Elves?
You sound like a homosexual and a knife ear.
Hating the "fantasy master race" is a sign of insecurity.
>elves
>master race
What are they masters of, wood carving and fart huffing? The noble dwarf is the true master race. Honorable, humble, crafty, and favors a hearty meal and drink.
Post physique
>humble, crafty, and favors a hearty meal and drink.
that's more of a halfling
>regular assortment of elven advantages
>typically little more advanced or better off than humans somehow
Sounds like they squander their potential more often than not. Can't see much about these frick-ups to be jealous of.
>He was genuinely surprised to find that some people find unapologetic hatred of elves unsettling, also
what the frick am I reading. Anon, I think you might be that guy in this situation
Player tried to use a mind control potion on an entire city of goblins.
Our GM had a rule that a natural 20 was a success no matter if the action was possible, unless it was god-tier territory. So it was technically possible for a thief to use a mind control potion and get full, total and permanent control over a full city of goblin. But a failure would make the PC braindead.
The player rolled a natural 20 and the game was over in the first 20 minutes of the first session.
We spent the rest of the time using the goblins to wage war on nearby kingdom using Chainmail.
The GM was pissed, he spent weeks on creating the adventure, NPCs and maps.
We had more fun than in any other campaign/adventure just because we were the ones actively creating the 'adventure' as we played instead of trying to beat the GM's plot.
Yes. I was the player who rolled a natural 20. Good times.
Sounds like the players and GM are not on the same page what they want out of the game. Have you talked aboit this?
Which one?
>gm who was only running to try and get with the girl he liked, played obvious favourites and thought rape donkeys were a funny joke
>player/gm who ended up causing a fist fight, and who was so toxic that no-one in the group had an issue with kicking him
>player who turned out to be a closet furry
>player (furry one again) who cheated hard at 40k and tried to manipulate things to his advantage
who ended up causing a fist fight, and who was so toxic that no-one in the group had an issue with kicking him
Kicking in a fist fight is quite rude.
I dont know how else to explain this but its come to my attention that the two women in my group are massive fujoshi that cant write for shit or interact with anyone but one another, and their primary source of enjoyment is having their characters sneak away to tongue wrestle.
Oh bonus points that every other session one of them makes up some contrived reason for them to get into an argument so they can "break up" so they can kiss and make up later.
Its not exactly magical realm but its close and just as exhausting.
I'll randomly add that people dunk on men who roleplay female characters because "this is totally anons fetish"/"this is a sex thing." Never had that problem with male players. Women playing male characters though? Its almost always been a sex thing. They always just make their Ideal Partner, I Can Fix Him, or Edgy Badboy With Tragic Past (but always a heart of gold.)
Pray for me anons
Your fault for not nipping it in the bud
>playing with women
I seriously hope you guys don't do this.
Those aren't women anon
I'm a woman (not a troony) and I started playing as a male character only so that I wouldn't accidentally end up just playing myself. I intentionally drew him as kind of ugly (not full on ugly bastard, but somewhat big nosed, lanky and angular).
Over time, I couldn't help but start fetishizing him anyway and now I spend a lot of time using ChatGPT to generate stories in second person where I get fricked by my PC.
Good thing I'm not a fujoshi, my games just continue as normal, the other PCs are all male so my dude just interacts with them normally.
But I think I accidentally developed a fetish.
I mean you post on /tg/; randomly rolling a fetish for no conceivable reason is just a fact of life here.
I'm sort of new to ttrpgs and to this specific board, so I genuinely didn't expect it.
But after playing some mini campaign where one pc accidentally flirted with some old guy (bad choice of words) and then went all out on it, the equilibrium between funny and uncomfortable as hell was delicate.
Fetishes, sex and romance really should stay out of the games.
Genuinely this. Any romance happens must be done in the background(if at all). Anyone who disagrees with this is too far gone
Not necessarily a game I was in but one of our players was a barely closeted furry. Not quite open about it but it was very obvious. That Guy was fine and perfectly capable of playing well provided he stuck to normal characters. Dude was a genuinely good player as a guardsman in 40k.
It turned out things got a bit creepy if he was allowed to play any kind of fursona.
My friend allowed freakshit and also allowed one other player to joke about their character sleeping with a goliath. That one-time slightly bawdy joke was apparently the chink in the armour the furry needed to start making NSFW art of his characters and coming up with weird IC relationships.
I have to see this crap on my social media, unfortunately. I taught that guys GM how to GM, and everyone from our RPG circles knows that. It reflects badly on me and pisses me off that he'd make such a rookie mistake. It's bad enough that the GM even entertained the thought of playing 5th ed.
Pic is the relic I'm giving to the GM to solve the problem.
Furries aren't real, I decided this years ago and never looked back. If someone tells you that's what they are just laugh and laugh because, no, that's just a maladaptive behaviour, you can't *be* a furry
>party is a group of fugitives on the run
>come across an empty cabin off a country road
>player attempts to break into it so we have a place to stay/hide the night
>rolls really high
>GM says he can't manage it, the lock is too advanced
>player visibly annoyed, shoots the window
>bulletproof glass
>begin heated argument about railroading
>other player and I try to no avail to defuse the situation
>GM eventually just decides to spoil the campaign and just tells us that the cabin belongs to a secret agency from the setting and is the entrance to a larger, underground base - it's sturdier than it looks because it's not actually made of what it appears to be. It was only there so we could make a connection later and come back to it
>player: "Well, how was I meant to know that?"
>player continues to make passive-aggressive remarks about how our choices don't matter for the rest of the session (he always made these kinds of comments whenever anything miffed him, could never let something go)
>GM cancels the campaign a couple days later because he's "not feeling well"
>problem player runs his own campaign a few months later
>gets annoyed whenever we stray from his intended plot progression
>is noticeably harsher on former GM compared to others
We tolerated the guy for a while after that but eventually we couldn't take his childishness and self-centered attitude anymore. That's just one of many other similar stories about the guy.
The GM would have been better off remarking that, yes, this was HIGHLY unusual for a cabin and an obvious anomaly, couching it as a mystery to solve instead of a bullshit obstacle so he didn't have to spoil things.
That Guy sounds like a douche, but that sounds like your GM wasn't all that good at his job either.
Content farm thread
yup let's just never talk about anything again because its all fake or will be put on reddit or low quality youtube channels. you are so scared of having your stories monetized that its killed you in an anonymous space. you are but a dead man walking.
/tg/ should be about sitting in your designated general and complaining about the newest iteration of things you used to enjoy 2 decades ago
DESIGNATED SHITTING GENERALS SAAR
>WFRP: player refused to read the rulebook or setting primer and kept trying to use DnD 5e rules for everything
>Cyberpunk: player started b***hing halfway through a session about how he was "bored" and "can we play something else" because we'd been doing investigation and social interaction instead of fighting. everybody else was having fun.
That's about the worst of it, which makes me pretty lucky I guess
Some players can't be helped in that situation, but I can't help but think that the second problem can be remedied. Obviously an ADHD or a brainlet, so provide something to keep them stimulated. Music, props, a personal touch to their character, or a mechanical advantage in combat for playing nice for the rest of it.
one time this newer player brought meth to one of our sessions, we thought it was yayo until we each did a bump. he told us after and we kicked him from the group. fricking junkie bring that shit to our game.
Half our group turned into The Guy overnight.
We had a really good college D&D group where everyone was the perfect type of well adjusted closeted nerd that really got into tabletop and were great at roleplaying. We'd play all the time in dorms or our rented houses and we would munch out making really elaborate dinners or ordering up buckets of chicken and pigging out on snacks and booze all night. We all stuck around the city after we graduated too and our (willingly) forever DM inherited his aunt's huge house so we had tons of comfy nights there.
Then within the span of two months three of those dweebs bought dogs and started bringing them to the DMs house. They would piss and shit everywhere, fight each other for real, bark incessantly at nothing, jump up on the table to try and steal food off plates or even right out of people's hands, chew everything they could get their mouths on, whine and whimper when they were bored, guard couches and growl and nip at people who tried to sit down, etc. These buttholes didn't train them at all properly and refused to leave them at their homes because it would be "too traumatizing" for these shitballs.
After a few months our DM lied and said he wasn't able to host D&D anymore from being too tired from his job. In reality he invited those of us without dogs and some other friends to new game nights instead.
It sucks because we really liked those other guys but they all had redditor mental illness pet owners get and just refused to accept nobody but themselves liked their heckin good bois. Once about a year later one of them heard about our session and asked to show up and our DM flatly told him no mutts and they got in a bit of a fight about it.
Genuinely horrifying.
>started bringing them to the DMs house
Just how vapid, thoughtless and egotistic one must be to bring an animal to someone else's house unasked?
Thank goodness no such people are in my circle.
The big "bad" of the entire campaign was the DMs furry OC in which we had two choices:
- join and serve him
- die
this is when you kill your DM IRL and take over the slot as the forever DM, there truly isn't any other recourse over stupid bullshit like that.
Invoke Black Leaf and sacrifice your GM to the RPG Gods.
>guy joins group
>seems like mild sperg at first
>turns out to be huge sperg who freaks out a lot
>have bantz making fun of his character
>he gets steamed
>later in dungeon he is critted by ogre to 0 hp
>not even dead but he freaks out and pounds the table and storms off
>later learned he went upstairs and smashed one of the GMs chairs
>is banned for 8 months
>comes back
>major battle, I'm DM now
>combat starts, he rolls two 2s on his attacks on his first turn
>another player makes minor joke
>he flips the frick out and screams FRICK YOU then throws his d20s into the minis knocking over 3 or 4
>storms out and is gone for over an hour
>returns and acts like nothing happened
>he comes out as a transsexual a month later
>another player refuses to call him a girl when he looks nothing like him
>gets kicked
>another players makes the mistake of renting a room to him
>he basically uses his transgender status to leverage complete tyranny, threatening to report him for discrimination if he does shit about it
>tells player he can't have his girlfriend over to the house he owns while trans is there, bevause a heterosexual relationship offends him
>still plays on game, makes caustic comments on other players tiny mistakes
>still isn't on hormones yet but honestly now I hope he does start taking them so he stops raging so much.
you kicked out the guy who was refusing to play along with the troony? homosexual
learned he went upstairs and smashed one of the GMs chairs
>>is banned for 8 months
back
How fricking desperate are you for players?
What the frick is wrong with your group that made you remain in contact with this psycho?
>8 months for smashing DM's chairs
I saw a post like this a while ago.
>GMing a campaign is about being a dystopian fascist cop trying to wrangle in a town for the authority faction
>it's subtle about the themes and I want my players to do what they feel is right
>two of them are cops and the last one is just playing a robot dog
>one of them was in jail due to fricking up really badly in a case and getting someone who was innocent stabbed to death before the fascist regime started, but is now being used due to his ability to shoot people
>the other cop is is someone who witnessed a terrorist attack and is straight laced
>the first thing straight laces does when he gets to the town is shit on every other cop for being unprofessional and takes control
>he gets upset when he realizes this behavior isn't liked by the NPC cops
>clams up
>jailbird takes the leadership position when something dangerous starts happening
>straight laces tells me 3 minutes before the next session that he can't play due to some rule he came up with to avoid playing too many TTRPGs
>punishing your players for leaning into what their leader character would do
>give leadership to a shitbird
You sound like an autistic homosexual.
NTA, but how is making NPCs have a reasonable reaction to hostility punishing, exactly?
The choice as who was captain wasn't given by me but decided by the three players. He wanted to have it more than the other two did at the time.
If he continued to demean people in that way there would be harsher consequences but at the time it was a general bad mood that could be improved through better action.
I've told this story in the past but it applies here too.
this is how my players turned a fun game into an outlet for their racist beliefs.
I'm DMing curse of Strahd 5e.
the players get lured into barovia by the vistani and soon meet Ireena. so far that's pretty standard.
soon after, when the possibility of having to take down Strahd comes up my, my players start talking about how "foreign entities have no right to interfere with the political stability of a sovereign country" (their words not mine) and instead start to focus on the Vistani. start addressing them as "parasites" "societal cancer" "subhuman vermin" (and here is were I start to realize these are dangerous red flags).
the adventures proceed with them actually bringing Ireena directly to strahd in exchange of assistance to deal with the vistani. I couldn't have that happen since they're technically allied with Strahd so my players drafted, and I kid you not, a "nonagression pact" with him in all vistani related matters.
they then proceeded in rousing the population of most town and villages to purge the land from the "parasitic vermin" and basically killed and destroyed all the vistani they could reach. my players often even let the word "gypsy" skip out revealing their true colour. when I finally tried to confront them about it they seemed bothered by my stance and attempted to justify by saying that their own home countries have real issues with Roma people (my players are Serbian, Romanian and Hungarian). this has left a very sour taste in my mouth and ruined CoS for me.
Where did you meet that group, /tg/?
a couple were friends of friends, one was a previous colleague and the last one was a fellow player in an old adventure we played years ago
People who get weird about people not liking gypsies have never been around them. They're not an oppressed racial minority, they're just a pack of weird buttholes
are you sure you're not talking about cumskins
>Doesn't believe other people's lived experiences
Isn't that a micro aggression?
Gypsies 100% deserve it. You don't have to tell me what "it" is, they do.
>"foreign entities have no right to interfere with the political stability of a sovereign country" (their words not mine)
>serb, romanian, hungarian
The racism against gypsies is part and parcel for them but this line right there proves they are simply clear cut morons. Steer clear of anyone from said countries who talks about "sovereignity from outside forces", dead giveaway.
State Sovereignty has been an underpinning concept in international relations for nearly 400 years. Discarding it would lead to the normalization of actions ranging from assassinations and regime change to territorial conquest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system
>Discarding it would lead to the normalization of actions ranging from assassinations and regime change to territorial conquest.
So, the shit America's been doing for most of a century?
Yes, except without a prejudice against this type of activity it would be even more common and widespread.
Yes
Yes but in the case of said countries it's just a huge red flag of taking so called """right wing""" political talking points at face value. Obviously it's way more nuanced but filtering people based on this is a safety net to pretty easily not end up with the situation anon posted originally.
>find a 5e game though the /r/lfg subreddit
>find a group running out of the abyss
>rules for rolling stats say "roll 4d6 7 times drop the lowest"
>think this means drop the lowest d6 out of every set of 4
>join the first session
>what sounds like a 13 year old girl starts talking
>she's playing Zoro from One Piece
>not a character based on them, literally them. like she named her character Zoro
>some weird busted homebrew class called "swordsman"
>notice that people have really high rolls in the roll20
>eventually we're given a belt of frost giant strength by some fishfolk
>we offer it to the 13 year old
>she doesn't accept it because her strength is already over 23
>realize that 4d6 7 times drop the lowest means drop the lowest out of the 7 4d6s, so people have stats at 20+ at level 4
is there a better place to find online games?
Ideally, you simply play with your IRL friends/table through discord.
Alternatively, you go to non-/tg/ related internet communities you happen to share interests with (vydia, comics, books, shows, a popular streamer circlejerk; hell, even same-fetish homosexuals do work surprisingly often) and invite them to hang out in a voice chat, and play once you get to know some of them good enough.
Going to the the lfg threads both in Ganker, Reddit and Discord isn't always a bad idea, but you already experienced how can that go wrong first hand. At least on Ganker you get a 50/50 chance of getting a decent table, or one full of pretentious spergs in multiple ways.
where do I find lfg threads on the board?
They appear time to time, though they usually don't last long. You could always make an opening post yourself if you don't feel like waiting.
/tg/ isn't the kind of place you actually look for friends or players. The density of autistic weirdos to humans is too skewed towards autistic weirdos.
It use to be that /tg/ would have regular gamefinder threads but the community here changed.
>perma gm for my friends
>burnout, school, just wanna play the game
>one friend finds a group, decide to go with.
>group seems alright, 3 other dudes to make a crew of 4 with the host gming
>first few sessions don't actually session, just make a char and end up bullshitting for a few hours
>place is a dungeon, grimy and messy, ttrpg stuff everywhere along with garbage, empty cans, gnarly bathroom
>attend for the promise of dnd to come
>gm finally reads enough of CoS to run the first part
>Slow grinding progress to get through anything, since the table is always bullshitting, drinking, smoking cigs and weed
>gm inevitably gets too fricked up to continue about 2 hours into each session
>one of the players sizes me up and says "I could probably kill anon if I needed to."
>gm keeps cracking the most painfully unfunny jokes english can manage and cackling at max volume
>other player who didn't remark about killing me stops attending
>the only other player who kept combat moving
>wtf am I wasting my time at these sessions for
>stop attending
>friend tells me a few weeks later he left too
>gm just kept getting drunk while the other player ripped a bong every 30 mins
Campaign ended for me at level 4. I can enjoy crude jokes, drinking and smoking at the table but if that's all there is, what the frick just drop the pretext of gaming and hang out. It's a shame too, since the GM had a resin printer and a huge collection of quality minis and terrain. Oh well.
>junkies
A very visible red flag.
The fricking war in Ukraine turned half the table into That Guys in under a week. Previously, having players who're well-read and knowledgeable about geopolitics was a huge boon, because it meant I could weave in some some more obscure ideas that they'd pick up on and pass down to the less interested members, fostering discussion without requiring a GM exposition dump. The problem is that now everything is parsed through this filter of Liberal International Order vs Multipolar Authoritarianism. One player is less of an issue, because he doesn't instigate, but if he's goaded by the real troublemakers he'll launch into an impassioned defence of national sovereignty and democratic institutions. The real issues are the reddit-tier, unironic NAFO contributor who CONSTANTLY attacks anything traditional or authoritarian, and the "Russian" (his family fled from it during Stalin's post-war purges) who completely ignores the actions of Russia and blames everything on the CIA and Ukrainian aggression. The second the heckin' NAFO doggo intentionally misconstrues an innocuous statement and makes a crack about, say, wanting to get paid by the ultra-conservative theocracy which looks like Imperial Russia if you squint really hard, the "Russian" either launches into a defence of authoritarian shitholes as being trad and based or simply becomes a whining, sullen child for the rest of the session.
I know this group is going to implode soon, or if one side wins the war, but I'm going to stick it out because the good times are great and outweighs the constant tension between just two of them.
You are unironically a victim of the Russian-Ukrainian war
Wow, you like in a microcosm. Pretty cool. This is also why the rule 'we don't talk religion, money, or politics' exists, because even people who agree, or at least agree to disagree, or otherwise will get along; can sink a social atmosphere into the fricking depths of hell from which it can not recover.
It's probably too late for that now. But consider it in future.
>Like
Live*
But it still works.
>the Russian in my group got fricking drafted
He's still alive but obviously he can't play and is in a fricked headspace. Told us he got shelled once and having convos in English even over Discord is a big risk for him.
I was looking forward to our PCs butting heads about shit, too. Every day I pray Putin wisens up for two goddam seconds and sends his dudes home.
I'll support either side in that war so long as the Ukranian people string Zelensky up on a public square for genocide. I'd do the same for the Russian people stringing up Putin and his cronies for their role in it.
Typical american post.
This is a game from years ago:
>Friend GMing for the first time with current group
>His GM joins as a PC
>Takes advantage of my friends naivete and creates a character from third party shit
>Character is OP af
>Soloing entire encounters with shadow beasts and shit
>I start RPing my character to be bored by every encounter cos he's just watching this dude annihilate whole groups of enemies
>Minor thing, but this guy never asks to do anything just says "I'm gonna do this" then rolls the dice without checking if he can
>After every session my friend and I discuss how fricked it all is
Unfortunately cos of the history of the group my friend didn't have the gumption to tell them they were being buttholes so I ended up leaving by saying they needed to respect him more as a GM and stop being such buttholes.
Every time I think about it I hope it worked out in his favour.