I'm really not sure what to call this, so I'll just relate what happened outright. It's a pretty funny anecdote.
Anyway, my college group decided to play the DIE RPG i.e. the isekai adventure RPG. In brief, the concept is that the players play as depressed adults who get sucked into a fantasy world and end up as their RPG characters, with the final choice coming down to "Are you going to stay in the fantasy world or go back and face reality?"
I find it's an interesting setup, but unfortunately the game really leans towards kind of hipster Scott Pilgrim-esque "Learn from your flaws and face reality, but not in a serious commitment" kind of way, where you're supposed to hug it out instead of embrace the power fantasy.
So we played with five players (and 1 DM) and it pretty much went how you'd expect with a group that slants progressive.
>Girl decides that she wants to quit her job to pursue art
>Guy realizes he's gay
>Guy realizes he needs to stop clinging to the past and get on with his life
>My character wants to stay in the fantasy world, so his conflict is irrelevant
So it's really boilerplate stuff, the kind of stuff you expect to see at the end of a modern novel i.e. the epiphanies that are sort of safe. Except for the last player:
>Guy decides to kill his family
Let me quickly explain. The last PC was playing a male nurse who kept getting compared to his successful banker sister by his well-meaning but somewhat pushy parents.
His epiphany was (after fighting his way through countless monsters as a Fear Knight, a kind of emotion-based paladin) that his family and parents were undermining him his entire life, and he really needed to be rid of them.
So while everyone was sort of hugging it out and talking about how the real world wasn't so bad, this guy was saying "Yeah, as soon as I go back, I'm going to kill my parents and my sister. Thank you, isekai God, I realize what I have to do now."
The others tried to talk him out of it, but he stood firm in his convictions and refused to budge. Ultimately rather than everyone going home to the real world, they decided to stay in the fantasy world so he wouldn't kill his family.
That's the whole bit, /tg/. It's not much, but I rather enjoyed one player being able to turn things all around on the others. It made a really boring night into a fun one, but possibly uncomfortable for the others.
... ok?
tl;dr btw
>RPG with an interesting concept
>Other players make it an unfortunately boring cookie-cutter setup
>One guy revealed his powerlevel and threw a genuine wrench into the works
Honestly I kind of wish I'd done it, I was just sort of tagging along for the ride
I like Die as a nonimportant source of inspiration, it does lose a lot when you start treating it seriously though.
I particularly love the Godbinder class. Having to bargain with gods or pay them off for each "miracle" really makes the cleric an actually interesting class instead of a religious healer/magician. You can even ditch the atheist/ecumenical angle and have the cleric follow a certain religion with the deities replaced with saints and such, so you theoretically have one god with main ethos and creed but a bunch of lesser miracle-granters with their own domains and their own requests related to them.
Plus the not-Paladins being based on particular emotions were so much better than the Lawful-homosexual D&D ones that they retroactively ruined them for me.
>One guy revealed his powerlevel and threw a genuine wrench into the works
Just give him the d20, problem solved :^)
>Plus the not-Paladins being based on particular emotions were so much better than the Lawful-homosexual D&D ones that they retroactively ruined them for me.
The Emotion Knights are actually quite fun to play, though some are pretty obviously better than the others.
Wait, is this a copypasta? I swear I read this exact post before.
It is, so did I.
Sounds moronic. Both the game and the homosexual undermining the obvious intention with his homosexualry.
to be fair the obvious intention is kind of gay
Yeah, this was the plot of the comic:
>Galacticus with a D20 for a head got Roko's Basilisked into existence, went back in time to help some Kraut invent Kriegspiel so that it would cause WWI, helped Orson Welles create Little Wars, trolled HP Lovecraft by showing him images of Call of Cthulhu the RPG, and the Bronte Sisters because I guess they needed some extras. All of this was done to help some farm equipment get over his mother's death, a dumb prostitute get over her dead dog and bad life choices, a Fr*nchwoman learn to trust others, and finally, and most importantly, to help a mentally ill Troon come to terms with his genderfluidity and then throw himself off a bridge.
That is unironically the plot.
To this day I still go back and forth on if the genderfluid thing was a last minute backpedal from a full on trans plotline or was an advanced level of virtue signaling so they could brag about having a genderfluid protagonist. Either way, I've never felt the tension in a story deflate harder then when the characters got together to explain what being genderfluid meant right near the climax of the final volume.
>I've never felt the tension in a story deflate harder then when the characters got together to explain what being genderfluid meant right near the climax of the final volume.
Yeah, that was about when I kept reading only because it was close to the end and I wanted to call it done.
Is there anything else cool that the comic does that we can use, but isn’t directly mentioned in the game book?
I was under the assumption the game book is pretty much the comic fully recreated as a runable RPG, so I'm not sure what the comic did that the game book didn't. Really though I think the only ideas worth grabbing are the PC classes and the worldbuilding that extends from those (Gods as entities you can regularly chat with, technogically advanced fae, the Emotion Knights, etc). Everything else is either there to emphasize the isekai drama or Sal being a pretentious autistic teenager building a world.
I was talking more plot-wise in regards to the comic stuff, but thanks anyway. What have you done in your campaigns, BTW?
Yes. But if you don't like it then just don't play the homosexual game instead of forcing yourself through it and then ruining it for the gays that are into that shit.
What class would you prefer to play in this and why? Since I’m the usual GM for my group, you can probably guess what I picked.
I like the idea of negotiating with gods instead of worshiping them for power. Adds a bit of warlock to it.