Lawyers & Paperwork
(midwest.social)
RPGMemes There's playing a quirky character, and then there's refusing to engage with the premise of the game and spoiling the fun for everyone else. Hope this guy read the room carefully before pulling this stunt.
"It's just a game"
But this isn't Slap-Happy Jack the Firbolg, this is a lawyer in an urban RPG. It's like playing as Lois Lane, I bet the GM loved it.
"The DM hated me"...
I think it's like "oh no don't fireball all these goblins I put next to each other!"
He specifically did not
If you are DMing and you have an action your players are "supposed" to take, you have made a grievous error.
If the action one player takes prevents the rest of the party from contributing, I can see why the GM would be annoyed.
that's when the rest of the party is supposed to fight against the most evil villain in the d&d world... Lawyers.
Idk if I was the GM I'd have the vampires fire bomb the PC's sleeping quarters
On the one hand, totally fair. on the other hand, I'm not sure how familiar the DM was with law, or how to turn that into an exciting encounter for the other players.
At the end of a day, a DM's creativity is allowed to have a limit, they're human. Even if the obviously correct answer is an Ace Attorney-esque court battle with the vampires where every player can live out the fantasy of shouting "OBJECTION!!!"
Absolutely DMs have limits — I’m a DM and I am acutely aware of my limits. If you can’t make filing the paperwork exciting, maybe the party gets jumped on the way to filing, or the law clerk you have to file with is a vampire, or the inspectors keep getting vampire-ified and the party has to go investigate. But you can be guaranteed that any time you make a plan contingent on the party doing what they’re supposed to, they won’t actually do that thing.
Been there. Players are so insane with the curveballs they throw. It's why I don't invest heavily into reading/planning on what's specifically in the adventure packs anymore. I just write down a list of the most important rules for the campaign/universe and vibe the rest.
I try to disclose to my players when they've left the track. "Okay guys, I have nothing written here. Anything beyond this point is improvised, so if I make a mistake or forget something, lemme know."
I'll break immersion to tell them when they're reading too much into something, or they've completely ignored information that will save them hours of frustration. I want to respect their time and their intelligence, and in return they've been pretty good about keeping sidequests brief. It's been nice, mature, and very easy to take notes.
My players are the opposite. They seem to probe for the "right" railroad choice and I wish they'd throw me a curveball every so often! I'll improvise if they let me!
You and me both brother/sister. I'm running a more sandboxy game, but most of the players are there for railroad and chill. We (me and the former DM, now PC) are slowly getting them to make self directed decisions.
I see some DMs with their 400 pages of notes going into session 0, and I’m just like “oh honey.” For me, it’s primarily a cooperative storytelling game, and you’re not being cooperative if you decide the story you want told up front.
I think you're being uncharitable. Those notes could be a strict railroad novel, but they're as or more likely to be drop-in encounters, fun characters, interesting places, and so on. Plus like...some DMs just enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake, let 'em cook.
I'm up to 24 pages of notes but in my defense about a third of that is recording what happened in previous sessions precisely because the party rarely does remotely what I was expecting and also I wanna remember the countless NPCs and relationships I came up with on the spot
Notes from sessions are great, notes for sessions will usually leave someone very disappointed.
Depending on the length of rules around combat, having mandatory ones seems reasonable.
wtf is a splatbook?
Any sourcebook that isn't needed for basic play - so you can play d&d with just a player's handbook and GM handbook, but if you want additional mechanics, new classes, new settings etc you'll find them in splats.
Basically, the tabletop roleplaying game equivalent of DLC. A splatbook contains fun new spells, classes, items, abilities, and monsters that mean all new ways to make things go 'splat'.
wild...when did this term come about? been dm'ing for years, and playing since the 80s, everything from gurps, tmnt, paranoia, AD&D, palladium stuff, then pathfinder.... til a new word lol
It was a common term for D&D 3.0 and 3.5
IIRC it was Vampire the Masquerade that started it. Mark Rein•Hagen, who created VtM, used this sort of bullet-point thing in his surname and some people started calling him Mark Rien Splat Hagen. When it became obvious that each of the thirteen clans would get its own 'DLC' people started referring to those as splat books.
ty! deep lore
Early 1990s according to Wikipedia according to Appelcline (2014).
Ahhh. Cool!
I cast... DISCOVERY!!
all the lawyers go splat
My favorite character that I've ever played was a lawful evil politician sorcerer. Pulling stunts like this was my primary tactic. That and ruining reputations with prestidigitation.
Easy fix make the zoning committee super corrupt and the vampires willing to bribe more than you can.
Should be careful not to just shut down player ideas. If everything they do slams into an annoying problem, it can quickly stop being fun.
I sometimes try to sync with the players and be like "hm do you think the 300 year old vampire has had to engage with the city before? What sort of plans and influence do you think he has?". Then it doesn't feel like I'm just screwing them, if they're thinking about it too.
Or have the city's enforcers come after them for nearly revealing the supernatural. Rule one of most urban fantasy settings is "don't break the Masquerade".
Non-combat sessions can be great if everyone is on board. My fondest tabletop memory is a bottle episode where half the players didn't show, so the two players left pretended to be security consultants and scammed the nobleman whose manor we'd just robbed the previous session.
Id say it isn't over in this case. vampires have a charm ability, so I think it'd be fun to give the players a chance to play through the inspector went to check it out, let them know that they should be listening in so that the vamps don't just charm the guy into a passing inspection. if they don't play out that part, the inspector was charmed and passes them
I kinda wanna get this book for a future campaign.
I feel like there's an easy fix here, where the bureaucracy of a fantasy city could be either so slow or just non existent that this wouldn't matter.
"What is the purpose for the inspection? Yes, you're free to go inspect it if you have some business purpose... What do you mean, 'city inspectors'? What's that? Commercial zoning? What? Build whatever you want there. No no it's perfectly fine. If the last person contaminated the area... Well then build somewhere else or clean it up? That's not our responsibility. If you don't like the area, just don't open a business there. No, the drinking water is not contaminated, I'm telling you I just drank from the well this morning and it was perfectly clear and clean water. If it made you sick, well, that tends to happen now and then everywhere, doesn't it? We have no laws about water never making you sick. That's ridiculous."
Or go the Ankh-Morpork way and make all bureaucracy completely nuts.
In anarchy online there was a character class of bureaucrat that would wear suits, summon bots to fight for them, slow/snare with red tape nanos, and motivational/demotivating speech nanos for buffs and debuffs
Oh man, there's a game I haven't thought about in a long time. I really enjoyed my Fixer, spent weeks grinding for a Grid Armor Mk4 disk, and then the entire thing became useless in the expansion packs.
I thought a bunch of classes were really creative, fixer and metaphysician were my favorites. I have some nostalgia for the game leveling in the sewers, group pvp, etc but it had some downsides too. It was the first game I saw a video ad play in there was a display above the shop kiosk playing military recruit ads 🤮
Yeah, I remember when they went free to play (without expansions) and added in the billboards. I think one of the first advertisements was Fanta?
I also always thought the implant system was very interesting, but it suffered from there being one or two mathematically best setups and everything else was just fluff. Still, it was fun to run around half naked and dual wielding heart print pillows asking for buffs to get stats high enough for a new gear/implant upgrade.
The Trader being able to step their way up through stat drains was kind of the epitome of this - for those unaware, the game had a half million stats that controlled individual aspects of your character, including which gear you could equip and spells you could cast. The Trader class had two different 'lines' of stat stealing spells, drains and divests, and they stacked... so the loop was to hit with the highest drain you could cast unaided, then a higher level of divest, then a higher level of drain, and so on until you couldn't hold any more buffs.
My personal second favorite class, though, was Agent. The combination of stealth + multi-critting aimed shot + being able to use other classes' spells was a lot of fun, albeit a lot to juggle.
Daredevil meets What We Do in the Shadows
The city hall episode is one of my favorites.
What?
22 comments and none about “the real monster”?
