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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 19, 2016 8:39:11 GMT -5
I don't mind strange PC races, as long as it isn't going to stop play every ten minutes as a big distraction. A Dark Elf travelling around on the surface is going to be that.
Pre-UA I had a DM who let me play a Dark Elf PC, pretty much right out of the monster description in G3. So, I had the spell-like abilities, magic resistance, special Drowic weapons, cloak, etc. I was a 2nd level fighter/1st level magic-user but began with 0 XP. The game was set in the Underworld. I was a renegade, although still chaotic evil, setting out on my own to explore some ruins or lost city. I was going to have make use of slave monsters and charm person to get my own little party going, or I wouldn't survive. I was doing a lot of searching, hiding, watching and running. Unfortunately we never got very far with it. I didn't die -- my DM just didn't run any more solo adventures for that PC.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 19, 2016 9:26:56 GMT -5
Well, if you're playing an adult, what they call "murder hobo", what I call "cheap charlie" type campaigns ( I don't think Monty Haul campaigns ever really existed in D&D as a game for adults.*) then the weird/monster as player is impossible. Its pure "CFMT" (Cigars Fine Motherfucking Tobacco?) all the way in these "sleep like a pig"/"embark without gear"/"players are my bitches" type campaigns that I was in for years in the 90's when the old campaign fizzled and I wanted to see what was out there. Frankly, I would rather play in a childish "Monty Haul" game at least you would have a chance to reign it in to some modicum of fantasy instead of the stifling "black breath of Lorr-dor"! Weird-wise it has to be so. Monster players must exist in a D&D game sooner or later or its a game breaker. There is all kinds of ways to be transformed permanently and a having a monster sidekick that slowly gets "henchmaned-in" is a trend that I've seen from the beginning of the game and omnipresent in good campaigns (Gene Weigel certified DMs get noticed more quickly by top shelf players! ) * I watched an episode of LET'S MAKE A DEAL the other day then I looked up video of the old show and its weird that the actual show's play isn't a giveaway at all but the opposite its more like a cheap game of D&D. ZONK!!!
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 19, 2016 10:00:36 GMT -5
I think "murder hobo" refers to the sort of campaign where you have a bunch of players who say "I kill it" before you are even finished describing what they see. They just want to roam around and kill stuff -- damn the consequences.
"Monty Haul" was the nickname EGG gave to Jim Ward and DMs like him, who in EGG's opinion, gave away awards disproportionate to the challenges. This is a fairly subjective thing, since some people look at EGG's modules and think they are "Monty Haul" because of the amount of treasure and magic in them -- I disagree with this, because the challenge level is high in EGG's modules when properly DMed which can wipe out parties who are careless and/or unlucky. And even in Jim Ward's case, just because he gave away a lot of treasure and powerful magic items doesn't mean the threat level wasn't correspondingly high. In any case, in AD&D player characters never get 'tired' of treasure because it is the main engine of level advancement. So, I don't think there is a risk in giving away 'too much' treasure, just not having a high enough challenge level... either that, or making it impossible!
I guess by "Cheap Charlie" you mean 2nd edition after they reduced the "1 gp = 1 xp" rule to an option, and recommended against it... and then DMs started to get big on story awards and cheap on the treasure and as a result began keeping player characters poor as church mice. One of the longest running campaigns I have ever been in is run by a "Cheap Charlie" DM which is annoying but he makes up for it in other ways to run fun and engaging games.
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Post by Scott on Sept 19, 2016 10:17:04 GMT -5
I haven't thought abut this in a long time, but I DMed a game once that allowed monsters, but it wasn't like one player with one character (but everything was on the table), it was pick a monster entry from the Monster Manuel and you start out as a 1st level encounter, and then you work your way up. For example, one player was a tribe of gnolls. He started with 9 gnolls. As he gained experience, more gnolls would join, leader types, associated creatures, etc. In that game one player played drow. It was PvP. I didn't get very far with it.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 19, 2016 10:31:02 GMT -5
Perhaps "murder hobo" is a post-modern reaction to the standard cheap campaign trying to be "OSR-ish"?
I don't know it just seems to me that the hobo campaigns are nothing that I recall. It has to be something invented after the dawn of the cheapskate era ( post-"A player character and his money by by Lewis Pulsipher - DRAGON #74 JUN 1983 - reprint Best of #4 MAY 1985" )
The William's touch of the second half of the 80's made sure that selling us text-filled shit that we already had was the norm. So in the wake of the D&D collapse DMs ran toward super cheap as a way to survive.
Murder hobo seems to be something "hipster-ish" that is trying to be old fashioned and titillating with a verve.
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 19, 2016 10:31:14 GMT -5
I've always wanted to run an adventure where the players are humanoids in the dungeon, so they can see things from the dungeon dweller point of view:
"We go out of the dungeon this way to go on raids at night. But you better avoid that area of the dungeon because there are things that kill us there. And avoid that other area, too, because it is the territory of the rival tribe -- curse their hides."
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Post by Scott on Sept 19, 2016 10:35:53 GMT -5
I've always wanted to run an adventure where the players are humanoids in the dungeon, so they can see things from the dungeon dweller point of view: "We go out of the dungeon this way to go on raids at night. But you better avoid that area of the dungeon because there are things that kill us there. And avoid that other area, too, because it is the territory of the rival tribe -- curse their hides." That's what I was trying to set up. A real living dungeon.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 19, 2016 10:38:47 GMT -5
That was a trend in the mid-80's with "reverse dungeons" because we didn't come up with "the evil campaign" in a vacuum. My character for our campaign was done on a 1986 character sheet and seems about right. The point, for us, was to redo all the classic modules with evil over all in mind. It was ridiculous but at the same time taken seriously for the record to see how things would be. Its surprising how replayable the letter modules were at the time. I sure couldn't play any of them now because I think they're all permanently memorized.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 19, 2016 11:26:42 GMT -5
There were renowned local bad DMs in the early to mid-80's where I was in Connecticut:
Jim "the ninja"
the Riverton group
the 2 kevins
With the exception of Jim "the ninja" most didn't participate in the Barbarian Wars because you had to be somewhat physically fit.
Jim "the ninja" wasn't totally evil he was just misunderstood... NAH! He was rotten to the core! I wonder whatever became of him? Is he actually a ninja now?
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 475
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Post by foster1941 on Sept 19, 2016 12:17:06 GMT -5
I'm totally okay with "monster" characters that arise naturally through the course of play - a character is reincarnated, or the party captures/befriends a monster that becomes an ally, or the party is in an exotic location (like another plane or deep in the underworld) when a PC dies or retires and they need to recruit a replacement - but all of those are special cases, and they all assume both that the game has been going for awhile and that the players all at least started out with "standard" character-types. What I used to get annoyed by and don't allow is when we're starting a game and everybody is rolling up new 1st level characters and everybody else is generating regular elves and gnomes and whatnot, there was always some dude who wanted their character to be a kenku or a moon dog or some shit just because it's cool and unique. In my games, if you want to play some exotic non-standard character type like that you've got to earn it through play.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 19, 2016 13:12:58 GMT -5
Why is he playing a lich? Because he can... Monster players come hand in hand with the big wargame and massive amounts of players type games and I think thats what I'm always aiming for. I don't particularly like the game where the fighter asks the cleric what spells he has memorized to maximize every encounter in the session. You have to have a challenge but not at the expense of the fantasy. The sword and sorcery has to be chief not some Nintendo power up mentality. I punish monster players by default (they certainly aren't going into the tenple or the palace!) they die on the vine if there isn't support.
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 19, 2016 14:11:02 GMT -5
Scott, in your next game I want to be a moon dog.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 19, 2016 15:14:27 GMT -5
The worst was this hardcore gamer type in 2001 that when I said could play anything a week later shows up saying they want to play an angel of the opposite sex which was... was... fucking awesome in retrospect only!
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foster1941
Warlock
Duke of California, Earl of Los Angeles, Knight Bachelor
Posts: 475
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Post by foster1941 on Sept 19, 2016 16:47:46 GMT -5
The moon dog character was in a game I ran at the local game-club (the Evansville Gaming Guild) around 1989ish. It was a higher-level game and the player was a kid (2-3 years younger than me) who wasn't very good and didn't take advantage of a lot of the special abilities (like becoming astral or ethereal at will) so it didn't end up seeming any more powerful than any of the other PCs - it mostly just seemed dumb that this kid was insisting on playing a talking dog.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 19, 2016 21:31:13 GMT -5
Probably Dean R. Koontz related that WATCHERS novel came out in 1987 with the intelligent dog. In 1988 my friend Henry moved in with a friend of our's boyfriend and he split the rent three ways with a childhood friend of her boyfriend. So every time that I hung out with that girl or Henry I'd have to hang out with the bf's childhood friend guy. Wooo! Whata loon! He was obsessed with Stephen King and "Deaner" (Dean R. Koontz) and he insisted that I read Koontz, King and Joe R.Lansdale. He made a D&D character but he just sat there and zoned out. I was a nice guy but this guy was just annoying. He became obsessed with my entire life (girlfriends, etc.). I left town for a few years but I heard that guy kept asking about me then ended up in a looney bin. All I did was turn him on to Lovecraft... sheesh!
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 19, 2016 22:13:05 GMT -5
You realize you are speaking to... The Shambler from Queens!
Make a Sanity check!
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Post by Scott on Sept 20, 2016 21:59:17 GMT -5
5E, and D&D for years has suffered from overactive drow syndrome. They're everywhere, even the Lost Mine. Not that long ago they were mythical, a legend, and now they're like the hipster douch bags of D&D turning up everywhere. This keeps getting worse. I have three 5E adventures. The drow are in all of them.
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Post by geneweigel on Sept 20, 2016 22:50:03 GMT -5
The elves aren't even in the manual it just has a drow listing. The other annoyance is the githyanki. I think that their proliferation is more offputting. If there was a book of player racial trends then " ELF, drow" would surely be a mainstay race but then so would: "DWARF, haggis eater""HALF-ORC, beefcake""GNOME, Artemus Gordon disguised as Dr Loveless edition""ELF, male-minded female""HALFLING, innocent kleptomaniac""HALF-ELF, drow-free"
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 21, 2016 8:19:26 GMT -5
I like the tavern drawing on the blog page. Reminds me of the DCS illustration in the DMG.
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Post by GRWelsh on Sept 21, 2016 8:22:12 GMT -5
Maybe there is an artifact out there somewhere that has the power to remove bad Scottish accents from all the dwarves in the multiverse. That would be a worthy quest!
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