OCC Thread

[zebediah]

No problem. Have fun wherever your destination may be.

Thanks, it's actually work (fun work, though) but the place is nice and I'll stay over for a couple of extra days.

[Vargr1105]

I would suggest us to split any money we find as that is easy to do on the spot and distribute items in the way seems more logical unless someone wants to call dibs on specific objects we come across. Once (and if) we reach civilization we can appraise the value of the stuff just to make sure no one is ripped off. Does that make sense to you guys?

That would make perfect sense for me personally. The decision is up to you players.

You may fight it out and duel for dibs on loot for all I care. GM impartiality and all that.

[Stonjuz]

I would suggest us to split any money we find as that is easy to do on the spot and distribute items in the way seems more logical unless someone wants to call dibs on specific objects we come across. Once (and if) we reach civilization we can appraise the value of the stuff just to make sure no one is ripped off. Does that make sense to you guys?

Isnt that the way EVERYONE does it? Ive had a few groups of unscrupulous players that 'sometimes' will play it "everyman for themselves" (they seldom benefit)... and when my kids were younger they once tried (and got} enemy survivors/slaves (im shocked they all grew up into fine adults myself) to carry their newfound stuff (only to be tpk'd by umberhulks) ... but most do it as above i think

[Ra the monk]

It is all good. It is just we talked about doing it a few different ways and we never decided on anything. I am just going to add 12GP to my character sheet. Just try and stop me...

Also i just want to point this out

Stonjuz jumps off the ground about 3 inches.

Even stranger than bats, have any of you ever seen a dwarf jump? And that high of all things. I think the furthest I have every seen a dwarf off the ground of his own volition is sitting on a bar stool.

[zebediah]

I think most groups I've played with dealt with treasure that way, but there are variations (once we had the thief as responsible for treasure and bookkeeping, and he did not steal the group much).

And making sure we have a common understanding on this saves us from discussions later.

[Stonjuz]

Also i just want to point this out

Stonjuz jumps off the ground about 3 inches.

Even stranger than bats, have any of you ever seen a dwarf jump? And that high of all things. I think the furthest I have every seen a dwarf off the ground of his own volition is sitting on a bar stool.

Ok, maybe it was only 19cm.

[Stonjuz]

"Now that I got ya, haha...what am i gonna do with ya?" Stonjuz's confidence turns south just a touch, but Thurinor can get an upclose gaze into the eyes of the bloodthirtsy creature as the dwarf pulls it away.
Oh my, what have I gotten the dwarf into this time? Can you imagine the look as his confidence wanes and he realizes the full size of the thing? Thurinor may be able to see that face and that Stonjuz may have "bitten off more" as they say.

At least temporarily, can I put Giant bat on my current inventory page?

[Vargr1105]

Sure, have a blast.

[Stonjuz]

Ozmond's shots miss, the first one miserably.

First, are you referring to Ozborn here? Otherwise we have a new player who has a very similar name. Second, my first shot was a modified 20, higher than any of Oridor's shots by 2.

Whats next ?....
Melon, Android, Tylenol and Screwluz? Hey, I might actually use Skruluz someday.

[Stonjuz]

Well, Stonjuz did accomplish his main goal of getting the bat off of the wizard.
I knew the dwarf had more hitpoints to spare than Thurinor. We'll see if it was a wisest decision in the long run, but....
let's have the party just make sure it doesn't end like Tom Hanks dying at the end of Private Ryan...."EARN THIS"

[Stonjuz]

still waiting on sheldomar's declaration, as of this post, for round 3 which started thur morn(by my time).
you visited on friday nite and last on sat morning, dont know why ya didnt post something.
even a post saying...'not taking an action' would help.

my lurking makes me uptight. just trying to get feel since this is my first pbp game.

[Stonjuz]

Thought I'd share this post from Dragonsfoot. It's one of my favorites.
Yes, this happened at my house.

The following is from Q&A with Tim Kask

I played one of the best role-playing sessions I have had in 37 years this last weekend in KC.

In one respect it took me out of my DM Comfort Zone; it also reminded me how much fun “all-out role-playing” can be. In addition, it managed to capture a spontaneity and electricity that I have not savored for many, many years.

A recently-made friend from KC invited me to his home to run a game for him and his regular bunch; I asked if a mutual acquaintance could also attend to bring the party to five. I decided to do it really, really, really old school, almost completely on the fly. I had a premise: they had been hired by a VINPC for a simple guard job, which they bungled, of course. It was going to take place within my mega-city (working name Megamegalopolis); it would involve (unbeknownst to them) a conspiracy of filthy Halfling thieves. I spent about 10 minutes on the plane thinking up a couple of NPCs that might be fun to run into. (As it happened, none got used.)

I took some low–level pre-gens; four fighter/thieves of levels between three and five, and a 5th Level Paladin to keep them sort of on the up and up. I told them to just play the characters, gave them the set up and off we went.

The following is a pretty much stream-of-consciousness tale of what transpired in the next four hours:

As it worked out on the map, the logical place for the burglars’ tunnel to come out was a large nomad compound. So one guy went to check the bars for word of small persons in the area recently, another decided to troll the bazaar for leads, another went to talk to blacksmiths (no idea why), one scouted the perimeter of the entire enclave, looking for a trail, and the paladin went looking for a constable to demand help apprehending the crooks. So, they found a “friend of a friend” tale about strange doings near there (I forgot to mention that the tunnel came up in the middle of a sort of thicket of plants and shrubs), another heard a second-hand tale of small somethings infrequently seen near there over the past couple of months, a smith’s apprentice told a tale of a very odd round metal box (oh, yeah, the loot was in a small cask about 45 inches tall and 34 inches girth) that had been commissioned and paid for by a “funny little fellow”, the scout found no helpful tracks at all, somebody in the bazaar scoffed nervously about the existence of any mythical “Halfling Guild”, and the Paladin with the Judge Dred attitude was informed that the area in which the theft occurred was a sort of duty-free zone over which he had no jurisdiction.

Just into the game and I have gotten to play 5 spontaneous NPCs! Sublime.

So they chased leads, talked to the sources eventually, found out the details of the round strongbox just a bit larger than their missing cask and made of AC2 steel and banded with three locking bands with no locks supplied, and the paladin was not acting very paladin-ish by now.

Four more new NPC’s created on the fly and bandying with the PC’s—haven’t done this in ages. I am fairly wriggling with delight at this point.

The paladin starts muttering about “going Inquisitor” and starting a new auto-da-fe to get information; about then I had him approached by a Town Guard officer and informed him that the city’s rule of thumb was “don’t make waves”, and that he was beginning to form ripples. Another PC makes contact with local skinheads, who hate Halflings and are absolutely certain that those “damned little buggers” are up to something big. Another lead is tracked down clear across town for more information.

More NPC’s created on the fly.

Time for a clarification: My host early on suggested, knowing how unruly his guys were, that I just use the tried and true “Waddya doin’” and pointing to each player in turn. This was a technique that I once used with small groups but had abandoned in recent years due to the size of the games I do at cons. I had to think something up for each action and then wait for them to decide what they would follow up on. As it transpired, they followed up on nearly every one, so my mind was running at high RPMs. This was the way I learned to play, wa-a-ay back when. The cobwebs were burning off and all cylinders firing. This was what we did at the very earliest cons when we were just spinning yarns to get players interested.

It was Improv Night!

When I do something like this, I use gentle parameters. That means you have to screw up pretty badly or attract a lot of attention to get in trouble with Authority. As you will see as the tale unfolds, they should have been more than just noticed, but I could never roll decent numbers to hassle them with the fuzz. They were extremely fortunate in that regard, but, hey, that’s joss!

Is this type of make-it-up-as-you-go style for everyone? No, and it is not a weakness on behalf of a DM if he or she can’t. I know, or have known, about a dozen DMs that can do this, and I am sure there are others I have not met. The ones I have met all matriculated through the School of Lake Geneva RPG’ing. This is simply how we began. Campaigns came about from the need to record what happened.

About this time, the paladin is fit to bust with frustration. (Oh, did I forget to mention that the VINPC had paid them with spiffy gold coins that now would not leave their person and would kill them in four days if they had not recovered the cask?) The paladin is having a real crisis of conscience; he wants to beat the information out of someone he suspects has it. The group decides to go find this guy, snatch him, take him to the hole and beat the hell out of him until he talks. They smack this poor bugger in the back of the head when he, righteously, resists accompanying the strangers. They sap the poor bugger, twice, and nearly kill him (1 HP left). So the paladin says he will Lay on Hands to revive him, after they tie him up, and after he is sitting on his chest with a dagger two inches from an eye. So far, the paladin does not seem to appreciate the irony here. (I later found out he never, ever, played Good PC’s—that explained a lot of his inner turmoil.)

They revive the poor bugger and demand that he admit his membership in the local chapter of the Guild of Thieves or lose an eye or even his life. Recall, this is the paladin snarling on his chest. (The air in the room was fairly crackling at this point—had this been going on in a RL bar, the patrons would be edging away or grabbing cue sticks.) It had happened earlier in the evening that the paladin wore an amulet at his throat universally recognized as “Good”. As he was glaring and shouting at his victim, I had the victim pointedly look at the emblem, then look in his eyes, then the amulet, then the eyes, etc. while responding to the threat of losing his life and eye for failing to tell him what he wanted—by asking the paladin, whilst doing the eye thing, if he could live his life after doing something like that. The room crackled with that spontaneous energy and made your hair stand up…but, the victim called the paladin’s bluff (and the guy playing him did one of the best jobs playing the role given him that I have seen in years and years.)

The erstwhile victim, babbling in relief at having been spared does tell them of an area within the city walls where no one ever goes because of the legends of curses and hauntings of a lightning-struck ruin of a temple.

Of course that was now where the thieving squirts had gone to ground. So they went in and had to kill three really large and nasty, and silent, temple guard dogs, slay a handful of pipsqeaks and obtain possession of a large round, AC2, shiny lockbox with three bizarre locks way beyond their skill levels, of gnomish manufacture.

So, here they are, five sort of scruffy guys carrying a big shiny barrel on poles between two of them, schlepping across the city once again, in broad daylight, off to find a gnomish locksmith, which of course I made up instanter and off they went. Not once could I get any serious notice of them, or any suspicion of them, that would warrant the intrusion of either Authority or Conflict. Damn, they were lucky. They find the gnome, he says that yes, he crafted them for the VINPC, and that one of them is Warded.

So, with only one of their four days left, they face what to do. They can’t even be sure that what was stolen is in the shiny barrel. So they schlep back across the whole city, again drawing no notice, back to the hole they came out of. (I should have mentioned that when they first descended they found a very snug shaft—an early clue that the thieves were little.) So they get to the hole and when I ask “Waddya doin’?”, they say they are dropping the barrel down the hole so they can return it from whence it was stolen. Too bad, it doesn’t fit. They had only dug the hole (remember the snug bit) big enough to push up the stolen cask, which may or may not have been in the shiny barrel, which was slightly larger. So they elect, three of them, to return the shiny barrel to the scene of the theft; the other pair elect to go back through the tunnel to the site of the theft.

The tunnel runners DO notice the two new low-level traps and avoid them, continuing their rush to redemption, but are dismayed to learn, once they reach the strong-room, that they are trapped within it. The VINPC had made improvements to the only vulnerability.

The other three knock on the door of the warehouse where they failed, and nearly lose heart when they are finally answered by a brownie night watchman through an eye-slit just about brownie height from the ground. He asks them their business and they request he give the VINPC a message right away.

Here again, the guy playing the paladin struggled to tell nothing completely false, having been informed just now that IF the VINPC deigned to deal with them, falsehood and deception made him particularly wroth.

The upshot of the message was: Tell the VINPC that we have returned what we are certain was that which was stolen, which they were convinced must be in the shiny armored box that happened to have a Warded gnomish lock on it.

The reaction was that he was reluctantly, just barely, willing to believe that maybe they were correct. He took the hex off the money and cheated them out of the remainder of what was owed them for not being sure. We called it well played and stopped.

Damn, that was a good time. At the end I was both mentally exhilarated and exhausted.

So to my host, James, his buddies Carlos, Al and Ronnie and our mutual friend, Rick, thank you for a great experience. I hope you had as much fun as I did.

_________________
Tim Kask
Fewer rules allow more fun.
If you're not having fun, why the hell are you playing?
The "system" is just the means to get to the fun; if you get to the fun, the vehicle becomes irrelevant.
"It is proper to disagree with the views of a person without maligning him; nothing is more contemptible than to smear the name of an author only because his ideas are not to your liking."
John of Salisbury (c. 1120 - 1180) in Metalogicon
http://www.eldritchent.com

This was my reply

Tim can go on and on about how much fun it was, but we were the big winners. I felt like I was on a game show and the prizes just kept coming. I even, totally accidental mind you, spilled an ale right on Spellbreaker's ( a fellow DFer) seat/lap.
Some history first...
Kaskoid came to KC as a special guest to the local con. I had missed several over the recent years and this would be my first in over 8-10 years. Good timing on my part, as I actually went to the con to try and find players, ironic somehow.
He and I are both tobacco users, so we chatted casually outside the doors. He was promoting new material for the old school and I was digging out history from him. I soon learned of GARYCON and attended GCIII this last March and shortly after that, North Texas, which Kaskoid was also in attendance. Then I urged him to revisit our local convention SHAUNCON/KCGameFair. This time I would be ready.
My wife and I had all the bribes ready. BarBQ and beer at a session away from the convention format that Tim had been hitting hard of late, and a chance to game at a table that had ashtrays. So we compared schedules and it all magically happened. Again I need to thank the Mrs. here. She really made us all wanting not.
I knew my group was different . Not for the faint of heart, we have run off many a player due to our brash style .I also knew that Kaskoid could pull it off and I jumped at the chance. Now I have a piece of gaming memorablia directly from the old guard to prove that it wasn't just a year long dream. Like I said, the prizes just keep coming.

The piece of memorablia i mentioned is....HIS OLD DICE TOWER....yep, i have Tim Kask's dice tower... autographed and everything.

[Stonjuz]

" IMA ATARADO BENDA , CUZ BENDA ATARADO ONAME"
I'm pretty sure Stonjuz will be casting this spell as soon as he is free.
I wanted to post it before I forget it.
It loosely translates into ...
"I am stuck on Band-aid, cause Band-aid's stuck on me"

[Stonjuz]

What else....mmmm...the simplest of Stonjuz's spells sounds like ...
"FINDA MAYA MAGIC EAR" .... detect magic , of course

[Vargr1105]

OOC: If the bats has external ears, the elf will remove them with his dagger.

It indeed has external ears, large ones. Bigger than those of an adult pig. Thurinor can put note them on his inventory if he wishes to keep them.

[Ra the monk]

Varg how far away is the tree line? I am assuming Oz is heading that direction as that was the direction we were headed before. I would like to make camp and tend to wounds and discuss plans as it has already been an eventful day, even if it is still early...

[Vargr1105]

Varg how far away is the tree line? I am assuming Oz is heading that direction as that was the direction we were headed before. I would like to make camp and tend to wounds and discuss plans as it has already been an eventful day, even if it is still early...

Treeline? What treeline? You are in a roughly circular valley containing a half-frozen lake and snow fields. You have not seen any vegetation bigger than a bush.

[Ra the monk]

Treeline? What treeline? You are in a roughly circular valley containing a half-frozen lake and snow fields. You have not seen any vegetation bigger than a bush.

I see... MMM I was under the impression that we were headed towards some sort of treeline, and that everywhere else there was mountains. Well then my question changes to what the heck is in front of us? I know we are heading in the only direction which does not contain mountains. How far until we reach some sort of reasonable place to make camp?

[Stonjuz]

I am under the assumption that we are heading east to where the mountains give way to flatness.
The trip from the lake will be at least 3 miles if im not wrong. (thats all player knowledge , the dwarf has no idea which way is east)

[Stonjuz]

Im pretty sure the dwarf isnt covered in blood. His hands and the wound to the wrist/arm area are washed with snow, and he was careful in his 'methodical research'. (scalpel, not machete)
Unkept, yes, his clothes are not prestine and ironed, but....covered in blood?, not what i would call it.
Stained sporatically at most. Perhaps more clay smudge than blood.

Now the stink....thats a different story. Tubes of bat guano cant be smelling good.