Dice Placement
First off I’d like to thank everyone who has been visiting the site these past few days for their kind comments. The comic is still very early in its life and to this point the only feedback I’ve gotten is from friends. Understandably I wanted to see what the broader Internet thought and so far the response has been fairly positive, so thanks for that.
I’ve redesigned the site’s look just a bit. Again a big thank you goes out to Christine at Draw Write Play for riding the mighty sandworm of CSS and bending Comicpress to her 3-columned will. I was trying to go for something that vaguely resembled the front of an old style arcade cabinet in keeping with the comic’s name and slightly nerdy theme. I think I succeeded in a sort of “well you can tell it’s an arcade cabinet once you know what you’re looking at” sort of way. I’ll probably do more fixes as time allows. I’ve come down with a wee bout of the plague this week, however, so I’ve mainly been bedridden watching Indiana Jones and Star Trek movies.
A lot of people had stories to tell about their own experiences with crappy dungeon masters, so I thought I’d share another blast from my D&D past that was a partial inspiration for this storyline.
Over the summer before my senior year a bunch of friends who were still in high school and some who were home from the summer for college got together most Saturdays to play a rather open-ended game. At the time I was relatively new to the game and still had illusions of being a great hero in the game context so I was playing a lawful good elf Warmaster (we bent some of the level requirements to allow prestige classes in the name of fun). We had amassed a decent sized army and were out doing mercenary work in the name of whatever king happened to have the highest asking price and the most noble cause. The problem was that a guy we’ll call Dan who had been playing the game for years was getting frustrated with all the goody-goody stuff and wanted to mix things up, so he cut a deal with the DM.
Long story short, half of the army we’d put together ended up being obliterated in a half hour battle where our entire party was taken captive with the exception of the DM’s buddy, who was the one doing the capturing. I don’t know what the hell the DM was thinking, ruining the game like that for everyone but this one guy who used to DM games for the current DM back in the day, but suffice it to say everyone was pretty upset when we closed that evening’s session.
I’d like to say that we all took the high road after that, but we didn’t. The half of the army that survived the encounter eventually freed our party, and from that day forward my Warmaster switched from lawful good to chaotic neutral (or evil, depending on your point of view) and had that guy’s character executed. And every character that he created after that. The instant he showed up, no matter the character, class, or useful plot developing information he carried, everyone in the party promptly stopped whatever they were doing to kill his character before getting on with whatever we’d been doing.
I just love happy endings.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:54 am
We had a fellow like that in our old DnD session. We did almost the same exact thing after his gestalted were-tiger Assassin/Fighter/Rogue/Mage tried to go vampire on us and obliterate our party “all in the name of Roleplaying”.
Needless to say, after her tried to bully some of the characters into givng up their artifacts to him (including a plot induced orb of dragonkind and a staff of the magi) we ended up killing his character rather handily. Especilly when it was found out that he’d been cheating the entire time.
Today, we call that sort of action “pulling a Pratt” named after him in his honour.
March 7th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Not much to say, but keep up the good work!
March 7th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Like the comic, good start, worst GM/player relationship I was ever party to was playing Star Wars, the GM’s 12 yr old brother played and was the best gunfighter and pilot in the galaxy (not even barring Han Solo). We managed to eventually get him trapped in a ship which had 20 thermal detonators in it and he died. Until the following week when apparently it turned out it was his clone. Left very shortly after.
March 7th, 2008 at 8:36 am
Haha, I just had a quick read through this comic, and I love it.
Does remind me somewhat of a mate of mine who used to DM and was basically a dick. I haven’t played in ages though
Gunna have to get back into it.!
March 7th, 2008 at 9:20 am
HEy, this is a good looking comic so far, and I’m really excited to see it flesh itself out. I really enjoy it, even though I’ve only ever played like, three games of d&d and 2 of exalted.
I’m putting you on favorites and waiting for a month so I can read a bunch at a time
March 7th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Hey Andrew, I love the work you have done with this comic, it looks good, and has got a good stroy line to it, I couldnt help but laugh at the characters antics, keep up the good work
March 7th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Yeah, that pretty much makes you (not the other guy who turned evil but yes, you and your other party mates) the worst roleplayers in history.
Cheers!
Having been a DM of several campaigns for several years, whenever one player thinks out a plot that will upset the storyline, it’s more than welcomed as long as they have the gaming experience to pull it off. However, whenever someone breaks character or does anything with his character because of non-character related motives, they can just fuck right off and come back when they have a grasp of the game.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Normally I would agree with you, Dodgy, but this guy was the antithesis of a roleplayer. He was the group DM from way back in the day before I joined up and angry that he wasn’t the DM of this particular session as well. A min/maxer to the extreme, everything he did served the express purpose of increasing whatever numbers he could in whatever way he could.
And he generally didn’t show up to games because he was throwing a hissy-fit about not being the most important player in the session, only showing up on the rare occasion in an attempt to destroy whatever everyone else had been doing.
Basically he was the king of non-character related motives, and we were just paying him back in kind. I’m more than happy with upsetting a plot in the game as long as it isn’t just someone pissing in everyone else’s Wheaties because their character isn’t allowed to be the grand leader/statistical demigod/natural 20 on every stat that they wanted.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:45 am
Honestly, I’ve never experianced this whole, “I want to be the DM!” “NO, I want to be the DM!” thing. I had trouble getting anybody else to run so I seldom got to just play. Later in my gaming carreer I found some people who really liked to run, but there was never a fight over who would run. More like “I’m almost done with this plotline. Whio’s running next?”
I always tried ot let the players run with their ideas, but never at the expense of the group. I had a little device I used that I called the Deadly D8. When someone wanted to do something that would take a great deal of time away for the whole group, I’d offer to roll to quickly detremine the outcome. The number on the die showed the level of success or failure with a 1 being spectacularly good, an 8 was horrifically bad and mediocre numbers producing mediocre results. I usually gave a fairly detailed description of the outcome, usually to cheers and laughter.
Over time people came to trust the deadly D8 for quick outcomes or would decide that the risk wasn’t worth the outcome and find another way to resolve the plot point.
March 7th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Hey, just came across an ad for this comic, not bad looking forward to seeing what comes out of it.
I’ve done my fair share of gaming and DM’img, and have run the whole line of “I want to be the most important character int he game!” So when this guy wanted to be the next demi god, i let the other players in on it too. Made for some real interesting sessions.
Lately I ran across the gaming group at the prison i work at, and while i dont play DnD (switched to old school Shadowrun, screw the video game) the prisoners who play this game get downright vicious on traps and monsters. Since i’m there to observe and control I get to listen in and sometimes pick up a few tips on what i can do with my current game.
Got this comic bookedmarked, keep it up!
March 7th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Nice comic, I never played this kind of game but I am really trying to start.
Keep it up =p
March 8th, 2008 at 6:35 am
My group of friends is pretty big (there’s about 14 of us out of 25 that actually game) and we usually have 3-5 games running throughout each quarter of school, we all take turns GMing (well, four of us do, anyway). This quarter we’ve got two WoD games (Mage & some strange amalgomation of Werewolf/Vampire/straight up WoD), a Serenity campaign, and a three-piece D&D in Ancient pseudo-Rome, -Mongolia and -Egypt. I would be playing in all of them were I not currently in Germany. When I get back for Spring, I’m gonna throw some Changeling up in there, and it is going to be sweet.
Worst player/GM experience: I was GMing a supersweet Serenity campaign, and one of my players was being a dick during mail call because he didn’t get any mail… he was playing a super-cute naive Marine who got care packages from mummy and daddy with cookies, so I gave up and said he got a care package with cookies, but some of the mean Marines beat him up and stole his cookies. For flavor, you know? He’s a good mate of mine, so I was just teasing, but the kid goes bonkers and demands a roll for it, I say no because its flavor and he doesn’t actually take any damage, but he is just freaking out and every other player in the room (this is an eight-person campaign) is aware that he is just doing it because he doesn’t want to look bad in front of his new girlfriend (also a player). Lesson learned: No more newly-established couples in games. It always ends badly.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:01 am
In my experience couples and D&D never work out. We had one game going where this creepy older dude that never managed to launch after graduating was DMing, and he was dating a girl in the group who was about 6-7 years younger and was also the kid sister of another guy in the group so they had to keep it a secret that they were dating because of the creepiness factor and out of fear that he would get the shit kicked out of him.
Didn’t stop his woman from getting preferential treatment every time we played the game.
Oh, and it was the same guy who ruined the game I was talking about in the original post. That guy was a real winner.
March 9th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Couples FTL. Lemme know if I’m getting off-topic or if this not allowed, but how do y’all deal with sex in-game? It’s never been a big issue with us except in Drow and then we just kind of glossed over it.
March 9th, 2008 at 1:00 am
The only time it came up in game for us it was sort of glossed over. Two characters (the dude and his jailbait lady friend) ended up getting drunk in a tower after a day of hunting bugbears, if memory serves. The DM said something like “And then the lights went out and we’ll leave the rest to your imagination” and that was that. I think that how you handle that sort of thing just depends largely on the group that you’re gaming with.
Personally I wouldn’t allow it in a game unless it actually advanced the plot in some way or it was genuinely a roleplaying point. Situations like that have the potential to get really creepy really fast.
May 9th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Hey Andrew, just discovered the comic from a link off of the Fanboys webcomic, and I’m really enjoying it.
I’ve been a D&D/every other rpg gamer for as long as I can remember, including having written/played in some friend written systems over the years, so this comic speaks to me on a very cool, almost creepy level.
And I’ve only ever encountered a major sex scene in one game, which was a drow game, and this was easily ended, and left to our horrified imaginations with 3 words. “Hot Liche Lovin’”
As I said, loving the comic, and the bordering is very cool, and whats making me really smile at the moment, is that you appear to be playing under 1st edition D&D rules, which rocks