Gaming Stories, Video and Tabletop

[cliffc999]

There isn't a planar connection in the basement.

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The odds of a good-aligned church surviving in Ravenloft for any length of time without exterior support are asymptotic zero so, again, your players are hardly being unreasonable in entirely blocking out the mental possibility that you created a good-aligned church for them to find. Because offhand, I cannot recall any of them actually existing in Ravenloft. Cripes, I remember back when the official sourcebook support for playing a PC paladin in Ravenloft boiled down 'You don't want to take this class, you radiate goodness everywhere and that's just a beacon for all the supernatural gribblies here to immediately run at you and kill you'. Their advice for good-aligned clerics wasn't much better.

So again, you are being very unfair to your players in not bothering to search for something that they already know can't viably exist in Ravenloft... because, again, if you are houseruling shit, you have to tell them.

Seriously, I recommended you just have a gorram divine omen or something else that's 100% unambiguous as a sign from their gods show up, because that is literally what it would take to get me to even start believing that I had found a good-aligned ally church in Ravenloft.

... and honestly, even then I'd roll to save versus illusion first.

tldr; Your first mistake was in DM'ing a Ravenloft game. Anybody who knows that setting is going to RP the most mistrusting, fatalistic motherfucker they possibly can, because doing anything else is an open invitation to get slaughtered like a baby bunny in a velociraptor cage before you make level 5.

(add) This is from my experience with 1e and 2e Ravenloft. 3e didn't really exist, and I'm not familiar with 4e and 5e. If 5e lightened things up, that's fine... but if they did, people only familiar with the earlier editions would not only not know that, they'd still be running on their original survival scripts.

 

[heralding_bubble]

today in The One Ring game as the group is almost at Rivendell:

60 year old Gildaen, mother of Aragorn: Well now, do I have the honour of meeting one of the... hobbots? What might I call you?

Hobbit: Ah, yes, I am Isengar Took, you can call me Isengar, or Izzy, or Hey You Over There. It's nice to meet you honoured ...Miss? ...Mistress?

Gildaen: My husband is dead.

Hobbit: ...Miss?

 

[Artalam]

So again, you are being very unfair to your players in not bothering to search for something that they already know can't viably exist in Ravenloft... because, again, if you are houseruling shit, you have to tell them.

Seriously, I recommended you just have a gorram divine omen or something else that's 100% unambiguous as a sign from their gods show up, because that is literally what it would take to get me to even start believing that I had found a good-aligned ally church in Ravenloft

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…that's not what they're saying?

They're saying that the players are focused solely on finding a portal to hell, and not considering any other possibility (I.e vampires, undead, evil wizards, ext), and essentially ignoring any other clue as to what could be going on as they've married themselves to the idea that it must be a hell portal.

It's like you find a good aligned church and you start specifically searching for the evil dragon who must be behind it, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

 

[shadowdice]

today in The One Ring game as the group is almost at Rivendell:

60 year old Gildaen, mother of Aragorn: Well now, do I have the honour of meeting one of the... hobbots? What might I call you?

Hobbit: Ah, yes, I am Isengar Took, you can call me Isengar, or Izzy, or Hey You Over There. It's nice to meet you honoured ...Miss? ...Mistress?

Gildaen: My husband is dead.

Hobbit: ...Miss?

Click to shrink...

I'm not sure how to take the answer she gave

…that's not what they're saying?

They're saying that the players are focused solely on finding a portal to hell, and not considering any other possibility (I.e vampires, undead, evil wizards, ext), and essentially ignoring any other clue as to what could be going on as they've married themselves to the idea that it must be a hell portal.

It's like you find a good aligned church and you start specifically searching for the evil dragon who must be behind it, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

Click to shrink...

I tell them there are signs of the complex being made via stoneshape

They find a spellbook in an empty church to an arcane god

They find many books in magic and how to make magic animals

They find An Intelligent Familiar Cat that kills all the rats in the place

None of them go "maybe it was a wizard and we might find their ghost/lich/mummy/vampire at the bottom"

 

[heralding_bubble]

I'm not sure how to take the answer she gave

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might be lost in translation since tl'd from finnish, he unsurely went between respectful address for a younger woman (Ms./miss-equivalent), and respectful address for an old/married(/higher-in-organisational(usually military)-rank) woman (Mrs./mistress-equivalent kind of)

 

[shadowdice]

might be lost in translation since tl'd from finnish, he unsurely went between respectful address for a younger woman (Ms./miss-equivalent), and respectful address for an old/married(/higher-in-organisational(usually military)-rank) woman (Mrs./mistress-equivalent kind of)

Click to shrink...

More that I was unsure why her response was "my husband is dead"

Most times where that comes up when someone is wondering what to call them, that statement is because they are saying they are available

 

[shadowdice]

Having remembered an old scenario I had adapted for a game (The Osiris Chip). A corporation indulging in mad science managed to create a mind control chip and are testing it on cyber psychos/booster gangers which begins with a job that is a set up to test out their mind controlled cyber psychos.

I had gone through character creation for about 6 Streetpunks (people who do not have the cool class abilities but still have starting skills on the level of a PC character) and actually rolled the dice for a battle involving them and the NPCs that are statted out for the initial ambush encounter (there are 20 allied NPCs with switchblades and light SMGs but little cyberware, one woman with super low body but high Judo and good armor, two near cyber psychos, a net runner, and a high body lieutenant versus 4 snipers with kalashnikovs and 14 other cyber psychos with high armor some chainsaw arms, four of which have grenades). The enemies all had SMGs, Allied NPCs were mainly there with Dai Lung pistols which are shitty except for the ones that had names but those were mainly using SMGs, only a few people had rifles on either side outside of the snipers, and the cyber psychos also had axes (which made them way better at close combat than most of the allied npcs that only had switchblades)

A lot of the combat came down to close range combat because of the Armor a lot of people had. Most of the allied NPCs did not have armor on their legs so the cyber psychos could target those.

Most of the allied NPCs died because of the low equipment, but the enemies pretty consistently had to go for the legs because their guns didn't do good damage until they whittled down the armor. Allied NPCs that did the most damage did so through martial arts throws or melee cyberware due to armor piercing.

For the Streetpunk PCs I made, the most effective ones were:

the One guy I made who had a very shitty rifle (because these are gangoons not really edgerunners) who spotted the snipers that were on the same roof as him and took them out so he could grab one of their Much Better Rifles to now take potshots at the enemy now that he was up on a roof they could not get to.

A basically fixer who had decent stealth and high skill with a mono katana. The Enemy NPCs were statted with Combat Sense which made his stealth null and void, but skin weave and armor made it so their SMGs did not work out very well (and they had to deal with the nameless NPCs) so he managed to take out a few with a mono katana due to good luck and using the actual luck stat (he was about up to par with their melee) though he still got KOed.

And a female punk that rolled the Corporate kid background package which resulted in a drive of 8 (which I treated as the max stat any starting character could have) which resulted in successes in "Okay, there are a bunch of cyber psychos with chainsaws. What if I just ram them?" Good driving rolls let her grab koed allies, and first aid did save some)

The real deciding factor was grenades which took out like half the PC equivalent street punks.

Basically, the whole thing shows that even minimal armor on any location is great to have. That and the importance of higher calibers.
6 Rounds of combat

25 Allied NPCs (2 lived. One by running away. 1 because he kept making the death saves after his arms and a leg were destroyed along with a chainsaw to the chest)
18 Enemy NPCs (All Dead)
6 'PCs" (2 dead, 2 critically wounded to the point of rolling not to die, 2 unharmed)

edit

Honestly, the fight is mainly hard if the PCs who are in what they know is the combat zone, do not equip properly for The Combat Zone. Even the enemy NPCs are not well equipped for dealing with heavy armor that some of the allied NPCs have (I think mainly because the writers forgot how skinweave/subdermal armor were supposed to actually stack with regular armor) because a few had Heavy Armor Jackets which made it highly unlikely that anything but the Snipers or grenades would take them out.

I had run the encounter before for my players and it really came down to "Who has a Rifle or Armor Piercing Bullets"

That or if a player realizes: Wait, there are motorcycles and cars around. I should ram them