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Post by Brave Sir Robin on Oct 2, 2015 10:04:02 GMT
I love 30 rock, such a brilliant show. Really enjoyed Chuck as well, til the final season. I have met both Nathan Fillion and Zach Levi and they're are super nice people. One of the absolute best things that ever happened to me. Don't know the other two shows.
Con Man was great, really funny. I didn't think it was possible for me to love Felicia Day any more than I already did, but turns out, yes, yes I can.
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missnash
Officer of Many Letters
illustrating happy
Posts: 190
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Post by missnash on Oct 3, 2015 17:50:31 GMT
I think I'd actually burst if I met any of them!
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Post by Brave Sir Robin on Oct 3, 2015 23:28:49 GMT
I was certainly pretty close to bursting.
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Post by GrumblyArcher on Oct 6, 2015 9:30:15 GMT
Oh so many...
1) Fighter (Unbreakable) At the top of the list was Old Man Bespoke. It was a campaign with a high mortality rate. When I resorted to Old Man Bespoke, I think we were already up to five or six fatalities by level 8. So I built Old Man Bespoke to compensate. Lots of hit points, lots of AC, absurd fortitude and will saves. Much like Bertie com to think of it. The fun part was that previously, a friend and I who lost our first characters at the same time decided to introduce our newer ones as the brothers of my first dead character come to check up on him. After those two died to ambush by a mummy and a mimic, the patriarch of the Bespoke family decided to find out who was responsible for killing his boys and promptly teach them why you do not kill a Bespoke.
A retired adventurer and quite accomplished tailor, perhaps the best in any given province he visited, had previously settled down with his most recent wife and remarkable brood (most from different mothers and different species as he had something of a wild youth) before this all happened. Pushing sixty he rapidly proved nigh unkillable and terribly implacable. At one point, he was dropped into a pool of water and swarmed with leeches. Instead of panicking and trying to climb out, he calmly gave the thumbs up to a plan that involved killing the leeches with a fireball centered on him and then making his way out at his leisure, holding his breath the whole time. When encountering a demonic werewolf with ridiculous damage reduction, he had the others hold it down and then went to work like a butcher faced with a squirming pig. Implacable.
The entire course of the campaign, the party was subjected to undead horror after undead horror, he provided quite the rock and practically ended up adopting one of the other party members. The member in question was a drow who had about a century on Bespoke and protested the entire time but ended up treating Bespoke as a surrogate father figure despite himself.
2) Fighter (Lore Warden)/Student of War Aref al-Arzani, scholar and part-time adventurer. Despite being the most learned man in the room, he had never bothered to take up magic. He instead got very, very good at simply making educated guesses about his foes to simply not be where they were about to swing and just where their armor was the weakest. It was not that he was fast (13 dex) but rather that he constantly thought ten moves ahead and acted accordingly. It seemed to simple to him. I don't think he failed a single knowledge check. Unfailingly polite and charming even at the most worrying moments, he simply did not strike people as an adventurer.
Everyone expected to see a surly mercenary when I said I was playing a fighter. Instead they got a somewhat unassuming looking academic who genuinely seemed to be a Good Guy. He approached every problem as a empathetic and reasonable person. Any time another party member tried the gritty tough guy routine he ended up practically shaming them into the right course of action. One of the other players decided to make her character antagonize Aref up to and including suspiciously close lightning strikes. Aref outright ignored it, frankly knowing that the other PCs and indeed all of the NPCs they were traveling with liked him better than her and she would not actually initiate any direct confrontation for fear of losing face.
This was perhaps my second character with this group and a stark contrast to the current trends, so much so that he has been canonized by the group as one of the most interesting characters. This perhaps says more about the group than the character.
3) Fighter (it's a trend, I know) Giles Harbinger was the head of security at a magitech research facility that was having a Very Bad Day (think Doom). Some people play Lawful-Good, some people play Lawful-Evil, far too many play Lawful-Stupid. Giles was Lawful-Lawful. It was a one-off that had an absurd number of homebrewed stuff in it. I will not bore you with the details but the long and short of it is that he piloted a mech suit that looked like the somewhat sociopathic love-child of the powered armor from Avatar and the mechs the humans used to hold off the machines in the last Matrix movie (only redeeming feature of that movie if you ask me). Unlike those, it was piloted by a competent fellow, had the enormous pelt of a dire bear draped over the back of it, and survived the entire plot.
The Bearsark (bonus points if you understand the reference) was a terror. Anything smaller than the Bearsark, got it and any buddies in the immediate area pelted by the horrifically large machine gun. Anything larger than it was simply too ponderous to lay a claw on the expertly piloted vehicle. His crowning moment was when the party was facing down the big bad of the adventure, the body of some flunky or other being possessed by whatever the evil thing was. The demonic presence began to start monologuing and presenting moral quandaries, etcetera. Giles cut it off a sentence in by ordering to deactivate all ongoing magical effects and accompany him to the nearest holding cells. It tried two more times, got frustrated, turned into a giant demon and was promptly stomped on by the party.
4) Rogue/Assassin and then rebuilt as a Slayer Maak, oh Maak. He was not a sociopath, he was entirely amoral. There is a distinction or was as far as he was concerned. Maak had spent his life taking what he saw as the only practical path, that of least resistance. There was some resistance mind you, but that resistance was typically dragged into the shadows and quietly dealt with. He was quite shocked to learn that there were people who tried to do 'Good' and the concept fascinated him. The problem was that a lifetime of strict, pragmatic survival had not skewed his moral compass, it had removed it in its entirety like an inflamed appendix. In order to figure out this concept he ended up joining some adventurers who were generally 'Good' or so they claimed.
He tried very, very hard to understand why it was okay to stab people in certain circumstances but not others and why chopping the heads off of corpses so their worried loved ones could identify them later even though it was more efficient was not the correct course of action. He took notes and everything. The rest of the party found him so endearing that when the resident Lawful-Stupid paladin took exception to what he thought was an honest mistake (Turns out you should not try to gut mentally ill patients that are released as a distraction, even if they are in the way. Who knew?) he was promptly defended by the rest of the party in its entirety.
The last adventure of Maak, ended with him on the run, a cabal of alien wizards hunting for him, and his beloved crossbow 'Mathilda' damaged. I have been quietly waiting for an opportunity to spring him on an unsuspecting GM disguised as some cover identity or other.
...wow, that's a lot of text TL;DR Bespoke: 60-year-old surrogate father to the party, full plate, excellent tailor Aref: Smartest and friendliest fighter you'll ever meet. Giles: Mech pilot, Judge Dredd/Robocop style law enforcement. Maak: Amoral rogue with a heart of gold, or someone's heart anyway.
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Post by Alex Newall on Oct 6, 2015 22:50:50 GMT
I very much enjoy you approach to characters. Fulsome and satisfying. You ALSO will do well here.
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Post by grumblyarcher on Oct 7, 2015 5:20:10 GMT
I always try my damnedest to make my characters more than wandering murder-hoboes. Sometimes it's bandying a few stray skill points around, sometimes it's deciding to approach combat from the most interesting way possible.
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Post by Alex Newall on Oct 7, 2015 12:03:15 GMT
hi, we're Wandering Murder Hobo and this is our new single: gimme the loot!
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missnash
Officer of Many Letters
illustrating happy
Posts: 190
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Post by missnash on Oct 10, 2015 4:59:17 GMT
Grumblyarcher, wow! That's so many really contrasting characters - and the depth is excellent! that's really inspiring!
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Post by grumblyarcher on Oct 10, 2015 9:29:51 GMT
Why thank you, gotta have a few after playing for 4~ years. Another one I'm going to spring on one of my DMs soon is The Man From Bespoke. They thought I was done playing the Bespoke family but I never said anything about their employees!
Bespoke Mercenary Services, llc Tailoring affordable violence to fit your needs
I can just hear the groans.
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Post by Alex Newall on Oct 11, 2015 23:10:06 GMT
I have always been fascinated by dead-hand policies. Effectively an insurance you pay so that upon the moment of your death mercenaries will avenge themselves upon your killer.
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Post by grumblyarcher on Oct 11, 2015 23:58:52 GMT
Oh, no, no. Quests against ancient evils and dread necromancers almost always turn up remarkable amounts of liquid assets. An enterprising mercenary contracted to a slightly shadowy organization with a cadre of divination specialists could end up very wealthy indeed by hijacking a bit of destiny.
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Post by grumblyarcher on Oct 12, 2015 19:23:01 GMT
There is now a constable archetype for cavalier that specializes in various kinds of dirty fighting, planning ahead, and has a special badge. Excuse me while I run off to make a Sam Vimes.
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Post by theoverlord on Oct 17, 2015 9:35:37 GMT
I must admit that I played a dwarven brawler once, in a campaign similar to this one. Where there were still massive sports such as rugby, hockey, football, etc and I had to pay a fan of a sport similar to that of blood bowl (as I am a massive Welsh rugby union fan) where he would put the idea to get drunk and watch the latest match, above nearly everything else. And almost raged at those people that did not support his team.
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Post by grumblyarcher on Oct 17, 2015 10:32:41 GMT
Ah, the dwarven brawler. A good friend of mine once played one and nearly died in a toilet. We were infiltrating the mansion of a noted diabolist during a swanky party and split up to search the place. He went into a water closet and got curious when his... business seemed to vanish. Somehow managing to climb down into the holding tank, he set off the disposal system and was nearly incinerated by hellfire.
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Post by theoverlord on Oct 17, 2015 11:07:01 GMT
Yes, I must admit nearly dying in a situation similar to that one, but instead of being completely interested in the toilet, I was blackout drunk from the party, and very nearly drowned when falling in. The other time I remember nearly dying was trying to take on an entire tavern of Orcish Warriors, when someone mentioned in passing something about dwarves, I took this completely out of context, as I was drunk, hit him and then attempted to fight everyone else, while my party attempted to quiet this down.
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