DM: Alright, I'm on board with this generally. But I still have a few questions. If we're working together to craft these plot arcs… how do we avoid spoilers?
Fluttershy: Well, um… I think you could just talk about the nature of the thing without giving specific details…
Pinkie Pie: It doesn't have to be every single thing! Just the stuff that creates an anxiety hazard because it fundamentally shakes up what we're comfortable with!
DM: But I like… doing that… Okay, point made.
Applejack: We can discuss how a thing starts but not nail down how a thing ends. That's kinda supposed to come from play anyway.
Rarity: Indeed! The "blacklisted" plot twist stressed me out, it's true… but the Prince turning out to be Elusive? I enjoyed every second of that!
DM: Yeah… But the original "send Rarity off by marrying her into royalty" plot wasn't even my idea. It was hers.
Twilight Sparkle: Huh? OH! Yeah. I forgot that I suggested that.
Rainbow Dash: So… what you're saying is, the theory works.
Just yesterday I was playing a Pokemon RPG with some friends. We went to sleep in the forest and at night when one person was keeping watch, a luck roll was made to see if a good or bad thing happened. Rolled a 1. So basically every possible Pokemon on the encounter list decided they wanted to attack us at once. This ended up including a couple rare Pokemon that normally would've taken high rolls to find, one of which I really wanted. So it worked out pretty great.
The party finds themselves in the Infinity Library, which holds all books that were ever written and ever will be (one copy each, representative of all copies in universe of that book).
Player: "I search for a good book."
*rolls 1*
GM: "...You find Twilight."
Player: "I burn it."
They then found all other books in the series and burned them as well. That universe no longer has the series, and it never existed there (because timey wimey stuff).
Heheh, the "nature" of a thing in panel 2. With nature.
*Ahem* anyway, I have the Fortune of being in a campaign where everyone took a disadvantage perk that gave us an enemy. I think we just did all the base homework for the GM so, that seems like it'll be fun.
That sounds awfully convenient. In need of a plot? Let's pull a name from a hat!
Then later on, the enemies could start to notice that all their rivals banded together, so they start looking into how cooperation could benefit *them,* and then what was originally a secondary enemy starts to take higher priority now that they're putting their differences aside...
Yes! This setup was an accidental thing, but it holds some interesting opportunity. Our individual enemies could band together. One PCs enemy hampers PC 2 to get at PC 1. Great stuff to play around with.
Dang. This is making me want to play Smallville even more.
For context, Smallville is a roleplaying system designed to recreate CW-style soapy TV drama, based on the 10-season Superman origin series of the same name. Instead of the GM traditionally running the main antagonists, the GM simply frames scenes between characters and creates wedges that drive the players into conflict with each other; so Lex Luthor and Zod would be PCs, just like Oliver, Lois, and Clark. The mechanics are based more on their Relationships, Values, and Character Traits; skills and abilities come secondary or even tertiary.
Basically, the format of the game is a lot like MLP: characters live in the same town and interact organically, instead of sticking together as part of an adventuring party; and there's just as much conflict between friends as there is between enemies. The nature of the game also gives the players a LOT more agency in driving the plot, as they are now discussing in the current arc.
The mechanics are so cool. I've been itching to try it ever since I got it.
This pretty much finishes off my "Patric Stewart as the DM" head cannon i had. There's absolutely no way to pull off that "but i like doing that" whine that still sounds like Jean Luc
Not really related to the comic, but you have a bad cert on your sight. Can't go over HTTPS because the cert you provide is for everythingfury.com, not friendshipisdragons.thecomicseries.com
Weirdly, that's only partly true, though. Most isn't encrypted (the javascript, the logo, the requests for user avatars, favicon), but the comic page is, and the paypal thing is, and user avatars (if your browser lets you initially request over HTTP) redirect you to the HTTPS version.
The march of time: The scariest thing of all this Halloween season.