Apple Bloom: Ah’m… sorry I got y’all into this mess.
Rarity: Oh, please, don’t beat yourself up over this. It could be so much worse.
Pinkie Pie: Yeah! We could all be mind-controlled!
Rainbow Dash: Or turned to stone.
Applejack: Or forced into a devil’s contract.
Fluttershy: Or turned into m-monsters…
Twilight Sparkle: Or dead.
Apple Bloom: Wow. That didn’t make me feel better at all.
Well, Scootaloo would turn into a chicken, and I am still too drunk to think of shit for the other two, so I shall have to eventually post again, I guess.
All three seem unaffected at first, but they'll often seem to get a Cutie Mark for doing something, only to have it fade away an undetermined amount of time later.
No, the poison joke effect of the CMC would be that their cutie marks turn invisible/undetectable. They've had them since they started, they just aren't able to see them due to the curse.
Scootaloo turns into a pathetic flightless filly, Sweetie Belle becomes more unlike her sister the more she tries to emulate her, and Apple Bloom loses the ability to ever get a cutie mark. In other words, nothing changes.
Scootaloo's wings grow enough that she actually can fly...and she develops a crippling fear of heights.
Apple Bloom gets her Cutie Mark...in getting a Cutie Mark.
Sweetie Belle can only speak in Q-bert-ese.
Yep never seen that anywhere before ;p
know I'm breaking the No all 3 have have the same joke.
But getting cutie marks at things they are really bad at.
Scootaloo gets beautiful butterfly wings... which only let her hover two feet off the ground.
Anything Sweetie Bell says or sings comes out in Morse code (either the code itself or her literally saying "dot" and "dash").
Applebloom...[thinks]...constantly makes origami animals out of whatever is at hand!
Ok, I know that people refer to Magic Kindergarten as bad, but what in world would make that bad?
Someone Explain that to me, please.
Was it really that bad, or are they just being over extcatied?
The idea is that. if you're sent there, it means that you've failed so hard that you aren't even expected to be competent at things a 4-year-old child can do.
And if you're there, it's really _obvious_ that you shouldn't be there (being 4-6 times the age of the other students and twice the size).
For an academic like Twilight, it would be the ultimate shame.
I think I've mentioned the Mekton Zeta campaign here before. One often-heard line from other players was, "Don't give The World ideas!".
The downside to me thinking enough like the DM to guess half the plot, was that I thought enough like the DM that he could drop in "oh dear, what if" ideas of mine with very little modification.
Fluttershy's fear comes across as a nod to her self-realization in "Putting Your Hoof Down". Not everyone does so well after a little ol' gaze into the abyss.
"Or sold into slavery."
"Or get swallowed whole by a dragon."
"Or lose a MacGuffin."
"Or get polymorphed into an article of clothing by a sorceress."
"Or be guilt-tripped into giving up our reward so 'the orphans have a place to live'...What?"
Also, here's part 2 of my Too Many Pinkie Pies alt-script. Hope you enjoy!
Okay, I very nearly laughed, which is actually more impressive than it sounds.
I also like how you managed to incorporate the doubt as to whether or not Pinkie is the real Pinkie, and how you explained the DM's original reasoning behind the Mirror Pool. I might have to remember both those things if I ever DM a campaign...
The Rainbow Dash Sonic Rainboom one is probably my favorite. So much emotion in that. I could totally see that happening in this comic strip (and kind of hope it does, even if it is unoriginal).
You know, I could have sworn that the incantation from the episode read 'there' rather than 'mared'. As in “And solemnly sweared not to be scared, at the prospect of being doubly there!”
“¡Ah! ¡The Mirror Pool! [echoes] ¡Oh, and there’s that voice again! Tsk, tsk, tsk. Ah Pinkie, you have got to stop talking to yourself. Starting. … now. ‘¡And into her own reflection she stared, uh, yearning for one whose reflection she shared, and solemnly sweared not to be scared, at the prospect of being doubly mared!’”
Yeah, I see it. I still feel that using the word 'mared' is too much of a stretch and has the feel of trying to force a rhyme which I've never liked. It's one of the show's worse pieces of prose in my opinion for that.
The Cutie Mark Critical Failure effect was awesome! THat would be an EXCELLENT game mechanic, as well as a reason why you might WANT a character who hasn't discovered their special talent yet. Example:
AB: But ah want mah Cutie Mark NOW!
AJ: Ya mean ya want to be succeptible to the CMCF like when Pinkie partied with her imaginary friends?
AB: ...point taken. No rush.
Also, in the party of one bit...
AJ: Pinkie Pie, I think you just failed a sanity roll.
PP: Wait, I have to roll to check if I'm sane? And I'm only having to do this now?
Everyone else: ... ... ...
"So I did that thing I do where everything goes all flat except me, and then I can see through the infinite reaches of time, space, and eternity, and that makes it easy to talk to the Elder Things that watch us when the stars are aligned, which is usually on Saturday, but only during certain seasons..."
Applebloom keeps having everything taste like oranges (or pears, whichever), Sweetie is caked in mud that magically comes back when a certain neatfreak sister tries to fix it, Scoot's wings get so big they're too heavy to flap("OH, COME ON!")
Going from a Magic User doing that one munchkin-y method where you choose where you're from and blah blah blah and you end up with an INT of 20-something and pretty much everything - damage, AC, etc. - is determined by rolling for an INT check, to a 1-INT Barbarian sucked kinda sorta super hardcore. There WERE some advantages though: I couldn't cave in someone's skull with my thumb as a Magic User.
My fratboy jock was once swapped with the character he hated the most. Namely, the leader of the party who he thought to be responsible for somehow drawing all the supernatural happenings like a magnet. It was one of the first plot points he wasn't too drunk or unobservant to rationalize away.
Just a question.....
What did Rainbow have to do? Rarity has thehair, Applejack is diminuitive, pinkie has to stick her hair out.... Twilight you don't know what the playere would have to do.... But what about Rainbow? Use her feet instead of her hands orsomething?
It has no impact at all on the game mechanics. Neither does messing up one's hair. The point is to make the players feel as silly - or in RD's case, disoriented - as their characters.
That in turn will impact their decisions during play. And be hilarious (for the DM; which will probably bite him/her in the tail later).
If you're doubting the disoriented part, then you've missed out on a few childhood (or adulthood) experiences.
As a kid, I had a tire swing (inner tube on a rope). My brother and I rapidly figured out that you could twist up the rope and then lift your feet off the ground to get a rather alarming amount of spin. We then rapidly learned why moderation is a good idea with that.
As an adult, I've had to do the "spin around ten times quickly, then _run_ in as straight a line as you can manage through this obstacle course" drill. Someone boasted that they wouldn't have problems with it. They had to do 20. A patch of ground got recycled lunch as a result of that.
"Or be aged up and down."
"Or had our gender changed."
"Or ended in a haunted house without any weapons."
"Or be forced to listen a very sad song."
"Or be attacked by the Borg in campain that has nothing to do with Star Trek."
"Or be attacked by pokemons... Wait!"
I'll confess, the comic that intrigued me the most, was where the players began to realize just how rich and deep Equestria potentially is, and there is NOTHING WRONG with spending a few sessions just exploring the game world and getting to know the NPCs.
I would so pay good money to see the classic "Body Swap" trope applied to MLP. :D
Add "Nerfed" to the list of could-be-worse scenarios.
My thoughts on CMC Poison Jokes:
Sweetie Belle = Sour Belle (Totally cacophonous voice)
Scootaloo = Scootaflew (Huge wings that keep catching air and lifting her)
Applebloom = Absorbabloom (Absorbs the cutie mark of whoever she touches, like Rogue from X-men)
Wow, yesterday was so busy for me that I forgot this updated.
Let's see....CMC poison joke effects...
....Darn, can't actually think of anything.
However, if I ever get the chance to DM, I am thinking of including a part where everyone has to go through a body-swapping.
Somewhat-similarly, our current DM said he wants to see us play the opposite types of characters from what we usually play next campaign. For me he was thinking either a lawful good paladin or a lawful evil cleric (neither of which is going to happen as long as I still have a say in it).
I have an odd question for all RPers here.
Has anyone ever balanced a characters stats for maximized plot and character development, even if said balancing led to an underpowered character based on their class?
To some extent, though competence was still the main optimization goal.
In most of the campaigns I've played in, we're expected to round out our characters to some degree, rather than make them unstoppable killing machines (or unstoppable at some other skill) at the expense of all else. In things like Ars Magica, for instance, we're encouraged to put a rank or two into some artistic pursuit or other item that isn't directly game-related but that reflects our character's hobbies and interests.
That said, building a character to be as capable as reasonably possible (without being solely focused on that skill) is also strongly encouraged. I actually had to retool my Pathfinder character for this after a couple of planned feats didn't work out.
This also depends heavily on the campaign. With the more freeform Mekton Zeta campaign, about half of our characters' abilities period were roleplayed and plot-based rather than due to anything on our character sheets. My character was assumed to be capable of doing spy-type things even if he didn't have a pile of skill ranks in espionage - at the cost of having the DM throw plot hooks at him via his handler. Most RP-centric DMs that I know will _gladly_ play along with hooks like that.
Well, my wizard didn't like violence and killing at all, especially killing. His goal was to do whatever he could, through any means, to stop killing from occurring in society, and his lifelong goal was to use mind control to do it. So, I always tried to have a mind altering spell and disarming with every level (hideous laughter, for instance, was one that I think fit his character), and charm person was his level 0 spell of choice. If I were to redo him I might just have ignored attacking spells altogether because my character would have had less interest in them, but the DM strongly discouraged me from doing that for gameplay reasons, so I did end up getting one of those every couple of levels. I ended up killing an enemy with one of those spells on our final or near final session, which basically put my wizard into a state of shock.
I asked because I remember one character I had who was...a little different.
I had a barbarian with low str and high int. He was an erudite barbarian, and was very well read. While most barbarians went for weapons or money in a loot pile, he'd go for obscure tomes, not magical but interesting. He'd read through them in down time and dedicate them to memory, because he enjoyed reading.
My reasons was he was barbarian by culture, not choice. His entire tribe were barbarians, and he came from there, but he left the tribe because he didn't fit in (like Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon), and had taught himself how to read in seven languages on his way to civilization. To balance his lack of strength, he read every book on anatomy - player character or otherwise - he could get his hands on. Since he still considered himself a barbarian, he put that gathered knowledge to use answering such questions as, "Which squishy part on this creature will make it fall down fastest?" Or, "What obscure local food item will make this creature not want to fight me?"
Created a strange game flow, but I got a ton of RP xp with my rather frequent debates with both PC and PC over automatically assuming a barbarian was an unlettered idiot. I once gained an entire level (from 0 xp on level gained to level gained) when I proved myself educated by reciting the entire "To be or not to be" monologue without looking it up. Got my group into an ancient library to recover the Maguffin without fighting the Guardian.
Of course! A lot of my players un-optimize their characters to favor really rich background and plot development. I do as well when I can get in as a PC.
I just started a Shadowrun game and my character is a Wiccan spellcaster who believes in harmony with nature to the point she has penalties casting combat spells.
(There's a 4-episode Anime called "Ruin Explorers", my character is based on Fam from that series).
Also, since my character is only 18 and dropped out early from college to find her older sister that vanished, most of her skills are at a measly rank 1-2 at best. :)
Definitely underpowered but oh so much fun to play.
I have an interesting tendency to not use the Class Features when I'm playing, so much as use the Skills and assumed competences/odd bits of knowledge that would come with them. Like a character that had a couple ranks in Profession:Mining, allowed me to help us navigate through an abandoned mine, instead of using Dungeoneering or whatever.
Not sure if that counts, though. I'd love to do more RP stuff, but so far all the games I've played in were with newbies or hack'n'slashers.
Heck, I do that more often than not! Granted, there's usually a bit of reciprocation there (I roleplay certain classes certain ways depending on what stats are most important), but connecting the mechanics to the personality of the character is pretty important to me.
Yep. Current game I'm in is a four lifepath Burning Wheel campaign. My character is a wizard, so the smart lifepath route would have been "City Born, Neophyte Sorcerer, Sorcerer, Sorcerer". My concept was "youthful wizard in training, who travelled to the city for mage training to escape his humdrum life in the country" though, so I went with "Village Born, Runner, Neophyte Sorcerer", keeping it to three lifepaths out of a possible four to keep him young, but greatly reducing the amount of skill points, traits and resources I had to my name. My wizard could only afford four low level spells, couldn't pick up second sight, and began the game naked, as I had no resource points left for clothes (I decided he was attacked by bandits and robbed just before the game began). I've also had a bloody ridiculous amount of fun crafting his backstory and the people he's known throughout his life, and wouldn't trade his character for all the powerups in the world.
In 1st Edition, the rules sometimes forced this on you if you were rolling for ability scores. There are reasons why this sort of thing was abandoned in later editions, based mainly on the idea that people should be allowed to play what they want to play. What players sometimes forget is that that is also a restriction on what they get to play.
My explosion-obsessed wizard had a few moments of this.
Guy:"Quick! Dispel (magic thing currently happening)!"
Me:"I can't! I didn't prepare that spell!"
Guy:"What? Why not?"
Me:"Because it doesn't kill stuff. Why would I ever want to prepare THAT? Eww."
It led to a few situations where the group wished we had an ACTUAL wizard.
Or the time we decided our characters would be very attached to the idea of fighting with unconventional weapons. "unconventional" as in "almost uselessly impractical". A book, an oar, and a bar stool make for surprisingly poor weapons.
Also, we made a team of grippli melee fighters. Gripplis are a race of two-feet tall frog-men more suited to ranger/rogue stuff, with an actual penalty to strength. There was a fighter, and I made a barbarian. We both had less than 14 in strength. Those characters were FAR from optimized.
My group was recently entered into a contract with a devil. It was all kind of silly when it went down, but I don't think that the players that weren't present will find it funny since they are somehow signed up too.
NEVER FORGET