Rarity: If we head home, we’ll be shunned just as much as Zecora was.
Rainbow Dash: We’re heroes! We took down Nightmare Moon and a dragon. Those villagers can deal with it.
DM: Apple Bloom looks like she wants to say something…
Applejack: What is it?
Apple Bloom: Well, Ah was thinkin’ Ah could go into town myself and get the herbs…
Twilight Sparkle: No.
DM: What?
Twilight Sparkle: We’re going to do what Zecora could never do: Go out into the open and explain EXACTLY what’s going on!
Rainbow Dash: Ooh, burn!
"Let me explain- no, there's no time. Let me summarize."
My players have an often-frustrating thing they do for "let me explain" moments meant to be RP'd out between themselves. They call it:
"BLAH."
Anytime some players got info and they must share with the other half, they call "BLAH" out loud and then the other players automatically assume they got the story. Since all the players heard it out of character, they figure there's no need to repeat anything.
As DM I don't really complain much about it... but as a player, this is where the frustrating point comes in.
I have to keep an eye on my daughter, including ensure she's fed, bathed, and put to bed at night. So often I'm away from the game to do these tasks and I miss important information. When I get back, I ask what my character has missed.
"BLAH" doesn't work on me in this case.
Unfortunately the other players can be downright knuckleheads so they fail to try and elaborate on what happened. This then leads to mission failure when we immediately get into a fight and my character isn't sure which side I'm supposed to be on.
As for fireballs, I'm the team magician and I don't have that spell yet. I do have lightning bolt as it's the better option against robots and electronics. ;)
However, that fight turned against us because the mooks got themselves killed in their own grenade explosion, so no one was alive to extract info out of. :/
But that's okay, because we actually came together with a good plan to catch the BBEG's important minion and extract info out of him. :D
...until the cops showed up in a record breaking 36 seconds response time, this is including the time it took someone to call 911 when they heard gunfire, so no info for us to gain. :/
So now we have to go with the GM's railroading NPC to get any info.
When we need to explain what's going on to NPCs, we usually just resort to comical paraphrasing. Example:
"See the big, red moon? Yeah, we're trying to do something about that."
Or our amazing recap rant of the entire plot of the campaign. I can't remember that one in as much detail, but here's the gist of it ("blahs" included):
Blah blah blah "The staff is the key!" Blah blah blah "BAGHLAGHLAGHLAGHLAGHLAGH!!!" Blah blah blah blah "FIRE EVERYWHERE!!!!" Blah blah blah...
In short, it consisted of a bunch of "blahs" and referencing every single one of the inside jokes/inside memes we had developed :P
Because it's not like Zecora ever tried to explain to people and they just didn't listen to her because they were too prejudiced to give a shit what she was actually saying.
Maybe the reason she rhymes is because the Poison Joke studied her dreams and noticed her want for people to actually listen to her and understand what she was doing.
So it jumbled her speech, and now even when people listen, they don't understand her.
(But seriously, in matters of discrimination, it's not a case of the discriminated person not explaining. It's a case of the discriminators repeatedly never listening and pretending they never said anything to begin with. It's a disgusting behaviour, and it's also something everybody engages in. Even all of you.)
Another of my favourite lines, Digo. Bought both books for the first time on the same weekend, after having known one movie only a summer's length and the other for maybe four years beyond that.
I'm surprised the players haven't had some sort of fit yet at how much the DMPC is doing. If I'd been in Twilight's player's shoes, I would have been thinking long before this that it was time for Apple Bloom to shut up and sit down and let the PCs handle this. Having the DMPC offer to solve their problem for them would be the icing on the cake.
I mean, think about it. Using Pathfinder/3.5 as an example:
You take 1 level of 'Inquisitor (Heretic of Infiltrator)' (+Wis mod.) (you can also take the 'Conversion' Inquisition to use Wis instead of Cha for it), 10 levels in 'Taker' with a Survival Skill of Bluff (+10), 1 level in Disciple of Baalzebul if you're evil (+Int mod), the feat Rapscallion (+Int), 10 levels in Master Spy (+10), 20 levels in Rogue(Spy) (+10 for deceiving someone), and... The list goes on. Add to that Glibness for +20 and all the various feats you can get (they list many here: http://alt.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=266356 ) and you can lie through your teeth and people will believe you when you say the sky is purple with green polkadots and the giant bone dragon is a small kitten. You could probably get epic level in bluff long before diplomacy, but then again diplomacy is more useful when it comes to gaining allies unless your DM is as kind as me. I think you could create a character who could speak to anything and bluff through everything pretty easily.
Personally when I DM I wont let the players say that the sky is purple with green pokadots, Why? Because the Sky is blue, However, I will let players say that the Sky is under a Permanent Illusion and that the sky is actully purple with green pokadots, or that the Giant Bone dragon is actully a Polymorphed kitten.
Ya know, I used to have this document where I wrote down the zen of bluff. It had to do with the idea that I could use bluff instead of intimidation or diplomacy. Basically, I have a crazy character who doesn't believe a single word of what he's saying, even if it's all true.
I'm not sure when I lost it, but I think it was around the same time my diary went missing. What a coincidence.
See my comments above. The episode was trying to be a racism metaphor, so this part fills itself in. The ponies probably never listened to Zecora when she did speak, because they're discriminators. They already shut their doors and closed their services to her, they treat her as a witch - at what goddamn point do you think that they'd show any tiny bit of decency to actually turn around and hear what she says?
Twilight isn't being amazing by any goddamn stretch of the imagination. She got one step closer to being a decent person by listening, and then took eighty steps back by imagining that somehow Zecora never mentioned this ridiculously important thing to anybody before and acted as if she's smarter than the one who's right there trying to cure the magical ailment she's suffering without anybody's help or compassion whatsoever.
In the show, yes, that makes sense. In this campaign, she's hated not because she rhymes and has stripes but because she kidnapped and either killed or drove insane a good chunk of the populous (and intention doesn't really help when your children are corpses or loons). They stopped letting her use them as highly expendable lab rats so she forced them to, which makes her species as relevant as calling it a racism issue if it turned out Hitler was actually a black guy.
Presumably "listen to me" is an easier sell if you're a pony and have a reputation as a citizen of good repute, than if you're a foreign zebra who walked into a xenophobic town with no in-town history and with strange mannerisms. It's the difference between a +4 bonus and a -4 penalty on that Diplomacy roll, in game terms.
I'm going to be on the receiving end of something similar when the Ars Magica campaign spools up. This time I took "Blatant Gift". Normally, the Gift makes people treat magi like used car salesmen as soon as they open their mouths. Blatant Gift makes them think you're there to eat their children as soon as they _see_ you. Covenfolk will _slowly_ get used to you, but my character is not someone you want along on the town runs.
So, before this point the DM was acting very suspiciously, trying to force the players into a very specific situation through Apple Bloom. So far all her advice had been good, and this suggestion is logical, so I think this was a trap from the DM to get Apple Bloom away from the party. Not on Apple Bloom's part, but I'm thinking she was going to get turned to stone or something if they had let her go. Everything was too simple before now...
This normally SOUNDS brilliant, but this one time the rest of the party kept wanting to mention my character's afflictionof being born a Host, which was basically the campaign's version of being a black, gay Jew in WWII Germany who also cheated on Hitler's wife and ate babies. The local NPCs were really braindead in that one, since being a Host is basically automatically casting "feat: random wings" if it's dark.
Needless to say I had to roll to "cover the idiot's mouth" during every encounter with sentient beings. I did let them tell the non-sentients, squirrels can keep secrets right?