Our cast is a bit different yet again, for it was still the pre-Rogue days, though only just. I think "the leadership feat game", as it's often called among the group, was the last big one before she joined. It was our primary game for at least two years, though there were short breaks, but there were also times where we'd play multiple sessions in a week.

The DM: The DM, obviously. My bestest bro. Owner of the library of all things D&D3.5, herder of cats.

Waifu: The DM's wife. Never plays with us if Psion is playing. Probably won't come up much in this story, but just in case she does.

Wizard: Our venerable neckbeard. Intellectual, patient, wrathful. /tg/ seems to consider him Santa Gandalf of Gygax Kingdom.

Psion: Our resident semi-dick and powergamer. On government disability for being just that much of a geek, essentially.

Brobarian: My good friend. Little did I know in a few short years I'd envy him like all xenos envy the holy Emprah. But s'aright, it's all good.

Doc Animeslaughter: Our token Asian nerd. I'll tell you more about him in a minute.

Me: That guy who I am.

Today will be a glorious day. I am posting in a surely awesome thread.

Now, as usual, I have to do a bit of a pre-game rundown of various people and events, primarily introducing you to the Doc. But first I want to take a bit to talk about Psion.

Psion has clearly been a bit of a "Huh?" character for some of you, and I'm usually fairly harsh on him. In part because he just has that ability to get under your skin bit by bit until suddenly you've got fucking gamer ringworm or something. So when I recall the instances of him being dickish, it gets me all riled up all over again. But some of you sympathize with him... and that's okay! He's actually not a -bad- guy.

See, to explain, I'm going to have to give you a bit of personal dictionary, and tell you the difference between an asshole and a douchebag.

An asshole not only doesn't care if he's annoying or stomps all over you, he probably gets off on it. An asshole will actually go out of his way to screw you over, especially if he thinks he'll get something out of it. An asshole will watch you fall across a gap and barely catch yourself with your fingers and toes, use you as a bridge, and laugh at you as you call for help, -then- threaten to knife you if you get pissed at him once you are up. Presented with a chance to do good or fuck someone over, the asshole always goes with fucking someone over.

A douchebag doesn't quite realize that he's stomping all over you. It's not that he's trying to screw you over, it's just that it doesn't ever occur to him to think of you while he's getting his. A douchebag will watch you fall across that gap, probably still use you as a bridge, but if you call for help he'll probably help you up, and just not understand why you're mad about the whole "using you as a bridge" thing. Presented with doing good or fucking over, a douchebag at least considers the options.

Psion could really be a douchebag. But at least he wasn't an asshole.

You're back! Did I miss any stories? The last one I read was of the real-life hero, Super Dave. Rest his soul.

>>11781239

Nope, I took a few days' break, this is the first I've posted after Super Dave.

>>11781189
Let it be so...

This better be worth it... That's a girl getting her tits lit on fire dammit!

Now, that out of the way, let me tell you about Doc Animedeath.

He actually got a mention in the last story. Yeah, he was the son of the Korean immigrants that Super Dave cited as being in pre-med. We hadn't seen a whole ton of him in awhile due to the whole, you know, college and medical school and residency, and in truth he wandered in and out of the game throughout its length. His character needed more excuses for absence than hooker-hiring governors.

As to the name I've chosen for him... um, shit, that's gonna need its own comment.

"Love-hate" does not quite properly explain the Doc's relationship with Japanese entertainment and culture. It was more like... "love-'strange twisted and slightly disturbing love'". Like, he loved pretty much every anime, but seemed to really, really like the ones where horrible things happened to the characters. Death, dismemberment, total party kills, he'd list them off the way most people would list interesting characters, neat story, and big bouncy tits as positives for an anime.

It's not that I think he was a guro fan or anything like that. He didn't seem to be turned on or morbidly fascinated by these things. He was just cheerful and happy, and seeing anime characters he loved dying horribly also made him cheerful and happy. Sort of the same way that if someone greeted him with "Konnichiwa!", he'd respond with just as cheerful a "Konnichiwa!", hold a conversation with them in their broken fan-Japanese, and end the conversation with a happily-said word that was, I think, the Korean equivalent of "cocksucker".

But anyway, now that all that's out of the way, I can provide the background for "the leadership feat game". Or, its alternate title among the group, "the freak game".

See, the DM had decided to run a game with the weirdest, freakiest characters we could manage. I remember the first session where we were waiting to be told what our theme for this game would be, and he came out of the bedroom, went over to the Library Of All Things 3.5, took out Savage Species, Complete Psionic, and a few Monster Manuals and thumped them down in the middle of the table.

"Guys. Prepare to go nuts."

And so, we did.

As we looked over the books and discussed what we might play, and ran things by the DM, we came up with a sort of unofficial rule guideline: we were going to make The Characters That Shouldn't Be.

The first to do this was Psion, who got to work creating a Thri-Kreen sorcerer. Yes, I know, Thri-Kreen don't use magic. This one did. Character That Shouldn't Be.

Wizard easily topped that, though. He made a skeleton cleric. With healing spells. The character concept actually included that it -hurt him- to cast these healing spells. The DM waved the idea of the char taking damage, but roleplay wise, it was probably the oddest of the oddballs.

I'll admit, the animated skeleton cleric was a hard act to follow. I don't think any of the rest of us actually managed to measure up.

I tried, with my Githyanki Paladin. Well, okay, my Githyanki Paladin of Freedom. Still, just saying "Githyanki Paladin" generally got across the sense of a Character That Should Not Be.

Brobarian probably came the closest to making a "typical" character. He made a Tiefling rogue. Now, admittedly, instead of making this a poor, persecuted good guy who was fighting against prejudice, his Tiefling actually used to be an evil bastard who reveled in his wicked blood. It's just that he was reformed now, and trying to be Chaotic Good(-ish).

Doc Animedeath made a ninja.

That doesn't sound like it fits, does it? It probably also sounds like something out of those "Al Bruno the 3rd" editorials. Oh god, not another ninja!

However, as it was explained to me, Doc's character was actually the return of a character he'd played in a much earlier game, in an earlier edition in fact. Back then, your character was always a Ninja/Something Else. Because the existence of ninjas was supposed to be a secret and ninjas were an urban legend, if you played one you were actually playing a Ninja/Rogue (ninja pretending to be a rogue), or a Ninja/Fighter (ninja pretending to be a fighter), or whatever.

Doc had played a Ninja/Ninja.

You see, as far as people in the game world were concerned, ninjas didn't exist. So obviously anyone who claimed to be a ninja was either an idiot or insane or both. And the more they acted like a ninja, the more they insisted they were a ninja, the dumber and more insane they must be.

The fact that Doc's character wasn't even a Rokugani probably helped. So here you have a -white boy-, claiming to be a kind of warrior that -doesn't exist-, and acting it to the hilt. No one in a million years would have suspected him of being an actual ninja, which is why being a ninja -who was pretending to be a ninja- was the perfect cover.

I laughed myself hoarse the first time someone explained it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09t2lCOolAg

summon familiar
quick cast greater charisma

All you fags report this for archival, I might not be able to read it all before I have to go to work and I don't want to miss it. :\

>>11781325
HHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

So we had our Thri-Kreen sorcerer (Zarsh), our skeleton cleric (The Cleric), my Githyanki paladin (Hawk), our Tiefling rogue (Alto), and our human ninja (Lord Percy Kelpforth).

Now immediately, our issue would have been, how the hell are we going to even get into town, let alone go to the tavern to meet up? (No, we probably wouldn't have actually done that. Thatsthejoke.jpg) If ol' Drizz'le thought he had a tough time, we've got a fucking skeleton in black robes and a giant bug with us. Oh, right, and the dude from the race known for popping into the Prime Material every so often for raping and pillaging, there was that too.

The skeleton at least had his robes, some gloves, and a mask to wear. I was in full armor and could have put the helmet's visor down. The insect man and the guy with horns might have been our biggest problem at that point.

Luckily, the DM had us covered from a story angle. We had all been invited to a city called High Talon by a man named Janus. This invitation had come complete with a badge we could wear, to show that we worked for the town's eccentric, extremely rich, extremely famous playwright. He basically said the badges would also do a tone-down on the hostility of other settlements, so while they might not exactly be welcoming, they at least would give us a chance to show we just wanted to buy stuff instead of killing us on sight.

Afterwards this was simply assumed to be in effect, we didn't spend too much time thinking about it. We were too busy being -awesome-.

Monster characters have level adjustment for a reason, let's just say that.

Between experienced players, powerful character races, and the DM's rather generous allowing (if not encouraging) us to use numerous different books and items, I think our average was taking down stuff four levels above our challenge rating. Our -average-.

We were a small band of bony, chitinous, wrinkle-skinned, darkness-casting, katana-wielding gods of war.

We'd started out above 1, obviously... I think it was something like five or six, just to make sure that no one had to spend multiple levels just playing a 'Monstrous Humanoid'.

Wizard was doing his usual patient march towards being a small, precise tactical nuclear weapon. I had Monkey Grip and full mythril plate, and was wielding a sword so large I really should have had spiky hair and an outfit with more zippers. Brobarian had, helped by the others, gone on a book crawl for every feat possible that let you do a sneak attack when you shouldn't have been able to. Doc was, well, being a ninja.

Psion was already a smaller, less precise tactical atomic weapon.

See, since we were already playing a weird game, the DM had decided to try out a few variant rules systems. We were using HP/Wounds, Damage Reduction, and most importantly, spell points.

Psion hoarded anything that gave him extra spell points like someone that lived through the Depression hoards whatever was on sale at Wal-Mart. At one point he blanket declared all CHA-boosting items to belong to him. We mostly ignored him.

He multiclassed pretty freely throughout the campaign into whatever prestige or other magic classes he thought he could wring extra power out of. He eventually started specializing in Orb spells, able to do impressive area damage without worrying about much spillover.

So eventually, you may be thinking, eventually he's going to get to the whole leadership feat thing.

I will, soon. I promise. It's just that to understand why the leadership feat was such an amusing part of the game, you need to understand the characters, and a bit what they were like.

Zarsh was living to the fullest, because he'd realized that in comparison to his companions he wasn't going to live long. The Cleric was creepy, and walked this strange line between good and evil, where he'd heal the sick and the lame and save the day but thought it was rather "eh", but he did really enjoy melting evil people.

Alto was a hero after a fashion, always looking for some good to do, always looking for a day to save, and constantly remembering what fun it was to be evil. He had a tendency to lean towards pragmatism rather than heroism when determining what to do with captives and not-currently-dangerous monster races. But he was still pretty easy to argue into doing good.

Ol' Percy was kind of a nut. Or at least he came off that way. He understood that everyone considered him completely bugnut bonkers, and a lot of times he just went with that. Still, every time he talked about honor and the code of the warrior and defending his noble house, he really meant it, no matter how crazy he sounded.

I don't know what this thread is or who OP is.

I'll try not to go on too much about Hawk, as he was my character so I could easily get carried away.

Hawk had been part of a raiding party onto the Prime Material plane, hunting down a human who'd managed to grab a Silver Sword. When the party caught up to the human, he was totally outmatched, and one of the Githyanki was going to kill him with an arrow. The human's pet hawk flew in front of the arrow and sacrificed itself to give him one more moment of life. Suddenly exposed to the concepts of self-sacrifice and truly caring for others for the first time, Hawk turned on the rest of his party, assumed the name of the fallen creature, and devoted himself to one day taking down the Liche Queen and freeing the Githyanki from the rule of the being that kept them so harsh and cruel.

As he leveled up, I sent him into the prestige class of Dragon Slayer. Hey, Githyanki ride on red dragons, makes perfect sense. But mostly because it was a good class, and we fought dragons a lot. Hawk was good enough at it that he just started putting little colored dragon heads on his sword, and there were more than a few.

>>11781441
SSSSSH Storytime

It was a long and awesome game, but what made it so more than our utterly badass characters were the NPCs we interacted with. The DM had known that he was handing us the keys to the cookie jar when he told us to go nuts, and that there was little he could have done to stop us from just slaughtering our way across the planes if we'd wanted to, short of whipping out a Tarrasque with "go fuck yourself" painted on its side at seventh level.

So he went the opposite tack and did his best to make the NPCs we interacted with so interesting and unique that we'd actually want to talk to them, want to follow the quest lines, check up on them when we got back into town, not go the extra mile to kill them because we actually wanted to fight them again in the case of rivals, and so on.

One of these NPCs was a nerdgirl wizard named Kelly. Kelly worked for a guild that employed adventurers to go out and explore places, so as to bring maps of them back. It wasn't exactly hard, all we had to do was tuck the magic orb they gave us in a regular pack, and not lose it. Kelly was sweet, kind, nerdy, solidly in the Good alignment, and a little on the naïve side.

She also apparently had a thing for Brobarian's Tiefling bad boy. Which just sounds like some sort of offhanded "all girls want bad boys" stuff, but it was more for what an amusing odd couple they made than anything else.

When Brobarian decided to take Leadership, just because he'd never taken it before, I don't think he was expecting the DM to give him Kelly as his cohort. But he wasn't complaining.

So Kelly had decided to get out of the stuffy Mapquester offices (they were officially the Mapping Guild, we called them Mapquesters just like we called weapon stores Bloodbath & Beyond). She was now part of our party. The DM RPed her when she had something plot-relevant to say, but he also let Brobarian speak for her a fair bit of the time since, well, she was his cohort. In battle Brobarian was able to have her use her spells to help out, though since she was two levels lower than him and started with a build determined by the DM, she wasn't a combat god to start with.

But still, I think Wizard was starting to see the potential in this. Not necessarily for the combat usefulness, though I doubt he hadn't noticed that. But for the interesting possibilities it could present roleplay-wise. And so he announced that he'd be taking Leadership at his next level as well. (We were all a bit staggered, due to different level adjustments and XP-using crafting and such.)

That's how we got the vampire monk.

Story 1&2 (Rogue Joins and Wizard flips out on Psion)
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/11700384/
Story 3 (Superdave)
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/11730759/
enjoy while we enjoy this over the OP's namesake.

>>11781386
>Wizard was doing his usual patient march towards being a small, precise tactical nuclear weapon. I had Monkey Grip and full mythril plate, and was wielding a sword so large I really should have had spiky hair and an outfit with more zippers. Brobarian had, helped by the others, gone on a book crawl for every feat possible that let you do a sneak attack when you shouldn't have been able to. Doc was, well, being a ninja.

>Psion was already a smaller, less precise tactical atomic weapon.

It doesn't really sound like you were particularly strong or optimised, to be honest.

We encountered her on a hilltop, not long before dawn. She'd been a Lawful Good monk who had been turned by a vampire, and thus become a mindless, bloodthirsty monster at his beck and call. She'd eventually managed to break away from him, but her nature still compelled her to drink blood and do evil. So she was waiting for the sunrise.

Wizard gave what was quite possibly one of the most darkly interesting motivational speeches ever. About how she merely needed to learn to channel that bloodlust, that desire for evil, against the wicked and the monstrous. That she might be a monster, but that she could become a monster for the forces of good.

And while she traded in level drain for being able to cross running water, she was still the most punishing monk you could have. Except for outside during the day. Her coffin stayed in the party's portable hole, with her assuming gaseous form to get in or out.

Of course, once he realized just how helpful a cohort could be in battle, Psion had to have one, too. By that point his character had died once and come back as a Changeling with Farspawn taint, resulting in two tentacles on his back. We all hoped that the DM wasn't going to give him a schoolgirl cohort.

What he got was a girl flesh golem with a few levels of (dun dun dun) psion. Specifically, soul knife. She'd apparently been an experiment by a mad doctor in how psychic powers work. Of course madness and heavy equipment rarely mingle well, so boom, laboratory go explode, patchwork girl survives, now we have an introverted, nervous, stitches-covered Psylocke around.

So it was time to play follow the leader. Or rather, follow the leadership feat. Seeing the strange and neat new characters we'd acquired and the new RPing dynamics they'd added, Doc and I were eager to follow suit.

The DM rubbed his chin a bit and said, "Tell you what, do you guys not mind waiting a little while to actually get your cohorts?"

We agreed. However, unlike the others, I wasn't quite content to just sit back and let the DM pick something out for me. Not that I didn't think he'd give me something awesome. Just that I had noticed the "odd couple" dynamic, and to make up for not being as much of a strange duck as Wizard's The Cleric, I wanted to take that dynamic up to eleven, then draw a few extra notches and keep turning it up.

See, so far, The Cleric kind of had the most fitting cohort out of all of us. He was undead, she was undead. He was morally ambiguous, now she was morally ambiguous. I didn't want to go all Bizarro with my own cohort, nor did I think I was in competition with Wizard... but he'd set the standard for Characters That Should Not Be, now I wanted to set the standard for What The Hell Cohorts.

So the next gaming day, when the DM and I met for our usual pre-game outing, I pitched the idea to him. At first he was uncertain. Then he gave me the 'What?' look. Then I think it sank in and he got thoughtful. Finally, he said he'd give it a shot, if only because he wanted to see me play this out. It would be a few more sessions, but he'd give me my chance.

>>11781414
>He multiclassed pretty freely throughout the campaign into whatever prestige or other magic classes he thought he could wring extra power out of. He eventually started specializing in Orb spells, able to do impressive area damage without worrying about much spillover.

Now I'm just confused. This was a psion?

We were headed down into the Underdark, with the intention I think of eventually running the City of the Spider Queen module. Of course, where that was pretty much a pure combat module, being that we were monster races we were actually considering talking our way through it and visiting the city some manner of peacefully instead of just slaughtering everything there.

But first we had to get there, and this necessitated going through the cave system. Eventually, in one set of caves, we went through a cave where the walls were lined with stone statues of monsters, adventurers, and so on. You're probably wondering if I was about to pick up a Medusa cohort. Well, no.

>>11781571
No, a douchebag called psion due to him almost always playing one.

See, first of all, the thing in the cave wasn't a Medusa.

It was a Beholder.

Second of all, it was trying to kill us.

Anti-magic fields make any fight tough, no matter how badass your characters are. It was in fact a beholder (not this same one, and along with a small army) that had been involved in the fight that had killed Zarsh's Thri-Kreen form.

We managed to finish it off, but most of the statues had been smashed or damaged in some way previously, meaning there was no real way to bring them back. The only completely whole one was a medium-sized black dragon. Since it seemed to have items, we decided it wasn't just a rampaging beast, and it would be wrong to just leave it there.

And that was how we picked up Kaladon.

Kal (to his friends) is quite possibly my favorite character I've ever created and played. He was a black dragon, sure... but he was Chaotic Neutral, made it a point to be articulate and well-spoken (in every language but Draconic, which he spoke in Cockney style), and did his best to be a charming and genial sort, especially to the ladies. You see, Kal had stopped being evil so he could get laid.

He had come to the simple and inescapable conclusion that sex was a lot more fun and a lot more interesting with partners that were willing and active participants. So he'd cleaned up his act, cleaned up his body (he had some gnomes make him some baking soda soap and toothpaste). He learned a bunch of other languages, including Celestial and Rokugani (he had dreams, man), and made sure that he could smoothtalk in all of them.

He had come to his fate in the beholder's lair through trickery. You see, according to Kal, there existed a sort of pen pal network across the world, as a way for... "open-minded" women to expand their experience of different species. The beholder had effectively been doing the pen and paper equivalent of pretending to be a girl online, luring in adventurers and monsters before saying "Why don't you have a seat over there? ... AS A FUCKING STATUE!"

And that was how my solemn, upstanding, straight-laced, somewhat dour Dragon Slayer picked up a genial, horny, wisecracking, eternally optimistic black dragon as a cohort.

Everyone was pretty ambivalent about Kal at first, but he seemed willing enough to come along as long as it got him out of that damn cave, and hey, if we were heading to Drow territory, he'd heard Drow women were totally into dragons.

Doc seemed to be silently wondering how much longer he'd have to wait for his Cohort, but said nothing. We started out of that cave and back into the tunnels, when suddenly there was a crash, a smash, the ceiling ahead of us came tumbling down in a hail of rubble and smoke and the sound of a body thudding. Then a moment later, after some coughing, a figure stood amidst the cloud of rock dust and thrust out a hand in salute.

"HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIL KELPFORTHAZZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Doc Animedeath was so damn happy.

He'd stab her. Universe would come along, zooop, she's back, still adores him. He'd push her off a cliff. Universe would come along, zoooop, she's back, still adores him. He'd shove her into the mouth of a giant monster. She survived anyway, she cut her way out, and she brought treasure from inside the monster. He actually thanked her and she adored him more than ever.

Of course he didn't just abuse her constantly, or appear to take -malicious- glee in it. He just played along with the gag and did it in that same solemn, offhanded way Ilpallazzo would in the series whenever she annoyed him, and she was always fine. She'd been built with levels of fighter and rogue, but I don't think I ever saw him use her for anything but daring suicide charges.

We were now at double our original party's number, and although the cohorts were all at least two levels lower than us, they filled in any gaps we may have had with their own builds. We went from taking on stuff four or more levels above our suggested CR to between six and eight levels above it with no real problems.

The sheer tactical power we had at our fingertips was devastating. We had a fully-armored divine fighter with innate psychic powers and a massive enchanted sword. We had a rogue who could sneak attack you while standing right in front of you and hide in plain sight. We had two powerful spellcasters, one a healer and one of pure damage, neither of whom were restricted by spells-per-day. And we had a well-worked out ninja who was almost impossible to hit but dealt damage like a reliable motherfucker.

But we now also had a wizard with plenty of debuff spells and the Twin Spell feat (more than one monster was reduced to not being able to stand by a double Ray of Enfeeblement). We had a monk with obscene bonuses to strength and dex and a natural slam attack that could turn gaseous and fly around the field. We had a Soul Knife that... well, she'd been toned down to make her medium and not totally game-breaking, but she was still immune to criticals, had natural slam attacks, and could stretch her arms out for extra reach when striking with her psionic blades. We had a black dragon that could fly, use his breath weapon, and had a damn good full attack, aside from all his dragony bonuses to saves and such. And we had Excel, who... well, she had a fuckton of hit points and she knew no fear, so she was probably the most meat shieldy meat shield ever.

If something needed killing, this monster of a party was going to fuck its shit up.

Of course, this meant a very sharp curve in the kind of stuff the DM had to throw at us to keep us from just walking right over it without pausing. We were fighting more and more giant monsters, and I'm talking of the Kaiju scale. Even then, between the characters we'd built and certain quirks of the alternate rules, that wasn't slowing us down a lot. He once threw a half-hydra Spawn of Tiamat at us. Brobarian and I killed it in two hits because we both criticaled it and wiped out its wounds points completely.

I could see that the DM was becoming a little frustrated. It wasn't that he wanted to kill us or anything, but he wanted our fights to be epic, and they were becoming about as epic as some Exalted characters fighting the rats in the tutorial level of half the videogames ever. It also left him in the position where the fights were supposed to take up a certain amount of time, and he hadn't always created quite enough material for that night when we mopped up an encounter that should have taken at least an hour and a half in twenty-five minutes. (Or, as mentioned above, five.)

So eventually someone (I don't remember who) suggested that maybe it would be neat to have our cohorts go off on their own adventure for awhile. Gain some XP like a normal party, develop their own dynamic separate of their "bosses", go off in a whole different direction.

The DM rubbed his chin, clearly torn. On the one hand, it was a good idea... while the secondary characters were powerful, as a whole they weren't quite as overpowered as even our original party had been. And it probably would be an interesting new dynamic.

On the other hand, he did have his house rule about no cross-playing. And every cohort except mine was female. (Though the only two in an actual relationship-type dynamic were Brobarian's rogue and his wizard cohort.) What to do?

>>11781571
The character for these stories named "Psion" is currently playing a Thri-Kreen Sorcerer.

In the end it was decided yes, we would split the party. We'd take a break from playing the main cast, and have the secondaries strike out on a different objective.

The fact that Yellow Bastard wasn't in this game probably helped him make this decision. As well, none of the female characters were exactly chainmail bikini types. Kelly was established as being very pretty, but bookish and wearing full robes. Kira, the vampire, had at times been described with adjectives like "hawk-nosed" and "severe", and wore a black gi. Three, the golem, had been outfitted with full body leather armor that was as patchwork as she was, and while Psion had noted it was rather tight, hadn't really bothered expanding on that.

And Excel was... well, she was Excel. The DM owned the complete series and had clearly watched it before this, and when Doc bothered to RP her himself he did a similarly exacting job. There's not sticking your dick in crazy, and there's not sticking your dick in KUH-RAAAAAAAAAY-ZEEEEEE.

I've got to say, Kal was happy. He had very broad views of what constituted an attractive female. While there were a few jokes made aloud (by other people) about his "harem", in my head I admit that I was picturing him going along humming the dragon equivalent of pimpin' rap music to himself.

(Kal was, by the way, exactly the sort of male who would, without a second thought, stick his dick in crazy. Any kind of crazy. He had about as good judgment regarding women as the print version of Conan.)

Not that I intended to play any of this out. It was purely from a perspective of getting into the character's head. And in the character's head, he may as well have been in a hot tub at the Playboy mansion for how well the party split turned out for him.

Needless to say, this new party was now an entirely different game. Not... literally, it was still the same game, but it was like playing Final Fantasy VII and going from playing Cloud, Barret, and Aeris to playing Tifa, Yuffie, and Red XIII.

While we still had at least two hideously powerful characters, one decent spellcaster, someone who was bordering on immune to most spells with saves and one... meat shield... the sudden tactical advantage was gone. We no longer had what the DM liked to call "WHARBOOM!" ability... no one who could just point at shit and make it explode. We also had no actual healer, and two characters that didn't heal normally.

We'd gone from "I kill an orc" to "Heroic tale of Balrog proximity" pretty fast, really.

Still, it was a fresh new dynamic and new roleplaying experience for us all after grinding on with the same characters for awhile. Well, fresh and new for most of us. Psion was still playing a quiet, overly pragmatic, rather introverted character no matter what it said on his character sheet.

Though the DM warned Doc that he should not expect Excel's plot armor to keep functioning on the sidequest, I don't think Doc cared all that much. He still had her run headlong into any situation that came up. The scary thing was that somehow, separated from the main group and no longer fighting Godzilla every week, she kept -surviving- when he'd do that. He was still happy.

Our new party made its way gradually up through the tunnels, with various adventures along the way, until we got back to the surface and headed off on our secondary objective, while the main party was presumably deep within the ground trying to make the earth itself their bitch or something. I'm sure I could remember the exact mission if I tried, but it probably involved rolling just as many dice as that would.

After various adventures we got back to the surface, and then set off across the ocean for lands both known and unknown. Along the way we had some interesting adventures involving explaining where one of our number went during the day to suspicious townspeople, diverting a week into orc-infested valleys just because they apparently hadn’t been mapped in detail yet, and trying to explain to the king that no sir, the dragon’s not here to pillage your kingdom, and there was really a very good reason you found him with your naked daughter…

I could explain more of the secondary party’s adventures, many more, but we’d be having this thread well through the night and into the morning. We were occasionally holding multiple games a week just to try and find places in everyone’s schedules and because we were enjoying ourselves so much. It was both some of the most interesting roleplaying and varied combat we’d had in quite awhile.

Eventually we were deep in Rokugan, investigating a plot to overthrow a shogun that involved sneaking in both inside and outside mercenaries under the guise of a giant fighting tournament. This was when Psion, a bit longingly, pointed out that all of our cohorts were high enough level to take Leadership themselves now, if the rules didn’t forbid it.

As you may have realized by now, the DM rarely let hard adherence to the rules get in the way of making sure we all had a good time.

Kelly the mapmaking wizard picked up a Halfling cleric that really had no interest in going anywhere, but followed whoever he felt compelled to by the whims of his god. Kira the lawful neutral vampire monk picked up a lawful good paladin-y samurai who actually believed in mercy and justice, and took to following her around mostly so that they could continue arguing about the nature of evil and the correct response to it. Three the Soul Knife/Monk (Psion had now discovered his favorite build ever) picked up a lesser electricity elemental. Excel made friends with a redheaded sorceress with a penchant for fire spells and mass destruction.

Kal somehow wound up being followed around by a very androgynous, brightly-dressed rogue who was very cute, very extroverted, apparently flagrantly bisexual, and not afraid to flaunt it. The poor dragon was constantly afraid to make a move on his cohort because he didn’t know if balls would wind up touching.

>>11781794
why am I sensing a matryoshka party?

dear lord this is awesome as usual MP&CC

Any of you who play Magic: The Gathering may recall a card called Scheherazade. What playing this card did was that both players would take half of their deck and start a new game to one side, and only return to the original when the other game was finished. Any of you that read my last story may also recall that Super Dave liked to build super-annoying decks just to use them once or twice to show how aggravating they could be before retiring them. Well, back before they put a very small limit on Scheherazade cards, he built a deck with something like five of the damn things in there.

That’s what this game of D&D was like. We’d take on new followers, play them until we were just curbstomping any encounter we came across, then split the cohorts off in a new direction. We didn’t do this a –ridiculous- number of times. But it did provide a nice excuse when Doc had to miss a string of games and we wound up with four cohorts, and could then just revert to whatever those guys were doing when he couldn’t make it.

That group, by the way, was a quartet of no-LA race characters who’d all started out with their first handful of levels being NPC classes. It was actually strangely satisfying to be able to kill an orc as an aspiring playwright with three levels of Expert.

>>11781811

did the GM make these cohorts or the players?

>lestion (approximately

It really probably wasn’t a ridiculous number of group splits, but it certainly seems like it thinking back. Probably because sometimes we’d only play a group for a few sessions before finding out they didn’t really gel and do a quick-step on to the next.

Eventually, about the time we were really starting to miss our original guys, we started gathering back through the various levels to hook back up with the mains. They’d gone up a few levels, and had finished up their business in the Underdark and were ready to move on to the endgame of the main quest.

That was when we realized just what we’d done.

>>11781847

Almost always the DM, just to see what he'd spring on us next. Sometimes he'd give us a theme or an outline to use, like when he told us to make characters using NPC classes.

If you look at the Leadership feat table, it describes how you have a cohort of a certain level and then various numbers of followers of other levels.

Of course we hadn’t actually created and played the hundreds of followers you could accumulate with the feat, but a significant portion of the personal armies our characters were entitled to actually had names, backstories, and stats thanks to our odd little diversion from the main storyline.

There was just something truly epic about how when the time came to stage our assault on the body of a dead god in which the Liche Queen had made her lair, it wasn’t just a bunch of faceless “fighters” and “paladins” and “clerics” that were tying up the foot soldier forces. It was guys we’d talked to the rulers of lands with, characters we’d shed blood as, who we’d worried about dying from the first person perspective. (Well, maybe not Doc.)

Eventually each of our mains had their personal quests tied up and tied in to the main quest line, which we also wrapped. The DM sat back and said, “Well, that about does it. So, usual wrapup… what are you gonna do now?”

This was the epilogue phase, where we’d basically say what our characters went on to do. Sometimes some of us would write bits and pieces of this up and we’d bring these to the next game day to share around for anyone who was interested. We were all quiet for a moment, when Wizard said simply, “Well, obviously we’ll work on turning our keep and small village into a city.”

We spent another hour that night and more session the next week going through our various character sheets and deciding what everyone would do. One or two went back wherever they’d come from, but many of them settled down and stayed.

This character opened up a shop, that one opened up a casino. This character went to work for that character, these characters got married and started a family, that character started up a new guild.

Eventually we’d pretty much settled on a fate for every single character we’d played. Some just had a short note about what they were going to do, some wound up with several pages about their shop and how they ran it and who they’d settled down with and so on.

The DM compiled it all into a binder, and said he’d hang onto it and keep it safe for us. It was now time for us to have a few weeks of movie night as he prepared our next campaign.

>>11781902

glorious.jpg

>stabuy Foundation.

>>11781902

Several weeks later, we settled down for the night of beginning work on our characters for our next campaign. The DM came in and explained that it would be a fairly straightforward sort of campaign, just go up and make core race characters of whatever class we wanted. So we all spent awhile getting things together.

Then he said “Alright, we’ll be beginning your adventure here.” He unfolded a large city map and spread it out on the table. There were the names of shops listed, a familiar-looking keep, and even markers for NPCs.

“Welcome to Asylum... your city.”

It’s remained a constant feature of our campaigns since. We always look forward to going back to visit.

>>11781949

there are no words. should have send a poet.

I...

I really want to play that game.

10/10 would read again

>slexcal ererr

Indeed, captcha. Indeed.

And that's the story of the main gist of the leadership campaign. Kind of short, but it has such a wealth of side stories that remembering them all and writing them out would be more suitable for a small novel than a Sunday afternoon thread. And while it might not seem as sweepingly epic or dramatastic as some of the other tales, that's probably because we were all just having fun and doing whatever, and interpersonal drama was thankfully at a minimum.

That's pretty much it. I really thought this would stretch on longer, but maybe I'm just not living up to the Rambling in my alias. Sorry!

I'll try to pick out a somewhat longer and more detailed story for you next time, if anyone's still interested in hearing it.

You just made all the games I have ever played look terrible in comparison, but thank you, nevertheless. I hope you don't run out of stories any time soon.

>>11781949

Dear lord, we must get this binder... it contains so much epicness that it will take a fellowship...

Thank you, OP. This is why I love this board.

>>11781987
it's always a pleasure to hear your tales Rambling Detroit, they make my creative juices flow, that and make me want to live the American dream.

How 'bout the LARP story you mentioned a couple days ago?

>>11782239

Since I do have my policy of first asked first answered, sure. I'll start working on writing it up later tonight or tomorrow. Maybe call Brobarian or Wizard to refresh myself on one or two details.

I admit this one probably would have been a bit longer if last night's session of our current game hadn't gone so well. My character got to have several very nice moments, one of which was big on the character development side, so my head's still all full of that rather than on older experiences.

>>11781987
I could sit here and read your stories all day if I had the time.

Might I request that we hear more of your adventures with the first group of followers? I about lost it when I heard your DM gave Animedeath EXCEL for his minion.

What ever happened to Kal! He was my favorite!

Link to the archived thread.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/11781189/

>>11782286

A future storytime, for sure. When we did visit the City of the Spider Queen we did a brief planar side quest that was pretty neat.

>>11782633

Kal made a lair out of the keep's basement and became the guardian of our original characters' tombs.

In the course of the chaos artifact game that followed, a lot of deific openings came up, and the previous characters became part of our houseruled pantheon. Kaladon became the God of Redeemed Evil Creatures.

>>11781811
>Excel made friends with a redheaded sorceress with a penchant for fire spells and mass destruction.
Just about lost it here.
>>11781987
>Kind of short, but it has such a wealth of side stories that remembering them all and writing them out would be more suitable for a small novel than a Sunday afternoon thread.
Not that I want to distract you from providing /tg/ with more wonderful Storytime, but this isn't a half bad idea. There are a number of novels based on RP sessions in Japan that were successful enough to be licensed into animated series, so there's a good chance if you wrote up some of the entertaining exploits of your characters into a book, people would buy it.

>>11781189
Awesome stories mate...

... though I must say:
Your games sound like everything I'd like to play, but at the same time remind me why I have never tried gaming IRL - and have no intention of trying.


PS - Envy = bitch, Psion = bigger bitch

Found this on page seven. I just thought I'd bump it up to page 1.

READ THIS THREAD!

>>11784612
Read the fuck out of this thread.

Then read the other two linked within it.

Whatever you do, be sure to read the tale of Super Dave - quite possibly the greatest fucking man to ever grace the hallowed pages of /tg/.


Boys (and girls), tonight, we - or at least I - drink to Dave.
*salutes*

>>11784814
LAst time I went to suptg and saw Super Dave's story it was at something like 9 votes... went there and saw 53 votes and epic thread status...

Feels Super Dave level man.

>Me when I saw this thread

This man needs to write books, I could read this all freaking day, he has great message delivery, amusing tails, and relates to his audience well. WRITE IT ALL, YOU MUST WRITE IT ALL FOR US TO DROOL OVER

>>11784612
Bless you, anon, I had forgotten MP&CC was returning today. Glorious Storytime.

>>11785452
> amusing tails
> tails
> amusing
notsureifwant.jpg

I feel like I just read an excerpt from "Chicken Soup for the GM's Soul."

Simply glorious.

That... That was fukken awesome.

Bumping in hopes of moar.

>>11786530
It certainly warmed my soul.

Here's a gratuitous bump for /tg/'s European crew before I go to bed.


> shogmer betz, or good night in captcha language

Oh my god. Does he do this every sunday night?

>>11790033
hopefully yes.

I look foreward to MP&CCs story time every time I see them.

>>11789854

You are my hero, Anon.