Gilda: You were constantly complaining about how lame and boring this campaign was, how unoptimized all the characters were.
Rainbow Dash: Oh... yeah... I was...
Gilda: So I thought I'd do you a favor! Give them a reason to go above and beyond. For you!
Rainbow Dash: By... yelling at them?
Gilda: Call it "calculated judgment." Nothing too mean; just a few nudges. Of course the total newb flipped out, but pffff. What can you do.
Rainbow Dash: And all that... was supposed to be my birthday present. Greeaaat. Just great.
Pinkie Pie: Now I understand!
Gilda: HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN THERE?
"Man, Pinkie's in the Griffonstone episode more than Dash is, even. I can't find a wide shot of both Dash and Gilda that doesn't have her in it and also maintains the location.
...
Welp, guess Pinkie's in the scene now."
How many TPKs must I stand
before I find a build that lets me live again?
Right now the only thing
That keeps me hangin' on
when my HP, oh it's almost gone,
I remember Digo said--
No I can't bear to play my build alone.
I grow impatient for a party to call my own.
But when I feel that they, they can't keep up,
These precious words keep me from giving up.
I remember Digo said:
Story time of characters that just ended up in every scene? In the superhero school game I was in, one of the other players had a super-fast invisible car and didn't really do much that would start scenes on his own. So he would just show up in other people's scenes if he had any justification to be there. PCs would start having conversations and he would go "I sense that somewhere there's a scene... AND I'M NOT IN IT!"
That same game also had TWO PCs who could teleport anywhere attached to the electrical grid. (Or if the place was on a separate power supply anywhere attached to that supply.) And my character on a good day could run at like mach 10. So 66% percent of the party was totally capable of just showing up in each other's scenes.
In the ponyfinder game I'm running, one of the player characters has an NPC girlfriend who's a ninja. Her stealth skill is good enough and their perception is low enough that they can never see her unless she wants them to. So she's developed a tendency to have "been there all along" whenever the PCs discuss things they don't want anybody to know about. She's a very moral character, so it's a good way to make sure they can justify whatever they are about to do.
leaving aside my envy, albedo, for you actually being able to be in a Ponyfinder game, the concept sounds quite amusing. Have there ever been times when the group tried to prepare and prevent her from sneaking in, only to fail?
Funny, that was very simular to the character I played. She was a master of illusions and could create one copy of herself. So when the party split up to discuss some topics, she would spy on both conversations at the same time while stay hidden if needed. Our group didn't have a policy to go to another room each time the party splits, still it was hard on me to try and listen to two different conversations at once.
There was one time I had a high-level party split up in a town to go collect equipment and some hirelings for a complicated dungeon crawl. The party wizard decided to burn up all her spell points on short-range teleports between each of the groups to relay messages.
Why didn't Gilda (or Dash, for that matter) just... ask?
I mean, they're all friends, here. I'm sure that if Dash was actually legitimately bothered by it, then the rest of the group would have been willing to accommodate. There's no reason to get them all riled up like this.
That said... I'm not sure that she's actually as upset about it as Gilda seems to think. People exaggerate things all the time when griping to friends (or at least I do). Maybe Dash was just doing some colorful complaining and Gilda took her friend's issues seriously.
I think Gilda's failure to just talk to the people about how the game is run is because of her inherent competitive nature.
Consider the situation from this perspective: Dash is Gilda's "Ally" and she is complaining about the game she's in, making the other players and the GM as an "Enemy." Gilda, naturally, wants to defeat the Enemy for the sake of her Ally by making them give up their "boring" ways. But you can't exactly force them to change, so you manipulate them, leveraging what you know about competition and optimization to push the Enemies to take the path that you want them to take. That way, your Ally is satisfied and the Enemy is vanquished. Gilda's competitive nature is satisfied.
Then there's Pinkie Pie, who completely violates Gilda's worldview by accepting the competition, directly becoming Gilda's Enemy, and then HELPS GILDA DEFEAT HER. By doing that, Pinkie helps Gilda "Win" but she couldn't "Lose because that's what she was trying to do. The confusion and frustration is what's sending Gilda over the edge, lose control of herself, and causing her to blab about her plan to Dash and reveal her whole strategy.
Good explanation. Pinkie is simply alien to Gilda's perception of the world, and not in the "forehead prosthetic but fundamentally still understandable" kind of way. That disturbs Gilda.
I think also Dash might feel like she's the only one interested in her type of gameplay so she hasn't brought it up, thinking everyone else would just blow it off. Recall back in the first adventure how the group pretty much guilt tripped her into playing things their way. Since then anytime Dash has tried to deal with a problem her way either another player shuts her down or the GM has rather blatantly turned it into a no sell because they don't want to have her fight something.
Going back through some of the other adventures you can see how many times Dash's fun has either been ruined or she's simply spent pretty much the whole session sitting there watching everyone else play. Gilda probably views Pinkie as the enemy because in all of Dash's stories Pinkie seems to be the main cause of session hijacking for herself.
Um, what? Maybe you don't realize it because most of it happens offscreen, but there's been a bunch of fighting happening in the last few episodes. Heck, she's had a whole episode practically devoted to her, and her character was even the one who got the special boost at first! Plus she's happily joined in on most of the more RP-heavy sessions. Are we even reading the same comic?
Well, the sub-optimization of the part is more or less irrelevant because of the lack of combat. Dash's player is more or less fine with that, even getting on board some of the roleplaying scenarios.
The problem is that she's led Gilda to believe it was a more combat-heavy campaign than it was. Presumably, because Gilda, from the outside, wouldn't get that a game with colorful ponies could be awesome in any way without combat.
...Hope this shows up as a reply to the right comment.
No, she isn't. I have, however, encountered people who feel that people who burst into tears over pretty much anything are 'whiners' who need 'toughening up'. Sometimes they're pretty clearly just trying to justify themselves, but sometimes they seem to actually believe it. The "newbie" comment is presumably intended to put Gilda in the latter category.
It might just have been an 'acceptable risk' rather than 'acceptable loss'
As in, it might be an unfortunate event, but not one big enough to abandon the plan over.
It still implies Gilda is a bit of a jerk, but that's hardly a surprise.
Maybe she just want to check if anything ok? After all this shit they gave to G about FS, it would be hypocrital if PP make G cry, right?
On the other hand, that's what RD is here for, so PP still looks bad
*notices the title*
Oh you can't hurry builds
No, you'll optimize late
Stats don't come easy now
It's a game of Griffon Take
"How much more can I take?"
You just wait until level nine
No matter how long it takes.
before I find a build that lets me live again?
Right now the only thing
That keeps me hangin' on
when my HP, oh it's almost gone,
I remember Digo said--
No I can't bear to play my build alone.
I grow impatient for a party to call my own.
But when I feel that they, they can't keep up,
These precious words keep me from giving up.
I remember Digo said:
That same game also had TWO PCs who could teleport anywhere attached to the electrical grid. (Or if the place was on a separate power supply anywhere attached to that supply.) And my character on a good day could run at like mach 10. So 66% percent of the party was totally capable of just showing up in each other's scenes.
So in a way, she was in every scene.
I mean, they're all friends, here. I'm sure that if Dash was actually legitimately bothered by it, then the rest of the group would have been willing to accommodate. There's no reason to get them all riled up like this.
That said... I'm not sure that she's actually as upset about it as Gilda seems to think. People exaggerate things all the time when griping to friends (or at least I do). Maybe Dash was just doing some colorful complaining and Gilda took her friend's issues seriously.
Consider the situation from this perspective: Dash is Gilda's "Ally" and she is complaining about the game she's in, making the other players and the GM as an "Enemy." Gilda, naturally, wants to defeat the Enemy for the sake of her Ally by making them give up their "boring" ways. But you can't exactly force them to change, so you manipulate them, leveraging what you know about competition and optimization to push the Enemies to take the path that you want them to take. That way, your Ally is satisfied and the Enemy is vanquished. Gilda's competitive nature is satisfied.
Then there's Pinkie Pie, who completely violates Gilda's worldview by accepting the competition, directly becoming Gilda's Enemy, and then HELPS GILDA DEFEAT HER. By doing that, Pinkie helps Gilda "Win" but she couldn't "Lose because that's what she was trying to do. The confusion and frustration is what's sending Gilda over the edge, lose control of herself, and causing her to blab about her plan to Dash and reveal her whole strategy.
Going back through some of the other adventures you can see how many times Dash's fun has either been ruined or she's simply spent pretty much the whole session sitting there watching everyone else play. Gilda probably views Pinkie as the enemy because in all of Dash's stories Pinkie seems to be the main cause of session hijacking for herself.
The problem is that she's led Gilda to believe it was a more combat-heavy campaign than it was. Presumably, because Gilda, from the outside, wouldn't get that a game with colorful ponies could be awesome in any way without combat.
Yeah, not making yourself look sympathetic here, G.
No, she isn't. I have, however, encountered people who feel that people who burst into tears over pretty much anything are 'whiners' who need 'toughening up'. Sometimes they're pretty clearly just trying to justify themselves, but sometimes they seem to actually believe it. The "newbie" comment is presumably intended to put Gilda in the latter category.
As in, it might be an unfortunate event, but not one big enough to abandon the plan over.
It still implies Gilda is a bit of a jerk, but that's hardly a surprise.
On the other hand, that's what RD is here for, so PP still looks bad