Story Time! (Wow, it's been a while.) Any stories about arriving at a new seemingly benign location and immediately finding reason for suspicion? Better yet, a story about being oblivious to the signs?
Every character in pathfinder I play tends to be a bit more on the paranoid side. The very first character I played was a bard named Lem (He was a premade, but I roleplayed him as best as I could). We entered the Prince of Trade's home, and immediately, I started looking around, examining EVERYTHING to see what was going to kill us.
Zombies came in through the windows, and the DM would NOT let me burn the building down to kill everything.
See, that's really unfair of the DM. It's a long-standing unwritten rule of RPGs--If the DM is allowed to use zombies, the PCs are allowed to set everything on fire.
I mean, I'd just call that a link-in to rule zero of improvising; never say "No", always say "Yes, BUT". It's not the DM refusing to let you do something, it's the DM reminding you of the consequences you should be able to see.
For example; Yes, you can set the house on fire if you'd like, BUT that Noble's Guards who I mentioned earlier are already giving you less-than-friendly looks. No telling what they might do if you pull out a flask of alchemists' fire and start sizing up the curtains.
If I get to actually keep said characters statistics and by "skill" you mean "ability", it would have to be Flash of Omniscience. 22 times per day I have a 100% chance to learn a secret I can use to annoy people.
...This actually works fairly well with my most recent character I have been working on, as I also use guns.
With 'skill = ability' ...I would want the magic part. It's using Spheres of Magic, so I guess if narrowing it down to one sphere...telekinesis. Because I am not into destruction that much. Though assuming same restrictions, I think it would be weird that I need a weapon with metal on it to use it, as I am almost a pacifist.
I'd say Tremorsense. I'm playing an Earthbending Sorcerer (basically an elderly male Toph dwarf), so I think whole 'spellcasting' thing might be a little OP. Not that I wouldn't enjoy being able to cause localized tremors to trip people, or instantly dig a 5 foot square hole.
Last build was probably 'Eir Aud', a part-Lynx flail-woman I made in GURPS.
Beast-people was actually one of three or so 'big' race-groups, but as you could guess from my avatar, it's not like it'd take much to convince me to play one.
In terms of strictly 'skills', as that's a category within GURPS:
Not entirely sure, but I think I'd just outright want her 'Melee Weapon (Flail)' skill, since it's the highest-invested and I'd be able to impress SOME people with it at least.
If I get to keep her stat-bonus, Acrobatics is the choice instead; With her dexterity and a decent bit of investment in the skill, she's pretty damn agile, even for a cat.
But if we expand the definition a bit, there's a lot of stuff in GURPS' 'advantages' section that a layman might, in the real world, call a 'skill'. From that, I'd want:
Animal Empathy - Essentially, read and manipulate non-sapient animals the way you'd do with sapient ones.
I'd still be using the same poor skill-checks I use when I fail to deal with people IRL (being, yaknow, a nerd), but I wouldn't really NEED to be good at it; Normal trainers have to use really roundabout methods to get their animals to listen.
If I could 'Carouse' with the dogs until they see me as the bringer of food, 'Diplomaticy' the cats to obey (most of the time, anyway) in exchange for fancier food and safe spots to rest, and so on... Well, even a nerd could probably do a good enough job to match, or possibly surpass, the average non-Animal Empath professional trainer.
And all without having to be mean to animals, so I'd get to be the 'naive dream' kind of trainer who gets to play with the cute doggies (rather than discipline them) and get paid for it.
Really, the LACK of 'Animal Empathy' is the big problem with animal-training, and people's skill at training them usually comes down to how well they compensate for the language (and general intellectual) barrier between trainer and animal.
"What is an "issue," when you think about it?"...deep. That is real deep, Flax seed...utterly meaningless but certainly deep enough to provoke some questions about what truly constitutes an issue? Least off all with a bunch of clearly stoner ponies high off of life and the bounty of Mother Earth Pony.
...being too stoned to know what constitutes an issue sounds like one.
Shadowrun--The team was hired to travel into the Redmond Barrens and extract a specific person. We really should have asked why we're being paid to head into the slums of Seattle for an extraction, but we figure "It's the barrens. Ain't nothing out there but homeless people and gangs. We can handle it."
Sure we could, and did. The address we were given went to an abandoned office park full of squatters and rats. Pretty benign (by comparison at least. We are skilled and armed mercenaries. Hobos and most lowlife gangs don't really stand up to us). So yeah, it was benign, up until we found a secret basement in a ruined office building that led to a top secret cybernetics lab. And everyone's dead. And the power is out. And communication lines are cut.
I just had to stop lurking to say that I was reading this web comic back in 2013, the for of track due to severe lack of internet access. Rediscovered it from a commenter on FimFiction 5 days ago, and have since binge read the whole series up to today. Loved every page of it, including your commenters. Thank y'all for making a week of the flu be much less miserable.
I did a Bed mimic the once, and the party totally missed it. XD
Around 4th-ish level they were in an inn that supposedly was haunted- anybody who stayed in the third room on the left mysteriously disappeared. They, naturally, promptly ignored the hook in favor of what they were currently doing.
Fast forward several levels and a couple dozen sessions, and the party is passing back through the same town. They decide that now is a perfect time to take on the case of those mysterious disappearances. They enter the room, ready for action.
The "Bed" in this room made a sense motive check, and NOPE'ed right out of that encounter- the party overmatched it by a long shot, so it behaved the whole night. The group, for their part, spent the night on the most uncomfortable bed EVER, and never figured it out.
So, for my 16th birthday, my parents and I took a trip up to Quebec. We got a rental house out towards a whole bunch of tourist attractions, and had a wonderful time, but the rental house is what I thought of when I heard that storytime question. It was lovely, well decorated and modern, perfect vacationing house (besides for the stairs so flimsy it made me panic every time I tried to go up them) but then one day I was out on the patio, and I stepped in the wrong place and suddenly my leg went through a giant hole that had just opened up in the floorboards. Scared the hell out of me. Turns out they kept the cleaning supplies in a secret cubby under there between rentals. Ankle got scraped up something fierce, but we just joked about it for the rest of the trip. Never did feel completely safe on that patio again though...
My first D&D character was suspicious of everything. Which was out of character, since he was supposed to be an idealistic farmboy-turned-hero, but paranoia is in my nature.
Anyway, the party wound up taking a mysterious boat to a beautiful island full of cherry trees. I was suspicious about the fact that there were clothes at the base of all the trees, but no sign of any humans. Tl;dr, we got attacked by zombies and barely escaped. FUn times.
In the first D&D campaign I ran for my group, their second quest was to investigate strange happenings in a small town. The quest-giver, a good friend of theirs, had fled the town after everyone there began acting strangely and her family disappeared. She particularly distrusted the local church, who she said had "gone weird."
When the PCs rolled into town, they made a beeline for the church, were (I thought) very suspiciously rebuffed by the priestess who didn't recognize the name of the priest they'd previously met, asked for a recommendation on where to stay the night... and then immediately went to stay the night at the inn the suspicious priestess recommended.
Needless to say, I didn't hesitate when they were ambushed by cultists in the middle of the night and only narrowly escaped the kidnapping.
So, my paranoia isn't so much about a place, as it is about a certain NPC. A very high level, general of Nidal barbarian, and an avatar of Zon Kuthon. His name is Zarokhan. Now, every campaign our GM makes is in the same world. There is a functioning timeline of what happens when in our campaigns. But Zarokhan is immortal, and keeps. Showing. Up. And forget my characters, with how good our GM's acting skills are, I'M scared of that guy. So every time we start a new campaign, my first question is whether or not Nidal would have any stake in it, because that's when he's most likely to show up.
We once came to a small village that seemed perfectly fine, no bandits or monsters attacking, no plague, nothing. The Villigers were friendly happy people. And my group immediately started freating out. Because, NO village you wander into is without problems!
We went into super caution mode, and went to the inn to rest. And our DM reminded us just why we belive it's safer to rest In the enemy camp.than an inn......
Long story short the whole town, save for a senile old priest, were ether demons or demon worshipers....
Every character in pathfinder I play tends to be a bit more on the paranoid side. The very first character I played was a bard named Lem (He was a premade, but I roleplayed him as best as I could). We entered the Prince of Trade's home, and immediately, I started looking around, examining EVERYTHING to see what was going to kill us.
Zombies came in through the windows, and the DM would NOT let me burn the building down to kill everything.
That's just professional courtesy.
Or even when they're not intending to, for that matter.
For example; Yes, you can set the house on fire if you'd like, BUT that Noble's Guards who I mentioned earlier are already giving you less-than-friendly looks. No telling what they might do if you pull out a flask of alchemists' fire and start sizing up the curtains.
Time for a back up survey.
If you could learn one skill from your most recent build, what would it be?
With 'skill = ability' ...I would want the magic part. It's using Spheres of Magic, so I guess if narrowing it down to one sphere...telekinesis. Because I am not into destruction that much. Though assuming same restrictions, I think it would be weird that I need a weapon with metal on it to use it, as I am almost a pacifist.
Beast-people was actually one of three or so 'big' race-groups, but as you could guess from my avatar, it's not like it'd take much to convince me to play one.
In terms of strictly 'skills', as that's a category within GURPS:
Not entirely sure, but I think I'd just outright want her 'Melee Weapon (Flail)' skill, since it's the highest-invested and I'd be able to impress SOME people with it at least.
If I get to keep her stat-bonus, Acrobatics is the choice instead; With her dexterity and a decent bit of investment in the skill, she's pretty damn agile, even for a cat.
But if we expand the definition a bit, there's a lot of stuff in GURPS' 'advantages' section that a layman might, in the real world, call a 'skill'. From that, I'd want:
Animal Empathy - Essentially, read and manipulate non-sapient animals the way you'd do with sapient ones.
I'd still be using the same poor skill-checks I use when I fail to deal with people IRL (being, yaknow, a nerd), but I wouldn't really NEED to be good at it; Normal trainers have to use really roundabout methods to get their animals to listen.
If I could 'Carouse' with the dogs until they see me as the bringer of food, 'Diplomaticy' the cats to obey (most of the time, anyway) in exchange for fancier food and safe spots to rest, and so on... Well, even a nerd could probably do a good enough job to match, or possibly surpass, the average non-Animal Empath professional trainer.
And all without having to be mean to animals, so I'd get to be the 'naive dream' kind of trainer who gets to play with the cute doggies (rather than discipline them) and get paid for it.
Really, the LACK of 'Animal Empathy' is the big problem with animal-training, and people's skill at training them usually comes down to how well they compensate for the language (and general intellectual) barrier between trainer and animal.
...being too stoned to know what constitutes an issue sounds like one.
Sure we could, and did. The address we were given went to an abandoned office park full of squatters and rats. Pretty benign (by comparison at least. We are skilled and armed mercenaries. Hobos and most lowlife gangs don't really stand up to us). So yeah, it was benign, up until we found a secret basement in a ruined office building that led to a top secret cybernetics lab. And everyone's dead. And the power is out. And communication lines are cut.
Yep. Should of asked more questions.
But yes, I've noticed that when PCs start asking intelligent questions that might spoil the scenario, Mr. Johnson starts getting cagey.
Bloody autocrat
Oh wait, I'm not my friend. I love it, I have no problems with it.
How does Autocorrect force you to be habitually on time for appointments and such?
I've attacked the PCs with a mimic bedroom.
The look on our faces when the DM told us it's damage when the barbarian tried to pet it was priceless. Good times, good times.
Around 4th-ish level they were in an inn that supposedly was haunted- anybody who stayed in the third room on the left mysteriously disappeared. They, naturally, promptly ignored the hook in favor of what they were currently doing.
Fast forward several levels and a couple dozen sessions, and the party is passing back through the same town. They decide that now is a perfect time to take on the case of those mysterious disappearances. They enter the room, ready for action.
The "Bed" in this room made a sense motive check, and NOPE'ed right out of that encounter- the party overmatched it by a long shot, so it behaved the whole night. The group, for their part, spent the night on the most uncomfortable bed EVER, and never figured it out.
I told them what was up after the campaign ended.
Anyway, the party wound up taking a mysterious boat to a beautiful island full of cherry trees. I was suspicious about the fact that there were clothes at the base of all the trees, but no sign of any humans. Tl;dr, we got attacked by zombies and barely escaped. FUn times.
When the PCs rolled into town, they made a beeline for the church, were (I thought) very suspiciously rebuffed by the priestess who didn't recognize the name of the priest they'd previously met, asked for a recommendation on where to stay the night... and then immediately went to stay the night at the inn the suspicious priestess recommended.
Needless to say, I didn't hesitate when they were ambushed by cultists in the middle of the night and only narrowly escaped the kidnapping.
We went into super caution mode, and went to the inn to rest. And our DM reminded us just why we belive it's safer to rest In the enemy camp.than an inn......
Long story short the whole town, save for a senile old priest, were ether demons or demon worshipers....