Nothing strokes my boner like some sweet bilingual bonus when I'm playing whatever rpg with my group. When a player can bust out germanic cursing or some russian folk song in place of draconic or whatever speaking in tongues, it really sells it for me.
Do you guys have any stories like this? Any bards who actually played traditional lute at the table? Ever play a survival game with a guy who's former military? Do you know someone who's ACTUALLY slain a dragon? Shit's cool yo, tell me
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>Do you guys have any stories like this?
Irl cooking skills.
The best kind of people hands down
I'll give this one bump
I speak several languages and always use them to add spice to certain characters. I'm also pretty good at birdcalls which can help if the campaign is in the right setting.
I agree with you, and most of the time it's just little things, but roleplaying is very much you get out of it what you put into it, and I always go full monty.
D&D Storm Kings Thunder where I as a Forever DM finally had the chance to be a player, so I took it.
I played a Rogue Investigator who was grumpy and hard on himself and others. He wanted the group to work like a well-oiled machine. He was a tactician, a Mastermind. But a Mastermind gets to pick a game set to be proficient in. Most Rogues would choose a card game so they can cheat or do some tricks with it, but my Rogue isn't a cheater or someone who scams. My Rogue is someone who wants to think one step ahead. So I chose for him to be proficient in chess.
Later on we encountered a flying tower and in it, an eccentric Cloud Giant. He was glad to help these smaller folk so we traveled in the tower for three days. Our DM asked how we wanted to spend our first day. I said "I challenge [party member] to a chess match!" The DM asked if I had a chess set. ...I had not... Being proficient in something didn't meant that I had it. So we had to memorize each and every move on an imaginative board. Even with disadvantage on Intelligence checks, my character won.
Later that day, the Giant offered to help him with a divination ritual. My character was searching for a killer and his only lead was a blank mask. So the Giant started his ritual and channeled The Red Knight, the demi-goddess of strategy. I rolled for Religion on it and got a natural 20, so the (newish) DM had to search through source material again. I told him I could look it up myself just to move the game along.
Still, my Rogue should be a tactician and the encounter with the demi-goddess of strategy was inspiring! And that's why I chose to teach myself how to play chess. Nobody ever taught me and I found the rules confusing as a kid. But now I get why it's an interesting game. And I want to practice more so I can think one step ahead just as my character should.
Chess is a fine game, keep at it and keep practicing. Don't listen to everyone that'll tell you to quit because you can't beat Houdini 3
>My skills are with computers
>Prefer wizards and knights over robots and hackers
I never speak technobabble, since it would be put of place. But sometimes I do make spellcraft analogous to software engineering.
>Sure, I'll make you a spell to turn ham into bacon... just give me 6 hours for the runes to compile.
One of my players is a fantastic artist. She does character art, crafts and paints miniatures, even helps me make handouts and props. Any time she can explain how to make something, I give her or the character involved a generous bonus on Craft skill checks.
Another player (my newest one) is so eager to do or play anything. He's very enthusiastic and throws 110% into whatever we're doing, and it's really infectious. Between sessions, he does research so he can come to the table and at least sound like he knows what he's talking about. So, I'll give him research bonuses to encourage him. Like, a few weeks ago, one of his summons wasn't acting right. So, after researching some basic therapy techniques, we roleplayed a therapy session between him and his summon. I was worried that taking about 30 mins game time to do so would have made the other players bored, but they were just as enthralled as I was. They gave suggestions, took notes, etc. Very fun.
bump for interest
I played in a campaign where one of the players rolled a on and irl he was a professional muay thai fighter. It wasn't much, he didn't stand up and start doing martial arts like a showy asshole, but some of the detail and accuracy he could add to the combat flavour just at the right moments was great.
Well more stories when?
That was the last session we played, I think my DM was little tired after that. I tried to tug his sleeve a bit yesterday but he didn't reply. And my own campaign was a massive bust. I've gotten a bit insecure in how well I DM as I can't even get a pack of newbies to get a goddamn map.
I'm moderately skilled with computer and sound mixing so I made an adaptive soundtrack for the games that I DM. As a situation escalates I hit a labelled button and the music changes. The look on my players' faces as the music swelled during a pivotal moment in the battle was worth the work.
Other significant moments involved a horror game where we were being hunted by a technohorror. We found a moment of tense reprieve when we all received texts on our phones from the DM playing as the villian. We found out that the DM can touch-text and was threatening us as the monster while he himself was dishing out expository. Shit was neat.
Newbies are a hassle to train, but can be well worth it. Don't give up just cause of a few setbacks!
I normally DM and whenever guests/friends/players comeover I make a literal feast for them and myself
Also on a lower note my combat training let me beat the shit out of that guy.
Also extremely educated.
>but people outside the US speak more than one language
not necessarily. A lot of french people struggle with a second language or only speak french
I give a pretty good blowjob and always bring my skills to the table.
Or under it.
I have a friend who's semi-fluent in Spanish. Whenever one of his characters speaks in Abyssal he just says it in Spanish. I think it came out of a joke about Mexican food being hot as hell.
>abyssal
>hell
TRIGGERED
>Playing a jester character.
>Literal God comes down to smash the Party's shit in because the Big Bad was their champion.
>Says he'll humor one request.
>Ask to play him in poker.
>Agrees, figures it'll be amusing to play a mortal game.
>Gamble for the position of God and the fate of the world.
>Agrees again.
>Ask DM if we could actually play for immersion reasons.
>I shuffle.
>Proceed to cheat my way to victory.
>All the while smiling like a smug cunt.
>DM catches on too late, God was bamboosled and there is now a Jester Goddess.
I warned him.
Did I say Abyssal? I meant Infernal.
I have no real skills to speak of. I can't draw creatures or maps well, tell stories well, do voices well, and I don't know enough about any given subject to represent it well in a game.
But I try to do everything just well enough that when it all gets put together it makes something passable, Charles Schulz style.
If you're enthusiastic, and make sure your players have fun, then you have nothing to worry about, my dude.
Go read books, learn to improvise and search some historical stories then. Skill can always outclass talent.
I've been singing at the table from time to time as a bard.
One player is good at wood working so he made a dice tower
Another player likes forging and made a mace. He wants me to crush his mini with it when/if I kill his character
As a sysadmin, most of the problems I give my non-technical players are dressed up troubleshooting ones.
I always encourage them to use social engineering to get access to places and things, and be security concious.
I spent a while in the army reserve, and taught my fellow players handsignals during a STALKER campaign
I did not teach the DM
Yeah. I've spoken another language once or twice because I just couldn't pass up the opportunity. I felt kinda weird doing it, but I thought it was cool for the roleplaying aspect
I have a penchant for playing "errant warrior from the east" characters because it gives me an excuse to use my japanese which I spent several years learning and never get a chance to use. It's actually been relevant a few times too, though mostly in relation to swordsmithing and when infiltrating castles.
>Page 10
No I want to read more stories
WEEABOO!
Shadowrun GM and fellow sysadmin here. I love presenting my players with stuff like this.
>Combat training
>Beat the shit out of that guy
You have to do a write-up on that, unless it didn't actually happen in which case don't worry
I collect tea. I've had people in-game offer the characters tea then pulled out a matching tea for the players before. It tends to go over pretty well.
(If you want to copy this, try getting pu-er, lapsang souchong, lychee-black, oxroot, rose, and ginger tea. You can also make garlic tea if you hate your players.)
I've got no skills except for sadistic wit and thrift shopping.
When I ran Curse of Strahd, specifically Death House, I bought a little old music box from a thrift shop and broke the mechanism from its case. When the players made it to the childrens' bedroom with the corpses and actual ghosts of the children whose demon-house-spawned-illusions begged them for help prior I cut the ambient creepy music on my computer. I added to the description of the room that their jarring of the ancient door knocked a dusty music box off the table- just as I placed the wound up distorted box on my coffee table to amplify it. Everyone was extremely unsettled during the entire encounter.
If they had helped the children, I would have later given them a "get out of jail free card" with some miraculous event/favor followed by the playing of the music box left nearby.
I let my dwarfs speak german. Sometimes I wear Lederhosen while doing it.
One of my Players is quite a skilled artist. She draws lewds of the party.
Another one is a trained Opera Singer. Quite dramatic in batlle.
I am playing a pair of lynians in a game of kingmaker right now. Just me, the wife, and a friend DM'ing for us. Wife is effectively our Meowstress.
One of these lynians is an alchemist, so I keep making infusions out of baked goods for all of us. They get to eat the pain au chocolat when I give them an infusion, or similiar goodie.
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I wish I had more money to make umami treats, but the wife and the DM have a notorious sweet tooth so I'll just have to languish :P
Fondue is a cavalier, order of the paw. He rides a giant tiger and is a huge derp.
you should also look into Go, if you enjoy chess. I enjoy both, even if I am admittedly equally terrible at both.
>She draws lewds of the party.
Show me
I'm learning french as an American and I can understand why. We do some things that would seem entirely counter-intuitive to them. It's easier for us.
You misunderstand. The difficulty of the language isn't the problem. Its just that the way thex teach english - or any language for that matter - is absolutely atrocious.
I learned more english by playing video games, reading scans and posting here than in class.
Having been to France, I say that's bullshit. The arrogant frogs are just ignoring you; they understand perfectly well. They just hate english people, and americans even more so.
Almost as much as they hate germans.
Where have you been tho ?
Paris is not representative of the whole country.
No one like Parisians. Hearing their accent is like picking your nerves with a rusted knife
Okay, I guess I'll be the cunt here. As long as It serves the immersion and actually fits the character, It's fine.
But most of the time, It irks me like hell.
Martial artists describing holds and techniques and getting pissy because "you can't counter It that way" "That'an easy technique, It should work for me".
Survival enthusiasts that try to bypass every single survival check by doing shit that's apparently super easy to do an intuitive enough for them to do.
You know, folk that cannot differentiate between their and pc's abilities and mindset. Folk that immediately tries to invent gunpowder in yer ol fantasy games just because he knows how to.
Fuck bringing skills to the table. I never had any good experience with that shit
I'm a mechanic by trade and a few times in games, I've offered advice as to how something works. Like a lock cylinder. I've re-keyed quite a few and it was fun to explain how one works and what you can do to by-pass it. This was in reference to a character asking to pick a lock with what tools they had. Also I've talked about how we could use various car parts for short lived generators to power things like a radio to hear an emergency broacast or dig up blower motors out of cars to create make shift fan to be a little comfy for a few hours.
As someone who has been to France quite often since childhood I find it to be a mix of absolutely not speaking any English and sometimes (not always) arrogance. I even heard of a story where a Frenchman refused to speak to an English speaker until they said they were Irish and not British, after which the Frenchman gladly responded in English
My own experience is that it's gotten a lot better with the arrogance to not speak English as well as not speaking English anyway, but in rural areas it really can be a mix. Same for Greece or Italy by the way, any nationalist in a country with a glorious history tends to be that way
(I'm Dutch by the way, and most of us hate our own country anyway, so we don't mind speaking English at all)
I learned a bunch of traditional sea chanties, pirate songs and nautical ballads for when I was playing a pirate Bard.
Most of them were raucous and rude and hilarious, then one night-time around the campfire I sang 'Sweet and Low', and told them about my son/wife who I was trying to get back to. Got a few tears from one of the players.
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English is one of the most difficult languages to learn.
With our words that mean different things and sound the same, or how we use slang, or how in conversations we don't use terms literally very often.
It's like we just slam shit together and understand by a mix of body language and guessing.
>Work for Verizon Telecom. Phones and T1s and shit. Uniform approved colors are red and black
>Play Dark Heresey as a tech priest.
>team inserted into a high-tech mining colony space station.
>We gotta get surveillance on these dudes.
>"I could craft and plant a surveillance device on their communication lines."
>Get cover for work by picking up maintenance tickets from mechanicum queue. Even get directions to the cable serving the bad guys.
>Get into maintenance closet. Start work. Fumble roll to plant the device.
>Device is planted, but I was detected.
>Vox from mechanicum 'wtf are you doing noob'
>"My apologies. I had located the trouble effecting cable 37 pairs 2400-4800. I started repairs and thought I was finished. While closing the splice case I noticed the damage progressed farther up the cable sheath, so I had to reopen the section and redo all my work, but the trouble should be clear... now."
"... Acknowledged."
*+30 on bluff roll*
I also fantasized about larping day to day by wearing an army backpack to hold my tools with a red robe over it, and deployable legs so it could stand by itself. I also had a febreeze auto-dispenser thing and a bug repellant dispenser hooked up to it because the area I worked in was so nasty. Seriously fuck people that live in trailer parks. Shit and piss dripping out of their trailer, bugs everywhere. Fuck youuuuu.
I could totally justify the backpack and was about to start wearing it when I moved out of the area and now I don't really need it often enough to bother. The mechanicum robe really may have been a little much.
>I will never work on plant that has been maintained for thousands of years by people that treat it with religious reverence and never skip corners and have all the budget to fix shit that they ever want.
>I will never have a cybernetic third arm to hold my work steady while I work.
>I will never have a servo skull to do the tedious/fiddly prep/splicing work.
>osama = saruman
>us/towers = sauron
It's like pottery.
Didn't go to Paris. Bounced around the north-east for a day, looking up little WW2 museums and ruins.
Speak english or get no tourist pounds, mate.