Have you ever pulled a

Have you ever pulled a
>Do you feel like a hero yet?
moment on your players?

I had to imagine that in the context of a rogue trader campaign.
Made me chuckle.

No, because I'm not there to spoil their fun. My players can be doing literally anything other than playing with me, but they waste time on my game. It's my duty to make that time pleasant, so they'll come back again, not mock and insult them for playing.

Railroading them into doing horrible shit and pulling a 2deep4u on them?

Nah. I might be an unimaginative faggot, but I'm not a pretentious unimaginative faggot.

I was going to try, but then they gleefully opened up on fleeing civilians with their hydra, without prompting.

I never railroad players. I do give them situations where doing the monstrous thing is easier and safer for them, then if they choose the easy route have people call them all.

Don't do it to mock them, do it to give them a compelling narrative.

Sounds boring to me, but if you're all having fun that way that's great for you I guess.

>Use Spec Ops as the op pic and quote it in the post
>You don't have to railroad, guys!
Maybe you should have picked another inspiration, then. Plenty of games call you out on evil shit you can do, but pretty much only Spec Ops railroads you into comitting atrocities and than has the balls to say "How DARE you play this game, you MONSTER?"

You mean where you railroaded them into doing something bad, then yell at them about how dare they do something bad, then when they point out that there was no other option available to them you say they could have always just stopped playing if they were really trying to be good people, and then no one ever wanting to experience anything made by you ever again?

One of my Players brutalized a Guard by repeatedly bashing his head against the wall after slashing him with her claws. Even after I spent a few posts to show him stop resisting, breathing, and eventually just be a puddle of blood.

It was a good way to end that pet of the campaign

no, because i'm not don't have to shove something like this down their throats every five seconds like this shitty game does

This was the most pretentious fucking game ever. Fuck you.

spec ops is shit but there's been times where NPC have called out my players on the weird shit that Players normally do

>Comment that the love interest has been married and impregnated in all of less than a year
>Even if it's true love, it's completely insane by normal standards
>Love interest constantly comments on that, and despite how much she loves the PC, she does note how insanely fast it all happened and how it's not something that should happen at all to anyone else

Is this game actually close to Apocalypse Now or Heart of Darkness?

Sounds like something relatively common to happen, actually. Even more so depending on their age and what kind of world they live in.

That doesn't actually seem that weird at all.

All my players are innate murder hobos deep down inside. While they can shape up to play more serious rp orientated games and can play things besides forever dungeon crawls, I've yet to see them react to their own damage to innocences with anything but apathy or some kind of twisted but restrained pride.

The devs sure thought so.
[Spoiler]They were wrong.[/Spoiler]

I feel like Farcry 3 played that card better

This. Dunno if I play with sociopaths or something but they'll gleefully destroy beautiful innocent things if it means some kind of reward

You're projecting your own impressions of how such things should go. There was absolutely nothing unusual about even promising to marry off a teenage girl to a favored suitor before they ever met, and it can be argued that it's not even that objectionable. Romance and the importance we place on it is a modern phenomenon and a luxury, and such marriages were often quite happy (because the spark of romance fizzles out in most cases and is a shitty thing to base a family on alone).

You mean Far Cry 2?

My group, myself included, have killed loads of NPCs who really didn't need to die. Players, particularly new ones, will have their PCs act like complete monsters usually without even needing a railroad.

My GM tried to make us feel it a few times, earlier in his career. It sometimes made me feel like crap about myself. I don't know if his GMing had anything to do with it, but I gradually started getting 'softer' and became more inclined to solve problems while killing as few imaginary people as possible.

There was the time the Rogue Trader decided to ambush and take the Cold-Trade goods from a merchant trader which was on a route back to Footfall. It was however decided just prior to the ambush, that they also wanted a new transport, so they would seize the ship, kill its command crew, and institute new cronies of theirs. And pay the crew a bonus so large they'd not complain about the change in leadership.

They ambushed the ship, performed a hit & run action to disable its ability to flee, then crashed into it for a boarding action. They were obviously going to win, but the transport ship passed every single crew morale check required to keep on fighting. Even when there were only a few hundred civilians left, they decided to fight back, to the last.

They had to quite literally kill every single man, woman and child aboard that ship, taking its crew population to 0 in order to claim it as their own.

The Lord-Captain stood in a flying tomb, its walls painted with the blood of thousands of men and women. A new Trader, his head in his hands he silently weeped at the cost of his ambition...

Then his Seneschal came up to him and handed him a data-slate with an approximation of how much cash they could make by selling the corpses to nutrient recycling farms.

Nah, Farcry 2 was bullshit and going full jungle savage with a machete was the best option. The villain's plan was stupid and dying was unnecessary. Becoming a monster that doesn't belong in society in 3 was better.

Nah, players are innately murder hobos.
I let my brothers roommate sub in for him once when he was running late.
This guy had never played before. Most mild mannered human I've ever met. Engaged to a church girl at 25, never had sex, never partied, never swore, mellow as fuck.

They have captured a lizard person who is guarding a fortress and are interrogating him before they heist the joint.
>interrogation is going well, he's cooperati-
>I slap him!
>roomy, he's cooperating
>oh. I do it anyway!
After they have all the info they knock him out and begin formulating a plan
>alright guys this is going to sound a little out there. What if... I skinned him, and wore him as a disguise?
>we all lose it
So out of fucking left field. Dnd is for murder hobos.

Autism: The Post.

>He plays tabletop RPGs for fun

>HAHA! Don't you see, the only way you could win would be to not have played in the first place!
>You could have walked out at any time and stopped playing but instead you chose not to, what a fucking horrible person you are.
>What you mean you didn't take advantage of the fact this was a game and use your meta-knowledge to stop the story whenever you wanted, or punch me until I gave you a happy ending? You're a bad person for that.
I might, if I ever wanted people to never want me to GM again.

Seriously, sometimes I think that I'm the only person that liked FC2.
Yeah, a lot of things sucked ass, but the game was really personal and magnificent in some aspects; the soundtrack alone was worth driving around the whole map(s), weapons weren't there to make you feel like a god, you really had to be good at the game, unlike FC3 and 4 where you had whole arsenal of "fun" weapon so you could destroy every living thing and get high.

Didn't have to pull one. The players did it to themselves. Wizard got a little overzealous with the cloudkill and ended up gassing a while cave full of noncombatants. They were hobgoblins, to be fair, but the ones inside were all the women and children, who would have totally just surrendered once the warriors were put down. Wizard fires off the cloud, and then they all go in to check it out after it's cleared. I even showed them in writing where it said that's what was in the cave. I was not expecting them to take it as badly as they did.

power corrupts

I'm not an insecure edgelord so no

>When /v/ takes over

I played it for about 20 minutes and commented to my friend "Is this just Apocalypse Now in the desert?" and he responded "Yeah, basically. You could probably stop now."

>pretty much only Spec Ops railroads you into comitting atrocities and than has the balls to say "How DARE you play this game, you MONSTER?"
That was literally the entire point of Undertale, as I understand it.

I actually would love it if my GM did. I'd enjoy the fuck out of playing a character slowly becoming the monsters they fight. Doing what they had to do.

Alternatively, playing it straight lawful good. It's only in the grim darkest of settings does playing a good guy have its worth.

>the love interest has been married and impregnated in all of less than a year
>completely insane by normal standards

Good thing your game doesn't take place in the modern developed world

Whew, I’m not sure you could recognize a story that didn’t involve climbing towers if your mama read it to you anymore.

Kind of the opposite, you actually have to try pretty darn intentionally to Feel Like A Hero Yet in Undertale, and it's pretty reasonably well-written.

Apart from that whole thing where it saves how many people you've killed into your profile, rather than the savegame itself. So if you've ever once killed folks, unless you wipe EVERYTHING, the game bitches at you about it forever even if you're playing Goody McPaladin.

Different execution, same degree of bullshit. It reminds me of old vidya where the game mocks or penalizes you for using cheat codes. WHY PROGRAM THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE IF YOU DON'T WANT PLAYERS TO USE THEM YOU CUNTBURGERS

It was pulled on me during one campaign, every session, under different GMs even.

Different user, and not to invalidate your point, but execution is everything.

Undertale only pulls it AFTER clarifying the "meta-ness" of the game world it's in.
What Spec Ops The (Railroad) Line does is it makes you BUY the game (ignore pirates for a moment), then doesn't make meta reference to the idea of the menu being non-story related, or the idea the story stops if you stop playing, or the idea that you can "turn off" the universe by unplugging the console.
Leaving you with only one "story" path to progress, and everything else is the equivalent of a game over because the story does not progress in ANY direction in do so. The game literally cannot reward you for stopping early, because there's no mechanic to endorse/promote it. It operates on a level of meta logic that the only way to "win" spec ops the line, is to never acknowledge its existence, because by acknowledge that it has a story at all (by playing it or watching it) you are complicit in allowing those things to happen. It's the equivalent of "You just lost The Game", except it tries to guilt trip you by saying the story doesn't exist unless you play it.
It's the equivalent of writing a horrific book that depicts horrible things, and then when people say "how could you write this book?" you say "It doesn't exist unless you read it, really, you're the bad person here. Why did you read it you sick bastard? You could have stopped and pretended it had a happy ending, but you didn't."

From memory that's just one character, who is explicitly trying to goad the player. The "worst" thing it does in that regard, is if you boot it up again after the pacifism ending, you get a pop up saying "I know you want to play again, but please don't take away the happy ending you gave us." before giving you the option to "True Reset".

The game doesn't really 'bitch at you forever', it's just kind of there. It's not like the game is insulting you, or as you put it, not wanting you to actually do it. It's something you can take or leave, so I don't get why so many people were offended by that.

Spec Ops was flat-out railroading, Undertale was like 'oh no, actions have consequences, but also you're free to take the actions you want'.

Everything we do backfires. Even under another DM nothing works out

Indeed. In order to facilitate this new player I made him make a persuasion check to the other pcs, he rolled a 19
Then I made one of them make a dc 5 wisdom check to see if this was a good course of action. They rolled a 2. So they fully endorsed it.

(I know that isn't how it works but we were all having a blast with it.)

No, my current party is is a bunch of lawful evil rogues and casters.

It's almost like there's a common factor that you're not realizing ;^)

For the most part I don't really mind the Undertale moralizing thing. It's certainly not the first game to have done that, for sure. But having it carry over from one playthrough to another really grinds my gears.

That said, I never really understood why SOTL tried to make you the player feel bad instead of just showing the main character feeling bad. It's just some weird immersion-breaking method-acting junk that almost feels tacked on. But you gotta have that edge, I guess.

Sounds like a fun campaign.

Well done.

Spec Ops was a shitty game that attempted to make you feel guilty over fucking pixels. It was a poor man's Heart of Darkness.

Every fucking GM I've played with recently has tried really hard to do that. It's cringy as fuck.

Far Cry 2 is a weird situation in that it's a garbage fire of a game, but it's a really amazing simulation of african operators operating operationally.

No, because when the party is a bunch of scared junior high students using stolen firearms and baseball bats to fend off a horde of adults who have bought into a punishment cult, it's hard to guilt trip people over killing grown men and women who openly want to flog, burn, and fry you to death for being young.

That exact post sums up why I hate "The House Abandoned"

No but I'm advising/assisting a friend who is running a game and the group is rapidly heading to a bad end where I think that question will be justified. I'll find out Monday if they game will continue or if it's Bad End By Way Of Apathy And Por Decision Making.

I thought FC2 was pretty good. Not great but I spent many hours ducking around in the game, alternately ghosting checkpoints before getting bored and mortaring the next one I came to.

>have you ever ridiculed players for roleplaying while they're playing?

No I haven't, seems rather pointless if its not nuanced just right.

This gave me a giggle.

How exactly does one implement such a moment into a 40K rpg?

That your actions will probably result in the death of millions is implied for Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader. Marines are sociopaths who don't care either way and Black Crusade is all about mustache twirling.

Also Spec Ops was weak. It was a "subversion" of the classic military FPS but the climax fell flat to anyone who wasn't trying to sip the kool-aide because the entire game is a rail-roading coordinator shooter. You spend the whole game passively observing a man who alternates between slaughtering untold amounts of soldiers one minute and then go-karting sadly the next.

>That said, I never really understood why SOTL tried to make you the player feel bad instead of just showing the main character feeling bad
He does try and shoot himself. Personally, I think 'Welcome to Dubai' is the best ending.

I have not put them in the position from SpecOps. I have put my players in a position where they were forced to contend with a small army of possessed peasants in a game. It was a brutal fight, L5R campaign so almost entirely melee combat the entire time. When the finally won, all traces of the Possession left. Unfortunately there was no way to save the peasantry. The opportunity they had for that, they skipped in order to follow up some different leads to get reinforcements.

In the end they managed to quash the problem, some fifteen thousand peasants dead and of the two thousand samurai they rallied to stem the tide they lost over half. Still they were hailed as heroes, despite not a single one of them feeling as though they were. It was a sobering experience for their characters, who at that time had more or less sailed through every adventure without much trouble (they rolled amazingly well far too often, and was in front of me so I couldn't cry cheating).

The players absolutely loved the adventure as it changed their and their characters perceptions of the world and themselves.

Yes, but it went alright, because my players aren't cucks with guilt complex.

I really didn't get the hate about Spec Ops: The Line, because I had enough schadenfreude to realise that the character I was controlling wasn't me, and mostly went along to see how badly the main character would fuck up.

It's a railroaded story - and it's just that, a story, with somewhat fun shooting bits tacked on to it. All the way through it I was going "wow, this guy is a fuckup, isn't he?"

When there's no decisions to make in a game, there's hardly any call for calling out the players. I don't get why people are outraged at a fictional character fucking up.

Nobody gives a shit about "a fictional character fucking up" ya dingus.

Everyone loathes the shitty devs that had the gull to call out the player because of "his" horrible actions, despite them being the faggots that gave you 0 extra options to avoid said horrible actions. It's like me tying you down to a chair, feeding you laxatives and then berating you for shitting yourself.

>It's like me tying you down to a chair, feeding you laxatives and then berating you for shitting yourself.

Sounds like part of the next Saw Movie to be honest.

But I'm not a hero. I'm a conqueror!

I have, but it wasn't unseen or anything. The party were bounty hunters and they took a job from some noble house to hunt a guy who murdered the baron. as they investigated it unfolded to be that the murderer was a community leader who had led his people to the city in the hope of a safer life after their distant village was destroyed.

The baron accepted the people but treated them like prisoners and animals, exploiting them for labour and sex trade. The murderer had lost his wife in the migration years ago and so was ready to give his life for a second chance for his people, and killed the baron before fleeing into the outlands.

By the time the players tracked him down they realised he wasn't fleeing for his life; he was going to kill himself at the place he buried his wife, as he knew his life was over either way.

They reached him in time and returned him to fulfill the bounty so the nobles could be satisfied by his execution. The players of course justified that he was indeed a criminal, but since they were essentially working for "the man" they struggled with it ic.

After the ending they asked me to extend the story so they could ride his body to his wife's resting place. Two of them gave the bounty money to his community.

For a party of neutral mercenaries it was nice how invested they got with that one. ended up being one of our favourite campaigns.

I might steal this one
How did you subsequently reveal that the backstory for the murderer and the community?

I start to wonder if the love interest isn't retarded. Might carry over to the child or something.

Seriousyl, where there's space to live in and means to raise a child, people are gonna breed like rabbits, I wouldn't be surprised if she bore the child withing the year.

Hey fuck off, Heart of Darkness was an awesome game for masochists.

Yes
Not even the DM, just the parties voice of reason that chides the shit out of them for being murderhobos with no ideas about consequences to their actions
Glad I rolled a neutral fighter over Paladin or those fucks would have made me fall time and time again

Being level headed in a group of murder hobos is true suffering
bonus points for being lawful with a chaotic mage and rogue

First three posts best posts

>gm-ing a game for a group of friends
>everyone's roughly chaotic good, except for my best friend who went chaotic neutral
>wary of the chaotic random, but he's my best mate so he should be fine
>session one
>sasses out literally every NPC he talks to, seems convinced 'chaotic' means 'be a dick to authority figures' even when aforementioned authority figures are trying to offer him money for a mission
>the rest of the party is clearly not going to deal with his shit for much longer
I can't wait until he fucks something up completely due to this attitude so I can pull this kinda moment on him.

yes we have talked about it ooc and he said he'll tone it down but I have my doubts

but it has nothing to do with insults and mockery. It's about regret, and interesting insights in morality.

At various points while investigating to try and find where he might have gone. Firstly one of the maids at the noble house was from the murderer's community, which obviously had a part in him planning the murder. The maid herself obviously alluded to the noble's antics, and further investigation at the manor could reveal some of it further.

Through the maid they learned of his community and so visited the ghetto where they had been forced to live in poverty, a condition which spoke for itself obviously. Though they met with some resistance being outsiders (and people obviously wanting to cover for the murderer), with some decent negotiation they managed to learn a few bits about what the community had been through and why the man was important to them.

This was further detailed when they decided to investigate his home. As I recall a young kid thought they were burglars and tried to protect the murderer's house from them, but they managed to get some information out of him instead.

From investigating the home and his belongings they found out where he had buried his wife on the journey to the city, and based on his nature as they'd gathered from the villagers, deduced that he'd probably take refuge there.

It was a hill above an old ruin, infested with mutants, and the PCs were unsure why he would put himself in so much danger if he were fleeing for his life. I think it was around then that they realised he had gone there to die, and not to escape.

Glad my party is all competent players, we've been using the huge inter party conflict as just a chance to RP a bit more
Also everyone pretty much despises and mistrusts each other in this DMs setting, it's basically the 30 years war with monsters getting in on the slaughter
So even though we always harbor suspicions about each other we all stick together because of how fucked everything else is
It also allows us to sling insults at eachother none stop which is nice

Alterity is mastered by kids more than 7yo. Since people playing Spec Ops are supposed to be 17 or older, there shouldn't be any issue here.

>the gull to call out the player because of "his" horrible actions
>I take narrative tricks used to make me empathize with the main character as personal attacks
Hold on your horses, man.

>It's about regret, and interesting insights in morality
For starters, it's not. It's literally a "hey guys, your heroes are actually the bad guys and everything good you did was actually bad and you are bad people for enjoying that."

Even IF it was though, your average player doesn't like interesting insights in morality and is certifiably incapable of feeling regret. At their best, they want their characters to evolve while furthering the story and at their worst they want loot and XP. In order for it to work, you need a very specific kind of group. But even then, that's quite the big IF.

>>I take narrative tricks used to make me empathize with the main character as personal attacks
Did you miss the loading screens calling you out? Or the developers saying "you win the game by not playing it?" Because that's insulting my fucking intelligence which in a way is a personal attack. And your
>assumptions
that the game telling me "This is your fault player" is a ""narrative trick"" is asinine. Narrative tricks are forced perspectives and twisting paths, not telling me that liking shooters make me a shitter.

And since we're on the subject, you're not as smart as you think you are.

deep breaths man

>I know! I'll mock him!

That's one way to give up, I guess.
Sperg Ops is still shit.

The Room WAD for Doom is a mildly infamous WAD that gives you only fists and a pistol. They point at you. Punching yourself in the face knocks 20% off. Shooting yourself in the head kills you. The objective is to escape the level via suicide.

It's like if Room WAD for Doom bitched at you for committing suicide.

Dude, calm down. It's a game. The devs weren't after you the player when they made it.
You're taking things way too personally.

>
>You're taking things way too personally.
Me not liking that a sub-par story with a piss poor "shocking" twist attempts to make me feel bad for things that I can't control is now "taking it personally?"

Oh wait, you have 0 rebuttal apart from a passive aggressive "U MAD BRUV?" Either present an argument or stop replying.

>>I take narrative tricks used to make me empathize with the main character as personal attacks
WALKER CAN'T SEE LOADING SCREENS FUCK YOU

Far Cry 2 was sort of the opposite, it's almost a redemption story.

Or maybe it does the "sink into corruption" thing and becomes a redemption story afterwards.

>Seriously, sometimes I think that I'm the only person that liked FC2.
I loved it.
I really, really loved it.

I think it had the peak writing of the series.
The others are good, the game engines are better and it has improved gameplay (mostly) but the writing and design don't come close to FC2 IMO

Why are you so assblasted about this dang video game?

>Spec Ops was flat-out railroading, Undertale was like 'oh no, actions have consequences, but also you're free to take the actions you want'.
Alpha Protocol lists the number of orphans created in the end-of-mission stats.
Or, if you avoid killing people and use non-lethal means, it lists the hospital expenses incurred.

Both stats are vaguely tuned to the economy of the country you're operating in, I believe. It's kind of the 'think of everything' that that game has going for it.
They don't really get in your face but it's there in the stats if you're paying attention.

I like how they number of orphants account for their nationality. Some kills produce more orphans than others.

>It's kind of the 'think of everything' that that game has going for it.
Not quite. I went through the entire game without killing a single person, but when I called Alan Parker on being a murderer in the endgame, he said that I'm a murderer too and a hypocrite to boot.

No, I'm not, Alan. No, I'm not.

Killing killing Al-Samad terrorists generates a lot of orphans, because Saudis have large numbers of children. Killing VCI, G22, or Alpha Protocol soldiers nets you very few orphans, because those sorts don't generally have families or children. Killing Chinese Secret Police troops nets one orphan per kill, because Chinese are legally restricted to only having one child per couple. It's very easy to kill only 15 people makes 80 orphans.

>Three UMADs in a row
As I thought.

Well, to be fair, the NPC didn't know that you were doing a non-lethal run.
He just assumed your murder-hobo status. You should have called him out on it.

Yeah, I'm a little surprised that they didn't think of that too but I guess they only really think of key decisions rather than play style. Except for the US embassy in one mission and they fuck that up slightly (any entry into the embassy is assumed to involve combat, even if no one even sees you and you don't engage anyone)

I think it kinda ties in with the game being rushed out the door before they had any time to iron out the details. A shame, because it's one underrated gem of a game and could use a patch or two.

AP2 never

>phonephagging

>how much cash they could make by selling the corpses to nutrient recycling farms.
Can't be much, especially since there's no way you've got the freezer space for that many corpses.

If you talk your way into the embassy the game acknowledges you did it peacefully, but you've got to be playing as a soldier or a veteran.