Politics

So the most recent episode of Mandalorian (S3Ep4) hit me right in the feels. I'm gonna put this behind a spoiler tag, but AFTER you watch the episode (or if you don't care), check this out.

***Spoiler...orian?***

@Misadventure huh. This seems interesting and useful though i could see your CEOs point, too

Consider this:

Feed a chatAI the RP and pages of a given predator.
Now interact with the chatAI as it writes and argues like that predator.
Word choice, common errors, phrasing. A textual fingerprint if you will.

Now you can spot a predator or more likely realize that someone you are dealing with is one.

And they can find you.

NB: I worked on a natural language processing service when they were asked to create a profile to recognize child predators online. That service could scrape all of Facebook, and thousands of forums, etc a day.

Our CEO said it was too dangerous.

NB2 current public chatAI are locked against sexually explicit or threatening language. They can be jailbroken though.

NB3 - feed it your own staffing sets and emits. Now you can generate things in your style quickly, and edit to better fit the situation. Try it for descs of locations and people.

This one is from TTRPG; now that I've read the whole acronym and caught up with the rest of the class, you know.

Content warning: Drug Use.

***The Story***

It was one of my very, very first TTs. I was like.. 12? 13?

And my poor, very underpowered in comparison character only had a gun, three bullets, and an alleyway. So she ran into the alleyway, but got followed by the big bad. the boys are all snickering, now

Not much else to do, right? She pulled out the gun she did NOT have much in the way of points in... and BEST ROLL OF MY TT LIFE. It shut the game down, for the night. Ooops.

In the tabletop vein...I was 19, and playing a superhero character that had a VERY small level of fame as a rising singer.

GM brings in this Juggernaut ripoff character and I think, what the hell. My char flies up, and I have the GM roll to see if he recognizes me. There's like a 6% chance that he does.

He does. Not only does he, but he's a fan. (It was a very good roll...for me.)

I kinda derailed the entire evening's combat in one roll, it's the only time in my life I ever did. And it was fun watching the GM's brain absolutely shut down in shock.

My other fun story was a different GM: it was GURPS and I claimed my char had area knowledge. He was like, "How does she know the area?" I thought about it and said, "She knows where all the malls are." (This was back in 1991. Malls were still a thing.) He disbelieved.

I told him to start naming landmarks in the area. He would. I'd tell him how to get there because of what mall it was near and how to get to that mall and then, by extension, to said landmark. I'd only been driving for about six months or so, but my mom had loooooved to go to shop, so it was a thing I could do: navigate that entire area via mall. Before I even learned how to drive.

Thanks, Mom!

This one was from years, years, and YEARS ago, but it pops to mind. It was on a MUSH, though I believe it was an invite-only space.

We're in a fantasy world. And I'd spent, oh, six months building up this villain. She was unstoppable, very powerful, etc., etc., etc.

Well, one of the players had done some subplot work to earn himself an airship. The flagship, in fact, of an airship fleet. So when he poses into the scene where the villain is now up against the players in person, he poses that he brings basically every player who signed up in on his flagship except maybe the one or two who had already posed being toe-to-toe with her.

And declares: "We shoot her with the flagship."

I had to pause momentarily, tilt my head to the side, and admit: "Well, there's no save vs. flagship."

I didn't let the flagship steal the whole show; I let it significantly weaken her to the point so that the ground crew could contribute as well, but shooting her with a flagship certainly made the fight easier on everyone involved.

I am friends with many of those players RL still, and "No save vs. flagship" has remained a fun tagline in-joke that you can sometimes hear one of us saying decades later.

Anyone have any cool "great moments" to share from their TTRPGs? Nothing negative, but moments where it was magical, or as a GM you felt like you did something amazing for your group?

I'll start. This is actually a story from this past weekend.

I'm running V5 Vampire for an in-person TTRPG group of 5 players. It's set in Chicago using the "Chicago By Night" module, and I'm taking FULL advantage of all of the canon characters (Portia, Annabelle, Gengis, DuSable, etc). Now, 4 out of the 5 players are old-school VtM players so they know a lot of the lore, and the 5th is brand new to Vampire so I am LOVING being able to introduce them to dark, scary, evil lorepieces for the first time and see their reaction.

However, in V5, there are some new things, and one of them are "Thin-Blood" vampires, whose vampiric blood is so thinned out that they can survive the sunlight better, often have warm breath and flushed skin, and could often pass as a mortal. My "OG" players had never encountered one. They don't have typical vampire powers, and instead dabble in a kind of "Thin-Blood Alchemy" that the other non-thinbloods don't have access to.

So my vampires are following a drug dealer suspected of peddling a new drug called "Ash", which appears to be made of blood and ashes. They track him to his apartment, see him leaving. He's got pink skin, warm breath, and so they approach him like he's a human. Now, "mortals" don't really get a resistance to the vampiric "Dominate" powers, but other supernatural creatures do. So assuming he's mortal they decide to roll on up, get eye-contact, and "dominate" the drug dealer into being quiet and walking with them.

It went like this:

Player: Okay I look into his eyes and say "Be quiet and follow me".
Me: "Roll a rouse check and then roll your dice pool to dominate."
Player: "But mortals don't get a defense."
Me: "That is correct. Roll the dice."
The whole table: "Holy fuck please don't let this be a werewolf."

I had them all eating out of the PALM OF MY HAND as they had no idea what the fuck they'd just rolled up on. They eventually were able to wrestle the thin-blood down after he used some sort of strange power they'd never seen before on one of the PCs. They basically beat him up and dragged him back into his apartment.

They search the apartment and find a secret basement where occult circles, chemistry equipment, and books in a cramped, filthy space. At the end of the basement is a shower stall with an old "Spongebob" shower curtain concealing something shadowy.

The looks on the players' faces was PRICELESS as they peeled the shower curtain back to find a missing Toreador from court, suspended upside down, staked, and with tubes in all of their major arteries and an empty bucket underneath with dried blood residue lining it.

They'd just stumbled into an alchemical drug lab where the blood of their peers is being used to make a street drug that works on vampires.

They're eating this chronicle up and loving it, and it feels really good.

@Ghost Shall I call it "Are you Mad Libs?

Might want to break this off. One offhand comment is fine, but this isnt a thread to derail with my waggery.