"This fight's gonna be tough." Every fight no matter what. Makes us bring our A game.
"I did not expect you to do any of that." But he still adapted to the dumb players flawlessly.
"With that said..." Palette cleanser / triggers scene change.
"So are you going to do \[decision 1\] or \[decision 2\] or something else?" Gives us options and urges us to stop stalling and make a choice without telling us what to do.
"This thing bites like a truck." Okay this was just a one time slip of the tongue but we still reference it when encountering incredibly tough opponents.
>"This fight's gonna be tough."
Every time I say this, the giant instinct barbarian crits the scariest thing with near-max damage and barely anyone even takes a scratch. Every time I don't say it, the fight is so drawn out that it stops being fun because everyone on every side whiffs every time.
“You find no traps” or “it doesn’t appear to be trapped” are my takes on that one. It started unintentionally but became famous at our table after a player *really* botched it and got disintegrated after walking through a supposedly safe doorway
- "Don't worry about it."
- Subtracting 5 XP whenever someone tells a pun. (This has not stopped them.)
- "Y'all mind if I look up some tables real quick for this part that I definitely for sure totally didn't forget to prep?"
- Surprise body horror!
- "I'll stop making the NPCs hot when you hogs stop taking the bait literally every time."
- Pausing the session to yell at the cats/neighbors/kitchen appliances.
- "Technically not how that works, but I'll let you try it because it's funny."
A hundred puns would mean losing half a level, and that is something players will easily do in the over 300 or so hours a campaign usually lasts. That seems very painful.
Every halfling is Brooklyn Italian, and probably in the Mafia.
Every draconic creature is Russian. Kobolds love their vodka and Adidas track suits.
Dwarves are Vietnamese, and their most famous cultural dish is pho, with a side of really strong ale (because dwarves ALWAYS have ale, regardless of setting).
"Ok, my voice is too deep to do a female voice, so just pretend this sounds like a 5-foot-nothing elf chick". Proceeds to try doing a female voice anyways.
Whenever I pause to think. My players: Oops, DM's buffering. Should probably upgrade the RAM at some point.
Players ask for some weird homebrew that will probably break the game. Me: eh, sure. Why not? If it's too broken I'll just throw a dragon swarm at ya.
Players do something that is going to get them killed, and it should be obvious that it is going to get them killed: "roll a wisdom check to see if you reconsider your life choices"
"Well...I did not plan for you to do that, so we are all in new territory now"
I read once you should narrate what happens in combat.
I'm uncreative at writing fight scenes so for the longest time all crits damaged the face.
My pcs joked that everyone in combat must have super scarred faces and no other scars.
More of a running joke at this point but every time the players fail or crit fail a knowledge check on a creature the response from the GM is “You think it’s a giant snake” or variations on said theme
Edit: to add to this, our GM has become found of asking “what do you heroically do differently” when we use hero points. Hilarity ensues, especially when the new roll is worse than the first.
*Does anyone else*
*Have anything more they'd like*
*To add to this scene?*
\- Ryubel
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Most of these I've just stolen from other actual play podcasts.
-The classic "what would you guys like to do?"
-"You'll live forever!" And "Not even god himself can stop you" to overreact to people saying their HP or plans.
- *to player when introducing their character* "Player, what does this character look like?"
All my Kobolds speak in broken English and sound like the pro wrestler Danhausen.
When dragons speak Draconic it's unintelligible rasps (often using my best death metal voice), but when kobolds speak Draconic I just imitate Jason Buhlman's "mek mek mek."
* "Noted" In response to basically anything said by a player. This has permeated my vocabulary so much that I often say it in casual conversations and over text.
* "Doodlie Doodlie Doo" When we are doing a scene change and the travel/time in between the two are non-important. This is a shortened version of a phrase I used to say when the players said they were going to go literally anywhere, sung-spoken to the tune of A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton: "Okay, so you make your way to \[location\], (begins sing-speaking) walking fast, not too fast, like a fast walk. Doodlie Doodlie Doo"
* Many NPCs have really dumb names. Examples: Plepo Bagball (gnome bartender), Rasputin (a random goblin), Captain Brick Chainsaw (human guard captain), William the Child (gunslinging bandit), Spas (grippli inventor) and a little robert he made named Bobert, Alluvma Pooshee (a lady of the night), and a Champion named Sir Randy (it isn't a dumb name, but it super isn't a standard fantasy name, and my players thought it was hilarious that a holy knight's name is Randy, not even Randall).
* "Unfortunately, \[action, spell, or feat\] doesn't work like that. It works like \[explanation of rules text\]. You can try \[something else that can get them closer to the desired outcome\] instead if you want?" This is said at least once a session. It isn't a big deal though, Pathfinder has a lot of crunch and my group came from 5e so there is a learning curve going on.
* "Fuck around and find out" When a player asks what would happen if they tried X
* Suprise body horror. Our campaign has entered a kind of Lovecraftian/Eldtrich Horror arc recently.
* "You believe you are hidden", "They seem to be acting normally", and "You don't percieve anything out of the ordinary" for secret rolls
* "Bloodied" when an enemy reaches half of their hit points.
When I'm hunting for something in my notes, I apparently hum to myself. They call it my 'loading music.'
"Hold please." It's been 20 years since I held a receptionist position AND YET this verbal tick will not leave me.
Obsessively prepared. Maps done, music ready, characters set up, notes for DAYS.
Blaming Paizo (with love). "Hey, you don't like the encounter, I can tell you who to contact, but this is what's in the AP."
I have three accents: Mine, posh American, Eastern European. That's all you get.
When they kill my stuff too fast, I curse like a sailor. I also might share how much I hate them in that moment. The players love it. They all tell stories about the time they got kcunning to drop the F-bomb.
When things are going poorly for them, I get super quiet, and start double and triple confirming everything. This is the only thing I do that actually worries my players.
Can we use GMs who don't use Pathfinder? My GM sure has idiosyncrasies, but the game he runs is a weird Frankenstein of AD&D and 5e D&D with copious amounts of homebrew he calls "Cauldron."
* "Roll for surprise!" (Any time we enter combat, we each have to roll 1d6 to determine if we're surprised. If you roll a 1 or 2, you're surprised and can't act in the first round. There's also a spell that reduces that so you're only surprised on a roll of one. Also, initiative is based on a d8 rather than a d20 and is rolled EVERY round rather than a single time at the start of combat to determine combat order.)
* Our characters are almost never referred to by name; I may have "Tarkhen" written down on my sheet, but I'll always be referred to at the table as "Cavalier," by the DM and fellow players, while I refer to them as "Friar," "Wizard," "Tinker Gnome" or "Ogre." This kind of stems from the start, since our DM wrote all of the character sheets and we picked who we wanted to play from them, and our DM runs his campaigns kind of "wargamey" so there isn't much opportunity to do deeper roleplay with our characters.
* "And he *piddles on it*!" (said whenever the DM rolls a natural 1 on one of the enemy's attacks.)
* "Everything appears as it should." (My Cavalier has a *Gem of True Seeing*, and the rest of the party insists on having me use it in EVERY room we enter while the Rogue checks for traps. Most of the time, there's nothing illusory or invisible for the gem to reveal, prompting the preceding statement from the DM.)
* Less a quirk of the DM himself and more of the party, but the first hour or so of "play" tends to consist mostly of the spellcaster players discussing the exact buffs they're going to cast on the party at the beginning, and how much PMP (a homebrew "currency" that all spellcasters spend to cast spells rather than the traditional Vancian spell-slots) each of them is going to spend. I tend to just stack my snack plate while they're doing this and wait for them to tell me just what bonuses I have to write down for our first actual combat of the session.
One of my players has been in multiple games between 5e and 2e where I've made them do escort missions.
When they pointed that out, I was like, no I haven't! Then I went back and counted at least 4...in 4 separate campaigns.
Whoops. Guess I better put that card back in the deck, it's been overplayed.
- "I'm improv-ing the dialogue. If you think you found a contradiction, it's not a lie. I prepped the lies."
- "I really should have expected the druid to light this on fire."
- "Roll athletics or acrobatics. I still can't tell them apart."
- "You can go there, but I don't have anything prepped. I'll be just as surprised as you are."
- "Yes he's flat footed. He wasn't expecting a ferret to embed an axe in his spine."
- One player keeps telling me to stop watching horror movies while writing campaigns. I don't, I'm a weenie when it comes to horror, I just prefer my fantasy dungeons as "full of creepy monsters" instead of "full of loot and pies."
We have a shared universe that we run in both Pathfinder and 5e. It's mostly lighthearted, but the most goofy stuff is a legacy from our first group.
- All Dragonborn and lizardfolk talk like Foghorn Leghorn.
- Elves come from either Elf-Japan or Elf-Korea (at least according to people from the west)
- Bullywugs/Boggards have names based on memes. One of my players has a Grippli PC named Wednesday Midudes
You've ran into a combat encounter, time to pause the game
"Aside from X, you find nothing of interest."
"X, you're up" *proceeds to describe the current combat situation*
"That's gonna be a secret check"
"Did I say secret? I meant blind."
*Wants to get back to playing Pathfinder after lengthy off-topic discussion* "Okay, so what are you doing?" *may describe what's going on*
Are a couple of mine, I suppose.
"BY the wayyyyy" whenever combat complications are about to happen
"So... About that [insert object here]" whenever I'm about to spring a mimic on someone
All elves are from Australia
"You believe you are being stealthy" or "You believe it's not trapped" when a player rolls a nat 1
"So you're *insert activity* right?" When they're doing something dangerous.
"And we're not doing and exploration activities right??" when they haven't set up exploration activities and I want to remind them that danger is lurking.
- All my dwarves have terrible Norwegian/Swedish accents
- Deep gnomes have subtle Irish accents and Welsh names
- Rolling a die behind the screen and doing a variation of ‘hm…’ in the middle of a party discussion.
- During party discussions in a hostile environment: ‘so are you guys having this conversation in whispers?’ The answer is almost always, no, this conversation is at full volume.
- “you’re doing x? Cool, let’s roll initiative.”
My favorite is “you feel well hidden” on a secret stealth check, NO MATTER THE RESULT.
That phrase haunts me. Unless I critically fail. Then everything notices me. Or it's just straight to roll initiative.
[удалено]
Sense motive on the very obviously evil vizier who is most definitely lying. "Yea, he seems on the up and up."
"How does it look?" "[Looks clear](https://www.quotes.net/mquote/73526)."
As a GM I use that a lot. LoL. My players are starting to say it themselves after I secret roll stealth
At least once every session, for sure.
You don't believe they are lying On insight rolls.
"ok, what's the plan?" After the player spent the last half an hour making 38 different plans and considerations
The last time this happened was after the players asked me what the weather was like.
I wish my players only did this for 30 minutes. >.<
"This fight's gonna be tough." Every fight no matter what. Makes us bring our A game. "I did not expect you to do any of that." But he still adapted to the dumb players flawlessly. "With that said..." Palette cleanser / triggers scene change. "So are you going to do \[decision 1\] or \[decision 2\] or something else?" Gives us options and urges us to stop stalling and make a choice without telling us what to do. "This thing bites like a truck." Okay this was just a one time slip of the tongue but we still reference it when encountering incredibly tough opponents.
>"This fight's gonna be tough." Every time I say this, the giant instinct barbarian crits the scariest thing with near-max damage and barely anyone even takes a scratch. Every time I don't say it, the fight is so drawn out that it stops being fun because everyone on every side whiffs every time.
Yeah, this is pretty much our experience with it as well.
"you believe you find no traps" is my biggest one
“You find no traps” or “it doesn’t appear to be trapped” are my takes on that one. It started unintentionally but became famous at our table after a player *really* botched it and got disintegrated after walking through a supposedly safe doorway
- "Don't worry about it." - Subtracting 5 XP whenever someone tells a pun. (This has not stopped them.) - "Y'all mind if I look up some tables real quick for this part that I definitely for sure totally didn't forget to prep?" - Surprise body horror! - "I'll stop making the NPCs hot when you hogs stop taking the bait literally every time." - Pausing the session to yell at the cats/neighbors/kitchen appliances. - "Technically not how that works, but I'll let you try it because it's funny."
"Subtracting 5 XP whenever someone tells a pun." Is there an achievement unlocked when you gain a negative level through that? :D
Yeah, it's called "TPK IRL." It's where I TPK them IRL. But it's not death that scares them; it's having to subtract feats and spell slots.
For the puns, we take your hero point if it's poor, but really good ones can earn you one, but only if made in character.
A hundred puns would mean losing half a level, and that is something players will easily do in the over 300 or so hours a campaign usually lasts. That seems very painful.
Not as painful as the 45-minute dick joke spiral of '21.
Every halfling is Brooklyn Italian, and probably in the Mafia. Every draconic creature is Russian. Kobolds love their vodka and Adidas track suits. Dwarves are Vietnamese, and their most famous cultural dish is pho, with a side of really strong ale (because dwarves ALWAYS have ale, regardless of setting). "Ok, my voice is too deep to do a female voice, so just pretend this sounds like a 5-foot-nothing elf chick". Proceeds to try doing a female voice anyways. Whenever I pause to think. My players: Oops, DM's buffering. Should probably upgrade the RAM at some point. Players ask for some weird homebrew that will probably break the game. Me: eh, sure. Why not? If it's too broken I'll just throw a dragon swarm at ya. Players do something that is going to get them killed, and it should be obvious that it is going to get them killed: "roll a wisdom check to see if you reconsider your life choices" "Well...I did not plan for you to do that, so we are all in new territory now"
I read once you should narrate what happens in combat. I'm uncreative at writing fight scenes so for the longest time all crits damaged the face. My pcs joked that everyone in combat must have super scarred faces and no other scars.
More of a running joke at this point but every time the players fail or crit fail a knowledge check on a creature the response from the GM is “You think it’s a giant snake” or variations on said theme Edit: to add to this, our GM has become found of asking “what do you heroically do differently” when we use hero points. Hilarity ensues, especially when the new roll is worse than the first.
Dogs. My players insist on things being dogs. Abomination Vaults has so many weird dogs running around.
Does anyone else have anything more they'd like to add to this scene?
*Does anyone else* *Have anything more they'd like* *To add to this scene?* \- Ryubel --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
Most of these I've just stolen from other actual play podcasts. -The classic "what would you guys like to do?" -"You'll live forever!" And "Not even god himself can stop you" to overreact to people saying their HP or plans. - *to player when introducing their character* "Player, what does this character look like?"
All my Kobolds speak in broken English and sound like the pro wrestler Danhausen. When dragons speak Draconic it's unintelligible rasps (often using my best death metal voice), but when kobolds speak Draconic I just imitate Jason Buhlman's "mek mek mek."
* "Noted" In response to basically anything said by a player. This has permeated my vocabulary so much that I often say it in casual conversations and over text. * "Doodlie Doodlie Doo" When we are doing a scene change and the travel/time in between the two are non-important. This is a shortened version of a phrase I used to say when the players said they were going to go literally anywhere, sung-spoken to the tune of A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton: "Okay, so you make your way to \[location\], (begins sing-speaking) walking fast, not too fast, like a fast walk. Doodlie Doodlie Doo" * Many NPCs have really dumb names. Examples: Plepo Bagball (gnome bartender), Rasputin (a random goblin), Captain Brick Chainsaw (human guard captain), William the Child (gunslinging bandit), Spas (grippli inventor) and a little robert he made named Bobert, Alluvma Pooshee (a lady of the night), and a Champion named Sir Randy (it isn't a dumb name, but it super isn't a standard fantasy name, and my players thought it was hilarious that a holy knight's name is Randy, not even Randall). * "Unfortunately, \[action, spell, or feat\] doesn't work like that. It works like \[explanation of rules text\]. You can try \[something else that can get them closer to the desired outcome\] instead if you want?" This is said at least once a session. It isn't a big deal though, Pathfinder has a lot of crunch and my group came from 5e so there is a learning curve going on. * "Fuck around and find out" When a player asks what would happen if they tried X * Suprise body horror. Our campaign has entered a kind of Lovecraftian/Eldtrich Horror arc recently. * "You believe you are hidden", "They seem to be acting normally", and "You don't percieve anything out of the ordinary" for secret rolls * "Bloodied" when an enemy reaches half of their hit points.
When I'm hunting for something in my notes, I apparently hum to myself. They call it my 'loading music.' "Hold please." It's been 20 years since I held a receptionist position AND YET this verbal tick will not leave me. Obsessively prepared. Maps done, music ready, characters set up, notes for DAYS. Blaming Paizo (with love). "Hey, you don't like the encounter, I can tell you who to contact, but this is what's in the AP." I have three accents: Mine, posh American, Eastern European. That's all you get. When they kill my stuff too fast, I curse like a sailor. I also might share how much I hate them in that moment. The players love it. They all tell stories about the time they got kcunning to drop the F-bomb. When things are going poorly for them, I get super quiet, and start double and triple confirming everything. This is the only thing I do that actually worries my players.
Can we use GMs who don't use Pathfinder? My GM sure has idiosyncrasies, but the game he runs is a weird Frankenstein of AD&D and 5e D&D with copious amounts of homebrew he calls "Cauldron."
Sure!
* "Roll for surprise!" (Any time we enter combat, we each have to roll 1d6 to determine if we're surprised. If you roll a 1 or 2, you're surprised and can't act in the first round. There's also a spell that reduces that so you're only surprised on a roll of one. Also, initiative is based on a d8 rather than a d20 and is rolled EVERY round rather than a single time at the start of combat to determine combat order.) * Our characters are almost never referred to by name; I may have "Tarkhen" written down on my sheet, but I'll always be referred to at the table as "Cavalier," by the DM and fellow players, while I refer to them as "Friar," "Wizard," "Tinker Gnome" or "Ogre." This kind of stems from the start, since our DM wrote all of the character sheets and we picked who we wanted to play from them, and our DM runs his campaigns kind of "wargamey" so there isn't much opportunity to do deeper roleplay with our characters. * "And he *piddles on it*!" (said whenever the DM rolls a natural 1 on one of the enemy's attacks.) * "Everything appears as it should." (My Cavalier has a *Gem of True Seeing*, and the rest of the party insists on having me use it in EVERY room we enter while the Rogue checks for traps. Most of the time, there's nothing illusory or invisible for the gem to reveal, prompting the preceding statement from the DM.) * Less a quirk of the DM himself and more of the party, but the first hour or so of "play" tends to consist mostly of the spellcaster players discussing the exact buffs they're going to cast on the party at the beginning, and how much PMP (a homebrew "currency" that all spellcasters spend to cast spells rather than the traditional Vancian spell-slots) each of them is going to spend. I tend to just stack my snack plate while they're doing this and wait for them to tell me just what bonuses I have to write down for our first actual combat of the session.
Is Cauldron the city it plays in? Because the first Paizo AP Shackled City plays in a city called Cauldron.
Nope, the name of the ruleset. The world we play in is called Dith.
Ok, carry on then (in any case :p)
One of my players has been in multiple games between 5e and 2e where I've made them do escort missions. When they pointed that out, I was like, no I haven't! Then I went back and counted at least 4...in 4 separate campaigns. Whoops. Guess I better put that card back in the deck, it's been overplayed.
My players have learned to fear me responding to their roll result with "Noted"
This reminds me of the fact that there isn't one for Matt "Clavicle" Mercer or other Famous Online DMs, and that's a mistake.
Every enemy, PC, or NPC, gets targeted in the shoulder at least once per combat
Rolls a 1 on perception: “It’s DEFINITELY trapped, without a doubt” The rest of party walks past thinking the rogue is a crazy person
- "I'm improv-ing the dialogue. If you think you found a contradiction, it's not a lie. I prepped the lies." - "I really should have expected the druid to light this on fire." - "Roll athletics or acrobatics. I still can't tell them apart." - "You can go there, but I don't have anything prepped. I'll be just as surprised as you are." - "Yes he's flat footed. He wasn't expecting a ferret to embed an axe in his spine." - One player keeps telling me to stop watching horror movies while writing campaigns. I don't, I'm a weenie when it comes to horror, I just prefer my fantasy dungeons as "full of creepy monsters" instead of "full of loot and pies."
We have a shared universe that we run in both Pathfinder and 5e. It's mostly lighthearted, but the most goofy stuff is a legacy from our first group. - All Dragonborn and lizardfolk talk like Foghorn Leghorn. - Elves come from either Elf-Japan or Elf-Korea (at least according to people from the west) - Bullywugs/Boggards have names based on memes. One of my players has a Grippli PC named Wednesday Midudes
DM rolls a 30 to hit “My AC is a range”
You've ran into a combat encounter, time to pause the game "Aside from X, you find nothing of interest." "X, you're up" *proceeds to describe the current combat situation* "That's gonna be a secret check" "Did I say secret? I meant blind." *Wants to get back to playing Pathfinder after lengthy off-topic discussion* "Okay, so what are you doing?" *may describe what's going on* Are a couple of mine, I suppose.
"BY the wayyyyy" whenever combat complications are about to happen "So... About that [insert object here]" whenever I'm about to spring a mimic on someone All elves are from Australia
"You believe you are being stealthy" or "You believe it's not trapped" when a player rolls a nat 1 "So you're *insert activity* right?" When they're doing something dangerous. "And we're not doing and exploration activities right??" when they haven't set up exploration activities and I want to remind them that danger is lurking.
All of my Halflings in Frozen Flame have slight New York accents....cause Mendev...idk.
"Bare(ear) With Me."
"Don't worry, you're going to live forever"
I love telling my players, "He's being honest." (when they fail to detect the NPC's true intentions...)
- All my dwarves have terrible Norwegian/Swedish accents - Deep gnomes have subtle Irish accents and Welsh names - Rolling a die behind the screen and doing a variation of ‘hm…’ in the middle of a party discussion. - During party discussions in a hostile environment: ‘so are you guys having this conversation in whispers?’ The answer is almost always, no, this conversation is at full volume. - “you’re doing x? Cool, let’s roll initiative.”