Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="D+1" data-source="post: 2000964" data-attributes="member: 13654">T-Shirt Character.  An extremely two-dimensional, shallow secondary character created only to shower a primary character with resources.Origins: In our earliest 1E days we very often all ran two characters, either because the party was too small/weak or because everyone always seemed to have one character that was busy doing level-training, research, or otherwise occupied with personal endeavors.  My younger brother, however, fell rather easily into having his human cleric simply "loan" money, equipment, provide spells to his dwarven fighter.  He himself came to realize this tendency of his and agreed when it was pointed out that his cleric may just as well be wearing a T-shirt that says "Cleric" because he was otherwise just an empty shell of a character with no personality."Wait for range Zero".  To bring about ones own demise by blindly attempting to maximize damage.Origins: A Star Fleet Battles game where one player wanted to do maximum damage with his weapons (closer range = more damage) and so declared that he was waiting until his ship reached range zero - point blank range - before firing.  However, he had failed to account for his ships actual movement rate and could not slow down sufficient to reach range zero, instead being forced to move 1 hex beyond the enemy and unable to turn.  That is, that he ended up ramming the enemy ship and doing so much damage to his own in the process that it was destroyed.Beggar Ron.  An NPC who seems utterly inconsequential to the ongoing game (and actually is) but who turns out to be invincible.Origins: We were running a little low-level scenario where our characters needed to help a small village repel an invasion by directiong the building of defenses and coordinating the volunteer troops in battle.  The players were given several NPC's each to roll dice for as they defended their personal section of the impromptu wall of overturned wagons and hay bales.  One of the NPC's still controlled by the DM was a beggar named Ron (after Foul Ol' Ron from the Discworld novels).  Ron never missed an attack roll throughout the battle, did exceptionally well on damage rolls and was only hit a few times for just a single point of damage on any hit.  Rapidly the entire defense of the town hinged on Beggar Ron who had stacks of bodies of the enemies before him and the attacking goblinoids bounced off him ineffectually like water off a ducks back.  It was simple random dice rolls but Ron became an INSTANTLY indispensible NPC though he was originally fated to be a red shirt like all the other commoners defending the town.The [Muad'dib] Memorial Fund.  The party fund.Origins: A one-time player created a monk character [named Muad'dib] who died after only one or two battles in a new campaign and was then immediately replaced by another character that the player rolled up.  Naturally, what little money and useful equipment Muad'dib had was taken by the surviving party before his burial.  One player, the one keeping track of the party fund remarked how callous it seemed to be looting his corpse when the characters hadn't even known him for more than a day or two.  "If you feel so bad about it build him a memorial or start a college fund in his memory," was the reply.  Instead, the party fund was given a formal name - the Muad'dib Memorial Fund.  Ever since then, the tradition at our games has been to name the party fund after the first character to permenantly die in the game."Maximizing Your Lethality Index".  Powergaming, min/maxing.Origins: One of the players in an old 1E game had a penchant for crunching numbers related to the game.  He even went through the Monster Manual and calculated what were the best monsters to fight for the highest profit and lowest risk (human cavemen it turned out as I recall).  He did the same for what weapon did the best average damage (settling on the morningstar) which all of his characters then used.  At some point he declared this to be simply a logical maximization of his characters lethality index rather than a questionable or bad thing.  I think he may have actually gotten the term Lethality Index from an early issue of White Dwarf that IIRC was regularly calculating monster attack/defense capabilities and assigning them a Lethality Index.  What we today might simply call CR but with all a monsters abilities reduced to strictly numerical values in an effort to reliably predict the level of danger to a given level and class of character.Durnwe's Folly.  1) Quite literally killing yourself in trying to gain treasure that ultimately isn't worth the effort.  2) The very such treasure that is being sought.A magic-user character named Nomelin had a REALLY nice pair of Bracers of AC 0 (IIRC) in another 1E game.  Nomelin was out looking to obtain a griffon mount for himself by stealing a few eggs out of a nest on a cliff above a river.  Griffon parents came home and killed Nomelin in the nest.  Nomelin is brought back to life (by now forgotten means) but declined to get killed again attempting to retrieve the lost equipment still on his corpse.  Durnwe, a dwarf fighter in the party was REALLY keen to get those bracers that were now free to anyone who retrieved them.  Durnwe arrived in the vicinity of the nest and was himself grabbed by the griffons to be fed to the new hatchlings.  With a dagger Durnwe attacks the griffon holding him in its talons.  It lets go of course and Durnwe drops into the river taking much damage but alive.  He then start to drown because he's in plate mail armor and sinking like a rock.  He cuts away his magical armor with the same dagger and reaches the surface - where he again starts to drown because he can't swim.  Durnwe's corpse is lost but he is brought back to life (by now forgotten means) and not only doesn't have the bracers but has lost magical armor and other equipment to the riverbed and is all but dead broke.  Nomelin's Bracers are renamed Durnwe's Folly and become objects of legend.</blockquote>

Verification