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wtf my party just murdered someone
Topic Started: Apr 1 2017, 08:01 PM (1,292 Views)
l33tmaan
Pokémon Trainer
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what the FUCK my Hex Maniac told his Lampent to eat some dude's soul!
I'm playing a vanilla pokemon game and the party called the cops on THEMSELVES in an attempt to lie to them and say someone else did it, except they failed spectacularly and now all the law in Undella Town knows they murdered some dude and assaulted the police AND Nurse Joy! How do I handle my game flying off the rails like this?
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Slytherclaw
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Storyteller
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Uhhh....probably by not actually giving your players the abilities to /eat souls/ and expecting things not to go off the rails? Wat
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Lord Fhalkyn
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The one and the only
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Understand that you need change the game type drastically. I assume you sat down with the players and discussed the type of campaign you want to run. If yes, feel free to sit them down and speak to them, and hopefully get a retcon.
If not, either end the game or go full Trigun.
In short: welcome to GMing, l33tmaan! Enjoy your ride!
Edited by Lord Fhalkyn, Apr 2 2017, 02:01 AM.
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DJW
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Rival
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Everybody needs to fill out The Same Page Tool to help prevent this in the future.
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l33tmaan
Pokémon Trainer
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Slytherclaw
Apr 1 2017, 08:17 PM
Uhhh....probably by not actually giving your players the abilities to /eat souls/ and expecting things not to go off the rails? Wat
Unless I'm horribly mistaken, isn't that exactly what the Litwick line does? Snatch life energy and eat souls to fuel their spiritual flames?
Bulbapedia
 
Lampent can sense when someone is about to die, whom it visits and steals the spirit from the person's body. Though most often found in deep forests, it wanders through cities and hangs around near hospitals to absorb the spirits of the fallen. It uses the spirits it has absorbed to fuel its fire. On occasion, it has been known to work with Litwick to lead people to the Ghost World while stealing life energy.

I even described the dude's soul floating around inside of the lamp. It might sound out of left field, but this seems 100% within the realm of doability, especially since the humans beat the piss out of the dude before Lampent finished him off...

I'm not doing a retcon, that's a slap in the face to my players. I'm certainly not opposed to having the International Police on their asses, but the actual goal of the campaign hasn't changed at all, my Hex Maniac basically wants to be a death cultist of Giratina.
At least the cultists they're fighting think they're doing it for a good reason - this guy's just been getting more and more maniacal over the past few months. Some strange character development.
Edited by l33tmaan, Apr 2 2017, 08:14 AM.
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Lockdown
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I SEEE YOUUUU
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So your problem is that you gave the PCs the chance to do something, and they did it? Sounds like you made your own bed there dude.
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Robot
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See, if you're going to use PokeDex entries as justification for why your player can suddenly go around devouring souls, then you should've seen this coming. By that same token, no one in your game can ever look into the back of a shedinja, or wield a honedge for fear of dying instantly. Never let your player get a Larvitar unless you want one of your region's mountains to disappear in their road to getting a Tyranitar. Probably shouldn't ever touch a slugma either, because they're hotter then the sun, burnt to cinders by proximity closer then millions or billions of miles.

In fact, probably just shouldn't have Slugma exist at all. Or Gardevoir. Small black holes do really horrible things to campaigns, and also planets. You brought this on yourself, then rebutt the only good options you can take. Having set a 'PokeDex Entry fluffs this as okay precedent' any player with even slight knowledge of the Dex can pull some really incredible bullshit agency 'because so and so did this with their thing'.
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Moriya
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The Litwick line does pick up the Soulstealer ability, so if they had that, devouring souls seems reasonable. I agree that using 'dex and the anime is a bad idea, but there's in-game justification for this one.

I'd have to second the recommendation of the Same Page Tool above. You and your players are clearly interested in playing different games. If your goal is to have a more light-hearted game, they should be aware of that and not run murderous characters.

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I'm not doing a retcon, that's a slap in the face to my players.

Twisting the game into something you aren't comfortable running is a slap in the face to you. Working with your players and what they want is important, but crossing a well-communicated line is simply disrespectful to you and your work in creating the game.
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l33tmaan
Pokémon Trainer
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Lockdown
Apr 2 2017, 08:59 AM
So your problem is that you gave the PCs the chance to do something, and they did it? Sounds like you made your own bed there dude.
Why is everyone assuming this is a problem? I'm just really surprised that I barely had to push my players to do horrible things - I was expecting more of a fight there.
My game is effectively "vanilla pokemon + 'realism'", or in other words - don't fuck with dangerous pokemon because they'll kill you, but the actual tone of pokemon society is exactly like in the games - you can just waltz into a high-class research facility and just ask the scientists what's going on.
One of my players just... used one of those dangerous pokemon to kill someone else. That's a fairly drastic shift from where we started, but I was about to start sending cult assassins to actually murder them anyway.

But they killed a guy and all he did was insult/mug them after winning a fight! It's so deliciously... proactive? I was planning on having the cops falsely accuse them of doing something, since they're pretty shady, but now I can just have the police ACCURATELY accuse them. They couldn't have done a better job of roleplaying, if you ask me, it was a very dramatic scene and we were all quite pleased by what's going on - now the other party member is going to reconsider why he's even travelling with the Hex Maniac in the first place.

NOTE: Also, the Litwick straight up looks for strong souls to deliver them to Giratina and has this entire game - it's how it met the PC in the first place. There's plenty of precedent for this thing being bad news, and it's already sucked some life energy out of people while they slept... with its master's permission.

SECOND NOTE: Also also, yeah, I did actually have non-Fire types take extra damage from being around lava and Slugmas during the party's trip through Reversal Mountain - we all had a great time and they only almost died twice.
Edited by l33tmaan, Apr 2 2017, 09:27 AM.
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Moriya
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You wrote your first post like you had a problem and they had broken your game. If you just want to brag about how your players are doing, don't make an opening post that sounds like you want help.
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