I have had players get confused when NPCs don’t want to drop everything and help them. Like, the NPC is just living life. They’re not going to risk their safety and livelihood because you asked nicely a few minutes after meeting them. One player had her mind blown when she learned NPCs can lie. She’d sort of pissed off this one faction with mild misbehavior. She gets pissy with one guy and demands he tell her where the macguffin is. He lies. She says okay, goes to that place. Gets in some trouble, and has no macguffin. She’s looking at me like “where is it?”. After several increasingly overt hints I just tell her “maybe he lied to you, because you broke into his house, pissed off his friends, and demanded he help you. Maybe he just lied to you”. “But… He said the thing is here”

Oh wow, thanks a lot! I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend.

it is a different game, yes. you can always reinject any story points you like, since it’s a toolbox for telling stories.

Same. Currently work life is busy and I feel heavily deprived. If things go to plan, I will be working on some interesting projects in December/January, but till then I suffer.

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it’s called Vain Pirates of the Seven Seas, it’s a GMless One Page ttRPG about Pirates and their accessories. With each accessory lost comes an impairment, making the game quite fun (we laughed a lot playtesting it). It’s free, and if you like it, feel free to let me know, it would make my day. Enjoy!

In a campaign I’m in, my party had to investigate a region outside of a city that was giving off malicious vibes. We ended up finding the source of the vibes and discovered that a member of the city’s 5 person ruling council is collaborating with mindflayers to sacrifice the city. The party makes its way back to the city and wants to figure out how to present that information while still remaining credible. It really didn’t help that we accidentally killed the captain of the guard who was sent with us to investigate (some of us rolled critical failures on attack rolls while fighting earth elementals and ended up hitting him for a lot of damage instead, and then he got crushed by a rolling boulder trap). When we went in front of the council and other townfolk to present our findings, we hit an additional snag when we discovered that we need to present our findings while standing in a circle that allows the compromised council member to read our minds. Our paladin had a bright idea; she put the thought of the treachery we uncovered at the front of her mind and cast Command at the evil council member with the word “confess”. The councilor failed his saving throw, but the DM didn’t want us to get out of it that easily. The dramatic order captured everyone’s attention and someone asked the council member what he had to say. “I… I… I… sometimes wear women’s underwear”. While surprising to the townsfolk, it was ultimately irrelevant to the them, and the council quickly (albeit not incorrectly) pinned the death of the guard captain on us. The evil council member got to cover his ass while putting heat on the party and guards started swarming the room to arrest us. All but one of the party members managed to get away, and there was a several week period of time where the one who got caught was separated from the party and had to roleplay a jailbreak.

My players had spent months finding the combination for a fortified vault door, and finally return to the cave they orignally found the door. Just as the champion begins entering the combination, the wizard realized the party had since leveled a few times, and disintegrate was in her exploration shortlist of prepared spells nobody was happy about that in the moment, hehe

it was a very weird one shot campaign in the style of magicthenoah (if that rings a bell); so very hastly written and not very serious. In my mind it had to do something with someone getting angry and wishing for something unclear regarding him never listening and it ended badly; but this is of course super vague ^^

TL;DR Don’t go swimming in an ice covered lake planning to climb up a ships anchor if you can’t swim or climb A dwarf druid decides to stealthily board a ship that swims in a frozen lake. For that they break the ice, cast a sphere of air around them and their snake companion and jump into the ice cold water - protected for an hour. They then walk the long walk, recast the sphere and stand in front of the anchor. Swimming up after stopping the sphere is unlikely as they can’t swim. So they try to climb the anchor. They fail because they can’t climb. They fail again and again and again and again. Bruised and nearly out of mana they decide to go back. However, it is quite difficult to find the entry point in a frozen lake. When they finally do, they realize that they can’t reach the entry point, because it is 2 and a half meter above the lakes floor as they went in a bit before breaking the ice. As the mana runs out they decide to stop the spell and swim up. But low and behold they still can’t swim, fail miserably even though they got like 5 tests to make it by the generous GM and die together with their companion under the ice. They went without telling anyone so nobody was there to get him out or to help in any other way…

This is hilarious!

Hey, I am currently working on a machine learning project, but LLMs (like ChatGPT that work with natural language) are not my specialty. LLMs generate plausible text. Text that you could read anywhere. It doesn’t reason in the sense that it thinks about your question and answers intelligently. Also, “Semantic Vector closeness” (i.e. what word is closest to the meaning of “tomato” without the meaning of “red” in all possible positions is not something people understand as it is very abstract; emulating an AI perfectly is therefore unreasonable. In my opinion try to do the following (these are not just hallucinations): Try to think of a sentence. Change it so it remains plausible but the meaning is altered When the AI doesn’t know the answer, make something plausible up. For example: If someone asks who invented something, tell them Edison did. There are many sentences out there that name Edison as the inventor of things. Whenever you are able to digress because of a previously discussed topic, don’t be afraid to digress If people get frustrated and try to get a different answer from you, make sure to give them the same answer again but word it differently Talk a lot and tell them blatant lies. When they correct you tell them how right they are and change your mind even if it is - again - wrong. Example: “How far is building XYZ away?” “Oh, it is quite a distance. The distance between here and XYZ is 3km” “But I can see the building!” “There are many reasons why you might be able to see the building despite the building being 3 km away. For example if there is nothing in between.” “But it is much closer.” “You are absolutely right! Good catch! The building is actually much closer than 3 km away.” “BUT HOW FAR IS IT?!” “The building is 1 km away; which is much closer than 3 km.” (still made up) Most importantly I think you should come up with your own system prompt. A system prompt can be as simple as “Answer as if you were a professor of computer science!” or as complex as chatgpts and try to stick to that. These tips are not just for hallucinations as I mentioned, because I think other aspects are equally or more important. In any case: don’t try to emulate an AI perfectly. Make it fun for your players to interact with the character, have a few catchphrases and everything else might be unnecessary bloat, but feel free to dig deep.

Cool idea!

I once made a jinn appear who couldn’t read and was deaf - it constantly started talking when players tried to say something “Oh! I know yoU wAnt to tAlk TO me, but I cAn’t HeAr You. A WISH went wrOng and nOw I have nO EARS.”. It was fun to be its voice. You could draw him images and he would do his best. The person who wanted to get lucky drew a four-leaf clover with some magic highlight lines. They received a glowing-in-the-dark four-leaf clover. Not too bad

!maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world

Part is still waiting to happen Our characters were hired in the past to extract the country-level head of security of one of AAA corps. After they did that, in “wishes and stars”, one of the players expressed that it would be cool if things they get in contact with would come back later So in close future they will be hired to extract him from a secure train and in doing so they most probably will (unless the decide to fail that mission) antagonize their fixer, which just so happens to be Lofwyr - a great dragon that is the owner of another AAA corp And the plan is that in beat climax run the samurai will meet a heavy modified clone of the guy, that is bodyguard of continent-level CEO of the first corp The further plan is, that after that beat, this arch will try to explore the reality when cloning is possible. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to meet the first guy again

Yea, that totally makes sense. I will wait a little bit longer to maybe get approval of a mod. In general I think it would be a great way to get lemmy out there a bit more and to draw rpg developers to reddit. The developer I have in mind is very well connected and had some - let’s say interesting - experiences with reddit hence I thought it would be the ideal moment to suggest to him to check out lemmy.

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Some stuff like mysteries you need to be ready to tell the players they got it right, even if their idea is a little crazy. Players are famously bad at noticing details and remembering plot. But if you do some subtle shifting instead of going in with a fixed, canonical, right answer then it can be fun. I did a one shot the other day that was about people being murdered. We found out they were being done in by golems, but the solution we came up with (do the golem creation ritual with the opposite elements) wasn’t what the GM had in mind. But they decided that our idea was good, so they went with it, and we all felt very smart.

I highly recommend watching or listening to the glass cannon network play through of this (unless you don’t want to spoil the plot for yourself). It’s across roughly 50 episodes and it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done. All the characters are interesting and their descent into madness is performed exceptionally well. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz3Be--ot61MziBtEnjmF7nFjXR166e_6 It’s referred to as Get In The Trunk seasons 4-6 but you don’t really need to have heard the first 3 (although they are good).