Probably Bad 1: It's a Probably Bad Podcast!

(24th December 2019)

(opening music)

Pencil: Welcome to the Probably Bad Podcast, a podcast which is probably bad. I’m Pencil.

Paper: I’m Paper! Today’s probably bad rpg idea is…

(dice rolling noise)

Paper: Describe all fights as uncharitably as possible

Pencil: eg. when the party is

battling the evil lich in his lair, “as your highly trained warriors continue to beat

up the old man in his living room”

Paper: See, I don’t think this idea is as bad as it first appears

Pencil: I’m going to say it is, entirely to play devil’s advocate

Paper: Well the thing is, there’s the option of if you have an evil party just

occasionally reminding them that they’re bad guys would be quite fun

Pencil: agreement noise There’s probably something about moral ambiguity there

as well

Paper: Maybe if you’re a Quaker and you wanted to pass on some pacifism to

your group; just shame them

Pencil: Every time someone kills anything just mention their grieving family and

grieving children and how…just their mutilated body and soforth. And eventually

everyone you game with will be a pacifist and support only peace and not orc mudering

Paper: Ah, the Austin Powers method

Pencil: There probably is something with reframing the you’re breaking into a

dungeon and killing people and you’re just breaking into some people’s houses

and stabbing them a lot

Paper: I do think about that a lot with things like the Legend of Zelda where it’s

just “ah the great hero come to save us all…why are you breaking all my pots? I

need those. I know there’s rupees in that jar. I was saving them, and now I need to

spend them because you broke all my stuff but I don’t have them any more

because you took my rupees.

Pencil: It’s like the smashed window approach to economy except you’re also

stealing the window-makers’ money. Yeah there’s a game called Violence – it

came out in 1999 – and the premise of that is it’s a standard dungeon crawl but

you just put it in a normal city and instead of orcs and what-have-you it’s just people who

live there and you’re just stealing their TV and it’s meant to be kind of “this is

actually a little fucked up if you think about it

Paper: So what you’re saying is this particular bad RPG idea is already a literal RPG?

Pencil: I feel like a lot of my bad RPG ideas are literal RPGs

Paper: True, but, this one specifically, that’s…I kind of want to play that, it’s beautiful

Pencil: It is very from the 90s but…

Paper: I mean so am I

Pencil: I guess

Paper: You haven’t seen me in a Smiggle. It gets messy

Pencil: Sorry what the fuck is a Smiggle?

Paper: It’s a shop which…it largely sells stationary and things like that but it’s

basically like? Like if the 90s threw up?

Pencil: Oh wait no shit I have seen a Smiggle

Paper: They have like, scented notebooks and all that bullshit

Pencil: But yes, so, other reasons to insult your players.

Paper: I mean sometimes your players are just dicks and you want a new group

Pencil: In terms of…

Paper: Why tell them that you want to leave when that could be an awkward

conversation, when you can just drive them away with moral complexity

Pencil: This is a good RPG idea for if you want to passive-aggressively drive

your players away because you hate them

Paper: Yeah I mean sometimes you do just want rid of your group

Pencil: There’s worse selling points I guess

Yeah I guess most of our RPG ideas are good if you count them by the standards of “will drive

people away from playing with you”. So there’s an endorsement

Paper: That is a market for RPG ideas I had never considered

Pencil:I do want to make an RPG specifically designed so you can go

“hey who wants to play a game of this” and you will never speak to any of those people again

Paper: Of course there is also the option of being such a bad DM that you never

have to run the games again and you can just play instead

Pencil: The trouble is then you end up with someone…you end up with the entire

group doing that and then it’s just…

Paper: And then you’re just another group with no DM

Pencil: Yeah and then people end up doing our ideas. And then

there’s a death toll. And then we get sued.

Paper: Speaking of doing our ideas, we have received an anonymous question

from tumblr. “Can we hear hilarious tales of your own games where probably bad

ideas got put into play?” So, I did actually run a one-shot based on a submission

to the blog by chaosshephard which was “the party is all half-human half-other

races looking for their shared human parent”. So technically I did cheat by

making it turn out that their father was an incubus pretending to be a human but it did lead

to some very good moments, including the whole group being convinced that they

were hunting down a reverse-manticore, whatever one of those would be.

Pencil: Is it just like, lions head that goes…human body. Scorpion wings, I assume?

Paper: Scorpion wings?

Pencil: Yeah, it’s reverse! It has scorpion wings and a bat stinger

Paper: I’m trying to imagine what scorpion wings would be?! Just

like…just like the shell from a beetle with no wings underneath. Just crispy. A crispy lion man

Pencil: I was picturing just the stingers as wings but I feel crispy lion man is a much better route to go

Paper: And also, free character concept

Pencil: laughs Probably bad RPG idea, play a crispy lion man

(crosstalk)

Paper: What’s the worst idea you’ve ever played?

Pencil: I made one of my characters into a probably bad rpg idea, so I went at this

the other way around. I made Pete the Pathetic Paladin, whose concept was: he

was evil, and he wanted to do evil things. But he was so wildly inept at it and

every attempt he made at it just made the world a noticeably better place, until he

was given paladin powers and sent forth to fight evil by paladins, simply by

showing up next to it and trying to help it and fucking it all up. He eventually

died flipping off typhoid kittens, which is the best.

Paper: Ah yes, kittens with typhoid who had just been rescued from a burning hospital

Pencil: Yes, which I set on fire, ineffectually, because it turns out people can

put out fires, which is something I hadn’t considered

Paper: Mmm. I feel like Craig got the best post-mortem…not Craig. Don’t know

why I said Craig. I feel like Pete got the best post-mortem experience of any

character I’ve ever come across

Pencil: I got to be a horse.

Paper: You did spend some time as a nightmare aka demonic ghost horse

Pencil: At which point I came back

Paper: You did also spend some time with your ghost and your skeleton fighting each other in the town square for all eternity

Pencil: Yeah ‘cause zombies can’t hit ghosts, because all their attacks are

physical. Ghosts can’t hit zombies, because zombies can’t do fortitude saves, and

hus my zombie and my ghost were fighting each other for eternity just…with no

capacity for either to actually hurt each other, or get tired, or leave or…

Paper: It became a tourist attraction

Pencil: Yeah we built a wall around it. I think we visited it in a later campaign

where me and my corpse were still fighting

Paper: What was fun about that was that half the party of the later campaign

where also in the party for the first campaign, so would have known Pete personally

Pencil: I think…yeah I feel like the corpse zombie ghost fighting ring

is a better tourist attraction if you know the corpse zombie

Paper: It adds stakes

Pencil: Hmm. I did eventually come back as like…I can’t remember what it

was…but having achieved redemption in the afterlife I came back as someone

who was so wildly bad at doing good deeds I became a blackguard by the powers of evil

Paper: I have not encountered this character

Pencil: It was in your spouse’s final campaign in the Black Fen setting, which is

something which won’t mean anything to anyone listening

Paper: Oh yes! With the clowns!

Pencil: Yes

Paper: My spouse knows that I hate clowns, so one of the antagonists was just a group of zombie clowns

Pencil: I think the zombie clowns eventually ended up inheriting the setting, and

that’s how we made sure we weren’t going to do any more sessions in the clown world.

Paper: Yeah

Pencil: It’s all clowns now. So there we go, another way to drive off your players, if you want to do that,

which seems to be the theme of this first episode, is to fill the game with clowns

Paper: You say that but, as referring to them as my spouse implies, I did later marry this person

Pencil: Ok you may end up marrying your gaming group but like, 50/50 I guess?

Paper: I like those odds! Shall we have another question?

Pencil: Yes!

Paper: It’s kind of related

Pencil: Yes, this question is from mrmentat. “What was your worst RPG experience?”

Paper, what was your worst RPG experience.

Paper: Well Pencil, it was probably when you guys – I should mention Pencil is in

one of my regular groups – so there was an assassin in a public place. So what

Pencil did was cast gaseous form, go inside the assassin, and resolidify. I don’t

know whether technically that’s allowed, but I felt like I had to rule of cool it

because that was a very innovative way to kill someone. It was also horrific for

me describe as well as turning the whole town against the group

Pencil: You can release the spell at any time, and gaseous form does explicitly say

that your gaseous form can go through small holes, which I assume include

nostrils. So rules-wise I am totally allowed to explode

Paper: Not in the rules because you’d be squashed.

Pencil: The blog did later point out...

Paper:But instead I was like, sure, explode the assassin

Pencil: Yeah the blog did later point out I would have probably been crushed

under the bones but I think Paper was just too horrified to remember anatomy at

that point, which meant it all went fine and I exploded out of someone like a

xenomorph. But yes. The worst RPG experience I’ve had – luckily I’ve not had any

really bad RPG experiences – the worst one in terms of “most fucked up the

campaign and setting” was in a game called Alpha and Omega (omeega) by Mindstorm

studios which was the first RPG I ever made

Paper: Or Alpha and Omega if you’re not referring to omega 3

Pencil: It was the first RPG I ever ran, I did not make the game. First RPG I’d

ever run, and I came up with a basic plot involving this cult rising up and slowly

taking over the area and people were trying to stop that. It was a very “my first

RPG” plot thing. The players were going through the woods and were trying to

find food and Paper’s player, a necromancer, decided that the best thing to do was

raise a zombie, raise a skeleton

Paper: It was a horse

Pencil: A zombie horse. And the rules were, by the setting, that the undead would

find the nearest living thing and kill it. So they sent it out into the woods and I

rolled to see what it found. Now in this game system monsters are ranged from 1-10

1 being tiny little weak things and 10 being massive apocalyptic setting

destroying monsters. I, somewhat stupidly, rolled a D10 to see what the horse

found and forgot to exclude the higher numbers. So this horse wandered slightly

off the path, the first thing it bumped into was an apocalyptic primordial

manifestation of nature’s wrath against humanity, kicked it in the face, woke it up,

wiped out the entire setting basically. Both of the two main city states that the

game was happening in were nearby and were just obliterated, the party very

nearly died, everything was on fire. So yes, my worst RPG experience taught me

to not have the end-game bosses included on random encounter tables, which I

feel is probably something I should continue to do…or don’t.

Paper: So I feel like what we’ve learned from answering this question is you

either definitely do or definitely don’t want to play with Mod Pencil, depending

on what kind of experience you’re wanting

Pencil: Generally if you’re more pro people being exploded from the inside out,

then I am a good player. Um…from Mattie Artemis “Dear Mod Paper, what is the

best character concept you’ve ever seen in a game, and why is it Hercules Bugbear?”

Paper: Ok so Hercules Bugbear is a character that this person played in a

campaign that I was also in who basically killed a load of bugbears who were

worshipping a somewhat wrathful nature goddess and as punishment was

transformed into a bugbear and had to basically be her paladin until an

unspecified point, which I do genuinely love as a character concept. You’ve got

built in character tension, you’ve got bugbears which, you love a bugbear, and

you’ve got the name Hercules, so it ticks all my boxes really. I am struggling to

think of a better character concept I’ve come across.

Pencil: I wasn’t asked but I’m going to answer anyway because I’m also on this

podcast and no-one can stop me. The best character concept I’ve seen in a game

I’ve had was from my housemate, who created an alchemist and the premise was

the alchemist wasn’t an alchemist. What they had done was mugged an alchemist,

stolen their bags of equipment, and were now just flinging them wildly in the

hopes of doing something. So what we did was we made a random table and

every time they would use an alchemist power what would happen was we rolled

and whatever random event, random spell showed up on there was what would

happen, which is not necessarily as good in the deep character building thing but

is good in terms of accidentally setting the campaign on fire

Paper: I mean if there’s one I love in D&D it is pure destructive chaos

Pencil: Yeah it was a character who at no point knew what anything they

were going to do would accomplish. They did eventually succeed but that was after

accidentally turning themselves to stone for a bit. I feel we should possibly

discuss a bit more about the question because I feel that that was sort of a bit

glossed over? If you have any particular ideas?

Paper:What question?

Pencil: Sorry not the question, the original probably bad rpg idea. Because I think that it’s also helpful in that

Paper: So one thing that I do quite like is the example you gave was describing

the lich as an old man, and I mean a classic trope in fantasy, not just in RPGs – I

mean RPGs are just a load of tropes in a trenchcoat – is just the idea of incredibly

powerful characters being described incredibly uncharitably to start with. When

Gandalf in introduced in Lord of the Rings it’s like “oh he’s got a big grey beard

and a walking stick…oh and also he’s a powerful wizard

Pencil: So what you’re saying is we should just mercilessly roast every powerful NPC as soon as they show up

Paper: What I’m saying is Gary Gygax ripped of JRR Tolkein so why can’t we rip

off…George RR Martin or Paul Stewart

Pencil: I feel like the reason we shouldn’t rip off George RR Martin is I want the RPG to be finished in my lifetime.

Paper: Ok, yeah, bad example

Pencil: (rimshot)

Paper: But you get what I mean, right?

Pencil: Yeah

Paper: It’s not as out there as it initially sounds, but at the same time I also like

the idea of kind of reversing it? Which would probably end up very sarcastic but I

am very sarcastic. Just when…low level “there’s rats in the basement” kind of

encounters…just get very dramatic. “And so, you raise your sword, and strike

down the final vile rodent. For 1 hit point.” So that’s about all we’ve got for

today, if you want to support the show for hosting fees, or just because you like us

(this info is inaccurate, head to patreon.com/probablybadrpgideas to support us)

Both: Remember to have a probably bad day

(end music)