Has one of your characters ever been broken?
>>43840496
One came close to it. He even went dangerously close to going axe-mad on an entire town.
But the darkness ate him.
Yeah, but it was part of my back story so I don't know if it really counts.
>>43840496
My character in 5e is slowly going mad. Playing Out of the Abyss and failing all those checks
>>43840496
Yes.
Being the sole survivor of multiple TPKs will do that to a man.
>>43840496
My WoD character has been slowly degraded over the campaign. Lost his parents, then kid, best friends, love interest, legitimate and fulfilling career , spent 2 months in hospital, spent an additional 4 months in a psych ward, left behind by the Cell, suffered serious and disfiguring scarring from burns, caught up in an assault investigation, accidentally blew up his puppy, had to burn down his personalized HQ with all his work notes, research and rare materials inside, then was found guilty and had to run from the cops to meet up with the Cell and stay out of prison by changing his entire identity.
My character was a noble woman, her entire family was assasinated , a demond possesed her temporally and after that she had personallity disorder also she saw a lot of missery and lived through bloody battles.
In spite of this she was caring for her friends and her old servants.
It was in warhammer fantasy first edition, and it all started as a total random generated character. All his missery were due a dick gm im not fond of edgy backgrounds.
>>43840496
What's the right question?
>>43840524
>>43840570
>>43840863 is exempt because it was not self-inflicted.
>>43840943
You don't understand. The darkness, as in a living entity made out of darkness, came up and just ate him alive.
Worst part is that we never got an explanation by the gm of what the dick just happened.
>>43840496
One of them was reduced to dismembered parts. The rest of the party had reassemble it.
>>43841037
... Okay then, consider yourself removed from the NTWIC Edgy compilation!
Not yet, my very first came close after getting duped into drinking essence of twig blight and thinking he was turning into a tree, to be honest it was pretty funny to play out but I'm happy he ended up recovering
>>43840929
He asked what does this have to do wit me when he should've asked What was the best gift
I think
>>43841120
No, those are two separate pages. So you read the first page on its own, and the gift talk comes before the wrong question talk.
Two of my characters are Drow sisters.
They were broken by the time they grew up.
One reacted to her horrible, constantly endangered childhood by weaponizing her vulnerability. She's a sensual, seductive poisoner with an innocent.
The other locked any part of her which can feel fear deep, deep inside herself. She's not even strong, but she'll throw herself into danger without though of self preservation, because if she ever stops, she'll realize how lonely she is when everyone wants her dead.
They're close.
>>43840496
Yup, he got pulled from his giant not-mecha and snapped in half by an eldritch abomination.Luckily he had spares
>>43840496
By Emotional Gravitas, no.
By a Gigantic Dick in the ass, yes.
>>43841217
Lesbian incest close?
>>43840650
This, and it's always by accident I'm left alive.
>>43840496
My token dark elf girl gone mad once.
It was an ERP, does it count?
>>43840943
Why is it any time someone tries to do something even halfway interesting using any sort of "dark" concept, little shits like you have to derail the thread with "MUH EDGE, BOO HOO"? In fact, if everyone's fine with it at the table, what's wrong with being a little edgy? I've played with characters that people would shoot down because "hurr durr edgelord bullshit" before and they've made decently interesting roleplayers.
>>43840496
Not permanently.
Things got bad enough that he ran away from the area and basically dropped out of the game for a while to figure his head out.
>>43844207
Lots of us had to live through and roleplay during the 90s, where literally entire parties were comprised of brooding hardbitten loners, each somehow trying to take the darkest corner table obscured by shadows in the bar.
After 10 years of edgy shit, you grow a distaste for it. There's no "refreshing twists" or "interesting quirks" left in that bag of tricks. They've been played out thousands of times.
As for anyone else that has a problem with it, they could just be dicks. Or both.
>>43844267
Have you tried not playing solely with edgy players?
>>43844286
>if not constantly exposed to edginess, your loathing of it will rapidly fade
Fuck off.
>>43844286
Wasn't an option from 1990 to 1999. It was an epidemic. The damage has been done. And that's what I do now; not play with edgelords.
Yeah, in a current campaign actually. Playing an urban druid, flavored as a sort of defender of the city (not batman, he is approved by the people and authorities). He was knocked out by dracolich cultists and kept paralyzed on a hill where he was forced to watch his home get burnt down and his NPC family murdered. The rest of the PCs, being the adventuring guild, decided not to get in the way. He went insane after being killed and brought back as a ghost to fight the PCs
>>43844286
>anon mentions having, in the past, to endure a decade of edginess putting them off edgy character types
>you ask him if he's tried not playing with the type of players he just said he long since grew distasteful of.
You sir, are a shit rooster.
>>43840496
Here is your daily reminder that not everyone likes playing characters who've been "broken" and therefore you shouldn't force someone to play that character if he doesn't want to.
Through a series of traumatic events my character joined a cult and became the antagonist of the campaign, recently let a strike force of cultists to attack a major tournament and ended up killing another PC and about half of the other NPCs at the tournament
>>43840496
I once played a Wizard to the fullest I could manage in a 3.5e game where the DM, a good friend of mine, wanted to see what kind of insanity I (and 3.5e's fucking magic system) could bring to the table.
The other players had fun (and I did my damn best to make sure they weren't miserable) but it's really something none of us would want to try again.
Yes, he got NTR'd.
>>43840496
He got pretty depressed for a while after realising that in his bravado and arrogance he had been a huge dick to the one person whom he actually cared about, throwing a birthday gift back in her face because he didn't want to break his cold-hearted stoic façade.
He got better. He's still kind of a dick but now he doesn't brood so much and might actually laugh (In a non-sarcastic, non-sneering fashion) on occasion.
>>43840788
Sweet werewolf Jesus
>>43840496
>Heiress to a global merchant conglomerate with a history as shady as they are rich.
>All of her "uncles" and "aunts" (family business partners) that would give presents and tell her stories were slowly being killed off around her.
>Nearly killed by a child suicide bomber at the age of 5 because she slipped away from her bodyguards to go play with other kids.
>Was the first and only victim when her father violently snapped leaving her hospitalized for several months. She came back to find he had locked himself away from the rest of their family for fear of hurting them.
>Was left in the care of her nanny as her mother became increasingly busy and overworked.
>Said nanny was killed in front of her eyes during one of the more successful assassination attempts made on her family along with her father being critically injured.
>That was the last time she saw her mother before she went back to her endless work.
>No one she meets is willing to associate with her for fear of being killed off by her family's enemies.
>All she ever wanted was for her family to be happy and together.
>Now she can only watch her father slowly dying while her mother works herself to death keeping the company going.
>And there is nothing she can do to save them.
>>43844658
>>43844494
Now that's a feel I know. Can be good to have PC antagonists for a while if your DM can handle it.
Mine came pretty close. Was a swashbuckling adventurer in the first campaign then in paragon became king. Found out really quickly that good adventurers very rarely make good kings and got almost half his people killed. Rest of the party had to go on a sidequest just to cheer him up.
>>43840496I was GM-ing an Only War game for my friends who barely know 40k, which actually was really FUN because they actually acted in character just like they would out of character, having no knowledge of the universe beyond the Infantryman's primer that I made them read beforehand.
After that, orks happened, and they ended up like so many guardsmen thinking life will be easy in the guard.
After the campaign was over, they were the ones to suggest their characters were probably traumatised by the experience. I made them read Achilles in Vietnam, a very interesting book about PTSD, that I can't seem to be able to put the extract with my post for some reason, which I found on /tg/, and 2 asked me if they could add PTSD to their characters flaws.
They actually did it pretty well, and it was justified, one having been showered by his best mate innards thanks to a grenade in a firefight, the other one having been captured and tortured.
Really happy with how they played it.
>>43840496
Yes, I've played Changeling the Lost.
>>43841177
>>43840929
>>43841120
The right question is "What IS the right question?" Hence the stop in his dialog and helping spiderman move forward after guiding him to that conclusion. Its sort of the whole "life is one big question you gotta find your own answer." Thing. Questions the same person to person but the answers always different.
I had a character in AdEva who had been left in Not-cryogenic stasis while remotely connected to his immobile Eva for two years after an angel destroyed the base. He was kinda fucked in the head after that but he could function well enough sometimes.
My character witnessed the death of Corellia in our Star Wars game at the hands of IG-88. Corellia happened to be the place where he was born and watching it explode nearly broke him. What did break him was the fact that not a single one of his comrades gave a damn about it even though it had been their job to stop IG-88. It was then and there that he decided he was going to kill the rest of his team once the right moment presented itself. GM is fully aware of this too and simply waiting for the day I put the plan into action.
Having a character survive a dark heresy game to 100 insanity is a good way to break them. Thanks to mutation and her inquisitor she was practically unkillable and witnessed all of her friends die in horrible ways, sometimes at her own hands at her insanity got into the upper digits.Apparently next campaign she's coming back as a villains chained mad dog
Here's one I saved a while ago from the days when tg had Larp threads, where the PLAYER is basically broken, along with the character.
Difficulty: not an overly edgy character who brought it on himself
>>43846531
This one of the ffg Star Wars? Care to story time or paraphrase how Corellia got nuked?
>>43846729
OK, ouch. That is depressing, no least because a run on a single character deserves a much better ending than that.
>>43846752
We're using the Saga edition of the Star Wars RPG. Our game, dubbed "Sons of the Empire", is a little bit A-Team and a little Sons of Anarchy as we were all Scout Troopers serving the Empire. Our characters created an alternate timeline starting at the battle of Hoth where we shot down the Millennium Falcon and blew up C3PO. Eventually we were framed by a superior officer and had to run for our live before becoming mercenaries and the ripple effects included several of IG-88's duplicates surviving, one of which was on the second Death Star long enough to broadcast a command prompt that started a droid uprising. While everyone got caught up in the Droid War we discovered the other IG-88 was trying to gain access to the Maw and all the insane superweapons contained within. Using an Eclipse class dreadnaught as his base he and his droid army began tearing their way across the galaxy. IG-88 wanted Centerpoint Station to further his agenda of eradicating all biological scum and it was our job to stop him before he got to it. We were able to disable the dreadnaught and broadcast an override for his droid uprising protocol but before the armies we were working with could fully take out the dreadnaught for good he pulled one last act of petty vengeance and blew Corellia to hell.
>>43844129
>Drow
>>43844330
what about someone who plays edgelord satirically? pulls out all the tropes and clichés, even when they contradict with each other (e.g. only child tormented by his evil twin brother) just because it's that ridiculous
>>43847121
I love how insane the Star Wars setting gets/can get. Does your character know about Alderran?
>>43847365
Can't be done. Edginess can't be properly satirical in a tabletop RPG setting because there's no meaningful difference in practically expressed interpersonal relations between group members and a genuinely edgy player, and a satirically edgy player.
>>43840496
My DM and I are planning to break my old Sharmind cleric.
He was an overly zealous servant of Torm who really liked to take judgment and execution into his own hands. I wasn't a murderhobo, but the cleric always sought to punish people for their actions.
I had him appear as one of the major villains in a sci-fi-fantasy game I was running, as a madman that was chasing one of the player's dad who is on the run for some reason.Originally I meant it as a joke but he's now an integral part of the plot.
I haven't revealed to the old DM, currently one of my players, exactly how my cleric showed up there, but I've been planning with him to find a way to drive the cleric to madness once he gets back to DM that old campaign.
>>43840929
Exactly.
>>43845540
That's actually a pretty good tragic backstory. Why is she adventuring?
>>43840788
Sounds like your average Mortals campaign.
>>43846729
I was going to rip on this for the "my parents are DEEEEAD" cliche, but I'm not going to do so for two reasons. First, dude was clearly a teenager when he created the character, and people deserve some slack for doing dumb shit at that age. Second, and more important, I don't think I've ever seen that cliche used where the PC actually killed one of them to try and save the other. Intervening in a drunken domestic violence episode is a totally new take on that to me, and I actually really like it.
And yes, playing a character for 15 years and having an ending like that is depressing as shit, and I feel bad for the PC.
>>43848303
A few reasons. She wants to get back at the people who are after her life, she wants to try and prove to herself she can successfully do something on her own because she's felt so powerless her entire life (ironic since she's set up to inherit the largest amount of political power in the setting), and she's secretly hoping to find something that can help her save her mother and father.
>>43840496
I want to say first that any details omitted are omitted because they're stupid and bad, I am telling you a story that is a lot worse than I might make it sound because I'm trying to paraphrase it in an attempt to entertain.
I tried to retire a character once, getting tired of a campaign, he made a heroic sacrifice alongside another PC to destroy a world threat and I thought that'd be the end of it. They did destroy the threat, but his best friend and leader died, and he basically survived as a lich.
After that he went on to wander around and do some generic PC stuff. Now, my character was already treated as a guy with a short temper and very poor decision making skills. Getting scorned by the citizens he helped and hunted by the paladin order he was trained at did not help him. (My character wasn't a Paladin just to make it clear, he aspired to be one but well before the start of the campaign he'd already been found wanting) Eventually he found a goal while lost in the world, that as the destruction of the dominant religion and the murder of the nobility that sent him on his original journey that ended in his undeath.
Through his journey, he picked up an undead dragon mount, turned an armada of a hundred men into an army of skeleton pirates, cut through a forest of elves and made more than a few paladins and clerics into mangled messes of flesh and bone.
The campaign ended for him a little earlier than it did for the other PCs when the gauntlet of enemies specifically designed to counter his skill-set (Perhaps justifiably) grew too big and he ended up getting torn apart by the setting's Grand Inquisitor. The actual fight was much less than I'd hoped for, but I was glad that my attempts to kill my PC off for good finally worked out.
And then the GM said in the epilogue that my character went on to conquer hell. Which was a real kick in the balls because all I wanted was to play a boring fighter who wanted to make some money and retire.
>>43840496
Last month my longest running delta green character I've ever had oped into the .45 retirement plan. He'd finally seen and done enough, one too many failed San checks.
One of the other players and I acted out the closing scene of Men In Black in character, only instead of a denuralizer it was a government issue 1911.
>>43840496
once by a giant gorilla
anther by a giant crocodile
Isle of Dread was fun
Mine was a Native American from a pre-reservation era. When by accident he was transported into the future where all his tribe was genocided, his people forced into slavery/reservations. He was depressed as fuck.
>>43840496
I played a Deathwatch game where I wound up on alone on a feudal world, and became embroiled in local politics while hunting for my fellow squadmates.
I appointed myself commander of the locals who had taken me in, and when they proved incapable of carrying out my battle plans began executing them, and got half-way to seizing power and becoming an insane superhuman god king out of sheer rage at the frailty of ordinary humankind.
I didn't quite fall to Chaos, but I came pretty close and will likely wind up there by the end. It taught me I should never occupy a position of authority in real life.
i had a character who was tricked into working for the bad guys. When he found out he ended up killing a bunch of his former allies and then charged the vastly stronger bbeg to delay him long enough for the fortress to collapse on top of them.it didn't work
>>43847406
Yeah but only through the filter of the Empire at the time so while he might have thought it a bit extreme he still believed that the Empire was doing the right thing to protect the whole universe. It wasn't until their unit got set up and they had to run and hide amongst the people that he began to learn about some of the real fucked up shit that went down under the Empire's rule. He understands the galaxy is a big place and the Empire couldn't get to every little warlord or crime boss but that they were actively working with and turning a blind eye to the activities of some of these guys was what really shocked him. Too bad the rest of his unit wanted to be just like those warlords and crime bosses because once they catch the guy who framed them he's going to blow the rest of them up and walk into the sunset,
Less 'broken' and more everybody I play with makes gimped characters for 'muh depth'.
Only time I went for actual optimization was a GoT game, where I died first session sacrificing myself in a duel with someone that might have been the incarnation of a god. Then again, less broken and more every GoT game needs a Ned Stark.
>>43851627
Misunderstood the question, clearly.
Played a changeling fathered by the Sandman in a Dresden Files game. Everything went fine, I even indulged in some sponsored magic now and again.
Then he met someone in a deep coma and failed all resistance rolls to stop him from eating the mind of a comatose girl. Mind you, this had so far been a game were death of a random NPC was a major holy shit moment, and the PCs tried to avoid killing anything but the most horrible monsters. We'd rehabilitated Lawbreakers, put up an illusion to keep White Council with its Burn The Heretic attitudes out of town, reconciled the cult of Steve with his girlfriend instead of turning him in for Time fuckery and in general been almost entirely non-violent.
The character Chose to be human and left town, with heavy implications of permanent mental scarring.
>>43850063
Did he like the hamburgers tho?
>>43840496
Yeah, fallen paladin.
>>43840496
One of my characters got murdered by his own sister, in revenge for killing his parents.
It wasn't even in backstory: our campaign was trying to depose a God that had usurped the D&D pantheon, and his parents were high-level clergy-members, so we got into a boss fight against them and won.
Later on, this Avenger shows up. It was my character's sister. being the overconfident knightly-ish-character he was (dude was a Warlord/Necromancer multiclass), he challenged his sister to single combat.
I was not prepared for the lethality of a Fullblade Avenger in 4e.
Killing him broke his sister, and she joined the party as my next PC.
>>43845904
I remember when Pururin was still a thing.
Not really. I don't enjoy playing depressing games. Being sad or upset or watching horrible things happen just isn't fun to me, so I don't really play a whole lot of tabletop since everyone seems to wanna work stuff like that in for motivation for whatever.
>>43844145
>This, and it's always by accident I'm left alive.
Yes... "Accident".
>>43852391
>Yeah, fallen paladin.
You should join our support group!
>Hello, my name is Lance, and I've been fallen for 28 days now...
>>43852588
Wait it's dead?
>>43852932
I don't know if it's true for you, but I can't connect to its Cloudflare server in London.
>>43840496
I was playing an Oread samurai in my friend's pathfinder game. We had a party member who was randomly selected to be our group's time-lord in training, and we also had a house rule that whenever a player was absent from a session, their character would be sucked into a pocket dimension, so as to preserve their character state until the player returned.
Because I had never missed a session, I would occasionally see party members vanish, then reappear at the completion of sessions, so my character interpreted these phenomena as how we were altering the timeline.
Now, my character was honor-sworn to protect our time-lord-in-training; and one day our time-lord missed a session, and was time-vaulted. My character panicked and we spent the session looking for our time-lord and trying to figure out what we could have done to trigger his disappearance. Our DM then used an intelligent cursed item to convince me that it was my fault that our time-lord was vanished, and I had failed my ultimate mission.
So I ended that session by committing seppuku.
>>43852960
Damn I get the same thingNow where am I going to indulge in my big butt trap deviances
>>43853057
I'm just more annoyed because that is literally the only place where they had purely English translations of Japanese stuff.
>>43845930
He was all for it, he has a very interesting style where all the players are just people in the world there isn't really a party unless we make one.
>>43840496
was playing a cyberpunk/magicpunk BESM campaign where I was a character who had been a spec ops killer for the European Technomancy. When he'd been let loose they did a mind wipe on him so he didn't actually have any idea of most of the atrocities he had caused, instead having those memories replaced with various patriotic stuff, also had some implanted kill orders for defending the Technomancy at all costs (was the reason I had to make regular Soul and/or Mind checks though the campaign up to that point, GM never had explained why, just had us regularly making them to obscure the fact it was my character who needed to do it).
I mean shit, I knew I shouldn't have taken that weird ass loyalty negative trait. Anyway, my character had a mental break when he was forced to gun down the elfen lied expy when she decided to try and hold a technomancy city hostage to force the technomancy to free some of her fellow genetic experiment friends. I wanted to try negotiating her down, she was a party member after all, one of only two characters who had survived the america's based nazi undead armies that had been attacking since the beginning of the campaign. Failed the will/mind check (I forget which it was that time). My diplomacy roll (which had been a crit success) was turned into a roll for my shoot-shit skill (whatever it was), and I used an explosive bullet on her head.
It wasn't that he wasn't prepared to do that to her if it became necessary, it was because it was directly OPPOSITE of what he had tried to open up with. It also started him remembering other times he'd done that in cold blood, and they conflicted so heavily with his patriotic "I'm the retired hero" memories that he basically broke down for a few missions.
>>43853239
>Technomancy
I meant Technocracy. Just woke up and saw this thread. Sorry.
Two different characters, actually. The first was a human fighter. He was possesed for a few turns in combat, which left him a bit odd, not being able to deal with it. Then he (and the rest of the party) contracted lycantropy. That made him angry and snappy. A fun combination.
The other character was a socialite in Call of Cthulhu. Made a deal with the devil and lost the mental strugle. Because of that, 3 out of 5 party members ended up dead.
>>43853308
Oh,. and I played a Malkavian. Being broken is kinda their modus operandi.
>>43853391
Not sure if I'd call Malks broken, per se. They just don't see reality the same way everyone else does, from what I've gathered. Like an entire Clan of Sheogoraths.
>potion on a pedestal
>do every check imaginable
>investigators declare it safe
>my high school librarian picks up the potion
>immediately feels sick, but waves it off and drinks it
>no effects at all
>fast forward three weeks, get into shootout with cultists
>the police are coming, radio chatter is crazy
>librarian charges into close range swinging a broadsword
>cutting down cultists, having a good time
>doors burst open, more cultists burst in
>body armor and .38 revolvers
>cultists had not used a revolver the entire game
>decide to attack since i was closest
>slaughter them all, leader cultist tries to run but I manage to take him down with a stungun, execute him
>your allies look at you with horror
>you feel a moment of sickness and it passes
>you look around you
>the bodies of police, hacked to pieces
>stab marks, blood everywhere
>at your feet, special detective richard johnson best friend, only ally
>GM looks up......
>ready for this sanity roll?
>more police arrive, gibbering insane guy covered in blood and crying with a sword curled up on the ground
>fuck you Call of Cthulhu
Contact poison on a potion that was filled with water
All my characters wore gloves after that.
>>43853440
Hmm... Good point. Well, in that case my Malk was broken. He was taken to undeath sometime after the 2nd world war. His sire had only sired him as basically a big fuck you to some toreadore the sire had bad blood with.
He was convinced that the ghost of his first victim haunted him, and would only leave him be if he could create the most perfect vessel for the ghost. Being a vampire (and a perfectionist), nothing he ever made would be perfect. So he lived in an abandoned warehouse filled with partial sculptures, paintings and other art projects, all depicting the same figure.
Plus, sometimes his PTSD would trigger and transform everything into something out to get him. Streetlights would become snakes, the cars in the road would try to attack him, ect. Would die down again if he got calm and collected.
He basically spend most sessions hiding in a corner.
>>43853841
"No, YOU stop!"
>>43853841
Plot twist
>art dealer finds warehouse
>dies from the sheer amazement as he sees the best modern art ever created
>haunts him for more artwork
>the cycle continues
>>43841037
Did the rest of your partyattack the darkness?
I think so. Bliss Stage.
Had a pilot that was basically everybody's big brother. Big guy with a big heart, wasn't too fond of violence but not at all against using it to defend others, proud to call himself a pilot. The usual trope. He threw down his own life for other people several times; chucking rocks at the aliens that had formed in the real world and were chasing down other party members that weren't even really his friends, jumping into dreamspace ops without an anchor because a rookie pilot fucked up on the first action really fucking badly, treating Dummies (synthetic people; think like Bishop from Aliens, I guess) like actual people when everyone else treated them like machines or shit, that kind of thing.
The problem was that very few people stopped to actually appreciate him for it. People even went so far as to tell him to not do it. He thought it was just them caring enough for them to see him starting to deteriorate, but as far as he was concerned, better him than them, right?
One of the other PCs turned out to be a Dummy. The model they had been running with had been terminated by the guy running the resistance behind the scenes in a side session because she was showing too much individuality, and activated a new model of the same variety. PC played along, but her memories still remained, so she had this plot to kill the leader, because the only thing she had pretty much done was ask for a thank you. My character put 2 and 2 together when she walked into the classroom, and had to step outside to collect himself before he lost his shit. When he stepped back in, the NPC Dummy, who had been a good friend for a long time, had been blamed for hiding this for some reason, and was getting beat on by a couple of the other kids.
Continued in next post.
>>43854553
My character flipped the fuck out, threw a chair at the other resident big guy and slammed a guy who was clearly suffering from the Bliss (thing that makes you go into a coma when you hit adulthood.) Having Trauma 3 does wonders to legitimize causing physical harm to other people. Leader, who was our teacher, walks in and pretty much defuses the entire situation with a cold glare.
After class, he tells me and the NPC Dummy to wait behind. He puts a gun to the Dummy's head, tells my character in no uncertain terms that if anything like this happens again, Dummy gets fucked up. It got really tense. Teacher eventually leaves, and Dummy reprimands my character for stepping in to defend him
Other characters start acting like nothing he ever did for them ever happened, mostly because of the other shit that was happening to them. By the time it got to the finale dream space battle sequence, one of his friends were dead, two were missing, his relationships with the other two PCs were broken, and he was right at the end of his tether. His Bliss sat at 106, and his Trauma at 6; 3 more bliss, he'd Bliss Out and game over. One more Trauma, he'd die a traumatic death and game over. Couldn't make an action, couldn't pull out.
At that point, his fighting spirit completely left him. He'd gone from being everyone's big brother, to loathing pretty much everybody that wasn't his anchor (whom he was still somewhat in love with). He said over comms that he was done with fighting for nothing, not even a word of thanks, and let the alien he was fighting get a hold of his ANIMA and attach itself. He was about to apologize to his anchor, saying that he would have loved nothing more but to spend just another day with her, but then the Dummy PC went and opened her mouth mid-rant and said "Welcome to my entire life."
To which he snapped, and responded "Shut the fuck up. You're just a fucking dummy." And hit the self destruct button.
So, yeah. I'd say that was fairly broken.
An evil necromancer (female) had a sister who was a cleric of the local goddess of death, who objected strongly to the whole "undead" thing. The necromancer was the experimental type and would purchase dead bodies from a nearby town in order to conduct her experiments. The cleric showed up one day with a cadre of holy warriors, with the intent to put an end to the necromancer's "evil ways." They were overwhelmed by the necromancer's horde of experimental zombies and all the warriors were killed, and the cleric soundly defeated. The necromancer was pissed because her work had been set back and a lot of her experiments destroyed, and she wasn't satisfied by just killing her sister. Instead she ordered one of her zombies to rape her sister, and left her humiliated and defiled. Through some freak fluke of undeath, the poor cleric become pregnant. The resulting abomination, after it grew to adulthood, was the main villain of my campaign.
The session where I explained his rapey backstory was... really fucking awkward.
>>43854605
That sounds pretty grimdark. What is this Bliss Stage you speak of?
>>43854663
Why explain the entire backstory, then? just say that it was an abomination sired by a mortal woman and an Undead father, no need to bring in rape and sisters and whatnot.
>>43840496
A temporary break in one game. My character was an alchemist with a long military background whos duty was to protect the town and do terrible things so others wouldn't have to.
We were camped for the night outside some eerily empty ruins while investigating some disappearances when my character failed a will save on guard duty. Some sort of creature mindfucked me into thinking it was a lost comrade from his old unit, and members of the party woke to me conversing with and greeting it. Ended up in a fight with the party protecting my "old friend" from their inexplicably hostile actions. They ended up winning, but after the combat a party member who I was already not on great terms with berated my character for "betraying" the group and being weak. That combined with the shock of the memories that came with the old friend was enough to send him over the edge. Stayed up for days on the way back to the town. Angry about failing, angry about a lot of stuff.
The icing on the cake however, was when we got back, there was some rabble rouser who was trying to incite unrest against the leaders of the settlement. We arrived at the part of his speech where he was questioning what we actually do for them, and asserting that we fail to keep the citizens safe. That was it, sleep deprived and broken, I calmly walked through the crowd and pommel struck that little shit on the temple with a crit and then proceeded to beat him well past unconcious with my bare hands and had to be physically torn away from him.
Things were different after that.
>>43854700
Bliss Stage is a game about giant mechs made of dreams versus giant aliens made of nightmares.
The premise of the game is that the mecha genre isn't -actually- about giant robots fighting, but about hot blooded warriors powering their machines by their relationships and ideals, and then takes that to it's natural extreme.
The giant robots are -literally- made from the relationships the pilot (or pilots) forge with other players. So that sword? That's your relationship with your younger brother. The torso? That's your true love's relationship.
And when they are damaged, they LITERALLY damage the relationship with the person making the thing as well. So the game is split between relationship building amongst the PCs and the giant robot fights.
It can either be complete wank, or utterly amazing, and depends entirely on the type of group you got.
>>43854700
It's sorta like Evangelion, I guess? It's pretty heavily character driven; the strength of your ANIMA (the robot) is directly proportional to the strength of the relationships you pick to build it. As the ANIMA takes damage, so do the relationships, and you only get so many interludes between missions to heal or advance those relationships. It was pretty interesting, and made for a damn good game.The epilogue for my character was that he woke up out of a coma after roughly a year, pretty much dead on the inside. With the former leader dead at the hands of the PC Dummy, he took on his duties to get humanity back into shape again. He turned into a completely different person when he woke up; uncaring, no nonsense, and non-confrontational in the way of "well if we don't do it like this this happens, then this happens, then we all die. If that's what you want, then on your head it'll be". He made every attempt to remove knowledge of Dummy manufacture, and decommissioned every Dummy that hadn't been activated yet.
Nobody quite knows what happened with his anchor. She sorta just drifted off to somewhere else, and as far as he's concerned, the last thing he did for her was break her heart. He wished he never woke up.
Played a Dwarf Slayer-like character in DnD. Owned a brewery in a small mostly human town and led a happy life, he was even mayor for two terms, until a Titan awoke under the village and sundered the town in Magma and raging earth, with his own family being incinerated before him, He's being trying to suicide by monster since.
Guy was pretty fucking broken and eventually had to be put down at level 20 by the rest of the party after he turned on them out of sheer sadness.
>>43840496
I think one did sort of break.
Small campaing crossover between 40k and Alien Vs Predator. We were a bunch of Inquisitorial Stormtroopers that were sended to investigate some Ordo Xenos lab located under a mine that went silent.
You can imagine what would happen if you suddenly are alone in some maintenance tunnels out of any other source of light that wasn't his night vision scope on his gun and a flashlight he borrowed from a corpse. Hoping to find the rest of his team at the rendevous, only to find a bunch of mangled corpses and the girl he liked glued to the walls.
Double tapping never felt that bad.
From an eight man team, only three remained.
Those three fuckers are the most paranoid and tought as nails NPCs we encountered on our DH campaing when some Nid thought that would be nice to nom the world we were in.
>>43855184
This kinda shit is why I'm fascinated with the Imperial Guard. Did they survive the Nids?
>>43855290
The commandos? As far as i remember yes.
Helped us take down a Carnifex when we discovered we were too late to stop the Genestealer cult and after that they boughts some time stopping their first wave with the help of a bunch of PDFs, just enought time for us to reach the Space Port and call our Inquisitor to hail the Imperial Guard.
After that they joined us and helped wound the Hive Tyrant. After that they were asked to join the retinue of a Grand Inquisitor
>>43855476
I always feel vicariously satisfied when I hear of Guardsmen (and come on, Stormtroopers are basically Guardsmen) being actually recognized for their service.
>>43840496
I have been broken many times, repair always follows shortly after. Reason for this query?
>>43855523
Me too, hell i'm thankful that our DM thought the same.
>>43855571
Honestly I expected someone to post Abaddon.
>>43840943
>edgy
this meme needs to die
>>43840496
Honestly...more than a few, actually. And not something I'd intended, either, so much as a logical result of what happened to them at the time.
Let's see, where to start... Well, there's Oracle, my Nossie hacker from a V:tM LARP. Reminisced about him a long while back in a nostalgia thread, but I don't think I went into what all happened with him after the whole 'attaboy for staking the Prince' incident.
So, since the actual story is pretty long and involved, allow me to green-text as much as I can:
>Be Oracle, Nossie Hacker
>3 Positive Social Traits, 5 Negative Social Traits = Best. Diplomancer. EVER.
>Insult the Seneschal, a Malkavian, on Night One by reporting to her (on Nos Primogen's orders) about 'following two Crazies around'; saved by fast-talking on Primogen's part, only to step right back into it ("I know those two, one is not my Clan." "Well he sure was acting pretty craaaaaaap.")
>'Adopted' by Toreador Primogen, Kaitlin Shaw, as 'worthy project' under principle of 'so pathetic it's endearing'
>Befriended by Brujah walking stereotype, Stone, after somehow being fast-talked into fixing his computer; invited to the point of expected at the Brujah weekly Rant'n'Rave, on the theory of toughening by osmosis
>Several Months Later
>SUDDENLY GHOASTS
>As in, ghosts around city, attacking and bothering population
>Experts called in, from Clan Giovanni; Oracle politely advised to stay the fuck away for diplomatic reasons
>Wanderin' the City, head to the Rant House
>Ob'd, hidden, not really paying atten-- HOLYSHIT the whole fucking Court is here
>Not three feet from the Prince, who's not ten feet from HOLY SHIT GHOST, who's shit-eating-grinning at Prince's adopted Childer, who's...bloody-palm wringing a sword by the blade.
>What. The. Fuck.
(Cont'd)
>>43857934
>Watching, Ob'd, unsure how to react
>Childer suddenly throws down sword, stomps off further into Rant House; Ghost goes for sword, Prince goes for Ghost, Ghost gets sword and disappears, Prince fails Frenzy check, Shit hits fan
>Prince looks at me (oh fuck), doesn't see through Ob (fuck yeah), turns - and locks eyes on Stone (OH FUCK)
>No time to plan, think quickly - Prince fighting Stone ends in bloodbath, one way or another; time to be stupid
>Reach into coat, pull out wooden dagger (gift from Primogen, for protection), make untrained desperation attempt on Prince
>3 Hard Checks - Pass, Pass, Pass - Prince staked, drops, Ob drops, revealing me in front of entire Court, my knife in Prince's back
>"Um..."
The next few minutes were...awkward, and included the Nos, Brujah and Torie Primogens trying to control the situation, not helped when the Giovanni diplomat tried a Passion-Down-assisted 'Calm down' suggestion on me that both backfired and alerted me to the attempt, leading to a rather loud response of 'Back - the fuck - OFF!' and a pissed-off, scared-to-angry Oracle storming out back to the Nos Nest.
Fortunately, by the time his Primogen was able to find him again, Oracle had managed to calm down, freak out, cool off and reach a state where he could be talked out of anything rash like fleeing the city in terror or staking himself to save the Sherriff the extra work. The fact that the Prince recovered just fine from the staking, and in fact had a messenger pass on his thanks for 'quick thinking in the face of danger', also helped.
>Fast Forward Selector
>Oracle continues taking etiquette, culture lessons from Kaitlin Shaw
>Starts showing improvement
>Experiment is successful, project continues
>Side Effects Include: Socially awkward Nossie being shown attention by pretty pretty Torie; Oracle knows better, but Emotions Gonna Emote
(Still more - said it was long.)
>>43858006
>Meanwhile, Toreador politics happen; Kaitlin Shaw is replaced as Primogen by Elizabeth Rainier
>New Primo-Donna still feels threatened by old, sets goon squad to spy
>Some Weeks Later
>Oracle walkin' round, bein' sneaky, bein' Ob'd; sees Rainier, Shaw go into a club; not trusting Rainier, decides to follow
>Follows pair into private room - where Seneschal is waiting. (FUCK.) Quick Check - No one sees him, small miracle. Another check - Fuck, door's already locked. Whelp, looks like he's staying for the meeting
>Only this is no meeting - this is a trial.
While I sat there, dumbstruck and thankfully unnoticed, the Seneschal laid out the charges: Aiding and Abetting a Known Diablerist -- Assisting Said Diablerist in Performance of Diablerie -- and Unauthorized Creation of Childer for the Purpose of Diablerie.
Most horrifying of all, Kaitlin Shaw denied not a single charge. Impossible as it seemed, it was true - unwilling and in very real danger as she might have been at the time herself, she had fed her childe to a diablerist in exchange for her own unlife and soul, and when that wasn't enough, had called for a pizza, Embraced the delivery boy, and let him be diablerized as well.
"Guilty." No sooner was the word spoken, than the Seneschal's Whip dropped his own Ob, staking Kaitlin and dropping her on the spot. The three of them - the Seneschal, the Whip and the Primogen - then calmly began discussing how best to clean up the mess, with all the care of a spilled cup of wine. There was even talk by the Whip (a confirmed sociopath and serial mutilationist) of using a combat knife to cut her up into 'easily transportable pieces, put her in small bags, carry her out'. Eventually they ended up dousing her in cheap alcohol and lighting her up to dispose of the body; I passed the check needed to resist fear, and stayed to watch the fire burn out. In the end, I collected the charred, useless stump of the stake and walked out once the doors were opened.
>>43858042
(Last one, promise.)
Needless to say, losing one of his only three friends that way did no favors for poor Oracle.
And honestly, I wish I could say that was the only traumatic, breaking-point for him, and that he was allowed to recover and become a better leech. But then there was the thing with his New Best Friend and the Haunted House, the time Stone ran into the Ghost Panther literally hours after Oracle found out about its existence, the thing with the pretty girl he liked being devoured from the inside by Fifth-Generation blood, the Werewolf incident... Honestly, it didn't take long for him to start believing he was the reason everything fucked up was happening, and it was all his fault. That...wasn't a healthy revelation to have. Especially once the other voice started up in his head.
So yeah. He got a little...broken.
>>43840496
Not my character, but as a GM I... kind of accidentally broke one of my PC's characters.
She was a half-elf sorceress, and the product of rape (the elves in this setting had been driven from their lands by an expansionist empire and became elven viking barbarians, basically), who ran away from home because her mom hated her for reminding her of the father (she was also a worshipper of Saranrae, though apparently in name only, so said sorceress was distrusting of anyone who worshipped her). After fleeing home, she lived a life of turning tricks, while utilizing her innate magic to make things a little easier on herself.
She and the party had uncovered a conspiracy of devil worshippers utilizing influence in high places and nasty geasses that warped the victim over time, in order to find a way to open up a planar gateway large enough for Asmodeus to enter the material plane (in this setting, I'd made it so that gods rarely directly acted on the mortal realm as part of an ancient agreement, but as the one who wrote the contract, Asmodeus stuck in a few seemingly harmless loopholes). One of those loopholes was that a god could have an Avatar, someone who willingly acts as a physical vessel of their power (this process obliterates the mortal's mind and soul, and avatars rarely last for long due to deities' essence being too strong for mortal bodies to contain).
Continued
>>43858684
In the process of chasing after this conspiracy, the sorceress found herself leading a life of far greater fulfillment than she ever thought she could be capable of. People depended on her, and after the party helped rescue a bunch of gladiator slaves from a brutal underground arena (it was a side-session we did while one PC was unable to participate), a new party member (a Paladin, who had been one of the imprisoned) joined that admired her almost like a physical manifestation of his goddess. This person didn't know (or didn't care) that she was basically a whore (or used to be, at any rate), and risked his life to save her when she almost got herself killed due to arrogant recklessness.
Then they stumbled onto the hideout in which the bad guys were preparing a powerful necromantic ritual. This ritual was set right in the middle of the expansionist empire's capital city. It would have taken the life force of every living person in the capital, and some of the surrounding villages to boot, in order to open a planar gate large enough for Asmodeus to enter through (gods could not enter the mortal realm through their own power. And since opening up a gate big enough for deities to enter is virtually impossible for mortals to achieve on their own, it hadn't crossed anyone's mind that this would actually happen).
After fighting their way through the enemies' active defenses, they came across the ritual room, only to find it protected by a powerful barrier. They couldn't get through it, but there was only one guy left in the area, huddled behind the wall preparing the circle. The party decided that they needed to call in backup to help bring down the barrier, and prepared to leave... when the Paladin offered to remain behind and keep an eye on things.
IC, the party didn't think too much of this. The enemies they'd faced up to this point were sometimes tough, but not so dangerous that they couldn't win, so they didn't object...
Continued
>>43858793
After the party left, the player looked at me from across the table and set me a text: "He's dead isn't he?"
Of course, we had this conversation through texting, so when the other players noticed us rolling dice without speaking, they got really nervous. It was a bit metagamey, but it didn't really bother me that the party got a bad feeling and decided they needed to get back down there, and not leave the Paladin by himself too long.
They returned to find the barrier down, the enemy gone, and the Paladin's smoking corpse in the middle of what looked like a fierce struggle. The sorceress took this the hardest, since it was after this that she realized she had fallen in love with him. One of the few people in her life who didn't look at her like a whore, and she (in her eyes) had gotten him killed for no reason.
This was just the beginning of this PC's downward spiral though.
It continued when they returned to the continent they started in, in pursuit of the other participants in the conspiracy. On their return, they found the country preparing for war with the expansionist empire they just left (there had always been an uneasy relationship between the two, the conspirators just stoked the flame, as it were). The army had gathered its professional soldiers and conscripts in four different camps, the locations of which were not widely known for security. What the party learned was that the conspirators had manipulated events so the camps were built around old ruins... in which they were preparing the ritual again (they REALLY wanted this gate to be opened, so they decided to try for a different approach of spreading out the pieces of the ritual).
Each of the four camps had a necromantic circle which would draw the lfie force of the surrounding area, and then sent it to the circle containing the gate, hidden deep beneath the capital city (the PCs suspected, but had yet to confirm the gate's presence there).
Continued
>>43858993
The party received permission from one of the Councilors to infiltrate one of the army camps (they couldn't just waltz in without alerting the conspirators to their intentions), and managed to get into the ruins and fight their way past the defenses there without raising the alarm in the whole camp, and found the first of the four necromantic circles. They didn't want to leave it there, though, and risk it getting set off while they called in the cavalry, so they brainstormed how to destroy it without making the energies within it go wild.
They came up with the idea of using lots and lots of holy water to neutralize the energy. And it worked. Sort of. Sadly, they didn't quite grasp the sheer scale of the energy contained within it. The holy water did cancel out a lot of the negative energy within, but it disrupted the circle, and the remaining energy went haywire. The party teleported out, and learned later that the negative energy had exploded out of the ruins, and killed a decent number of people (though not NEARLY as many as it would have if it had been set off properly, thousands would have perished in that case).
This, since the holy water was her idea, coupled with the Paladin's death continued to pile on more and more guilt onto the Sorceress' shoulders. She started becoming something of a deathseeker, trying to redeem her perceived failures. She volunteered herself to be a decoy in a feigned assassination in order to root out a gang of thieves and assassins that were under the sway of one of the conspirators, and held one of the major cities under their sway, nearly dying to a poisoned arrow, and letting her own body lie on actual target's funeral pyre (she had immunity to fire, but she almost choked on the smoke) with an illusion to make it look like his.
But the full weight of guilt didn't come until they went to infiltrate the next camp...
Continued
>>43859134
This time around, the infiltration was also a rescue mission. One of their allies had been captured scouting out the location of the camp, and they knew he was being held within the same ruins as the circle. They used scrying and teleport to pop in right where he was being held, and fought their way through the defenses there, again without alerting the entire camp. After slapping invisibility on their allies and leading them out, the party continued on their way into the ruins, and found the next circle, this one hidden away in a sealed off room.
And this time around, the Sorceress had the... brilliant idea to destroy the circle by hitting it with disintegrate. I mean, it worked. It destroyed the circle... but the entirety of the necromantic energy, with no guiding force, exploded out of the ruins. The party had used a barrier to protect themselves from the circle's energies, but the camp wasn't so lucky. There were more than a thousand soldiers in it, plus an unknown number of noncombatant camp staff. They all died.
In the Sorceress' eyes, she had become a complete monster. When they returned to the expansionist empire to pursue another lead, she almost drank herself into alcoholic poisoning-induced death.
It's almost a good thing the campaign never got to finish (scheduling conflicts, plus a couple of the PCs having to bow out for real life obligations). Not only did it kill everyone within the blast, but it seeped into the ground, and started reviving the fallen as a horde of undead that began to assail the surrounding villages. By the time the party would have gotten back to that country and learned about it, it would have progressed to the point that the veil between the material plane and the negative energy plane would have weakened enough for the whole area to become a necropolis.
The Sorceress' player told me that if she'd found out about it, he implied his character might have actually tried to commit suicide.
>>43840650
>TPK
>party member survives
O rly
>>43840496
I MADE a character that was already kinda broken, mainly cause it was Ad Eva.
We played out part of his backstory in flashbacks which included him drinking himself to death save for the fact that NERV was spying on him 24/7 and got his stomach pumped in time.
Our game ended up being more about broken people helping each other, than a traditional broken people making each other more broken than you would expect from Eva though...
>>43859414
not them, but I guess it could be they were the only one there was enough left of to use raise dead
>>43840496
She's had some low moments. After the death of her first love, that was rough. Her whole backstory was pretty raw as well.
Still, she built herself back up and kept going. 'Cause that's what you do.
He was a guardsman is a group of players who had the audacity to hope for a Good End.
>>43864920
I'm so sorry for your loss.
My 35 year old russian Summer Knight almost didnt save the Summer Lady (who he sees as a daughter) and went rage mode on the Winter Knight.
That was a great campaign and character.
>>43840496
Wife died because of one of his expermient gone rouge. He ended up taking over a third of the inhabitable world, and was shot to death by his adoptive son.
