Changing the mood of an RPG session

[irishmick79]

Hell, I once had a Star Wars player play a droid nut named Habib who built suicide droids stuffed full of thermal detonators. He basically ran a droid Jihad against the local Imperial garrison until Imperial forces just started shooting or disintegrating droids on contact. One of his R2 units was affectionately given the call sign R2-C4.

[irishmick79]

Oh, and this reminds me of another fucking munchkin who taunted Luke Skywalker by replying, "I fucked your sister" to him when Skywalker tried to tell him that his jedi circumcision methods were unsound.

[Terralthra]

GM: Okay, what do you all do.
(other players say what they're doing)
Me: I attack him.
GM: Okay. Do you have any weapons?
Me: All I have is a sandwich.
GM: (long pause, then a sigh) Roll Dex plus Melee.

At that point, it was hard for the game to be remotely serious from then on as I carved my way through horrible monsters wielding sandwiches coated in cleansing holy flames.

Tell your idjit GM that Cleave can also manifest an entirely spectral weapon (and indeed, is even better that way, as Cleave manifested on a physical weapon rapidly breaks it, since no physical melee weapon can take the strain). There is an apocryphal story of a one-armed Hunter whose Cleave manifests as a glowing holy flame-wreathed prosthetic arm.

[loomer]

I'm sorry, but anything that stops the Flaming Sandwich is just not worth it.

[Civil War Man]

Tell your idjit GM that Cleave can also manifest an entirely spectral weapon (and indeed, is even better that way, as Cleave manifested on a physical weapon rapidly breaks it, since no physical melee weapon can take the strain). There is an apocryphal story of a one-armed Hunter whose Cleave manifests as a glowing holy flame-wreathed prosthetic arm.

Oh, the sandwich was quickly disintigrated by the holy fire and severe beating. The thing was, I said "I only have a sandwich" to say "I'm not holding any weapons" while he took it to mean "I'm going to beat him to death with a sandwich"

Once the latter was established as game canon, everyone just rolled with it. One of the characters even made me a bandolier full of sandwiches for the express purpose of righteous killing.

[Utsanomiko]

I think my players in the Dark Heresy game figured out pretty fast what the tone was when they started joking about the Emperor's dick in front of an Imperial Guard Lieutenant and very nearly got a party member with a structurally unsound laser burn in their head.

I was watching that game for the first couple pages, as I was reading up on running my own DH play-by-post game, and I had the same basic thought.

Except I would have had a bolt put through his chest. In a setting like the Imperium, everyone's a danger under the right provocation, so they'll have to play along with the ideology of wherever they're infiltrating. The cast needed thinning anyway.

Also, and I'm less sure I'd have acted on this one, but when a female psyker's description has 4 sentences about her hair ribbons, my instinct would be to use GM discretion and declare "as part of Psykana sanctioning your body has lost all hair. You may keep a lock of it as a humble charm." In the grim darkness of the far future we can't have nice things.

EDIT: I suppose this thread was further down the page than I last noticed.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I tend to brutally suppress silliness among my own group, especially now that we're playing Dark Heresy. I've emphasized time and time again that doing stupid crap will probably only get one killed (or worse), and while cracking jokes and having weird superstitious rituals is fine (hell, it's part of the fun, after all), I like to keep my games firmly grounded in what passes for reality in an RPG.

[Utsanomiko]

I've found the main outlets for in-character amusement in DH so far include:

1) Weird cultures. People love to play the quintessential dwarves because of the excuse to attempt a Scottish accent and rave about beer and gold. Want to play a character with a waxed mustache, ridiculous slang and a big gaudy hat? Add an accent of your choice and go to town.

2) Superstitions and bad education. Ironically more so than most fantasy settings, 40k is very medieval, and I think we forget just how fucked-up clueless everyone was back then. On one hand a lot of 40k fans will be crushed when they realize their characters doubtfully know more about the non-Imperium than 1-2 races by names from folklore. But the real charm here is, assuming you have more functional knowledge of pre-industrial times than watching the Smurfs, to borrow extensively from the good old days and pride yourself in all the wrong stuff you know.

Admonish the sin of bathing, poke disobedient children with pins for rude behavior, persecute red-heads, don't let anyone take your photograph, claim the Emperor himself visited your planet to give them their language (as well as move a mountain and invent the game of golf), insist Holy Terra is not a 'physical' location you can reach while mortal, carry a book describing theories of female Orks and the races' mating practices, collect the magic powder found inside bullets, never read anything at night regardless of lighting, etc. And above all else, provide a saint-related anecdote for everything.

3) Brutal. Indiscriminate. Violence. Every fun party should include someone with a flamer, a full-automatic weapon, explosives, and psychic powers. This is one reason I think most games should start higher than first or second rank.

4) Tech-priests and tech-usage. The GM should feed characters in the cult Mechanicus profession more narration than just simply succeeding or failing to activate some device. Give them amusing descriptions for what they did, reasons why they failed, and encourage them to come up with their own. Tell them they can't awaken the engine without a handkerchief to place over the manifold and absorb the 'miasma', or demand silence during a firefight while they chant the activations for a force shield. Give them a Bisselheim tray or a gribben; just look around you for ideas and go nuts.

Really, 40k is very much about style and exploration of setting and character, far more so than tactical game mechanics-oriented games like D&D. With as random as warhammer RP combat can be you've got to think more about how your character can survive the simple task of interaction with their team and environment more than strategizing 'proper' class builds and turns of attack.

Acting like a chump is going to get you killed in 40k like a D&D wizard donning some plate mail and trying to back-stab some ghosts while flat-footed or whatever.