Motivation and Knowing Your Limits

So since I am crazy behind on games to posts, I am going to lump the two of my regular D&D games into this post and give you all some thoughts on the upcoming game I have this Sunday. 

For the whole of this game (overarching story line) our characters have been labeled as the harbingers of the apocalypse for the continent of Khovaire and capable of changing the world around us through our actions.  We have fought together, made allies, made enemies, and come to know each other's motivations along the way.  For the most part my character has had her schemes, but each scheme has been "fulfilled" or met in some way, leaving my character now with having to find a "sense of purpose".  Of course I don't mean this in a mean way at all, I think that when you have a good DM who wants your plans/schemes for your character to succeed, this is a position in which you will naturally find yourself.  The struggle I am facing is just trying to figure out what my character is wanting to accomplish, which is getting to be more difficult as the game is quickly coming to an end.

Anyway, what I really have to worry about now is getting ready to fight someone who is several levels higher than our group who is INSANELY powered.  I guess I should backtrack though and give you some background on this character.  This is supposed to be the father of one of the party members who is partly ruler to the fey realm, is pretty much considered a deity, and calls himself the "Prince of Thorns" (which by the way I have the hardest time not calling him the Prince of Thrones...it just rolls off the tongue better right?!).  He wields magic but is strong, fast, adept with melee weapons, and immune to a shit ton of stuff (like paralysis which is the bread and butter of my character).  All in all this dude is a huge bad ass and this is going to be a really tough fight.  If you don't believe that this is going to be a tough fight just from that...our DM gave us 2.5 million gold to spend to get ready...so yeah we are so fucked right now.  Pretty much this break from work over the holidays is going to be me making of a list of shit that I need to buy to try and not die when we go to battle.

Basically I am writing this post in reverse...I have given you the problems my character is facing with this overpowered character and the failing of her motivations at her current state, so now here is the background as per what has happened in the story.  My character has had a romantic interest with another party member and they are pretty awesome together and by awesome I mean we have 12 pages of saved gchat conversations of their relations so this is a pretty epic relationship.  A few games ago he kind of became King of Karrnath and then the whole of the continent, which is really awesome and fantastic for your boyfriend to be ruler of everything right?!  Well my character might have kind of been a little bitchy-just the tiniest bit and now he thinks that they "broke up"...which totally wasn't the case at all (if you asked her at least).  So now two games later we are getting ready to go into this huge fight and they still haven't had a chance to talk things out.  To be fair though we did try, but there was so much going on that the opportunity never came up until the very end in which we got ourselves set up for this fight.   That means that if we don't get a chance to talk before this fight, one of us could die (a very real possibility put forth by our DM) and that means that the last things we talked about were petty passive aggressive words to each other-which really doesn't make me feel great at all.

So this is the predicament that I find myself and my character.  This might really be a scattered post and didn't really give much about the actual story that we encountered, but these are the main things that I have found myself thinking about in reference to these sessions.  What is my character going to do in this situation with the Prince of Thorns?  So far she has been intelligent in her reasoning, quiet in her opinions, and very mild in her manner of actions; but now we NEED to win, we HAVE to work together successfully, and melding into the background isn't any option anymore.  I need to bring in some of Sylara (my Star Wars character) and fuck some shit up-in a constructive way-and push Kai passed the way she has previously acted.  I have relied on what I thought my character's strong points were, but really was really resting on it more like a crutch.  It made me feel as though my character wasn't as powerful or as "useful" as other characters, but this is going to be a changing point and it's really a do or die situation.

I guess this Sunday will be the reckoning for our characters and we will fight for our motivators and push past our limits to hopefully find victory and not the death of our friends....

Hard Places, Harder Decisions

First I need to apologize for the delay...the past few weeks have been really crazy busy and I have had hardly anytime to catch my breath, let alone write a post.  But I have some very persistent readers that I very much appreciate the push from, so let's get into this shall we?  So many things to discuss and so many hurdles to leap together...

So to start the Star Wars game; I am going to try and not run both the games I had together, but I can't promise that won't happen and really there are only one or two readers who will know :).  When we last left off from the Star Wars game, our group was sent with the mission to return to Coruscant (now occupied by Sith) and retrieve a holocron from one of the Senators.   When we thought about it, we thought about how easy that was going to be...I mean no big deal guys right?! Just walk right into the Sith headquarters and take a holocron-walk in the park.  Luckily, my beautiful and perfect Jun Fan (yes I will refer to him like Carlos from Night Vale #sorrynotsorry) arranged some "help" to the tune of clearing out the way for the most part so that we didn't meet up with any unnecessary unfriendlies whilst on the mission.  After said holocron was collected, we headed back to the ship, where we planned to meet up with the other part of our party. That's where things get interesting.

We did the biggest faux pas of RPGs and the one thing that any smart party will try as much to avoid doing...we split up.  For the most part things went "okay", aside from the other part of the party almost getting assassinated.  They were able though to work it out through negotiations and returned to the ship with their "ally", ready to bring us the good news of their discussion.  Turns out they had met up with a contract killer, hired to kidnap Harper (the heir to the Hapes' people) and through diplomacy and tactics managed to talk him out of that and instead into working with us to train some Silver Strikers (I am sure you guys remember those dickbags from the past post) that would be helpful to us.  That sounds really great guys right?! I mean we worked on diplomacy instead of just shooting the shit out of everything and made an ally.  Way to go us!!!

So here is the thing, I ALWAYS play safe characters, I try really hard to not rock the boat and not piss off other PCs.  Really it is always my intention to keep the other PCs and their designs in mind with my character's actions, I think it is only fair to the other players and their characters.  That being said, I did something more in line with what I thought my character would do and less what would be better for the party.  So WARNING to all you readers, IF you are going to do this-make sure you are ready for the fallout.  I wasn't and it has been tough to say the least.  But first let's get into what my character did....

Way back in a backstory from long long ago in a far away galaxy, my character was put on a mission to kill a contract merc named Ladden.  The mission was unsuccessful when she was pulled off the mission to start the quest (IE the game I am in now), so a mark was left alive, a job unfinished.  So we get back to the ship and guess who is there waiting for us...none other than the rest of the party and Ladden.  Good thing for my character, he didn't notice her at all, but she knew him and knew that this was the best chance that she was going to get to fulfill the mission.   So she plays up the flirty Twi'lek nature and talks with him and tells him to come to her room later and she can give him the lightsabers that he requested.  Of course he comes to her room, because duh and starts to put the moves on her.  She puts a lightsaber at his chest and intimidates the fuck out of him (I rolled a nat 20 guys, it was awesome) and pretty much tells him that after this deal is over then their fight begins and she will kill him this time.  Well apparently ol'boy didn't like that (go figure) and in the middle of space pulled his ship off from their ship, creating hull breaches and a huge clusterfuck of a mess.

As you can probably figure the rest of the party is abruptly awoken and about to shit their pants as to the fact that space is literally coming into the ship.  Arguably the most important person on the ship (Gannis-who happens to be from a holocron) is the main person who saved us, alongside on of the companions.  Needless to say Gannis was less than thrilled and as soon as we docked with the larger remaining Jedi fleet, left.  So yeah pretty much in one game I managed to lose the trust of my companions and turn over one of the most powerful allies the Jedi have to the Sith. 

Now I am picking up the pieces, working to fix everything, and trying to keep the galaxy from completely falling to the darkside...although if that happened, it wouldn't be too hard to make that switch. ;)