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ellbent posted:This is why in Revised edition most of the answers to the question "what happens when a vampire tries to Embrace a _____?" were I think my single greatest thing to come out of oWoD was a response a friend got from a developer when trying to figure out how dominate affected werewolves. "Well first what you need to do is look at your stamina and fortitude stats. Add those together, roll vs difficulty 6 and then subtract that number from thirty. That is how much aggravated damage you take. Don't try to dominate werewolves. " The Dev went on to explain what actually happens but nearly two decades later I still snicker at that.
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Sep 24, 2015 19:23
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| # ? May 11, 2024 07:35 |
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quote:Faced with his actions, he went somewhat mad.
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Sep 27, 2015 07:22
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Just caught up with this thread and noticed that something was missing - the strange properties of small animals in D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder. We've discussed Druid Moles, and I'm sure we're all familiar with the odds of a housecat beating a level 1 wizard in a fight. That's not what this is about. This is about something far stupider. Carrying Capacity, and Wizard's Familiars. It's less overblown and universe-rending than a lot of the spell interactions, but it's no less silly. This is just about swole Wizard Familiars Let's start small, with the lowly Toad. The RAW for Pathfinder say Dimunitive creatures get a x1/8 strength score for purposes of carrying capacity, or a x1/4 if they're quadrupeds. Toads are Dimunitive quadrupeds, and Toads have a strength score of 1. Based on the Carrying Capacity chart, STR 1 creatures have a max load of 10 lbs. The max push/drag capacity for a creature is 5 times it's max load. This means that 3lb toads can drag around 25 lbs. Two-year-old human beings often weigh something around 25lbs. A 3.5/PF toad could drag a toddler around. Or a fairly skinny adult halfling, given that the average halfling weighs 30-35 lbs. That's pretty dumb, yes, but it gets even dumber with cats. A cat will most likely get away with murder Cats are not Dimunitive. They are Tiny. Tiny quadruped creatures get a x3/4 score on the Carrying Capacity table. Cats have a Strength score of 3. STR 3 creatures have a base max load of 30 lbs. The math says a cat can "lift and stagger around with" 45 lbs, and drag 112.5 lbs. Why bother with riding dogs when the average halfling and 10 lbs of gear could just ride around on a cat? We already know that cats are dangerous foes for first-level Wizards. However, could a cat get away with murdering a wizard? The Wizard is the favored class for Elves. The average weight for an Elf is 110 lbs. Considering Wizards' generally low strength and constitution scores mean they're often going to be below that in weight. This means that cats will not only kill a Wizard more often than not in a stand-up fight, but the cat is capable of disposing of the body afterwards. Even if a Wizard weighed more, the cat could just get the assistance of one other cat or some "favorable conditions" and easily move the corpse. What's more, the cat has an amazing skill list of Balance +10, Climb +6, Hide +16, Jump +10, Listen +3, Move Silently +8, Spot +3. That's more than enough to let a cat have a very good chance of killing a wizard, dumping the body, and disappearing without a trace. Their absurd strength also means that well-trained (or empathetically-linked, as Wizard's familiars are to their wizard) cats could function as squires, in a pinch. Assuming medium-sized equipment, tower shields are 45 lbs, full plate armor is 50 lbs, and a longsword is 4 lbs. If you put all of that in a burlap sack, it could be dragged around by the average housecat. Your Tenser's Floating Disk expire? Well, it can only hold up to 100 lbs. Your cat's got that, easy. Dump it in a bag and strap it to your familiar so it can drag all your stuff around until you can rest and get your spells back. It might be best to be evil-aligned for this, because your empathetic link to your cat is suddenly extremely upsetting. Bonus Cat Fact: It would not be in any way inconvenient for a cat to wear a harness with a heavy repeating crossbow (12 lbs) with 20 bolts (2lbs) mounted on it. That puts it at the limit of it's Medium load, 15 lbs. Or to carry around 7 javelins (2 lbs apiece). Now that's all well and good, but what about more practical uses for your familiar's gym membership? There is one often-overlooked caveat at the end of the Lift and Drag section for the carrying capacity rules: quote:Favorable conditions can double these numbers, and bad circumstances can reduce them to one-half or less. "Favorable conditions" is an extremely vague description, but right now we'll interpret that as "smooth, reasonably even terrain and attached to their load with a harness". That's generous enough for this thread. Most of the vehicle for 3.5 and Pathfinder require a certain number of Medium or Large creatures to be pulling any given wagon or carriage. However, a Cart is a listed item in "Goods and Services -> Transport", purchasable for 15 gp and weighing 200 lbs, all the detail provided is this: quote:This two-wheeled vehicle can be drawn by a single horse (or other beast of burden). It comes with a harness. Well, again, "other beast of burden" is not a terribly specific limitation. Any given creature could count as a "beast", in the generic "beasts" meaning "animals" sense, and "of burden" is pretty flexible. We're certainly about to burden an animal. Moreover, this isn't the "well you know what they mean" thread. Enter the hawk. Hawks are another Wizard familiar option. We won't be using them for their flight, since the rules for flight vaguely specify that only creatures with light or unencumbered loads can fly - a Hawk's light load is 10 lbs, which means that while they could fly around carrying two flails, there's not much else we can really do with their wings. We're more interested in their strangely burly legs. Hawks are not quadrupeds, but they have a Strength score of 6 and a size of Tiny (x1/4 carrying capacity) giving them a max load of 30 lbs. This means they can drag 150 lbs, or 300 lbs under "favorable conditions". Hawks, being birds, are pretty bad at grabbing things with their wings. This means that they are limited to grabbing something in their beak and scooting backwards with it, unless there was some sort of harness provided. Fortunately, we have the harness covered. There are no given rules on how quickly you can travel when pushing something, but the rules do specify that creatures can only move 5 feet as a full-round action when lifting and staggering around with twice it's max load, so we'll have to work with that. This means they're moving 5 feet every 6 seconds, or .56 Miles per hour. This sounds rather slow, yes, but when compared proportionately to a horse, that's not so bad: carts are listed at traveling at 2 MPH when drawn by a horse. A hawk-dragged cart is about 27% as effective as a horse-pulled one. A 2-pound hawk is doing a quarter of the work that a 1000-pound horse. There are also no core rules given for exhaustion aside from Forced March, which is any amount of time spent walking over land over 8 hours. Which means as long as we don't make this hawk work overtime, no harm done. So what could this bird actually pull? Well, according to 3.5e/PF, the average adult Halfling weighs somewhere between 25-35 lbs. Four skinny ones wearing no equipment and carrying no gear on top of a Cart puts us at exactly 300 lbs - the Hawk's "favorable conditions" drag weight. Assuming four skinny nude halflings with no strong feelings about animal rights, they could use a hawk cart as a reasonable, if quite leisurely, means of transportation on any decently-maintained roads. It doesn't even take a lot of fiddling or splatbooks or minmaxing to make 3.5/PF break down into complete strangeness. Apparently it just takes cats. E: Edited some formatting for clarity, was written in a hurry. EE: Realized my math was off for the hawk cart's speed. My bad. Rip_Van_Winkle fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 21:58
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Sounds pretty true to life, a bird cart doesn't run 
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Sep 29, 2015 22:37
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All that just makes for a way more imaginative fantasy setting than standard Pathfinder. Reminds me of Battlepug or Redwall. http://battlepug.com/comic/2015/9/28/if-you-insist
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Sep 30, 2015 00:43
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You may be interested in Pugmire then.
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Sep 30, 2015 00:51
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the best part about all of the common animal fuckery is that 3.X d20 rules are based on a flawed premise. they arbitrarily attribute a meaningless value to a real world equivalent (1 point of STRENGTH is worth 100 lbs of lifting, or whatever) and then proceed to try and measure additional values in a geometric progression. the problem is that a more realistic incremental increase would probably more closely resemble logarythmic growth, but that kind of math isn't super-duper easy for most people to do in their head, so instead they stick a square peg in a round hole and model a world where normal sized toads can successfully wrestle babies or whatever bullshit is going on
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Sep 30, 2015 00:52
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a world where toads can suplex babies is a world i want to live in
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Sep 30, 2015 00:58
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also, because their arbitrary scale of 1 STRENGTH isn't mapped to 0 lbs lifting, and you can't functionally possess a negative attribute to model things far weaker than humans (like a cat or a toad), you get into these hilarious situations where a hawk can pull 300 pounds of baby suplexing frogs, as long as the frogs offer the hawk a harness first, since even the worst rating of STRENGTH is a positive integer. you could maybe-kinda-sorta make it work slightly better if the concept of having a zero in an attribute didn't directly equate to the immediate death of the character (good old death by ugly), but even in that case the natural language of 3.X would mean that the scale is something like 0 STRENGTH = literally an invalid, possibly you are intangible like a ghost (?) and then the next step on the ladder is 1 STRENGTH = 100 lbs lifting, with no meaningful way to measure any kind of distribution between those two points. you're either an ephemeral invalid or you can at least lift 100 pounds over your head, no questions asked it's also silly because the relative physical abilities of a human man are clearly the standard measure of what a STRENGTH score represents, so things that are far weaker than a human man still have to exist, and have to have a defined STRENGTH value, which can't be zero or a negative value, so now an actual draft animal can pull something the size of a fully packed Noah's Ark across the bottom of a dried out river basin without breaking a sweat
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Sep 30, 2015 04:43
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Eh. While the formula is silly, I think any system is either going to get just as stupid on the edges or end up ridiculously fiddly. Like, trying to make a strength scale that models both human strength and also toad strength is going to be just the sort of fiddly nonsense 3.X already has too much of. A relatively easy formula that works for most of the cases players are going to encounter is good enough. The other workable option is to just have the DM eyeball things, which is my preference in most games. But if you're going to have a strength/carrying capacity system, it's gonna end up wonky in the edge cases. It's a little like Pun-Pun. I've seen people point to Pun-Pun as the reason 3.5 is broken. He really isn't. I mean, he's ridiculous, but he requires intimate splat knowledge and a DM being a complete doormat to work. It's broken because a core-only wizard is so much more powerful than a fighter past the first few levels. This is an edge case most players aren't likely to encounter. It's ridiculous in kind of a fun way, but it's not something most players are going to really notice. They might notice how the druid turns into a spellcasting bear while the rogue gets to roll another d6 in some highly specific situations.
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Sep 30, 2015 05:57
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Yeah, dear god I can't imagine wanting to play a game that even attempted to accurately model housecat carrying capacity or toad-vs-infant combat.
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Sep 30, 2015 07:33
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It's called "Any fiction-first game". In FATE or DW: "I want to tie the Hawk to the wagon." DM: "Hahahaa, no." Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 07:38
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homeless poster posted:you could maybe-kinda-sorta make it work slightly better if the concept of having a zero in an attribute didn't directly equate to the immediate death of the character (good old death by ugly) oriongates posted:Yeah, dear god I can't imagine wanting to play a game that even attempted to accurately model housecat carrying capacity or toad-vs-infant combat.
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Sep 30, 2015 07:40
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Can they at least be giant toads and enormous babies?
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Sep 30, 2015 08:09
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Golden Bee posted:It's called "Any fiction-first game". This dm is a coward. Bring on the chariot.
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Sep 30, 2015 08:18
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homeless poster posted:the best part about all of the common animal fuckery is that 3.X d20 rules are based on a flawed premise. they arbitrarily attribute a meaningless value to a real world equivalent (1 point of STRENGTH is worth 100 lbs of lifting, or whatever) and then proceed to try and measure additional values in a geometric progression. the problem is that a more realistic incremental increase would probably more closely resemble logarythmic growth, but that kind of math isn't super-duper easy for most people to do in their head, so instead they stick a square peg in a round hole and model a world where normal sized toads can successfully wrestle babies or whatever bullshit is going on GURPS Supers did the same thing with 2E, by changing the weight you can lift with Telekinesis by level from an exponential increase to linear increase past a certain level. This looked fine, but forgot the GURPS: Wild Cards expansion. In GURPS, 100 points is a basic adventurer-level human. Superheroes start at 500 points, and really super Supers can be 1000 points. In Wild Cards, there's a hero called the Turtle whose sole power is Telekinesis strong enough to lift a battleship. He has so much TK that despite being ordinary in most respects he's still a 1200-point character. However, that's under 1E Supers rules. Under 2E rules, to perform the same feats he'd have to be something like a 100,000-point character. By comparison, Fortunato, a magician who can send telepathic messages across interstellar distances, freeze time and raise the dead, costs 1200 points.
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Sep 30, 2015 08:47
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GURPS Lensman has some hilarious statblocks too. Being a Lensman (an old-style pulp psi cop for the unfamiliar) is a 100 point advantage and requires some other poo poo to go with it, mostly a restriction on many psychological disadvantages and generally being a stand-up guy. It gives you 50 points to spend on telepathy skills and power level (and the ability to buy more independently) plus a bunch of other little genre appropriate bells and whistles. The game suggests building Lensmen on 400 character points, which does fit the fiction. The main character of two and a half of the titular books, Kimball Kinnison, is built on 3,398 character points, although to be fair about a thousand of those points involve the Ally value of his wife (1,804 points), a semi-fourth dimensional guy from a Pluto-style world (2,038 points), a lumbering psi-ox pacifist dude (2,215 points), a space marine captain from a high-G planet (1,185 points), and a space dragon with ten eyes (2,572 points). All of these guys would probably also be costed higher if they had Kinnison's Allies block. Unfortunately the nature of GURPS means most of the other stuff in the list amounts to "A real real high skill level in a bunch of skills, and general high base attributes." Any one of these guys (except the space marine) could probably out-psi most of the latter day fictional telepaths such as Professor X and so on.
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Sep 30, 2015 09:49
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An ambulance of Murphys doesn't make a game bad, and it's certainly not the reason that I don't personally like 3E/PF. I mean, god knows how much more Murphys you can pull with 4E if you try to apply the Power fluff to the various mechanical interactions that are allowed. The bad thing about 3E is that, while it understands that it's mechanics are just an abstraction of how it's world works, it still tries to make that abstraction permeate every possible interaction the players can have with the world, creating a culture where it's not clear where the abstraction ends and the Murphys begin. Basically, while this exchange could still happen in 3E: Golden Bee posted:In FATE or DW: "I want to tie the Hawk to the wagon." what's different is that, if the DM forced the players in a situation where the only good way out is harnessing a hawk to a wagon (for some reason), then the player has every right to invoke the rules as written and the DM can either do nothing about it, or be labeled a railroading rear end in a top hat.
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Sep 30, 2015 10:36
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I think it's also the case that there's enough not-good design in 3e to make it a not-good system even if you agree that Pun-Pun isn't really a thing you can practically pull off. It's just that calling out Pun-Pun is faster to say that delving into the whole martial vs caster dynamic.
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Sep 30, 2015 10:45
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If you use punpun you get  "OH YEAH WHAT ABOUT MOUNTAIN THROWING HULKING HURLERS" though.(Arguably this is still an example given the peak of a caster's power is becoming a literal god who can do anything and is immortal whereas the peak martial strength is doing arbitrary amounts of damage and being a bit tough).
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Sep 30, 2015 11:43
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But at the end of the day being the best at physical abilities is more fun. Being the ultimate God-Wizard is about as exciting as playing a video game with all the cheats turned on. Meanwhile I just suplexed a boat and it was amazing.
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Sep 30, 2015 13:56
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Golden Bee posted:It's called "Any fiction-first game". Say yes or roll the dice 
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Sep 30, 2015 15:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think it's also the case that there's enough not-good design in 3e to make it a not-good system even if you agree that Pun-Pun isn't really a thing you can practically pull off. Oh, sure. I'm just saying that the bad stuff that matters is the stuff that players will actually encounter in the average game. A little wonkiness can be forgiven if it doesn't intrude too much on regular gameplay. Savage Worlds has a bit of fun with statistics. If you're not familiar, in savage worlds, you roll two dice for skill rolls. One is your skill die, which generally ranges from d4 to d12. The other is your wild die, which is almost always a d6. These dice can explode. Most of the time the target number is 4, with increased results every four over the initial target number. Getting ones on both dice (snake eyes) is a critical failure. This normally works decently well. However, there are a couple of places where the math gets weird. For example, you're slightly more likely to hit a target number of 6 with a d4 than a d6 (18.75 vs. 16.666...). This isn't a huge deal, since the d6 is still better for most target numbers (which are usually four, remember), it's more likely to give you a raise, and it's less likely to get snake eyes, but it does give math nerds pause when first learning the system.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:04
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Golden Bee posted:It's called "Any fiction-first game". This is a bad DM.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:36
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Golden Bee posted:It's called "Any fiction-first game". "Sure, that sounds reasonable."
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Sep 30, 2015 17:19
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IMPLIED: "It doesn't pull the wagon though. Since it's a bird."
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Sep 30, 2015 17:48
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I mean realistically you'd go "...Okay, why're you doing that?" then work from there because it's obvious you've either not understood or there's a potential expectation mismatch you need to handle.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:53
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Roll rather high DC checks for whatever governs knowing hawks can do that and for training a hawk to do that. If the nude halfling party wants a hawk-drawn wagon and have the intellect and skills to make a hawk-drawn wagon, for gently caress's sake let them have a hawk-drawn wagon, because this nude halfling campaign is already strange.
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Sep 30, 2015 17:59
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I guess it'd depend on the tone of the game, but a wagon that's pulled by birds isn't unreasonable at all in more mythological settings.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:01
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There is some absurdity you can get up to with chickens, since they're so cheap, and clubs, since they're free and thus technically can be crafted instantly. This is a self-reminder to write up some of the Murphy's later.
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Sep 30, 2015 18:13
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Cross posting from the death pool. Volatile: If a Pyrovore is slain by a Wound that inflicted Instant Death, every unit suffers a Strength 3 AP- hit for each model (excluding Pyrovores) within D6" of the slain Pyrovore (resolve damage before removing the Pyrovore as a casualty). Intent is fairly clear, but atrocious writing means it can be read as every unit on the table takes wounds based on total units around the pyrovore. This is why clarity of writing is super important
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Sep 30, 2015 18:26
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It comes down to group and GM expectations. Does everyone want a game where you can yoke a wagon to a more-or-less normal hawk and have it work? Is that the sort of game the GM wants to run? I think that's one place this forum goes a bit too far sometimes. Like, I think we all agree the "GM as god" thing is stupid. The idea that the players need to humbly submit to the whims of the GM is juvenile. But the GM is a player too. His fun is also important. It's just not more important than the other players' fun. That's why it's so important for the group as a whole to decide what sort of game everyone is comfortable with. Do you want more realistic action, or do you want gonzo wacky adventures? It's something that should be decided before the game starts, and occasionally revisited as it goes on. It needs to be a conversation to make sure everyone's got a shared vision of what the game's going to be. And the GM's fun needs to be considered too. And if the group has decided and agreed that they're going to have a more realistic, gritty game, then it's perfectly fine for the GM to say "No, the hawk isn't going to be able to pull the cart. Your character is aware of this. Am I missing part of your plan here, or do you want to try something else?" Sometimes it's okay for the GM to say no.
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Sep 30, 2015 19:47
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Exactly. In one game I ran where the Cavalier's horse was the captain of a stolen ship for a few days, a wagon powered by a hawk would fit right in. In the current very serious end-of-the-world campaign I'm running, it would absolutely not be acceptable to try that even if it worked RAW. Know your players, know the kind of game you are running, have fun.
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Sep 30, 2015 19:57
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The Bee posted:Cross posting from the death pool. That doesn't look like someone wrote it confusingly, it looks like they straight out made a grammatical mistake that changes the meaning. I see what the intent was too, but I can't get it to make grammatical sense that way; The only way I can seem to read it, is the unintended way. It very clearly says it applies to every unit, and the 'within D6' part very clearly only apply to what units add to damage - no confusing commas, no vague wording, and so on.
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Sep 30, 2015 20:01
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aerion111 posted:That doesn't look like someone wrote it confusingly, it looks like they straight out made a grammatical mistake that changes the meaning. Yeah that's why editors are important kiddos.
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Sep 30, 2015 20:41
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Paizo recently previewed a new spell from one of their books, intended for Shoanti Humans (I don't remember poo poo about them, I think they're tribal?)quote:CHAMPION'S BOUT (SHOANTI) Notice how it never once says the two champions have to attack each other.
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Sep 30, 2015 20:59
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"any creature attempting to aid or hinder either of the two targets in any way must succeed at a Will save or lose its action instead" Does this apply to the fighters also if they try to smack each other?
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Sep 30, 2015 21:03
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"any creature attempting to aid or hinder either of the two targets in any way" I'm just picturing a courtly setting where you get this spell cast before making a request in public, so anyone who tries to argue against you just can't. Alternately, "in any way" certainly doesn't require that the attempt to hinder be by direct action right now. Stop people from plotting against you, or calling the cops on you during a robbery, or such.
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Sep 30, 2015 21:07
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Eox posted:Paizo recently previewed a new spell from one of their books, intended for Shoanti Humans (I don't remember poo poo about them, I think they're tribal?) So you cast it on two allies, who can attack the foe with impunity, while the enemy has to make a will save or else just willingly accept they are going to be slaughtered. Awesome.
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Sep 30, 2015 21:09
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Eox posted:Paizo recently previewed a new spell from one of their books, intended for Shoanti Humans (I don't remember poo poo about them, I think they're tribal?) if you don't imagine this as a hulk hogan / macho man dream team double team against any and all challengers, then i weep for your atrophied imagination
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Sep 30, 2015 21:18
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