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I don’t believe they did that, because that would mean they knew what was good in the system, which they clearly didn't.
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Dec 13, 2022 19:17
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Robindaybird posted:Honestly the fact some feats are intended to be "Traps" to screw over players for not being perfect min-maxing psychics is completely bullshit design, it's one thing if it was unintentionally unbalanced, but the fact it was meant to be "gently caress you if you pick these".
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Dec 13, 2022 19:25
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Yeah they have admitted that they didn't catch spellcasters being as powerful as they were because in the playtest they just played the wizards as blasters slinging fireballs and such, not doing the spells that just delete encounters.
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Dec 13, 2022 21:25
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LatwPIAT posted:why do you need halflings? Very specific WHFRPG2e answer but because somebody has to toss the Nasty Chaos Thingie into a volcano/blast furnace/hole-in-reality. They're the only ones immune to mutation. Every other race risks getting Screaming Dick Tentacles but them. Plus they make awesome pies. And are great for stealing poo poo.
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Dec 13, 2022 23:27
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Everyone posted:Very specific WHFRPG2e answer but because somebody has to toss the Nasty Chaos Thingie into a volcano/blast furnace/hole-in-reality. They're the only ones immune to mutation. Every other race risks getting Screaming Dick Tentacles but them. Plus they make awesome pies. And are great for stealing poo poo. No, that's hobbits.
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Dec 14, 2022 00:12
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Everyone posted:Very specific WHFRPG2e answer but because somebody has to toss the Nasty Chaos Thingie into a volcano/blast furnace/hole-in-reality. They're the only ones immune to mutation. Every other race risks getting Screaming Dick Tentacles but them. Plus they make awesome pies. And are great for stealing poo poo. And in Eberron sometimes you need someone to ride dinosaurs, but why do you need need halflings and not, I don’t know, just some guy with cooking and thieving and dinosaur riding skills and a high mutation resistance stat? Or something more novel that’s immune to mutations. Why the whole halfling package in the first place, why tie yourself down with all that? What does it add?
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Dec 14, 2022 02:28
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LatwPIAT posted:And in Eberron sometimes you need someone to ride dinosaurs, but why do you need need halflings and not, I don’t know, just some guy with cooking and thieving and dinosaur riding skills and a high mutation resistance stat? Or something more novel that’s immune to mutations. Why the whole halfling package in the first place, why tie yourself down with all that? What does it add? That's only half a joke. Eberron was the last of nine ideas Baker pitched for WotC's public competition for a new D&D setting in 2002. Way he tells it, he actually used the words “The Lord of the Rings meets Raiders of the Lost Ark in the Maltese Falcon” and was understandably baffled when that's the one that made it to the next round. In other words, Eberron was never homebrew, it was always a WotC product. Meanwhile WotC was struggling with what to do with all the TSR legacy settings and coming to the conclusion those are splitting their customer base. That sounds kind of weird but I would guess they were in a situation where no Dragonlance fan would ever buy a Dark Sun book, and trying to serve each setting in turn would leave the company no room to make generic books that could be fit into any setting. The company decided they would forget about the old busted stuff and create a cool new setting for their cool new edition (only two years old at the time of the contest) and it would have to have room for all the stuff in the rules. That got put in the design spec as one of the ten things about Eberron mentioned above: If it's in D&D, it's in Eberron. That meant finding space for every race and every monster in the core, and that's the reason Eberron is noun soup. In other words, it's to move Monster Manuals. Neat retrospective from Dicebreaker where Baker tells the story. The prize money was ridiculous. https://www.dicebreaker.com/games/dungeons-and-dragons-5e/feature/making-of-eberron-dnd-contest
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Dec 14, 2022 07:15
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LatwPIAT posted:And in Eberron sometimes you need someone to ride dinosaurs, but why do you need need halflings and not, I don’t know, just some guy with cooking and thieving and dinosaur riding skills and a high mutation resistance stat? Or something more novel that’s immune to mutations. Why the whole halfling package in the first place, why tie yourself down with all that? What does it add? Why do you need Elves? Or Dwarves? Or Orcs? Especially since Dragonlance demonstrated that you don't need Orcs. Back in the Most Ancient of Days (the 1970s) Gary Gygax ripped that stuff off from Tolkien since that was the best known popular fantasy series that wasn't Narnia. Because he wanted his product to be purchased and he figured the folks most likely to purchase it were the ones who were already into Lord of the Rings. At least that's my guess. 40+ years later and in a poo poo-ton of RPGs even beyond D&D you still have your Elves, Dwarves, It's a little asinine, honestly. Like if there was a rule that the main cast of every science-fiction TV show had to have an white guy American leader, a white guy American doctor, a guy with pointed ears, a black woman, a Japanese guy, a white Russian guy and a white Scottish guy. The answer they don't need them, but it's a D&D product, so they're going to put some versions of their standard character races in there no matter what.
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Dec 14, 2022 10:52
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disposablewords posted:(no vampire robots for you!) TURBODRACULA disagrees! disposablewords posted:They can’t wear suits of armor because they have it built in. Q: Why can't the humanoid robot wear armor in a setting where humanoids of all shapes and sizes exist? A: gently caress you
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Dec 14, 2022 11:43
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Everyone posted:Why do you need Elves? Or Dwarves? Or Orcs? Especially since Dragonlance demonstrated that you don't need Orcs. Yes, I know. It was a rhetorical question.
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Dec 14, 2022 14:18
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JcDent posted:TURBODRACULA disagrees! GURPS does this better by separating the two main aspects of armor, at least in the context of medieval brawls.
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Dec 14, 2022 15:29
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i love the d&d approach to player races. it's just the 'we have [x] at home / the [x] at home' meme. like monte cook would hear a player saying they want to be a rakshasa and go 'oh no but a rakshasa is a high level demon inappropriate for a player' and set about crafting something like: monte cook posted:poo poo Rakshasa and then he leans back and breathes a sigh of relief, knowing he's captured everything the player liked about a tiger demon, but maintained the sacred balance of the game. just the weird tension of like, for some reason trying to be simulationist in a lot of ways while also being very arbitrary and artificial about how the player interacts with that simulation. We insist on counting your character's armour suit and their natural armour seperately, so your robot can't wear armour because that would be unfair to everyone who isn't a robot. Never mind that part of the appeal of being a robot in a fantasy world is being able to wear goofy fantasy stuff as a robot. they create settings with a like star wars variety of creatures and intelligent beings but then only let you play as the star trek aliens of the setting. like the fun of a simulationist game is in applying the rules of that simulation to your advantage, but d&d's designers are terrified of the players doing that. I don't know if its a holdover from an older, more adversarial type of DMing where they're terrified of the players 'getting one over' on the game. Like fun is a zero sum game or something. I like fully understand that a level of balance is necessary for a game to be really satisfying to win at, but I don't understand why you would nail the fantasy of your world to the rules of your game while not really integrating the two properly. d&d has all these fabulous and creative ideas in the various settings and splatbooks but they're all behind a velvet rope. Like yeah there are good vampires in the setting, but you can't be one. There are good mind flayers, but you can't be one. Even a monster that's just basically 'a mean guy' like a bugbear is controversial. It jostles you out of the world of the game when you run into these obviously artificial parts, like finding an invisible wall in a videogame. I'm glad that games now are decoupling the fluff from the crunch a little more. Games like Lancer where the rules define the mechanics of your character, but you're free to justify why they have those abilities yourself. Like why could a level 1 warlock not just be a baby beholder or something? idk it's been a lifelong frustration of mine because i grew up in the 90s where all media was about heroic monsters and creatures of various types teaming up to fight evil, so it always seemed very weird to me that so many RPGs forbid that explicitly. I know DMs can (and have for me) let you refluff stuff, but the fact you can ignore the rules if you want isnt really a defense of a game. I liked that 5e advanced manual that someone wrote up a page or so back (i cant scroll enough in the post preview thing to see who it was sorry) seemed to be moving away from 'we must simulate your racial physiology' to 'hey you're a nonspecific race but maybe you worked at a factory and got skills' Nessus posted:Armor in D&D has always been weird because "armor" suggests that it's actively getting in the way of blows, but from the very beginning it always functioned as more a warding-off-damage field, by making it hard to "actually" hurt you. Presumably some of the misses on a guy with a high/low AC (depending on era) were actually "hits" (probably glancing blows) that just didn't accomplish anything but making a loud bonking sound. However, if you did get hit clean, you just took the same damage as always. For a war game this is probably a really good general abstraction rather than having to take four points off THIS damage and two points off THAT damage but Anti-Knight Steel Piercing Elf Shot goes straight through iron and steel (but not leather or bronze)... ive never really understood why armor wasnt just damage reduction in d&d. its a good enough abstraction of how armour works irl. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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Dec 14, 2022 15:59
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I'm glad that games now are decoupling the fluff from the crunch a little more. Games like Lancer where the rules define the mechanics of your character, but you're free to justify why they have those abilities yourself. Like why could a level 1 warlock not just be a baby beholder or something? idk it's been a lifelong frustration of mine because i grew up in the 90s where all media was about heroic monsters and creatures of various types teaming up to fight evil, so it always seemed very weird to me that so many RPGs forbid that explicitly. I know DMs can (and have for me) let you refluff stuff, but the fact you can ignore the rules if you want isnt really a defense of a game. Heroic or anti-hero monsters rule and we need more of them, it always gets some love out of me when a bunch of weirdo creatures with not a single point of biological similarity nonetheless team up to handle something that's evil to all of them. juggalo baby coffin posted:ive never really understood why armor wasnt just damage reduction in d&d. its a good enough abstraction of how armour works irl. If you want to make a good faith argument, I'd say that players would probably find it more immersion-breaking to lack dodging/missing than damage reduction, and while having both would give you more mechanical levers to pull and a bit more simulationism, having only one of the two makes everything mechanically simpler.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:08
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PurpleXVI posted:Heroic or anti-hero monsters rule and we need more of them, it always gets some love out of me when a bunch of weirdo creatures with not a single point of biological similarity nonetheless team up to handle something that's evil to all of them. that's actually a good point i hadn't thought of. i was also thinking like, it would be a bit weird for you to keep having blows that exceed your damage reduction (ie piercing it) without the armour falling apart. and then i thought 'well what if you had it so after successfully dealing damage, a subsequent attack roll of the same exact number ignored DR to represent hitting the same spot where a hole had been made' ...and then i thought 'this idea is turning into a loving nightmare'
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Dec 14, 2022 16:12
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juggalo baby coffin posted:that's actually a good point i hadn't thought of. i was also thinking like, it would be a bit weird for you to keep having blows that exceed your damage reduction (ie piercing it) without the armour falling apart. and then i thought 'well what if you had it so after successfully dealing damage, a subsequent attack roll of the same exact number ignored DR to represent hitting the same spot where a hole had been made' ...and then i thought 'this idea is turning into a loving nightmare' I actually had a thought on how to handle that... Armor has two stats: Damage Threshold and Armor Points. Say I have a Chainmail that's DT4 and AP12. It gets hit by something that does 10 points of damage. The armor absorbs up to 4 of those(Damage Threshold) and loses a matching amount of Armor Points. So now it's DT4, AP8. When it's out of AP, it no longer functions as armor. Essentially turning armor into ablative HP that can be blasted through by really heavy hits or special armor-piercing/ignoring attack types. But I think then you start getting tempted to add cool things like lightning damage ignores metal armors, and ice damage makes metal armors lose double AP for X rounds(because the cold makes the metal brittle, see), and fire damage is only half reduced by metal armor(because metal conducts heat!) and while that adds a lot of neat things and starts approaching Original Sin 2 with special elemental damage sources, then you also start musing about having piercing, blunt and slashing damage have different effects on armor and soon you design something that's great for a cRPG but less so for a pen and paper RPG.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:20
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Armour as pure damage reduction works poorly because stab-proof vests actually are, but they can only cover so much. So instead of abstracting away the armour’s capacity to soften blunt trauma and hinder penetrating hits, you end up with a system where wearing a helmet and a swimsuit shaves some points off every hit.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:31
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Damage in combat does not need to be made more complicated. It is not an especially interesting topic and additional detail adds little to the game. The idea is “Armor makes you harder to hurt in combat” and implementing that in the to hit roll is a reasonable solution.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:46
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Bar Crow posted:Damage in combat does not need to be made more complicated. It is not an especially interesting topic and additional detail adds little to the game. The idea is “Armor makes you harder to hurt in combat” and implementing that in the to hit roll is a reasonable solution. Armor as purely making you difficult to hit quickly makes combat very binary, though, either you take no damage or you take all the damage. It can make things harder to balance and very swingy. Damage-reducing armor is easier to work with for balance reasons, and if you're trying to make combat mechanically interesting, more, smaller hits makes more space for things like healing to fit in.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:54
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I've seen games where armor was just "free hits." In Fellowship, for example, the recipient of a blow can either take damage or mark off one point of Armor (if they have any). Once that's all gone, they have no choice but to take real damage on a hit. Of course Fellowship also doesn't have hit points, and a "hit" disables one of your stats/special abilities instead. So it's even more abstract than most combat. Works, though.
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Dec 14, 2022 17:13
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 Level Up: Advanced 5th edition Adventurer’s Guide Part Chapter 3: Adventuring Classes The fundamental core of classes in LU is the same as in 5e. You have a level from 1-20, your proficiency bonus goes up based on total character level, you get Ability Score Improvements that can be traded in for feats, etc. However, a few things have changed that are worth discussing before I get into actual classes. First, and most trivially, some names have been changed. Monks are now Adepts, Paladins are Heralds, Barbarians are Berserkers, and the Marshal now exists (Marshal is the Warlord from 4e). Second is a very Pathfinder-esque approach where you get a lot of small choices across levels. Very few, if any, levels are “dead” with no choices to be made, and you’ll end up with a poo poo ton of minor class features. Many of these features tie into the Exploration pillar, but there’s plenty of options if you want to just stick to combat. Finally, Combat Maneuvers. I touched on them a bit earlier, and will save reviewing all of them in depth for their own chapter, but I’ll put a summary here as well. Combat Maneuvers are the “spells” of the martial classes. They come in 5 Degrees, and you unlock higher degrees as you go up in level, similar to spell levels. Maneuvers belong to a number of Traditions, which are basically spell schools, except you only get access to a set number of Traditions based on your classes. Combat Maneuvers don’t have spell slots, instead being fueled by Exertion Points that reset on a short or long rest. The vast majority of martial classes have an Exertion pool equal to twice their proficiency bonus. I’ll only specifically mention the exertion pool when that’s not the case or they get something unique with it. With that out of the way, let’s move on to the classes!  They can either add their wisdom modifier to AC while unarmored, or become proficient in light armor and use Strength instead of Dex for AC. The former option is going to be better most of the time, especially since Dex is a very strong stat in general. The best light armor in the game gives a base AC of 12 + Dex, and you probably have at least a 14 wisdom. They gain Combat Maneuvers at level 2, and have a decent progression in them, able to reach 5th degree maneuvers and eventually learning 10 techniques. They also can use Exertion to fuel some Adept Stuff, taking the place of Ki points from earlier editions. For 1 Exertion they can: Make two attacks as a bonus action, Disengage or Dash as a bonus action and double their jump distance, or Dodge as a bonus action. This is a really good feature, since even if your fists are only dealing 1d4 damage at low levels, they still add your stat and two extra attacks for a bonus action is a great deal. Additionally, they gain access to a number of Practiced Techniques at 2nd level (1 at 2nd level, learning a new one every other level, up to 10 at 20th). These are a wide range of Monk Tricks, with many having level or proficiency prerequisites. A few standouts include: Adept Speed, increasing your speed by 10 feet and can be taken as often as you like. Hurricane Walk, requiring two prerequisites, proficiency with athletics, and a de-facto minimum level of 6, in order to spend 1 Exertion as a bonus action to fly for a single turn. I mean, at least they can fly at all, but wizards can just actually cast Fly at this point. Instant Step, letting you teleport up to 500 feet for 4 exertion. Shadow Walk, letting you use shadows to teleport up to 60 feet. Same level requirement as Instant Step, but no exertion cost so it seems fair. Like every class, the Adept gets access to an Archetype. Adepts get theirs at level 3, and can choose between Brawler (Improvised weapon expert and tanky guy), Exalted Athlete (Skill check and movement specialist), or Warrior Monk (Extra Combat Maneuvers and better punching). Improvised weapons are never good. Stop building features around improvised weapons. Brawler’s tanky features are actually pretty good, but it means you won’t be getting any useful features until level 6. Exalted Athlete has some really nice skills and jumping. If your DM is serious about exploration and skill checks, this is a solid path. Otherwise, you’re going to be disappointed. Warrior Monk is the best all-arounder here. Extra combat maneuvers is always good, and they can regain exertion when they make a critical hit, and later on their fists actually get higher crit range. Not as fun as Athlete, but mechanically very solid. You can also spend 3 exertion when you kill someone with your fist to explode their soul, making them unable to be rezzed except via Wish magic. Third level also gives Focus Features, which are a set of minor Adpet Features you can choose from every level. These are different from Practiced Techniques because of reasons. There are a LOT of these, but a few standouts: Additional Attack (level 11 min) to attack 3x with the attack action Deflect Missiles, which lets you reduce missile damage and catch it if you reduce the damage to 0. If you catch it and spend an exertion, you can throw it back for free. Deflect spells (9th level), which works like Deflect Missiles, including being able to throw it back if you reduce the damage to 0. Vengeful Spirit (15th level), when you make a death saving throw you can unleash your soul and become an angry ghost attacking the creature who reduced you to 0hp. And for some reason both Weapon Skill (become proficient in a single martial weapon without the heavy or special property, it is now an Adept Weapon) and Adept Weaponry (Choose two weapons or one rare weapon, gain proficiency and they are now Adept Weapons). Editing strikes again. They get a host of other minor features as they level, such as bonus exertion and the Extra Attack feature most martials get at level 5. Overall, the class seems fine. A good mixture of skills and combat prowess, and it has more Stuff than the 5e monk gets. As an Adept, you’ll be fast and tricky, and able to punch dudes a bunch of times. I may come back to this class as I review others, to see how it holds up with the benefit of comparison.  Being full casters, Bards didn’t need the same degree of help Monks did in the transition. They retain their full caster status in LU, and gain a number of new features as well. First, they get Art Specialty, letting them specialize in a group of instruments. They can change their pick every rest, and it enhances a specific type of bard spell based on the instruments chosen. They retain Bardic Inspiration, essentially unchanged from 5e. Battle Hymns are a new use for Bardic Inspiration. You learn one at level 1, and another every 3 levels thereafter. You can spend a bardic inspiration die to activate one, giving a persistent bonus to one target as long as you maintain Concentration. Each turn you maintain it, you have to spend another bardic inspiration die. While many Battle Hymns are pretty good, the fact that it eats up your Concentration means you’re usually better off just giving out bonus dice. This changes dramatically at level 4, when you can choose a Battle Hymn Focus, one of the options being “your battle hymns no longer require Concentration”. There are technically two other options, but why would you ever choose something else. Once you get that, Battle Hymns become useful, although they’ll burn through your inspiration dice pretty quickly. Starting at level 2, you learn a Trick, which is this class's “Pick from a list” set of features. They learn new ones pretty slowly, only getting 6 by level 20. These are all skill features, enhancing the Bard’s role as the skill monkey jack of all trades sort. At 13th, 16th, and 19th level, the Bard can also pick up a Developed Talent (Berserker features), a Sign of Faith (Cleric features), a Soldiering Knack (fighter), or an Elective Study (wizard), though never two from the same class. Like the Adept, the Bard gets their archetype at level 3. Loremasters learn more skills and spells. Minstrels get more skills and more bardic inspirations. And Mountebanks get more skills and are good at deceiving people. Mountebank’s abilities feel a bit weak, but the other two are very good and give you the chance to specialize in either casting or singing. Bards don’t have as much to talk about in the change to LU, since they were already very powerful. Most of their new bonuses give them a stronger showing as a skill/support character, which is exactly what a Bard should be. Next time: Berserker and Cleric
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Dec 14, 2022 18:16
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3.5 had these sorts of things as optional rules in the Unearthed Arcana book of big ol' optional rules, but which also got added to the SRD. Given the way numbers were in 3.5, I'd probably at least institute the class-and-level-based AC bonus alongside Armor As DR rules because there's not really much of any amount of DR that's worth more than being able to just not take the hit.
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Dec 14, 2022 18:22
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juggalo baby coffin posted:d&d has all these fabulous and creative ideas in the various settings and splatbooks but they're all behind a velvet rope. Like yeah there are good vampires in the setting, but you can't be one. There are good mind flayers, but you can't be one. Even a monster that's just basically 'a mean guy' like a bugbear is controversial. It jostles you out of the world of the game when you run into these obviously artificial parts, like finding an invisible wall in a videogame. This would backfire in some ways, because people love lore, but I'd be very into a version of races in D&D where each race just gives you one to two special traits and that's it, then you can just pick any set of traits you want and skin it however you'd like (but defaulting to the listed race so it's not overwhelming). It's been moving towards that for a while, but a version of it that just really embraces "here are 20 different deals you can have and a default explanation of why--maybe you're sneaky because you're a goblin or maybe you're a human street urchin, maybe you're smelly because you're a troglodyte or maybe you're a dwarf who refuses to bathe" would really click for me. Alternately, go back to B/X and just make races into classes. Although multiclassing makes this pretty silly, as the 3.5 implementation showed. PurpleXVI posted:Armor as purely making you difficult to hit quickly makes combat very binary, though, either you take no damage or you take all the damage. It can make things harder to balance and very swingy. Damage-reducing armor is easier to work with for balance reasons, and if you're trying to make combat mechanically interesting, more, smaller hits makes more space for things like healing to fit in. Into the Odd does damage reducing armor with automatic to-hits and it works really well. The big thing they do, though, is absolutely never have flat modifiers or multiple dice on damage rolls (so you do 1d4 damage at minimum and 1d20 at max) and keep the armor values very low (max 3), so there's always a chance your armor blocks everything but also always a chance you take at least 1 point of damage. That game also caps HP at, I think, 20, so fights go quick and decisively.
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Dec 14, 2022 18:27
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LatwPIAT posted:Yes, I know. It was a rhetorical question. True, but it shouldn't be a rhetorical question. It should be a serious, asked-out-loud-answer-me-goddamn-you question. Why are they putting the same tired poo poo in slightly different boxes? Why are we buying that same tired poo poo when we already know how it smells? Way back in 1998ish on the Warren Ellis Forum Ellis asked "What if 95% of all books were Nurse Romances?" That however else people shared knowledge, opinions or other fictional stories, the only reason most people would bind printed pages together in a book would be to tell yet another tale of some nurse at some hospital dealing with the hot doctors, mean supervisors and whatever other tropes came with Nurse Romance. Obviously Ellis had and has his problematic behavior, but he's not wrong about this. His illustration was aimed at the Western or at least American comic book industry, but the same point is somewhat valid here. Can we not just take a few baby steps? Maybe just replace one of the Big Four. In the world of Everstrike doughty Dwarves struggle against Orc invaders. Halfling merchants and Human soldiers vie for power and wealth. But in the forests the shape-shifting Werefolk seek to reclaim the lands stolen from them by the "civilized" races. Meanwhile, the Elves have never loving existed on this game world so try rolling up something else for once.
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Dec 14, 2022 20:08
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Talislanta turned 35 years old this year. Runequest is even older. The problem isn’t that this stuff doesn't get made, because it does, it's that people really like
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Dec 14, 2022 21:09
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Siivola posted:Talislanta turned 35 years old this year. Runequest is even older. The problem isn’t that this stuff doesn't get made, because it does, it's that people really like People really like it. Which people? Bear with me a little. I'll bet it's people like me. Or at least people like I'm "supposed to be." I turned 12 in 1980. I was at the perfect age to really get into D&D. Except my late father was a conservative (lower-case "c" denoting temperament, not political leaning) church minister and later a professor of religion at a religiously inclined university. He didn't think D&D was evil or Satanic. He just thought that paying to get the rules on how to correctly pretend to be an Elf was a silly waste of my time and his money, so I didn't really get into role-playing until I hit college. Thank God. Because as annoyed as my teenage self was that I didn't get to dive into RPGs with "everybody else," it meant that I got to miss the D&D indoctrination. My first real RPG was 1ed Warhammer. The GM was a widely read guy with a range of eclectic interests who thought D&D was the crappy prison food of role-playing games. So I got to play a bunch of games that I'd likely never have known existed otherwise. That was back in the mid-80s. Here we are in the last month of 2022 AD and there's still a fuckton of people (many around my age) who still think the bestest gaming evah is meeting a bunch of folks in a bog-standard tavern and going to jump in a hole in the ground to explore the absurdly well-engineered dungeons inside said hole. Everyone fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Dec 15, 2022 |
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Dec 15, 2022 03:37
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Yeah imagine enjoying the stuff everyone else does.
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Dec 15, 2022 06:31
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Siivola posted:Yeah imagine enjoying the stuff everyone else does. There's enjoying the stuff other people like and then there's "McDonald's is the absolute best eating place in the world because I've never bothered to eat anywhere else."
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Dec 15, 2022 07:13
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Everyone posted:There's enjoying the stuff other people like and then there's "McDonald's is the absolute best eating place in the world because I've never bothered to eat anywhere else." I guess Warhammer Fantasy is one of those Burger Kings that sell beer? This analogy works surprisingly well.
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Dec 15, 2022 08:43
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Siivola posted:If D&D is Mickey D's, the halflings are soft serve ice cream and elves the fries. Fiddling with those will do big nothing to make the Big Mac meal of the world-saving campaign more interesting.
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Dec 15, 2022 08:51
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Seems to be working well in that it's absolutely fine to take the kids for a Mac as a treat but you don't want to make a habit out of it.
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Dec 15, 2022 08:52
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Elves are better the hotter they are.
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Dec 15, 2022 08:59
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This metaphor keeps fitting better and better. Halflings like the bland Mac "ice cream " are only good once you add things to them.
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Dec 15, 2022 09:22
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juggalo baby coffin posted:attack roll of the same exact number ignored DR to represent hitting the same spot where a hole had been made' I'll go out on a limb and say that hitting the same spot as you penetrated in either melee or at range is probably punishingly hard in real in life due to the target being so small, and the enemy constantly moving and defending that you shouldn't have such a rule except for big boss monsters. Similarly about armor falling apart. Piercing mail at a single spot doesn't make the chain links to burst off your body like you're some speedy hedgehog. At most, I'd say, you could go after helmets jamming up or something if you wanted to.
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Dec 15, 2022 09:31
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Rules to cover the chance of your enemy’s armour being less effective due to previous attacks? [HârnMaster Gold intensifies]
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Dec 15, 2022 10:28
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I have strong, negative feelings about The State Of Modern D&D and really dislike 5e, but this digression is weird and there's no problem with D&D/sword and sorcery saving the world and dungeon delving qua itself. It's not even like a big mac-like, I wouldn't even say it's unhealthy? It's just a thing that's a little annoyingly popular but that's what life's like sometimes. Also elves are cool.
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Dec 15, 2022 14:03
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Everyone posted:Here we are in the last month of 2022 AD and there's still a fuckton of people (many around my age) who still think the bestest gaming evah is meeting a bunch of folks in a bog-standard tavern and going to jump in a hole in the ground to explore the absurdly well-engineered dungeons inside said hole. I have a hot take on this topic that I only half-believe in. God knows I lean away from standard fantasy races as much as I can when I GM (except for goblins, who are mandatory). So, the generic D&D fantasy setting is a weird mash-up of a bunch of resonant archetypes and convenient historical misunderstandings. You have a medieval setting with multi-story inns. You have kings and knights without really feudalism. You have fantasy Europe but with a wild west-style manifest destiny "unclaimed wilderness" vibe. Elves are people but better. Dwarves are people but tougher and with a funny accent. Goblins are people without common sense or morality. Adventurers travel around and get asked to go places and kill things by people in need. Orcs are like people but they're angry so they're okay to kill. For whatever reason (and this is 100% a self-fulfilling prophecy) people basically come out of the womb these days understanding how this world works. If you start a D&D campaign in a tavern in a generic-rear end world people know what the deal is with approximately 0 minutes of worldbuilding explanation, and they know how engage with it. This is important for one big reason: in a RPG, setting understanding is player agency. If the players don't understand how the world they're pretending to be in works, they can't really make meaningful decisions in how they interact with it. If you make a bunch of fancy new fantasy races (I don't have elves--I have ishkalar, who live in the trees but have fish for heads and communicate entirely through poetry) then the players get put in a position where they either have to basically do a bunch of homework reading of all your setting lore in order to have fun, or they just kind of get led tourist-style on a set path by the GM. What's hosed up is that this applies even to real-world settings. Luke Crane made a historically accurate France 1600s game called Miseries & Misfortunes and my experience with it was that it was just completely unplayable to anyone who wasn't a historian, and ultimately just defaulted back to being a generic fantasy rpg setting but without the supernatural in practice. Your setting needs to be instantly graspable to be interactive, and the generic D&D fantasy setting is nothing if not instantly graspable. I find this whole issue pretty annoying, honestly, which is why I really like fantasy campaigns that start with the players coming into a new and unknown location as outsiders. At least then the process of the players learning about the setting is the same as their characters learning about it, and I don't have to constantly be like "but of course your character would know that reciting a limerick to a ishkalar is a marriage proposal".
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Dec 15, 2022 15:22
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But that also depends on how much simulation you intend to offload on the players: Do you ask the players to detail every item in their wardrobe as 1600's France was highly stratified and clothing choices might get a person in deep trouble? Do you play from the position that all characters know how to function in society and players don't need to calculate how many francs they need to reserve for their lifestyle? Seems to me that it's entirely up to the disposition of the whole group if the play must include the intricate details of blackpowder keg maintenance or the proper attire for a day in court(legal or royal).
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Dec 15, 2022 15:36
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By popular demand posted:But that also depends on how much simulation you intend to offload on the players: My point's less about simulation or offloading work onto the players than about the players being able to take the initiative on things. If they don't understand the situation they're in they can't really interact with it in ways that haven't been prescribed by the GM. One fix to this is just to leave stuff blank and flexible--if the players say "I go to the sheriff" then that means that village sheriffs are a thing even if that wasn't part of your initial conception of the world. In practice, though, that just means you end up back at a generic D&D fantasy world.
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Dec 15, 2022 15:42
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BTW I don't think anyone on these forums ever played a lesbian swashbuckler inspired by the real La Maupin, and we are all poorer for never have read a gameplay report about such a thing.
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Dec 15, 2022 15:57
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A lot of modern RPGs specifically address the whole stodgy "every elf has darkvision" D&D paradigm, but this comes at the cost of having to redefine a race/heritage/subspecies every time you jump campaigns. "So in OUR world, elves have blue skin, live under the sea, are experts at building split-level houses, and poop ham sandwiches." "Aww. I wanted to jump as tall as the trees and shoot magic sparkles from my fingers, like the other campaign I was in!" "Hmm ... well, nobody's made a halfling yet ..."
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Dec 15, 2022 16:18
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