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Golden Bee posted:Unexpected Monsterhearts Synergy: I'm imagining a player with said character just constantly organising plans with the other characters and saying "As long as you do your part, absolutely nothing can go wrong!" and hoping that everything goes wrong (so they're drowing in Strings) or that everything goes right (and they get what they want!).
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Aug 19, 2015 01:50
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Golden Bee posted:Unexpected Monsterhearts Synergy: it's actually a metaphor for how one should learn to be an adult and grow up and leave all that childish bs behind (which i think is a major theme of the game based on my F&F reading of the subject). pretty cool when the mechanics re-enforce the actual themes of the game!
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Aug 19, 2015 05:30
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homeless poster posted:it's actually a metaphor for how one should learn to be an adult and grow up and leave all that childish bs behind (which i think is a major theme of the game based on my F&F reading of the subject). pretty cool when the mechanics re-enforce the actual themes of the game! Well no, since Strings allow you to manipulate people to do what you want, turn them on (or kick their asses), and make them fail when they manipulate you. The only growing up is the Growing up moves, and they're usually only unlocked in season play. There's actually a skin about getting what you want with bad advice(the Coyote), but I see those two moves as being utterly holier-than-thou.
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Aug 19, 2015 06:15
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Golden Bee posted:There's actually a skin about getting what you want with bad advice(the Coyote), but I see those two moves as being utterly holier-than-thou. Alternatively it's just being Megatron when at least one of the players is being your Starscream. "YOU'VE FAILED ME AGAIN, WEREWOLF! We're still best friends though right?"
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Aug 19, 2015 06:43
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Golden Bee posted:Well no, since Strings allow you to manipulate people to do what you want, turn them on (or kick their asses), and make them fail when they manipulate you. d'oh! this is what i get for only knowing as much about the game as a cursory skimming of F&F provided.
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Aug 19, 2015 06:45
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I sat down to read the D&D 4th ed. Player's Handbook because people have been saying so many weird things about it that I wanted to see how it actually worked. And I came across how to roll percentage values:quote:You can use d10s to roll percentages, if you ever need to. Roll 1d10 for the "tens" and 1d10 for the "ones" to generate a number between 1 and 1000. Two 10s is 100, but otherwise a 10 on the tens die counts as 0--so a 10 on the tens die and a 7 on the ones die is a result of 7 (not 107!). It doesn't actually say how to interpret the numbers on the ones die. I know that I'm supposed to treat 10 (usually 0) on a d10 as 0, but the language used seems to imply that you should normally treat a rolled 10 as a 10 (because treating 10 as 0 on the tens die is an exception). Which means that there are two ways of rolling 100 (either 10 and 10, or 9 on the tens die and 10 on the ones die, which has a sum of 100), and no way of rolling 10. So a valid interpretation of these rules is that you roll percentages with dice that can never come up 10, but have two different ways to come up 100. Good job, editors!
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Aug 21, 2015 15:38
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What in 4th ed requires percentile rolls?
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Aug 21, 2015 15:45
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You never treat the "ones" die as anything but 0-9. Ever. You sound like you've never rolled a d100 set.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:09
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Lord Frisk posted:You never treat the "ones" die as anything but 0-9. Ever. You sound like you've never rolled a d100 set. A fact I know because I've rolled d100's a lot, but not one that is obvious from the way the rules for rolling the dice are written.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:14
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Lord Frisk posted:You never treat the "ones" die as anything but 0-9. Ever. You sound like you've never rolled a d100 set. Experienced players know that, but from the point of view of someone who's never rolled a D100 before I can see how it'd be confusing from the description.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:17
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gradenko_2000 posted:What in 4th ed requires percentile rolls? Loot.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:18
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LatwPIAT posted:
It says treating it as a ten is the exception, not the other way around. It seems pretty intuitive to never use a two digit number as a single digit number. I guess I follow your complaint, I just don't agree.
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Aug 21, 2015 16:24
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I guess it depends on the type of D10 you're rolling. I've seen 0-9 and 1-10 versions, though I think the former is more common?
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Aug 21, 2015 16:27
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Zark the Damned posted:I guess it depends on the type of D10 you're rolling. I've seen 0-9 and 1-10 versions, though I think the former is more common? In one of his books, Greg Stolze specifically calls out that 0-9 is the far more common d10 type.
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Aug 21, 2015 17:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:In one of his books, Greg Stolze specifically calls out that 0-9 is the far more common d10 type. This is also the reason that the d10 rolls in at least one edition of Ars Magica were 0-9 instead of 1-10- it's a lot more likely for someone not familiar to pick up d10s marked 0-9, so they just used the more intuitive number range based on 'hey it's what the dice say on them'
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Aug 21, 2015 19:03
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unseenlibrarian posted:This is also the reason that the d10 rolls in at least one edition of Ars Magica were 0-9 instead of 1-10- it's a lot more likely for someone not familiar to pick up d10s marked 0-9, so they just used the more intuitive number range based on 'hey it's what the dice say on them'
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Aug 21, 2015 19:27
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Whoever came up with that should be dragged into the street and shot. Don't worry, they won't fight it. They know what they did.
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Aug 22, 2015 01:28
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You Can Die From Insanity, or a Cultist's Shotgun Blast, or Even Being Eaten by a Shoggoth, but You Can't Die From Hunger or Thirst in Call of Cthulhu d20: The title pretty much says it all folks. I believe this version of CoC was based on the D&D 3.0 mechanics of the d20 System, and while the designers did a decent enough job porting the Cthulhu mythos into the context of the system, there were still some gaps in the core mechanics that can lead to all kinds of Murphies. In this case, RAW it's literally impossible for your investigator to die from hunger or thirst. Pages 75 and 76 of the CoC core book talk about what subdual damage is, and how it works. Basically, subdual damage was the d20 System's kludge for trying to model non-lethal, or stunning damage; the kind you might take from taking a few barehanded slaps from a mugger, or maybe the kind of hurt you get slipping and falling down a shallow embankment that doesn't actually pose any life threatening danger. The main idea is that subdual damage tracks separately from your current hit points, and where hit point damage goes down when you take lethal damage, subdual damage goes up when you take bruises. In this model, a character who is taking a few scrapes along with a few actual injuries is more likely to pass out from the trauma, because once your total subdual damage sustained is equal to your current hit points (not maximum, and it doesn't matter if this happens because you sustain a ton of subdual damage, or because you take only one scrape and then a lot of lethal damage) you are staggered, and once you've got more subdual damage than your current hit points, you're completely unconscious (and helpless, but that's less important here). What's interesting is that there's no rule for overflow subdual damage, meaning that once someone has taken enough subdual damage to knock them unconscious (greater subdual damage than current hit points) additional subdual damage doesn't ever become lethal damage, no matter how much more subdual damage you take. Essentially, extra subdual damage just keeps the victim unconscious longer, because subdual damage is only recovered at a rate of 1 point per character level per hour; there's a caveat about spells or magic powers that heal hit point damage also restoring an equal amount of subdual damage, but in the context of CoC these abilities are unlikely to be something that the average investigator can just count on having. Cut to page 85, where the rules talk about what happens when an investigator has to go prolonged periods without food or water. A character can go without water for one day, plus a number of hours equal to his/her Constitution score. After that, the character must make a Constitution check against an escalating DC every additional hour that passes with no hydration, or else take d6 points of subdual damage. Starvation works the same way, except the timer doesn't start until 3 days without food have passed, and the escalating Con check is measured in days instead of hours, but the result for failure is the same d6 subdual damage. Finally, the rules explicitly mention that subdual damage accrued due to thirst and/or starvation can only be recovered via eating or drinking; in other words, you can't sleep off not having enough to eat. Things get interesting here, because as I said before, there's no ruling for subdual damage turning into lethal damage, no matter how much you take. On the same page as the rules for starvation and thirst (85) there's rules for what happens when an investigator gets trapped under a landslide (or any sufficiently large pile of debris) and those rules explicitly state that characters who are knocked unconscious due to falling objects initially take subdual damage from being trapped, and eventually start taking lethal damage once they've taken enough subdual damage to fall unconscious. BUT, thanks to a quirk in the core mechanics for d20, a general rule is only counteracted by a specific rule in the literal situations where the specific rule applies. In other words, while being knocked unconscious because a ton of sand got dumped on your noggin will eventually kill you, being knocked unconscious because you don't have enough to eat or drink literally can't kill you. It gets even weirder. Back on pages 75 and 76, the subdual damage section says that every time a character is knocked unconscious due to subdual damage accrual, there is a 1 in 10 chance every hour that the character will pop back to consciousness (alive but staggered), until you either take additional subdual damage that puts your current subdual damage over your current hit points, or you take additional hit point damage and drop your current hit points under your total subdual damage. So, even though someone who has fallen unconscious due to starvation can't recover their subdual damage per normal, there's still a mathematical likelihood that within 10 hours of first falling unconscious, they'll actually wake back up. This gets even better, because as the rules for subdual damage state, when you wake back up, you're also staggered. Staggered is a condition (described on page 91 in the core CoC book) that starts by saying "The character has subdual damage equal to his/her current hit points" and follows by explaining that a staggered character can also only make 1 move action or 1 attack action each round, but not both. This is crucial, because RAW the very first thing that being staggered does to you is reset your current subdual damage to be equivalent to your current hit points. With this in mind, it's entirely possible to have an investigator fall unconscious due to thirst or starvation, but be basically okay within 10 hours after having passed out. Let's explore the rules with our example investigator, Professor Puny. The Prof. has the lowest Constitution score that a human can start with, which is 3 (out of 18). As a first level investigator, Prof. Puny starts with a d6 worth of hit points, plus or minus his starting Constitution modifier. For the sake of making a playable character, let's say our GM rules that starting investigators always get max hit points from their first hit die, and just modify that with their Con modifier. In this case, Prof. Puny has a whopping 2 hit points (his starting Con of 3 gives him a Con modifier of -4, ouch). Thanks to the way the rules for starvation and thirst are written, the good Prof. can go one day without either food or water with no ill effect, and after that he has a 70% chance to fail his first hunger or thirst check (either the next day or the next hour, depending on the condition). He has an 83% chance to fall immediately unconscious due to lack of food or water (owing to him rolling any number other than a 1 on his first d6 subdual damage check) and will likely accrue more and more subdual damage each subsequent check as he has no meaningful way to prevent it. However, because the general rule for subdual damage says he has a 1 in 10 chance every hour of waking up staggered, and the specific rules for starvation and thirst don't contradict this or present an exception, he's likely to wake up sometime with 10 hours of failing his first hunger / thirst check. For at least the next hour (thirst) and possibly the next day (hunger) Prof. Puny can more or less do whatever he needs to do, as long as he does it slowly. Although there's nothing literally stopping him from engaging in a combat encounter (it's not the best idea for a variety of reasons) he can otherwise assist the other characters in the investigation with no real drawback. Interestingly enough, the staggered condition doesn't explicitly prevent you from taking a full round action; remember, it only says that you can't take both an attack action and a move action in the same round while you're staggered. So, what's an example of a full round action that Prof. Puny might try to do? Well, how about RUNNING at quadruple his movement rate! That's right, while he can't run around and shoot a gun simultaneously while staggered, he can can totally spend an entire round running up to four times his normal distance. The rules for running (page 68) even state that he can keep running for a number of consecutive rounds equal to his Con score before having to make an Con check of escalating difficulty to continue running. Guaranteed, a man who is suffering from sufficient starvation to fall unconscious can, within 10 hours, wake up and start running around a track at top speed. Plus, since your movement speed isn't related to your Constitution score, Prof. Puny can do this amazing feat just as well as someone else who is well fed! Also an amazing feat? Prof. Puny can make a full-attack action. If somehow he survives long enough to raise his base attack bonus to the point that he can make multiple attacks with the full attack action, he can do this too while suffering from starvation / thirst. Finally, recall that subdual damage earned due to hunger / thirst can't be recovered at all except by eating or drinking (or waking up staggered, but I digress). Another full round action that Prof. Puny could try is casting a blasphemous spell he learned while performing his eldritch research. He might even know how to summon one of the profane Old Ones, or one of their Avatars, and if he is able to provide a sufficiently appropriate sacrifice, he might even get the creature to grant him a boon. The one true limit to the infinite power of a being that exists beyond time and space and to whom humans, with our myopic 3 dimensional perception, are little more than ants, is the ability to directly cure someone from the effects of starvation / thirst. Since magical healing of any kind explicitly doesn't effect subdual damage due to starvation or thirst, even dread Azathoth is powerless to restore the lost physical vitality to a man whom is severely malnourished. Freaking Crumbum fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Aug 31, 2015 |
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Aug 31, 2015 04:40
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I always find it amusing so many games have rules for starvation even though it hardly ever, ever comes up. Lack of sleep, sure, drowning, could happen, but starvation? I think it's come up all of once in all my years of gaming, and certainly I've never actually seen a PC starve or dehydrate to death. It seems like the kind of thing that might be important for your classic Torchbearer-style resource management fantasy hexcrawl, but beyond that, it feels mostly like a cargo cult-ism from those older sorts of games.
Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Aug 31, 2015 |
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Aug 31, 2015 04:58
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I agree. Strict tracking of camping supplies is like one of the first things I throw out (granted, it's because of the type of game I play) so I almost never see starvation/dehydration come up unless it's an explicit narrative incident.
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Aug 31, 2015 05:25
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The only time it's reasonable to track stuff like food supplies, equipment weight etc., is if one player really wants to manage all that If someone wants to play some sort of traveling merchant guy with a wagon full of food, water, soap, silver weapons, acid arrows, etc. It's reasonable to throw out some bonuses to reflect that the party has been riding on a wagon, snacking on beef jerky instead of marching in full plate armor on dungeon rations.
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Aug 31, 2015 06:52
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:The only time it's reasonable to track stuff like food supplies, equipment weight etc., is if one player really wants to manage all that I'd say it's only reasonable when everyone is on board with the idea that supplies are vital is going to be a huge part of the game. The GM then has to make collecting, maintaining, and transporting supplies to be interesting and fun as well as important.
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Aug 31, 2015 07:58
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AlphaDog posted:I'd say it's only reasonable when everyone is on board with the idea that supplies are vital is going to be a huge part of the game. The GM then has to make collecting, maintaining, and transporting supplies to be interesting and fun as well as important. I guess I'm off track here using the word "Only" Rule #1 is pretty much "Is this fun?" If the players are having fun with supplies, indulge them. If one player wants to handle supplies, let him, and give bonuses to the party to reflect his contributions. If there's a special circumstance where careful management of supplies makes sense to the narrative and doesn't disrupt the game, go for it! But if your players just want to kill some loving Kobolds, don't pull out your calculator to figure how much their 11 foot poles weigh.
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Aug 31, 2015 08:07
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Are there specific rules for how much you need to eat/drink to recover? Because if not, you might get away with carrying a pack of crackers and a water bottle that you only ever consume when you're going somewhere dangerous, awhile you just generally starve away when you're not in a hurry.
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Aug 31, 2015 08:20
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I believe subdual damage is actually old, and did in fact represent putting the boots to a dragon, medium-style, so you could capture it and sell it to someone else. What they were going to do with a dragon in a cage is another question. As for food/drink I remember them being a factor in Dark Sun but I think they were also abstractable. I remember - perhaps falsely - that there were delicious and savory rules for how much food you'd get off your party members...
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Aug 31, 2015 08:26
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Nessus posted:I believe subdual damage is actually old, and did in fact represent putting the boots to a dragon, medium-style, so you could capture it and sell it to someone else. What they were going to do with a dragon in a cage is another question. This goes back at least as far as B/x and I think originally only dragons could take subdual damage.
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Aug 31, 2015 08:39
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Yeah subdual damage rules I think are a holdover from old D&D when you scored more XP for taking bad guys prisoner (and ransoming them off to god-knows-who). Nowadays the shorthand is "if you declare that you want to knock a guy out instead of killing them, then yeah you just do that", but at the time you were actually supposed to follow the subdual damage rules because they made combat harder, which would then give you more experience for undertaking that harder mode of combat.
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Aug 31, 2015 17:24
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AlphaDog posted:This goes back at least as far as B/x and I think originally only dragons could take subdual damage. I've seen it put that subdual was universal but the example was with a dragon and phrased as if the dragon was the only thing that used it. No idea how true that is; never played B/X.
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Aug 31, 2015 18:08
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spectralent posted:I've seen it put that subdual was universal but the example was with a dragon and phrased as if the dragon was the only thing that used it. No idea how true that is; never played B/X. More that people saw the specific rule and assumed that clearly it must be a universal rule when it wasn't. Some elements of the rule became optional rules later on in the line's run.
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Aug 31, 2015 18:12
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I always find it amusing so many games have rules for starvation even though it hardly ever, ever comes up. Lack of sleep, sure, drowning, could happen, but starvation? I think it's come up all of once in all my years of gaming, and certainly I've never actually seen a PC starve or dehydrate to death. It seems like the kind of thing that might be important for your classic Torchbearer-style resource management fantasy hexcrawl, but beyond that, it feels mostly like a cargo cult-ism from those older sorts of games. i agree completely. likely it's a side effect of the 3.X ruleset trying to model the entirty of physical reality within the context of the game, and the utter impossibility of that task. CoC is really just bolting the CoC theme and mythos onto the d20 3.0 rules without doing much to change the underlying mechanics, for better or worse. the general idea that a game should be able to accurately model starvation / thirst isn't awful per se, but it's typically a really edge case situation that most groups won't ever have to deal with. it's even more outlandish in the context of a game like CoC, where the investigators are nominally going to be adventuring around in a fairly populated city within a first world country, so a situation like not being able to find enough food and water to eat and drink is almost non-existant. i could see it making more sense if your group of investigators actually charted an expedition up the mountains of madness, but even in that case it'd make more sense to me to have the starvation rules published in that supplement and not taking up space and being generally non-sensical in the core book. hell, even settings like Dark Sun, where resource scarcity is a major conceit of the setting, only really hassle players about their available rations when they're outside of one of the major cities. even that game acknowledged that tracking food and water intake daily is needless busywork if it isn't going to directly support the overall theme of the narrative
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Aug 31, 2015 20:27
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spectralent posted:I've seen it put that subdual was universal but the example was with a dragon and phrased as if the dragon was the only thing that used it. No idea how true that is; never played B/X.
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Aug 31, 2015 20:29
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Starvation and thirst are an element of resource management and games can be ALL about resource management, see: hit points, mana points, spells-per-day, surges, whatever. The problem is, you can't just add a resource to manage and say "there that's a good game mechanic"; there are games where food and drink will matter a lot, and post-hexcrawling, tile-mapping, rest-every-few-Turns D&D is not it. And like Encumbrance, D&D keeps it around because it's always been there.
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Aug 31, 2015 20:34
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Rulebook Heavily posted:And like Encumbrance, D&D keeps it around because it's always been there.
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Sep 2, 2015 01:39
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Poison Mushroom posted:Like Encumbrance, ability scores, armor check penalties, weapon proficiencies.... None of which are bad things to have in a game (or even all in the same game) if they were just thoughtfully integrated into the design instead of this cargo cult bullshit where we worship the text of AD&D 2E. Or hell, just intelligently covered in the DMG (or equivalent) explaining, "Encumbrance isn't necessarily worth tracking in all games. However, in campaigns (or even just individual adventures) where the PCs are far from home and isolated, it can be both a thematic and practical challenge to choose between extra gold or extra food, or even worse extra food and haulting back the unconscious body of your fellow adventurer." A chain of so many failures, and just one smart choice at ANY POINT in the process would make things better.
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Sep 2, 2015 16:54
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kaynorr posted:even worse extra food and haulting back the unconscious body of your fellow adventurer." Depending on the group that those options may be one and the same.
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Sep 2, 2015 17:20
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Athenry posted:Depending on the group that those options may be one and the same. Athasian halflings, man... They'll make sure that resurrection costs you an arm and a leg.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:37
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...and some sweetbreads.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:26
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homeless poster posted:You Can Die From Insanity, or a Cultist's Shotgun Blast, or Even Being Eaten by a Shoggoth, but You Can't Die From Hunger or Thirst in Call of Cthulhu d20: This is actually a side effect of 3.X D&D being the basis of d20 and no-one bothering to proofread when they copy/pasted 3E into other settings. Yep, it's not just one ruleset that includes hunger/thirst as a penalty mechanic without the ability to die from them! edit: This was also uncorrected in 3.5, of course Darwinism fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 01:48
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Weirdly, the rules for being killed by non-lethal damage do exist for some conditions. For instance, if you take nonlethal damage from heat exhaustion or cold environments you'll start taking lethal damage once you fall unconscious...but for some reason this never happens with starvation and thirst. Even worse, it also never happens with smoke inhalation. This is something that came up when I was doing a F&F on the World's Largest Dungeon, because that rules hiccup turned an (already extremely stupid) trap into a bizarre stasis trap. What happened was the room was designed to shut itself when the PCs went in and lock with no keyhole or access on the inside. The place featured several burning braziers and a bizarre clue that was meant to indicate that the room would open when the fires in the brazier went out due to lack of oxygen. The intent was to trigger several very obvious fireball traps in the room to consume the oxygen and open the doors. The more likely result is the PCs sitting around trying to figure things out fruitlessly (it was a very stupid trap), while the lit braziers more slowly consume the oxygen. According to the room text, it takes 2 hours before the braziers completely consume the oxygen and the doors unlock. Unfortunately, after 105 minutes the people trapped in the room start to suffer the effects of smoke inhalation. That's 15 minutes, or 150 rounds of smoke inhalation. Since most characters will find it impossible to make their saves after 10-15 round, this means roughly 60 or 70d6 non-lethal damage, which'll knock out most anyone at the adventure's suggested level. However, because smoke inhalation only inflicts nonlethal damage the worst that'll happen is the entire party falls unconscious and then the door opens...for 3d6 rounds. For those who don't recall, nonlethal damage is healed hourly. The doors open, the braziers relight themselves and then after 105 more minutes the nonlethal damage starts up again...and the cycle continues endlessly.
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Sep 17, 2015 07:42
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Starvation and thirst are an element of resource management and games can be ALL about resource management, see: hit points, mana points, spells-per-day, surges, whatever. The problem is, you can't just add a resource to manage and say "there that's a good game mechanic"; there are games where food and drink will matter a lot, and post-hexcrawling, tile-mapping, rest-every-few-Turns D&D is not it. And like Encumbrance, D&D keeps it around because it's always been there. Mutant: Year Zero has very clear rules for starvation and thirst, because they are absolutely things that are supposed to come up in that game.
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Sep 17, 2015 14:13
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