|
On the other hand, it's pretty common in fiction to see dwarves with domesticated goats, boars, moles, and the like. Subterranean race, different environments and needs. Age of Wonders even had dwarves using domesticated giant dire moles as cavalry mounts that can tunnel through solid rock.
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 03:01
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 00:45 |
|
|
Big Mad Drongo posted:As someone who doesn't get probabilities, You got it already. That's exactly the reason it's bad. There shouldn't be any expectation that players understand probabilities.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 03:14
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:Nah, dogs are a weird human thing. Halflings love'm both because there's nothing cozier than having a dog at your feet at your hearth, and because there's nothing cozier than having dog cavalry protecting your village. Dwarves dislike them because they remind them of the Orcs and their damnable wargs. Elves would never admit it, but they fear them because they answer their master's wishes as if they can read their master's thoughts- if humans can emulate Elven Cats, what other secrets could they steal from Elfkind? I like your version better, but these goofy things were canon at one point. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 03:55
|
|
|
Big Mad Drongo posted:Advantage is roll twice, take better, right? As someone who doesn't get probabilities, how does that mess things up more than a fiddly pile of +1s and +2s? Okay, simple. If you are rolling 1d20+3, you have a 0% chance of rolling a 25. If you get a +2 situational bonus on top of that, you now have a 1-in-20 chance of hitting that 25. If you are getting a reroll, you still have a 0% chance. Essentially, as long as you're only using numerical modifiers, your chance of success is always going to be a fraction over 20, and calculating it is very simply "how many results on the d20 are successes?". Rerolls basically gently caress up that nice, simple math, and also gently caress with the math behind the D&D difficulty curve.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 03:59
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:I like your version better, but these goofy things were canon at one point. Canon all through 2nd Edition at the least, as Skills and Powers had an Elven racial power that let you have either a cooshee or an elven cat as a pet. Sadly, Elven Parrot, Elven Goldfish, and Elven Gerbil weren't options.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 04:07
|
|
|
For what it's worth, the elven cat and elven dog weren't invented for D&D; they're just stolen from celtic mythology. The fairy cats are cait sith, the fairy dogs are cù sith. The D&D versions are way more boring than the mythological ones, though.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 05:07
|
|
|
It was long years before I realized that 'cooshee' was an anglicization. And thanks to Final Fantasy, every time I see 'cait sith', I think of the cat-riding-a-moogle drone.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 05:25
|
|
|
OvermanXAN posted:Okay, simple. If you are rolling 1d20+3, you have a 0% chance of rolling a 25. If you get a +2 situational bonus on top of that, you now have a 1-in-20 chance of hitting that 25. If you are getting a reroll, you still have a 0% chance. I'm an education major and I sell starships for a living, so I'm not sure what the difference here is. I also lower my risk of a 1, if that's a relevant factor.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 05:26
|
|
|
Two 10% chances is a total of a 19% chance, so the +2 is better than a reroll in this case. This is assuming that rolling a natural 1 isn't any worse than missing with another number, which isn't always the case in games. Also 5e drastically scaled back in how high most bonuses get. In 3.5, for instance, you'd want at least an AC of 20 + level if you're planning on spending appreciable time in melee, if I'm remembering my numbers right. senrath fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Nov 3, 2017 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 06:05
|
|
|
senrath posted:Two 10% chances is a total of a 19% chance. This is, incidentally, why Impact is such a big loving deal in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Because not only is your average damage going to be better rolling twice and taking the best, now you have a 19% chance to do a damage-cap breaking Fury chance. E: Also why the introduction of 2d10, 3d10, 4d10, and 5d10 dice weapons in WH40KRP messed a lot of the damage math up.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 06:08
|
|
|
senrath posted:Two 10% chances is a total of a 19% chance, so the +2 is better than a reroll in this case. This is assuming that rolling a natural 1 isn't any worse than missing with another number, which isn't always the case in games.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 06:13
|
|
|
Big Mad Drongo posted:Advantage is roll twice, take better, right? As someone who doesn't get probabilities, how does that mess things up more than a fiddly pile of +1s and +2s? Nessus posted:How often do you need to hit a 25 though? I mean I am just a humble country hyperchicken but I think the highest DC for anything I've seen in my 5e game has been the paladin's AC, which is either 19 or 20. On most of my poo poo I'm rolling with a +6 modifier. So if I'm trying to hit some bug with AC 25 at my current level, I got a 10% chance of hitting - but if I reroll and keep highest, this is two 10% shots, compared to a +2, which would be one roll with a 20% chance. In 3e, target numbers constantly went up, and you needed to keep chasing after them with higher and higher modifiers. Further, those modifiers would often come from multiple sources. You might have a high-level enemy with an AC of 25, and as a level 1 character with +2 Strength and +1 BAB, you'd have zero chance to hit it. But as you yourself gained levels, powers, and gear, you'd eventually get to something like +13 BAB, +4 Strength, +2 from feats, +2 from your magical weapon, +2 from flanking, +1 from Bless, and maybe another one or two situational bonuses on top of that, which would let you hit on anything except a natural 1. In comparison, even level/CR 20 monsters in 5e only top-out at AC 20, which means even a level 1 character with +2 Strength and +2 proficiency has some chance of hitting it. This is what they called "Bounded Accuracy" - the scale of the numbers never gets very high, which means you're almost never looking at totals greater than 30, and also that you're not on some kind of gear or feat treadmill where you need to hit certain benchmarks just to keep pace. At the same time, 5e also gets rid of a lot of modifiers, feats, abilities, and situational bonuses that add flat modifiers, so that you're usually only adding three numbers together: [d20 + ability modifier + proficiency bonus]. Advantage replaces a lot of the effects that used to add anything from an additional +1 to +5 to your roll, and Advantage combined with Bounded Accuracy tends to create rolls where your chance-to-succeed is increased by enough that it's similar (but not the same) to the kind of high roll that you might get in 3e if you played the character optimization game well and stacked a lot of small addends together.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 06:30
|
|
|
Conversely, damage is basically the only way 5e can balance higher level monsters, meaning healing resources get increasingly strained, and the wizard's save or suck spells never get any worse.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 06:43
|
|
|
So 5e is... better?cat cat posted:The cat’s gestation period is about two months, with 1d4+1 kittens in each litter. Kittens are weaned when about eight weeks old. Ah yes, the ever important litter of kittens roll
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 06:55
|
|
|
JcDent posted:So 5e is... better? That is a can of worms you probably don't want to get into.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 06:56
|
|
|
JcDent posted:So 5e is... better? Bounded Accuracy accomplishes the simplification and magnitude-reduction that it set out to do. The Advantage system has a few flaws largely related to its inability to stack and how it is acquired, but is also by-and-large a good mechanic. My qualms with 5e are towards the rest of its systems and the game as a whole.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 07:00
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Bounded Accuracy accomplishes the simplification and magnitude-reduction that it set out to do. Yeah, they did a pretty okay job of really locking down the math at the most fundamental level of the game, but then they got all nostalgic about 3rd edition so your basic fighter gets a +1 or +2 here or there, and then the wizard flies around and controls minds and opens any door and poo poo. It's more pronounced at higher levels—lol barbarian's +4 to a couple of Abilities vs wizard's casting invisibility and charm person at-will—but even at level 1 it's still clearly LFQW regardless of how basic dice roll mechanics work.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 07:18
|
|
|
The thing that perplexes me about DnD is that it doesn't really have a world like that, and why would I play it then? Unless Forgotten realms are now the DnD setting. Whenever I want to play an RPG, it's because I'm interested in having adventures in its world.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 07:21
|
|
|
All magic systems need to have the chance of wizard exploding. WHFRPG/WHFB 4 lyfe.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 07:23
|
|
|
JcDent posted:The thing that perplexes me about DnD is that it doesn't really have a world like that, and why would I play it then? Unless Forgotten realms are now the DnD setting. Yeah, I've got some bad news about 5th Edition...
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 07:35
|
|
|
I've now put together an update that is longer in page count than the section of the book of TLE it covers because that's how wrong everything in the games mechanics are. I genuinely am going to have to split 7 pages of book into multiple updates because get your poo poo together TLE
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 07:50
|
|
|
I maintain that FR can be a good setting if you ignore the sort of creepy stuff that Ed Greenwood has done. It's big and there are countries and big organizations at odds to provide Plot and you can have all kinds of adventures.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 07:54
|
|
|
My problem with FR is that it is neither Eberron nor Dark Sun.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 08:09
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn has forced me to do this. After having been mercilessly Starfingered for weeks now, I felt an irresistible compulsion to counteract that joyless slog with actual fun. Messy, broken, flawed fun that came out of lackluster intentions, but fun nonetheless. I present to you the most metal D&D setting of all time:   A pirate guy with a space boat beating up another guy with an octopus for a face. Nothing about this does not deserve to be painted on the side of someone's van. A history: Like a lot of nerds who've caught lightning in a bottle, Gary Gygax was singularly unqualified to run a large company. He hared off after his dreams of turning Dungeons and Dragons into a media-spanning empire and basically left the company in the hands of acquaintances who, through bad luck, incompetence, embezzling, or multiples of those managed to send the company into a nosedive. He wandered back to find TSR on fire and got them ousted by the board, but apparently not in time to prevent huge losses and layoffs. They also between them had a large number of shares of company stock, which they promptly sold to Lorraine Williams, the then-general manager of the company, giving her controlling share which she used to shitcan ol' Gary. A lot of old D&D grognards make Lorraine out to be a Satan who hated nerds, sued fansites maliciously, prevented writers from playtesting product with a 'no playing games' rule at the company, and more, but a lot of those stories aren't verified and will probably never be more than rumor. What is not rumor is that her eventually-fatal plan for TSR was to spitball in every direction and see what stuck. This led to heavy investment in failed product lines that sank the company like a stone (see Spellfire and Dragon Dice, TSR's ill-advised attempts to compete with Magic) but it also caused the explosion of campaign settings in the late 80s and early 90s. One of the first of these 'let's see if it sticks' settings was Spelljammer. On the face of it, Spelljammer is a somewhat cynical setting. It looks more than a little bit like a 'setting' that actually only exists to tie other ground-based settings together. Is your party tired of being on Krynn? Well step right up and buy our box set and they can be on their way to Toril! On his blog, Jeff Grubb mentions that this was not the primary thrust behind Spelljammer and instead something of a side-effect that they took advantage of, but Spelljammer suffered throughout its life by not having a comprehensive setting in the same way things like Forgotten Realms had. Near the end of its run TSR finally did churn out a box set with a Spelljammer-only setting, The Astromundi Cluster, but honestly it wasn't that great and didn't turn anything around. It was by and large up to a DM to make up sufficient content for their game, and I think that's what hurt it the most. The Setting (such as it is): Spelljammer is less of a setting than a bolt-on rule mechanic upgrade for D&D. The bulk of the main box set is spent on laying the groundwork for how space works and how ships work in space. Here is the gist of it: Space works in a way that lets you fly boats in space and have adventures. Anything that keeps you from being on a boat in space and having adventures is not how space works. Are you concerned about microgravity? Well don't be, because a 30-foot boat in space is all you need for 1G. No matter how big or small a boat you have, it's 1G. Need a space suit? Ha no space suits are for your dad. Your ten tons of wood boat have sufficient gravity to attract and hold a bubble of air around it that will keep ten people breathing for about half a year, so your barbarian can go right on wearing a furry He-Man diaper and nothing else. This is not to say that everything is completely hand-waved away; there are fun gravity tricks such that a ship's gravity is a flat plane that goes through the midpoint of the ship, so a character can be standing up on the underside of a ship in space, some ships have decks that are reverse gravity from other decks, and a couple of ships are actually designed without a 'bottom'. This can lead to some fun times when your ship enters a larger object's gravity and what had been the floor promptly turns into the ceiling, better hope your stuff was tied down. Air is more of a dramatic device than anything else; while it's difficult for a ship with a normal crew compliment to run out, certain space creatures and phenomena can spoil a ship's air supply and cause trouble. The astronomy of D&D was set up to explain the often-contradictory existence of the ground settings. The solar systems all exist in gargantuan spheres that contain the sun(s) and planets and moons and all that, completely separate from other solar systems. Within a given crystal sphere, local rules apply: Planets orbit suns, suns orbit planets, planets are flat and on the back of a space turtle, planets are hollow and have a sun inside them, anything goes. The 'stars' visible from a world are not other suns, but are instead lights dotting the inside of the crystal sphere and can be giant torches, alien cities, portals to the plane of fire, windows to the outside, whatever. Speaking of the outside, the thing outside of all of the crystal spheres is the phlogiston, a luminous and highly flammable vapor that flows around them. (Phlogiston is an actual pseudoscience material from ye olde days that attempted to explain combustion.) The flows act like jet streams, allowing a ship moving with the stream to achieve tremendous speed and travel from system to system in relatively short order, if one knows the way. The lack of random magic spaceships popping in on Athas, for example, was explained away by its crystal sphere being extremely remote, or the phlogiston flows around it being unfavorable to navigation. A side effect of the whole 'local rules apply' thing is that divine spellcasters were occasionally in some trouble. The phlogiston, being unreachable by planar contact to some extent, dampened a cleric's ability to contact their deity and recover higher-level spells, and when in a crystal sphere the local gods may or may not be cool with them. Your cleric of Sithrak may be at full power upon entering an unknown sphere, or may be severely diminished. To that end a great many clerics in Spelljammer were taking up the missionary life, attempting to establish sufficient worshipers in every system they could for their god to have sway there, and there were several common pantheons in use among spacefaring clerics that had wider reach than more narrowly-focused ground-based gods. If all else failed, a cleric in a distant sphere with no faith friendly to their god could use a spell to contact their god and regain spells normally. This still managed to be far, far less obnoxious than Planescape's restriction on magic, but was still something that players had to keep in mind, as magical healing wasn't necessarily something they could rely upon. It's late so I'm wrapping up here. Next up, Spelljamming (verb), Spelljammers (noun), and The Spelljammer (proper noun)
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 08:39
|
|
|
Barudak posted:I've now put together an update that is longer in page count than the section of the book of TLE it covers because that's how wrong everything in the games mechanics are. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 09:09
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:I like your version better, but these goofy things were canon at one point. To be fair cu sidhe/sith are in fact canon to mythology. To be less fair obviously that's not how you pronounce those words. Feinne fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Nov 3, 2017 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 09:28
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Found it. The Elven cat has 3+6 Hit dice. Which means it can take as much damage as an Ogre (4+1HD.) More like a cat-roach.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 11:30
|
|
|
Elven cat: cat, but more so. I think there was a winged cat in one of the Elric of Melnibone books, as a companion to some bard dude?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 12:00
|
|
|
JcDent posted:Elven cat: cat, but more so. He showed up in the Corum and Hawkmoon stuff, not Elric, but yeah. Jhary-a-Conel and his winged cat.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 12:11
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Found it. "Many can speak a crude form of the elven tongue" Elven lolcats?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 12:24
|
|
|
unseenlibrarian posted:He showed up in the Corum and Hawkmoon stuff, not Elric, but yeah. Jhary-a-Conel and his winged cat. I remember there was some implied special significance about that cat (apart from being winged and magical and all that). It never got followed up on as far as I am aware.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 12:48
|
|
|
Oh hell yes. Love me some Spelljammer. Such a weird, remarkable little part of DnD.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 13:42
|
|
|
Angry Salami posted:"Many can speak a crude form of the elven tongue"
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 14:27
|
|
|
And there was a great lamentation among the people, and they cried out, “Talking frogs! We need more talking frog encounters!” And lo, their prayers were answered, by The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 17: The Deck of Fairy Tales 102: To Kiss a Frog, Version 1 So there’s a frog in a swamp, staring at the PCs intently. If they notice it (with a Wisdom check), she’ll explain that she’s the daughter of a duke, turned into a frog, and needs to be kissed to return to her original form. She can’t promise a reward, though, since the duchy is very poor. Actually she’s a peasant woman who angered a witch, and couldn’t get passerby to kiss her, so she made up a more appealing story. She hopes they’ll forgive her for the deception. Uh, sure. I suppose it’s an interesting enough quick diversion, and we can keep it. That WIsdom check is totally unnecessary, though. No way is the DM going to secretly make those rolls, see that they failed, and declare “No encounter happens. Carry on.” 103: To Kiss a Frog, Version 2 There’s a frog in a foul-smelling swamp. It’s gross. It belches and explains that he’s a prince turned into a frog, just like in that fairy tale, and if one of them will “plant one right on me ol’ kisser,” it’ll reward them when it turns back. If it weasels kisses out of the PCs, it jumps away calling out “Suckers!” Keep. Why not? 104: Dwarven Nightmare In a lightly forested area, near a swamp at the base of some hills where there are mines. The PCs see four trolls march out from the swamps carrying picks and shovels, and singing a dwarven marching song. They are actually dwarves polymorphed into trolls. The rest of the dwarves were killed by an attacking wizard’s magic; these four lived but “were not quite fast enough to escape all of the effects [of the wizard’s spells].” Uh… okay? Why was this wizard trying to transform their opponents into larger, more dangerous creatures? Let’s just say it was a wild mage and move on. The P.S.: XP rewards: “5,600 for killing the trolls, 1,500 for not jumping right into combat.” Optimal PC behavior: don’t jump right into combat, listen to the trolls’ story, and then kill them all. 105: Paladin Trolls But not dwarven paladin trolls; that would defy several highly important laws of nature. Near a small hilly village, the PCs see four humans, grunting and clutching chunks of meat, running from two trolls, who are shouting at them to stop. “Stop those trolls!” they shout, while refusing to explain things more clearly. Two paladins were fighting four trolls who had eaten some peasants, when some random wild magic switched their forms, like it does, I guess. That’s the whole situation. Two “polymorphed into trolls” encounters are one too many. This one loses because you have to hack away at completely harmless humans with 43 HP each, which would be tedious. Pass. 106: Mistaken Identity, Version 2 When the PCs come to a new village, a large angry crowd turns out to meet them, saying “how dare you come back here after what you did” and so on. A group of con artists had previously seen the PCs, “developed masks that resembled the PCs faces” (!) and pretended to be them while scamming this village. I’m... gonna assume that there was some magic involved in these masks. And why would you steal the identities of a bunch of heavily-armed, notably violent, magic-wielding roaming adventurers? Surely there are less dangerous choices! Also, I appreciate the premise, but without further development this card is boring. Now I need to figure out who these con artists are and what they’re doing, and make it entertaining rather than just “Hey, you! Stop doing that!” . Too much work for me. Pass.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 14:30
|
|
|
I'd wonder what Orc cats are like, but we have Caragors now. Wargs domesticated goblins.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 14:32
|
|
|
JcDent posted:So 5e is... better? No, as in wizards don't have to use higher level spell slots and can still utterly trivialize every single combat while everyone else has to actually engage with it. Also every single spellcaster can just use spells to replace the Rogue, and Bards and clerics can actually out-skill-monkey the rogue. They also brought back multiclassing, which means that almost every single class defining ability requires level 18, 19, or 20, which is where the game's bounded accuracy starts to break down. I'm also reasonably certain that no published adventure actually goes that high. JcDent posted:The thing that perplexes me about DnD is that it doesn't really have a world like that, and why would I play it then? Unless Forgotten realms are now the DnD setting. Forgotten realms is now the default DnD Setting, and they're utterly uninterested in publishing books outlining other campaign settings until the golden goose stops laying eggs because the DnD Development staff has been cut to a small fraction of it's former self.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 14:38
|
|
|
Ah, no reason to play it, then. What are good fantasy alternatives?
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 15:36
|
|
|
JcDent posted:Ah, no reason to play it, then. What are good fantasy alternatives? I feel like it's gauche to mention Shadow of the Demon Lord again, but in the context of a game with a really strong default setting to play in ... Shadow of the Demon Lord. The other usual 5e alternatives are 13th Age, maybe Fantasy AGE, Strike!, but they don't (IMO) hit that strong setting benchmark. except for maybe 13th Age with the Eyes of the Stone Thief supplement Comedy option: Monte Cook's Ptolus
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 15:44
|
|
|
Ugh, I’m so over talking frogs now. One thing that’s unfortunate about spelljammer is that it sort of forces the implication that every setting takes place on a planetoid. I think that’s unfairly limiting.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 15:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 00:45 |
|
|
DalaranJ posted:Ugh, I’m so over talking frogs now. Nah. Spelljammer specifically says you can have whatever cosmology you like going on inside the spheres.
|
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2017 15:55
|
|
