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Kavak posted:poo poo like this is why I'm a Call of Cthulhu fan.
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Apr 17, 2018 00:33
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Nessus posted:I'm a partisan of GURPS, the Insane Clown Posse of RPGs. look all I'm saying is, if you're going to use a single RPG to run every genre anyway, why houserule DnD 5e when this already exists and has done your homework for you
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Apr 17, 2018 00:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:look all I'm saying is, if you're going to use a single RPG to run every genre anyway, why houserule DnD 5e when this already exists and has done your homework for you "Used to D&D" is a -15 point disadvantage.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:02
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theironjef posted:.Ultimately this was going to be a question of degrees. If it hadn't been "Where's my Bard?" It would have been "Where's my Skald?" because 3e made prestige classes such an integral part of the conversation (not that you'd know from either 3.x PHB, neither mentions them.) 4e made the call to keep those, integrate them directly and put them right there in the book along with Epic Destinies so that players could see what the full process looked like instead of having to buy Tome of Battle (or for example wherever Incantantrix was, FR?). Not a perfect solution but the perfect solution was probably an 800 page book. I'm gonna disagree with you here. Nobody actually complained about the Loremaster being gone and that guy was in the 3.5 core rules. People didn't actually care about the incantatrix other than as a route to free power. I certainly couldn't tell you what the fluff was other than "does...metamagic...things?" and it apparently dates back to 2e, but it showed up in pretty much every online 3.5 game for dumbass persistent spell shenanigans. Much like 4e's paragon paths, you identified as your base class foremost and the very rare exceptions to this were things like ur-priest and chameleon that were mostly used for dumb shenanigans anyway. Really, killing the drat things would have gone over just fine because they always just turned into "free power". Glagha posted:Alternatively, Fly is really cool and good. I really don't want to lose Fly because I think it's just such a cool thing and is so intrinsically a thing I wanna be able to do if I can use magic. While I understand the reasons for it my biggest disappointment in post-Morrowind ES games is that you can't fly around. Same thing with teleporting. Agreed on the first, disagree on the second. If your entire class is defined by the ability to pick a lock, maybe your class doesn't have enough meat? The rogue and the wizard get a lot of weird overlap where the rogue can steal all the wizard's tricks by paying money and the wizard gives up combat power to do poo poo you don't care about most of the time. The real problem is that the wizard plays "I win" cards and the rogue has a chance to fail, but if a 5th level rogue's lockpicking ability was knock at-will no one would care. People would be fine if wizards could burn spells to do things worse than what other classes get for free. gradenko_2000 posted:Monster manual math Keep in mind too that was done years into the edition's release, when power creep was hitting in full force. One of the better PHB-only AoE nuker builds is a tiefling wizard with fire powers and the hellfire blood feat, but there's not as many feats and items to stack onto this schtick. Once you grab adventurer's vault and Arcane Power you can start stacking on crap like Dual Implement Wielder and other stacks of damage bonuses to make him blow dudes up harder. Hell, I vaguely recall a "powerup for tieflings" book that got released around Essentials. You don't need to cut monster HP as much when PC damage goes way up. Lastly, I'm not sure why everyone is insisting that the game did fine when the head of the D&D club got fired every year till Mearls, Pathfinder made it into mainstream bookstores (unlike whatever lovely 2e clone the grognards loved that no one else cared about), and Essentials decided to go back and grab grognards with meaningless changes like autoattack fighters and autohit magic missile, but I don't actually have any numbers to back this assertion up. Anecdotally I would argue 4e split the playerbase worse than the 3e transition, but I can't prove anything either way.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:41
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Because it was best selling version of the game until 5E? Like, I know missing facts to get those sweet dunks on D&D is apparently the review gimmick here but this is basic stuff.
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Apr 17, 2018 01:50
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One of the big problems with playing a high-lethality style of game in 3e is that the wider range of choices to make during character creation also makes character creation a whole lot more time-consuming, especially beyond the first few levels. In older editions, if your PC was flattened by a falling anvil trap, you could at least plausibly create a new one mid-session and get back into the action before it was over. In 3e that ain't happening unless you kept a backup character sheet in reserve.Glagha posted:Alternatively, Fly is really cool and good. I really don't want to lose Fly because I think it's just such a cool thing and is so intrinsically a thing I wanna be able to do if I can use magic. While I understand the reasons for it my biggest disappointment in post-Morrowind ES games is that you can't fly around. Same thing with teleporting. The Rogue/Thief class seems to have a pretty weird and awkward history in itself, in terms of how it fits into the game. I've heard a few of the really old-school types talk about it as the class you picked if you rolled bad stats and wanted your PC to die quickly, although I don't know how representative that opinion ever was.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:00
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You know, I won't be getting to the books but jesus christ did FFG loving love Techpriests. Depending on how you interpret RAW the geneticist specialization for the RT Techpriest can give one +30 S and T. Plus their good S and T advance. Plus Machinator Array for another +10. Plus maybe Best implanted muscles for Unnatural Strx2. You can, with the right augmentations and talents, make a Techpriest who can punch a Sentinel walker out with their bare hands. You can basically turn an Explorator into Senator Armstrong, NANOMACHINES and all. E: I think my issue with it, thinking about Explorators elbow-dropping Chaos Marines and hugging robits across the galaxy is that that feels like the intended baseline for everyone from the game's fluff, and instead it's an exception. That should be everybody! You should all be crazy and great! Night10194 fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 02:23
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Mr. Maltose posted:Because it was best selling version of the game until 5E? Like, I know missing facts to get those sweet dunks on D&D is apparently the review gimmick here but this is basic stuff. Do you have any numbers to support this?
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Apr 17, 2018 02:25
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Do you have any numbers to support this? oh my god 
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Apr 17, 2018 02:32
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Do you have any numbers to support this? Do you? I mean, let he who decided to make inflated, unsupported claims first cast hard date.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:55
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Do you have any numbers to support this? If I hadn’t left my old job to start my own store, I would for Greater Boston. 4e outsold both 3e and (more relevantly maybe) contemporaneous Pathfinder products at our store for almost the whole run, only falling off when WOTC stopped printing things for it late in the run. Ditto organized play. IIRC 4e “encounters” was bigger than PFS even once it stopped being supported, it absolutely was for the time they were doing active support. The company clearly wasn’t happy with getting the base splintered and did a hard turn back on a lot of 4e’s changes, so it’s possible they concluded (possibly rightly) that it had good sales in spite of itself rather than because, but it did have good sales in my direct experience.
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Apr 17, 2018 02:59
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Night10194 posted:E: I think my issue with it, thinking about Explorators elbow-dropping Chaos Marines and hugging robits across the galaxy is that that feels like the intended baseline for everyone from the game's fluff, and instead it's an exception. That should be everybody! You should all be crazy and great! This was my approach when I drew up a Necron Cryptek. I assumed she'd be comparable to a high-level Explorator and used that as a base. 
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Apr 17, 2018 02:59
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The reason people at WotC got fired was because Hasbro got into a pattern of making company wide cuts every year and WotC, having fewer staff to begin with, got hit harder. This was happening while 5e was developed. Finally they reached a point where it is now basically impossible to make the staff smaller. Even with 5e doing extremely well they haven't really expanded the skeleton crew on the game, because Magic is still more profitable.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:01
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Yeah, the constant staff cycling during 4E was the fact that if you weren't doing Magic or Pokemon numbers you weren't worth enough to avoid constant downsizing by Hasbro, who has constantly demonstrated that D&D's value to them is as an IP as opposed to an actual product.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:09
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Agreed on the first, disagree on the second. If your entire class is defined by the ability to pick a lock, maybe your class doesn't have enough meat? The rogue and the wizard get a lot of weird overlap where the rogue can steal all the wizard's tricks by paying money and the wizard gives up combat power to do poo poo you don't care about most of the time. The real problem is that the wizard plays "I win" cards and the rogue has a chance to fail, but if a 5th level rogue's lockpicking ability was knock at-will no one would care. People would be fine if wizards could burn spells to do things worse than what other classes get for free.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:09
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Mr. Maltose posted:Do you? I mean, let he who decided to make inflated, unsupported claims first cast hard date. https://icv2.com/articles/games/view/20743/top-5-rpgs-q2-2011 https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/7580/is-pathfinder-selling-better-than-dd Ultiville posted:If I hadn’t left my old job to start my own store, I would for Greater Boston. 4e outsold both 3e and (more relevantly maybe) contemporaneous Pathfinder products at our store for almost the whole run, only falling off when WOTC stopped printing things for it late in the run. Ditto organized play. IIRC 4e “encounters” was bigger than PFS even once it stopped being supported, it absolutely was for the time they were doing active support. See this is the part that confuses the gently caress out of me. You have a large base of loyal, happy customers. You piss them off by altering the game to draw back the people who abandoned you to a worse product with titty art and "mature themes" like this. I do not understand this decision, I do not understand why they felt the need to bring in RPG pundit to sell to all 3 old men who still play 2e instead of refining the game and targeting the loyal crew who stuck with them. I was assuming it was a drastic change because things weren't selling well, but if it wasn't what the hell were they doing?
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Apr 17, 2018 03:13
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Because the people interested in keeping 4E forward moving got released by Hasbro, repeatedly, which you....also mentioned?
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Apr 17, 2018 03:18
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:https://icv2.com/articles/games/view/20743/top-5-rpgs-q2-2011 Mike Mearls is a D&D grognard who wanted to make 3.x, but again, and Hasbro let him do it because they didn't give a gently caress. From day 1 Mearls' intent was not "to make a good game" but instead was "to make a D&D game", where D&D=3.x Piell fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 03:20
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Mr. Maltose posted:Because the people interested in keeping 4E forward moving got released by Hasbro, repeatedly, which you....also mentioned? The designers, sure, but IIRC Mike Mearls was fairly invested in 4e and I don't know what the hell he was doing. Presumably someone in management had to approve the soft reboot, and i'm not sure why they'd do that if their game was selling so well.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:21
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It's about the Core Brand. See, Hasbro considers Magic a Core Brand because it sells above a certain threshold. In many ways, 4e was an attempt to get D&D to that level of moneymaking, complete with integrated online support (which didn't quite work, for reasons detailed above) and all that poo poo. So, while the game sold well, it still didn't make that threshold. Arguably Essentials was the last ditch attempt to do so, but it backfired- that it wasn't really 4.5 confused the crap out of customers, and that more than anything dropped 4e's sales. (Consider that the PHB 2- a year after the initial hype- made the NYT Bestseller list, and from all accounts DDI was doing well until the end- and it's still got subscribers enough that it's still kept up.) So you get 5e, which is a simple game that gets supported with adventures from a fairly small staff, and they insist that to have too many books on the market would just destroy that wonderful elegant simplicity and that's why we can't have Warlords back so stop asking.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:22
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Mike Mearls was fairly invested in 4e Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha seriously?! Mearls was the biggest hater of 4e in existence.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:25
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The designers, sure, but IIRC Mike Mearls was fairly invested in 4e and I don't know what the hell he was doing. Presumably someone in management had to approve the soft reboot, and i'm not sure why they'd do that if their game was selling so well.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:25
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Hasbro, as I mentioned, literally does not give a gently caress about the game Dungeons and Dragons. Even at the peakest peak, D&D is a drop in the bucket compared to Magic and Pokemon, so the product quality doesn't actually matter. It's the name Dungeons and Dragon that has value to the company at large, not the product line.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:25
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If we could not devolve further into edition flag-waving, I'd appreciate it. I know I've done my part - not that I'm championing one version. But I'm cutting myself off on it, and I'd appreciate it if others did the same. The reasons for a given edition's failure are myriad and can be read and discussed about elsewhere (Designers & Dragons is a good start). Ultimately, in the long tail of things, every edition of D&D "failed" or will "fail", because that's the nature of the industry. While the history of such is worthwhile to note, it rarely tells us much about the actual game, and it's important to remember each reinvention of the game is a success to anybody who had fun playing it. TL;DR: This is thread is for game reviews, critcism is welcome, but this is a debate that usually doesn't go anywhere meaningful.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:42
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I mean, is it really edition flagwaving when it's addressing stated facts in the sameself review that are, well, wrong?
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Apr 17, 2018 03:46
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gradenko_2000 posted:look all I'm saying is, if you're going to use a single RPG to run every genre anyway, why house rule DnD 5e when this already exists and has done your homework for you Because players refuse to learn to play any games other than D&D because they think all games are equally reliant on player knowledge of the system. Seriously though, GURPS is great, so long as it's in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. The Basic Set is loving awful at explaining how the system should be used, but ultimately it's a solid system that's pretty simple for the players, even if it does front load a lot of work onto the GM. Alien Rope Burn posted:Isn't that what Challenge Ratings were designed for and around? I mean, one can certainly point out the flaws in the CR system in regard to varied player character groups (either due to randomness or choice) and the actual assignment of CRs, but it was definitely an early attempt to balance encounters. Granted, there were some occasional subversions - dragons were given artificially low CRs to make them more difficult - but generally speaking that was a deliberate and obvious attempt to make sure heroes weren't overwhelmed. Emphasis on attempt, of course, but the intention seems clear to me. Yeah, I'll happily agree that the CR rating system was very broken (looking at the loving rage drakes). However, Challenge Ratings were designed to help the DM work out the relative difficulty of a given threat, and how much XP they should get for it. I'll get to this later in the write-up, but it was assumed that in an adventure, 10% of encounters should be lower CR than the party, 20% should be easy if handled properly (the example given that if you can take out the invisible cleric that's healing the beefy fighter types, the fight gets much easier), 50% should be of equal CR, 15% should be of up to 5 higher and 5% should be higher still. Those encounters include traps by default, and can also include negotiations, environmental hazards or just about anything else that requires (or at least risks) the loss of resources to solve a problem. quote:Well, you can build tension with things other than "and then I take your character sheet away from you". There are games that are built around rapid character turnover, like Call of Cthulhu or RECON, and that can be fine if the game is designed around that. But those aren't games that lend themselves to or demand extensive and detailed character growth like D&D does. And the thing is, that D&D 3rd Edition expects players to be involved in combat on a very regular basis, and then gives a random chance of just losing a character. Now that's something I think we can agree on - 3e does require far too much mechanical investment into a character for its risk of character death. Now, at 5th-9th level, maybe the local temple owes the party a few favours, or at least likes the party well enough to be willing to use one of their few diamonds of sufficient value in exchange for a favour at a later date, but that does require a lot of DM input. Also, honestly, losing a level in 3.x is a pain in the arse because of how much can change on a given level. I mean, sure, you catch up quickly enough because you're getting more XP than the rest of the party were, but having been there before, that was by far my least favourite part of the game; enough that I would gen new characters if my character died, in spite of the fact that we had the diamonds for me to get a resurrection spell used on me. I do think that the permanent negative level in Pathfinder is a better way of handling this (particularly since it's only a 4th level spell to remove them) because it still has the mechanical cost and recovery time of coming back from the dead without the ball-ache of removing feats and skills and such. Personally though, for crunchy RPGs with a slice of danger I prefer GURPS and RoleMaster FRP over D&D 3.x/Pathfinder. In both games you're easier to take out of a fight than to outright kill, and good decisions in combat will typically reduce (though not eliminate) the risk. As I said at the start of my write-up, however, D&D 3e is not my favourite game, nor is it even my favourite edition of D&D. That said, it does seem unfairly maligned in some respects, and I think part of that does come from people having ignored half of the PHB and most of the DMG. It certainly has its problems (particularly at higher levels), but I still wouldn't call it a bad game per se (even by today's standards); just a mediocre one that still managed to be an overall improvement over its predecessor. The most important thing to come out of it, as far as I'm concerned, was the OGL. quote:I think there's also been a tendency to champion 2nd Edition as a reaction to 3rd Edition, and it at least reads more coherently than its forebear. But yeah, they deliberately changed little for fear of blowback from their consumers, and so you have stuff like AC being kept the way it is even though the designers full well knew it always felt rear end-backwards. There I can definitely agree with you. I actually quite like old school D&D, and I could imagine having quite a bit of fun with core only 2e (though there are definitely a few tweaks I would want to make), but I do think that taking all of the different subsystems of AD&D and making them work more consistently compared with each other was something that needed to happen. That said, given the opportunity, I'd play just about any edition of RuneQuest over any edition of D&D. Edit: Alien Rope Burn posted:If we could not devolve further into edition flag-waving, I'd appreciate it. I know I've done my part - not that I'm championing one version. But I'm cutting myself off on it, and I'd appreciate it if others did the same. The reasons for a given edition's failure are myriad and can be read and discussed about elsewhere (Designers & Dragons is a good start). Ultimately, in the long tail of things, every edition of D&D "failed" or will "fail", because that's the nature of the industry. While the history of such is worthwhile to note, it rarely tells us much about the actual game, and it's important to remember each reinvention of the game is a success to anybody who had fun playing it. You're right, and for my part in it I'm sorry.
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Apr 17, 2018 03:47
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Mr. Maltose posted:I mean, is it really edition flagwaving when it's addressing stated facts in the sameself review that are, well, wrong? You can always write your own review if you think you have a better take on it. No niche protection here, and if it's in a review, it'll get archived, so it'd be the most productive way to do it in the long term. TheGreatEvilKing seems like he either was unaware TG has a big coalition of 4th Edition fans or is actively being combative, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure you're preaching to the choir and one guy who's already made his opposed opinion abundantly clear. I got a lot of complaints this morning and I'm no mod, I'm just the OP. I don't like having to act like a mod. It's really not my favorite role-playing class. Please, let it be. hectorgrey posted:You're right, and for my part in it I'm sorry. It's fine, you deserved a chance to retort to my comments and I think it came out well as a discussion. I'm not throwing blame on people for acting naturally when reviews of "competing" D&D editions are being run simultaneously. It's okay to comment on things. Just try and go easy.
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Apr 17, 2018 04:14
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I think that trying to draw a correlation between the "success" of a game line and the hiring-and-firing practices of the parent company is a fool's errand, because any kind of exposure at all to corporate culture tells us that these things are not meritocracies or rational decisions.
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Apr 17, 2018 04:37
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Agreed on the first, disagree on the second. If your entire class is defined by the ability to pick a lock, maybe your class doesn't have enough meat? The rogue and the wizard get a lot of weird overlap where the rogue can steal all the wizard's tricks by paying money and the wizard gives up combat power to do poo poo you don't care about most of the time. The real problem is that the wizard plays "I win" cards and the rogue has a chance to fail, but if a 5th level rogue's lockpicking ability was knock at-will no one would care. People would be fine if wizards could burn spells to do things worse than what other classes get for free. I dunno because that was just kind of an example of one thing a caster steals. Like, there's the classic example of how Druids in 3.x at least are just better than fighters. Like you could be a fighter, or you could be a bear which has like 20 strength, multiple attacks, AC and big HP all in one package. And then every druid is two bears. One of which who can (after feats) still cast spells. I mean, rogues do other things to, and I don't disagree that the class has traditionally been a mess as far as design goes, but they've still had a sort of niche of being sneaky-stabby dudes with lots of skills. The problem being of course that casters can just replicate most if not all skills with a spell, without rolling, stabbing in 3.x is worse than magic, and who cares if you can sneak if we have invisibility. I just think that the base caster classes should not just have a "I do your job but better" button for every non-caster class available. That and yeah, I've always supported that line of thinking with magic in games. If a wizard can say "I just open this lock" then a rogue should be able to say "I just open this lock."
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Apr 17, 2018 05:25
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Alien Rope Burn posted:If we could not devolve further into edition flag-waving, I'd appreciate it. I know I've done my part - not that I'm championing one version. But I'm cutting myself off on it, and I'd appreciate it if others did the same. The reasons for a given edition's failure are myriad and can be read and discussed about elsewhere (Designers & Dragons is a good start). Ultimately, in the long tail of things, every edition of D&D "failed" or will "fail", because that's the nature of the industry. While the history of such is worthwhile to note, it rarely tells us much about the actual game, and it's important to remember each reinvention of the game is a success to anybody who had fun playing it. All editions of D&D are bad, and all reviews of D&D are bad reviews.
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Apr 17, 2018 05:58
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Thuryl posted:The Rogue/Thief class seems to have a pretty weird and awkward history in itself, in terms of how it fits into the game. I've heard a few of the really old-school types talk about it as the class you picked if you rolled bad stats and wanted your PC to die quickly, although I don't know how representative that opinion ever was. The point where I really got into AD&D was 2nd edition, so my only real experience with rogues prior is OSR products of various kinds(which are intended to emulate the True Original Feel(tm)) and yeah. Yeah. They seem to have a boner for making rogues a "punishment class." Technically you have a bunch of skills that the other classes don't, but they tend to cap out at something like 50% chances of succeeding(at stuff that may kill you if they don't, like hiding from things that can kill you, disarming things that can kill you or climbing at heights that can kill you) at level 10 or higher. So for most of the game you're really just a worse version of the Fighter because you're not going to be using your actual class-defining features for anything. 2nd ed AD&D had something of the same issue at low levels, but at least rogues became useful considerably faster, plus they had some Lord-esque features in terms of establishing their own thieves' guilds.
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Apr 17, 2018 05:58
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Alien Rope Burn posted:If we could not devolve further into edition flag-waving, I'd appreciate it. I know I've done my part - not that I'm championing one version. But I'm cutting myself off on it, and I'd appreciate it if others did the same. The reasons for a given edition's failure are myriad and can be read and discussed about elsewhere (Designers & Dragons is a good start). Ultimately, in the long tail of things, every edition of D&D "failed" or will "fail", because that's the nature of the industry. While the history of such is worthwhile to note, it rarely tells us much about the actual game, and it's important to remember each reinvention of the game is a success to anybody who had fun playing it. My apologies.
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Apr 17, 2018 05:59
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 So on other message boards I posted this review there's a bit of a demand in curiosity on my revisions for NS7: The Return of Hallbjorn. I compiled a list of the major changes here: 1.) Half-Face in this case was still a Dorvae, but he took on the guise of Harald, a bearded Northlander godi who visited the witch PC at the end of Plague in Trotheim to commend her on the sacrifice she made for her beloved. Now he can treat her as an equal, given that she made a pact with her patron to let him take Althunak's place once she killed said god. He said that the Lord of Ice and Stone sends his regards, just as a huge jotund troll rose out of the stormy waves to throw giant rocks at Silvermeade Hall. After subduing Harald with black tentacles she reunited with the rest of the party who were sending out a fleet to attack the new threat. 2.) During the fight 3 longships from the sea arrived, Hallbjorn was among them. When the PCs were knocked off their summoned shark mounts and saved, only then did I reveal the adventure's name when they discovered the identity of their rescuer. In addition to Northlander Nieuland colonists, I had Ammuyad Caliphate and Huun sailors among the fleet, including two named NPCs for the respective factions: Nejla, a dimensional dervish Magus and Uldin, a Ranger whose hawk companion delivered potions and spell scrolls to characters climbing the troll/on other ships. My final NPC was Turid, Hallbjorn's wife and a Cleric of Odin. They did not get much screen-time save to give a "face" to the colonist factions, although I plan to have Uldin reappear in NS9 when the Huun invade the Northlands. 3.) I initially had no plans to have Nieuland contain indigenous people, troll or otherwise. But after some thought I decided to on account that our Norwegian gamer noticed hints of the Vinland Saga in the initial set-up. So instead I had the Oestryn Isles be home to a people known as the Crey, a human ethnic group strongly based off of real-world Cree people. 4.) The impetus to travel back to the Isles was motivated not by greed or crushing the natives, but when Hallbjorn discussed strange weather as of late in the normally temperate isles. When the witch PC informed him about Harald and discovered that said "godi" was gone, the tracks he left before teleporting had soil found only on the Oestryn Isles. The party realized that their old friend Althunak was making a comback in the place Hallbjorn ended up, and they disembarked to set sail once again. This was not a hard choice, as the sailors had friends and family back there. 5.) When the PCs arrived to Kasternack, they found a supernaturally cold fog over the area. A group of cloaked cultists of Althunak were holding a lottery where they gave each villager stones of different colors. Many of the stones were similarly-hued, but one of them was different from the others. When the cultists drew a stone from the bad, the person with the matching color was their pick. Said stone was enchanted with a geas spell to make the person travel alone to the Wolf Cairn Mountains. There were similar lotteries among the colonist and Crey villages. When the PCs arrived to stop this lottery, the cultists summoned a monstrous shadow dire bear (which existed in NS7 as a unique random encounter) to fight them. 6.) The witch PC ended up taking the stone from the "winner" in an effort to stop the lottery, only to be affected with the geas herself. Granted, this was a risky maneuver, although she had a cohort NPC she could play for the duration so the group was fine with this. I had the PCs basically follow her tracks and get involve in encounters on the way to help lead them to her. 7.) In Smoking Lake Crannog, Half-Face/Harald converted parts of the ruins into an arena-like stage for the champions to fight each other. The Cult of Althunak is most active on the fringes of the world, and it was not hard for them to learn of the Oestryn Isles' unique situation. With a "ship's graveyard" style mishmash of marooned cultures, the Cult could use it as a testing ground for the martial prowess of those respective cultures without incurring the wrath of their homelands. Half-Face threatened to plunge various villages into deadly winters if they did not choose a "champion" among themselves via the lottery system. He planned to have the champions fight each other and the winner would join the Children of Althunak (this is not a yes/no choice). 8.) In addition to Kasternack, I added the villages of Duhran near the south and Uliastai to the north to represent where the Ammuyad and Huun settled respectively. The troll villages I replaced with Crey villages. I had it so that the Ammuyad people were the only village who refused to pick a champion, so I had an encounter when a pair of osyluth (bone devils) were planning to blow up a large beaver dam and flood the village. The PCs managed to stop them, although Nejla did not know that and already offered herself as Duhran's Champion (much to the consternation of the community). 9.) I reworked one of the stone golems at Giant Hill to be a multi-armed ice golem which rose to attack the party for interfering with the aforementioned osyluth encounter. The witch PC met a champion from one of the Crey villages (Beaver Lodge) and his sister. There was worry he'd kill her right then and there, but the specifics of the geas compelled both of them to fight each other in the arena and not right here and now. 10.) I had inspirations from Vengeance of the Long Serpent to have Althunak-sympathizers among the various colonist and Crey villages which the PCs could root out and destroy. However this did not occur given that the PCs were in one form or another heading directly for the Crannog. The PCs were allowed entrance, weapons and all, in that the Children of Althunak were confident enough in their numbers and strength of arms that they "wouldn't be stupid enough to try something here." 11.) I imported the Lair of the Thrall Collector's giants from NS6 to be guardians at the Crannog, along with various Children of Althunak recruited from the various villages. Non-members were allowed inside as spectators for the eventual games, as Harald wanted a Rome-like Bread & Circuses element. He even told a story about the legend of Spartacus, a slave-paladin who in a decadent empire convinced his masters to pit him against the colosseum's monsters instead of the other slaves. Harald spun this tale into a similar act of self-sacrifice the respective champions chosen. What I revealed with a successful knowledge check was that Harald did not tell the part where Spartacus led a successful slave rebellion. 12.) The witch PC managed to exploit a wording in the geas spell ("travel alone to the fortress in the eastern mountains and fight the other champions there"). It said nothing explicit about killing them, so she used a covert message spell to the other Champions. The champions feint-fighted about while the other PCs snuck about to scan the crannog's defenses. At this point the player who used to play a skald but was now a fighter wanted to bring his old PC back, so I had him show up on an enchanted ship to disrupt the blood-sport. This distracted Half-Face/Harald and the various Children of Althunak that the witch, the Champions, and the rest of the PCs fomented a rebellion and started killing the cultists around the crannog. 13.) I planned to introduce the Jomsvikings as a hostile third-party, angered at the PCs for killling the Jomsking and wanting revenge. However this part was excised due to time constraints. 14.) Skraeling troll mooks were replaced with a mixture of human barbarian cultists and low-grade demons. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Apr 17, 2018 |
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Apr 17, 2018 08:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think that trying to draw a correlation between the "success" of a game line and the hiring-and-firing practices of the parent company is a fool's errand, because any kind of exposure at all to corporate culture tells us that these things are not meritocracies or rational decisions. Lisa Stevens was in one of their first firings, and we all know how that turned out. TheGreatEvilKing posted:My apologies. You're free to review games how you like, just keep in mind there are a number of folks here frustrated to see their favorite edition oft-used as a chew toy and are pretty used to the arguments against it. (I've hardly played 4th Edition outside of a few con games, myself.) But I don't know how many times I've been like "Man, who would want to play the Tax Accountant class? Nobody!" and somebody will bust in through the door and be like "Actually I was in a game where I played a tax accountant collecting the Imperial Tithe in Dark Heresy and we took down fatcats corrupted by chaos and it was awesome!" You never know who might like a thing.
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Apr 17, 2018 10:17
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Alien Rope Burn posted:But I don't know how many times I've been like "Man, who would want to play the Tax Accountant class? Nobody!" and somebody will bust in through the door and be like "Actually I was in a game where I played a tax accountant collecting the Imperial Tithe in Dark Heresy and we took down fatcats corrupted by chaos and it was awesome!" You never know who might like a thing. Also a whole lot of elfgamers seem to be unable to tell the difference between "good/sensible design decisions" and "my personal preferences."
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Apr 17, 2018 13:20
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:If they announced 6e tomorrow and decided that they were going to fix the fighter problem by removing the class and including spellswords instead, I guarantee this board would be pissed.
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Apr 17, 2018 14:40
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They should just release the Book of Nine Swords again with the core rules bolted on and call that 6e
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Apr 17, 2018 14:43
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I mean if magic is going to be the only way you get worthwhile abilities in a game, deciding the game is going to include only characters with magic would hardly be insane.
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Apr 17, 2018 14:51
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It would be such an uncharacteristic admission that I think it would be greeted warmly.
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Apr 17, 2018 14:55
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Nothing will ever get fixed in D&D until they admit that the problem is one resolution system is 'I have a limited stock but I simply say what happens and it does' and the other is 'I say I am going to make the attempt to make a thing maybe happen'. It's two fundamentally different resolution systems pretending they're the same game.
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Apr 17, 2018 14:56
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