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The creepiness of owning a given number of cats (n) is expressed by the formula: Creepiness = (n-1)^2 , where n is a positive integer. That guy with seven cats scores a whopping 36 creepiness units, (CU), which grants a +6 to intimidate and a -6 to diplomacy and ever having sex checks.
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Sep 28, 2009 23:50
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Etherwind posted:What does 4 creepiness units result in? You have to take at least one level of a prestige class from the book of erotic fiction as soon as possible. Also you will die alone. EDIT: P.S. I have 1 creepiness unit, which causes me to breathe audibly through my mouth when I stand behind a girl.
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Sep 29, 2009 00:39
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A friend of mine was upset that in 4E there is a "stealth" skill instead of Hide and Move silently. That got me wondering; has there every been a movie or book where a character was really good at one of those things but not the other? Has having someone be good at one skill but not the other ever contributed to a game in any meaningful way?
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Sep 29, 2009 01:26
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Riidi WW posted:angel summoner and the bmx bandit is a much better and more faithful presentation of the fighter-wizard party dynamic When I saw it, I found it hard to believe that it was not made explicitly for the purpose of making fun of the caster/non-caster dynamic in mid-to-high level D&D. In my groups, we almost always played perpetually between levels 1 and 6, so casters were never really insane. One day, we decided for fun to run some level 12 characters. My sorceror essentially never touched the ground or became visible in between turning every enemy into a rabbit.
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Sep 29, 2009 16:48
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opaopa13 posted:Did they somehow miss all the feats/power/items that give bonuses like, "+5 to stealth as long as you stay in the square you started this turn in" or "+3 on any Perception check to notice a trap"? These concepts aren't just possible in 4e, they're already there! Not to mention that having separate skills for "search" and "spot" frequently lead to extremely retarded and counterintuitive situations. Such as the incredibly alert and keen-eyed ranger somehow having no chance to notice the outline of a trap door, the switch for a secret chamber, or the snare made of vines on the forest floor. Or, if you granted such a chance with DM fiat, then the search skill's use becomes even more nebulous. Plus, search only ever came up when used actively (unless you were an elf), meaning the only way people ever found traps without setting them off was if they decided to search every area they moved through - which in turn slowed their rate of progress by an unbelievable amount.
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Sep 29, 2009 18:45
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Ashenai posted:I was a giant rules nerd, and I actually knew the grapple rules off the top of my head at one point (yes, all of them.) Not anymore, though! Once you learned the grapple rules, you realized; "Holy poo poo, we should be doing this a LOT more often. Hey rogue; you like sneak attacking all round every round?"
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Oct 12, 2009 15:02
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Dyrnwyn posted:Completely recovering from the brink of unconsciousness by taking a 5 minute breather and spending 4 healing surges. Not that I'm complaining. "The Brink of Unconsciousness" = "Man, that last swing almost got me! And I need to bandage that cut on my arm soon. Also, I need to get off my feet and catcf my breath; I'm exhausted!"
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Oct 14, 2009 00:24
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raruler posted:"You enter the village, in front of one of the huts is a sign depicting several lions." That's actually pretty funny as long as it never ever ever ever happens.
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Oct 20, 2009 17:43
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D&D 4E: What they say: "We tried to avoid save-or-die effects as much as possible when designing traps and powers" What the Grognard hears: "I should be able to pick up a bucket of cyanide and drink it without dying and you have no choice but to let me MU HA HA HA HAAAAA FOURTH EDITION!!!!!" I also love how he was outraged that the druid's beast form was a "loving mini-T-Rex" when the appearance of your beast form is 100% flavor and makes no in-game difference. It communicates pretty clearly that this DM hates that his players even get to be a little too awesome in his IMAGINATION.
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Oct 21, 2009 16:10
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CuddlyZombie posted:See, I just talked about the cyanide barbarian with someone on AIM, and it's actually a great character idea: the Barbarian drinks his cyanide/battery acid/whatever whenever its time for him to rage. Yeah, I guess it's fairly cool. However, if you're DMing and your player announces, essentially, that they are committing suicide, there's nothing stopping you from informing them that this is probably going to kill them just because this is fourth edition. Also for the record I have lost more characters in 4E than when I played 3E so there.
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Oct 21, 2009 16:21
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Yeah look at that 'spergy buffoon, denying the obvious danger of suggestive clothing on pretend elf women.
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Oct 21, 2009 23:51
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Oligopsony posted:yeah but the letter he's referencing said nothing of the sort; it just a hysteria that crawled out of his brain You're right, I just read the letter and it's totally reasonable. In fact, I doubt that the guy in questions actually read the whole thing, since he was dumb enough to post a link to it in his rant.
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Oct 22, 2009 00:04
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TG Discussion: "So your a weedy git of an orc, and he is an olympian god of a man. "
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Oct 22, 2009 01:59
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P.S: Interesting fact; In 4E, your HP at first level is SIGNIFICANTLY more than the amount you gain at each later level. Why is this? It's in order to give players the ability to survive unexpected critical hits and actually be CAPABLE of running from a losing fight rather than simply being suddenly sent from 80% HP to dead in one hit. If you want your players to have a higher risk of death, well, just up the level of the monsters by a notch or two? This isn't exactly rocket science. 4E is literally better at giving the players the chance to use discretion over valor (especially with healing surges and encounter powers) than any previous edition I can think of, and at lower levels, there is absolutely no comparison. At low level 3rd edition, I saw a brand new level 1 barbarian, fresh off the character builder, get killed in the second round of combat ever. He was fighting two level 1 orcs, just a little speedbump encounter. The barbarian was full health and suffered a critical hit. Rules as written meant that he was now eating 3d12+12 damage, which is instant death even from barbarian HP. Whoopsie-daisy! Guess you shouldn't have assumed that your fully-healed, battle-ready killing machine hero could take down two nobodies with a whole party of backup! The player was really annoyed, because he had spent quite a while fleshing out his cool backstory for his awesome displaced barbarian princeling, and here he gets killed by factors completely out of his control in the first fight ever. So I guess my point is; more hp, more gradual loss of health, more chances to meaningfully use options like tactics and fleeing rather than being one shotted by some random rear end in a top hat.
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Oct 22, 2009 14:46
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Yes, really, the reason that PCs might want to have a "speedbump" fight is that they are playing as heroes who can make mincemeat of unprepared or unskilled enemies in a fair fight. Every now and then it's nice to, you know, do that. (especially if there isn't a decent chance that even a normal dude is going to one-shot them regardless of their decisions when he rolls a lucky crit on his longbow) Anyway we are derailing the thread. Let's talk Grognards. One example that I remember was a .txt file just full of trap ideas from around the internet that I picked up. I think it was written int he heyday of 2nd. ed, which really showed in some of the traps: "-Reconstructing Skeletons: This has the stats of a normal skeleton but it has infinite hitpoints. A player can't kill it, but don't let them know that. If someone rolls a critical hit, the skeleton breaks apart but reforms one round later. This is a good trap for when you really want to kill off the players (good time for them to hear the bad guy's speech while they are out ; )" My goodness, what a fantastic "trap" - a monster which, for no obvious reason, can't be harmed in any way! And a real masterstroke there when you explicitly said not to tell the PCs they aren't damaging it with their attacks. This is the sort of thing that will keep players coming back to your table for more! "-Spike gun: This trap looks like a normal closet, but if someone steps inside of it, an iron spike shoots out of the wall and into the other one. Allow a save if the player has mentioned that they suspect a trap, and instant death on a hit." yes, what could be more fun than being killed by a closet. Move over, J.R.R. Tolkien!
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Oct 22, 2009 18:52
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Fuego Fish posted:Those are terrible. Let me see if I can find the file on the internets again. The last time I read it I was in middle school, so... EDIT: No luck finding that grody old .txt file from my teenage years, but I did turn this up: http://hubpages.com/hub/101rpgtrapsandchallenges In no particular order; 101 Traps posted:
My favourite is #62, which as far as I'm concerned is basically the full text of the 2nd edition DMG. In fairness to the author, there are some pretty neat ideas in there: "98. A locked, impassable door that, when touched, beeps and says "Password please." nearby is a large, onyx pyramid on a pedestal that, when touched, steals the spirit of the person who touched it and randomly injects the spirit of one of it's other captives into the vacant body. One of these souls knows the password, and a number of them are violent, insane, or previous adventurers with their own agendas who wont be too keen on giving up the body they're in." -that could make for a really fun "social" trap, where the key to victory is some serious bluff and diplomacy. Epicurus fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Oct 22, 2009 |
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Oct 22, 2009 19:08
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Fire posted:That's pretty outrageous and is one of the more obtuse examples of grognardism. The fact is that, if you are playing by the rules and using honest method to generate random numbers, it should be 50 50. What I have seen is a lot of gamers tend to use dice that they perceive to favor higher numbers, thinking that they are lucky. Since it is impossible for the manufacturing process to always produce dice that give a normal distribution, this has a survival of the fittest effect on people's dice collection. It seems improbable to me that his die is really that good. Seems more likely that this guy is just experiencing some serious confirmation bias and had a lucky sample of rolls.
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Oct 22, 2009 19:39
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Bob, where is that from? Is that a Gygax quote? BLASPHEMY. DMs must be True Neutral, or they lose their "Suspension of Disbelief" power! As an aside, one of the biggest lightbulbs in my DMing career was the idea that the PCs are not, in fact, just like every other shmuck in the game world, that there aren't hundreds of level 20 wizards flying around doing way more important poo poo 24/7. I think it was Eberron that first opened my mind to the concept that the PCs could actually be the best, pound for pound, at their specialty in the whole world. Once this idea hit me, my games suddenly got a lot more fun.
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Oct 23, 2009 16:47
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ZorbaTHut posted:
That WAS a pretty epic demonstration of obliviousness. This guy is just so into the Star Wars universe that he's not thinking of Star Wars as a movie written by people from real life but rather as its own complete universe.
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Oct 25, 2009 08:02
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Ashenai posted:I used to be a GM (mod) in the Core Coliseum (kind of like an arena for D&D characters) a long time ago, and this reminded me of one of the (3.5) fights I ran, an 18th level warrior-type against an 18th level mage. The warrior actually won... thanks to his 16th level Leadership cohort casting a Contingent Teleport, Quickened Invisibility, Dimensional Anchor, Quickened Fly, and Anti-Magic Field, all before the opponent could act. If you were actually involved with something like this for a significant amount of time, your hatred of third edition must be blazing with the heat of a million furious supernovae, because I am literally having an aneurysm just thinking about this.
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Oct 26, 2009 19:22
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Actually I think that that test should have its own thread I'm gonna do that okay?
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Oct 27, 2009 16:25
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RagnarokAngel posted:Its funny because those roles technically always existed there just werent very good mechanics for keeping them in check so Wizards and Clerics basicallly fuliflled all of them at once.
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Oct 29, 2009 15:59
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Cyrai posted:Whenever I roleplay, I make sure to play the exact same role I play in real life One interesting this about D&D is when you play someone who is significantly less powerful than the actual you, at least in some respect. If you're pretty booksmart in real life, it can be interesting to try to see the world through the eyes of your int 8 fighter. Of course, somehow this never seems to come up with the ability scores Strength, Dexterity, Constitution or Charisma with any of the people I've ever played D&D with. What a coincidence.
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Oct 29, 2009 18:32
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Benagain posted:That would actually work really well as long as you stayed in a forest. It'd be like some horrible cross between the Blair Witch Project and Rambo for anyone you came across. Jesus christ, just thinking about this is making my skin crawl. A loving invisible, silent, shapeshifting stealth tree stalking you through the woods, looking to stab you with its sharpened branches when you let your guard down and pull you into its root-filled maw!
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Oct 30, 2009 05:24
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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is like a poor person complaining about switching from a Randian dystopia to democratic socialism.
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Oct 31, 2009 02:10
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As a longtime 3E GM, may I say that if I never hear the phrase "caster levels" again, it will be too soon.
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Oct 31, 2009 16:42
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The last quote above is correct, it can sometimes begin to slightly tax your suspension of disbelief to imagine that you literally cannot take a step, and yet you attack unhindered. And yet, who the gently caress cares?
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Oct 31, 2009 21:24
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Fuego Fish posted:"Your god has no sway over the realms of winter, blah blah blah" problem solved. Or just, you know, play an edition that doesn't have hosed up spells like this all over the place, just waiting for some OCD guy to find them and realize they can now gently caress dragons with a level 3 spell.
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Nov 1, 2009 22:13
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Etherwind posted:I think we should institute a ban on 4.Fail Grognard for this month, it's too deep and easy a well to draw from. Dunno if I can make it a whole month without my fix.
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Nov 1, 2009 22:31
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moths posted:As a DM, it's nice to sometimes have combats that the players aren't intended to win but survive and learn from. Or have an exciting skill challenge as they try to get the hell away from it. Is it nice to have them happen entirely at random and out of your control because the CRs are meaningless?
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Nov 4, 2009 00:00
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Brace yaself, we talkin' tomb of horrors here, from a blog called "Grognardia". http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/09/retrospective-tomb-of-horrors.html Some Grognard Motherfucker posted:While it might be an exaggeration to say that 1978's Tomb of Horrors is the greatest D&D module of all time -- though the case could certainly be made -- I think it is fair to say that no other module is a better Rorschach Test of one's gaming sensibilities. By the time I first encountered module S1 in 1980, it was already legendary as the ultimate "killer dungeon." That alone ensured that I would buy and inflict it on my players, both because I wanted in on the excitement and also because I knew my players would love a good challenge. As it turns out, they liked it well enough that they threw multiple waves of their characters against it until, after weeks of attempts, they succeeded in making it to the end. What the christ? So these players thought that a dungeon was fine if they had to literally throw away the lives of characters to make slow progress in it? They only conceivable way to survive was to 'respawn' again and again? Jesus H. Christ. Some people complain the 4E is inspired by WoW, but I think some of the older editions were inspired by the massive "gently caress you" games of the NES that eventually spawned 'I Want to be The Guy." Can you guess which is a worse inspiration? but wait, there's more posted:Despite all their planning, no one managed to make it all the way through to the end of the Tomb. That is, no one until Morgan Just. Morgan was the biggest badass of my old campaign, a 16th-level Lawful Neutral human Fighter with a goodly selection of magic items played by my cleverest player. He was rarely played, because he'd been formally retired, but my friend Shawn would bring him out for "special occasions." Tomb of Horrors was one such occasion and he didn't fail to disappoint. Building on what he'd learned through the characters who'd somehow managed to escape the Tomb -- often without their clothes and possessions -- he entered it alone, armed with the best "special" adventuring gear he could muster, like sealed clay pots filled with green slime, various items with continual light cast upon them, and an entire bag of holding filled with iron spikes. Jesus loving christ. You want to talk about forced, video-gamey, unheroic, ridiculous bullshit, look no further than the army of suicidal idiots whose goal in life is to march to certain death and tell their cousin how they died. THIS IS GOOD WRITING.
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Nov 6, 2009 04:00
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I will give the guy ups for being frank about what he thinks is fun and at least pretending to acknowledge that there might be other concepts of fun, but I actually object to the idea that a module is well-written when the only conceivable way to survive it is not only to have "backup" characters to try again when the first ones die, but in fact to have many many sets of such characters. The whole thing is pretty patently ridiculous, and if you think about this in-character for a moment... Calling it "one of the best modules ever", decrying how soft people are these days...
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Nov 6, 2009 05:02
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shotgunbadger posted:Attention TGD: Grognard and 'different taste' is not the same, in fact they are quite different, there is nothing Grognard here. thanks for the heads up bro
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Nov 6, 2009 06:15
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some grognard posted:Attacks: Bite +34 melee, 2 claws +29 melee, 2 wings +29 melee...yadda yadda I don't have a problem with this one. This was always a huge pet peeve of mine; the dragon never misses its attacks under normal circumstances. This is principally a problem with 3.x's retarded failure to increase AC as level rises resulting in bullshit like this. I mean, watch an action movie or read a book and see how the heroes dodge around massive creatures as these try to ponderously flatten them, whereas in 3.x these creatures hit for a tiny attack every round. And another thing! How the heck does a dragon find time to bite, claw twice, use its wings, and tail slap in a coordinated way every six seconds? Almost every monster with multiple attacks has a statblock that seems to suggest that in a fight it is spinning like a top, flailing its appendages purely at random in a spastic dance of death. Something tells me that if you let the authors of the 3.5 MM have their way, the statblock for an ordinary human would list under 'full attack': 2 punches, 2 elbows, 2 kicks, 2 knee strikes, 1 bite, 1 headbutt
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Nov 12, 2009 06:59
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Phuzzy posted:Jet Li's statblock That's the thing though; even a martial artist tends to attack with the same limb or pair of limbs several times, not just once per crazy limb they have. I was never even sure how to describe what it would look like when a gargantuan dragon hit someone with two claws while biting them and also hitting them with its wings in such a short span of time (during which, after all, the other player's attacks also happen).
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Nov 12, 2009 07:07
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Yeah, to be honest, while that pregnant zombie monster thing is pretty awful, in a game intended to be heavy on dark horror, that seems like a good fit. Otherwise it's just too hosed up.
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Nov 12, 2009 21:09
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Angry Diplomat posted:e: bah, I just got baited hard, well played I didn't think it was bait. Also I am now so anxious about not being a misogynist that I am going to fill the next dungeon I write with nothing but a 50/50 split of the giant carnivorous zombie womb ogre and the giant acid-peeing ballcrusher cock-creature. EQUALITY
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Nov 14, 2009 19:53
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How about some horror stories? I've always wondered what it's like to work in a gaming store. I can't decide if it would be awesome of awful!
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Nov 15, 2009 21:57
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Drox posted:4rons. Is that new? I don't think I've heard that one before. I guess the idea is that as you increase in level, fights should just get easier and easier instead of scaling up too? I mean, if you're level 10, you don't need a 10 to hit the stuff you were fighting at level 2, but you might need one to hit the stuff you are fighting at level 10. If you really wanted to feel like king pimp, you could I guess go back to the crappy kobold caves and beat them all to poo poo, but really isn't the best default position that level-appropriate monsters scale up with you, all else equal? How would it be superior if monsters suddenly got hit more and more and had to balance it in different ways?
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Nov 16, 2009 02:37
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I used to put tremendous effort into every dungeon I made coming up with a plausible ecology. If the monsters were humanoids, the PCs would find barracks (with locked weapons), a supply room with food and liquor (also locked up), bedrooms, signs, traps only in unused areas, etc. Monsters had food sources, predator-prey interrelationships that determined where they would be willing to go, etc. I don't think the players ever once noticed or commented on it. I think there might be players who like to figure things out and really immerse themselves in the biology and ecology of the world, but I think those players are pretty rare and you shouldn't cater to them off the bat.
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Nov 17, 2009 17:52
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