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DnD Next is a lot like making an Old Kentucky Shark whiskey, You mix Old Grandad, Landshark Beer, and Gummy candies to create an unpalatable mess that nobody likes even if they like the individual ingredients. Martial healing is like Wild Turkey American Honey, delcious and smooth with a sweet flavor that mixes well into citrus teas. It lets you do more as a group be letting your tastebuds focus on bolder flavors or allow you to simply sip alone if the encounter calls for the fighter to hang out by himself.
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# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 15:47 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:47 |
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Kai Tave posted:How do you guys cook hamburgers on a stove? Do you prep the meat in any special way? Temperature settings, cook times, I'm all ears. Hit me with your best stovetop hamburger techniques please. If you're pressing down on your patties, don't. You're squeezing fat out and causing them to dry out and burn on the edges more rapidly. If you aren't, consider added some marinade or getting higher fat content patties. I like making Mojitos with the mint from my back yard and then finishing it with my home grown bananas. Later I look at the mango trees in backyard and curse the gods for not having them be old enough to bear fruit yet. DnD Next's theater of the mind is a poor decision to try and use as a base for a modular system. It requires too much rules overlay and interlocking if you want to make the game's combat more meaty and meaningful in your tactical choices to the point where you might as well go play something that isn't actively working against you.
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# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 17:25 |
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Gr3y posted:I keep at least one bottle of this in my trunk at all times for when I have to go to somewhere where I must interact with people. If they're not the type of people I can share a bottle of trunk bourbon with I find that telling them that I have to take a break from listening to them them talk to go drink some of the bourbon that I keep in my trunk is a good way to un-break that ice. Old Grandad tastes like it was brewed inside a 1982 Chrysler Lebaron so not serving it out of your trunk is an insult its flavorful legacy. I like to keep a bottle of Rose in my trunk personally because I haven't been able to get rid of the stuff and I want it out of my house. If anybody else here is a big Gin person, I can't recommend Nolets enough if you want a smooth fruit flavor. Or if your a big traditionalist, turpentine is available at Home Depot at rock bottom prices right now. I wish Next introduced better fight resolution mechanics. DnD is a squad-based murder simulator first and an anything else second so why is it that alternate objectives, combat scenarios, and encounter designs are so hard to come by? Also have we seen anything that keeps aggro in this game? Lack of stickyness in previous DnD's meant that gentlemans agreements were the only reason the wizard survived anything.
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# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 17:51 |
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Mendrian posted:If I've just started drinking whiskey, what's a good way to go without breaking my wallet or my throat? Chivas. Its a blended scotch whiskey with smooth flavor. Note, you will be called a huge loser because its a blend and not single malt but I don't think you're quite ready to pull of the level of smug required for being a Whiskey Connoisseur at this point. Have they made a clarification of what prestige classes are? Because if leveling is anything like 3e where I should basically never stick to my class unless I'm a wizard I'm going to be more mad than when I see Whiskey Connoisseurs talk down to Wine Connoisseurs in some sort of smugularity.
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# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 19:19 |
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Lord Frisk posted:Ability scores may not be the best way to deal with how to mechanically plot a character in an rpg, but honestly, d&d isn't the best rpg. Those stats, with their inherent problems and missteps, convey everything about d&d, including its problems and missteps. You could make a functional game using ability scores but as long as ability scores convey both mental and physical traits and imply a huge difference between having them be fully trained and left bare its never going to work once any sort of roleplay shows up. That said, a 100% dungeon-crawling adventure could get away with DnD's score system as it stands which is exactly what DnD started with. The fact that ability scores haven't changed to reflect this (2e and its Comliness stat non-withstanding) is a testament to the staggering effect of grogs on the game. Nolet's Gin on the other hand is a great example of keeping a long-running thing good and modern. Its a classic Holland style gin that abandoned Turpentine as a flavoring agent (DEATH TO ABILITY SCORES AND TURPENTINE) and replaced with fruit infusions that make it smooth and sweet to drink. If you aren't having Nolet's Silver you aren't drinking a good gin.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 17:03 |
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Lord Frisk posted:But that's the problem right there (in bold). If they scrapped everything and built a new system, dropped classes, abilities, leveling, the six scores, and the d20, they wouldn't be making D&D, would they? I disagree, the issue is that DnD has tried to force people to like a pre-concieved game rather than tailor the game to a pre-concieved audience. If DnD Next restructured itself to focus on a specific demographic (lets go with a huge one with presumable overlap: video-game playing Adults 18-35) it would find out that a lot of its supposed "core" mechanics are meaningless, outdated, and conflict with expectations of the majority of the market. In addition, they would quickly note that the product fails to have profit generation mechanisms in line with what this demographic is comfortable with and expects. The fact that the Next team is basically pissing away a huge opportunity to rebuild brand equity, expand the player base, and retool the game around new and more efficient profit generation systems in favor of doing the same thing as before should insult you as a consumer. It means on a fundamental level they are uninterested in you and no amount of modules will produce a recommendable product.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 20:00 |
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Hodgepodge posted:This was also less of a problem because ability scores were initially random. So a high Strength did not preclude a high Charisma or whatever. Halloween Jack posted:Ability scores originally did barely anything except a bonus to experience and DM's discretion. They mattered about as much as alignment did in later editions. Thanks for bringing more nuances. Its really unfortunate that any alternate use for them rather than 3e and 4e's this is what determines what your character is good at in and out of combat is being lost in the shuffle while at the same time making these scores super, super important in 5e. In a lot of ways I think another thing holding back the 5e team is a desire to make random roll and a point buy a functional counterpoint of each other is a really, really bad idea because it hinders efficient development of them into anything new or interesting. Asimo posted:And is also one of the big early prominent examples of grognard word-of-mouth ruining something for no reason, since New Coke pretty much polled higher in every taste test they did, but it was different so there were media frenzies about it and people pre-bigoting themselves against it before even trying, and making up reasons why it was obviously horrible. It's both pretty interesting in retrospect, and pretty depressing. Polling higher in taste-tests is not a determinant of a better product. For instance, many products like cooking sauces tout that they do better in taste-tests than competitors but ultimately these products usually sell less than their competition. In food products, during taste tests people will typically select the more sugary and sweet one as it is the biologically "tastier" one. When it comes time to consume large amounts of it, the sweetness can be a major turn off resulting in purchase of the "worse tasting product" Of course much of it is also psychological in nature and as an advertiser myself I wouldn't begin to deny that but I did want to point out some nuance to that particular issue. Barudak fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Mar 4, 2013 |
# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 22:11 |
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Halloween Jack posted:Just a warning, by the way, that comparing tabletop games to large corporations in radically different businesses tends to get ridiculous, quickly. See: "Someone should create the Apple of RPGs." Someone should create a well-integrated, streamlined iterative product that engages a new customer base by not being trapped in the stodgy mindsets of competitors and by offering a new experience is not exactly something RPGs should shy away from.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 23:00 |
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Winson_Paine posted:Dude there are a metric assload of people trying to do this in RPGs. Major brand holders who have established brands almost never do this, because it can derail the brand. You sort of saw it with 4E where they actually made big changes for the better, and the result was Pathfinder taking off like a rocket. I agree in the sense everyone's trying to do it. At the same time when I was looking at upcoming RPGs being worked on a few years ago little work was done on the critical aspect of defining new spaces for table-top games to exist. Apple's big innovation with its iPod and such wasn't that it played music, it's that it allowed the concept of how and when one played music to evolve with technology as it exists. I'm curious now because I've been out of the new game looking thing for a bit but is anyone trying to develop a cohesive delivery mechanism using tablets, smartphones, and laptops to both streamline the play experience and exert more internal control? This is something DnD Next needs to be doing if it wants a bigger slice of pie. Hell, if they wanted to they could use the same system to defeat the glut of unbought splatbooks and create focused campaigns to lure players into using the same system via remote campaigns and playtimes. So much money on the table not being pursued makes me sad.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 23:09 |
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Gau posted:Time and again, we've seen that VTTs are expensive, troublesome, buggy, and, well, just like any other sort of software development. The first person to market with a decent networked tablet-enabled tabletop assistant will make some serious money, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Wizards has already tried and failed. Which, I guess is what I was thinking with the Apple comparison. First one past the post to deliver this product with enough money advertise it is going to win.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 23:18 |
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fatherdog posted:I feel like the existence and widespread popularity of Darksun is sort of problematic for this theory. Given that by creating stand-alone universe experiences which did not properly integrate with 2e Core material is what helped kill TSR I'd argue its actually a really good example of how its not "DnD" in a brand sense.
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# ¿ Mar 4, 2013 23:45 |
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Ulta posted:Also something about Dark Souls and D&DNext, because I want someone to capture that game's feel in tabletop. Isn't that just old school DnD like Tomb of Elemental Evil. Combat isn't very weighty in that like it is in Dark Souls but it contains the same giant dungeon filled with traps, puzzle monsters, hidden treasure you'll never get on your first time, and constant horrific death. That said, are their RPGs with respawning built into the mechanics? I tried doing it with 4e but even using the Demon Soul's style Bloodied is now Max HP until you find the appropriate stuff it's all a bit wonky.
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2013 17:14 |
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Splicer posted:How to become a billionaire writing RPGs: Alternate method would be to use the RPG is a launching point for a brand, then carefully manage that brand into numerous alternate media properties and eventually about 30 years from then option the rights to a string of major motion pictures. During this time RPG sales will account for so little of your income that you will wake up one day and remember that you never actually moved those guys into your new building and they're still located in that lovely dump at the edge of town. Then you'll fall back to sleep on your mattress of licensed toy money.
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# ¿ Mar 5, 2013 17:27 |
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Winson_Paine posted:Yeah people get het up about beans, although it is mostly a Texas thing. I like beans too, again mostly because I am broke a lot and stretchin' that meat dollah is a bonus. If it doesn't have a dash of cinnamon, chocolate, allspice, and cloves with a recipe originally invented next to a strip club its not real* chili. *eat it texas
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# ¿ Mar 6, 2013 15:10 |
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Winson_Paine posted:Question: does anyone have a dumpling recipe that doesn't suck? Everytime I make chicken and dumplings I get these hard little shotputs which are tasty but ultimately not really satisfying. I want floofy poofs of dumpling. Help. What kind of dumplings? For chinese style its in the thickness of the dough and your skill at searing the bottoms in the pan. If you're making the dough to thick and it overpowers your filling consider steaming them. It won't give you the wonderful seared bottom but they won't break open or be too thick to compensate. If you're having problems with them being dry make them like Canton Buns with added semi-soup liquid inside to prevent them from totally drying out. Whats the best cheese for Northern Buns? I'm trying to get the beef and pork ones to come out better with cheese. I've been successful so far using a spicy buffalo muenster but there's got to be something better than just spice covering the things.
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# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 15:43 |
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Why would you ever used fixed rate healing in a group game with defined by HP roles. That's just tedious and results in waiting around for your tank to heal while Mr. Wizard gets really, really impatient.
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# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 18:29 |
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PeterWeller posted:Because it doesn't actually matter in practice. You're rarely going to use the fixed healing rates because your party has a cleric to take care of that sort of thing. What, your party doesn't include a cleric? Are you sure you're playing D&D? Which results in the next problem of "getting back to be able to fight a thing" involves managing a passive healing factor, the clerics healing, and the clerics healing spell regeneration. Its just layers of boredom to accomplish nothing unless Next brings back the wandering monster encounter tables.
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# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 18:45 |
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Mendrian posted:In practice if a Fighter wants to work at full capacity he has to do so by spending more time doing nothing. That seems weird. What's happening? Is he healing? Resting? What? If he's healing, what exactly is he healing? His morale? Clearly if HP are physical wounds, he's at least as functional as the Wizard at 12 HP, so what's happening? DnD is a simulation of whatever you want it to simulate. Maybe the Fighter is preturnaturally luckier than the wizard but it takes time for luck to cling to his skin so at at 12 HP both he and the wizard are equivalent but tomorrow more luck will be on him and he'll have 13. Hell, HP could be a representation of Ennui and the poor stupid fighter has more HP because he is incapable of seeing how truly pointless existence so over time becomes more fulfilled and happy while the wizard is stuck unable to ever muster up more enthusiasm than 12 because his years of study have made him realize that ultimately we all die alone. Its functionally irrelevant what HP represents other than that it represents the states of "does things" and "does not do things." The issue with the differences is that restoring them at even rates results in meaningless downtime while at the same time introducing a ton of mechanics and making other ones more difficult. The Monster Manual never presumes you'll fight creatures wounded and as a result you can only plan an "optimum" encounter and rely on the player to have a fudged "my party is wounded" encounter. Barudak fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 7, 2013 |
# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 20:01 |
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Splicer posted:Fighters have more HP because they're supposed to lose a lot of HP. Making the Fighter recover HP at the same rate as the Wizard is like making the Wizard recover Spells at the same rate as the Fighter. And thats a bad thing? Bring true Vancian Magic to the system. Once cast forever lost!
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# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 21:07 |
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Randalor posted:As an aside, does anyone have any recommendations for a drink for someone who doesn't like beer, but is partial to Port, Jagermeister and Creme de Menthe (last two are typically used in mixers) Absinthe. I know its not a beer but palate wise its similar to Jaegermeister and the Creme de Menthe mixed. Louche well my friend. Louche well.
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# ¿ Mar 7, 2013 21:14 |
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Lord Frisk posted:I have more than one friend who puts ketchup on goddamn everything. Eggs, potatoes, sandwiches, you name it. Well it seems pretty simple, you start with a base class (eggs) and then add a seasoning (ketchup/sriracha) to suit your personal preference. Then at some point according to Next's design some rear end in a top hat shows up with the entire menu of food at his plate except the eggs and then bitches at you. To add further insult to injury, the only good sauce for eggs is hollandaise but only the place down the street has it so its either eggs with bad sauce or eating alone.
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# ¿ Mar 14, 2013 18:36 |
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Keith Bearjumper posted:Are people lining up to infiltrate drow cities? Any time I've ever been in an adventure where part of it involved infiltration it has been a gigantic pile of spiderly flavored death. Faking your way past a bunch of crazily powerful elves was already a poo poo sandwich before handing out Know Alignment. Given the usual temperments of a party I'm pretty certain even with Know Alignment your party will be welcomed with open arms as one of the fmaily.
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# ¿ Mar 27, 2013 22:18 |
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01011001 posted:Bear in mind that "one of the family" is synonymous with "ripe for murder" unless they've changed drow significantly. Given the average party that's down right hospitable.
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# ¿ Mar 27, 2013 22:25 |
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P.d0t posted:I'm sure it has to do with multiclassing or niche protection Yeah its only an issue if you didn't spec as a wizard because then you won't have the income of skill points to split on numerous, expensive niche skills and products. Its compounded by the fact that wizards don't have to worry about day to day struggle or labor so they can use their endlessly accruing skill points wastefully instead of having to dedicate to a single thing and never spec out of it like a warrior.
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2013 17:46 |
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Winson_Paine posted:Microwaved hot dogs stink a hotel room up like a mad motherfucker, I tell you what. What the heck dogs are you putting in there? All beefs have that thick beefy aroma but if you eat something thats a blend like the turkey, pork, beef poverty dogs that sustained my youth then you'll find they don't leave much of a smell. If you're microwaving andouille or something in there you both deserve the smell and are me because most people have the common sense to see that coming from a mile away.
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2013 20:07 |
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Winson_Paine posted:What, you guys don't like Arthur Treacher's All Fish Hot Dogs? Only when I cover it Nathan's Famous Tartar Sauce.
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2013 20:40 |
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PantsOptional posted:For my money, the proper way to cook a hot dog is to cut it into a spiral and flame-grill it. Some might say you ought to entwine a bacon strip in the area you cut. Those people may have correct bacon-based instincts but they're missing the point of the spiral-cut dog, which is to expose as much of the meat to the fire as possible. Fools the lot of you. The correct way to make a dog is to bake it inside your bread. Then and only then does the dog achieve what all of you fail to realise is the true nature of the hotdog; a fusion of flesh and bread. Two must become one.
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# ¿ Apr 1, 2013 22:14 |
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Splicer posted:It was a tourney module specifically designed to kill you. The winners were the people who got furthest without dying. It bears as much relation to table play as, I don't know, CounterStrike to Borderlands. That reminds me, looking at how the class balance changed from Borderlands 1 and Borderlands 2 is something that WoTC should be considering for Next. In BL1, the 4 classes fit pretty tightly into Cleric/Druid, Wizard, Fighter, and Rogue molds from DnD. Whats most interesting is the thing that breaks the wizard in both of these games is not its ability to deal damage which it has lots of but its ability to easily control enemies and prevent them from engaging on equal footing. Additionally, because the wizard is the "frail" class they gave it a complete escape ability in phasewalking and then decided, no it should also be able to attack while invulnerable and heal during that time something no other class can do. The optimal party set up in BL1 is Cleric, Wizard, Wizard, Wizard. In BL2 they looked at why the distribution didn't work. Its because being a melee fighter in a game with lots of ranged combatents and with people who can inflict statuses from ranged is a slog and you're taking hits the rest of the party doesn't have to take for no reason. Its because being an occassional dealer of large critical hits in exchange for never being able to actually engage enemies is tedious and feels like you aren't contributing. In the sequel, they completely shook up the talents and trees to make it so that skills are spread around more evenly and characters are all mechanically unique in non-traditional roles.
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2013 15:48 |
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Mendrian posted:And yet, in BL2, despite a lot of improvements, there is still a talent tree devoted to tedius, chain-headshotting. Honestly, to me BL1 is 3rd and BL2 is 4th. 4th isn't perfect and is a clear revision of 3rd but it shakes up a lot of things to make it more viable for everyone to participate regardless of class choice. Next is staring at the chain-headshotting thing, blaming 4th for it, then remaking 3rd and then including chain footshotting.
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2013 16:35 |
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Splicer posted:I like Brick He punches money out of people. Roland, the soldier, is a druid. The turret is his animal companion. Buffing damage on the animal companion is a terrible, terrible choice but pumping up his ability to summon it and improve its healing makes him an excellent battle cleric. Not to mention he gets the only resurrection spell and team healing abilities in the game. Brick is terrrrrrrrible. The entire end game is comprised of enemies who invalidate Brick's playstyle through the crazy ability of "Can fly and attack from range." Which, again, like DnD is a huge reason why playing a fighter blows.
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2013 16:42 |
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Razorwired posted:Didn't someone post a story about how Gygax killed a Ranger over and over because he didn't "earn his levels"? Or was that in grognards.txt? I believe it was more complex than that. The guy showed up to a game as a way higher level ranger than everyone else and wanted to play and he kept dying to things that other people with much lower characters weren't falling victim to. Gygax assumed it was because he had just cheated the levels and had no idea what he was actually doing.
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2013 18:00 |
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Winson_Paine posted:Yep, and by 4th you were a motherfuckin' HERO. I kind of perferred Veteran over Hero simply because it contains no baggage in terms of alignment but has implications that you bring a lot of experience and knowledge at level 1 instead of the hero blundering their way out of flammable village #37. I would also settle for professional. "We've rescued your village, ma'am. In exchange we'd like the village's magical heirloom." "But, but you're heros!" "No ma'am, we're professionals"
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2013 19:10 |
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P.d0t posted:This is where 4th (and the D&D boardgames) did really well. Anyone who thinks you need to spend levels without your class' primary gimmick is a stone-cold brain-dead full-on idiot. Every single game that makes this mistake gets complained about that it handholds you, prevents you from having fun, or in the case of TT just gets skipped because thats stupid. Its perfectly fine to say "You get your core gimmick and not much else" but it is not ok to have to earn the reason you're playing your character. quote:It also got rid of the initiative-based rocket tag (which we're seeming creep back in with Next) by making 1st level characters not one-shot kills. Well you could make a rocket tag team by going nothing but Strikers but even then its not true rocket tag since you could probably tank 1 or 2 good hits before going down.
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# ¿ Apr 2, 2013 22:17 |
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kingcom posted:Fighting off the unyielding horrors of the common household seems like a pretty sweet introduction for fantasy roleplaying. Closet of Horrors and Moving Truck on the Borderlands were both perrenial favorites with my players.
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# ¿ Apr 3, 2013 15:14 |
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Payndz posted:Has anyone ever played a game of D&D, of whatever edition, precisely to RAW? Even in B/X, I don't remember anyone ever bothering with spell components, and the faff of checking 1e's AC and damage modification tables of weapons against various types of armour and sizes of opponents ("Hey, Gary, why not split the combat tables between two books?" ) probably meant they were used even less often than the grappling rules. I did to the best of my ability. As one of the other threads revealed I screwed up some of the rules but 10 year old me was determined to follow every rule in the book as far as possible. I figured they were adults and had designed the game so clearly they had put more effort into the rules than a 10 year old would. A few sessions of 1e's damage tables changed that viewpoint really fast. I still like games whose RAW is functional when I read it even if I know I'll probably change some stuff every once in a while.
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# ¿ Apr 5, 2013 15:17 |
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theironjef posted:I guess they would suck if your DM was all "Day 42. You head east. It continues to be ooze. One wonders why you went to the Plane of Ooze without a plan" but that's definitely a DM problem. If you played and lost against a Wizard and his "Figure it Out" you get the Plane of Slime. Its simple cause and effect.
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# ¿ Apr 12, 2013 19:06 |
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eth0.n posted:And INT for smart tactics, WIS for spotting openings and maintaining situational awareness, CHA for feints and confidence. Nobody who wants ability scores has the capacity to make them good and functional because thats not why they like them. They like them because they're a system mastery trap that is the foundation for innumerable other system mastery traps. Its a matryoshka doll of system mastery traps.
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# ¿ Apr 16, 2013 21:48 |
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FRINGE posted:I dont think thats necessarily true. Ignoring feats (which we always do ) there are things like: Sure but this isn't how ability scores typically work since all those stats also tend to have defensive properties, health properties, and chance to hit properties. I have yet to see anyone who likes ability scores advocating a streamline like you're stating which, if they have to exist, is explicitly how it should be handled. It is also about at max a half-step away from just not having ability scores and just having 4 differently fluffed fighters with skills packages.
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# ¿ Apr 16, 2013 22:01 |
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Father Wendigo posted:But if ability scores are rolled (which is the ~One True Way~), and scores are tied to level... I'm going to guess Pinnacle didn't get the memo that we no longer flavor gin with turpentine because that would produce that exact hideous flavor combination. The British might be globe conquering jerks but they had the good sense to cute the turpentine out. Nolets is the best gin on the market pretty much without question. If you want other dull flavor and character lacking Gins try Old Tom's and/or Death's Island. By the by, if anyone in this thread has been thinking they want to try perhaps the single finest pre-mixed beverage on the market check out PAMA. Its labeled as pomegranate liquor but its actually an unbelievably flavorful combination of tequila, vodka, and pomegranate juice so its not actually distilled from any pomegranates. Its 100% drinkable if a bit sour by itself but if you throw in in some pineapple juice or a little fizz you have one hell of a nice drink. Regarding ability scores I was really hoping we could either do away with the whole 2 points=an actual bonus or at least make the system not be locked into the 18 is the max starting score concept. It always feels like for all the complexity it provides it results in tons of fiddly math and rarely does the odd score mean much except outside of feats but the best feats are ones which provide mechanical bonuses anyway.
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2013 00:45 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 14:47 |
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Bare minimum for tequila is Patrón Silver. Depends on how you plan to drink the Tequila; if you plan on sipping a Tequila Anejo is the minimum. Silver and Golds are fine mixers but I wouldn't drink them solo. If you want a good, modern Tequila you can't really go wrong with Tres Generaciones if you can find it around.
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# ¿ Apr 17, 2013 05:43 |