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Lord Frisk posted:IIRC, you could save on expertise die for a parry (roll = bonus to AC) and save the rest for damage, rather than using it for all or nothing Actually, "you regain your spent martial damage dice at the start of each turn, whether it's your turn or someone else's". ...though this rules text appears only in the barbarian description for martial damage dice, not any of the other classes', but the barbarian was the most recently released class. So I suppose you argue with the GM about it? Anyway. Have we heard anything about Paragon Paths, besides that they'll all need some in-game justification for you to take? It half-seems like they're supposed to be a large part of how your character advances beyond 10, since that's when feats and maneuvers/fighting styles die out, and the spellcasting classes stop getting new spell slots, save for one of each spell level beyond 5th. But the Barbarian and Monk are still racking up their special abilities beyond then, so who knows.
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Mar 1, 2013 10:12
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AlphaDog posted:Yeah, we had a look at 5th edition through the free "basic" set or whatever and decided that it was too much loving trouble. Hackmaster 5e is... pretty much everything 4e was making fun of in the funny bits. Hackmaster 4e is a good AD&D clone. Since the rulebooks are well laid out, it's an easy job to learn the game if you're familiar with AD&D - not 2nd ed, not 3.5, AD&D. Which was the whole point. I suppose if you pop a writeup in FATAL and Friends that'll be a better place to ask this, but when and why did Hackmaster start taking itself seriously? And, relatedly, is D&D Next trying to pitch to precisely those people who WOULD take Hackmaster seriously?
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Apr 7, 2013 08:04
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Since I didn't see it linked, here's the Q&A from 5/9. It's on the general topic of subclasses, and can be distilled thusly:
So, uh, I do enjoy bagel sandwiches, especially on a toasted bagel, but a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a toasted bagel invariably ends up liquefying and running down the center. I have accepted this as the price of deliciousness, but maybe someone else has had different experiences with it.
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May 13, 2013 10:16
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AlphaDog posted:I really want to see how this is supported in the rules. It would be cool as hell if by taking Knight, you were automatically good at "knowing things about etiquette, nobility, and royalty", as well as being able to leverage "I am Sir Generico, and you will do as I tell you, peasant" in some mechanical way. Ah, so you're thinking more like the Rogue's "guaranteed +3 stat bonus in this skill", along with the skill training you get as part of your background? So a Noble (background) Knight would double-tap, basically?
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May 14, 2013 03:53
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AlphaDog posted:To put it a better way, DW still isn't my ideal game, but it does everything I hoped Next would do. It adds bits that some of my group (including myself) are not 100% comfortable with (yet), but it took almost no prep, so I'm done with trying to run Next as it stands now. I'm going to keep following the development, and I really hope they pull out a miracle and make a good game. I'm glad you found a game your group likes to play! Hop over to the Dungeon World thread if you need help tweaking things.
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Jun 5, 2013 07:50
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Mendrian posted:I'm not sure 'submit to bullying and blackmail' is a valid business strategy. Storytelling games are definitely a thing though. I mean, The Quiet Year, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, "Happy Birthday, Robot!", Fiasco, Durance, Our Last Best Hope -- these are all games that don't tie randomizers to anything on your "character sheet", such as it is, but use them to generate story seeds to help you tell a story. Just, you know, conflating that with Apocalypse World is kind of silly.
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Jun 18, 2013 23:42
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FRINGE posted:Yes. Want those goblins to be a frightening raiding party? 2 are F1, 1 is R1, 1 is T2. (Assume 2e) done. (Of course this is not using 4e, where (from what people have said in these threads) it is assumed you need a computer to make a classed character, instead of just a sticky note and a pen. That is a design failure, not an inability on the DMs part.) You can actually make a "classed" NPC pretty easily in 4E, there's a template for it, whether designing one as an NPC or making an existing monster elite by adding a class template. Basically pick an at-will, an encounter (as a recharge power), a daily (as an encounter power), and a utility of appropriate level from the class, tweak defenses after the pattern of the class defenses, work out HP (additional HP for the elite), tweak damage as appropriate. +1 encounter/utility at paragon, +1 daily/utility at epic. Yes, you could hit the database in search of just the right power for the concept if you wanted, but the idea's pretty simple.
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Jul 10, 2013 07:47
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Father Wendigo posted:Also, one more question as someone who's still turning over rocks in the playtest packet... how mechanically do I draw aggro as a fighter? DM fiat! No, seriously, DM fiat. If you have a shield, you can sink all your feats into the ability to spend your single off-turn reaction to give a single attacker disadvantage against an adjacent target (and follow up with an attack), or stop a single advancing attacker in its tracks, and get a whole extra reaction which you can only use to make an opportunity attack. So if the DM wants to bum-rush the wizard, there's not a whole lot you can do to stop him.
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Jul 10, 2013 19:39
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theironjef posted:"Here's a bunch of hilarious wrong information for players that roll low. We assume they won't ever read this or quickly learn to ignore the DM when they roll low on knowledge checks." "Welp, honked my Spout Lore roll. Bring the pain." "You remember these creatures have a pronounced weakness to fire." "That's not pain. ...wait. They're not really weak to fire, are they?" "Not even a little." "What happens if I hit them with fire?" "Not telling. But if you act on your new 'knowledge', you can mark XP!" Your friendly neighborhood reminder that Dungeon World owns.
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Jul 12, 2013 02:37
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I'm more worried about being able to spend them unevenly. If you've already invested in some mechanic that regularly grants you advantage on an action, inspiration won't help you do it any better. Similarly, if you're a spellcaster and the prime determinant of how well your spells work is somebody else rolling a check, inspiration isn't going to help there either.
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Jul 25, 2013 21:29
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moths posted:When our Greyhawk campaign was splitting up between 3x and 4e, I suggested we switch over to Basic. The implied setting for Basic is Mystara, part of the Known World. Greyhawk was the generic setting for Advanced. There are things in Advanced with no ready analogue in Basic.
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Jul 31, 2013 17:26
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Hmm. Skill dice have vanished, expertise dice are linked entirely to ability scores, and only a few scores (dex, wis, and cha, I believe) actually link up. With an attribute cap of 20, sample DCs of 25 for str, con, and int checks are now practically impossible, and sample DCs of 30 or higher are literally impossible. Maybe they just haven't made a pass on those yet, but it looks like the guidelines chapter (which contains them) was updated.
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Aug 3, 2013 07:03
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How did the playtest go? Missed the stream, but I imagine it'll be up eventually.
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Aug 10, 2013 01:42
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They haven't even gotten inside the dungeon the adventure features yet, have they? 60 minutes of talking out the setup for the adventure. That kind of hurt to listen to.
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Aug 10, 2013 11:44
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Sir Kodiak posted:Bah, some wizard could make more gold and wreck the money supply. If they were smart they'd use a currency limited in quantity by the finite speed at which Modrons can perform secure hashing. No lie, this is actually how my 4E afterlife favor-economy works. The modrons do the scutwork of the Game of Making, and their masters inevitables pass around the credit as they need things done.
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Aug 14, 2013 02:54
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah, and at least from my perspective, this cemented Monte's reputation more than any other work of his, from Book of Eldritch Might on. It has made me very hesitant to check out Numenera, and made me really fear for his influence on Next had he stuck around. I just don't trust his design instincts when magic or wizards are involved. The Battle Healing line did straight-up health restoration and was necessary for healing up a party which had gone to the absolute brink, but it wasn't the extent of magical healing. The Transfer Wounds line was the other healing line of spells, which turned physical damage into half as much subdual damage on the caster, and subdual damage healed naturally in a matter of hours instead of days. This doesn't do a thing for the whole "overreliance on magical healing" argument, but still.
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Aug 25, 2013 00:33
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P.d0t posted:Apparently there was another R&D live game, earlier today: In two hours, the party managed to have one combat (defeating a single low-level githyanki and a lieutenant, and letting another escape). They also poked around a giant room full of skeletons, curled up for a rest inside the hanging corpse of an astral dreadnaught (because the cleric blew all his high-level spells trying to deal with a big fight in the previous session), and surprisingly nothing happened. They then tried to open an ectoplasmic door, nearly got the wizard feebleminded by a gith whose soul he trapped the previous session, used turn undead to open a door made of zombie flesh and true seeing to find some secret doors... And then wandered into a vault leading to the second floor, and despite their proficiency bonus to Wisdom saves both the party casters (a wizard and a cleric) honked two saves in a row and have been subverted by the lich-queen, through no obvious mechanism of action. It's... possible the cleric can no longer cast spells? The DM was being weirdly vague about it.
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Oct 13, 2013 08:51
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P.d0t posted:Did the fighter and the rogue do anything? The fighter and the rogue did most of the damage against the gith, actually, and got the party up to the corpse stash. Well, except the mage, who was flying. Of course. The fighter apparently is of the "golf bag of weapons" variety, which is... working pretty well so far? Kind of hard to get a barometer for it. They also did most of the damage last session against the beholder, largely because it had pinned them down in a corridor and was fixing them with its antimagic eye, and through luck and the fighter's "advantage on all saves" class feature, have retained their minds. ...until the mage dominated the rogue. I can't see how they're going to survive this. Save or Lose is back, baby.
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Oct 13, 2013 09:16
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DalaranJ posted:Yes, yes, but what were the "high-end DM techniques"? Golly! I wasn't paying attention for those. You'll have to watch the stream yourself to find out! (If I had to guess, though? "Read boxed text". Also "write up a complete personality matrix for your villains in case the wizard traps their soul and then talks to them".)
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Oct 13, 2013 19:18
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Mr. Maltose posted:I guess it's my turn to riddle: Not organs, is it? Anyway, my issue with Next can be summed up in last week's R&D stream, where the wizard and cleric, having burned through most of their single high-level spell slots in a tough encounter, try to find a place to take an eight-hour rest in a sealed psychically monitored citadel. And then fail two saves in a row and get mind-controlled, probably dooming the entire party. I realize Vancian casting is kind of necessary, but that doesn't make it mesh any better with the demands of an adventure. Making spells powerful but rare isn't going to make people hold back on them, as long as they think it's possible to scramble for a safe place once they burn them all. It's also kind of problematic to have obstacles and effects that will completely disable a player character with no intervention possible, even if certain other characters can counter them after the fact, because there's no way to guarantee that those characters won't be the ones taken out. Really it's the intersection of class design and adventure/monster design that's creating these problems, and what worries me the most is that they're still kind of flailing on the monster/adventure front. Glazius fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Oct 19, 2013 |
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Oct 19, 2013 01:34
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AlphaDog posted:Why is it even "kind of" necessary? Politically necessary, or nearly so. People aren't going to buy a game called "Dungeons and Dragons" without a Vancian wizard, at least not the people they're trying to pitch this to.
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Oct 19, 2013 08:11
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Zandar posted:It's one of those curiosities that was weird enough to stick with me once I read about it. The combination of three, music and "devilish connotations" just tripped the memory. Is it a dungeon? Anyway, as far as Vancian casting goes, I'll agree that it's more about its context in the general adventure framework. "You can do four awesome things and then you have to sleep for 8 hours" doesn't really work when you can just sleep for 8 hours whenever you want, and nothing really comes of it. Would it work better if magic was Vancian and explicitly per adventure, rather than trying to make the DM decide what snagging 8 hours did to the storyline?
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Oct 20, 2013 00:31
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Zandar posted:That's right! Well, here's my little something cryptic, then. "Next-to-no charcoal, chopped up fine, gives three lanterns four flames." Covok posted:I think per session would be better, perhaps. Way I see it is that it allows a spellcaster to be awesome a certain number of times during a meet-up. This decreases the annoyances of long-term resource management if you don't know if you're going to be able to rest before the next session and --while there is much better methods like per encounter and at-will -- it is a more set time length (usually about 2-3 hours, in my experience) so its easier to balance around. FATE does refresh basically as per-scene, per-session, per-adventure. Of those, I think per-session is maybe the most ambiguous? Like, I've had sessions end at a decent place to wrap up loose ends in comfort and safety, and I've also had them end in the middle of cliffhangers. With FATE it's a little different because what's refreshing is basically stock footage or spotlight time, and not in very great quantities. But with something like wizard spells, where there's this big wad of fluff wrapped around exactly how you get them back, per-session is a little weird. Between adventures you can hole up in your lab and attune yourself to the universe; between fights you can take a few minutes to clear your mind and refocus. (Yeah, I'm not exactly a big fan of "rest for an hour/rest for eight hours" either, because neither of those timescales make a lot of sense when you're going dungeoning.)
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Oct 20, 2013 20:06
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Glazius posted:Well, here's my little something cryptic, then. Guess riddles are out of fashion, huh? The answer is ARCHON. If you've never solved a cryptic before, maybe you remember "11th Hour"? Half the word puzzles in that game were cryptics. They're, like, half rebus half crossword. Here's how this one works: "Next-to-no charcoal" -- NO CHAR, the "next two" syllables of "no charcoal" "chopped up fine" -- scramble the letters. Working out the operation is key in a cryptic, language that talks about destroying something means to scramble the letters you have. "gives three lanterns four flames" -- lantern archons were angels in 3rd ed, fire archons spit flames in 4th. And yeah, trying even to houserule something in 3rd-ed just made my head spin trying to account for everything else that could mess it up.
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Oct 23, 2013 00:35
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PeterWeller posted:Hooking up with a dragon is a pretty old D&D trope by now. But that doesn't make it a good origin for an entire PC race. D&D has generally treated it as something that's both special and strange, with often tragic results. That said, I don't think there's inherently anything creepy about it. My dad was a knight and my mom was a silver dragon is a pretty boss origin.
Glazius fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Nov 30, 2013 |
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Nov 30, 2013 17:34
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I've actually found the D&D Next magic item tables very useful! ...for making magic items in Dungeon World. "Fiendish icon loud songcraft" and "element(water) ornament strange material frail" gave rise to these things.
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Jan 14, 2014 21:18
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:has anyone mentioned that your stats are also your hp in numenera and you spend the relevant stat (physical/mental/who cares) to use your powers so you burn from both ends playing the fighter, while virtually nothing does damage to your mental stat Things that have to happen before you make a check: commit to spending hit points to make it easier. Things that don't have to happen before you make a check: the GM actually tells you how hard it is. Yeah, turns out that rusty door in the buried shuttle from five civilizations ago was actually difficulty 1 to open because it was rusty and brittle! Hope you enjoyed the half your hit points you spent finding that out!
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Jul 1, 2014 20:57
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Covok posted:So, what games are everyone in/running right now? I do a weekly small-press night at my FLGS. No campaigns, just one-shots. Two weeks ago was Our Last Best Hope, last week was Atomic Robo, tonight was Microscope, next week is Dungeon World, week after is A Penny for My Thoughts. Got a two- to three-month rota going.
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Aug 5, 2014 06:12
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Dungeon World has been a huge hit in my group because it plays fast (we have too many people for 4E at this point) and is flexible enough that fudging is factored into the game play, and not something you do in spite of what the book says. About the only thing you can power-game in Dungeon World is the order in which you get certain class abilities, and people who insist on approaching it in the same way they'd approach modern D&D look silly and miss the point. People that constantly whine about 4E being a video game and why can't it be like when I was 13 should just play that and shut the gently caress up forever. True facts, I showed up to game night with Dungeon World, a map from Dyson Logos, and a pack of toolcards. A fifteen-minute question and answer session, and a deal from the pack, and we were good to go for six hours.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:18
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01011001 posted:the blood war is the logical conclusion of wanting to make a point of making a distinction between law and chaos In 4E Asmodeus is basically Revolver Ocelot. He's a divine servitor who killed his god and took over his divine realm. The other gods use him as a divine PMC, feeding him a proper god's share of power and souls in exchange for basically being a bulwark against the Abyss. I mean, it's not like he actually cares for any of the damned fools who wind up as shock troops. Or, more generally, Evil fights Chaotic Evil because you can't blow up the world, it's where I keep all my stuff.
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Aug 13, 2014 04:02
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Effectronica posted:honestly, i'd love a one-shot rpg that was all about emulating john carpenter movies, or a dogme 95 game that i could prominently fail to run pbps of, but lol if anyone actually wants that out of dungeons and dragons So, Dread, then? Not the easiest game to pbp, of course.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:08
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Effectronica posted:i want to see people take inspiration from celtic/norse/chinese/japanese/a whole bunch of native americans mythology and just do a game with like, five gish classes and maybe one pure caster or fighter How We Came to Live Here Sagas of the Icelanders Bonus: no FATE.
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Oct 8, 2014 04:01
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