What I can do is sour the victory.

You can make them suffer for it in the long run lol

well I want to add more bleak/dark to my world of darkness.

and I don't want a reoccuring ally NPC

so the Angel after falling will be bitter

No shit, fallen angels tend to be :P

I think it is time to introduce Javert, the Hunter Angel.

This is Demon the Descent, so the players are fallen Angels of the God Machine.

The player in question is a Sabotour/Tempter -- "I Fall Angels".

Aah

It honestly don't make much difference though.

@BESW Interesting. Sounds tedious. :/ I mean, it could work alright if you gave everyone tokens that represent their moves. Still, this would still be everyone moving once in order, just with some folks doing more in their turn.

I'm envisioning essentially the opposite. A system where you only perform one action each time your turn comes up, but the action's cost and your characters speed determine when their turn will next come up.

@DampeS8N That sounds interesting. So if I try to take an action that costs 4 seconds to perform and I do things at a rate of 2 seconds per whatever, I don't get to go for a while?

@Jerenda Something like that. Specifically we're talking about Final Fantasy X's battle system in table top format here.

Ah- I lack the appropriate background then. :)

@DampeS8N Exalted 2e does this.

Dorian bobs his head in vague agreement, a blithering idiot in one hand, and obviously paying more attention to the portable dvd player in his lap than he is to the conversation.

There's an eight-section "battlewheel". Every action has a speed, which is the number of "ticks" that elapse before you can take another action. Some character or weapon traits can speed up or slow down actions.

It's actually one of my favorite mechanics, but IIRC they cut it from 3e because apparently some people found it too complicated to follow

The impetus for this is a CRPG I've been working on designing for years. It has a system where time is specific and important, actions have 3 phases: charge, release, and delay. Where charge is time before, release is the moment of the action and delay is time after.

@Grubermensch That sounds exactly right. Thanks!

Anyway, working on that game got me thinking about how I might model the same thing in a TRPG... And I can't think of a good way, but thought an FFX type battle system could be really close.

Here's a good explanation of the system from Exalted: bazzalisk.org/exalted/201X.pdf

Hm, interesting.

/me is curious to see if /me works here...

guess not lol

@Dorian In theory these chat rooms aren't meant for entertainment but for structured conversation that the Q&A portion of StackExchange doesn't support well. So the chat has been largely designed to support more scholarly discourse. The Q&A portion of StackExchange is generally more successful at its goal.

I realize that but it's worth a shot to test. I think I asked at one point too but I couldn't remember the result if I did.

I just have an odd habit of randomly posting every couple of minutes as a way of letting people know I was still paying attention, even if only vaguely. Comes from the many chat rooms where I've been a moderator or at least a veteran member.

@Dorian I looked for a more... refined... example of what SE Chat is supposed to look like, but I came up empty.

Scope also may have changed in the ~3 years since I moderated anything.

@DampeS8N Not sure what you're getting at there. I wasn't meaning chats via SE though, just to clarify. I was mostly referring to some old RP forums that had chatrooms they used for casual discussion and randomness.

Hi all

Heya

I'm planning to start throwing story based mental stress at characters in my Fate game soon. I'm looking for advice on how to measure and dole it out? How do you decide if seeing someone hurt is a 2 stress or a 4 stress? How do you keep it consistent?

@waxeagle long time, how are things?

@C.Ross fairly well. Work is crazy nuts, but everything else is going pretty well

@waxeagle what are you playing these days?

@C.Ross mostly 4e, mixing some 5e in

Phobias and Self Doubt are examples given in FAE

@C.Ross Possible starting point: List of mental disorders

I think the major knob you have with mental stress is how immediate the stressor is (ex. family member mugged vs person on street mugged vs news report about mugging will be different levels of intensity, and thus take different amounts of time to bleed off).

@DampeS8N deadEarth is an awful system, but I occasionally do chargen for lolz.

@C.Ross @Emrakul has the right of it, I think: make it an attack roll. I'd say start with a baseline and then add +s for relephant story factors like "It's my Uncle Ben" and "I could have stopped that mugger earlier."

(Peter Parker takes 5 mental stress and gains the consequence Guilty about Uncle Ben's death, which cannot be removed until after he begins to deal with it.)

Today in Context Need Not Apply:

@Emrakul @BESW I don't like the attack roll mechanism because of the variance, and because it implies there is some chance involved in how strong the attack is. It wouldn't make any sense for "Uncle Ben's death" to be a +5 attack roll, roll a -3 and have it only be a fair that he shrugs off.

I was thinking more static attacks based on the trap example I believe is in FC, the heroes are running through an arrow trap, trying not to get hit. It has a static DC of X, the players roll against that or take stress.

G'day mates.

@C.Ross ...Honestly, that's how I model a lot of things just because I'm lazy I feel even a single roll can overemphasise minor elements.

So, this evening we started a short game of Microscope.

Its ostensible theme is "Humanity barely survives a technovirus."

...But it's starting with humanity being dominated by a world-spanning dragonic empire.

This has been an awesome RPG day.

@pet Just left a comment on your question.

@BESW yes i started reading

ah yes, it is related,

i searched if it was asked before but dit not find this

When I saw your question was on hold, I thought it'd be as a duplicate of that one.

@pet Probably because it was asked from the other side of the table.

kool, so should i just delete my initial question

If you feel that one's a duplicate.

By the letter of things, yours has some differences in what it's asking but I think the answer would be similar enough at to make no difference.

yes the answer contains enough suggestion how to handle the situation better

I'm glad it's helpful!

i had one more question in mind ,,,

who get's death saving throws

Player characters.

so it seems, but why not enemies too ?

or at least a boos

Because 4e doesn't care about mechanical parity.

hm it the only dnd-4e i played so far..

If you want to give a boss death saving throws, go ahead, but the choice is saying something about that boss and what he is to the story.

have you tired 5e?

NPCs and PCs don't share the same mechanics--like the healing surge disparity I mentioned in that answer.

@pet Nope.

Only player characters get death saving throws because by default only player characters can survive being below 0 hp.

@pet Basically, in 4e monsters exist as foils for PCs, obstacles and challenges to be overcome. That defines their role in the game and thus defines the powers and abilities they have. In the case of falling below 0 hp, for NPCs the PC dealing the final blow just gets to decide "unconscious or dead."

ok,

actually, one more thing..

last game ended in the following situation

If monsters got death saving throws, PCs would just start stabbing already-unconscious monsters before they make the saves. Which is both vicious and boring, so it doesn't happen.

the players managed to push the boss into a hole and started throwing explosives down,

Where'd they get explosives?

well, they found an ancient bazooka, with some amunition

i am thinking now of a way i can get out of the hole for the last round...

in DnD 4e?

yes

Teleportation, flying, climbing (usually athletics roll), jumping (acrobatics)

they are kind of magic stones, which have a cb-3

My first reaction to that scenario is to think this might be an issue with your group:

climbing will not work, as the players are assembled around the hole, they till hack at anything that moves up

Well in that case why do you want the monster up in the first place? If your players have already gotten it in a hole and are throwing explosives after it they'd probably expect it to die.

You can of course make some emergency rule patch but that's just silly in 4e, a rules-heavy game.

flying would work, but how do i give a boss wings with the players willing to not debate it, they really like hacking at a helpfess target

so they have have two grenaded for the bazooka and i have about 300 HP

so they will not finish the boss with that,

and the hole is deep enough to not be able to reach with the sword

This sounds like a mess you shouldn't have really gotten into!

^^,

i was quite proud of the players.

its a boss fight, so i want it to be 3 distinct phases,

except for the last one i need to get out of that hole

I'd probably patch my way out of that by making the monster disappear deeper in the hole

"Hey! I found Narnia!"

"Later chumps, I'ma find me a Killing Word!"

@kviiri ah nice i did not think of that

But yeah, I think the big issue is not the hole, but the grenades.

Handing out non-power-defined objects in 4e can quickly lead to narrative-first solutions in a game that's totally dedicated to mechanics-first problem solving.

yes, but they have limited ammunition, so 2 ore shots and its useless afterwards

But until then... you've got a problem.

so yes i have to come up with something

My GM gave a party member "the skull of dazing"

A thrown skull that deals heavy damage and dazes

The damage is, again, heavy because he insisted that it uses the same stats it used when an ogre was wielding it

Wait, I have a link for that too...

(Second bullet point.)

That's a very good question specifically for dnd

Hey anyone know any good dark classical violin music playlist somewhere I can turn on? Need help focusing on writing up my NWoD chara and she's due tomorrow.

@Dorian not only violin and not a playlist but this comes to mind

nice, but the mood is too dramatic

Dorian stabs all the inactive members of the chat in the foot with a metal spork because the chat needs some activity.

@Dorian [in pain] Ow! That hurt!

Well lookit one of them is alive! lol

barely

Yeah, good luck getting a lot of activity out of chat on a weekend.

I just discovered this site called EatWith which seems very interesting.

And in case anyone is wondering, yes, I am always thinking about food.

want melty cheese....

feel like such a noob

was having problems with the a:visited psuedo selector in CSS

went into stackoverflow chatroom for it, problem was a typo which my mind refused to see, had typed "a:visted"

It's always something stupid like that.

the most frustrating problem I ever had like that was with javascript for school, had a PDF version of the textbook, part of our exercises including copying sections of code from the text and fixing them. Since I had a PDF version I figured hey save myself some time, directly copy and paste....

it took, but the quotations mark character from the PDF was recognized as a different quotation mark character, slanted quotation marks, and was thus not valid for any sort of syntax

I didnt have color coding on at that time, so there wasnt anything obvious to scream THIS ISNT BEING READ CORRECTLY

find/replace?

yes once I did realize what was happening I did find replace all on both ends of the weird quotation marks

@BESW this site seems to pretty much say "screw your area, we doin country"

yeah, it pretty much goes country in general

@Dorian It does.

Do these people live in Luxembourg?

I live in Baltimore, I do not want results from New York and San Francisco to be the top five.

well there's a limited amount of what you have lol

I don't care how good your dinner is. I'm not driving 3000 miles to eat it.

This is atrocious UX

Let's put it this way, this site is for people with VERY disposable income :P

Any D&D 3.5ers here work with Mercurial weapons at all in their campaign? Particularly any that aren't the Longsword and Greatsword in the book.

@Dorian I've seen them in use, what's the problem?