(@BESW Or is part of it that way? Is there something I can do about it?)
(I wrote that entire answer because a lot of what was being asked was a non-starter and then seeing it equated to a "you don't get it" answer is... terrible D:)
@Chippies The Deathmarch quests, however, will not be shortened. In fact. I'll be adding even more and longer ones that should take as long as 100 years to finish. You're welcome.
@DampeS8N well, the cost increase formula could probably be changed
@DampeS8N it's not necessarily the quest that is bad, but the fact that it takes 3-4 ticks to kill an enemy with 31 attack and I would need to increase my attack A LOT to decrease the number of hits required
@Chippies I'll be adding more ways to increase your various stats as well as making the existing items less horribly exponential while also making it way easier to increase the amount of gold you get and adding lots of zeros to existing quest gold rewards.
then there are those quests where you kill stuff in one hit and since you can't change how often the ticks are, it still takes forever, regardless of your attack
@Chippies This will be much easier. Also, there will be other quests at all levels and eventually randomized quests that are level appropriate.
@Chippies Taking forever is part of the draw of the game. It is part of why it is sticky and it is the reason that people are still playing it months later.
@Chippies Feel free to tinker if you desire. And I love the feedback. If you have a specific idea for improving the leveling in general, I wanna hear it.
@Grubermensch For the time being. Sorry. I haven't really had time lately to work on it. And I'm not sure what the code gains from most of the improvements. I want to see more and see some real tangible improvements before I will merge it.
@Grubermensch Alternatively, I'll find it a lot easier to swallow smaller changes to single systems. I'm not really good enough with github yet to know the ideal way to accept parts of the merge request or even if I can.
I really hate metagaming, I really do, but I'm soo insatiably curious... Anyone know of a large (really large) sized brown segmented worm type thing in D&D? Uses knowledge (nature) to ID it so apparently it's an animal, fey, giant, monstrous humanoid (yeah no) plant, or vermin.
Apparently it's mouth opens in four flaps that meet to a point.
Oh, and apparently (lore wise) it's something that hasn't been seen in-game for a VERY long time, and last time one surfaced in the physical world it apparently needed demigods to stop its rampage.
But that might just be campaign specific lore idfk.
Oh, and apparently it has no problem snoozing with a few thoqqua
I suppose it depends on your gm. If I wanted to have a destroyer of worlds kind giant worm and didn't want to do too much work that tarrasque stat block would fit perfectly.
Of course that monster might be somewhere in one of the monster manuals.
Usually the trick is knowing which ones your DM owns ;)
And I don't think he wanted to do a destroyer of worlds type. But he seems to be throwing us in way over our heads repeatedly. I have a feeling he intended for us to leave it alone either way.
@JonathanHobbs Yeah, particularly because it didn't answer the question. Remember the Fate gremlin and the need to address a question as framed before re-framing it.
and needed a different knowledge check, not knowledge (nature)
I've yet to find a giant worm type that uses knowledge (nature) either... So this may just be a flat out homebrew beastie...
Which is what I'm afraid of, I've noticed this GM likes RAW and has a very customized setting. His setting trumps RAW but it's hard to tell what's setting and what's not. And lastly, I've seen his homebrew class in action... it was horribly weak. I'm also seeing his "challenging" encounter one hit kill (not nega HP, but DEAD-DEAD) a lv7 party member with a d8 HD....
Oh, wait, that wasn't even the "challenging" encounter, that was a friggen 4 orc/4 warg scouting party.
Oh, yeah, did I mention there's an egg in the same room as this thing, an approximately 8 long by 5 around egg, surrounded by thoqqua...
made it real tempting to try to get closer... yet I'm not stupid. Even if I don't know anything, myths about needing demigods to kill it, and being that size, and being 30 ft underground right now... we're not in good shape to fight it.
grr... need sleep. if anyone has any ideas as to what it might be just tag me in it. happy gaming all
@BESW I didn't think it was that bad to be honest :( The guy was talking about how deadly fate is, and it isn't deadly at all. And then he was asking about knocking people out via attacking them and dealing consequences, which is the worst mechanical way to try to knock someone out, really.
If you do ever catch the Fate Gremlin in my answers, and if you notice, could you point it out to me?
It was really kinda frustrating to realise maybe it was being like that, since I was pretty happy with it and thought it was pretty good overall.
Yar. I've been very stressed/distracted the last couple days so it wasn't something I could really process into productive action before it came to your attention other ways.
For voluntarily sacrificing your current narrative control, you get a wad of meta currency which will give you more narrative control over events in the future.
(And, of course, you get to be part of an interesting story.)
I'm not familiar with that, but Fate PCs are definitely more familiar with the traditional storytelling heroic arc: proactive goal-seeking leads to defeat which steels hero's resolve and ultimately inspires him to true victory.
By comparison the heroic arc of a traditional D&D PC is more like a line: success leads to more successes, while failure leads to terminal failure.
My favourite example of a Fate story is Die Hard: a proactive and exceptionally competent character works toward his goals against overwhelming odds, suffering repeated setbacks and injuries which only serve to make him more determined to succeed.
I can go through that film and list off "negotiating success at cost after a bad roll" (he's barefoot for most of the film, in exchange for not getting caught in the initial attack); "conceded a conflict and took a consequence" (escaped an armed gunman by walking barefoot on broken glass); "spend a Fate point to declare a scene aspect" (the chains which happened to be hanging nearby during the penultimate conflict); and so forth.
Heck, he uses the walkie-talkie chats with his policeman friend as a way to justify starting to recover from mental consequences.
> Declare a Story Detail: To add something to the narrative based on one of your aspects, spend a fate point.
It's "based on one of your aspects" in Fate Core, but previous versions of the engine were more open-ended about the notion.
The basic pre-Core concept was that you could spend a Fate point to automagically Create an Advantage by creating a scene detail, instead of rolling to Create the Advantage as normal.
Core then codified that every Fate point expenditure had to be associated with either a stunt or an existing aspect.
I see. I guess I read Declare a Story Detail as not necessarily making aspects (though I guess it could be), but just a bit of narrative control. "I'm a Disgraced Cop, so I know one of the punks that are about to attack us," that sort of thing.
Previous iterations like DFRPG liked a slightly crunchier version.
In Fate Core, McClane would be rolling Perception as a Create Advantage action to "notice" the Dangling industrial chains in the room.
@Magician At the end of the day, though, the difference between a little narrative control and an aspect is extremely tiny.
It's firmly established that any established narrative detail which turns out to be important enough to be an aspect mid-scene will automagically become an aspect.
Huh, I have a question, then. One can Create Advantage to create an aspect, getting free invocations; or discover an existing aspect, getting free invocations. Can one Create Advantage on a known aspect to just get free invocations?
> If you’re trying to take advantage of an aspect you already know about: - If you fail: You don’t get any additional benefit from the aspect. You can still invoke it in the future if you’d like, at the cost of a fate point. - If you tie or succeed: You get one free invocation on the aspect for you or an ally to use later. You might want to draw a circle or a box on the aspect’s note card, and check it off when that invocation is used. - If you succeed with style: You get two free invocations on the aspect, which you can let an ally use, if you wish.
Once you know the principal hates rap music, you can push that button whenever you like.
...I'm not sure the Nightmares of Mine author knows what "picaresque" really means.
Describing Lovecraft's "Dreamlands" stories: "it is the quality of the imagery and the picaresque elements of the narrative that give them their dreamlike feeling."
Then he uses it more properly three paragraphs later, but still seems kinda confused: "Swords and sorcery horror campaigns will tend toward the picaresque; one self-contained story or short story arc after another."
Or maybe in that case he just doesn't know how to use a semicolon?
Oooh, apparently he's going to talk about something called "Scooby Doo syndrome," which has to do with serial adventures whose threats all become too similar from episode to episode.
[skips ahead to read]
I think this is what @Emrakul was concerned about.
Urrrgh, this section drips with GM elitism.
"Only [the gamemaster] has... the degree of detachment necessary to look at the campaign as a whole. If your players notice a [campaign] pitfall before you do, it's gotten pretty bad."
Not that I find the book useless. I've read under a dozen pages and he's helped me codify some of my thoughts and provided frameworks for my campaign design/analysis.
user61230
6:01 AM
Ahh, yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about.
So, the actual syndrome: "...every scenario or story arc is the same. It's always the first (or third, or youngest, or whatever) NPC that the characters meet who has the key to the mystery. The monsters are always defeated the same way, or always have the same motives, or are otherwise indistinguishable. The police are always wrong, or always corrupt, or always have to bail out the characters. The treasure is always cursed, or never cursed."
I'd argue they're more detached, because they're not immersed in the entire story like I am, and they're sufficiently detached from the whole that they can look at the small details and go "hey wait a minute"
Because I have no control over which NPCs the party meets in what order; because when the monster is REAL it won't share the same motive with other monsters in other stories; because when the monster is REAL it will need a different method of defeat each time.
user61230
Therein lies the difference.
user61230
The point of the games you're writing isn't to find out whodunnit, it's to defeat whodunnit.
(In fact, one reason I'm excited about this Curse of the Lake Monster plot is that the last two modules I've run both ended with "kill it with fire!" while this new one will almost certainly have a different solution.)
user61230
And for this, I see that it could reasonably work.
A friend keeps talking about "Dragonball syndrome" where each boss is played up to be cosmically potent and always takes a long and excruciating struggle, and then they're beaten with some hero's final form that turns out to be not so final as the next boss shows up.
user61230
6:07 AM
As an aside, @BESW, I strongly recommend against reading House of Leaves by itself. Find some other trivial book or series to counterbalance it.
I'll have to get to it in a while. I already have 11 books/series on my priority list, excluding the books I'm currently reading. But it is, indeed, on my to-read list.
@BESW Rose really overstayed her welcome. She dominated the story too much. Same with Amy. River, on the other hand, I would like to see continue to pop in for many seasons to come.
Rose, Martha and Donna were occasionally annoying (especially Martha), but they were people, with families and goals and plans. Moffat's women are single-focus ideas lacking nuance and real humanity. Amy is The Girl Who Waited (note the mandatory Capitalization, because she's a Title, not a person). Clara is The Impossible Girl. River is The Annoying Mary-Sue-ex-Machina..
In addition to being the longest-running in Moffat's line of near-identically themed "What's Weird About the Hot Woman?" story arcs, River dominates whatever story she appears in to the point of trivialising the characters around her in order for the story to showcase what a Strong Sexy Woman she is.
And therein lies my non-show-specific issue; River is one of those Strong Sexy Women Who Is Really Kind Of Mean And Immoral But We Should Overlook That Because She Has A Tragic Past. Which at the end of the day is astonishingly patronising because it defines her as a victim whose trauma renders her unaccountable for her own choices.
Stargate SG-1 put Claudia Black in the same role for its last two seasons.
And it's why I grit my teeth most of the time HG Wells is on the screen in Warehouse 13.
@BESW I've been rolling the mechanics of the "cruel and dirty" game I mentioned to you yesterday. The one where characters die fast and easy, but they also progress in power very quickly should they survive.
I see it going in a direction where the mechanics would heavily favor ... er, "less privileged" party members taking a lot of shots for the guy who actually survives to level 3 or something.
Hm, I think every new character should start at the bottom, but even new characters should be reasonably potent (to not make the players feel powerless) and advancing should be fast (to make advancement viable despite the deadliness)
I also made a small comparison to DnD (4e) - where in DnD 4e a party is expected to survive a normal combat with no casualties, in Cruel and Dirty game a normal fight would be one where... say, maybe up to a third of the characters got killed.
A little bit of lighthearted slaughter à la Paranoia.
In this case I'd refrain from too many or complex character building options - since the character is likely to be pushing daisies after a few encounters :P
I'd want the focus to be on naturally evolving and mutating power disparity between players as one's character survives several battles in a row while the rest attempt to frantically protect them to not lose their only buff character :>
TPK's shouldn't be commonplace unless the party manages to lose all their powerful characters.
I'm after an experience of trust where party members try to balance on keeping themselves alive and keeping the party (as a whole) intact.
For light-hearted sudden-death fun it's a good source. I'm not sure it'll give you the cooperative element you're looking for, but it's probably better than Paranoia in that respect.
@BESW I actually thought of something like that as an "in-universe justification" for the dying. Players are some cosmic beings that can incarnate at will, so they can have a distinct personality between characters.
Oh no, I was reading the backlog. I'd voice for the right of GMNoob tot to be banned, because nobody should ever be in my mind except spammers and trolls - but I fear getting too vocal and getting banned too.
It's a suspension, not a ban, and I don't know the specifics of it but there are auto-suspensions for extremely consistently getting the majority of one's posts closed/deleted.
But it does cast light on one of the ideas his concerns seemed to side-step: that the site has inherent goals and guidelines in place which cannot be overridden for emotional reasons or by majority vote without compromising the structure which makes the site work in the first place.
Unfortunately it was no job agency, just a friend asking us to go choosing a computer for her, because she embodies the technologically impaired female trope
He's absolutely right that there's often an inhuman disconnect in the way the site's guidelines are enforced, and it's nothing new that moderators make decisions which go against the common vote (though that's not usually bad; it's why we have moderators after all).
But emotional appeals, vitriol, and failing to acknowledge the Stack's expressed purpose and goals when making arguments, do not bring good attention to one's suggestions.
It happens every so often, that a citizen takes justifiable umbrage at a Stack behaviour but their chosen expression of that umbrage leads to the actual problem which needs to be addressed gets dismissed out of hand.
> Sonia Clò on 29 july 2014, 12:02 No no let me understand, this guy is raging harder than a swamp rat. he hates D&D and plays its watered down version Dungeon World? Ok, go back gnawing your stick in the wood valley, my dear forgite, cause now that Next is coming out, trollbabe and many other games known to the relatives of your guru will fade into oblivion even more...
@lisardggY oh no itss not about RPGs. It's about how, according to her, all the people playing "modern" games are just oogling at ron edwards like zombies and trying to convert the others. She always curses at them.
@BESW and I'm tired of people refusing to acknowledge that "aiming for the good experience with coherent rules" is not "using crutches because you're unable to play the real games"
