Contentious topic of the day... can you wield a double weapon one-handed in 3.PF?
> A character can fight with both ends of a double weapon as if fighting with two weapons, but he or she incurs all the normal attack penalties associated with two-weapon combat, just as though the character were wielding a one-handed weapon and a light weapon.
The character can also choose to use a double weapon two handed, attacking with only one end of it. A creature wielding a double weapon in one hand can’t use it as a double weapon—only one end of the weapon can be used in any given round.
(Paizo official position is "No". WotC official position is... unclear)
user20683
12:54 AM
@Adeptus I would say the WotC position is yes. Valenar Elves wield double scimitars from horseback
oddly enough, someone who looked at my tags page would be a little confused, because I don't actually play WoD at all, yet my most-upvoted answer's on a WoD question :P
@Aaron This looks quite interesting. I haven't really played Castlevania (I know, I know :v), but the setting, characters, and visual style are extremely appealing to me here.
I mean, to be fair, I have spent a lot of time playing many different games, I simply didn't have time for some of them, especially if I was gonna do anything other than playing video games
Yeah, I know what you mean. Way too many games, too little time.
But I should try them sometime... I love Gothic fiction and vampires and all that good stuff. That's why I bring up Crimson Peak. I just watched the trailer, and it looks like a wonderful adaptation of classic Gothic romance/horror sensibilities with Del Toro's style and a big ol' budget.
yeah, to me Castlevania was just a series of games, most of which were likely to be good, that was in the pile with other games I might get around to playing some other time
...my players....are throwing a memorial service for the enemy they just killed
There were so many ways to end that plot arc, they decided to end it with blunt force trauma, only to put everything together in the end that the bad guy...wasnt evil, just had a very different perspective than the party
I'm going to buy all of them soon enough, and get proper fate dice instead of my makeshifts (which I'm still proud of)
Coincidentally, Vol 2 Issue 1 I think, which I bought, contains a FAE hack/playstyle called Primal World where nameless characters representing an idea (The Defender, The Scholar, The Terror) "explore" a newly formed, chaotic world. "Explore" is in quote marks because the world has a Stability Table of 5 by 5 squares. Once two aspects that refer to the same thing exist somewhere, such as [I was born in the Cullbrook Citadel] and [I hate Cullbrook Citadel],that element becomes a part of the world
and the same goes with approaches, which players either pick out of a larger list or invent themselves. Once an approach appears on two entities, it becomes a World approach, and once there are six on the world's stability table, everything has to change and adapt to use those approaches, if they're not "consumed" by whatever reality-eating forces can attack the world
the world itself is treated as a character, with pre-determined Consequences that start acting once the world takes stress, and it evolves at the same time as the characters explore/create it with the 5x5 aspect table
@BESW I must admit, they have largely fled my head, and I don't have any headspace right now, what with a game to run in 2 days and everything. But by next week this should hopefully change.
**The Defender** The Defender is a wall against destruction and unmaking. But the defender isn't defined by what it defends, only *that* it defends. Being a wall has little meaning, though, unless there is something on each side, something to keep out and to keep in. Perhaps the externals are exactly the threat it needs to solidify its own existence: the wall between the monsters from beyond and this world. But if that were so... would the Defender truly want to shut those monsters out for good? Or would it want a constant trickling threat to defend against forever?
Approach: Good(+3) Indomitable
stunts, stress and consequences work the same, of course
but milestones are different, and allow for a lot of change and concretion, to reflect the nature of the game... I really like it, I'd recommend Vol 2 Issue 1 just for this honestly
It also has an article called "Two Hour Fate", about managing to have good two-hour game sessions with the system, based on a fixed, fluid "budget" of aspects, stress etc
mhm! I really like it, and another article about.. translating Dresden Files into Atomic Robo or something
but it's really good outside of either too
some very good ideas that, as is always the case with Fate, you can build on yourself
These people obviously really care about Fate, and they have some very sweet ideas, and again I love the informal style a LOT
and it's $2.99 or something in pdf, mobi and epub
and yes, I know that when I'm really excited about something it sounds like I'm actually selling you the stuff myself, sorry for that :P
vol 1 issue 4 has this, too:
-Nick Bate's take on violence in Fate, Why Are We Always Fighting? -André La Roche's political campaign system, Campaign Season -Encoded Systems's new dice mechanic, Momentum Dice -J. Huston Todd's quick start adventure, The Pilots of EDEN
Speaking of eBooks and the like... my wife has recently published 2 eBooks and a print-on-demand paperback that combines them (3 short stories & a novella)
It's fine so long as it's not overrunning another conversation (in which case the less on-topic conversation will probably be suggested it moves to the Not A Bar).
I know that in some areas the Stack is really strict and cold about some things
I might have gotten a lot of flak about things on StackOverload
@BESW I'm a bit curious, did going into Fate-type/lite/plusyminusy RPGs make you see d20/heavy games differently? Would you ever prefer those over lite games?
@AlexMitan It very much changed how I see other games, though I'd already started to see the problems with elements like goblin dice before I made the switch.
I'm still open to "heavy" games, but I've shaken off the illusion that complexity is valuable for its own sake, especially in the proliferation of subsystems.
I now value complexity for the effect it has on the game experience, and most of my own gameplay needs are currently better fitted by simpler systems.
I feel pretty conflicted, on the one hand I've come to really feel contempt for complex d20 type games, to the point where if I'm in the right (or wrong?) mood I'll go on a little hate rant about them
His blogging about 4e vastly increased my own enjoyment and understanding of the system, and also facilitated my understanding why I needed to leave it.
but on the other I have a very deeply rooted sense of "We're all a community around a hobby that should be more popular anyway, I can appreciate any game which brings people joy and if that's their thing, great"
So long as the people involved in the game experience are happy and safe, nobody outside the experience is qualified to tell them they're Doing It Wrong.
@BESW Self-publishing - eBook through Amazon & Smashwords (who also distribute through Apple store, Kobo, B&N, etc); and PoD through Createspace (part of Amazon)
A few of the chat regulars, myself included, have an assortment of issues with D&D, though mostly not with the complexity itself, but with the underlying reasons for it. Or lack thereof.
Yeah, I'm not saying they're Doing It Wrong, it just pisses me off so much on an emotional level, a level on which it perhaps shouldn't register
Maybe a bit of frustration and sense of "revenge" that it made me break down that one time and such, the fear that it might have discouraged my group a bit
It's a very strong system for certain gameplay goals, but it just bit off more than it could chew in trying to also accommodate other gameplay goals that it wasn't quite so well fitted to.
Reading this gaming industry retrospective I ran into a few phrases which confused me.
The d20 bust caused by 3.5e (2003) and the over-saturation of d20 products ran right into the Great Recession.
What's "the d20 bust"? I came into RPGs shortly after 3.5's release, so I can't compare befor...
Basically, the d20 boom was when the d20 System's open gaming license let many small businesses publish RPG material without having to invent their own system--thus reducing overhead and making more people likely to buy it.
...but a lot of it was very low-quality, and it was all based on the same basic set of mechanics, so quantity increased while quality and variety got sidelined.
I felt it myself, and I've learned a lot... in the end, I don't regret it
But seriously, having to tell her "No, you used up your spell slot on a huge bolt that missed and poofed against the cave wall, you can start using your mace now for the rest of the day"
Whereas in Fate, on that one-on-one game, Zee the rogue deciding it was time to reveal her pyromantical abilities and Sneakily let out a fireball on someone.. we both loved that
and I let her use whatever stealth attack bonus she had on her stunt, at which point I just thought "Man, Skyrim should really let you have sneak bonuses on magic" since it was her character from Skyrim delving in a small dwarven ruin
Magician is running us through 13th Age this weekend, and it's closer to D&D than I ever thought I'd get again, but I'm willing to give it a chance 'cause it's got some really cool solutions to a lot of the pushback I faced with D&D.
if you roll too high or too low, your stats will be less likely to actually effect anything, and beyond stats there usually isn't too much you can do to influence rolls
Like, 13th Age uses a d20 for attacks... but in addition to "did you hit the target number?" it also asks "did you roll even or odd?" and "did you roll 6+?" and so forth, with various class effects keying off it.
Also, D&D told me "It's fun to hide the difficulty number, it's IMMERSIIIVE" and I just took it for granted. And you know what? No it ain't. I love the "bargaining" going on in Fate... I love the "Ha! You thought that was it?!" going on with trying to one-up the other, it distributes the tension and narrative over a longer process that is active, instead of a longer process that is mainly number-crunching
I've been working for quite some time to phrase my feelings on these topics, on the position that mechanics occupy in d20 vs. fiction-first games like Fate, but it never comes out entirely coherent.
@AlexMitan I agree personally, but I've had players in the past who felt that kind of discussion made it hard for them to take the story seriously because it exposed the machinery and artifice too much.
Sure, but everyone's aware they're depending on mechanics to resolve things, might as well make the mechanics fun to manipulate instead of bow down under and hope you rolled right
With enough Fate points (which you get by playing as more than a set of numbers) you could turn any bad roll around on its head
D&D tried to do a similar thing with Inspiration, but now it just seems token, no pun intended, since they insist you have to decide if you want to use Inspiration "before the roll", so you still have no idea if it's going to be needed or not
D&D's got a long tradition of carefully balancing cause-and-effect "realism" with genre tropes and mechanical convenience. Each iteration's success is wide open for debate, but that's contentious enough it should probably adjourn to a side chat if anyone here wanted to dig into it.
For a number of societal and sociological reasons, it's hard to critique an RPG system without folks inferring --rightly or wrongly-- that we're also criticising those who enjoy that system.
@AlexMitan I actually like hybrids and borrowing elements from one system to another. I don't like answers like "Don't homebrew D&D to be like Fate, play Fate instead" because it ignores many factors, like the fact that people are people, not rational decision-making machines.
In other words, don't be hard on yourself. Homebrewing D&D to be more like Fate is perfectly fine, since the cost of switching systems, especially for groups who've only played the same game for years, is huge.
Learning is an eternal constant in human existence.
My life getting more stressful is one factor in burning out on D&D 3.5 when I did, and then again on D&D entirely. The prep time and the effort of orchestration just stopped being worth it.
Now I've got GMless games, and games we can play without prep at all, and games my other players will volunteer to GM. Gaming had become a job instead of an intensive hobby, and now it isn't a job anymore.
@AlexMitan You're forgetting that for many D&D players, and even for me, in certain moods and times in my life, the number-crunching is a desired element, not something you slog through to get to the good parts. The mechanics are a game element that people enjoy for its own sake.
Especially since some really major exams are coming my way number-crunching in it felt like more exam prep to me, I'm pretty good at math, but dear lord do I hate it
So people wanting more of that felt like a "Surely you're joking, sir" kind of thing at first
I have a regular group where we played mostly d20 over the years - a long-running 3.5 campaign I joined late, two Pathfinder campaigns, BESM d20 and Fading Suns d20. We played d20 systems because they were familiar to us. Only two players were actual optimizers (and they moved to the US after the original 3.5 game ended).
We still kept with d20 because it was familiar and we couldn't justify the cost of switching systems.
@AlexMitan He fell off the wagon three months later.
@AlexMitan Mostly. But I've done it in Roll For Shoes, and D&D 3.5, and D&D 4e, and Cthulhu Dark, and basically any system I've ever run more than five sessions of.
How can you make "twosies" better? What do I need to take into account differently? I want to do more of them to feel more secure since I barely ever GMed in general and I don't want to be overwhelmed
@AlexMitan No, I meant it referentially: after swearing to stop playing RPGs, he was back at them again three months later. He tried to "quit" but "fell off the wagon."
@AlexMitan Try looking at questions tagged twosies, to start.
Interestingly enough, this allows for roleplaying with stories that are closer to the sort of stories you'd get in literature, where there's often a single primary protagonist that the plot revolves around. Groups in RPGs are a sort of ensemble cast that doesn't always map well to the sort of stories that many players come to the table hoping to emulate.
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Hello, I was given the advice ask a question I posted on the rpg.se here.
The question is this: Is there a recommended party composition for D&D 5e?
If I have a party of three who are interested in being a Paladin and two rangers should I encourage that party composition or will the group be inhibited?
Ahhh, well 5e comes with much of the same expectations as 3.5. Unlike 4e, you don't specifically need a party member of each "role", but a certain number of party members and certain abilities are usually expected to be covered. Anywhere from 3-6 members in the party should do fine, and as long as the party has access to healing they can still do admirably well.
I am starting a campaign and I need some advice, I have yet to find any 5e advice on building a party online.
I have three players who will make the party and I will DM. My issue is that since I am new to 5e (but have played one campaign of 3.5) and none of my players have ever played d&d before...
Yea I'd like to reiterate what the others have already said: just take into account what your players can actually do and you should be fine. After that, the best way to learn DMing (or, in my opinion, anything) is by doing. You'll do great! The fact that you're taking the time to think critically about a lot of this means you have a leg up on many many people who try to run games. =)
@JohnP I agree that that particular answer isn't very good, but I went and upvoted some of your questions that I thought were good. Hope that helps. :)
So...updating legacy code. Found a critical process that updates a DB when finished, so it can be alerted upon if it fails. I can find no code from the last decade that actually checks the DB.
Site chatrooms aren't as differentiated as the stack sites themselves.
I have a total network rep of over 20k (I think that's the limit), so I sometimes get notified of people flagging chat comments as offensive or whatnot, even on chat rooms for sites I don't go to.
Arqade's chat seems to draw in a lot of foul mouthed kids.
Click on your username and you see there's a diamond there, regardless of the site.
I'm edited a post that says that "specific beats general" is an unwritten rule. I have a hard time believing that's extra-textual. Can anyone point me to the Pathfinder SRD that establishes it? Failing that, the d20 SRD?
@JohnP I know it's literally "Specific Beats General" in 4e. I am pretty certain there is language that means the same in d20/PF, but this morning my google-fu fails me.
Reading this gaming industry retrospective I ran into a few phrases which confused me.
The d20 bust caused by 3.5e (2003) and the over-saturation of d20 products ran right into the Great Recession.
What's "the d20 bust"? I came into RPGs shortly after 3.5's release, so I can't compare befor...
