The one where one of my players teared up was Out of the Abyss
If you're fine reading spoilers, I can ellaborate haha
it was really heavy though. A 0.1% chance of happening (I did the math)
no one (except another player who was in on it) saw it coming
The Cleric cast a spell in Faerzress-infused area, meaning I roll a d20 to see if a wild magic surge happened. I rolled a 1- 5% chance. I then rolled a d100 to see what happens, result: 48 (A Unicorn appears!) 2% chance. After the Unicorn facerolls the enemies they were fighting
they asked it to heal the party, which he did. Then, a certain (soon-to-be-dead) NPC asked the unicorn if he could be cured of being True Polymorphed (this is the spoiler part).
I looked up the unicorn's spells and turns out he could with Dispel Evil and Good (Well, by RAW, it could not have really dispelled polymorph, but eh, it was 5th level and the unicorn wanted to try. I thought it was fun)
So after a few theatrics with spells, and a dramatic visible d20 roll (I didn't hide it in the screen), I swear to god this player- really macho and death metal-y, squealed in excitement
to cut the story short, the NPC got "cured" of his madness and reverted back to being a monster. And attacked the party.
Which they swiftly killed. I ended the session after that, no one wanted to go home, though, we just sat there and discussed what the fudge happened
ah. I don't really do in-person mainly due to transportation issues, but that might change (I have a sneaking suspicion there may be a FLGS w/in walking distance now)
aw man, must be awesome to have those. Most Game Stores here just sell MtG and boardgames. There's a local AL group but they're all too bloodthristy and murder-hobo-y for my taste haha
cues scene with his 3.5e cleric flipping the bridge ogre a gold coin and telling him to throw the change in the bridge repair kitty, when all the ogre asked for was a silver for the wagon toll
the one AL game I played in, the other players who weren't part of my regular group wanted to kill the non-aggressive escort guards of a merchant caravan just for the exp. So, yeah
my preferred RPG FLGS (run by a friend; another friend runs my prefrerred board game FLGS) has a wall, maybe 20' floor to ceiling of display RPG books, plus the used book shelf. I always feel a bit spoiled
I noticed that my players would pay everything in gold. A simple piece of bread? 1 copper. "Here, have a gold and keep the change." They get into a tavern. A beer! Here, have a gold coin and keep the change. They would give beggars gold coins like they are candies. They make a donation to the chu...
@daze413 her thinking was more like "we need this bridge -- might as well start investing it it" after all, amateurs study tactics, but professionals study logistics, right?
haha I read that question, I think it's fine. I agree with the answer that the players are just trying to simplify everything. Unless you're an accountant, like me, no one wants to keep track of how many copper vs silver vs gold vs platinum vs electrum you have
@Shalvenay exactly! invest in goodwill. Who knows, the ogre might help you next time youre there
but the system really is hard to bookkeep if you keep it like that. What about if everything was sold and bought in copper coins? Like, what if other coins didnt exist?
I'd argue that most of the sorts of campaigns D&D's actually designed to support and encourage would be totally fine with aggressively abstracting that kind of thing.
Sadly, my ignorance of fate makes me comprehend only half of the things mentioned in the link :( Tell me if I got it wrong but in Fate, there's no resources except some sort of story resorce thats shared to all resources like skills and other mechanical stuff? And Fate assumes the same assumption when you're watching movies/TV that the main character always has enough money except when the plot requires him/her to be broke.
Pretty much, yeah. Anything it'd be reasonable to have, you have. If it's unreasonable, or it's dramatic to have tension about whether you can get the thing, then you either roll your "Resources" skill or you spend meta currency to get it (or accept meta currency to have it be unavailable to you).
Fate's got a totally different attitude toward "stuff." Most iterations of D&D look at your stuff as a primary method for power advancement, but Fate doesn't really care mechanically whether your awesomeness is from your stuff or from innate ability: you've got the same number of "be awesome" slots that you can fill however you like for permanent coolness, and anything else is acquired and lost through the story.
Or you can hoard your meta-currency to spend on your rolls directly, which is much more flexible than spending it on specific details... but may leave you in trouble when you run out.
In some Fate games you'll wind up with "I'm a wizard who wields cosmos-shaking power, but I've invested so much in my awesomeness that I don't have the meta currency to buy off whatever complications come my way;" "I'm an ordinary mortal policewoman who can't hold a candle to the wizard in terms of raw power, but I have the meta currency to have more control over the situation and be luckier than him."
Which means those characters can have adventures together without either one overshadowing the other!
I've played a campaign with a swamp thing, a thundercat, a jedi, and an IT professional.
I'm considering GMing Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, but there's something I fundamentally don't understand: Why is The Doctor a player-character option? And why is it the default selection? Shouldn't the Doctor almost always be an NPC?
Player's Guide, P5: "If you like, you can pla...
bubblegumshoe uses structural limits on characters more to control the complexity of the story than to work out any sort of power balance. This is evident in its willingness to toss around extra relationships mid-game as the story requires.
If you were going to try implementing a Fate-like balancing system in D&D, the first challenge (one which only 4e ever came close to cracking) is to roughly quantify each character feature's relative spotlight power.
Most editions of D&D rely on a kind of hand-wavey go-by-the-gut sense of balance based on radically presumptive ideas about what sort of game will be played while simultaneously encouraging people to view their system as a universal panacea for all types of play.
That makes it VERY hard to do something like match specific features to values of a generic control currency.
Fate's spotlight management works as well as it does largely because whatever quantified value a feature has is measured against the value of the fate point and its applications.
@BESW Huh. I noticed one of the writers is Laura Anne Gilman. That makes sense - she wrote the Retrievers series I'm reading - urban fantasy about a magic-using thief.
@doppelgreener Absolutely. This city's economy relies exclusively on drug trade and maintaining a caste system where some people will forever get the short end of the stick. Unless the PCs give one of them $20, and they spontaneously get better in literally every way, which actually happened already.
@DuckTapeAl It's an idea I'm pretty proud of. We're running a round robin GM game in something of a Stargate universe, so each GM takes a few sessions to run their outlandish setting, then hands it over to the next guy and a new world. The last guy did a weird cult setting that really messed with our heads.
@JoelHarmon this is actually how payments used to work in fact! (you may know this, since you suggested it at all, but i'm gonna geek about it anyway here.) in past millennia where people would trade livestock and goods and services for that of others, instead of currency -- sometimes called the "barter economy" -- there was still a currency backbone, and they traded those goods and services because they knew they were equivalent currency-wise, even if they didn't have coins on them.
@doppelgreener @JoelHarmon There is an mmo that tried to replicate that- look up "Path of Exile" there is no such thing as coins or other such currency in that game and everything had to be traded with an equivalent value of something else.
@daze413 that seems like it's going a bit too far if they were trying to replicate the historical state, since minted coins still existed in wide circulation (at least in cities)
@doppelgreener PoE isn't trying specifically to emulate a particular historical state. It's a (sort of) post-apocalyptic RPG, so no one uses currency because they're more concerned with where their next meal comes from than what their currency is worth.
It's more of a "last bastion of humanity" situation than an emulation of any realistic medieval trade system.
And, as a game designer that dabbles in economies, it's deeply exciting. :D
THE P2W HEATHENS SHALL BE SLAIN, THEIR BLOOD USED TO SWEETEN OUR COFFEE! MAY THEIR HEADS DECORATE OUR OPEN PLAN OFFICE! MAY THEIR ENTRAILS FESTOON OUR BREAK ROOM!
@doppelgreener no, I mean that they have 3 hours to complete the adventure and resurrecting someone means they now have 2 hours 45 minutes. There's no "let's wait for 15 minutes" anywhere, there's just "we have 150 rounds less to win" (and anyway i'm not sure I want to use this timer. Checking how many resurrections would have been possible and using a similarly restricted pool of characters might be better).
Also, yay Path of Exile. As a hoarder, tho', trading is hard. there must be a reason if I tried Diablo 2 on Battle Net and I hastily went back to farm my equipment in endless single player runs.
(where at least I can mule items way more easily. Muling = switching out items to other characters built just to use the free space in their inventory)
Me in a week: "Ping me with expressions of interest!!! I said Please T_T" XD
Jokes apart: @eimyr, we need to discuss what you, as a prospect player, explect me to put on the table. Character creation rules? Setting? Where I intend to play? All of the above?
You may answer your question like you may answer any other question. You will be held to the same quality bar. If what WotC staff say is satisfying as part of your answer, excellent.
I really like Money.SE. I can feel good about myself when I read about other people's terrible financial choices, and laugh at ridiculous things that people say.
"Never, ever spend more than about $1250 on a car. It's utterly pointless spending more than that."
@DuckTapeAl i spent $9,000 on a car, it was a beautiful thing, and sold it a year later for the same price i got it for. effectively only paid for insurance and maintenance and fuel.
if i spent $1250 on a car i would expect it to be so barely functional i would be paying to replace half of it within a year and spending several times that in repair costs
The only way I can see a 1250$ car being a reasonable thing is if you're super patient, willing to do lots of your own maintenance, and have tons of knowledge about cars.
@Zachiel I feel like this is a dumb question, but I've seen that word a lot and I don't know what it means. What is VAT?
@Zachiel that's a harsh reply man, they're not doing that in australia either, you just have to avoid the random encounters laid out across the path and you're fine.
@DuckTapeAl It's a tax on buying things. Basically, here as soon as you buy a car you just spent around 10% of its value in taxes, and you will never manage to seel the car at its full price anymore.
I'm not sure it's 10% for cars, it's probably near 23%
the moment you drive it off the lot, the value drops by several thousand dollars, possibly over ten thousand. you've effectively paid $thousands in overhead. let someone else with the money to burn front that cost, get your car second-hand, after that enormous value decline.
But if the difference is paying 25k for a new car, or 15k for a nearly-new car with a few quirks, the cost/benefit scale is weighted was towards the used car.
@Zachiel let's assume this is true (it isn't, I'll respectfully disagree with @DuckTapeAl here): a generic Ford Falcon here that costs $18,000 brand new will sell for at most $12,000 a year or two later. therefore you can also buy a very recent high quality Ford Falcon for around $12,000 (at a generous estimate). selling this theoretical example car will mean you lose $6,000 on the car over its lifetime.
Alternately, you can buy that second hand $12,000 Ford Falcon. If it has problems, they may cost $1,000 to fix if they're fairly severe. It will almost certainly not have $6,000 of issues.
So, this entirely decent car costs $13,000, and you lose $1,000 on it.
I'm using a bit of hyperbole when I say they "always" have problems, but what @doppelgreener says is exactly right.
Every car needs maintenance, but the difference in maintenance costs between a new and nearly-new car is not a significant difference, while the difference in purchase cost is huge.
@Zachiel Fair enough. I prefer to pick out decent second-hand cars from brands that experience little value loss over their lifetime, and replace them over time.
(at least, that would be the plan. it's the one my parents and brother follow; my last 2 cars I gave up because one was done in by someone colliding into it, and the other was sold because I was moving.)
@doppelgreener I guess that looks like a lot of work to me. Besides, I'm just doing what my dad does and if it works for him, I'm fine. Plus, should it ever turn out that it's the wrong way, he can't blame me XD
The cost is the extra work you have to put in during the search. The benefit is that you never have to worry about the maintenance nightmare that is a 150k+ mile car.
Related: When I was going through monetization numbers on the game I worked on, I found out that there was one player who had spent over 20,000$ on the game through microtransactions.
Which was mind-boggling to me because I have no idea how you could possibly spend that much money on the game.
Like, there wasn't even 20,000$ worth of stuff to buy.
So any time I hear anyone say "I couldn't imagine spending X$ on Y thing", I think of that player.
@DuckTapeAl How can you know you will never need that money one day? (This is what is stopping me from having fun, I fear ending my resources and having no ways to get them up again)
Hmm. I'd like to ask you something, and I sincerely apologize if this is an offensive question.
Growing up, would you say that you were generally poor? Or that your family had to worry about money?
I ask because that question is something that I've heard from many different people that had a low-to-middle class financial upbringing, and generally not otherwise.
My answer would be, basically, I don't know that I won't ever need that money.
But there's a cost-benefit analysis involved. I know that, if I suddenly lost all income, I'd be able to live for X months on my savings.
In my particular case, the value of X is large enough that I believe that my wife or I could get gainful employment within X months.
So, if I spend a small amount of money on entertainment, it is unlikely to cause me long-term problems.
I think I've spent about 200$ this year on video games, which is about 15% of my bare minimum monthly spend to keep my apartment and internet and food and stuff.
@DuckTapeAl My family fares fine. I think I had this revelation about having wasted money the day I went to sell my Dragonball manga hoping for an almost full price and I got told it had no value whatsoever.
I do a decent amount of hoarding money as well, so it's more a matter of the ratio between money spent on things I don't really need and money I'm saving.
I'm unemployed right now, but when I was working, my wife and I were putting away a pretty good chunk of change each month.
So spending a little bit of money on games every month or so wasn't a significant relative cost
I buy games because the relative improvement of my life that the game gives is higher than the relative improvement that the 20$ would be in my bank account.
@eimyr Ok, let's start by saying that most rules are the same as fourth edition D&D, which I don't see among your usual tags. Are you passingly familiar with it?
given the SRD of 4e, I doubt there is anything legal.
Starting from 3.5e: full round actions are no more a thing. You get a standard (long), a movement (medium) and a minor action (short). You can sacrifice any action to get one of the shorter ones.
Attacking is a standard action, moving is a movement action (including the 5ft step, which is now called "shift 1" - shifting means moving without provoking OAs, and distances are measured in squares), minors can be drawing/stowing weapons, opening/closing doors and other... well... minor actions
every special action you can do will clearly indicate the kind of action it takes
Attacks of opportuinty are one per turn, reactions (special actions you can take out of your turn) are one per round (a round is made of the turns of the characters)
and with the exception of free actions, I think we've explored the action economy
@eimyr it depends on the power you use. Apart from basic attacks that you just can do by virtue of having a weapon, each class has powers. Think spells for casters, ToB martial manoeuvers for non-casters
So some powers will allow for more than one attack per turn, all crammed into the standard action
move and attack twice? Easy, with the right class.
powers can be daily, encounter or at-will
one of the ranger at-wills (that you get at level 1) is "make two attacks, but don't add your Str or Dex to the damage they do"
Also, charging is now a standard that includes movement but ends your turn, so you can use movement to position and then charge. (Finding good charge paths is also easier). The downside is that you can't use powers when charging, just your basic attack (except if you have the right powers from the right class)
rogues and barbarians have powers that can be used on a charge, for instance
Skills have been reduced and grouped, Pathfinder-like (but no fly skill, don't you worry)
What used to be saves now: a) work like different sorts of AC. If one casts a fireball, he has to roll to hit each of the targets. b) are determined by using the highest of two modifiers, (e.g. int or dex for reflexes and for AC if you're in light armor - heavy armor uses no stat bonus)
Saves are now an entirely different mechanics used to end ongoing effects. Roll a d20, 10 or more and you pass the save
Death happens at -half your total HP, or after you've lost three saves versus death in the same encounter.
I have a small group of players who don't play often and we've been playing D&D 3.5.
I wanted to know if there are any significant differences between D&D 3.5 and D&D 4e? Do they use a different style of game? Is one better suited for certain groups? Or is D&D 4th edition just an 'update' of D&D...
It is still possible to obtain a non-updated copy of it (I still have it, it still works). I don't think WotC wants us to use it (they passed to the online character builder to prevent people subscribing to DDI once or twice a year just to download the updates) and the current one, if it still exists, is in their subscription online site.
Someone did a program that lets you enter customized material more easily and someone else used it to create the missing content. That, that I'm sure is not legal at all.
(Having the need to reference it in a place where I have no internet connection, I'm really glad it still works)
Great Ork Gods talks about what to do if you've got fewer players than there are Gods, but what we have more than seven players? It'd be very unfair, I think, to have a player with an Ork but no God--they wouldn't get any automatic easy difficulties, or earn Spite during play.
How should we dist...
I'm considering GMing Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, but there's something I fundamentally don't understand: Why is The Doctor a player-character option? And why is it the default selection? Shouldn't the Doctor almost always be an NPC?
Player's Guide, P5: "If you like, you can pla...
