@Miniman most are, with a few meeting them recently and coming along for the ride, but im actually setting up for those players to split into a parallel party for a while (since they are generally only available online)
In that case, I'd (personally) definitely skip over the downtime.
I mean, you could have them build relationships with their fellow gladiators, and delve into the micro-politics of arena life, but why bother if they're here for a couple of fights and then moving on?
i also want to use the first day to sort of practice to figure out which players are going to be slow and troublesome, so i can implement advice from a guidebook on fast combat that was posted here
@Miniman yea, wasnt really thinking of that
at most maybe have one player whos a war vet come across an old comrade
i was thinking more high level politics or world building, people talking about the political conflicts since the city they are in is comprised of the worlds ambassadors looking for time to kill
> ...the practical problem that people often assume there's a “move action” and they refer to it when discussing combat.
Implies your question isn't about whether the assumption is true, but about how to explain that it's not.
If anybody want to say "Oh, but it's true!" that's a frame challenge.
I think you'll get better answers this way, as explanations will be very different for an audience that doesn't have an opinion vs an audience that's already made up its mind.
Suggestions for retitling welcome. “Is there such thing as a move action?” isn't currently accurate for the question, except poetically. I can't think of a way to title it that will look useful when linking it to others though.
[said the person who has read as little of 5e as possible]
> Not exactly rocket surgery. The rigorous education and demanding brainpower of your profession as a rocket surgeon lets you apply Lore to academic subjects and logical reasonings of every kind, no matter how specialised or obscure.
> A student of novel living. You are absolutely better than a normal person at plotting, scheming, and untangling the plots and schemes of others. However you are weak against reality not conforming to the conventions of literature.
@Miniman Like classroom teaching. It's humbling, how many of my relatives are better teachers than me despite my decades of experience and education, and their none of either =\
@nitsua60 yeah I mean, I have only the internet teachings to go by, so grains of salt can be liberally applied to how seriously you take the compliment XD
> The pathetic fallacy. You can use create advantage with Rapport to animate inanimate objects, but the resultant aspect describing your creation must include an extreme emotional quality like sobbing, paranoid, or exultant.
Lately, there's some activity in The Back Room: Live Tabletop Games, which was just recently unfrozen for the purpose of catering to the good-people-of-this-stack who wanted to run or play RPGs with fellow good-people-of-this-stack.
So far, some playtesting has been done here and there, but adv...
also the odds are rather dependent on the rolling mechanism used, it was probably 4d6 droplow in my case which is clearly less impressive than doing it on straight 3d6
If you count Baldur's Gate, I was one of those people who would spend an hour clicking reroll at chargen waiting for obscenely high stats, so I've possibly managed better on a flat 3d6... but only by virtue of using a platform that lets you roll repeatedly very quickly
and then i realized how dumb i was after 15 minutes
if you recast the problem as what are the chances that with N players my randomly assigned hand is better than every other players randomly assigned hand the answer is really obviously 1/N
the extent of my faffing with probability these days is mangling anydice to show me how terrible the dice mechanics I invent are, not done any proper mathematical calculation thereof in ages
I independently came up with what modern D&D calls advantage/disadvantage, too, shortly before I read about this new Advantage thing in the article that made me hate Rab Florence
Original mechanics are overrated; I want whatever mechanic is going to encourage and support the design's desired behaviour and experience, whether it's new or old, complex or simple, clever or inane.
Some of my favourite games, and two I wrote myself, key off of All Outta Bubblegum's mechanic, just tweaked in different ways to create different effects.
It's practically designed to challenge that notion.
Depending on your character choices and the situation, a single 1d20+X >= Y roll might ALSO check if 1d20 >= 5, 10, 15, or 18; if 1d20 is even or odd; or a handful of other variables.
but there's still less potential variety to be had than if, for instance, your system used 2d10 rather than 1d20. Then you could do things that key off doubles, as well
or if your system allows you a way to roll 3d10 and choose two of them, then perhaps you get to make a decision between a successful hit that does something boring or being able to trigger some other special effect
> God plays dice. When you invoke an aspect to reroll a Science skill, roll six Fate dice and keep the best four Fate dice for your result.
> There are no rules. Once per scene, when you invoke one of your aspects, instead of getting a bonus or a reroll, you may swap out a Fate die for a regular six-sided die—the kind that are numbered one through six.
> The magnificent three. When using a Science skill, if exactly three of your dice show the same result, you get a boost for free.
My interest trends less to having lots of special cases that might theoretically apply to you and more to having a non-trivial core mechanic with separate components that interact to create more complexity and choice
well I mean I still think those things can be fun, they're just not what my brain comes up with when I sit down and think about games
But it's important to recognise that while no single 13th Age raw d20 mechanic applies to everybody, you have to work really hard to not have one: rider effects based on your raw d20 roll is a core gimmick of the game.
Even cthulhu-dark, which has some of the simplest mechanics (outside of roll-for-shoes, of course) I've ever seen, has interesting triggered effects and hard choices built into the dice mechanics.
I don't like stopping the narrative to study dice in most of my games, but half the fun of Danger Patrol is shaking up a giant handful of different kinds of dice and then pouring over them to uncover what awesomeness has occurred.
I'd much prefer something like Cthulhu Dark's sanity die (add it to any roll, or add it to re-roll, but if it rolls too high you temporarily freak out and get a little closer to permanent madness--and you MUST add it to any roll dealing with freaky stuff).
Or Don't Rest Your Head, where the whole point of the three dice pools is to represent the shifting tides of your mental and physical power and stress.
I like my mechanics to mean something. Bubblegumshoe takes the Gumshoe skill pool concept and hooks it into relationships so running out of a pool doesn't just mean you're out of bonuses to rolls--it means you have to go patch things up with your mom before she lets you borrow the car again.
in that vein but not-actually-dice, 6d6 (or at least the version the GM used in the game I played) represented damage to the character by having to actually discard the cards that represent your abilities
@Carcer Shadowcraft lets you ALWAYS succeed at magic, but you have to roll anyway. If you fail your roll, your body or mind change in some way representing getting slowly absorbed into the essence of the magic you're casting. Too much of that without time spent remembering your individual humanity, and you become an NPC dedicated to the magic you harness.
The awesome twist is: becoming more one with your magic usually grants you AWESOME POWER.
Earth-channellers might get stoneskin armor, shadowcasters might be able to walk through walls, natural casters might grow horns or be able to see in the dark.
So you're constantly tempted to walk the balance between AWESOME and GONE.
like the more insane you are, the less shaken you are by freaky stuff, so there's an advantage to being somewhat crazy, it's not just a perpetual burden
The catch is that despite being almost guaranteed at least minimal success, the problems you face are so overwhelming you NEED that edge in order to have a chance of facing them without going mad or dying--much less actually defeating your foes.
I was doubtful about "you never fail unless someone calls for the chance, and even then probably not" being good for a Mythos themed system.
So one-shot systems like Cthulhu Dark and Lovecraftesque are great for us: they're explicitly divorced from the lore, but perfectly designed to invoke the themes.
...I based our last Lovecraftesque game on an episode of Thunderbirds Are Go.
Speaking of game mechanics with lots of variable potential, I'm looking forward for Ki Khanga; it uses playing cards.
I've read a handful of games with playing cards, like I'm a Pretty Princess (also uses coloring books!) and Hot Guys Making Out, but haven't played any.
I played a one-shot in such a system several years ago when I was at university but I can't remember anything about it other than the plot was HHGTTG inspired and I headbutted a door open at one point
alternative randomisation mechanics to dice are interesting but can get abominably hard to run the math on if you like doing that kind of thing to your systems (I do)
A column isn't updating as I would expect but I can't find any issue with my calculation.
The issue is displayed on cell G23. As you can see I did not add anything to the Goods column to the right, so what should be happening is it should take the cell above, G22, and add the cell to the left, F23 to get 125.81, however, what seems to be happening is it is ignoring the value in that cell and adding it like there was nothing in the goods column. If I add 3 into the goods column it shows the proper value but that shouldn't be needed.
Yea that happens all the time where I work. Ask someone for help and as soon as they come over you finally figure out what happened or it just. starts working suddenly
dunno about programs suddenly kicking into life, but it happened to me a lot with electronics generally
usually because the interval involved in friend coming to get me and then me sitting down to look was long enough for the issue to resolve itself, now nobody was trying to use whatever the device was
Is there a balance reason behind the Consumption mechanic in the Kingdom Builder rules not being able to drop below 0? Why not allow for extra farms to be built to help built up BP in case something happens or for trade with other kingdoms (Assuming you can trade of course) My assumption is this rule was to keep players from simply spamming farms and fisheries everywhere and raking in BP but couldn't it be simpler to limit which hexes are viable for farming and fishing or limit how many a kingdom can have by size?
I would probably skip this question if I saw it flagged in the review queues because I don't know anything about the rules that you are talking about. But questions about why rules are the way they are I don't think are immediately off-topic.
They can attract a lot of bad answers though so you need to be careful with them. The only good answers have to use personal experience with not following the rule, or a reference to developer commentary. Sometimes these questions attract people who only guess at why things are the way the are, and don't have much support to back them up
@Aaron Another good way to think about it is, "is this question a symptom of a different question?" For example, in your case it sounds like you are considering not following that rule, but want to know if you are missing some crucial balance component that actually changes everything
That it just an assumption on my part based on reading the question though, and I think there is an argument to be made that my "different question" interpretation is opinion based.
So to answer your question, I don't think that it's off topic, but I do think that you'll need to be sure to discourage answers that rely on speculation, or you could risk an influx of bad answers which will ultimately put your question in jeopardy.
My actual thought was allowing something like a silo to be a building you can make and it lets you store excess food for trade and storage. Each silo lets you have your consumption be 1 more in the negative and you can only have as many silo's as your size/10 with 1 minimum.
As @Adam pointed out, "Is there a balance reason behind the Consumption mechanic in the Kingdom Builder rules not being able to drop below 0?" is on-topic but may never receive an answer because without input from the writer/developer we will never know the specific balance reason.
I really want to suggest he just slaughter the character so the player can roll a new one, but I don't think that would be well received. rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/97315/…
@GreySage It's probably a remnant of the old "roll your stats in order and you're stuck with it" rules from the early days of RPGs. I think OD&D though suggested that the referee roll for stats behind the screen and make a character for the player, so it was assumed the referee wouldn't give you a guy who would insta-die
On the one hand, I don't particularly like point-buy systems because they facilitate min-maxing. On the other hand, I don't like dice gen because RNG is... well, RNG.
The problem is that I would really like an improbable idealistic stat gen where you don't feel like RNG screws you over, but there's still a lot of individuality.
So basically, I want to eat my cake and have it too.
I saw a system with hybrid die roll and point-buy where you roll for stats and based on your stat total, you were allotted a number of points to adjust your stats further.
so, for example, the standard is 3d6 or 4d6 drop lowest (I forget which one is official, I've seen so many). with that you get a total of 18 die. you would in theory have to have at least one for each stat, so you would have 12 to play around with
the main problem with that system though is for the possibility of getting over a 20 in 5e
I'm generally not a huge fan of rolling for stats, but the way my current DM had us do it isn't too terrible. He had do 4d6 drop lowest 7 times, then drop the lowest of those and arrange as desired.
one of the site's resident optimisation experts suggests using the standard array just because it avoids those scenarios where someone rolls very close to the top and another rolls close to the bottom.
The tension between stat rolling and point-buy/standard has to do with the sense of a unique character. Some people (myself included) feel a little bit of a loss of individuality/uniqueness when point-buy/standard array is used.
Point buy or Arrays are always safe, if min-maxing is distasteful (from a GM perspective ) there is probably a better system to run (Dungeon World) that avoids it
@doppelgreener I get that, but I also find that it does make the character very...inorganic. When I use the stat array I feel like I'm just painting on cardboard. It isn't nearly as much fun to me
@JoshuaAslanSmith yes, if the levels of min-maxing available via point buy (i.e. "not very much") are distasteful, the entire rest of the system presents a significant problem.
@Adam fair, though i consider that a small price to pay for avoiding the nega-fun of "so the cleric's got three stats at 16 and the rogue's best stat is a 14, and one of these characters is making the other look like garbage"
@doppelgreener Agreed. It's a very difficult medium to find. To be honest, I'm usually cool with mucking around with the 4d6 rule so much, that I might as well use the stat array. But, I don't want to. Stat arrays don't feel like a part of the experience to me
@DForck42 Product page says 1-11. But you can move right into it after the starter set, so I suspect the first 3-4 levels are simple adventures to prepare yourself for the real deal. PotA is like that.
@Yuuki had a Korean roommate for a year. I asked if he played star craft, he said no. walked in one day to him playing, and his APM were insane, and he's a "casual" player
@DForck42 my players typically insist on starting at 3 to feel more heroic when we begin. They don't like the risky lower levels, and they don't feel like they can have exciting backstories at level one
level 1 characters are approximately equal to goblins. Being an equal to a single goblin does not make for an exciting backstory
@Aaron Except it's like a tax on all questions if you have to put in requirements that answers already have. "Expertise" is what the site's explicitly about, after all. I tend not to ask for experience/sourced statements in the question, but liberally downvote answers that don't provide such.
I still think it should have counted as a higher CR encounter cause the damn thing countered my entire build
@nitsua60 True but by asking for personal experience you're not asking for general expertise but people who actually have experiance with the specific question. For example I've never played a ranger character but I can still answer a question about them in pathfinder because I know the system well enough. But if someone asked for personal experiance I wouldn't answer cause I have not played a ranger before.
I've died as fast as is possible in a campaign before. Got hit by 2-3 goblins during the first encounter in LMoP, then failed and crit-failed my death saves, dying in two rounds.
@THiebert we had a sorc die in his first fight cause he used wild magic, and ended up summoning a pentadrone on accident that killed him (he also wandered off by himself, so... yeah, his own fault)
I tried to play it safe. lvl 1 heavy crossbow with rapid reload. I fired round one and moved back. I thought I would have time to pelt it with arrows before it reached me.)
@Aaron The mission of the site is set up to discourage people who don't have expertise with the specific question from even answering in the first place.
I'm aware of that. but someone who knows a system can answer a question about something he might not have played first hand and the answer could be completely legitimate and answer the question. Sometimes however a question can have a form of detail that requires Personal Experience and not just general expertise of the system. I've seen multiple questions like this in the past and they were on topic.
@Aaron But then the structure of the question should make it clear that the kind of specific expertise you need to solve it is also personal experience. So people with only general system knowledge don't have the necessary specific expertise.
@Adam Yes. But I would guarantee unless you add a little snippit on the end asking for personal experience people without it would still add the 'guess' answers we are trying to avoid.
Even with that warning, they might do it anyway. At what point do we draw the line though? If we say "you always need to say you're looking for an expert" then we are taxing every question. And if we never put it on there, we get a few questions, which may or may not have shown up anyway, which people will (hopefully) either downvote or ignore entirely.
Plus, there may be some people who think that their knowledge doesn't qualify as "[adjective] experience" and won't answer as a result, even though they may have had a really good, really helpful answer
Should read "we get a few answers, which may or may not have shown up anyway"
All this being said, the idea I'm trying to get across is only that you shouldn't have to put a disclaimer on your questions to get good answers. Though, if you feel adding one helps the question in some way, go for it.
Our general questions tend to be when people don't understand a mechanic or can't find something. At that point anyone can answer if they find the answer. However the type of question being asked in this case isn't something that is as easy to answer. Instead of "What is this mechanic" It is "What is this mechanic, and if I change it in X way will it break the system." (C)
One is easier to answer with even a bit of experience. The other people might think they can easily answer but really without personal experiance they can't provide a proper answer as they are not familiar with the system lacking personal experiance.
I understand what you mean. Just consider all my rambling a somewhat paranoid fear that if we start putting disclaimers all willy-nilly on questions, then people will start thinking either that they are mandatory, or that future questions which are of a much lower quality can be fixed simply by adding a blurb at the bottom asking for informed answers only.
oh! I didn't mean to imply that you were suggesting we put them everywhere. I apologize if that was how it came out. For some reason, when I see people contemplating adding one though, I just always jump to "No! you shouldn't have to do that!" It gets the better of me sometimes most times :p
I'm struck by the thought that if this were a traditional forum, both of you would be scream-typing at each other and hurling insults by now. Huzzah for the RPGstack!
My existence began falling from the sky, which my mind debates that it's probably the thermosphere. As soon as I get a rough idea what my body is, I slam through a dome structure, crushing me. But apparently my body is slowly reconstituting itself while I end up trapped in my mind, chasing fragmented memories of the 'Changing God' that discarded my body like an old shell. After chasing the memories, I look into a mirror of dopplegangers, point one out, and that's my persona. Chargen is weird
I'd like to know what Monte Cook was smoking when he wrote the setting.
@Aaron I guess I don't generally assume that I know enough about the answer to a question I'm asking to be able to specify what expertise is needed. IMO the question shouldn't say "I need people talking from personal experience," the question should be well-enough stated such that if personal experience really is necessary, that's obvious from the question. Questions should be about the problem you have, not the answer you want.
After battling a creature in my mind called The Sorrow, which chases the god that made me, and all his shells, across time, space, and dimensions, I wake up on a laboratory floor where a man with living tattoos and a woman who exists on all planes of existence at once and is more a 'community' than a person are debating what I am.
It's a very unusual setting with numerous interesting characters. Even seemingly mundane NPCs seem to be fleshed out.
I think I got it as a freebie for backing Bards Tale IV.
Apparently there are so many discarded shells of the Changing God that there is a faction that favors him and a faction that hates him, thus creating 'The Endless Battle'
> To celebrate Brexit Day, what is your favorite instance of a player shooting themselves or the party in the foot? > Someone knocked on the door of their cabin while in Barovia. The party barbarian said loudly "come in".
It's a commonly assumed fact (“CAF”?) that there are move actions in D&D 5e.
Is moving a type of action in D&D 5e?
Lately, there's some activity in The Back Room: Live Tabletop Games, which was just recently unfrozen for the purpose of catering to the good-people-of-this-stack who wanted to run or play RPGs with fellow good-people-of-this-stack.
So far, some playtesting has been done here and there, but adv...
