@Emrakul The point of your post is that different people have different expectations of what an RPG experience is going to involve, and bringing GNS in as an example really only makes sense if it's a good example; otherwise it's muddying the waters.
@AlexP I am interested in the idea of how multiple players can be satisfied for various apparently contradictory reasons by the same experience, but GNS may not be the method to analyze it.
Star Wars: Edge of the Empire will soon be joined by Star Wars: Age of Rebellion, and some time thereafter a third book with an unknown title. The format will almost certainly be the same, though: Star Wars: X.
Fantasy Flight Games will be rolling out these games using an approach similar to the...
The text on the feat Master Healer reads as follows:
Benefit: You gain the ability to brew short-lived
draughts that duplicate the effects of a Medicine
check. To make one, you must pass the corresponding
check by ten or more. You may make
three draughts per [Scene]. These draughts la...
@detly The problem with security checkpoints in RPGs is that usually the GM has a desired outcome in mind already, and has to tune the "challenge to get past" accordingly so it only feels like a genuine challenge. Often this is because you've set yourself up a false dichotomy where either success or failure will stop the plot cold.
(Success because you'd planned for the next bit to be "escape from prison" or something like that, or failure because the police are ready and able to kill on sight if the party resists.)
@BESW I see what you're saying, and I actually fell into that trap at first.
In this case, if they're selected for a search, they'll always pass, but something else will happen that opens up a possible penalty or encounter later
@detly Skill challenges are a lot better than skill checks, because they mitigate the effect of misapplied goblin dice and instead use the d20 roll more as it's intended, but skill challenges as written in the DMG are a very poor implementation.
I strongly suggest you look into some alternative skill challenge rules, either entire re-writes or modifications like the one I linked in my answer. My skill challenges perked up a lot when I started using it.
Do Not Go Gently is a level-agnostic (I'd fill in the DCs from the skill challenge chart as appropriate for the party at the time I used it) skill challenge designed to let me be really REALLY mean about my encounters in a Shadowfell adventure.
I could actually kill a character off and this skill challenge would let them complete the adventure before needing to be resurrected.
I'd hand that sheet to the party, along with my handy reference sheet for running skill challenges in this system, and they could basically run the whole thing themselves with me taking a break.
(As a modification of my own, I let them spend daily powers or healing surges to do things again that normally the skill challenge rules only allow a single character to do once per encounter.)
@detly A common criticism leveled against skill challenges is that you're just rolling a series of dice and tallying successes, without any roleplay inherently attached to it. Little narrative suggestions like I added to that sheet are prompts rather than mandatory descriptions, but really help kick it up a notch.
@BESW - I think that's about how prepared the DM is. If anyone in my game tries "I do an intimidate check" the response will be "the guards look at you blankly"
"Did he say... intimidate... check?" / "Pfft. Tourists."
Heck, make the encounter a combat in which the villain is trying to make skill challenge checks to summon a demon while the party is making skill challenge checks to break the summoning circle, and the villain's got minions hassling the party with proper combat to slow them down.
The climax of my first 4e adventure, based heavily on Keep on the Shadowfell but reskinned for my own campaign and with a rather complicated skill challenge attached.
(It's a good example of both a skill challenge as part of combat, and of a skill challenge where failure hurt immediately as well as being bad for the challenge.)
(I would later decide that losing your action to a failed skill check was punishment enough, and stopped using that gimmick.)
Later on I wrote up the generic rule reference sheet so I could have more room on each skill challenge sheet instead of just printing up the same repeated rules over and over.
@detly I have nearly everything from my year and a half campaign saved as a pdf (the last ten levels are a bit spotty 'cause I got more comfortable improvising), so if you want more I can dig through it.
@trogdor Why, thank you good sir.
Since a good half the plot was based on your campaign request and subsequent character, you probably get a bit of inspiration credit at the very least.
@BESW is that skill challenge sheet I just downloaded from your link the same that's in the article in the useful links in your profile, but streamlined?
I was looking around and realized we are inconsistent on what we call adventures - we have modules, adventures, published-adventures and scenario-authoring. That's a bit of a mess; obviously the last two have some slight distinction (the authoring a bit more than the published - I would say when ...
"Hi, I'm Raegar the Bloodslaked, and I'm a murderhobo." "Hi, Raegar!" "It's been seven sessions since I callously bludgeoned a sentient humanoid for his stuff." [various murmured affirmations of support]
"I'm, you know, RPing and stuff now. I tried crafting, but I never put any points in it, so all I can get is a job giving adventurers Dented Dan Buys Bloodied Armor for Awesome Prices brochures as they come into the city.
"I'm scraping up XP from role-playing encounters with the local color. My next level I get a feat. I'm thinking maybe I'll pick up a new language or two, see if I can get a job translating the runes on blood-spattered chunks of masonry some blokes carted back from some temple somewhere."
It rose out of our discussion of @JonathanHobbs' latest Fate game session, in which at least one of his players is still having trouble kicking the murderhobo habits.
@InbarRose typical D&D PCs are basically homeless, travel the countryside killing things to solve people's problems. Largely without regard to the sins of the people they are murdering
Yea. I play a monk in one game who is going through training which is why he travels but he is CG and does sense motive on almost all quest givers to make sure they are the good guy. And even then if we fight a sentient being he tries to see if it will leave without a fight.
When you want to write someone's name fast on IRC chat systems (on Mibbit at least) you can write the first letter of the name and tab thrugh the list of the names starting with that letter
when I do that in this chat, my browser goes back a page
so I actually get out of the chat, and it's annoying, so I need to stop doing that
If it is a plot point I understand if the DM smudges the roll to make it work. I have it maxed for each level. I am level 4 so it is 7. I am the group leader so I tend to be the one talking the most.
Honestly, Sense Motive is more useful for PCs than for NPCs in my experience; in a lot of cases the group's gentleman agreement forbids the use of social rolls against PCs
and then the bluff thing. Which has no magic boni in an AMF. Otherwise, the modifier you can crank up for bluff is like 25 points higher than the one you can have on SM. Which is the stupid thing in the rules I wanted to point out. I can't remember if the panalties for incredible lies were factored in when I did the math.
Same thing goes for hide/move silently versus spot/listen
19 range means that if the sum of alla possible modifiers for a check is 20 higher than the sum of all possible modifiers for another, I will win the roll with a 1 when you roll 20.
The idea Zach is trying to get across, I think, is that if you and someone else put equal amounts of effort into maxing a skill, and one chooses Bluff or Hide while the other chooses Insight or Spot, the offensive skill just plain has more options to get buffed within the same range of effort--almost regardless of what range of effort is chosen.
I know of multiple ways to break almost every class. The D&D system is incredibly easy to shatter into tiny pieces and then stomp on them with your lvl 10 I can kill a lvl 20 npc character.
Your character was afraid of combat and elected to use Hide as a method to escape it. At which point she became afraid of Spot checks because they negated her chosen method of avoiding her fear.
@BESW Because it was cool to drop without making a huge THUMP sound on the floor.
And because she is small and a contortionist, she had to be good at hiding. And playing Twister.
In retrospect, I'm glad I had those two skills well pumped up
But the initial idea was to play a really stupid elf that didn't have enough skill points to buy those.
I changed my mind when I saw the human had been houseruled into having two +2 on two skills at my choice. (In exchange for the game not using favored classes, I think.)
Ok I could have maxed Escape Artist even more by being a Chaond but... Chaonds are ugly
I was reading savage species and looking at the hybrid spices. I tried to convince my dm to let me be a race that got (1 + int mod ) x8 for a rouge. He wouldn't let me :(
All this needs is a "% in Lair" and it's ready to be VIOLENCE.
Which, come to think of it, actually punishes murderhobos more.
Because it has this rule: "Oh, you didn't want to spend any money on clothes for your character? Okay, you're wearing cut-off shorts and a t-shirt with an embarrassing logo."
Rouge is the French word for "red" and may refer to:
*Rouge (cosmetics), a cosmetic used to color the cheeks and emphasize the cheekbones
*Rouge (film), a 1987 Hong Kong film
*Rouge (film journal), an online film journal
*Rouge (football) or single, a score of one point in Canadian football
*ROUGE (metric), an evaluation metric used in natural language processing
*Rouge (newspaper), a weekly newspaper published by the Revolutionary Communist League in France
*Rouge (pop group), a Brazilian girl band (2002–2005)
*Rouge (TV series), an MTV series about an Asian girl band
*Rouge, Toronto, ...
I read something interesting in a xkcd what if yesterday. If you play 500 miles by the proclaimers in the International Space Station from the first note to the end of the song the ISS will have traveled almost exactly 1000 miles.
If anyone know that song this is funny because of the line. "I would walk 500 hundred miles then walk 500 more to be the man who walked 1000 miles to fall at your door." Not an exact quote but close.
@Aaron I personally feel like I have a large repository of general knowledge already, but whenever I want to speak about something I usually look it up a bit first to make sure I know what I am talking about (at least a bit) when others say new things to me, I sometimes search for it on my own, and sometimes ask them to explain it to me - depending on the situation. There is nothing wrong with what you did, I was just wondering why. It may have come off rather sheepish.
@Aaron The word 'Monk' starts fights around here. The last time someone said it aloud, history itself recoiled from the backlash and a guy named Ferdinand ended up shot in his car.
@Lord_Gareth What's wrong with the monk? I mean I know it sucks compared to other classes but that is a given. I am only playing a monk in order to challenge myself as a PC
@Aaron You know, I've seen that kind of thing done - with classes that have optimization potential. I've seen The World's Most Frightening Samurai, for example, who can lock down entire armies of equal-level characters with his Intimidate (provided they can be affected by it)
Essentially, sixth level is the end of Monk as an independent class.
Monk's biggest and most pervasive problem is that it can't play well with itself. More than any other class in the game, a Monk's features demand exclusivity of use, even to the point where you can't use other Monk features if ...
@InbarRose Depends on your definition of 'crazy'. There is, of course, No Such Thing as D&D. However, I've never seen a Monk do anything but curl into a corner and scream in unending agony, even with high degrees of optimization.
I am planning on taking a prestige class that should make my monk much better. The Red avenger. It gives you the ability to lay on hands healing and some other neat stuff I can't remember right now.
I deal 1d8 normal damage and another 1d6 due to a feat. With flurry of blows I take a -2 (or 1 I can't look it up right now.) but if all attacks hit I have the potential to do 42 damage at lvl 4.
You guys are into some crazy optimization stuff, I am not sure if I would consider myself above amateur level compared to some of you (even though i have been playing D&D for over 10 years)
@Aaron That's a tricky question to answer. I can get you infinite damage loops starting at first level if I really, deeply want to cut loose. A Mailman of that level that isn't going infinite is still dealing damage in scientific notation; Fighter and Barbarian builds can charge for thousands of points. In the world of More Reasonable Crap, Diamond Mind strikes for Warblades and Swordsages are slamming for 90-200 depending on weapon and potential crits.
The problem with optimization is that the things that looks cool for wizards deal more damage than optimized monks. A level 1 wizard can deal 100 damage IIRC, optimizing (and not going Pun-Pun, that's the most powerful build ever in D&D 3.5 and is a lvl1 human wizard)
@Aaron Monk's biggest problem is that whatever it was meant to be (and that's not very clear), it didn't get there. The abilities and features it was given don't let it do anything, really. They can't connect for damage, can't chase spellcasters (whose mobility mocks them), can't handle out-of-combat encounters, can't move and attack in the same round, etc.
@Aaron Don't ask. The knowledge will not improve your life.
Oh most probably not, Aaron, but most GMs go easy on monks and other weak characters on purpose, giving them something to do. Which starts being hard when the wizard wins initiative and AoEs everything for 2k damage
@Aaron The wonderful thing about system mastery in 3.5 is that if you can use it in a mature and responsible fashion the sheer number of options lets you bring characters to life like never before.
I've always just played the game and used the rules to back up the story. Not looked through the book to find optimizations and crazy loopholes or combos and then made a story/cahracter around that.
A 'Mailman' is a spellcaster (usually an arcane spellcaster) whose emphasis is on delivering damage and - this is the important part - on invalidating defenses against that damage. The idea behind Mailmen is that you, not the enemy, decide if damage is dealt.
@InbarRose I love writing and playing in a good story. What I hate is when I try to say that my character is something ("He's a talented swordsman,") and then the dice get busted out and it turns out that I can't show what I told.
@Zachiel No Spell Resistance either - Orbs and suchlike.
@Zachiel Preeeetty much. At the gutter level, a Mailman just takes damage spells that are hard to resist. The other end of the scale lays waste to armies with a single standard action, then returns to his pocket dimension to make sweet passionate love to his summoned Eladrin girlfriend.
@Lord_Gareth Common problem in d20 (and some other) games
There are many alternate ways to deal with the problem.
I have a few favorites, but essentially it can only be solved by modifying the rules or applying house rules.
Standard d20 just sucks when its comes to that, someone who has 1 in a skill could get 20 on a check, someone who spent 16 ranks in the skill gets an 18... :P
@InbarRose Competent game design can solve this problem just fine. There's other D20 systems, and some of them are actually pretty legitimately great. Have you checked out Legend yet?
this might be an interesting time to note, that I am developing (or have been for a while) a gamesystem (I suppose that is not an uncommon thing for experienced players to do) and I am wondering if any of you have experience with producing game systems? Or how I might go about doing that.
One v. common trap is when we imagine our characters as not just competent but hypercompetent--and thus when we're imagining their personality and what they're doing, we fail to imagine how they react to failure.
