It's got five parts, each treated as an individual elite NPC: head, body, claws, wings, and tail. The body has additional hp equal to the other four parts combined, but is otherwise elite like the others. I want each part to have two or three options: one reasonable offensive, and one cool supportive, both of them standard actions.
Same as your multipart system, each part defeated deals its hp in damage to the body, which is otherwise hard to damage.
Dragonpope is dragon. Arkhosia is dragonborn federation, but its founding city-states are each ruled by a single dragon that considers its city and citizens to be its treasure hoard.
(They compete for superiority through the prosperity, happiness, and talent of the dragonborn under their rule.)
It's the only way I could see multiple dragons having any sort of cooperative role in a nation.
And it's very clear from the canon material that dragons played a large role in running Arkhosia.
@Magician Not at all! Later nations that joined the federation are ruled according their own choices, but the central powers are dragon-run.
Having a set of dragons at the heart of your empire does wonders for morale, and is a great sales pitch.
Most nations joined willingly, rather than being conquered.
The dragonpope doesn't appear as a dragon very much, though; before the Imperial Wars, he always showed up as a golden-haired young human.
(Not a dragonborn, to emphasize that he wasn't one of them.)
So far, I've got... Wings: AoE attack for push/prone, or grant flight to ally (allies?). Head: bite that saps healing surges, or breath attack that gives radiant vuln to enemies and temp hp to friends, effects on head transferred to body, can't be flanked, can only be attacked with CA. Tail: slide/prone enemy, or slide ally Claws: grab (automatic bite or squeeze on failed escape), or... ? Body: terrain change, or transfer effect from ally to self, can slough effects to its other parts
Context: the evil PCs (run by the players) are trying to kill the dragonpope, with the help of a boss-type devil whose main job is to upgrade their damage potential.
The dragonpope summons in the good PCs (also run by the players) to defend him.
Dragonpope and devil are both simply enablers for their respective PC groups.
The dragonpope's almost certainly going to croak --I want it that way for a lot of reasons-- because the good party's being pulled out from Closing the Way just minutes before. His death will give his allies the effect of an extended rest, and they kick the evil PCs all the way to hell.
@Magician They've got a very good healer, and a tank with the Never Again power.
Taking out their tank is actually going to be crucial for the evil PCs, or at least taking out his healing surges, because so long as he has at least one surge and the dragonpope dies in 5 squares of him, the dragonpope will get back up.
Never Again At-Will Healing No Action Close burst 5 Requirement: You must have at least one healing surge. Trigger: You or an ally in the burst dies Target: The triggering creature Effect: You spend one or two healing surges but do not regain hit points for spending these healing surges. The target does not die, and the target regains hit points equal to his or her surge value for each healing surge you spent as a part of this power.
So I'm cool giving them plenty of healing surge use. I want them to survive, but I want them to feel the burn and need to husband their resources. The best way to make that happen is to give them free reign to expend them.
Spend a healing surge, and gain a bonus to one roll before the end of your next turn equal to the number of surges you've spent since your last extended rest?
So, concepts for the devil: Medium size, to contrast the big-ass dragon. Female, because let's play into tropes. Aura that lets people spend HS for massive guaranteed damage boosts. Standard action that grants an ally a basic attack.
Another standard action that lets the devil alter the terrain for one round: I'm specifically including this as a counter the dragon's ability to fly and to grant flight to enemies, in case someone feels left out because they didn't bring their winged boots.
Thrusting up spires of earth beneath allies, or creating stairs of fire, to let them reach their targets.
Gonna give the devil a paladin-type mark to put on the dragonpope, so the two are duking it out instead of turning their attention to the little guys. Lets the party take the main action.
Power that makes a link between the mark and an ally, makes the ally deal more damage to the marked target. Has to rotate, because using it on the same ally twice in a row burns and blinds the ally (Hellfire is dangerous stuff).
Random idea: make hellfire a buff any ally of the devil can take, when they hit the marked creature and spend a HS. Do more damage, but gain ongoing effect (burning, blinding, something). Saves start at +10 (so no chance of failure), but with -1 for each expended HS.
The way I've calculated it, very roughly, the party gets slightly fewer utiilty items than they would otherwise because they can't spend a lot of money on useful low-level trinkets. But the items they do have are generally more powerful and more precisely suited to the character wearing them than they would be otherwise.
Yeah, sounds like it should work just fine. 4e economy doesn't scale very well, there's plenty of useful low-level utility items that become essentially free at higher levels
At level 30 in my system, they're spending just over half their points on +6 weapon, armor, and neckpiece. Leaves them with budget for four epic pieces, or a number of lower-level items.
I give them some freebies too: everyone has a Tattoo of Vengeance, a modified Wayfinder's Badge, and a free Ioun stone of their choice.
The tattoo and the badge make really great mechanical encouragement for group cohesion.
Carrying Capacity
Movement
Aiming a Spell
I'm not a Pathfinder player myself, but this place seems to cover all you've asked and it has a search feature.
I'm not a fan of just posting links, but I'm unsure if I'm allowed to post the actual rules on this site.
@William'MindWorX'Mariager I posted that question, and having played Pathfinder for a while, I can assure you that the links provided don't give the needed help.
I'm revising the answer, though I still think you have to ask more specifically if you want a situation handled. Flight and 3D movement is mostly covered in small case-by-case, like the Fly spell or the various monsters flight description.
That would require multiple questions, which if necessary I'm willing to post on a case-by-case basis. However, I was hoping to avoid that, as there have been cases in the past where, when I ask the community at large, someone will have a link to something that is at least helpful, if not something that provides the information completely
Instead of posting a huge number of different questions, all concerning the same basic concept, I asked if someone knew of a place that handled issues with that concept already.
Get the sandbox feel of Minecraft, which, because of the blocks, is gridded and ready for turnbased combat along 4e. The in-game object editor is needed for all the players random ideas. It'll never ever be a substitute to pen and paper which I love and enjoy. But I think it could be a great tool for online, quick games.
The turn-based nature of the game would sap most of the dynamism WoW brings to the table, and the vast options available remove the potential for strategy that the confined box of chess (or even WoW) makes possible. You'd have to seriously chop it up to make it function well, and then it's just a pale ghost of 4e.
@BESW On the tabletop, the GM has plenty of scope to make an interesting story. On the PC - you're limited to what has been programmed in as available.
@SimonGill It's only a limitation on poorly designed software though. Computers today are plenty enough powerful to allow constructing things dynamically at runtime. Want to make a fireball? Pick "Projectile Power", tack on hit roll, damage roll and a "Fire Sphere" graphics.
Well, combat is the only thing that needs real automation though? I'd still think a GM should run it and conversations would be run between you and the GM, not some random prepared script.
I don't consider something with premade story to be roleplaying. That's just interactive storytelling.
Interactive storytelling still works for me though. It keeps the important part of role-playing - making choices - and wraps it up in a graphical environment I can play in on my own. That's what I'd like to see come back and instead we're mostly stuck with "level-up" mechanics tacked onto shooters.
And it'd have to be able to do so dynamically in conjunction with an understanding of the character's aspects, the current situation, and an ability to recognize potential for complication.
@BESW A lot of fun. A lot of cognitive science too!
The only way I can see it working is having a lot of general elements that get composed together and give players plenty of options at each stage. It'd have to be visual novel style rather than isometric or first-person too.
Aspects get processed using the keywords into various emotive drivers (Restraint, Anger, Love, Fear) and so on. Each possible action gets presented with a list - and any possible action that could be determined to add complication would get presented with a Fate chip as a signifier.
I can't see how it wouldn't be trivial to game the system for Fate points without actually complicating scenarios.
But then, I'm not on gamedev for a very good reason.
My understanding of programming ends somewhere between writing mathematical progressions in BASIC on a Tandy, and reading Computer Power and Human Reason.
@BESW For instance - one obvious action element is Cause Insult To X. That would be a complication because it adds strain to the relationship between X and the player.
An action element like Apologise to X would then improve that relationship but wouldn't ever grant Fate points.
This would have to take a very Polti-like reductionist approach to stories and to character actions. That's the only way to build enough story elements to help it feel like a dynamic self-writing story.
Can anyone recommend a few good articles on studies on roleplaying? I'm writing a short pick-your-own-topic essay, and I wanted to discuss the positive/negative effects of roleplaying, and I'd like some professional cite-able opinions.
The issue is that outside of actual case studies, to the best of my knowledge most scholarly works are based on news reporting of extreme acts blamed on RPGs --many of which are entirely falsified because it makes for more interesting news than "His parents let the sitter raise him and his teachers never talked with each other to recognize how serious of a pattern his behaviors were."
There was a teenager about 10 years ago that killed his friend, and then the media caught on to the fact that he used to play D&D and latched onto that.
Are you looking for effects on cognition, changes to social abilities, math ability, use as a teaching aid? Those will probably be in teaching or psychology journals, rather than in role-playing works.
@SimonGill Stuff like that yeah. I remember reading about how it had helped some otherwise very socially lonely people. I think things like that would be interesting.
Though you'll probably have to narrow it down a bit to remove CRPGs and MMORPGs from the list.
@William'MindWorX'Mariager I've heard similar things about sci-fi fandom or geekdoms in general. I know a guy who wrote his master's thesis on the sci fi fandom in Israel, but it's in Hebrew, so probably not much use to you.
@BESW That's so very very true. From the articles I've read where I've known the real story behind it, I know you can never count on what they write. It's all about headlines and readers and very little about facts.
@AvnerShahar-Kashtan Sadly not, though I'm sure it'd be interesting read.
I'm not as far as calling the media big brainwashing machines, but most of what they write really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
@William'MindWorX'Mariager Columbine is the classic example now, in which the media created entirely fictional versions of events and then used each others' reporting of them to justify continuing that version of the story.
It's much easier to write a story about how an identifiable element in the culture, preferably a recognizable but not mainstream element, is to blame, rather than to acknowledge that some people are messed up and our society isn't very good at figuring it out and getting them help.
It's not about brainwashing, it's about palatable narrative.
Sadly the two look a lot alike in practice.
But then that gets into narrative time as a perspective through which to view life and history, and then things get weird because my understanding of it is largely through examples in classic Russian literature.
It's a much more nuanced process. It's not "The media has an agenda and it will use its power to brainwash you into it".
It's more that the media just wants to be, to be watched and consumed. It will both pander to popular tastes, and simultaneously influence those tastes, in a process that's not really under anyone's conscious control.
Yup. But all the explicit recognition of the process won't help you change it. There are too many factors at play - economic, social and cultural - for any "Emperor's New Clothes"-style revelation to change it.
Heh. I agree, to a point. But that gets into an entirely different discussion about processes for social change that I'm just not capable of handling eloquently at this hour of night.
Suffice to say, I do think that breaking out of that cycle is possible --and perhaps even inevitable-- but not easy, quick, or achievable through standard channels currently in place in the world at large.
But then, I am regularly accused of having an unreasonably optimistic view of humanity and its ever-advancing civilization.
I've never really seen much Trek. But from what I know of the setting, I think if he was familiar with the works of Ellul or Marcuse, but if he was, he explicitly rejected them.
What I loved best about my Philosophy of Technology class is that we read about 12 different papers, from the 50's on to the early 00's, all starting with the claim that there was never any formal attempt at a philosophy of technology, so here's what they suggest...
@BESW In half those cases, they were separated by two decades and coming from completely different backgrounds. It's like a formal field of philosophy of technology kept trying to emerge but never succeeded., and the wheel reinvented again and again.
Hrm. That's the second question in the last ten hours where I've seen an answer which addressed the title line as the question itself and largely disregarded the body of the question.
I guess my rebuttal would be that taking out the Hitman on a social stress track takes him out socially, not physically, and thus only lets the Target achieve social-based goals or desires.
What's a good time for an earth shattering event, literally, to happen, and still have been way back then, but before complete recovery. I'm thinking like 2-300 years.
Earth shattering as in, this used to be a one huge island. Now it's two larger islands and a whole ton of smaller ones.
I didn't forget like "oh crap now I've pressed send what do I do?", i forgot like "mmmh, ok, seems fine to me let's browse some other page now" until I saw your clarification ;)
the options are like "think what to do when this D&D campaing is going to end" "play alone on a play by chat just to level up faster hoping something happens" or "make assumptions and expectations about any of the two just to see them burn in some distant future"
I'm realizing that I have no idea on how to hack a module
when he discovers the ruse he wants to kill her and she tells him he changed her mind and wants to be good. He doubts, and if he kills her while he thinks she might be telling the truth she might have ended her mission successfully, for his soul will be damned.
Carrying Capacity
Movement
Aiming a Spell
I'm not a Pathfinder player myself, but this place seems to cover all you've asked and it has a search feature.
