@BESW Added my part. I may not actually attend the online sessions, especially not if it'll complicate the schedule - I'm content with just our geek night sessions.
I find the current tagging for world of darkness to be quite confusing. world-of-darkness what's the purpose of this? it seems to refer to what is now canonically known as "classic world of darkness" not what is officially referred to as "world of darkness" also known as "new world of darkness" b...
@Oxinabox I really really want to make a suggestion here or better understand it so I can contribute to the existing suggestions, but I have no idea about the structure of the WoD books. Which I understand themselves are an organisational mess.
I DM a group of four PC's and even "easy" battles take at least an hour to resolve. Normal encounters take even longer! I want to speed up combat so my players can do more in a session.
I've been trying a lot to speed up combat, we are already using:
Initiative cards that the players keep up
3...
Close votes please! I'm voting to put this on hold as unclear. We need more info, because something absurd is happening at this table. I left comments:
What is causing your combats to go for 25-30 rounds!? Are you sure you understand the rules correctly? You said you completely removed healing surges altogether; are you aware almost no monsters have them and players can only use one second wind per encounter? What on earth is going on? How does your typical encounter play out? What are the monsters the players are fighting? What are the players doing the whole time? What are the monsters doing? — doppelgreener5 mins ago
Voting to put this on hold as unclear - the major issue here is that you have so many rounds, and suggestions can only place band-aids over the issue that you are somehow having that many rounds. If you really want to solve this, you need to explain to us what's going on such that you can reach that many rounds - and we can tell you what your group's doing wrong. Something absurd seems to be going on at your table. — doppelgreener1 min ago
I know very little of 4e, but if someone told me they'd managed a 30 round combat in 3.5 or 5 I'd assume we were talking about an epic clash of mighty armies, LotR style.
@BESW Did even your epic boss fight encounters manage to go for that long? I'd appreciate you chiming in, since you went the full 1-20-something spectrum
@BESW I would value you leaving a comment to the effect of your general experience re: the number of rounds in combat, in the usual cases or even at the limits. I would, but I only experienced early levels. A comment like "My own combats are usually over at round 5, even the boss fights don't pass round 20." or something would go a long way to helping this person realise that something crazy is happening.
@BESW I suspect that they may also be following bad DMG advice and creating difficulty by using monsters above the party level who do not hit hard. They will almost never get hit, and they will reliably just take ages to whittle down the PCs.
Is that rounds or turns? that's a lot of rounds. Most combats go 5-6 with mid level optimized characters. You should stop by chat and we can talk about this — wax eagleJul 10 at 13:42
@doppelgreener "So manage your expectations here, you're probably about where most groups are." is a bit worrying. Looking through answers and comments on that question, most people seem to think that rounds should take way longer but there should be less of them?
Oddly enough, most of the answers seem to be making suggestions about making rounds take less time...
For comparison: I once ran a boss fight for my group that had seven enemies, and it took 1-2 hours in total. But it was still only a single-digit number of rounds. Individual turns and rounds can take a long time, but they shouldn't be taking many rounds at all! — doppelgreener19 secs ago
(should I mention anything extra in there or modify it, whilst I'm in the edit period?)
"Well," Anastasia notes as she runs, "it sort of helps that the people we're fighting are demons, demon summoners, aaaand demon worshipers. Anyone in the middle of their summoning room is not a civilian or an animal, or if they are, they're /really/ better off dead." <-Black and white morality.
Also, I suppose black-and-white morality isn't necessarily the right term since she's bringing that up to classify them as combatants (as opposed to noncombatants) and in reference to their terrible practices against prisoners
They also nerf classes they don't like, give them trap options, or outright make the class a trap option. They make the features bad to make the class suck.
@doppelgreener Or because they want to discourage play of it, which is not (in their minds) the same thing. Remember that this company nerfed monk while believing it is still viable
@doppelgreener I think that's a symptom: Paizo prefers its consumers to be uncritical, and the easiest most obvious way to do that is for players to be ignorant of the things which they might criticise.
@doppelgreener This is made less likely by Paizo creating adventures in-house that cater to their required play style, emphasizing low-to-no op humanoid enemies.
I notice Paizo has released Pathfinder Technology Guide. I can't help but wonder, from conversations here, how badly nerfed everything in the book will be...
If I wanted to exaggerate the situation by using a disproportionate metaphor, I'd mention that limiting education and controlling the means of information dispersal is a common strategy for any group which wants to maintain power over others that it doesn't deserve.
That thing, early in an adventure, is the Eater of Parties in the PF community. It is their idea of a wholly overwhelming encounter requiring hours of pre-planning and in-game strategizing
Both good reasons. It also lacks offensive power, has to give up its biggest defensive advantage in order to be able to attack, and has relatively low AC for level.
@BESW Congrats, you just made a sub-optimal party beat the quasit. But if they were smart enough to do this they would have built more optimally in the first place.
The GM spent most of her time in 3.5e. Her group is moving to Pathfinder because it's familiar but they won't know every spell off by heart any longer. I'm joining them. It's deliberately making low rules use, somehow, not sure how yet. I'm just worried about all the trap options, or picking something a designer happens to hate.
I guess I'm mainly worried we'll set out to have fun roleplaying and adventures and when it comes to the actual mechanics the system will crap all over us.
It's a super-fast flyby attack pinger that stays out of range except while attacking, and its "range" is still further away than most spells can travel.
But with intelligent environmental design, without advancing the golem itself at all, you can create battlegrounds that make the golem up to CR 10 without adding anything else but traps
@BESW Like, a FATE game about brutal mercenaries that kill ethnically and biologically diverse creatures in their own homes in order to gain fame and wealth from their speceist societies?
The question is mainly what systems. Fate is one. We need something that lets us have exploratory roleplaying - dungeon world may be unsuitable for limiting what we can do and trying to constrain the experience.
@Lord_Gareth I think it's a played-out topic. As in, battles have raged and dust has settled and no one really believes in them anymore. You're going to, of course, prove me wrong with your forum-going experience.
@Magician Despair, my friend. Despair that all of your hope is in vain. Despair that your faith in Man is a bitter lie made to shield you from a truth the innocent were never meant to bear. Despair and weep, for what you believed must be true is not only false, but still held to be an unproductive end to the debate. Despair, and know true suffering.
@doppelgreener Oh, we absolutely are. And I guess I also don't think much about alignment because I've gone through those alignment fights in my adolescence, and it's been a while.
@Lord_Gareth From what you've said about systems getting in the way of the story, I guess. I always think of videgogame RPGs as being extremely tightly restricted RPGs, I tend to forget that they're separate in other people's minds.
@BESW It's the collaborative, improvised story of fantasy setting mercenaries that defeat varied and challenging enemies with shifting tactics and few morals
@Miniman Of course. Even strictly non-fiction writing needs to convey information in a manner that makes it comprehensible, clearly conveys its message and engages the reader.
Black hells to the one that wrote this test script. "Go through this long process. Save the application. Close it. Now open the load screen. Enter the save reference number we are only now telling you that you should have written down."
@Miniman this stuff could easily be done by a machine. Currently it is being done by the slow, expensive variety of fleshy machine that handles boring tasks by doing them even more slowly, and badly due to being bored. There's little human intelligence necessary here apart from specific steps, which just require a human to hit play, do a thing when the script prompts them to do something, then hit resume.
There are tons of hours and dollars and brains to be saved here.
Forrest|sleep I like Sony better than Microsoft Forrest|sleep I like Nintendo better than both Lord_Gareth didn't say he liked Microsoft either Forrest|sleep still Childe Lord_Gareth: And yet you work on a product that promotes Pathfinder... (I know it's not Sony, but Paizo is equally evil) Childe (if not moreso) Forrest|sleep It benefits him, so it doesn't count :V Lord_Gareth Paizo is the EA of tabletop gaming, yes Lord_Gareth But I'm also helping DSP with non-PF projects IronHeart Then what's Wizards?
As I dont have (yet) the PHB, and looking at this question
Does a touch spell require an attack?
I assume that touch attacks no longer ignore AC provided by armor, or more exactly because of the new armor rules, make your AC 10+DEX (10 if your armor ignores DEX modifiers?) versus those attacks....
@doppelgreener Buhlman took credit for writing almost the entirety of PF core, thus both handily shutting out all the others that worked on it and absorbing the blame for all of the horrible.
Like dungeons and dragons I think was one early one.
I DM a group of four PC's and even "easy" battles take at least an hour to resolve. Normal encounters take even longer! I want to speed up combat so my players can do more in a session.
I've been trying a lot to speed up combat, we are already using:
Initiative cards that the players keep up
3...
.png/494px-Link_(Super_Smash_Bros._Brawl).png)
As I dont have (yet) the PHB, and looking at this question
Does a touch spell require an attack?
I assume that touch attacks no longer ignore AC provided by armor, or more exactly because of the new armor rules, make your AC 10+DEX (10 if your armor ignores DEX modifiers?) versus those attacks....
