@Wibbs @BESW Nice one! I've never managed to grip the Call of Cthulu mythos. (Tentacle joke here). Currently playing a sandboxy OSRIC (second edition DnD) with a group of friends online :)
@Polyducks Nice. I love me some sandboxes. I'm currently running RuneQuest 6 as a sandbox set in Glorantha, but my players want me to provide more quest-y direction. We're considering a switch to HeroQuest 2 that would make that blend easier to handle mechanically.
@SevenSidedDie It's interesting dealing with the conflicting desires for freedom and direction. My players spent most of the last session following a wandering helmed horror for no particular reason.
@Miniman Yeah. And I really enjoy that kind of stuff as a GM, so my impulse is to let them wander if they begin wandering. But they want punchier, faster event development, which means less laissez faire GMing and more Stuff Happening Now injections from me.
@Polyducks When my group wants Mythos-y horror scenario, I usually just take the setup for a Doctor Who story and replace the Doctor and his companions with the clueless mortal Investigators.
Hence the system switch we're contemplating. RQ is really heavyweight for suddenly improvising some things, so I don't improvise them. (No spur-of-the-moment combats!) HQ lets me throw things into the pot pretty much at will, and resolve them as quickly or as slowly as we wish to dwell on them.
Yeah, around here it seems to generally be either a not-really-necessary addition that doesn't add much to an already-good answer, or an attempt to provide support for an answer that can't be supported from the actual product.
Or an attempt to clarify a super unclear situation that requires that much attention to the specific words used. (for example, fey ancestry)
Fey Ancestry, in summary: It looks like a charm spell. Things immune to being charmed are immune to Fey Ancestry. But it's still not marked as a charm spell. Some characters are resistant to charm spells. Are they resistant to Fey Ancestry?
@doppelgreener Yeah, but the dictionary quote still doesn't really add much there - it's used to show how the issue is unclear, but that was already obvious to everyone.
@BESW re: Trail of Cthulhu and Gumshoe specifically. Haven't read it, but the way Gumshoe circumvented that was to break skills up into Action and Investigative, and give out a number of investigative skill points based on the number of characters. Trail does the same.
As long as they maintained the balance between the total number of skills and the number of skill points the party gets as a whole (and there's no reason to think they haven't), it should be just fine.
Yeah, I figure they must have thought it out so their showcase mechanic is basically foolproof, but... sometimes my faith in game designers is misplaced.
@BESW I saw that one, but it's sufficiently different that I wasn't going to be the hammer. If I had a non-binding close vote, I would've used it, but I wasn't convinced enough to be the sole decider.
@doppelgreener Slightly messier. Edited the first, then deleted it, reposted the revised version. I closed the repost, undeleted the original, and he deleted the repost.
@SevenSidedDie The flayer of halves! Make sure you're always fully equipped, not partly equipped, or you'll be vulnerable to it. It ignores all adventures with neat and full and proper attire and without half-drained potion bottles. Better to empty or drink your vials and waterbags than bring them in half-full.
@BESW So mind-flayers are what happened when a wizard decided to make a chimerical beast out of a half-flayer and a mindling. Hoping they would cancel each other out and the world would be a better place for it, the wizard was somewhat disappointed by the actual result.
So apparently Wizards deleted their forums on Nov 5?? Great timing for me when I googled "post campaign feed back for Dungeon Masters" and only am getting useful results that send me to the unuseful Wotc Forums...
still i searched stack... and found nothing here. would it be good to post a question asking for a post campaign feed back form that a DM can give to his players to find out what they liked or didnt like about the DMs style, the campaign, the game itself, etc etc
@MC_Hambone With tool-recs going off topic, it might be better phrased as "How can I get feedback from my players on a completed campaign?" - problem is, that might get hit as too broad or opinion-based.
Which is my long-winded way of saying I'm not sure, I guess.
right on. I found one that gave me some inspiration for my own survey which is a word more people know than questionnaire and that led me to better results than my first googling
Shark pool room. At a glance, trivial: stone bridges over a pool with sharks in it, just don't slip. Then air turns out to be air elementals trying to blow you off. Then bridges turn out to be earth elementals that twist under you. Then water gets out of the pool to bring the sharks to you.
Fun fact: Sharing Shark doesn't have teeth. It has a symbiotic relationship with a swarm of piranhas instead. That's right, a breath attack of piranhas.
Fun Fact: piranhas the sharing shark shares with are scientifically known as necranhas. A little studied species, they not only strip a grown man to the bone in seconds, but also animate the leftovers to serve them and their sharing shark.
Fun Fact: teeth of necranhas look like miniature tombstones. It is said they start out blank, then the name of each person they eat appears on one. No one knows what happens when all the teeth have names on them.
Fun Fact: once a year, sharing sharks go on a Shark March. Curiously, it happens in August. They migrate across the continent in their water elemental mounts, with their skeletal servants leading the way. At the end of their trip, the water elementals merge into a huge lake where there was none before, and sharks elect their king and queen.
@BESW example 1. Investigators were searching a potential perps apartment. I knew they needed to find a stash of drugs but hadn't decided exactly where it was in advance as I wanted to be flexible with which investigative skill it would require to use it. The doctor, who had a personal interest in Architecture, did a search of the bathroom, and I decided to put the drugs in a little hidden compartment that was found with Architecture to spot the irregular size of the room
@BESW example 2. The case they're working on is off-book and non-official. I'd decided they wouldn't have access to official case files, but same doctor made a Medicine spend and wanted access to autopsy reports etc. I went with it, which led to the creation of 2 unplanned scenes with a coroner I hadn't planned, and details about the murder victims that I had to make up to give additional clues I hadn't planned for.
In the end I decided the murderer had attempted training as a doctor and failed - a detail I hadn't added at design time, but something that gave a good clue from autopsy reports
Apparently its possible to run an entirely improvised Trail of Cthulhu game, but I'm not quite at the stage where I'd be comfortable with that degree of winging it yet :)
There are issues with finding a balance about how clue information is given. At times it felt like the players weren't doing quite enough and I was spoonfeeding a little. This I think was more due to my lack of familiarity with the system, and the fact they were playing pregens whose skillsets they weren't familiar with
It's an interesting system that requires a different way of thinking to anything I've played before, both in terms of scenario design and during play itself
@Magician So, this shark room concept now has me thinking of other ways to present a predictable-looking puzzle and then add a twist which subverts the expectations.
New creature concept: halfsie. At first it looks like a regular hybrid creature: an owlbear, a griffon, a centaur, etc. But each round it randomly swaps one of the halves for something else.
@Pixie Ayup! I'd actually briefly considered doing one for eldritch abominations. Stat blocks and everything. Make a random combination, here's your monster.
@eimyr While I have my reserves about the AVGN (he can get a little too much on the offensive sides), I still remember the game that originated his "fire sharks swimming in lava with laser"
@eimyr an old game somehow similar to pitfall. It had a trap at the very start. You begin the level near a stair, if you climb it down you end up in an "overkill" stile of room.
As soon as you enter you fall in lava
but there are also at least three more enemies/traps that would still kill you if the lava wasn't there.
Because of that the AVGN had a rant about the developers needing to add some upside down volcanoes, shark with laser cannons swimming in the lava and such..
~ Ok, @SPArchaeologist, let's see... *Flips a small coin* Luna. Sorry, seem I got lucky this time. I think I will start with column 3. |_|_|_|_|_|_|_| |_|_|_|_|_|_|_| |_|_|_|_|_|_|_| |_|_|_|_|_|_|_| |_|_|_|_|_|_|_| |_|_|_|x|_|_|_|
Meh, I'm not that interested in waiting for a chance of a response in this general chat. From my experience, nobody relents from their personal biases, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Guess I'll have to find something else to do during my downtime at work.
@LucasLeblanc You can flag the post itself to get a moderator's attention. We're also pingable in chat even if you can't see us, with the normal @ thing.
Meta's also fine for contacting moderators to ask about meta. (Meta-meta-questions?) New meta posts go directly into our moderator inbox, so we never miss them.
That said, the moderator/SE Team discussions mentioned in the notice attached to the deletion are still in progress, so it's premature to assume the post's fate.
