Very busy! Work has been the main thing taking up my time lately, but I have also moved out, helped three other friends move out, manage office training, and I have started to try and plan a weekend trip halfway across the country, all in the space of a month!
Ahh fair enough, as a matter of fact, Toby has unfortunately just agreed to take on a permanent injury. I'm not sure what it will be, we'll see what it is when he regains consciousness!
as to sewer encounters -- foul air is the biggest one -- maintenance workers are a thing too -- there are also currents down there due to storm drainage
btw, we are a go for tomorrow @nitsua60 -- waxeagle's game for tomorrow night got scrubbed
as for now? I'm listening to some LiveATC archives from last night's fog-up
So, I've started compiling what I'm tentatively calling "The 5e Cheapskate Index" - a list of content in all the free official 5e PDFs. I've done all the smaller ones, and am working through the SRD now.
Observations: 1. The SRD is big! 2. Basic contains more subraces & backgrounds than the SRD.
@Miniman Basic has the variant human, but no feats. SRD has one feat. So, if you were to pool all the free resources, you could get Grappler for free...
@Miniman this is why the +1 feat houserule is one of Forrest's most strongly recommended (also it allows character-playstyle-defining options at character creation)
(regarding Variant Human, it's not that it's necessarily strong; most races have abilities that are much better in the long run than a feat, and VHuman has _just_ the feat) (it's that there's a couple character-defining feats that enable a playstyle or concept)
if you want to play that concept, you need that feat. If you're playing at level 1, then that means you're playing a Variant Human. Not an issue of power but just the fact that your concept is not supported whatsoever outside of that race.
In the games I've run and played in, Variant Human generally wasn't picked even after a "feat at 1" houserule was instituted--once you have the one character-defining feat, it's not nearly as good a choice (outside of people wanting Sentinel+Polearm Master), and the options from other races outpace it.
@GuidingLight Well, for BESW and myself (and maybe trogdor) the baffling issue is they released a free DMG, and a free PHB, and... no free adventures to showcase actual gameplay.
That's a big difference between ambivalence and distaste, and even if there is distaste, there's a big difference between "I choose to play this anyway because my friends like it" and "I must play this because my friends like it."
Interpreting the situation into its most extreme and unfriendly possible scenario is rather uncharitable, both of Greener's friends and him that he'd consider them friends if that's how they behave.
"For the benefit of others, our group plans to do a one-shot so at least we can say we have some play experience in it." - I don't think I'm confused as to the meaning of this.
As a person in his group, I'm pretty sure he means that some people in the group are curious about experiencing D&D 5e, and everyone else is willing to play a one-shot to help their friends get that experience.
"So we can say we have some play experience in it" means that one of the reasons to play a D&D 5e one-shot is to be informed about our decision to not play it more.
(Or maybe we'll love it and want to make it our primary game. Though we doubt that, it'd be unfair to dismiss it entirely out of ignorance.)
Congestion at Victoria station due to a terrifying horde of shuffling automatons. Lifeless, soulless, their dead eyes will forever haunt us.
@Miniman Oh. Uh. We're doing it to benefit ourselves. I was saying we were doing it, for the benefit of others understanding what we were talking about. XD
Well, there was that one time, but it turns out doppelgangers never stalk out a place by pretending to be a doormat for good reason, not because nobody ever thought of it.
But there's no proof it was me so anyone who accuses me of being a doormat is probably wrong and a liar and thinking of the wrong doormat.
My friend went to Korea once, and as a big (literally) foodie, he went to eat out frequently. In one restaurant he received a long stare from the waiter and then got asked in broken English "Would you like pork?" Well, my friend being a fan of house specials agreed and was very disappointed when the waiter brought western cutlery instead.
What you're saying seems consistent with my personal experiences with Koreans. They seem very topic-focused in many aspects, English proficiency included.
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But I've been thinking and indeed in ye olde tymes we picked a system that we liked mechanically well enough and a setting that was something we fancied, but the story could be anything, as long as it's appropriate, but we changed moods and themes more often than we changed systems.
Now it seems that I choose mood and theme first and then pick from a number of appropriate systems, so my game selection process is backwards to the one a decade ago.
And yes, sometimes I choose mood and theme because the system I like inspires me to do so, but it's about as frequent as choosing the system for a narrative basis in ye olde
@doppelgreener I'm trying to stat them up appropriately; this is the big blow-out fight scene at the end of the Umdaar volume and I want to make it Battle Over New York epic.
Right now I'm trying to pump up the termites to epic awesomeness, but I'm not sure what to do about their life-energy powers, or what would make for epic scene aspects inside the engine hive.
@BESW Laser beams. Some of them weaponised. Others gentle enough the workers are using them to ride up to higher levels, from which they are firing the former variety of laser beam.
@BESW In Overlord you are a Big Bad that controls a small horde of generic goblin-like minions who truly adore his villainy. You have many, many more than you can control at any time, because they, well, die for you AND you sometimes have to sacrifice them en masse.
@BESW When you desire to forge yourself, say, the Apocalyptor mace, you approach a huge cauldron and a couple hundred of minions go down a slide, yelling in excitement, as they are melted in the lava to fuel the weapon's design.
@BESW Why not use your termites to fuel something in a similar way?
And I'm going to be using a single fractal for all the Soldiers in a scene, which can take stress to inflict stress on others by having some of its individuals explode, but erases stress when reinforcements arrive.
(The workers are just an aspect that grants bonuses to more complex termite fractals. If you can clear the workers out with an Overcome or Create Advantage action to change/remove that aspect, the bonus goes away.)
My idea is, the Soldiers are an obstacle fractal that play with their own stress tracks to inflict stress on others while also controlling their enemies' movement. The Queens are close-range behemoths who give bonuses to the soldiers when they aren't engaged themselves.
The engine is the hive. There's not much "closer to the power source" than that. But yes, we've established that the engine is studded with crystals, many of which are broken, so I'm thinking that should be tactically involved somehow.
I want the obvious/easy way to defeat the termites to be destructive of the engine.
I want the termites to be a threat that can't just be swept through; trying to remove them by killing them all one by one should be unthinkably difficult.
@eimyr given the termites are eating away at the engine's life energy, it may be difficult to tell the difference between "charging up the engine" and "overcharging the engine"
@BESW compel us that our efforts to actually beat up termites badly damage the engine. be prepared to do it at least twice. like atomic robo kicking his brace loose in that page that's about doing things at a cost, ARRPG p77.
they explode horribly and the engine seems to shudder and melt.
Also, the whole spaceship is currently Supercharged with two free invokes.
(Its batteries weren't charging because crystal termites ate the organic wires, so it's on full solar energy absorption to compensate. Greener's character re-grew the wires, but we haven't figured out how to turn off the "maximum intake" setting yet.)
@BESW Big wires leading to the engine that look kinda like glowing veins or roots and are visibly hulking up the termites tapping into them, and that are visibly shooting off little sparks of lightning.
@BESW Put a giant freakin' device that is also the absorption shield controls in the same area, so we have something to do besides all be on "beat up termites" or "save the engine" duty. Myka or Doctor Light could shine there. Termites still might freak out about us tampering with that device.
If we can't all be there to save the engine because there's another pressing priority, which is changing the shields ASAP [compel compel], that means the termites don't have to be strong enough to take on absolutely all of us at once.
Doctor Light might rather be fixing the shields, because he probably helped plan them, and his usual aggressive approach might do more harm than good in dealing with the termites. To both his freshly regrown self ("Eargh! I don't want to disintegrate again!") and the engine (sploosh, sizzle)
Myka might have the skills to deal with the shields if Light doesn't take that compel.
Okay, so broad strokes: the termites are tapping the engine's power so it can't work. Also, the ship is drawing too much power. Clearly, this means that if the termites stop drawing power, the ship will overload.
...mechanically, this means so long as the Pearl of Rebirth is black, the termites are getting free invokes on being super-powered--and if the termites aren't there to get those invokes, the ship starts taking stress.
@Polyducks He did have our help too. This is Fate. We're all making the story. The GM, currently BESW, does have to do a lot of hard work though at times like this.
We started with Greener's character (a tree person) trying to fix some wiring and getting covered in bugs (as a cost: he failed his roll and accepted "covered in bugs" as the price for succeeding anyway).
Which we then said were termites because that's more horrific than, say, spiders, for a tree person.
Yes, they were normal sized but made of living crystal.
Later on we went to investigate why the engines weren't working.
I handed that over to my players, who used the ARRPG mechanic 'brainstorming' to formally take turns competing to "find" (read: make up) clues, and then one of them got to put all the clues together to say what was wrong.
...and what was wrong was that crystal termites had infested the engine and were draining its power to become giant and super-charged.
So we started with a kinda funny "oh, hey, here's an idea" thing on the spur of the moment when deciding a cost for success, and later we used that established detail as part of a new major plot complication.
We do this quite often, and it means that every time we re-visit something we learn more about it.
It's first about making everyone at the table feel free to suggest ideas, and second about reaching back for established details when a gap needs to be filled to make the world a more coherent and interconnected entity.
A GM can do the latter without player support, but it's such a joy to have everyone in the group contributing ideas: takes the pressure off of me to always have a good idea, and makes the story a lot more diverse.
Our very first session, I said "You're going to meet a nuclear physicist. Who does he work for?" and the group agreed he works for amazon.com's secret physics lab.
The result... it's not an artificial intelligence at all, it's the preserved brain of Charles Babbage in a neural/machine interface tank.
Now Babbage is a PC.
And yes, it's much easier for my players to be invested and engaged when they're helping make the story more than just through their PCs' actions.
(Though I'm aware of some players in other groups who find such meta-level involvement to be distancing and distracting and prefer that the GM handles all such things invisibly.)
(I ran games like that for a long time and it was fun but I eventually burnt out.)
We get quite silly sometimes. But part of the round-table approach is that if things get too silly (or too serious, or otherwise off tone), people feel free to say "Hey, maybe that's too far."
But, you know. Two sessions ago we had an evil vulture-woman sorceress fighting two Philosoraptors while disguised as a Swamp Thing, and last session we hacked and imploded Elon Musk's spaceship after he hung up on our Skype call.
Our own spaceship (before it crashed) was powered by a nuclear goldfish.
(Monty Python quoting in general bemuses me; the group's genius lies in their improvisational skill and the unexpectedness of their material. Once everyone can recite a Python line in unison, it's divorced from its comedic value and becomes a badge of belonging rather than a joke.)
I think that was the appeal of the Holy Grail. It attacked so many tropes that it became a label and because of that it's easy to apply to most situations.
I'm so excited for the game tonight. More for what the NPCs in the universe can do than what the PCs are going to do next. All sorts of abominable horrors and nightmares and magic potions are going to be released from the player's actions last game.
A prolific author/illustrator of books and comics for both youth and adults (her weirder, more off-market stuff is published under T. Kingfisher, because branding).
For example, she just published the short story Razorback, which features a twist on an old folk story of an undead animal.
What I love about Vernon's stories is (among many other things) her protagonists are both practical and emotional in very real ways.
@BESW Trogdor and I have spoken. We've got a viable backup plan in case the thing we're calling the engine dies. We'll need you to play along with the details of it, if it becomes necessary.
T. Kingfisher's Seventh Bride also has an interesting take on what I'd call a necromantic type of power, in the terms D&D describes necromancy, but it's not a skill set a D&D necromancer could ever accomplish.
Its antagonist steals peoples' gifts and sells them to others: someone's voice, someone's sight, someone's magic--someone's death.
Since D&D tends to describe necromancy in terms of manipulating life energy, that would fit neatly into the scope of a D&D necromancer. But...
(Also, the way magic is limited in that novel, he might just as easily fall into the D&D school of thaumaturgy.)
My question regards a specific detail of the Day After Ragnarok setting for Savage Worlds. Specifically: how far into the sky does the corpse of Jormungandr (the Midgard Serpent) extend?
Would that be considered an on topic question, @Polyducks?
I am interested in knowing if a particular type of product exists, that is a campaign setting entirely divorced from a game system.
I am not looking for a list of products (though a single example would be nice). I might be interested in financial/sales information, but I know that's a stretc...
I am interested in knowing if a particular type of product exists, that is a campaign setting entirely divorced from a game system.
I am not looking for a list of products (though a single example would be nice). I might be interested in financial/sales information, but I know that's a stretc...
