TRPG General Chat

BESW

12:00 AM

@SevenSidedDie Nice.

It's the sort of thing I'd probably use Roll For Shoes for at first, then maybe codify it in something like Fate.

Joel Harmon

12:18 AM

@BESW I'm reminded of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere

BESW

Shades of, yes.

fectin

1:04 AM

Humble bundle has a pathfinder thing going that's worth taking a look at, if you're into those sorts of things

2

doppelgreener

3:02 AM

@BESW this is how Emrakul happens. Emrakul is just a floating island PC turned murderhobo who's gotten way out of hand.

@LegendaryDude 4e cares about balance but says "have at it!" in flavour. I could go the whole game holding my 2h sword in one hand swinging it around and looking awesome because that's flavour stuff. (But when we hit rules that say something happens, it'll be on us to explain how it makes sense. I don't see this being an issue.)

Ben

5:42 AM

In 5e, the only way to improve your AC is either don armour, increase your dex, or use mage armour... right?

daze413

7:46 AM

@Ben there are spells that can increase your armor. Warding Bond, Haste, Barkskin, to name a few.

You can also find cover +2 1/2 cover, +5 3/4 cover

I can help you optimize, what's your character?

Ben

8:03 AM

I actually have a Fighter that wears chain-mail, so normally his AC is fine. However, on the off-chance he gets jumped when not wearing his armour, he only has 10 dex, meaning he only has 10 AC in that situation.

BESW

What kind of modifier does chain-smoking give? A +2 Rebellious Self-Destruction bonus?

Ben

Hahaha. I was hoping no one would catch that

The auto-correct is against me today

@BESW +2 to denial skill, and a -2 to all status effect saving throws

BESW

8:36 AM

VTC video game

Urist McDorf

9:22 AM

Hi everyone. Just popping in to ask if this is a place for questions, too (just less rigidly structured) or a regular chat thingie.

BESW

[wave] Sure, we're happy to brainstorm and problem-solve in a more free-form capacity.

Urist McDorf

Cool. So, a bit back I asked about 4e Lite (ponderingsongames.com/2012/03/25/4elite), but my question was too vague. I've read into it for a bit and I have a more specific question now - that said, it's somewhat opinion-based and not very critical, so I'd rather ask it here.

The question is in regards to this - "Any time a stat modifier is referenced in a power effect (most often as bonus damage), feat or anything else, it is 4. Your character is good at whatever they do, but not overwhelmingly so." While it's okay for damage effects based off of the primary stat, it might not be balanced for non-damage effects and effects based on the secondary stat.

Would changing it to something like 2 + tier modifier (1/2/3 for heroic/paragon/epic) + 1 if primary be more balanced?

BESW

Ooh, shiny. Ponderings On Games is written by our own @Magician, who we may be able to summon by the Power Of The Ping.

Urist McDorf

Oh, that's great to hear, because I'm planning to test the mod out on completely new players and I now know who to contact if I run into more problems :)

BESW

Awesome. I don't have any experience with 4e Lite myself, and haven't played 4e (or any D&D, really) for about three years.

Urist McDorf

9:33 AM

Well, for me it's a bit of the opposite - I haven't played anything BUT D&D for about three years. Well, okay, played a few FATE Core and Fiasco one-shots.

BESW

My dimly-remembered sense of 4e balance says it wasn't too hard to get a single secondary stat near or equal to the first if you put in much effort at all; it was only Y classes or overambitious A classes that really fell prey to secondary stat declension.

Urist McDorf

I'm fairly sure the "expected baseline" if you don't want one of your defences to be low and haven't chosen a completely fitting race is 18/16 for primary and chosen secondary.

trogdor

well, you could get the secondary stat to the same level as the primary one, but that wasn't an optimal thing to do

BESW

(Jargon: Y classes have two primary stats and one secondary stat; A classes have one primary stat and two secondary stats. Ostensibly you're supposed to choose one of the two to focus on, but Y classes often required tertiary focus and A classes could do amusing things under those conditions.)

trogdor

still, if you want to do it it's practically built in for you to be able to

@UristMcDorf that is certainly the optimal way in those conditions, at least for specific builds and to hit on attacks and such

the point was mostly that you could have primary and secondary stats be on the same level

BESW

9:38 AM

I usually ran 18/16/16 or 18/18/14.

trogdor

at least I assume so

BESW

Because I was an optimisation nut.

...who would do crazy things like play a shieldless shaman.

Urist McDorf

I'm a bit of an optimisation nut too actually.

But it's mostly about making weird combinations playable

And as such I've been wanting to remove attributes for a while now (because those limit race+class combos)

BESW

Makes sense.

The Oracle

10:22 AM

0

Q: How should I provide examples of experience as proof for my answer?

I attempted to answer a question about group dynamics today, which I did by talking about how I think this issue would be best resolved. I received two comments, suggesting that I should provide whether I had personal experience on the matter, in order to create a more cohesive, less speculative ...

discussion

trogdor

4e was great for that stuff

Urist McDorf

>was

b-but

BESW

Trogdor is part of my group, which moved on from D&D some years ago and don't really plan to return.

Urist McDorf

Fair enough.

Man, now I'm remembering my plans to attempt at making a horrible amalgam of 4e and Fate

BESW

We enjoyed the puzzle-like quality of 4e's tactical and private play, but D&D itself (regardless of edition) proved to have a few too many obstacles against the kinds of games we best enjoy.

Urist McDorf

10:36 AM

Private play? First time I've heard that term.

BESW

@UristMcDorf One of our members is planning a Fate hack game for a 4e setting, but probably with very different themes and goals for the PCs.

@UristMcDorf Private play, solitaire play... there's lots of words for it, but it's the RPG work you do by yourself between group sessions.

Planning character advancement, researching tactics, making lists of awesome items you want, that kind of thing.

Urist McDorf

Ah

BESW

Systems like Fate don't really support that play, which makes @trogdor sad.

But the cost/gains analysis for our particular group heavily contraindicates systems which support intensive tactical private play.

trogdor

@BESW it's not good for everything, but on the whole I still do like Fate better

Urist McDorf

Have you guys seen "Strike!"? It could be called a mix of Fate's and 4e's paradigms from what I've played of it.

(back when it was still called Sacred BBQ)

BESW

10:40 AM

I've got a rules preview I've glanced at.

Might be worth pointing @doppelgreener at it, for his Fate Hack & Slash notes.

What does it offer from 4e?

eimyr

Yo

BESW

Yawp.

eimyr

@BESW Have you seen my Surgadores question?

BESW

Narp?

[looks]

eimyr

19 hours ago, by eimyr

@BESW So in Surgadores, if you've used 3 assets and coloured your mask completely, you can't roll dice, so you're essentially out of the game. Is that correct?

BESW

10:45 AM

Ah. Yes, that's the intent of that version of the playtest.

Urist McDorf

From 4e it offers tactical combat, the whole planning out your classes thing and all that.

eimyr

So you can't win it ever?

doppelgreener

Some common link shorteners are now blocked (not all, by design):

9

A: Ban URL shortening services

Automated blocking or rewriting is probably never going to happen; as Jeff notes, that gets quite expensive. But there's some educational value in limited blocking of specific, popular shorteners. We've been trying this out on Stack Overflow for a few months now, and the results have generally b...

BESW

@eimyr The final round is... dicey, pun intended, but it's quite winnable. It requires cooperation and coordination.

You only fill in parts of your mask while operating: the win condition is everyone gets three successes on operation before going a full round without anyone winning a grapple against Death.

But once you've got your three wins on operation, you can't help wrestle Death anymore.

The final roll of the game is a tense win/lose moment.

Nobody's left to wrestle Death if you fail it.

eimyr

so the only way to win this is to have the last round see everyone left playing successfully operate and no one to wrestle?

BESW

10:51 AM

Yup. Generally the strategy is to, each round, have folks wrestle until someone wins, then the remaining surgadores operate.

It's not great, but that's why it's a first-draft playtest.

Urist McDorf

@BESW Basically, Strike! takes 4e's tactical combat paradigm and builds its own, simpler framework for that (that is at the same time somewhat more flexible, in that all classes can be combined with all roles, and classes are more different from each other). It doesn't have as much solitaire play due to the overall simplicity but I'd say it's deep enough in prep and in play.

eimyr

@BESW I see. Have you playtested that part successfully so far?

BESW

@eimyr Yes, several times.

eimyr

and what was the conclusion?

trogdor

we won every time, as I recall

BESW

10:56 AM

It works, but it's too railroady.

trogdor

yeah true

I pointed that out after our first game, not in those exact words but still

it could definitely use some sort of extra element or something

it was still real fun though

BESW

@doppelgreener Urist is saying Strike! is a mashup of 4e tactical strategy and Fate flexibility. There's a free rules preview.

Thought of it for your H&S research.

BESW

11:36 AM

Does this meta question have potential for a faq?

2

Urist McDorf

It looks like it does.

BESW

12:20 PM

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[Bundle of Holding](https://bundleofholding.com/ "Great bulk deals with bonus charitable donations!");
[Writing the Other](http://writingtheother.com/writing-inclusive-games/ "A workshop on writing inclusive games. Feb 11 - Mar 4");
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DForck42

2:07 PM

mornin

daze413

2:44 PM

@Ben hm, alright, seems a bit broad, still. If you're looking for ways to boost AC in your current situation (naked and equipment less?), these are the things my players have tried in Out of the Abyss: (1) used a barrell lid as a makeshift shield +2 AC! (2) use a dead drow as a makeshift shield +5 AC but halved speed!

Also, that is assuming you are totally caught unawares that you are equipmentless, i.e. no multiclassing or spell shenanigans, just straight up fighter awesomeness

nitsua60

@BESW The static order of OPERATIONs--pun intended--seems it could create a stumbling block. Did that cause trouble in playtest?

DForck42

4:42 PM

chat's pretty dead today hmm?

The Oracle

0

Q: Small cleanup of the [faq-proposal] tag

I've just cleaned up the faq-proposal meta tag. It had two kinds of questions: questions which were proposed for the faq tag. very old questions which were proposing changes to our help documentation, which several years ago involved a document called the "FAQ". The second type has been retag...

discussion tags meta

Adam

Yesterday the main site was pretty slow. I guess it's just moving its way through the system

Adam

4:56 PM

The monk question from the other day got re-opened and answered. I love it when the system works.

DForck42

@Adam it's a good question

just needed some tlc to get there

I think I saw a very similar question on r/dnd

about 3 week sago

wouldn't be surprised if it was the same person

LegendaryDude

5:32 PM

I've been trying to limit my daytime chat activity, since I'm at work and I'm supposed to be actually doing something sometimes

DForck42

@LegendaryDude true

I'm at work as well

KorvinStarmast

6:36 PM

@SevenSidedDie rather than move Ken's answer to comments -- he then gets no rep at all for a successful frame challenge answer to a question based on serious expertise -- why not leave the answer up and he adds rep (since he's right) and in future if he drops by can comment? Just asking.

LegendaryDude

6:54 PM

@KorvinStarmast I don't think it's a successful frame challenge; the question is specifically asking about the odds and happened to include a misunderstanding of the rules. In any other case, a comment would be used to clarify the question.

Urist McDorf

7:11 PM

It's embarassing to answer a question and only 2 hours later realise you've answered it for 3.5 and the person was asking for PF.

Even more so when it turns out the answer RAW is directly opposite.

Joshua Aslan Smith

haha

thats life

LegendaryDude

1d2

d2

:sigh:

d4

4

d20

4

7:23 PM

d100

d%

2d10

Dice Service

5

1

KorvinStarmast

@LegendaryDude Too bad the diamond mods can't just assign him 100 rep, given that he's successfully published an RPG ... (and since we played a little of it a few decades ago, a fun one).

SevenSidedDie

7:55 PM

@KorvinStarmast If someone were to tune up his post to make it an answer so it could be undeleted, as an act of charity, that'd be OK. It's wonderful to have a creator here, but it's a bad look on us to favour that so much that we end up with a high-voted answer that corrects a misconception, but leaves the question unanswered.

KorvinStarmast

8:14 PM

@SevenSidedDie OK, the answer is deleted by you and I think the question got edited, I had not even thought to edit the answer that you'd converted to a comment.

SevenSidedDie

@KorvinStarmast At the time, the reasoning I went with is that the post's content was what Ken would have used a comment to say, had Ken been familiar with SE and had commenting privileges. Given that, he wasn't intending to do anything that was rep-worthy anyway.

It would be nice to have some way to recognise game creators (some kind of “verified” flair on their name?) without conflating that with knowing-how-the-site-works reputation, though. feature-request

KorvinStarmast

8:38 PM

@SevenSidedDie Thank you, now that the question has been edited to fold in Ken's point, and the two answers are extended treatments of how dice work, all is well, no worries. I suppose I fell into drooling-squealing-fan-girl mode when I noted that T&T's author had dropped by.

SevenSidedDie

@KorvinStarmast Been there! And every time I squee and hope they'll join us and it'll be awesome. 😅 I think the saving grace(?) is that, unfortunately, most creators rarely stay. I've mostly seen them do drive-bys, probably driven by Googling for their games.

MadMAxJr

I still like when the guy who made Irony Games webtools crawled out of the darkness to answer what happened to his site.

It was a buncha 2nd edition AD&D tools from the 90s.

SevenSidedDie

8:56 PM

It just occurred to me that rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/93032/… and all the other questions from super-new D&D 5e players who are having a hard time extracting basic game understanding from the rules would be a good use-case for Documentation at RPG.se. I was thinking making a FAQ question that linked them all together, but what Docs does would do it even better. /cc @nitsua60

DForck42

@SevenSidedDie yup

doubt they'll make it available for other sites, or if they do it'll be a WHILE before they do

Adam

You know it frequently surprises me how few of those basic questions are already answered.

doppelgreener

9:38 PM

@SevenSidedDie That's pretty much what documentation is made for! "The official docs for all these things suck, and there's no capacity for crowds to improve them. Let's make our own!"

LegendaryDude

Wouldn't that require reproducing the OGL as part of docs for OGL licensed products?

nitsua60

VtC lotsa reasons

LegendaryDude

And if so, does that interfere with SE's own CC licensing?

nitsua60

This'll get into one of those weird "the rule can't be copyrighted, just the expression of the rule." I can just see it.

LegendaryDude

^^ And that

But even that is weird... According to my MTG Pro friend, Hasbro/WotC has a copyright on "Power/Toughness" for all card-based games for all powers and toughnesses 0 - 99.

But only physical card-based games... so digital card games like Hearthstone and Eternal are fine, apparently.

Urist McDorf

9:46 PM

Does that mean I can make a card with 1100 PWR or something

I know they have a copyright on tapping

LegendaryDude

You can

That's how the other CCGs/TCGs get away with it

Yu-gi-oh and the like

BESW

You can copyright/trademark/patent practically anything you like, and then wait 'til somebody tries to take you to court over it.

LegendaryDude

Force of Will, a fairly new TCG from Korea I think, Does similar, they added 00 to the end of all the numbers

@BESW That's how corporations like Hasbro maintain control; they have enough resources and lawyers to tie up such a case in court for years. If I'm the company making Force of Will I have no hope of fighting that in court.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie Is there a desire from the Overlords to push Documentation beyond programming?

Q: Allow Documentation in other Stack Exchange communities

I'm a Salesforce developer and would love Documentation to be available in other Stack Exchange communities. The reason is salesforce.stackexchange.com a lot of Salesforce developers get help, especially newer ones like myself. The developer forums and documentation on developer.salesforce.com is...

feature-request documentation-beta

Zachiel

10:13 PM

@UristMcDorf, @Magician. @Magician, @UristMcDorf

@Magician as you might have seen from the pings already, Urist has questions on 4eLite

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Not any time soon. There's pull by Arqade and I imagine other sites, but they've been told “not yet, not soon; it's still baking”.

@LegendaryDude Docs is deliberately example-driven, so what we'd end up doing is saying “Here's how to do it using an example. Here's a little bit of explanation of the example.” So it would be really easy, and really obvious, that nothing is being copied, and that what's created is new rather than merely derivative. It would be like Building Bruenor, but broken up to document specific “How do I…?” problems people run into.

DForck42

@SevenSidedDie exactly. as long as we aren't replicating the rules, but rather clarifying them via examples. we avoid a lot of legal issues

Magician

...huh. Cool.

Urist McDorf

Ah

I was about to go to sleep.

Magician

10:28 PM

@UristMcDorf, it's certainly not going to break anything.

nitsua60

@SevenSidedDie if you get a check, want to sanity-check my dupe vote?

(Or @Miniman ^^ if you're around)

Urist McDorf

It was mostly because I wanted things like "slide enemy SEC-stat squares" to be adjusted over time

Magician

You can have players designate a primary stat at +4, and treat all others as secondary, scaling with tier like you describe, if that's your preference.

Urist McDorf

Instead of remaining static

Because those are quality differences, not quantity

Magician

It's been a while since I wrote that, or ran 4e games. I think I may have been trying to avoid these effects getting out of hand.

As stats do get high, and some abilities do become borderline broken as a result.

Urist McDorf

10:31 PM

I'm fairly sure they're intended to go out of hand. You're epic-tier by the time you get to push 5 squares with an at-will, after all.

Magician

Oh, it's not 5 squares that bothered me. It's paladins giving +10 to saves almost every round.

Urist McDorf

Ah. I didn't know about that power.

Magician

So, yeah, I've had my reasons, but don't let that stop you. If you want to see those numbers change with tiers, go for it. 4eLite is a simple enough hack of the core rules, hack it as you will.

Urist McDorf

Fair enough, was just wondering if it'd break things on its own or if there are hidden obstacles to that. Now I know there are and I know what to look out for :)

Thanks

Magician

No worries, let me know how it goes!

Urist McDorf

10:35 PM

Sure. Won't start till Feb though, probably.

I'm also planning on making another small adjustment, giving each player two paradigms instead of one - one from the original list (modified to have Martial be a single paradigm) and one from the list (Strength, Dexterity, etc). Though I might simply go with FAE for the latter.

So there's more difference between, say, a cleric and an avenger. It felt a bit weird to have just the one.

Magician

Makes sense.

Urist McDorf

The lack of a "DON'T DO THIS, FOOL!" is encouraging.

Anyway, I'm gonna go to sleep now. Thanks again.

Frezak

Hey guys. Is it okay to ask for a source on an old, accepted answer?

BESW

Absolutely.

DForck42

@Frezak do eeeet

Frezak

10:46 PM

LETS DO THIS SHIZZLE

nitsua60

11:03 PM

@Shalvenay !!!

doppelgreener

11:25 PM

@nitsua60 th[EXPUNGED]

SevenSidedDie

@nitsua60 Surface judgement is that it looks good enough, but that's not enough conviction that I'd object if a reopen posse contested it. So, I guess kinda? :)

(Sorry, I was ignoring my notifications for a bit there. I was writing a ridiculously long answer that nicely doubled as doing some game prep for next week.)

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