However, in this instance, it's a woman. Not trying to generalise, I think in this situation, she may very well choose to name herself George. However I don't think it's very fitting for her persona haha
I think I should also mention that I have always had troubles with playing as a female character in any game (I just somehow feel disconnected), and this is the first one that I have actually enjoyed.
@Miniman, yeah... it's 5e. However I'm gong off the concept that a Tiefling can be born through the introduction of demon ancestry in the bloodline, similar to half-elf or half-orc. Or, going out on a bit of a limb, pledging servitude to a demon turned her into one.
@Adeptus I like your train of thought! I was originally trying to focus on Tiefling names specifically, but I just realised that a "witch" name would also be a good idea...
Additionally, I'm liking the idea that she hides her demonic features (wears a hood and robes to hide her horns and tail) so that she appears elvish at first glance.... to disarm her prey
Well, I am really starting to like her a lot, so I think I might keep her as my "universal NPC". Currently she is the primary antagonist in my newest adventure
I've just had a thought. Often, we (including myself) choose character names that reflect the character's chosen class or personality. What if the parents really wanted their child to be a certain class, and named them appropriately, then the child grew up to follow a different path? Magius the Barbarian! Harmony the Cleric of the god of Chaos!
I don't think her current circumstances are the ones she was particularly planning to be in when she was... I dunno... 57? That's primary-school age for an elf, right? Lol
Actually.... what do you guys and gals think of "the Whispering Witch"? She doesn't actually speak, she just projects her voice into the minds of those she speaks to.
I mean, if she were a PC I would say that kind of nickname might be overdoing it
but she is an NPC as I recall you saying, so I see no actual problems with it
and I would only object to a PC with such a dramatic nickname on the basis that it seems better, from my personal perspective, to get PC's to generate any nicknames they have more organically
I really liked the "tabletop grid combat" style of 4E - are there any game systems that have tried to expand on that? (5e seems to have gone in a very different direction)
4E had some mechanical "rough around the edges" features that could be homeruled around. Was curious if anyone had ever tried to solve them with a wholly new system.
That's not my area of expertise, but I doubt it: Pathfinder lives and dies on the d20 System OGL, which 4e did not offer. Attempts to "improve" 4e would have to start from the ground up and design an entirely new system or risk facing the legal might of Hasbro.
As a fellow fan of 4e, I'll say that I'd also consider 13th Age as my first pick if I ever wanted to do a D&D-like system again. But if your favourite parts of 4e were the gridded tactics, 13th Age may not be to your taste.
13th Age is, the head devs of 3.5 and 4e got together and wrote their own D&D-like game without the onus of D&D tradition and Wizards/Hasbro oversight.
The Vampire class from 4e was such a missed opportunity. If only it was good, then we might've had another look at "race as class" (you know, like when Dwarf was a class).
@trogdor Some people think (wrongly, obviously) that capital-D "Dragons" indicates something different from lowercase-d "dragons," aside from showing proper respect.
@trogdor I like dragons myself, too. But my favourite ones are the catastrophic dragons. Partly because of me loving the elemental themes in general, but mostly because they just look so goddamn badass.
@UristMcDorf Bastion is a heroic fantasy campaign I developed but never got to run through. I originally made it for D&D 4e, but in my current group with BESW and trogdor and others I've been looking at running it in Fate instead.
If they lasted more than milliseconds they might be horrifying. Source. (A possible installment in "your fantasy setting isn't weird enough.")
@UristMcDorf Ironically this Bastion campaign I developed for D&D 4e is actually better as a Fate story than as a D&D 4e story, hence the switch being beneficial! It also means I get to skip all the padding I'd only have added so that people could be high enough level at various points.
@doppelgreener That's cool. My problem is just that I want to fiddle with the tactical system. I accidentally stumbled on one earlier but it wasn't good and tbh I'm glad it collapsed (since I was starved enough at the time to keep playing even if it's bad).
@doppelgreener it is pretty great, though there were some issues for our 4e group at later levels, the NPC opponents apparently couldn't at all keep up with the PC's without some tweaking
The melding of roleplaying and actually decent "boardgame rules" aimed at long-term progression (which you won't see in any boardgame) was what got me thinking about making my own deckbuilding-based RPG. I didn't pursue the idea because I've no other people to make it with (which is very important for me as I need someone to offload the routine work to :) )
Still got the basic ideas stored somewhere in my brain though.
Penny Arcade's Gabe / Mike Krahulik went and made a sort of card-based RPG / card-board-adventure-game-thing. Also IIRC Savage Worlds bases its resolution mechanic around a deck of poker cards.
@UristMcDorf I suggest writing them down in a Google doc. :D
Oh, the name of Mike Krahulik's game is Thornwatch.
Well, here I was planning on not using regular cards, but rather character-specific decks. Each new ability or item or whatever would be a card or a bunch of them, shuffled into the character's deck. Status effects and wounds would be similar. Each card'd have a combat and a non-combat purpose (simplest example using arbitrary terms - GM sets a difficulty for a task of 3 athletics, 1 magic; character has to play cards with at least 3 athletics, 1 magic together)
An interesting quirk of the latter part would be that there outcome of a task could be predicted beforehand IF the GM knew what cards the players have in their hand. Which puts the GM in a more adversarial role than usual. Which might not be desired behaviour so that'd have to change.
The problem with that whole idea is that it needs a lot of content and cards. A physical version would be... probably not very popular due to the big investment required to just evolve your character.
And I'm bad at creating content. I can design systems well but when it comes to populating them I am terrible. It's why I'd need someone as commited to the project as I am and not just talking to people.
For what it's worth, at least I'm really good at editing already existing content.
One of the common strengths found in an RPG is the ability to make up any darn thing and use it: arbitrary weapons, arbitrary items, arbitrary abilities, etc. A system that requires that an item has a printed card foregoes that strength. (That begins to enter the realm of trading card games or living card games.) However, there's an alternative model which doesn't forego this strength.
Instead of having an axe represented by a card specifically about that axe, you could have Weapon cards which say your weapon does a thing. Players make up their own weapon. If the GM gives me a War Hammer, I shuffle some new Weapon cards into my deck, perhaps Blunt Force Trauma cards plus a couple that let me stun an opponent. (We might take note of which cards are connected to the hammer so that when I no longer have it, I take the same cards out of my collection again.)
On a side note, would it be appropriate to use the word "scale" instead of "tier" for 4e? I'm trying to translate some terms for my players and the word for "tier" just isn't used that way in our language
The War Hammer is just a note we agree on that I write down that affects what I can narratively do with it (I can't shoot with it for example, nor expect to chop wood with it), while the cards are generic enough they just care that I have a weapon at all.
Likewise a Magic Rod might not be represented by magic rod cards, but by magical effect cards I get to put in my collection.
If your game comes with 20 cards for damage, four players can't have ten each. This can be used to benefit the game design however. It suggests their deck should definitely be full of other types of effects (like cards that help them recover stuff). It also means if your game makes only 2 Mind Control cards available, Mind Control should be a very rare and valuable effect -- and two players can have one Mind Control card each, or one player can have two, but you won't see more than that.
For example, if you're asking whether each item in the list is appropriate for a party of a certain level, then you're effectively asking a different question for each item - so it would need to be split up.
@UristMcDorf Yeah! And one of your players could say: "I want to play a samurai, but there's no katana item. Can I make a katana that gives me Slash 2, Wide Swing 2, Counterattack 1?"
@UristMcDorf So, 4e-wise, this is digging into why 4e works the way it does: the system is a collection of well-defined parts which can get re-combined in interesting ways to approximate a given narrative fiction.
"It's up to you - you're the DM, so it's your decision whether you're happy to boost your party's power level."
Or, it gets answered by a bunch of people variously going "yes", "no", "you shouldn't give them items at all", "in my day we had to walk barefoot across a volcano for magic items".
While reading this
Cohort Question I was kinda struck by a quote in there and instead of asking an unrelated question in that area I figured it would be good to make a separate question.
The quote was "Though I am not advocating a strict adherence to the wealth by level progression..." So my que...
You've gotta give answerers a baseline for "appropriate." Some editions have guides like 3.5's Wealth by Level chart which can be taken as a common baseline, but folks argue about the usefulness of such things.
And lots of games ignore it for a wide variety of reasons.
But it's still a little problematic, because it's all very well to say "characters shouldn't get X-tier items until level Y", but when you reach level Y, do you give the party 1 X-tier item? Or 1 each? Or all of them? It doesn't offer any guidance there.
Though I'm still a bit down about the fact that I've got a bunch of projects but I can't focus on one due to my inability to create content and the overall lack of time.
I'm not sure what you mean by your inability to create content. Certainly, beginning to create in a void is scary and difficult -- however creativity is proportionate to constraints, hence why no constraints is tricky.
I can relate, Urist. I'm not sure what game you're working in, but I find it most useful to start with the pantheon of gods I'm going to acknowledge and just yank their lore straight from the book.
Within that I find I kickstart myself... "oh, and this god would hate this godess, and the elves would have sided with this one, and this is how the minotaurs felt about it" etc etc and then I'm off.
If you've got a prototype version of your system, work out your goals, then pick a focus area to develop in (like "I should make a couple of cool axes") and start throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Playtest it while it's relatively simple and see what works well and what doesn't.
@nitsua60 You're not crazy. Now that we look at the question and its effects, it's basically just inviting ways to keep track of item counts without having to write on and erase paper.
And people are responding with "well how about lego" "counters" "dice" "potato chips" "rhythmic chanting to the god of records who will consume all living memory"
A way to make the question functional would be "how do the rules say I should do it" or something like that, so that there's an actual source to relate to to provide a scope of best or correct.
@doppelgreener Or more constraints on "here's what we have available, here're our priorities" so that one can look at counters vs. legos and have some way of deciding whether one is a better answer to the underlying question.
@Euch Some of them, in my head. Not at all concrete though. It's mostly a thought experiment so far.
@LegendaryDude I liked Gamma World 7e's ammo tracking system. Any weapon that uses ammo can be fired once per encounter. You can use it a second time, but then you run out of ammo and you can't use it again until you find ammo.
That wouldn't work well in 5e. Martial classes get an extra attack at level 5, which means they can make two ranged attacks.
After the first round they'd be out of ammo
The game is balanced assuming that those classes will be making use of their extra attack so if their damage output is halved it is going to slow things down quite a bit.
@UristMcDorf I'm intrigued enough to listen to what you've got. I've made a smattering of board, card, and video games in the past. Some good, most not. :P
@UristMcDorf Don't feel like you have to share, of course, but if you're looking for a sucker you found an ear.
@BlackVegetable - hey, that's great! DW is an amazing game and has a great community! I think the Q I answered about "off-screen" moves was from you, hope it helped.
@UristMcDorf - I don't usually chat, but I wanted to kind of say hello to everyone. But ask some non-D&D questions and there's a good chance I'll be there! :)
Yeah, I can't think of a way to torture dice into a really good distribution without getting really complex. Maybe there's something simpler for distance.
I wonder what it looks like if we substitute the lowest non-1 values instead.
Heh, that just shifts each peak closer to multiples of 4.
Introduction
I am a software developer and I've been with my current company for about 4 months now. Initially I've generally stuck to myself but after a while (a month?) of getting to know everybody I've started spending most of my break time with a group of colleagues who share similar interes...
That is a game, if you could kill you colleagues characters you did VERY WELL, at least you know now with what type of unmature people you have to deal with. Indeed I would go further more and make fun of them for behaving like 10 years old child. Such persons are very easy to manipulate
