@Delioth I seem to recall that the DMG says that almost in detail, but I don't have it with me atm so maybe I am remembering that badly.
@Delioth and yeah, there needs to be an at table consensus per your Because my interpretation of what's Lawful Good might well be vastly different from your interpretation
You have the power to design your character, but also the responsibility to make it fun for everyone around the table. Your character isn't for you, it's for everyone. That's the main point I hope you get out of this discussion. Alignment is just the tiniest touch that probably won't even matter.
dunno if it's already been discussed, but... new UA is out! http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/unearthed-arcana/ships-and-sea "Ships, officers, crew, and hazards on the high seas—those are the focus of this month’s Unearthed Arcana." https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/downloads/UA_ShipsSea.pdf
Yeah - it just depends on how you imagine your "descriptive". It might be descriptive of what you want to be, what you aspire to be, or descriptive of your actual actions
@Delioth Yeah, and IMO it is something that grows over the career of a character ... but that's me playing across multiple editions ... and not necessarily 5e specific.
But there's also definitely a table consensus needed - per my interpretation, Thanos would be Lawful Good; most people would call him some sort of Evil (some Chaotic, some Lawful, some Neutral)
And it definitely can grow (it might not, but it may grow depending on a character's specific storyline; it's also completely possible for a character's entire outlook on life change without their alignment changin')
I think the "descriptive not prescriptive" means avoiding my-guy situations where a player says "Well my character is <alignment> therefore I must do <extreme action>"
Unaligned is also a thing, but I think 5e restricts that to things without a proper moral compass at all (eg. animals or other mindless/non-sapient monsters)
@Delioth I preferred L/N/C; it gave one a lot more latitude to work with. However, that required a certain setting assumption of the "cosmic, existential battle between law and chaos, between civilization and the wild ..."
Good> Sacrifice of Self to benefit Others Neutral> Sacrifice of Self to benefit Self; or Sacrifice of Others to benefit Others Evil> Sacrifice of Others to benefit Self
I've recently noticed that this is missing cases of "no-one sacrifices", but I'm still unsure of whether that's a problem
@V2Blast Oh, it's my own personal interpretation - I don't recall having stolen it from anywhere (I wrote a ton on it on Reddit as I though through the problems), I just noticed last week or so (after a few years using this model) that it may be missing those cases
@NautArch Which is part of why I play Pathfinder, where Throw Anything is a feat and you get lots of those and not one every 4 (?) levels in contention with your ASI
@MikeQ My bard Paladin begins to anticipate an awesome gestalt game ... think of him as the Red Army Chorus' solo performer who is also a Knight of the Order of most Orthodox Gospodi Pomiluj
@MikeQ Singer and paladin. Russian, and refer to a holly warrior who sings holy songs (I still recall the live performance of the Don Cossack choir doing Gospodi Pomiluj years ago ... it was amazing singing. I think it means something like "lord have mercy" ... )
@goodguy5 Fair enough. They only gain 2 additional spell slots until level 11, and after level 11, they're only getting their third and fourth slots as fifth level slots.
@KorvinStarmast One background, one race, 4 levels, two classes, no multiclassing. 4th level gives an ASI and a feat. Any books or UA. Don't worry about optimization. Just bring something that you think seems fun.
@MikeQ What I mean was "in world" time pressure. "the mayor's wife dies unless we get the macguffin in time" type time pressure. Ticking CLock, in game.
Sure but I wouldn't worry about it too much. As I said earlier, I'm not the type of DM who heavily rewards charop preparation. This will be a one-shot with experimental rules and will probably have a very silly story.
@nitsua60 I'm putting together an experiment a 5e one-shot. I wasn't planning for our regular ToA time, but it was mentioned. Anyone's invited if they're willing to tolerate me as DM.
@Rubiksmoose Well, there's a lot of ways it can work! I'm A Pretty Princess has you pick a coloring sheet as your character sheet, and you write your Princess's qualities in different colors of crayon in the margins. When the dice don't go your way, you can declare "I'm a Pretty Princess!" and say why one of your qualities says things go your way anyway--and then color in part of your sheet with the associated color.
I riffed on that concept in my (still in testing) game Surgadores, where you draw your luchadore mask and color in parts of it each time you succeed on a roll to operate on your patient.
When everyone's mask is filled in, the patient stabilizes.
Can I make a question? I'm seeing the D&D Critical Role first episode of the second campaign right now, and I want to confirm to questions I have: 1) It seems to me, or are all the PC reading a script when they talk?? 2) It seems to me, or each time they see a new NPC they write something on their books? Why are they tracking down that? Also, shouldn't that be done by the DM?
no, it is not bad practice at all for players to take notes when meeting NPC's. This allows the player to "remember" stuff that a character would, in world. Players are real people with busy lives.
@EnderLook Why are they tracking it down? Because as a player, I forget things that my character would probably remember better because they don't have a life outside of the game.
@EnderLook Not every DM will spell out clues or foreshadowing to you. My last DM had us sold as slaves. After we escaped, a long time later we heard the name of the person who purchased us (but we've never met). We only ever recognized it because we wrote it down.
So it might seem like they flow as if they're reading from a script because they're simply more experienced as an actor than @Yuuki, who spends most of his time not talking to people as part of his job.
My early groups expected me to keep track of everything as GM. I was very grateful to the player who established precedent that it was okay for players to keep notes and track continuity too, which led to me asking players to help with campaign maintenance in later games.
My least favorite is the kind of DM that withholds information because we forgot it. I'm fine making an Int check for it, but you can't expect us to remember every last barmaid you threw at us.
@DanielZastoupil H*ck, in one of my particularly long and complex campaigns, just before the big "everythings' coming together now" scene I designed a whole session just to remind the party of all the different pieces of the story.
@DanielZastoupil Also, recently RPG systems that are designed for investigative play have discovered that withholding information tends to be boring. The Gumshoe system, in particular, demands that the GM always give the minimum clues for the story to continue (no more "you failed the roll so the case grinds to a halt"). The interesting bits lie in how the PCs deal with what they're learning.
@EnderLook In Apocalypse World, we quite often do this thing where the GM introduces a new NPC and straight away asks which of the PCs knows them and what their relationship is like
@kviiri Yeah, in the few long-form campaigns I've done lately, engaging the players in the worldbuilding takes off so much pressure and makes the game a lot more interesting.
@BESW Having played that with BESW I thought it was pretty fun. The adventure had some expectations about the possible routes I might take, including a total red herring trail (which IIRC would be regarded as an incorrect glitch to even have available by modern Gumshoe adventure standards). I managed to skip the red herring, follow some trails in unexpected ways, and wind up at the conclusion and resolve it satisfyingly.
"Yeah, I totes know Oily Ollie Otterton. We've had good fun many times, but I think Hell'll freeze over and thaw again before the day he repays me for all those times I covered his bar tab!"
@BESW In my Masks game, one of the most emphatic feedback item I got and continue to get is that the love being part of the worldbuilding one heck of a lot.
So much. And that worldbuilding isn't just something you do beforehand!
I think opening up the GM's constant "I didn't think of that" improvisation to the players helps mitigate the assumed authority of the GM and make the experience more cooperative.
@BESW Definitely. That was responsible for a huge shift both in burden for the DM and tone and experience for the players. It really emphasized the fact that we were storybuilding together.
@BESW Oh yeah you're right, I did! That was a blast. And so challenging in good ways.
In Bubblegumshoe, we were teenagers investigating how a poor kid's awesome new bike had gone missing, hopefully to find it again. Toward the endgame of that session we'd found some school bully had cut the chain and run away with it to do awesome kickflips at the skate park, broke it, and hid it. We got every piece of dirt on the dude we could and just about every piece of information we could ask for.
But none if it answered: OK, what do we want to do with this information to resolve the mystery? Where do we want to go from here?
That was such a breathtaking (and scary) position to be put in. We had all the knowledge and power available to ruin several peoples' lives depending on what we did with it, and it was all on us to figure out how to tie the story off in a way we'd be happy with and be able to live with ourselves after.
@Rubiksmoose It meant that suddenly the game could surprise me in ways previously reserved for the players, while the players could feel more confident about their roleplaying because they weren't afraid of conflicting with unknown setting details.
We eventually used a combination of carrot and stick to get the bully to donate his own bike for spare parts. One of our close friends (an NPC we'd created at the start of the story who was a mechanic) restored the kid's bike to good as new using the bully's bike, and managed to make the poor kid happy again without having any major fallout.
I GM'd a session of D&D today, just to see that it's still not my cup of tea. (But there weren't enough other GMs for my club's campaign, so it had to be done.) There was one cool bit where I thought D&D could have shone, but that did not get enough focus: A floor of square tiles changing colours, with each colour doing something special to the one stepping onto it. That would be cool as changing terrain, and that's a thing D&D is supposed to do decently.
Looking at the discussion above, giving out good clues was pretty hard in that written adventure, because of all the disconnected single-trick traps and puzzles about.
@BESW Not that I know those in particular, but this made me think (again) that something like 4e, as opposed to many of the other editions, does have a good narrow purpose to make a game I would consider playing with glee.
@nitsua60 In 4e, when terrain becomes tactically important in an active/reactive way (more than just "you get cover for standing in this square" sort of stuff), the terrain is given monster qualities to represent that.
Right. Steam vents might be "give the vents their own initiative count, and they make [this attack] on that count against anyone in [these squares]."
And the changing color terrain @Anaphory describes might be an immediate reaction attack against anyone who moves in [area], targeting their mental defense if the target is trying to figure out the pattern or targeting their physical defense if the target isn't.
A crumbling bridge is an attack against Reflex every time you cross it. Three successful attacks destroys the bridge entirely as it crumbles away.
@BESW In this case, the pattern was predictable, but it still felt like one of the cases where strategic positioning on a 2d-grid makes things more interesting instead of just more cumbersume
@Anaphory Ah, cool. So each color square would have its own power, like "Lightning attack against Reflex" or "grants +2 to attacks while standing here."
Sounds like the kind of thing where a prop would make the encounter very memorable--like a plexiglass sheet marked with grids, raised up just a little so there's room for strips of colored paper underneath that can be moved on the floor's initiative count each round.
@MikeQ just a quick note as as follow up and perhaps we should move our discussions on this great idea of yours to the Back room when we talk about it again.
@nitsua60 I think it's worth making explicit that, like Fate, 4e only gives enemies (monsters OR terrain) the mechanics they need. Terrain doesn't get attack modifiers unless it's making attacks; no hit points and defenses unless it's attackable.
(Similarly most monsters don't get fully kitted out with items and feats because you just need to know how hard they hit and how hard it is to hit them.)
