Our rainy days ended, got a nice breeze and sunshine today. In the 70's now. That's kinda nice. I am moved to go and play some Diablo III. Mindless slaughter.
@Shalvenay Hmm, I think I'll suit action to words. Do you think that some day Juniper and Malik will adventure together?
Anybody here willing to help me come up with some plot ideas?
As in, I know I need to get from point A to point B, but ??? how to do that.
Context/background: This is D&D 5e. PCs are currently 4th level. Last session they took down an organized crime group (which I just call "the mafia" even though it's not that big), and now they're about to find out where the mafia's money has been going, which was into the pocket of a corrupt politician.
And I feel like the continuation that makes the most sense is that this politician + a couple other NPCs are in some kind of secret group attempting to make a power grab, and had been using this money to finance some civil unrest + other things.
But this doesn't connect directly with what I want the overall plot arc to be.
Which is that this country is at war, and the player are going to have to collect a set of ancient magical artifacts to defeat some super-powerful opponent and lead the country to victory in war.
They've stumbled upon the first magical artifact already (via "plot hook"), but they don't yet know that their role as the chosen ones is to collect them all.
So somehow I need to get the players to the location of the second artifact (which can be basically anywhere, haven't decided, but like some cave or ancient temple or bottom of a lake)
And I need a reason for these politicians/businessmen to have anything to do with these ancient artifacts.
So I'm thinking, make this secret group be an evil cult, which is aware that these artifacts exist and have found the location of one and want to use its power for evil.
I think it would be really cool if they were to fight the cult while in the artifact room, and they manage to acquire the artifact and turn the tide of battle.
Another idea: for some arbitrary reason the cult needs to perform some kind of sacrificial ritual, and they identify the party as being the ideal subjects for the ritual because they see that they already have one of the powerful artifacts.
Somehow they catch the eye of one of these cultists, who tells them the location of the next artifact and offers to take them there, but then the cultists turn on the party, and the party has to defeat them by acquiring the artifact.
Ehh... how about, in the process of following up on a lead from the mafia, they encounter one of the cultists (say, one corrupt businessman the mafia had been paying). The cultist attempts to kill the party, but it's a 5v1 fight and they win, but then the party learns about the cult's plan to perform some important ritual in the very near future.
They have to rush and beat the cult to the location and secure the ancient artifact first, which involves fighting through some proper undead monsters and stuff.
So they do that, and acquire some epic loot, and then have to defeat the rest of the cult, which includes the politician, which is what gets the party in the "public eye" so to speak and serves as a jumping-off point for any other subplot I want.
Decently! I have just come back from my first time at the boulder gym after all that hospital&recovery time and noticed that even the second-easiest level is hard for me, because I lack strength and thus feel very unsafe, but it's really good to get started again!
I remembered some discussion of pictures, so I though maybe someone has already gone through strategies how to find character portraits. Strategies which don't involve Flash for HeroMachine.
@Shalvenay Or that. I mean, I can draw decent faces. But I can't manage to draw specific faces – they never end up with the features, ethnicity, haircut etc. that I envision.
Not that odd. I have some explicit knowledge like “eyes are vertically roughly central in the face”, which makes a generically decent face and gives me stuff to vary to get different faces. But I have no idea what it means for a face if the eyes are closer together, or how a Caucasian head-shape differs from an Australian.
@Shalvenay @KorvinStarmast @trogdor finally got around to dropping some handouts in R20. (They're actually linked from a campaign-blog post, rather than proper handouts in your Journal.)
Another D&D 5e question, relating to the same campaign I mentioned earlier: what are some good/interesting magical properties to give a sword? (other than just making it a more powerful +2 or +3 magic weapon)
@nitsua60 also, if you're granted HA from your background, does the sell price on it get multiplied up if you're selling it within the confines of Chult, for gear swapping purposes?
Or that the example of a difficulty rating Tough (6-7) is "resist an Asonbosam's hypnotic gaze" but the Asonbasam's monster entry doesn't mention anything about a hypnotic gaze.
@nitsua60 one more thing: what sort of staff do you get from the Outlander background? (I've been assuming it's equivalent to a quarterstaff, but I could be wrong)
At the heart of the system, though, is just the problem of complete randomness.
The resolution mechanic makes it very hard for your stats to matter much, success or failure is almost completely dependent on the order you draw your cards.
And then there's just silly things, like how you're expected to buy all your character mechanics from a single pool of points with no floors or ceilings on any of the features.
Or how summon animal says that whatever animal you summon can be your mount even if it normally wouldn't be, but it takes a LOT of dedicated point buy in that particular ability to be able to summon anything that could hold your weight... so either you have to become a dedicated summoner or you can have a riding squirrel... for just one or two rounds, because duration is round/rank.
(Does the book tell me what a round is? No. Later on it mentions a "round of cards," but that's the definition of a "play," which I don't find used anywhere else.)
In the "What's a Roleplaying Game?" section the text urges me to only use mechanics when an action's outcome is in doubt: "Mundane tasks, like walking across a road, need no rules. [...] You just describe these mundane tasks. The rules and randomizer come in when something you do might or might not have the result you desire." That's fair, for most systems I'd agree.
75 pages later... Difficulty: Easy (1-3) Example: run on dry, even land
From that same page I learn that the more complex a lock is the harder it is to break the door, and that it's easier to cast fireballs while being shot with blowgun needles than to sneak past a pride of lions.
(There is no fireball spell, nor are there stats for lions or any other mundane creature.)
hrm...does one really need a waterskin when in the jungles? also, this is driving me crazy, enough coin to be a burden but not enough to buy anything actually useful on the adventure
wait a minute, NVM :D
@KorvinStarmast pokes with a waterskin
rejiggering some inventory stuffs at the last second here
and trying to figure out if keeping a full waterskin with my character would be called for, or if the raincatcher would be enough for this adventure
also, trying to figure out what the use of a hatchet (handaxe) would be in such an environs
@KorvinStarmast -- the other half of this is trying to figure out whether my character should keep a hunting knife (dagger), a hatchet (handaxe), or both on them
@KorvinStarmast -- did you catch my post on hunting knife vs hatchet vs both?
Furries are some of the most consistently kind, welcoming, generous subcultures I've ever heard of.
I know illustrators who've sworn off vendor tables at every other kind of convention but will do furry conventions eagerly because they're so pleasant to be at--in, admittedly, an aggressively gregarious kind of way that doesn't work for everybody.
Welp, a fandom of people with genuinely harmless hobby, one that requires additional verbal cues to substitute for reduced facial expressions, requires substantial amount of courage and investment and has all other subcultures picking on it for no good reason?
but i'm willing to admit that good part of my intolerance with furries come of my work experience with sex offenders and my personal experience with "bad furries"...
I'd be willing to admit that perhaps there appears to be an elevated level of sexual misconduct around furry conventions, but that is true for all conventions, sadly, and something we have to work on too.
is not the matter (for me) if there is or there isn't a causation, and more on the line of "the ones that were multiclass offender/furrie" made me diskiles the thing as a whole!
