So, I want to come up with an interesting situation to introduce my characters to each other. I like the idea of doing perhaps multiple introductions (e.g. in a part of 4, maybe have 2 players meet, then the other 2, then the 2 groups). A bar fight or a "common destination" is good, easy... but it leaves the assumption that the PCs will just stick together.
One story I heard (while not particularly bonding, though still highly entertaining), a black dragonborn, sitting in the middle of the road, bound, surrounded by multiple bodies in a circle around him (all armed guards), near a crashed prison cart. The party arrived at the scene and his argument for his defense: "wasn't me". (roll persuasion - nat 20)
Well for example, if I say that both wake up in a cell together, and they escape together, that sort of gives them a common goal, a reason to stick together through the escape, then creates a bond of the shared experience.
Whereas if they all meet in the pub, or in a caravan together, it requires a separate quest to build that.
I mean, sure, if they all go dungeon diving together, to clear out a nearby goblin cave, sure, they helped each other avoid death, but that's not really a bonding experience
creates an interesting start and, while yes, some player bonds are stronger than others (to begin with), I just see it as being better than "You going my way?"
Not about RPG mechanics, but also about RPG mechanics:
> Models have no truth value. Some models are useful. (source)
ICYMI earlier, over on @briecs Thoughty blog our own @fredhicks gives a behind-the-scenes look at the design and decisions behind our Fate Accessories KS which is now in its final week! http://www.briecs.com/2018/02/quick-shot-on-fate-accessories.html
An introduction to a new band of characters isn't just about introducing the characters to each other, but the characters to the players as well. An "Introduction sequence" allows players to learn about how other characters react, and even sometimes how their own characters react to situations and other people. It forces that dynamic to be created.
@BESW This reminds me of how I teach math. So often a student asks me if something's "correct" and my answer is along the lines of "well, that's a true statement, but we've yet to see if it's useful."
One of my biggest and best 3.5 campaigns started with my telling each player that their PC needed a reason to want to get a ship across the ocean ASAP. They were all strangers pooling their money to get tickets.
The first session was picking a ship. (Cheap, expensive, legal, illegal, which political faction, etc.)
Yes. This is what I'm going for. I suppose what I meant by "going my way?" was more the simple "all in a caravan together to find a new city - more to come later"
I prefer to ask players to make sure their characters have a shared motive or goal. All members of the same organization or guild, all invested in the safety of the town, all being blackmailed by the same corrupt mayor, whatever.
However, using the "going my way" approach as a reason for people to meet, is different. Rather than just deciding to talk for the first time cos you've all been sitting on the same carriage for 3 days
Seriously though "It's dangerous to go alone" is a legit reason to band together in real life... but D&D characters tend to be less convinced of their own mortality.
It's even worse in World of Darkness games, where often the only reason all the vampires or mages or whatever aren't dealing with their own drama independently is that the GM a terrifyingly powerful authority figure has told them to stick together.
@nitsua60 In this case, it's a solid clarity edit that cleans up misspellings, tidies up pronouns and conjugation, and removes a distracting amount of emphasis punctuation.
I've seen questions and answers both, which contained good content but were obscured by style choices to the point that voters and commenters thought the point was the polar opposite of what was intended.
And questions which languish in obscurity because they're confusing or a chore to read, and after a clarity edit the question gets excellent responses.
I feel that way too. I mean, by following the rules, a paragraph is 4 sentences about the same topic. But sometimes that can basically just create a block of text. Following that can be hard sometimes. That, and what @BESW said. Phrasing and everything, sometimes using too many analogies can blur the meaning
Rules are more like guidelines, but guidelines exist for a reason and breaking from expected structures is going to challenge the reader: it's important to challenge the reader on purpose rather than by accident, and to have a reason to do so other than for the sake of the challenge.
Big enemies is certainly a theme of Tome of Foes. A lot of the creatures in Volo’s Guide were aimed at levels 1-10. Here the team, led by Jeremy Crawford and Mike Mearls, wanted at least half of the monsters to be challenge rating 10 or higher, with a number of them being challenge rating 20 or higher.
Re: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes D&D 5e
“A lot of these monsters are very powerful, while the ones that are challenge rating 20 or higher are almost Godzilla-type monsters. When they show up, it’s world changing,” says Mearls. “Part of that plays into the character of Mordenkainen, where those are the kind of threats he would want to study and understand, because he would be concerned about these threats to the balance. That was good for us because we know players want that kind of material but it also fitted his profile.”
“Multiple styles are explored through these creatures,” adds Petrisor. “From gothic fantasy to—my favorite—cosmic horror! I think players will be inspired by all the stories they can weave with these monsters.”
“ Tome of Foes doesn’t take players through settings per say, although it does give them material and insight to multiple planes, including the Shadowfell, the Nine Hells and a certain extraplanar city,” says Petrisor.
Has 5e given indication yet about whether it's reverted to the Cosmic Wheel?
@Acts7Seven Cosmic horror --or, more accurately, cosmic fear-- is a very specific kind of horror theme rooted in the existential dread that one is a caring being in an uncaring universe.
The "Mythos" is a term used to describe the presumed conglomerate setting of Lovecraft's cosmic horror writing, codified by authors like August Derleth after him.
"Pulp" is a term for cheaply published books, and became synonymous with low-brow, high-concept, high-adrenaline thrills in which there's a hero who always kills the bad guy and gets the girl.
Pulp Mythos is a kind of story that evolved out of the meeting of the two genres, in which the main character is more likely to meet unspeakable terrors from beyond time and space with a shotgun than with philosophical angst.
There are several fundamental planes: the Astral Sea, the Elemental Chaos, the Mortal World, and the World's two echoes: the Feywild (from which the Eladrin came), and the Shadowfell. And then there's Sigil, the city of doors, a plane which doesn't quite fit in anywhere and may not rightly exist ...
The Points of Light setting is so great. The Mortal World is specially designed for D&D-style adventuring: vast swathes of monster-infested wilderness growing over the ruins of ancient civilizations, with occasional towns and cities as "points of light" in the darkness.
D&D fifth edition (2014) largely returned to the older Great Wheel cosmology, but the Inner Planes retain aspects of the World Axis. The four elemental planes are back, but they remain tightly integrated with the material plane as its creative foundation.
The paraelemental planes have also returned for the first time since Planescape, but they have more evocative names. The Plane of Ash is known as the Great Conflagration, the Plane of Ice is the Frostfell, the Plane of Magma is the Fountains of Creation, and the Plane of Ooze is the Swamp of Oblivion. Additionally, the Elemental Chaos is the churning realm within which the Inner Planes are held.
I think the Astral Sea was genius. Forcing all the gods and Orders to share a common space, but giving them all their own dorm rooms, makes for great flavor. Letting the gith float between them instead of off in the ethereal plane ties it together nicely. And of course, the brilliant thing about both the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea was that they gave awesome opportunities for GMs to shove in whatever innovative thing the campaign needed.
The Wheel's procedural nature is great for cranking out splatbooks, but not so great for giving the GM space to customize reality in directions other than the established orderly procession from one primary color to the next.
Paraelemental planes between homogenous planes are more restrictive than paraelemental pockets within a heterogenous chaos.
The conflict between the Primordials and the Gods was great, and tied to the setting really tightly so that it informed a lot of what else went on, and gave a lot of interesting opportunities for stories beyond "these guys are good, those guys are evil."
Leaving the Far Realm unexplained and unexplored was brilliant.
Ditto not trying to explain the echoes of the Mortal World too much.
And overall 4e's policy of contradicting its own lore in small ways all the time, to give it a sense of received history rather than absolute knowledge so the GM and players could massage it however they liked, was a masterstroke and masterfully executed.
The Cosmic Wheel... is more supportive of a didactic approach to lore material.
@trogdor Very simple, very understandable, very big-picture as suits such beings, and easy to understand how "just talk it out" probably wouldn't work so the conflict feels unforced.
@trogdor Demons were created when a shard of pure evil fell into the Elemental Chaos and formed a bottomless pit of evil called the Abyss. Demons are elemental embodiments of evil.
They're like little mini-Primordials who enjoy the suffering that chaos causes to mortals rather than being indifferent to it.
Devils are angels (the neutral servitors of all gods both good and evil) who rebelled against their god, killed him, and took over his Astral domain.
As punishment the other gods locked all those angels up inside that domain, and they can only come out if summoned by a mortal.
Hence wanting revenge on the gods and needing to manipulate mortals to achieve their agendas.
I am really getting good at explaining D&D mechanics to new players
I'm explaining each part of character creation, by separation. Yes, there are some parts that make it seem more complicated, purely by volume, because there's [this part] and the [this part] and then [this part], but they do understand how each individual part works, it's just a matter of putting the pieces together, rather than getting confused when the bigger picture needs to be broken down yet again
The one thing I am doing is elimination - Do you want to be melee, or magic. or both? That choice immediately removes 2/3 of the character classes, and, depending on their choice, can remove half of the in-game mechanics they don't need to focus on (i.e. melee combat vs magic use)
Hmm. That reminds me, I want to do something with the four Ki Khanga modes of agency, which I'm calling Disciplines and re-naming to Soul, Mind, Body, and Heart.
Actually, in one section of the book there's a fifth Discipline: Soul, Mind, Body, Heart, and Tech.
@WheatWizard I'm mostly familiar with that one in a drive-by fashion. Now that you mention it, I don't usually see an accepted answer over there.
On the other hand, you can get a good answer for any of the literally thousands of programming languages, which makes it harder to pick one right answer.
@WheatWizard As I hope my comment made clear, we can usually get something of a definitive answer on this stack. It often just takes a day or two to accumulate responses to choose from.
However, I think the usual advice is to wait for a day or two after asking a question to accept an answer, as it tends to invite a broader range of answers.
In case you're missing context, I left the following message on WW's question: " While I appreciate your enthusiasm, accepted answers tend to discourage new or alternate answers. For that reason, we recommend you don't accept one for at least a day (which lets users around the world see it). I recommend you unaccept this answer now and come back in a day or three to accept the one that you find most helpful at that time."
@Miniman if I ever use the Storm Herald path, I think I might actually draw from both versions. Mostly from the UA draft, for save DCs etc, but there were some parts of the revision that made better sense too
It doesn't say how to, but you can match words and phrases between chapters and find a pattern that seems to imply as reasonable a damage mechanic as can be expected in a system where the difficulty can be randomly increased by as much again as the range the GM has control over.
So in our Ironclaw campaign, our paladin (a corgi) belongs to the Church of the Good Shepherd. The party just went there and was greeted by evangelists asking "ARE YOU A GOOD BOY?"
BUFFALO *bribes a valet for information*: Thank you for your discretion and intelligence.
ELEPHANT: Intelligence?
BUFFALO: I didn't have to break his legs. That's intelligent.
@warcabbitMWM @UrsulaV Buffalos get a huge bonus to intimidate. It's the oxpeckers. When you have open wounds and a bird drinking your blood from them and you don't even seem to notice, people realize you are in a whole other league of badassery than they are.
I mean, I am perfectly fine with how terribly he has been as a dad, but I would not be fine with it if he was incapable of recognizing it and at least trying to improve by this point
The I, Robot short stories were interesting logic puzzles marred mostly by how the deliberately consciousless robots were more engaging characters than any of the humans.
And the main character was a Heartless Career Woman Who Secretly Wishes She Could Have a Family Too.
Nightfall was... decent as a short story, interminable and thin as a novel.
Asimov was really best with his short stories exploring a scifi concept, because they didn't so much require an engaging character to keep the reader sticking around.
While I genuinely liked Asimov back in the day, I think his main benefit for me was being split between the YA scifi shelf and the adult scifi shelf at the library, taking me from the former to the latter.
Heh. I remember a review complaining that Ancillary Justice, of all things, was flawed because it was falling back on the evil empire cliché.
And I'm sitting here going "Have you ever read a more sympathetic portrayal of the assimilated assimilator in any scifi ever? A more biting condemnation of cultural colonization? If you think the Radch is cliché, you think nobody should write a story about an expansionist government, ever again."
I think that is part of why I don't like those very much in fact
it hits too hard
and that isn't what I read for
I have two main reasons that I read things
the first is to entertain myself and escape from reality, the second is like, hardcore history research that I don't think most people enjoy as much as I do XD
it's hard for me to explain without feeling like I am bragging about my reading retention, but I have a hard won habit of retaining and repeatedly analyzing what I have read that I don't do nearly as much to TV shows and such
and whats more is that I got into reading in the first place as escapism
so my largest portion of enjoyment from it comes from things that don't mix well with depressing subjects/themes/ect.
and I don't want to make assumptions about most other people, but I kinda do think most people don't,... have that same dichotomy between reading and TV shows/movies
maybe part of it is my experience in high school where I was almost the only kid reading for fun, or even reading the assigned material as study
It makes me feel less hopeless to listen to an album or read to a book from the 1970's or so, notice that they worried about lots of the same things as I do, and things didn't go so bad after all.