So, @Nits and @Korvin following our game the other week, the worst part of it was that the Zombie Priest's Undead Fortitude was insurmountable. This was partially due to the fact that I was rolling it incorrectly (I believe I was adding proficiency as well as the con mod; therefore it was d20+5, rather than d20+3), so how do you feel this could be balanced better for a 1st level party?
So, (whispers so @BESW won't hear) at the risk of creating some extra bookkeeping... perhaps I could "increase" the DC of the Undead Fort save with each roll?
@Ben I mean, once the mooks are cleared out he'll have to be making two saves each turn (assuming, as I do, that 2/3 PCs hit each turn)--he'll not last long.
@KorvinStarmast It wasn't as bad as I'd thought, but I kinda felt like Ben slow-played the opposition. (Though maybe it was just faithfully playing the layout/placement he had in his mind, but without a good view of it I just felt like it was "too easy" not getting attacked by the mob and firing away at them.) The fact that you never got super-swarmed, being the only one running in to melee, seemed nerfed to me.
Yeah. I had the layout in my mind already, but obviously didn't relay that properly to the rest of the group. I had intended the place to be filled with rows of pews, columns, and the like, so there was lots of way to "kite" and restrict the numbers a PC was dealing with at any one time.
@KorvinStarmast Yeah. The session was a bit rushed, and I think we only really payed attention to the hit/damage side of things, rather than the flow of everything. But in a "mob" fight, flow is also part of the mechanic
@KorvinStarmast I was happy with that, at least. Even with 3 on you, you did take a beating, which was the point - this fight is meant to be a difficult one ("hard", I believe it was), but all 3 of us survived.
two pieces of party: one mummified ex-holy-warriors, the other a current crop of holy warriors, playing meet-in-the-middle to kick a bunch of grave-robbers out of an ancient tomb
@KorvinStarmast One of the brilliant ways Cthulhu Dark makes its horror work is that anything you can attempt to do is almost guaranteed to succeed... except attacking the monster directly; that is always fatal.
Aye. And since it's a cosmic fear game, the mechanic forces players to confront that their failure is not just the randomness of the dice: they succeed at what they do, but it's not enough.
(One of the biggest problems I have with most horror systems is that they rely on dice too much for dread to ever really set in; failure by randomizer means you could have succeeded, so there's no despair--just frustration.)
Just cancelled a vegas trip, the Missus has no interest in the Dice, and I do (craps is a fun way to gamble) so we'll pick somewhere else. Not sure where yet.
@trogdor basically, a bunch of USAF (and sometimes other friendly air forces as well) units get together and practice air warfare against specially trained aggressor squadrons based out of Nellis AFB
What would be the problem? I've always felt re-training was the easiest way to mitigate some of the D&D-like attitude that people only add new things, never change old things.
@BESW I don't really see much of a problem with the re-training. Form my experience of the PHB/DMG it's not really allowed [cough... hack...] but I'm not sure if the balance works well. My idea was to give the PC a bit more of a "free reign" of their class, since the game this is designed for is actually going to be fairly short lived.
Yeah. The reason I ask is cos this game is going to have a lot of loot swapping. Longsword+1. Greatsword the does +2 ice damage... etc
So the only other idea is that they might be able to pick a "Primary" weapon for the session, and get the appropriate Fighting Style?
Like, they might perhaps find a 2 Shortswords, switch to Dual wielding, then find a cool shield, and switch to duelling (or protection... for god knows what reason) :P
But, during the session, the situation might call for a different weapon (it might get dropped, for example), and need to switch to a different weapon, but they don't have the appropriate fighting style for it
They can still use it, but without the extra little bonuses
Then next session, cos they lost the original weapon, they can switch to an appropriate Style.
@Magician So... yeah. it's not different haha. That's how it can be used, to allow gameplay to flow
Re: re-training, it feels to me that the re-training limitations are a solution to a problem that many tables don't actually have
(at least, none of my tables)
To us, re-training has always been about not being stuck with unfun choices, and more importantly by extension not having to spend undue amounts of time with each choice to make sure they're not unfun. Unlimited re-training would open up doors to lots of power gaming exercises but no one's been audacious enough to even suggest anything of the sort!
@kviiri This situation of "unlimited" retraining is solely for this game. For all the effort I've put into it, it is a very rail-roady, predefined adventure, with a definitive end. The PC's won't be getting past level 5, so the room for PC growth is incredibly limited.
So this is merely an option to try and add a little bit of variety to it, at least in terms of character "development"
In all of that, I forgot to mention the most important part haha. Levelling is done per dungeon level. So at the end of each dungeon level, the party levels up. There is only going to be 5 dungeon levels, so in all honesty I don't see this going past 10 sessions, total.
that's fair on their count, but there are some people who preach directly from the bible but still believe God is the most reasonable being in the universe
and I don't want to disparage faith in a whole religion, and wholesale at that, but I do feel like some hypocrisy/lack of reason, is involved on a case by case basis
It's very often a matter of framing, and a lot of these stories shared between a multitude of faiths have about as many interpretations as there are believers.
I can definitely see the attempt at a moral in Lot's wife being turned to stone
but it's definitely an anachronism
but my issue with it is that people still quote the bible like it's the one and only authority of righteous behavior without,... being able to admit that that particular statement needs some freaking riders on it
Like Samson, for example. "Thou shalt not kill" is a grievous mistranslation, but it's really hard to justify all of his killings as nothing other but spiteful murders from a neutral point of view.
When I was a kid, I was always puzzled by the fact that Samson fell for Delilah's trap. I mean, she asks him several times how to make him lose his strength, and he suggests a lot of things, and Delilah proceeds to try each of them.
And finally Samson reveals the actual way. Quite an insidious trap, eh?
Well, given how many times he tells her to tie himself up, I think he was, y'know, into a sense of powerlessness.
There's a strong argument against my interpretation though, and I recognize that - were that actually the case, Samson probably would've had Delilah shear his hair when he was awake. Instead, she did so covertly when he slept.
The Bible and various related works are full of very wise people making the dumbest decisions because a woman has them do it...
I guess that's the best explanation for everything in there :)
A rather poor one for a modern sensible world.
In Kebra Nagast, Solomon falls into idolatry because the Pharaoh's daughter dares him to enter an Egyptian shrine to kill some locusts without breaking a red ribbon she's tied across the doors. So he has to bow to the Egyptian idols to enter, and killing the locusts counts as sacrifice, apparently.
"Nee-ner nee-ner, u is idolater now" -- Pharaoh's daughter, probably
@Ben Some of that lore is a little bit of a retcon, in terms of the Warrior being Leoric's son. From the original Diablo I books, a Sorcerer from Kejistan, a Warrior from the West, and a Sister of the sightless eye are the heroes who tried to deal with the evil in the Cathedral, and further down.
I am not sure of Chris Metzen (Blizzards lore master, as it were) decided on that after Diablo II or not. I think it was after. It didn't appear to be in the Lore that I recall from I or II.
Metzen’s hands have touched StarCraft, World of Warcraft, Warcraft III, Diablo and several other blockbuster titles from Blizzard. He was recruited at the ripe age of 19, with his only “real training” a long-running Dungeons & Dragons game
I know of two: the Player's Handbook and "your GM". The latter may of course vary in quality, but then again it's likely to match the game you'll be playing, so...
But on a more serious note, I dunno and I haven't really been looking around.
First off, sorry, this is more of a direct question for the mods than meta, but I don't know how else to reach them.
I recently conversed with Stack Overflow employees about a suspension last year on this site. Topic aside, this is a quote from their message:
Right now, you have about 11 mon...
@goodguy5 To Whom It May Concern - Hello Sir, I am calling you about the Fortune of my Recently Departed Archdevil, which I am willing to share with you as I have heard you are a reliable business partner. I need but a fee of 500 astral diamonds to pay the bank to initiate this transfer.
I'm a bit disillusioned with Strahd myself. So many named NPCs I couldn't keep track of them if it was a novel! Let alone a game I ought to participate in myself.
There's a book series I've read that had a fairly expansive cast, and managed them well by associating each character with a unique trait, role, or location. Every chapter the character came up, the author found a way to remind us of their trait/role/location in the same sentence they were named or very soon after, so as to remind us “oh yeah, that's the CEO” or “oh yeah, that's the guy on the ice planet”, or “oh yeah, that's the blue-skinned android”.
they also had distinctly different naming styles, which helped.
Though it's been ages since I read it, all I remember is the bit with the crucifix cultists and then the other bit where their entire internet accidentally got pwned by their own AI or whatever
@SPavel not a large number, but it'd jump around and give even me, a person who was only picking up the book to read it every few days or even after a long hiatus, a way to remember who was who.
Hyperion itself deals with seven pilgrims who, over the course of their story, each take turns at telling their history. Hyperion needs to remind us of who these seven protagonists are until it's burned into our memory, and then needs to be able to identify various characters from their pasts cleanly enough that when they come up again later we remember who that was.
It also spends some of its chapters giving us context for the wider world the characters are in: we see Meina Gladstone, CEO of the Hegemony that makes up the full expanse of humanity's exploration of the galaxy, and some other people come up, but I don't remember how much of what I recall is from Hyperion or Fall of Hyperion.
You can tell us your problem and ask us to solve it, but we can't recommend you a “good resource” (there's a few dozen things that could be good resources, and potentially a dozen versions of each of those), and we can't recommend you “good cheat sheets” since that's also mainly a list collection & matter of opinion.
@goodguy5 Ask for that then.
Like, pretty much exactly that.
Our tool recommendations are best handled by doing the following: describe the problem you have, and ask for a solution. The solution may involve recommendation of tools, but may not. We can sort answers based on how well they solve your problem. But don't assume a tool will be the solution; request a solution, not tools.
But sadly, it wasn't as good on a re-read as it was the first time around. I think if Vonnegut had put a lot of effort into it, he could've made the book work well on re-reads - and it would make sense, given the themes of non-linear time and precognition.
this is from the "but what can we do?" section of this post, basically it suggests we see “recommend me a tool to fix this problem” as an XY problem, where someone has problem X and presumes tool Y is the solution, and asks us for tool Y instead of asking us to solve problem X.
fwiw if you use the "more purple is better" character sheets (they are very clever and auto generate basically everything you need as you fill in stuff) it has a very nice cheat sheet included as part of it. patreon.com/morepurplemorebetter
@NautArch I feel you for sure. I'm lucky because I have friends who have most of the physical books and generally the only time I need those books (DMG, MM, etc.) are when I'm DMing.
I really like the idea of using digital sources at the table. but I've always found laptops to be more trouble than they are worth at the table (for the DM, very quickly learned that it was a bad idea for players for more reasons)
@Rubiksmoose Yeah, my group has a lot of the books and while bringing all the books to sessions is definitely annoying, it's nice to turn through the books rather than taking out my phone/laptop. Even playing in Nits' ToA run I keep DNDbeyond open AND my PHB out.
fwiw if you use the "more purple is better" character sheets (they are very clever and auto generate basically everything you need as you fill in stuff) it has a very nice cheat sheet included as part of it. https://www.patreon.com/morepurplemorebetter
you'll have an easier time than trying to mash it into our format (like a square peg into a round hole) and this site doesn't try to be all things -- it's good at one specific kind of thing and really bad at others
@doppelgreener @goodguy5 and you can put what YOU want to be in it :) When I first started I made cheat sheets for myself on all the combat options I had so I didn't forget anything.
no problem. Just an fyi there are actually more of these out there. just google dnd 5e cheat sheet and you'll definitely get a bunch. But in my expereince, MPMB's cheat sheet is very good.
For the record, the character sheet is free so there should not be an issue with you just using it from that pdf, but if you appreciate his work he does have a patreon.
And if you want to actually use the character sheets there is a whole subreddit dedicated to it.
I feel like they're pretty consistently over that, even in easy encounters or encounters with few enemies. It's a party of six so it's likely to skew high but I dunno. Should I encourage a faster pace? I'm worried players will get bored
@NautArch Yeah maybe I'll start putting a little pressure on - It's often too much back and forth talk and then deciding to just cast firebolt or melee attack anyway
@NautArch Well, I had to download it onto my phone. Then I tried to save one page to pdf, but it my app wouldn't. So I had to send it to myself so I could open it on my work PC, then learn how to export one page in Adobe Acrobat.
A technique I've had varying success with: Each player's action must roll into the previous action.
1. Hagar the Barbarian cleaves a goblin in twain. 2. Sneaky McSneakerson uses the rain of viscera as a distraction while he attempts to sneak attack the adjacent goblin.
First off, sorry, this is more of a direct question for the mods than meta, but I don't know how else to reach them.
I recently conversed with Stack Overflow employees about a suspension last year on this site. Topic aside, this is a quote from their message:
Right now, you have about 11 mon...
