@ACuriousMind ah. take it you won't be available for the next couple of weekends btw?

@Shalvenay Actually, except for a Friday in two weeks, most of the weekends to come are still free

Just the current one isn't

OK, got it. I'll inquire with Pixie about the weekend after this upcoming one then

wb @KorvinStarmast

Anyone who was in the room most of the day: did you notice whether Angry's post of today came across the ticker? ("Fanservice BS: Dwarven Bear Cavalry")

I'm going to re-link it because the original on the star board doesn't really do it justice:

FRPG monsters devised by neural net and other bits of computational fun. You can also enter your own characters' details to feed a sample set for chargen =)

(I'll un-pin as soon as it's naturally starred)

Thread:

hehehehe

I couldn't play like that, but I am still proud of my ridiculously over the top self compel that one time

the Dr Light lost in time thing

hey there @Thatguy

How are ya tonight @Shalvenay

@Thatguy not too badly

Good to hear! Could always be worse.

@Thatguy Your question regarding beefing up monsters seems like a XY problem to me

You're asking how to beef up monsters because one particularly tough one died fast after an extremely unlikely series of criticals, but the problem of "how do I prevent this from happening again" would have other solutions too, like abandoning the unbalanced critical fail rule for spell saves.

@kviiri How do I prevent this from happening again is a flawed premise to being with in a system like d20* ... Things happen in clusters sometimes ... swingy is part of the feature as designed. cc @Thatguy

@Shalvenay back on briefly, hope all is well. I tossed a few thoughts into your proposal, which has some good risk / reward considerations that I had not even considered.

Possible Vote to Reopen after a previous "it's a dupe" vote got me looking into it. I voted that this question is a duplicate, but I may be over reading this. If you feel that closing it as a dupe was a reach, please cast a reopen vote.

Never mind, reopened, it is based on a different enough misunderstanding that it need not be closed.

@KorvinStarmast "Swinginess" is not binary, though.

@kviiri Not sure I understand your point.

The point: even if a system is designed to have some degree of "swinginess", it's not necessarily desirable in any possible quantity.

@kviiri That doesn't make sense to me. IF the designers didn't care for swinginess, they'd have adopted a less swingy system. That had/have the power to do that. (

We're talking about a house rule here.

@kviiri If you are making a subjective value judgment, however (like or dislike how swingy a given system is) that doesn't change my observation on the fact that nova spikes are a part of the system, as designed.

@kviiri I utterly agree on your point about the house rule, though. Per my comment.

I think that the root cause is the house rule, in terms of how it amplifies the swinginess, or has the potential to.

Yep. Basically the swinginess of "crit/no crit" is inbuit

In the "save / no save", in a simpler form. It's similar in amplitude.

You mean the basic system, or the house rule with crit fails. (I think you mean the former)

Yes. Save no save has huge swings in effect, particularly for "control" spells.

Actual rules, non-housed. (Mobile chat's working weird for me)

Can't reply :<

@kviiri OK, i guessed correctly, we are in accord. :)

Again, the Cult of Natural 1 and 20 at its finest ;)

@kviiri Yeah, while I accept it in 5e, I prefer myself games where the crit isn't. Even though that may make combats longer ...

KRyan had a really good post/answer a while back about how critical hits are biased against the player, given the number of times a player is exposed to being hit. It was very well presented.

I'm fine with normal crits. I'm not a huge fan but they're usually too negligible to really hurt either.

@KorvinStarmast Yeah, it's intuitive once one thinks about it but still people are often surprised by this.

Once past 3rd level, yeah. Crits do make for some "wow" and "aw crap" moments and to a certain extent add spice to a confrontation.

I'm learning the 7th Sea system, I kinda like the success model here. I've only skimmed through that part because I'm too absorbed in the lore

Pirate game, or am I guessing?

I wouldn't use this for just any game, but the basic idea is that one rolls d10s and builds subtotals of 10 or more to get Raises, and these Raises can be used to "buy" success in a scene.

@KorvinStarmast Sorta! Piracy and sailing is prominent, but it's not the sole defining thing. There's plenty of land-based swashbuckling and adventuring too.

Ah, the roll and keep mechanic.

Looks like a cool system. I wonder if there's a group who plays near to where I live. With Jack Sparrow and other pirates becoming popular, I wonder if that gave the game's 2d edition a boost?

Romance, intrigue and chivalry. The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Three Musketeers, The Merchant of Venice, Casanova, etc.

Sounds like fun.

I'm not 100% sure about the differences between the editions, except the second has a better map and Montaigne (the France-equivalent) is still Absolutist where I think it's a republican tyranny in 1e.

The book makes picking obvious parallels to real history almost an artform.

Irish? You must mean Inish! Protestant? Nah, Objectionist! Castile? No, Castille.

Crusades? No, War of the Cross! (Although that's more of a parallel for the Thirty Year War)

Montaigne is ruled by the absolute monarch Sun Emperor.

I think some of our old fart gaming group might want to play that on Roll20, given our preferences.

I'm the resident history buff of our group, the one to like this stuff the most I guess.

I set up a background scenario loosely based on the War of the Spanish Succession. The young king of Castille, a generally popular figure, is embarking on a risky military expedition with a contested succession in the event of his death. The two candidates are a religious hardliner who mostly wants more church in every state, and a sleazy foreign prince who's ostensibly a constitutionalist, but only because it's popular.

Every throne in Theah has something at stake. Should the king die, practically everyone on the continent will be at war.

It looks like this question had an answer-in-comments, and I'm sad that whoever it is doesn't seem to be taking Doppel's advice and answer in an answer, because I am having a hell of a time trying to track it down

@A_S00 It wasn't an answer to where the vampire thing was.

that makes me feel better

@A_S00 their comment was that unholy toughness is an Ex defined in MM3, if it helps

if it doesn't, it's the kind of thing that would be helpful to mention in an eventual answer

Yeah, unholy toughness is a medium-common undead ability defined in Libris Mortis and used in MM3 as well. I assume Unholy Vampire provides the ability, but it hasn't helped me find the template/variant yet.

current guess is that it's in a Dragon Magazine somewhere, because the contest it appeared in allows Dragon content in its rules.

Right, needing something to provide the ability makes merely knowing where it is kinda useless to the asker

in fact they might already know, given they say "i need this thing"

Hey everyone.

o/

Doppel i have a question. Do you know of any programs that can be used to shuffle a deck in a certain way. To be more specific i want to play The Quiet Year with my friend but neither of us have a deck of cards so we are looking for a program or app to use.

@MaikoChikyu I don't, but if you have a diceroller you can roll 1d52 for the first card draw, 1d51 for the next, 1d50 for the one after that, etc

assuming you have a list of the cards involved

I guess we will do that. Thanks

roll20 lets you add a card deck, also

the results aren't pretty but they might be worth trying out

Aight, search unsuccessful. I have posted my best efforts.

@A_S00 My personal idea is that there's some "unholy" archetype that might apply to different cratures than vampires (possibly undeads in general), but in this case it's a vampire, so "unholy vampire".

I did look for Unholy Creature or similar in a bunch of lists of templates, no luck.

But that doesn't mean it isn't somewhere.

I also PMed the user on the GitP forums, but they haven't been active for a long time so not real hopeful there.

And here I am, hoping that the hat of diguise won't need to be activated every 10 minutes.

Hat of disguise?

hey @ACuriousMind

@Shalvenay heyhey

@ACuriousMind btw, Pixie should be available next weekend

@Shalvenay Nice! What day would be best for you two?

@ACuriousMind Saturday would probably be best for me personally -- not sure about Pixie

and Saturday will work for Pixie as well, so we should be set -- any ideas on time btw?

@Shalvenay Got nothing planned there yet, so I could make anything work that's not like 4am for me ;)

@ACuriousMind okiedokie

@NickBrown Thanks for that answer.

@A_S00 d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#hatofDisguise

@MaikoChikyu In addition to roll20, a lot of chat bots (like in Discord) with deck-of-cards functionality are available.