from the news feed: https://www.montecookgames.com/announcing-arcana-of-the-ancients/
"Arcana of the Ancients will be your comprehensive guide to bringing science-fantasy into your 5th-edition campaign. This hefty, hardcover book will be filled with creatures, devices, character abilities, technologies, tips, advice, and adventure. All fully compatible with 5E."
Drawing a blank on something: I swear there is(/was) something in the D&D5e rules related to magic item use (and... rogues?) where the DC is 8 + proficiency, without a spellcasting modifier, because they've somehow gained access to something normally meant for spellcasters, but I can't for the life of me find where that text is. I think it's related to Thief's Use Magic Device and items that enable casting. Also can't remember if the 8 + proficiency thing was from a book or dev social media.
"A magic item, such as certain staffs, may require you to use your own spellcasting ability when you cast a spell from the item. If you have more than one spellcasting ability, you choose which one to use with the item. If you don't have a spellcasting ability - perhaps you're a rogue with the Use Magic Device feature - your spellcasting ability modifier is +0 for the item, and your proficiency bonus does apply."
@KorvinStarmast alright here. pondering an incident from a while back (AI101's nav receiver mayhem) and ATC's handling of it, as well as a couple recent weirdos (including the runaway baggage cart at LAX that hit a plane when it was lining up for takeoff)
@KorvinStarmast the former? yeah -- go around, then they had a bit of a time finding somewhere to land due to a 200' ceiling marine layer in the Northeast + not being able to shoot an ILS approach
which was kinda....sketchy in my book. (just listened to the ATC audio from the incident). better to either clear them for a published approach (there are no VNAV minima to KEWR 4R, so you'd have to clear them to 4L instead), or just send them straightaway to a place you know can get them in -- KPSM actually comes to mind, as they have GCA there
@KorvinStarmast yeah, the AI crew didn't seem to have trouble with diverting, they immediately were asking for weather for other airports after they realized that JFK wouldn't work
it's just that a) I'm still not sure what JFK departure control was thinking and b) if they were asking about places as far afield as Pittsburgh (which came up at one point), certainly getting on the horn to Portsmouth and seeing if they can get the GCA going wouldn't be out of the question....
@trogdor I had a friend in high school who lived in Guam before he lived in virginia. His dad was in the Air Force and was also an airline pilot. A few years later, had a friend in college who was from Guam. But oddly enough, despite the four years I spent in the Pacfic fleet, I never ended up getting to see Guam. Always ended up somewhere else ...
@Shalvenay Capacity on ground/gates can be an issue if a lot of airports all of a sudden get weather ....
Approaches to minimums ... good fun if you don't mind a little tension in your life. :)
@KorvinStarmast yeah, very true -- the weather situation in the NE was manageable for most planes on that day, just not AI101 considering they lost all their precision approach capability to 99% of airports
@trogdor yeah, deployment patterns and home/at sea cycles are an odd thing. Also never go to australia. So it goes. I spent plenty of time in the Atlantic fleet but never got further south than Curacao. Mostly I ended up in the Mediterranean, since that was where the busy stuff was happening at the time. (80's)
@nitsua60 not sure if you ever visit SF&F, but if you do I'd like your impression on my answer regarding Shelob. It's been pretty active the last few days,and one answer was so good I sent a bounty (wcullen's) to it.
@trogdor Given that I spent a few days on the USS Guam (an amphibious ship back in the 80's) I'll never forget Guam. And also I'll never forget my friend from college. And now you and BESW refresh my memory, so I'm good on that score.
@KorvinStarmast to be fair, I shouldn't expect literally everyone to remember we exist,... But considering this is a territory of the country a little bit of recognition of the situation that we are in, in terms of being a territory, would be nice from decision makers
I am reading a book about medieval knighthoods in the time of Henry II, and I get this eerie feeling that the political structures really haven't changed that much since then ... 1100's to 1200's.
It's an easy read called "the greatest knight" about a guy who served 5 different kings: William Marshal. The author tries to make that period more accessible to a modern audience. So far, doing a decent job.
The superstars of the NBA, in the 12th and 13th century terms, were knights who made their living going from tournament to tournament in France. Interesting parallel. Put's a new meaning to the term "free lance" for me.
Meddle not in showing up wizards in their own affairs, for when they say "if you like your fire magic so much why don't you marry it" they ain't messin' around.
I know a black star is not the most uncommon symbol in the world, but every time I see it in use I can't help but think of this incredibly bizzare old ARG entrypoint video that I saw back in college.
About to stream our D&D 5e actual-play podcast in around 20 minutes: https://www.twitch.tv/events/sxp1tn6GR3qeDZOOApMvaw
In a universe adjacent to our own lies a world known as Runia. This world, once peaceful and idyllic, is now threatened by a monstrous being from its prehistory. A group of adventurers known as Whiskey Company have risen up to do what they can to fight this entity known only as Nagat. They have trekked far across the mortal realms in search of the shards of Barrinoth, the Titan of Justice, in hopes of returning him to his full power.
For example in this question about damage when falling/diving into water in 5e, where it seems utterly clear there is no RAW, is there a way to query for an acceptable way of handling this that is neither a "shopping question" nor an "opinion-based" question?
I'm interested not just for this f...
ugh I'm actually rethinking if that AC question is a dupe. They are actually pretty different when you dig down into the details even though the answers are generally the same.
Before I begin let me preface this with the following: I understand that mechanically speaking the barbarian and Monk armor classes are calculated 10 + Dex mod + Wis/Con depending on the class played. My conundrum is this: One of my players is playing a Dragon Born Monk who just got to level 4, H...
I thoughts so as well but now I think it isn't really. The natural armor is: 10 + your Dexterity modifier + your natural armor bonus and the AC from the feat is 13 + your Dexterity modifier
Alternatively, if you focus your question just on asking if allowing it would be game-breaking, this question probably would not be a duplicate and could be reopened. — Rubiksmoose59 secs ago
@goodguy5 Easier to hit in a way that inflicts damage. A hit/miss narrative need to be a whiff or strike. Parry, deflect, and rolling with strikes are efficient ways of avoiding damage even though the enemy is still "hitting" in the most literal sense.
@goodguy5 Donning a garment or armor that doens't bend in quite the same way and makes some motions awkward increases the chance that the wearer doesn't properly dodge,deflect,parry, or absorb an attack.
It's "avoiding actually taking real damage and falling down" points.
And AC is the barrier that you enter from the attack being a non issue into having to expend some of your ability to not have it be a real life hit-hit.
But it just feels super silly that your body is covered in scales that are rendered useless by a thin layer of leather.
@goodguy5 Scales protect you from a certain direction and kind of attacks. If you ever try to cut an animal with scales, you have to get under them. Usually and angle against the grain will do that, or manually lifting a scale etc.
@goodguy5 Unless the armor your wearing restricts the motion of your skin so it is held taught in areas it should give or you're not able to easily move so that the attack is coming along the direction of your scales.
e.g. badgers and some dog breeds have "loose" skin that protects them from damage by allowing them to move and not be trapped by punctures and bites.
@goodguy5 All magic item balance questions are weird, because magic items are inherently unbalanced. Or rather, unbalancing. The only real way for a magic item to be balanced is if everyone in the party gets one of equal power.
@Bloodcinder Well we have started at level 5 and I've only played one session. I like the idea but the big issue for the alchemist subclass so far is that all of the damaging effect are AOE and no way to exclude teammates. That might be thematic, but it is going to really start to be a pain in any enclosed space. I don't have my mechanical servant yet, but I am excited to get to it.
They also only have prof in simple weapons, so their non-AOE options are really severely limited.
It bugs me a little that we let people ask whether magic items are balanced without demanding a point of comparison. I mean, unless the item has major drawbacks, a character with a magic item is almost invariably going to be more powerful than one without.
Because this is not about what to include in a game, it is about creating magical items and how to balance them theoretically against the set of all other magic items including for DMs that don't think the same way you do about DoMT and wishes
@Rubiksmoose Probably the latter. Ring of infinite wishes or deck of many things or flying laser tanks with full damage immunity are all pretty quickly pigeon holed into the category of things not to include in a game.
@Rubiksmoose Oh, there is no way to balance items that break rules and narratives. It's one of the indications that the people might enjoy a different gaming system or narrative altogether.
But the bigger thing is that we have no idea how OP thinks. If we accept the implicit point of comparisoni "all magic items" without anything specificified by OP we have no way to exclude those items.
@Rubiksmoose I totally thought a deck of many things and pet dragons were cool as a kid. It was what we were fascinated with and the DM rolled with that. It didn't make for great story telling, but being like 8, we didn't care all that much.
@Rubiksmoose Implicitly, my comparison is what feats/abilities/class features does it step on the toes of, and what are the drawbacks that usually come with those. Mostly with an eye of are you going to be pushing in on the role of another character in the party.
@ColinGross Me too. And the subject of so many "cool" D&D stories that I used to love as a kid and now just roll my eyes at those stories and memes and think how awful/ridiculous/broken/whatever it is.
@Rubiksmoose Yeah. They weren't very good stories. I think we all benefited from the myriad of other role playing systems that came after D&D that had a focus on story telling or better story telling.
@Ben Did you run into this problem in the playtesting, or are you speculating? If you experienced it, please give me details about what happened. (while I value suggestions, the experiences are more important because I need context)
@Ben Yes. The target is about power, not longevity, so Special cards are included. Did you have gameplay experiences which suggested this might not work as intended?
@Ben I didn't intend Paint the Target to have a forced target. Would changing the word "target" in the text help clarify that?
@Ben I like the idea of drawing monsters, but I don't think I'm going to ask people to print special paper for it.
And yes, try it with two island features per player as the text indicates, I think you'll reach the win state more regularly.
@Rubiksmoose Pretty much this. And ok, lots of actually cool DnD stories are also about, but many-a-times it's something the group managed to engineer by working their way around the system's limitations, not something the system really supports or helps happen
Could someone edit in the DNDBeyond link into this question instead of the fanwiki link? I think Healing Word is part of the SRD, so there's probably no issues with copyright, but it's still probably better not to link to unofficial sources: What is the best way to nerf healing word?
Like for a while it was super cool to tell stories about what happens when DM lets the player make a ridiculous roll and roll a 20 which then proceeds to somehow allow the whole universe to bend around allowing this absurd reaction. (most of them ignoring the fact that skill checks cannot crit and that DMs shouldn't allow players to roll for something they aren't prepared to have succeed.
Then the counter memes I've seen recently have been about canny DMs allowing similar rolls (for some reason) and then when the player rolls high gives smarmy reasons equating to "nothing happens". Which irks me because a good DM should 1) not allow ridiculous rolls and waste table time in most cases (silly lighthearted tones aside). 2) should really attempt to allow things to fail forward in an interesting way (despite D&D being terrible for enabling this mechanically)
Here's a wild theory: The rules themselves are meant for wargame consistency rather than fun, and the fun arises from human-generated improv and occasionally breaking the rules
@Rubiksmoose Technically it's not universally applicable. Certain groups genuinely enjoy the raw number-crunching and looking up the rules. As much as I'd rather watch paint dry, it would be incorrect for me to call it badwrongfun.
For me a crunchy system is kinda like playing bridge. There's a part of me that enjoys the puzzle of playing bridge, but a lot of me just likes the people that I tend to play bridge with, and bridge is as good an excuse as any to hang out.
Not that I doubt people can enjoy crunching numbers. I was there and very much enjoyed it when I was in school. Or at least I think I did. It is really hard to separate what enhanced the fun and what simply didn't kill the fun.
Tangent: Has anybody here played/run Paranoia? I'm interested in hearing anybody's table experiences, bad and good, with the game. Considering running it for my group but want to hear any advice/warnings/pitfalls/etc. that people might have encountered.
I think I lean on the other side of this. Not the "I love number crunching!" part/not "I'm here for the game, not my friends", but I still get a heck of a lot of enjoyment out of working within a rules system to build something I like & that feels sufficiently unique. Granted, there are degrees of that. If the rules are too loose, I don't feel like the attempt to build a character is actually a challenge. Too tight and I don't feel like I've really had input to make the character 'mine'.
But it also means I care about the rules being applied/being consistent, because if the game is significantly different than the conceptions I built my character under, it kind of deflates the enjoyment of the feeling that comes from a build 'working'.
Yeah. I mean, an extreme is also the person who enjoys attempting to specifically break a game with their builds. I don't like crossing that bridge. I prefer my stuff to not require arguing.
@Rubiksmoose Mostly heavier, really (3.5/4e). I've touched on Fate and seen some other games played (dungeon world/apocalypse world), they didn't seem as much my thing. Currently in a Savage Worlds (Super Powers) game for the first time, still evaluating that system. Completely went in blind on it.
@CTWind ah ok, well it seems like you are well within the realm of what I was getting the impression you seem to like. I would be curious to see how you would feel about something like PbtA.
So one thing I've realized is I generally like games where the limit of my input is what my character can directly do/say/etc. I actually like not having further narrative input beyond that (beyond, like, backstory stuff, anyways)- something like Fate where you also have a lot of input on the scene and world around you kind of breaks some level of immersion for me.
@nitsua60 I think a major factor is the player engagement, and how they're interacting with the game. Dunno if there's an a priori rule, but it's visible a posteriori.
e.g. If the player's interaction is limited to 1. building a character and 2. showing up to roll dice, then I'd likely say they're not very engaged with the game or other players.
Right, and as I said before, it would be wrong for me to say it's universally unfun
But for me, if a monkey or AI or sufficiently advanced python script could replicate everything I can do in the game, then I'm likely to become disengaged
@Rubiksmoose To be fair, I do roleplay as well, I'm not just in it for the mechanics. I just still get a lot of enjoyment out of the building & mechanical bits. I don't mean to imply that I only am there for combat and skill checks.
@CTWind oh yeah and I didn't mean to imply that I thought you did!
I think players are just fine with different levels of interactivity. I love the fact that players can edit the world and contribute to scenes and world-building in PbtA. Like seriously it was one of the coolest collaborative creative experiences. It was a blast. However, it sounds like, to you, such a thing would be actively off-putting (something I find very interesting since I've never come across that perspective before!)
@Rubiksmoose I can sort of understand it. Players may expect the DM to provide a comprehensive and fleshed-out world. Asking the players to worldbuild may feel like giving them an unfinished world; some players may not appreciate that kind of burden.
@MikeQ Yeah I can definitely see that point of view. If a 5e DM kept asking me to generate the stat blocks for the monsters I am fighting I would find that very un-fun. But that is because generating statblocks is not fun for me.
@Rubiksmoose I know players who prefer concrete, well-defined options. They like strategic gameplay, where they can make optimal choices. When given broad challenges, or asked to create something with loose criteria, there are too many options and too much room for dispute, and the player gets frustrated.
That's along the lines of how I feel. I like exploring the unknown and seeing the world react to me. If I'm also shaping the world, it removes an important barrier between it and my character.
Similar for problem solving- if I can declare that there's something in the scene to help me solve a problem, or if I can define a punishment for doing it wrong, it's temporarily taking me out of the character's shoes to make that call. I'd rather just stay in them and solve the problem with the tools my character has. And I'd rather have it revealed by the GM what happens in this world when I screw up in that way.
@CTWind Ah okay I may have misunderstood. I thought you meant being limited by a finite set of options; you meant having the limits of how the character can reasonably affect the world.
Put another way: I'm interested in the story of what my character does in the world with the tools I've given them and the party they're alongside. I'm less interested in telling a story that happens to have my character in it. If that distinction makes any sense.
I think there's also an element of "My character is a variable introduced into a situation to change what normally would happen without them. If I'm changing things beyond my character, I'm not really testing what they're changing" to the psychology of it to me.
@MikeQ A bit, yeah. Because I'm interested in how my character can change the world, but now the changes are not just 'things my character has done', they are 'things my character has done, and things I as a storyteller have the power to do'.
@BESW not a problem, per se. But there was some confusion when a player replaced regeneration with another regeneration card
@BESW not particularly... The situation we ran into was one player had 2 specials, but only one body card left. It seemed perhaps a little unfair? But at the same time they perhaps did have more power than the rest of the players... I was uncertain about it
@BESW of course, not for the testing or anything. It's a final development addition :)
However the "describe your actions" really helped that game as well
And as for "paint the target", I think that it's clear enough. Most manouvres don't have a target, they're boosters. So that's how we played it.
One of the design challenges with this project is that the original game was designed to be intentionally capable of significant imbalance.
Over time I've mitigated some of that imbalance where it was making things less fun for individuals in the group.
But changing it to a card structure has made the entire system lean more toward intentional balance, and I'm struggling to find where I want to draw the line.
(Collateral Damage existed partly to reign in unhittable builds.)
For example in this question about damage when falling/diving into water in 5e, where it seems utterly clear there is no RAW, is there a way to query for an acceptable way of handling this that is neither a "shopping question" nor an "opinion-based" question?
I'm interested not just for this f...
