TRPG General Chat

12:03 AM

7

Q: Does the spell Misty Step transit through the Ethereal Plane?

In older D&D lore, most teleportation type spells worked like a short and (almost?) instantaneous transit through the Ethereal Plane. I'm working on a monster species with Succubus ancestry, being able to cast Misty Step. So, does it work via the Ethereal Plane, or is it something entirely differ...

BESW

3:42 AM

"Into The Black is a lightweight RPG love letter to Mass Effect without the military trappings" article by Chase Carter for Dicebreaker about Into the Black by Monkey's Paw Games.

AncientSwordRage

@BESW TIL what ashcan release is:

11

Q: What is an "ashcan" release?

What are "ashcans"? What are their purpose? Where does the name come from?

terminology game-design indie-rpg publishing

BESW

Ah yes.

TRPGs: when a medium is so new, all its jargon is nipped from older mediums.

AncientSwordRage

Yup!

Looks exciting, and I'd even buy it if I had time for RPGs right now

BESW

I remember when people were haggling over "theater of the mind" in 5e.

AncientSwordRage

My brother bought be the original Mass effect about 10 years ago, but I've still not played it.

@BESW heh

BESW

3:53 AM

(I got more than 300 rep off that kerfuffle.)

AncientSwordRage

Back when you cared for such things 😜

BESW

[checks] Ah yes, the nostalgic yesteryear of 2016.

AncientSwordRage

In other news: Today's suhoor went off without a hitch thankfully

Alhamdulillah

BESW

Hooray! Have your suhoors been hitchful recently?

AncientSwordRage

@BESW oftentimes

I don't have the best sleep cycle most of the time, so then making sure I'm up for suhoor isn't always easy

BESW

4:01 AM

Ah. I know that feeling.

Many years I go into fasting with "Midnight is early bedtime" as my standard. And I don't feel good if I eat right after I get up, so I need to schedule that into my wakeup time too.

AncientSwordRage

We've had a good start to the evening if we start eating before midnight, and that's on days where we're not fasting.

It's 5am here and I need to be up before 9am

BESW

Sleeeeeep?

AncientSwordRage

That's the plan

That's the plan every night/morning

BESW

@BardicWizard Grats on the jab!

AncientSwordRage

4:16 AM

I was thinking more Pinky and the Brain, but I'll accept that too

@BardicWizard JABGRATS!

V2Blast

@BESW never heard of it

BESW

(Image is from a background in the show "Twelve Forever.")

AncientSwordRage

Goin to plot my sleep plan on sleepyti.me from under my weighted blanket

Bardic Wizard

4:41 AM

@BESW aww, thanks! It’s been just over a week since my first and it’s just been bugging me cause I sleep weirdly

@AncientSwordRage thanks!

BESW

I got my second two days ago, and both times I had trouble sleeping for at least a night or two because of the sore arm.

Bardic Wizard

@BESW oof, I’m sorry

Congrats on the vaccine though!

BESW

Thanks!

I'm just glad that so far I haven't had anything worse than a couple days of feeling achy and not sleeping well.

Bardic Wizard

@BESW Yay, that’s good

I’m doing three final projects, cramming for AP tests, researching an essay, and writing a thing this week, so it’s probably not the vaccine causing my lack of sleep

BESW

Wow

That is a great many things

A. B.

4:50 AM

bzk

(is tired can't brain)

Bardic Wizard

@BESW yep! Then add that I’m going back to in person school for the last few weeks...

sptrashcan

I have become increasingly frustrated with the D&D 5e authors' decision to describe fantastical magical effects, which do not exist and which we cannot reasonably intuit the workings of, with ambiguous "natural" language.

bobble

How many APs?

Bardic Wizard

@bobble 2 tests, one class (WHAP and AP euro)

I’m taking like 3 next year though

bobble

I see you and raise you 5 APs

(I did 5 APs last year too, but the tests were weird and school was so nonexistent that I had ample study time)

Bardic Wizard

5:02 AM

They only offer sophs WHAP/euro so I’m only doing that this year

sptrashcan

I think I ended up taking 6 APs my senior year, lo these many years ago. That was a stressful time. It did make completing my degree notably cheaper though.

Bardic Wizard

I gtg to bed, night!

bobble

I shall sleep as well :)

nice to know there are some other crazy AP people here

BESW

ttfn

(My high school didn't get APs until it was too late for me to take them.)

A. B.

> I have become increasingly frustrated with the D&D 5e authors' decision to describe fantastical magical effects, which do not exist and which we cannot reasonably intuit the workings of, with ambiguous "natural" language.

@sptrashcan Point. Details?

Which one d'you have in mind?

sptrashcan

5:22 AM

Today, it's the definition of "target".

Spells do not state, as a line item, their targets.

There are quite a few features that key off being the target of a spell.

Hilarity ensues.

BESW

That must be extra frustrating since it was already a solved problem within the same franchise.

sptrashcan

Yes. It's enough to make me briefly nostalgic for 4e.

(4e has some real problems if you want to run it without computer assistance, but ambiguity is not one of them.)

BESW

Aye. The closure of the online support systems effectively killed it as a playable game for me, regardless of any reluctance to play it for personal reasons.

sptrashcan

I feel like 5e is in an uncomfortable position where it has heard of fiction-first and thinks it's a neat idea but also still wants to be a tactical simulation board game.

BESW

May 6 '19 at 8:06, by BESW

Then 5e came along like "unite the factions! The new edition will be a universal connector for all previous editions! Pathfinder apostates will return to the fold! players and GMs can all individually choose which variants to use! ALL WILL LOVE D&D NEXT AND DESPAIR."

But all we got was unlimited rice pudding.

sptrashcan

5:32 AM

From the designer perspective, I'm sure it must feel like the best of both worlds: engage in as much crunchy rules fiddling as you want, and if you happen to create unresolvable ambiguities, well, Let The DM Decide!

Did you know that Tenser's Floating Disk can cross arbitrary distances instantaneously? It used to have a speed, but now it doesn't! It just moves to within 30 feet of you if it can, as soon as it can, achieving arbitrary velocity in the process...

It's a particularly bad approach given that there's quite a bit of popular fiction that has careful consideration and exploitation of the exact mechanics of supernatural abilities as a major theme. But you're not supposed to think about how magic works...

(Admittedly, trying to balance abilities at the fictional rather than the mechanical level is an amazingly hard puzzle, but then, spells aren't really balanced around their mechanical effects either...)

BESW

As an amateur designer, I take this kind of thing as a lesson to be more like Verity Lambert and less like Steven Moffat: unnecessary explanations are unnecessary. The more space I leave open, the more room there is for my audience to insert their own needs if any, or to simply move on if they don't need to dwell on it.

A. B.

I'd have thought that was half the fun of a magic system like D&D's. Given these spells that do these very specific things, how do you do X?

sptrashcan

I think it's okay to be vague about how it works if you're precise about what it does, or vice versa, but not both.

BESW

It's one of the reasons my card-based TRPG is stallling out; it requires more precision than I feel qualified to bring to the project.

sptrashcan

Well, for better or worse, I do have Programmer Mind.

A. B.

5:45 AM

I don't know Tenser's Floating Disk from D&D, but I do know it from Discworld :-D

sptrashcan

6:03 AM

I remember going back to 4e a while back and doing some analysis, and I found that because the monster defense progression is more or less constant, you could effectively implement bounded accuracy by getting rid of defense progression scaling and then removing all feats and magic bonuses to accuracy. This made me briefly excited.

Then I took a look at the stat block for a 4e svirfneblin and remembered that bounded accuracy was the least of my problems.

BESW

Partway through my 4e campaign I implemented the L1E tables for monster stats and it vastly improved the gameplay but also made me realize that I could've just removed all numeric progression entirely and made it a flat-number game with progression defined by increased feature access.

I also modified all GM rolled damage to streamline my side of the table: if the average damage of the original dice expression was A, then my new dice expression was [A/3.5]d6 + [A/2].

It made my damage output much less swingy and let me make all my rolls with only a d20 and a handful of d6s.

sptrashcan

I have a personal antipathy for "progression" systems that consist of "number go up", and I particularly dislike systems that make you choose between "interesting thing" and "number go up".

BESW

Aye, same.

I've ripped numerical progression out of most of the systems I've played for the last several years, and in many cases I've removed cumulative progression altogether; among other things, it helps reduce friction when your friends can't show up to every session.

sptrashcan

I've been tinkering with non-numeric-incremental progression systems for a while now. It's harder to think of new toys than numbers that go up, but it's also way more interesting IMO.

BESW

The only game I'm designing which has any kind of cumulative progression, it's an expression of the work you're putting into the world and is held in the progression of NPCs rather than in the PC or even a relationship stat.

(It's a mechanical implementation of my Traveling Librarians Game Guide.)

sptrashcan

6:20 AM

Yeah. I've also thought about fantastic expressions of the idea that power comes from being at the apex of a pyramidal supply chain - basically, combat mages as fighter pilots.

BESW

I've also got a game where PCs' stats are phrasal attributes, and progression consists of adding to or changing what your phrase means (or changing the phrase itself, Fate-aspect style).

sptrashcan

Interesting, though I'm personally leery of meta-narrative mechanics because they tend to be disassociative.

BESW

Think, like, if Luke Skywalker had the stat I want to be closer to my father. It starts out meaning that he wants to enlist in the Empire because his father was a soldier; but when he learns that one of the Empire's leaders killed his father, it turns into a revenge stat.

All three films have him retaining that desire of being closer to his father, but what that means changes many times, and very dramatically.

sptrashcan

Yeah, I understand. I do think it's neat, and I have enjoyed games that focus on narrative structure, but they're not what I want when I come to play a "role playing game" if that makes sense.

BESW

Our play goals are very different, I think.

sptrashcan

6:28 AM

Quite possibly!

BESW

I was probably a lot more like you eight to ten years ago.

I get a lot of where you seem to be coming from, it's just vastly deprioritized for me these days.

sptrashcan

When I am specifically playing a "role playing game", I'm less interested in crafting a "good story" and more interested with engaging with a fictional scenario as if it were real, through a fictional character as if I was them.

I'm not opposed to playing games that are explicitly about creating a narrative. I like Microscope a lot. But I don't think of it as being in the same category.

BESW

Ah, you're into bleed.

That's one of the terms for overlapping player and character as closely as possible.

One "bleeds" into the other.

sptrashcan

Hm. Maybe? It's less about being the character, per se, and more about living in the world. I like the feeling that a fictional place has life beyond what I can perceive, that things are happening outside of my view into it. Treating it explicitly as a narrative constructs undermines that sense of... non-solipsism?

BESW

Audience, not author?

sptrashcan

6:38 AM

Participant, not observer.

BESW

But not creator either.

sptrashcan

Not beyond the bounds of my fictional person, no.

(These boundaries are not necessarily as set in stone as I might be making them seem. I don't mind inventing parts of the world. But it would bum me out if I asked what was over the next hill and was asked "well, what do you want there to be?")

Hot RPG Questions

3

Q: Are there any mechanical issues with removing the concept of "triggers" for readied actions?

Since I first read the Ready Action rules, the concept of a trigger rubbed me the wrong way. The idea that a character cannot adapt and improvise in the moment seems odd to me, and when I imagine them setting up to do something, I don't imagine them having to look for a very specific thing to hap...

dnd-5e house-rules

sptrashcan

Using the taxonomy from the MDA paper (users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf) I prioritize discovery, fantasy, expression, and challenge in more or less that order.

BESW

I spend probably more than 3/4 of my time at the table as a GM, and was in the GM chair for months before I ever got to run a single character, so my awareness of the illusion and the work put into sustaining it makes it difficult for me to 'forget' the creative act I'm participating in.

In the last five years or so I've come to prefer instead to invite my friends to share the creative act at whatever level they're comfortable with. It never means demanding that a player decide something about the world, but it does mean inviting them to whenever they wish.

But it does mean destroying the illusion that I'm somehow merely the medium conducting a ritual seance in which we commune with a realm beyond our own.

sptrashcan

6:56 AM

That's fair. I've GMed myself a time or two, but when I'm in that seat I like to create a situation with a lot of things to find and fiddle with, and enjoy discovering what the players will do with them. I don't really think of myself as an illusionist, because I am "playing fair" to a certain extent in that things are where and how I decided them to be and I don't go back on those decisions.

BESW

Heh. My players have never been predictable enough to make that possible.

sptrashcan

I'm currently playing a character in a game with a like-minded GM, and he's just about as excited about us stumbling through and upsetting the world he's been building as we are about poking through it.

BESW

I've done "set up the world like a chessboard and let the PCs smash through it like a pack of ravenous bowling balls" and it's a ton of fun. But it always goes in directions I have no preparation for, which is part of the fun.

sptrashcan

Admittedly, he does have the advantage that we're playing only a few hours a week and we have to tell him where we plan to go ahead of time. I know that the world is in some sense being assembled in front of us, but it's being assembled according to someone else's sensibilities based on information I'm not yet privy to and I enjoy that mystery.

BESW

(Besides, my friends usually have much better ideas for what's "really happening" than I do, so long before I started explicitly inviting them to participate in worldbuilding, I'd be tossing out my notes and leaning into their ideas mid-campaign anyway.)

Part of the joy I get now from collaborative creation, is that nobody knows where it's going and so everybody gets to discover something mysterious because it's literally unfolding as we go.

I'm right there with everybody else going "omigosh look at how these two things connect in ways we didn't anticipate!"

sptrashcan

7:05 AM

Yeah. That's a sometimes food for me. I like collaborative worldbuilding discussions, but I also want to be able to opt out of that in favor of enjoying different things.

I mean I'm always going to be conscious of the artificial nature of what we're doing but I don't want to have my attention forced onto it all the time.

BESW

Hmm. How would you feel if other players in the same game had those kinds of conversations and contributions, without you being pressured to participate?

sptrashcan

I think where I draw the line is the distinction between idle discussion and suggestions that may or may not be incorporated, versus an actual system rule that formalizes manipulating the narrative.

It's a fuzzy aesthetic distinction, but for example, Feng Shui is on one side of the line but Fate is on the other.

sptrashcan

7:32 AM

In Feng Shui, if you're fighting in a kitchen and it's your go, you can say "so I reach over and grab the wok full of hot oil and throw it at him" and everyone nods and it's fine, that wok always existed because of course it did, why wouldn't it. In Fate, there's a whole process for establishing a thing in the scene and everyone is acutely conscious that it's a New Plot Element that is there because somebody used their god-like narrative power to cause it to come into being.

Aesthetic and subjective! But it matters to me.

sptrashcan

7:53 AM

It's like the difference between watching a movie and watching a behind-the-scenes documentary. They're both interesting but they don't engage in the same way.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

10:43 AM

A thing that I think makes a big difference between the 'number goes up' option being boring vs. interesting is whether the number is *meaningful* or a purely arbitrary part of the 'boardgame' more than an RPG.

E.g. in GURPS, raising your engineering skills into the mid-20s allows you invent some cutting edge stuff, and likely be one of the people who push the technology level forward in a setting; having wealth at certain levels lets you afford a ship instead of travelling the hard way; having Running and Breath Control both at 16+ means you can generally switch from overland travel being…

sptrashcan

In that scenario, though, aren't the numbers themselves not as important as the unlocked capabilities? It sounds like you could have the latter without the former.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@sptrashcan Well that's . . . reversing causality?

Capabilities unlocking is a result of being able to overcome high difficulties, either at all, or reliably.

(This is somewhat undermined in invention rules by minimum skill requirements existing alongside of difficulties, but outside that it works smoother.)

kviiri

A friend once brought this discussion up regarding the video games Factorio and Civilization

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

The wealth example is probably cleanest. It's not that you need a special tag to be able to just unlock purchasing a yacht. It's that a yacht has a price range starting at so-and-so, and you need to save up a certain amount and then also pay the maintenance to keep her running. And to save up enough, you need income/wealth/savings.

sptrashcan

Okay, but I don't think I'm so much reversing causality as skipping a step. You invested resources, so your number is X, so you can do things with difficulty Y, and because thing Z has difficulty Y, you can now do thing Z. Or: You invested resources, so you can now do thing Z.

kviiri

10:52 AM

In Civilization, you progress mainly in numbers. More citizens, more technology points, more techs unlocked, better buildings to produce more economy stuff like tech and culture, and more units. You unlock capabilities, such as fielding a rifleman instead of a pikeman --- but the rifleman is basically just a pikeman with improved stats and the gameplay doesn't change much because of the change.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@sptrashcan Uhh, maybe? Point is, the unlocking emerges naturally from the properties of the game world, not assigned purely ad hoc.

kviiri

In Factorio, you also progress in numbers (resource production, technology granting bonuses to building efficiency) but the progress is more tangible, and unlocks gradually start changing the way the game plays as you adapt the unlocked features into your skill set.

sptrashcan

Okay, but the partitioning of knowledge into discrete skills, and the assignment of skills to tasks, and the assignment of tasks to difficulties are kind of ad hoc. Fundamentally, it's a choice as to what your capability graph looks like (and whether you want capabilities to have fuzzy or sharp boundaries).

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Well, you can't entirely eliminate the quantisation of game elements.

But you can make some things more smooth.

(There is usually a trade-off between playability and smoothness, but it's not a zero sum and there are ways to make the sum of the two more favourable in aggregate.)

But even with some grainy steps, I found that when numbers mean something within the game world, and the game world doesn't magically rubberband to PC progression, then the numbers going up are more interesting.

sptrashcan

Some things really are measurable on a single axis. You can't have "a lot of money" without having "some money" also. Some things are not. It's more or less equally an abstraction to say "learning one knife trick has no impact on learning other knife tricks" versus "once you get a certain level of good at knife, you are equally good at all the knife tricks of a certain difficulty."

Well, there's also the distinction between contested and uncontested skill. I can get arbitrarily good at throwing a knife at predictable targets, but when I go head to head with Larry the Knife-Dodger who has spent an equal amount of time in front of a tennis ball launcher that shoots knives...

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

11:02 AM

@sptrashcan You can design systems where you can improve separate sets of a 'Skill'. It has been done before, it will be done again. But that seems to be a separate matter entirely from numbers having coherent in-world meanings at all.

(Into how many competences a character is split is a question that different systems answer very differently, with answer-numbers ranging from a handful to hundreds.)

sptrashcan

But I am nitpicking, and I do agree with the general idea that progression that opens new options is more interesting than a red queen's race, whether that new option comes through a number meeting a threshold or is just chosen directly from an expanding set of available improvements.

AncientSwordRage

@sptrashcan Interesting paper, I'd guess I was: Expression, Discovery, narrative in that order. Maybe some others in a lesser degree as well

sptrashcan

Admittedly, I'm probably favorably disposed toward discrete binary capabilities partly because I have spent too much time with the d20, aka "The Die That Makes People Bad At Things They Are Good At."

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

I should also probably emphasise that the thresholds don't need to be a matter of 'you need to be this tall to ultramarathon'. Instead, it's that certain changes in how your resources flow gradually mean that different tactics become viable and eventually reliable.

So with the (somewhat clumsy and not exactly realistic) running example, it's not like some sort of Feat you unlock. But your fatigue economy becomes such that it becomes reasonable to run some, make some recovery rolls, and run some more, and get a better per-day mileage becomes better than a normal person walking nonstop for t…

Carcer

@sptrashcan mumble mumble take 10

sptrashcan

11:14 AM

Yeah, I can see how it works, but I'm also not drawn to that level of granularity. I acknowledge that saying "you can do Z" is practically and functionally equivalent to "you have a very good chance of succeeding when you try to do Z" and if you want to break things down by probabilities of success against uncontested skill checks then capabilities as a result of rising success chance are an emergent property, more or less.

Carcer

for some I people I think there's a degree to which it feels more satisfying to be able to do something via the emergent property than it is to just have a trait that says "and now you can Z"

sptrashcan

It basically comes down to whether you measure progress by causes or effects, I guess.

(and how far up the causal chain you want to go)

Carcer

the extra step of figuring out how to be able to do the thing, as opposed to just buying the ability to do the thing, is a kind of game itself

sptrashcan

And whether that's a bug or a feature is very much down to taste.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@sptrashcan Granularity level can be a separate matter too. You can have pretty rough granularity while still retaining meaningfulness. You will probably have more all-or-nothing splits, but if that's not a problem for the group, then it's not a problem.

BESW

12:09 PM

...does that star mean somebody got my unlimited rice pudding reference? And was it someone other than Troggy?

trogdor

lol

wasn't me

I've been barely paying attention to this room for the past,.. month at least

BESW

Heheh

Unrelatedly: rejoice, for Beau Sheldon's website is back online. Which means I can do this again.

"PTSD, access to role-playing games, and the Luxton technique" by P.H. Lee, hosted by Beau Sheldon.

trogdor

I even thought you meant your latest star but you meant the one before that

BESW

AncientSwordRage

@trogdor hands up!

@BESW Sadly I did not

trogdor

12:20 PM

lololololololol

BESW

12:55 PM

Animon Story by Zak Barouh. Take on the role of Kids who team up with their very own monster buddies called Animon. Together you'll go on adventures, grow as friends, and maybe even save the world!

Thomas Markov

@KorvinStarmast Am I just being blind to what youre talking about? I really dont see anything mentioning CR in the description.

KorvinStarmast

@ThomasMarkov Nope, my memory playing tricks on me. Deleted the answer. Just got my Tasha's out, and what I recalled as being there wasn't there.

Thomas Markov

Okay, there is a discrepancy between Tasha's and the UA version (and DDB has the UA version).

It's worht mentioning, but it isn't a huge deal.

KorvinStarmast

@ThomasMarkov checking DDB ... to reconfirm, but I don't think CR is there either since the UA I have on file doesn't show it.

Someone_Evil

It just has a dash on the CR field

It also has Proficiency bonus on the same line, which might be a trip-up spot

KorvinStarmast

1:05 PM

yeah, my brain I think mixed prof bonus and CR until I looked in Tasha's, so Thomas is right on the "where's the CR?" point.

Thomas Markov

@Someone_Evil There's a lot of white space between them in the printing, but not on DDB.

KorvinStarmast

@ThomasMarkov my DDB is inside of Naut's shared campaign, so I had to go back to the UA file to read the UA version.

in other words, my DDB has the TCoE rendering of the spell

Thomas Markov

@KorvinStarmast what does "at higher levels" say on your DDB?

KorvinStarmast

@ThomasMarkov At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, the creature assumes the higher level for that casting wherever it uses the spell’s level in its stat block

Thomas Markov

That's incorrect

That matches the UA language

Tasha's actually is a bit different

The printed version says:

> When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, use the higher level wherever the spell's level appears in the stat block.

KorvinStarmast

1:11 PM

@ThomasMarkov yeah, and yet the notes under my entry says this: Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything , pg. 109 As usual, DDB, sloppy

Thomas Markov

Posting on the Tasha's thread now

KorvinStarmast

let me see what roll20 says since I got the Tasha's there ...

Someone_Evil

The compendium entry seems to agree with printed

KorvinStarmast

Roll 20 says this in the compendium: At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd Level or higher, use the higher level wherever the spell's level appears in the stat block

@Someone_Evil yeppers

Thomas Markov

Updoot my forum post

VTC'd here, I think each subclass should be its own question.

KorvinStarmast

1:23 PM

I think it's probably OK to put all of them in there, since the Class is what they are asking about, but it is harder to answer that's for sure. I'd not mind seeing related questions with each subclass ...

AncientSwordRage

1:47 PM

@BESW that's excellent

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