@Zachiel The Toolkit is basically a discussion of how to hack the Fate dials, with specific examples.
@Zachiel Hound Archon Hero, MM1 17, right next to the ordinary Hound Archon.
It's just an example of a Hound Archon with class levels, not something fancy like the Rakhshasa that gets sorcerer levels rolled into the base monster.
Tweets to Campaign By presents Domiciles & Distilleries:
Every man's home may be his castle, but the police are finding that many of them also are distilleries. OH1920
Their weird (rather directly Tolkien-inspired) society.
So, orcs are immortal, like elves. And as they age they only grow in intellect and ability.
There's no "prime of your youth" kind of thing.
But they're consumed with hate and destruction. So they don't tend to live that long, really.
He says the overall consequence of this is that your mere age and survival are very powerful socially. More so than the kinds of wealth that elves or dwarves might accumulate (which orcs tend to destroy).
I'm not too excited about that, but it is interesting how much their lifepaths focus on this kind of hierarchy-through-survival. There's a bit of a "noble" class, but really everyone starts out massively expendable. You don't even get a real name unless you're in charge.
Ugh. Temperature is down below 30 (celcius) here for the first time in a while.
And there's a breeze that slightly breaks the airborne swamp humidity that is our life.
There is a word in Hebrew for the first rain of the year, as well as for the last rain. I wonder if those concepts sound weird in places that have actual weather all year-round.
We've been playing for about 15 years, covering (with large jumps) more than a century of Bretagne.
We've had ghost Roman legions, fairy infestations, necromantic curses, and the usual stock of plagues and famines, murders and assassinations, and (lately) a full-blown English invasion.
I don't know where you live in Bretagne, but chances are it was wiped out at some point in our campaign. :)
I don't know the area's history enough to be sure it's accurate, but for us in the 12th-13th century, it's one of the least urbanized areas of Europe, with a lot of ambient magic still around, while it's been vanishing from many other places in Europe.
Let's replace "urbanized" with "populated".
or "civilized".
Hmm. We've been on hiatus since June. Will be nice to get back to the game.
@AvnerShahar-Kashtan I live near Rennes, capital city of Bretagne where Anne de Bretagne, a famous duchess, lived, though it's later than what your campaign covered
We're located on a hilltop not far from Vannes, though we don't really keep accurate measure of distances and travel times.
And Brest is the Ducal seat for most of the campaign.
Well, except for the brief period when the Duke was killed and the city run by syndicalistic guild system which turned Brest into a tightly controlled beaurocraticly oppressive city-state. Yeah, this campaign has action.
@AvnerShahar-Kashtan Never tried a bureaucratic setting, especially in a medieval setting. Always wanted to, but I'm kind of reluctant with highly populated cities. Too many NPCs and places to describe.
SPAM IN THE STAAAAAAACK oh nevermind it's already gone
@BESW I'v seen that but the player asking me says "there's this humanoid dog monster (I think it's an angel of some sort) which name I can't remember that is presented with paladin levels and no base creature without them is given, how do I determine which are its starting stats?"
@Zachiel Not every monster is meant to be PC. And not every magic item is priced with magic item creations guidelines (to expand on wraithstrike slotless item)
(the price of a Sword of limitless True Strike is laughable)
@Trajan Oh I also remember seeing a different entry with a hound in armor that's not the hound archon... a planar like the aasimar maybe? Something on par with the ghaele?
Ok. So now taking Athletics is a strictly better choice (provided str increase is what you want for your character) but you can only take Athletics once. Next ability increase, you are forced to take str increase
@Garan (1) Then maybe it's just there so you take it instead of the ability score. You have no reason so don't take the ability score. (2) Games often contain crap options like this which are there to make you feel smart for not choosing them.
@Garan No, think at how the 3.5 feats got out before the other ones were published. In my D&D 3.0 core only game, Iron Will is a perfectly viable feat for the barbarian. He has more feat slots that feats he needs to do his barbarian job
Of course if he had access to a wider variety of feats he would avoid that one in favor of more damage
@Garan That, or they had no idea of how weak certain options are. Remember that 3.x got playtested up to level 6 more or less. Some feats don't work by RAW as the designers intended them and some others are bad choices with a cool theme.
I didn't mean to make that a rant against D&D or for Fate but it is pretty nice being able to have a system where you're not limited/subjected to the designers' choices of what you could learn to do.
e.g. I have seen people here being quite against some of the feat taxes in the game
@Zachiel Context: was actually used by Einstein to describe quantum physics, a field he did not much like. At the time, quantum physicists were performing the same experiments over and over. Einstein thought it was pretty silly. However, they were getting different results each time.
@Trajan Every 3.5 monster can be back-gineered to be a playable PC race. Some of them take more work than others, and many shouldn't be, but everything can be.
Because quantum physics is like that. It follows a different set of rules to the ones Einstein was used to (namely: he was used to the determinism of regular physics, in which performing the same experiment over and over would yield the same results each time)
@Zachiel Nope, just sayin': That quote is a whole lot less profound and a whole lot less of a general observation than people use it for.
It was actually just a guy criticising a field of science for doing stuff he thought was dumb based on what he understood (and based on what he didn't realise he didn't understand).
So there's actually some degree of irony in that the origin of the saying was that the people being criticised were doing the smart thing, the person criticising them just didn't realise it or fully appreciate and understand what they were doing and why they were doing it.
@BESW the one I remember is a yellowish-skinned dog (really, those kind of dogs with long dropping doggy ears) with an aloof stare and a full armor. No helm.
This guy is not cool. He's all "Oh, look at my narrow tie. It's so snazzy, you won't even notice I'm a slob in the kitchen and don't care enough to hide it."
@BESW I think it was similar to the blink dog as portrayed in Neverwinter Nights. And that remembers me I need to have that blink dog companion dropping from the Neverwinter mini-dungeon
@BESW Eve, pictured by GENZOMAN. A random chick in bikini top and sexy lingerie with a machinegun and a splinter cell visor. Mel Gibson's Braveheart poster. Kill Bill's poster.
That fits the base hound archon's 15 Str, 10 Dex, 13 Con, 10 Int, 13 Wis, and 12 Cha, because he started with 10s and 11s across the board before racial adjustment.
D&D 3.5 tried to be many things it is not. I spent years forcing that system into unnatural shapes because I thought it should be able to accommodate playstyles that I now understand it actively discourages.
In hindsight I did really well getting the kind of game I wanted out of a system not designed to encourage such things, but it was eternally frustrating because I didn't know why I had to work so hard.
If the game had come out and said "I am designed to facilitate these particular playstyles. If you are not interested in these playstyles, I am not going to be much help as a system," then I... probably still would've used it. But I would've gone in with my eyes open.
As it is, the manuals deliberately present the D&D engine as capable of support every playstyle imaginable.
One reason I respect the 4e system so much more than 3.5 is that it's honest about the scope of playstyles it's interested in actively encouraging and supporting.
@LitheOhm Yes, really. Wounds are not a thing in D&D; you just lose HP (which may or may not correspond to in-character wounds). Wound rules typically involve penalties for getting hurt, or different styles of handling health. D&D doesn't use them. Your answer is effectively inaccurate.
The New World campaign was Fall '06 to Spring '07, with The Cauldron minicampaign over that winter break. Prior to that was the Valley of Day and Night over the summer of '06 and before that... the Acheron Hades campaign?
That must've been Fall '05, and I can't remember if it continued into Spring '06 or not, but it definitely started Fall '05. I went home summer '05, so no gaming then but I was working on the Hades campaign.
@Trajan I was first told I'd be a good GM late in the fall semester of 2004. I took the core books home over the winter break and started my first ever D&D game, as a GM, in Spring 2005.
@JoshuaAslanSmith the Batman guide gets a really bad rap; it was really oriented towards making a wizard who is effective without, as much as possible, stepping on weaker classes' toes or making them pointless.
And I stayed in 3.5 until... late summer 2011, I think.
Spent a lot of time 2008-2010-ish running minicampaigns for @Trogdor and his brother (The Evil Minion Campaign and The Ajani Games are the ones this chat's probably heard of), then ran The Island of the Scale (AKA Knave Port) for while at the local University that they went to. When that fell apart I ran The Sandbox with them and some of the guys from the university who could still join, and by then 3.5 was chafing enough that we moved into 4e and The Imperial Wars.
@KRyan WhiteWolf systems do it too. And Call of Chtulu sort of does. It really never tells you it's meant to be played Paranoia style but that's what the adventure modules written by its creator say
@Zachiel I think part of it is that the games were early enough in the genre's history (and D&D was so astonishingly dominant in the genre gestalt) that it was hard to really conceptualize or express how the games were different or what they could and couldn't do.
@BESW marketing; it was really clear that Wizards' rules forbade the authors from ever admitting a mistake, barring explicit errata (which they also avoided doing as much as possible)
