I wrote a thing about 13th Age, and not only did I fit it in less than 1500 words (barely), but I managed to do so without bashing Next. Somewhat proud of myself.
But should probably wait until I move to a new domain to post it. If that ever happens.
It doesn't seem coherent, and I've seen nothing to indicate that its developers are using the lessons they learned from previous games to make this one better.
hmm, I know people seem to actually like overpowering their characters with splatbook X, and 4E had a lot of that aspect hurt by the recession coming out just as they meant to release a lot of that stuff
(and Dark Sun withering on the vine)
do you still have the daily/encounter power thing?
I've heard about dailies but I'm new to D&D and will be starting a game with the D&D Next playtest materials.
Are there any daily powers in the pre-generated character sheets we will be using?
@JohnCraven Sort-of-not-really. Spellcasting is vancian once again, and "fighters" hit stuff. They typically have a daily pool of points to power cooler things. It is miserably small.
Is it the complex character building options? The opportunity for mindless-but-morally-justified violence? The way the default setting was so amorphous that you could move from one genre to another almost at random?
(My usual vote count req is 4, but feeds from stack citizens usually only require one... I'm not sure which I'll go with--since the feed is my own, I don't want to give it preferential treatment.)
Gnome Stew was grandfathered into our feeds. It's gotten a total of one vote on the meta page, and the only reason it's still in the feed is that it was there before the voting page was made.
I don't personally find their posts very interesting or useful, and since the meta post for them has garnered no love, I'm open to removing the grandfather clause.
The other guy says he doesn't like 4e. This is his reasoning. 1) Players want to be cool playing Naruto or Samurais or Monks in medieval, LotR settings and this is bad 2) 4e has bipedal dragons and catfolks and similar non-canonical-fantasy races like 3.5 core had
I told him to refluff dragonborns into something else
And he said "why don't you take a chicken, turn it 300 feet tall, paint it green and call it a T-rex? Trying to save 4e is a loss of time"
I'm updating twice a day for the foreseeable future, with a mix of old and new tweets.
I'll be posting most of the new material I find here first, because the queue is going to at least a week ahead most of the time, and because I'm using SE's twitter layout for the screenshots.
And that means obliterating their paths, not killing them.
Best thing I've found--better than bleach, better than windex, better than any non-highly-toxic commercial compound--is soapy water with vinegar and lavender oil. Spray and wipe. The wiping is crucial, because you need to remove the trail instead of just covering it up.
Yeah, and it wasn't like the annual termite swarms.
The ants were nice and neat, in one door and out the other.
Termites get into everything. Had one in my ear once.
Protip: if a termite is in your ear, he's as unhappy about the situation as you are. Shine a flashlight into your ear and he'll come out toward the light.
I've had rats, monitor lizards, and chickens in my bedroom without much fuss--concern, because do you know how filthy a monitor lizard's mouth is? but poisonous snakes freak me out.
Even ours, the brown tree snake, which is about the saddest, lamest excuse for a poisonous snake ever.
Its fangs are in the back of its mouth, so it's gotta chew on you for a while to get the venom in because most of the venom that goes into the wound is from its saliva.
And even then, unless you're allergic you might not react to the venom at all. Only babies and the frail elderly are at risk.
We get wolf spiders with leg spans like dinner plates that hunt mice, and that's not something one ever gets used to seeing clinging to the screen door. But they're not dangerous.
This classy lady (when not burdened by her egg sack) will hang upside down from a branch or the ceiling of your garage. When a roach or lizard runs past on the ground she'll let go and drop onto it like a freefalling black ops trooper with venomous fangs.
They're pretty cool. Don't let them in your bedroom because the bites itch pretty bad, but in unused parts of the house they're great for controlling more hazardous pests.
But I did spend all my childhood steeled to see this peering through the screen at me every time I opened the garage door.
Our house was nestled onto a little patch of new-growth forest which quickly let out into grasslands at the back. We were literally surrounded by boonies, and we had the wildlife to prove it.
Gardens were a non-starter between the wild pigs and the feral chickens.
Started out mostly as Philippine chickens, but they got loose and interbred with the imported fighting cocks.
Many generations later, most of Guam that isn't totally urbanized has feral chickens. They're colorful, lean, mean, and fly a lot better than most people expect chickens can.
I know a halfling cook who might like spending 1k gp on cookware, though.
Can't remember her actual class, but she was created as a lvl6 character with the Prestige feat. For being a famous cook. Wrote world famous books, and all.
@Aaron Ring of Three Wishes. "This ring is set with three rubies. Each ruby stores a wish spell, activated by the ring. When a wish is used, that ruby disappears. For a randomly generated ring, roll 1d3 to determine the remaining number of rubies. When all the wishes are used, the ring becomes a nonmagical item."
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles had a Frying Pan of Doom which, if wielded by the proper hero, turned anyone hit over the head with it into a gigantic poached egg.
It technically worked for anyone, but it burned the hands of everyone else so only the proper wielder could use it without wearing oven mitts, and no hero wanted to wear oven mitts into battle.
(It was going to be a Sword of Doom, with different (undefined) properties, but the enchanter was startled when his wife popped in during the ritual to ask him how he wanted his breakfast egg, and he tripped on the pig (he prefers pigs for familiars; they're smart and clean and good-natured) and the spell hit his wife's frying pan instead of the sword.)
After trying to give the Frying Pan of Doom to various deserving heroes, all of whom laughed at him, the enchanter got the King and Queen of the Enchanted Forest to hold a "Well-Rounded Warrior" contest --jousting, wrestling, and baking-- to try and find the true wielder of the Frying Pan.
@SvenB. I'm not sure the Enchanted Forest setting cares about that (it's not an RPG setting, it's a series of novels and short stories).
@SvenB. Yes.
It's "mithril" in Tolkien.
"Mithral" is either an attempt to sound original while ripping off Tolkien, or an even more pitiful attempt to head off litigation because "mithril" is actually trademarked.
(But Saul Zaentz doesn't seem interested in enforcing that particular trademark.)
@BESW I believe it is the 'pitiful attempt at evading litigation' option. Same as balrog became balor and ent became treant. Still, I'm pretty sure the Dwarven city in the original publication of Streams of Silver was named Mithril Hall, not Mithral Hall.
And unlike nearly anything else in Lord of the Rings, subsequent authors can't claim they got "mithril" from some primary source shared by Tolkien, instead of ripping it off him proper--Tolkien made up mithril from whole cloth.
Since D&D is based on Middle-Earth in the collective mind, if not in fact, and mithril objects are among the few truly wondrous and magical items in the setting, it makes sense that it would get undue attention in the game--if not from the makers, then from the players.
Mithr-al was focused on by the players, so the developers did more with it, making it more desirable for the players.
And in 3.5, well. They worked so hard to retain some of the "iconic" elements of D&D that they over-emphasized some of them. Mithr-al got spotlighted into No Choice At All territory.
The fundamental key to balancing choices is that the choice has to be a hard one. It's key to designing classes, spells, feats, features, races, anything: If you design a choice that is obviously better than other choices, you have failed to produce a balanced choice.
Mithr-al is not a balanced choice, because it is without question the best choice by default (with a very few edge-case exceptions like druids).
@BESW As far as LotR goes, very few items are actually shown in the books to be Mithril, the stand-out example being Bilbo/Frodo's chain shirt, which is said to be worth all of the Shire and surrounding countryside. The idea that you would make something like a Waffle Iron out of it seems the ultimate in ostentatious overpaying. Like making a yacht with a pool with a smaller yacht in it.
That's the thing. It's played up in the books as being a Big Thing, but in D&D terms what does that mean? It means it costs a lot and is mechanically desirable.
Well, D&D being what it is, a high cost isn't a barrier for PCs for long.
And players being what we are, we want the Big Thing--as much of it as we can get, as fast as we can get it.
And game developers being who they are, they want to give us what we want, so we'll buy the books it's in.
So mithr-al gets better and better, and cheaper and cheaper, until every PC is running around with mithr-al chain underwear and mithr-al fillings in their teeth, like bloodthirsty nouveau riche gangster Donald Trumps.
I've heard about dailies but I'm new to D&D and will be starting a game with the D&D Next playtest materials.
Are there any daily powers in the pre-generated character sheets we will be using?
