(Johnny Two-Hats is a performer of legendary status. One of the protagonists, upon meeting him, asks him what the heck is up with the two hats, it makes him look like a berk. Johnny Two-Hats is visibly annoyed and put off.)
@BESW I kinda want to suggest he just ask if one can still play D&D 4e with 3-4 players, if it's more manageable than 5, and if there's any major problems with it he'll have to deal with
@mrcleaver I suggest you edit your question to just ask what (I think) you really want to know: Can D&D 4e be played with 3-4 player characters, is it more manageable than having 5, and are there any major problems with playing that way that the DM will have to deal with? — Jonathan Hobbs29 mins ago
I have this big-ass terrible graphical design model thingy, right? Which is in annoying super-proprietary format so of course to distribute it anywhere we have to export it. In this case, to Word.
Anyway, embedded in the model are small MS Word documents. Like as hyperlinks.
When you're writing a program to deal with Excel... everything in a workbook is a range of cells, including a single cell. I spent a few hours earlier on in the year trying to figure out how to read cells in a very simple Excel sheet and gave up.
Then on top of that all of the lists are one list, somehow. And I've done everything I can to fix that in the source documents and it does nothing. So I think I just have to go through the generated doc and press "restart list" on every page.
Fully a quarter of many of my jobs is nothing but screaming at the Word documents from the client until I can get them into a shape that InDesign will accept.
I have seen Word reformat a document just because the doc was closed and re-opened.
@BESW [pictures BESW opening a Word document and unleashing a mighty bellow of fury and grief at it and sustaining said bellow for five minutes, whilst all the characters and styles on the page shake around and cower into an orderly arrangement]
We've basically gone into a full-on reproduction of the Holy Hand Grenade sketch this week, but with days. "Wednesday is the third day. It is neither the second day, nor the fourth day. Three is the number of Wednesday."
I have suddenly remembered that on the other side of the planet from me, in Canada, for two weeks a few times a year, a LARP group meets. Once or twice a year, a friend of mine will have flown in from the UK to join them. For two weeks, they will camp, fight, roleplay, sneak around, spy, ambush, develop shared stories within and between their factions, advance the game world, and remain in character for almost the whole time. Then they go home.
I sorta like to act online, during a role-playing game session, or in front of a crowd in a play,.. but for some strange reason it does not apeal to me in a Larp specific form
until this year, you might even have called me prejudiced about it
I think the real reason, at this point, is probably the nonstop nature of it. there isn't a specific line, or set of lines, and moves you do, and then you exit stage left. everyone keeps going until the whole group is done, (unless your character dies I suppose)
but the fact that it isn't necessarily behind closed doors is also a factor I am sure
@trogdor That's actually a point of appeal to me. It would be a couple of weeks of being almost entirely in some different way of doing things. Story stuff appeals to me, acting appeals to me, playfighting appeals to me.
@trogdor that would definitely leave me feeling a bit shy at first, but since everyone there is doing it and there is simply nobody else there - they are pretty much camping out in the remote wilderness - means it's not an issue. (who're you going to be embarrassed in front of? the people doing exactly the same thing?)
In an alternate reality I am probably a method actor.
I don't think I could really get into traditional LARP because I don't do that much continuous being-there play. When I do tabletop I'm aware of, like, scenes and stakes and stuff.
Not that I avoid immersion but that I don't think of the game as one continuous long take, you know?
Though I've heard LARP has branched out from that style, too. Like the Scandinavian stuff.
@AlexP IIRC they do break character occasionally through the course of the LARP to arrange actual scenes. sometimes something happens, and people just say: "ok. we need to arrange something around this."
I vaguely recall there is something like a GM overseeing the thing who will do that themselves
The Jeep LARP stuff is crazy. It's like, "Pause the scene while a spectator walks over to you and whispers a secret from your past" or "Redo this scene again, but now it is happening like this instead of like that."
It's a very different way of looking at LARP.
Borrowing a lot more from improv (at the expense of the "reenactment-like" quality of it).
I've done historical reenactment stuff but not really "in character" beyond saying a few stock phrases.
The thing that keeps me from getting more into it, besides the costume expense, is that I don't like camping. And RevWar is all about camping, as far as I know.
I knew a guy who really liked the boffer LARP stuff. Dagorhir is the name of the big (US East Coast) event, I think?
The main reason I read about LARP-ish stuff is that it has an overlap with post-Forge indie stuff. Like, a lot of the women from the old Forge discussions have done Jeep-type LARP in various ways since then. And there's always a couple of interesting LARP people in discussions about social contract and communication on Story-Games and similar sites (I ran into a bunch of cool stuff while looking up good links for the "lines and veils" discussion today).
I'm looking to make a combat effective 'high' (14) Int Paladin for PFS. Any thoughts on class dips, archetypes and feats to make it effective? I enjoy playing with people's preconceptions of certain classes so it seemed like a smart Paladin would make many players stop and think about Paladins in...
I'll slap that Pally question around later, but I have a few answers.
All of them, 'No.'
Though some of them read further, 'No, and PFS is really the absolute worst place to try this too.'
And there may be an, 'And furthermore you're probably going to find out that 3.PF is a pretty crappy place to try this kind of experimentation too unless you're ready to refluff a Magus or something.'
@BESW - "This system is bad at what you're aiming at," isn't editorializing, it's advice. It'd be the same if someone wanted to use FATE for their hyper-realistic tactical combat concept
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Frankly though the question seems good enough for me; he wants an Int-focused paladin that can participate in PFS scenarios 'effectively', which generally means with a certain chance for survival and able to contribute to the party
There's a difference between "bad at what you're aiming at" and "really the absolute worst place to try this." One is relatively objective and helpful, the other is a rant.
The big reason PFS is the worst place to try it is the point buy, @BESW; Pathfinder's point buy is fairly hostile to begin with but PFS kinda takes the cake on not handing out enough resources for non-casters to do weird stuff.
(As usual Wizard goes for Int and doesn't give one lonely solitary damn)
What, me? No. It's just that whenever I hear the name my hate flares with the fury of ten thousand dying suns screaming their last defiance at the universe that birthed them just to glory in their pointless, miserable deaths.
Well, seems Pathfinder Society occupies a rung higher on the hate-ladder than regular Pathfinder, and I didn't even know there was a difference until... 10 minutes ago.
I think there's so much gamebreaking material in D&D 3.PF that some houseruling is needed in every campaign. What PFS does is giving a common set of (hopefully working) house rules for all the partecipants of this big, multi-DM campaign. I know really well how frustrating it is to build characters under unusual house rules but at least PFS is famous enough to have lots of people who knows them
Trying to adhere to an existing and playable set of HRs, I once ran a pencil & paper campaign using only Living Forgotten Realms rules (no polymorph, a wide list of bans) and there were still encounter-breaking characters in it. I hope PFS has better designers (but given the precedents I guess not).
If it's anythingh like LFR was, it's just different tables in every corner of the world, you go there with your character sheet when some adventure of adequate level is gonna be DM'ed and you join it, getting XP and items. Adventures are built for the format, DMs are supposedly trained to distribute goods and XP evenly
WotC got the D&D license and put out 3rd Edition. It showcased their brand-new d20 System and made a lot of people mad, as all new editions do, but it also pleased many people. Its shining feature was to consolidate nearly all rolls under the aegis of the 1d20.
But 3rd Edition was not very solid; it had lots of holes and bugs and flaws, to the point that in order to save the franchise they felt the need to create a 4th Edition.
...but 3rd Edition hadn't been out for very long yet, and releasing a whole new edition so quickly would've shown a lack of confidence and been franchise suicide.
So they made it D&D 3.5 instead.
3.5 is a nip-and-tuck update of 3.0, slightly better polished on the edges but without any major structural changes.
3.5 crusaded on for another four or five years, gathering an absolutely inane amount of official expansion material, but it had something really cool going for it: the OGL.
By releasing the core material of D&D 3.5 under an Open Gaming License, Wizards created a positive business relationship with a number of third-party companies who could also release expansion material! Legally!
Most third-party expansion material was rightly looked at askance; the vast majority of it was poorly tested and really quite silly, either low-quality fan material or the work of companies who just wanted to make a quick buck.
Then, as the income from 3.5 expansion materials was waning, Wizards was bought by Hasbro. In order to make D&D profitable enough to keep Hasbro from axing the franchise, Fourth Edition was born.
4e was originally pitched as a tabletop system and an online virtual tabletop system and an MMORPG, with TCG elements, just to be sure Hasbro's execs would believe it had enough cash legs.
4e made a lot of people mad, as all new editions do, but it also pleased many people.
However, the people it made mad were now a marketable resource, which they weren't so much in the early days of 3.0.
These people who had enjoyed 3.5, were suspicious of 4e's MMO allegiances, and didn't want their 7 years of expensive expansion materials to become useless, were ripe for seduction by Paizo.
In an absolutely brilliant move, Paizo wooed a great number of 3.5ers with the promise of "3.5, but better!"
They pledged to fix the common complaints that 3.5 users had about their system, without making it unrecognizable. Pathfinder rules are still largely compatible with 3.5 content, so expansion books from 3.5 aren't useless.
And they brought a whole new (but not different enough to be alienating) D&D-like world setting for their new customers to explore.
Sadly, in order to keep Pathfinder enough like 3.5 to ease the transition, Paizo was unable to fix most of the core problems with the d20 System. They did make a great deal of headway in bandaging many of the issues, but couldn't really get to the source so it keeps bubbling up.
Still, for people who want a 3.5-like experience that continues to release new content, Pathfinder is ideal.
