@JoshuaAslanSmith You narrated the guards actions, and what he said. Without having won control over the narrative. Normally it wouldn't be an issue - but in this case, the Captain himself was a challenge.
Don't be afraid to DESCRIBE your character, what he is THINKING, and have him perform an ACTION and think about HOW HE HOPES IT WILL TURN OUT and then wait to see what the other people do.
Look at rillette's last move. She did a lot, interacted, spoke, and progressed the story - but she didn't take control over anyone.
Right but I didnt narrate the conclusion in anyway, the captain of the guard talking to me and letting me help with whats going on didn't mean he would actually act on my opinions at all. His words were dripping with sarcasm, maybe I should have explicitly stated that in italics. Rillette on the other hand narrated getting away from Fledger without him really being able to react. I guess I don't see how what I did was that much different from what she did.
@Metool I don't think so. To be honest it is no different then buying about 5 wands of cure light wounds each time you visit a town. This way they can't accidentally forget to buy them.
@InbarRose Im not trying to be churlish, I'm just trying to see where the boundaries are for your campaign so I can stay within them and we have smooth sailing ahead
Erin - Kind Of
This part of what Erin said is right:
Erin thinks that the DMG guidelines are flexible and we should
consider the cost of the Ring of Cure Light Wounds in context of
other, existing magic items.
DMG p. 282 says something pretty similar in the bottom right corner (SRD ve...
Suddenly I'm curious. In D&D 3.5e, do you need to have fingers to be able to wear rings? Can you use a Ring of Regeneration to grow both your arms back?
> A humanoid-shaped body can be decked out in magic gear consisting of one item from each of the following groups, keyed to which place on the body the item is worn. [...] One ring on each hand (or two rings on one hand)
A toe ring would probably take up the boots/shoes magic item slot...
@InbarRose From the perspective of the intact hand's ring, you lost a hand. From the perspective of the severed hand's ring, you lost everything but your hand. Both will work to regenerate what was lost while you were wearing them.
@Metool If yourself and each of your doppelgangers can earn 180,000gp quickly enough, each doppelganger can just go create more doppelgangers, and ensure every copy's securely equipped with two rings of regeneration. Exponential clone army growth!
Chances are that, if not in a previous forum thread on this topic, then at least in some future discussion, someone will respond to that with "Oh, a reasonable DM would have the gods grow angry, and smite each and every instance of you in unison" or something to that effect.
I've been reading through the D&D 3.5 rules and I'm trying to make sense of a few things.
There are so many classes to chose from the basic classes and then there's the multiclass system, next there's the prestiged classes, and finally the psionic classes. As a first time player where should I start in character creation?
I've looked at previous questions but most are pretty specific as how to I make this character/class X do Y and Z efficiently...
@SolidusVerum likely your best best is not to start here, but search around and look for a "class guide" type forum post that will walk you through making optimal (or at least not super sub optimal) selections
if you have questions in the process, then ask or search here
@waxeagle @waxeagle I may have tried that once but another time won't hurt. I didn't get a notification that you had replied to me when I checked just now - is that normal?
@ArpLaszlo notifications take a few moments/minutes sometimes Ive been in chat and responded to a chat response to me and then gotten the notification my phone/ on main rpg.se
mainsite notifications for chat take a while, and even longer if you're still signed into the chat room (that way you don't get bombarded if you're having a conversation)
@waxeagle argh, I hate wholesale book banning; ban specific problematic things, but not the book wholesale (excepting, of course, situations where you don't have access or familiarity with the book).
@KRyan I'm not a fan, and would actively campaign against that in a 4e game, I just see it all the time in 3.5 games mentioned here and as someone who isn't familiar with the system and is giving general advice, that seems like a relevant bit
3.5 is not a good system; it's actually a fairly terrible system. There are, to my mind, exactly two things going for it: an enormous quantity of available material, and a multiclassing system flexible enough to let you use that material and combine it interesting ways. If you aren't taking advantage of that (e.g. by limiting available books), you'd be far better served with another system.
@SevenSidedDie possibly, but the statement was specifically that unlimited healing was powerful in D&D 3.5 which simply isn't true taken as the system presents itself
if the sentence was merely in this situation (which differs quite a bit from the typical 3.5 assumptions), that'd be valid; I've upvoted HeyICanChan's answer that basically amounts to that
(though, for what it's worth, I also find absolutely nothing of interest or value in the attrition game)
@KRyan I think familiarity with the book would prevent DMs from saying no to entire books. I.e. when you see someone banning a whole book it's because he's not familiar with it (or he doesn't like a subsystem, like the "no Psyonic HB" in my Planescape game)
like, spellcasters are arcane or divine, and those are very slightly different
manifesters are very similar, but a bit more-different than arcane vs. divine
since they use points rather than discrete slots
they're still "casters" though, even though they use different terms
@Zachiel nope, sadly. Wish that were so. Sometimes it means that. But often people just randomly take a disliking to something, and think it's appropriate that because they don't like it, the players shouldn't have it.
(and all too often that disliking is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the material, often based on second-hand information from the Internet)
@KRyan As the system presents itself in isolation, yeah, that's what it seems like. In isolation, it also implies that the correct setting is Eberron and that the official Greyhawk setting is nuts. That's the paradigm wall: you get totally, completely opposite understandings of the system depending on which you assume: that the rules were written to be self-contained, or if you assume that the rules were written to streamline existing D&D practices.
@KRyan I find it very odd that, the very things you advocate as the "correct" way to play D&D 3.5 are exactly the things that break it and make it a terrible system by your measure. This paradox has confused me for quite a while.
@SevenSidedDie Eeeeh... I suppose I agree, but I also think this is mostly because Wizards failed what they were trying to accomplish in that they were trying to facilitate existing/historical D&D playstyles and just failed to do that.
@KRyan But if I don't like let's say maneuvers and I'm the DM I can just ban the whole ToB and be sure I never see one without doing the work of parsing the book to see what is salvageable.
@KRyan From experience, it actually works extremely well for them. You have to go back to assuming that splats are optional and are setting-specific (i.e., the DM endorses them), you have to assume that PrCs are similarly setting-limited, and ditto with magic item availability. Then the game works quite nicely in the playstyles that existed when it was released.
for a relevant example, a lot of the changes they made diminish the role of logistics, supplies, and so on; they made a system that is much less interested in or built around the concept of attrition as a major part of the experience. And the increased access to plentiful healing is an aspect of that.
@SevenSidedDie I cannot speak to that, because that games sounds absolutely awful and so I cannot judge what would be "nice" to someone who actually wants to play it
they can get Craft Wand if they really want to, but they don't really have to
@SevenSidedDie yeah, it is broken, because the most broken thing in the game, even if you assume all the splats and all the items, is still the cleric, druid, and wizard, straight out of core, and their most powerful spells are the core spells
remove all those things, those three are still broken
but everything every other class has gotten to try to catch up is gone
@KRyan There are assumptions there, too. Clerics and druids don't have plentiful access to healing either, because of opportunity costs. Every slot put into healing means other spells they don't have; and that used to matter.
@SevenSidedDie as I was saying in another question, spell slots are plentiful by like, level 5
they shouldn't need all their spell slots by that point
and that fact only becomes more and more true
because one spell can end an encounter, if well-chosen, and plenty of spells can end all sorts of encounters so you're likely to prepare them if you're paying attention
Now it's common advise to not "make" the players waste their spells on logistics, puzzle-solving, prophylactic spells (like anti-poison), but that is actually the mode the game was written in. Not pressuring the spell resources creates the problem of plentiful healing.
Ending an encounter with one spell was also considered normal. Just not every encounter. And there were standard GM techniques to prevent the 15-minute day.
That's another assumption: that wizards have access to every spell. That wasn't true, and isn't even true by RAW. They get two per level in their spellbook, and the rest are put into the DM's hands (edit: as treasure), so that their acquisition is rate-limited to suit the campaign.
I'm not convinced anyway that every problem can be solved with four spells of each level, though. That's contingent on the DM only presenting a specific spell-solvable problem once per preparation of that particular spell, which is an odd assumption to make.
Yeah, plenty of spells like that exist, and they were expected to be used. The normal mode (again, at the time) wasn't to have one or two long combats per session, but to have many, interspersed with many other obstacles and challenges. (Connected assumption here is that CR is to be followed instead of used informationally; following CR results in matched, drawn-out fights, which weren't the norm.)
@SevenSidedDie the book itself suggests 4 combat encounters a day, interspersed with non-combat stuff. just how much non-combat are you assuming as the interspersing? curious what number you are thinking of here
Used to be, meeting an wide variety of difficulties of creatures was normal. An adult dragon at 1st level was a thing that could happen. CR was designed to be better informationally than HD used to be; for information purposes, as a loose guide, it didn't need to be super-accurate. It only needs to be super-accurate if it's to be followed, instead of merely consulted.
All over the map. Taking 3e in isolation implies a "standard campaign", but that didn't exist. And the flip-side of not encoding playstyle in the game is that they didn't intend to create it, either.
I really would have been comfortable with you giving me a number that you consider a standard deviation or two above the mean; the idea was just to have a fairly extreme number
There isn't an answer that I'd consider fairly high. "Normal" is what ranged all over. It was normal to have sessions at a time with no combat. Variability was the norm.
No, but when people get into theoretical discussions about how many spell slots of a level is safely sufficient, a norm is implied, or at least asked for. What was sufficient for one session might be woefully insufficient for another, and require other creative approaches.
anyway, the point I'm trying to make is, by the DMG's guidelines, you're looking at around 5th level when a wizard starts to have more than enough spell slots. You can easily have a campaign that pushes that number higher... but every character's going to suffer for that, most of them more than the wizard
a 5th level wizard has 12 non-cantrip spells per day
that's 4 combat encounters and 8 non-combat things
That's what my mention of opportunity costs above was about. I've had my wizard shrug and apologise that she's no help for a certain obstacle, because she prepared for combat today instead of non-combat. Or vice versa.
the wizard may have prepared for combat today, and not be that useful now that they've made it to Rivendell. But tomorrow they can prepare divinations and charms, if those will be more helpful. The fighter can't do anything about the fact that he's only got combat feats, low intelligence, and lower charisma
@SevenSidedDie well that one Wizards is most definitely guilty of actually changing
In earlier D&D, one of the fighter's greatest strengths was being durable. They could take point on non-combat risks that would be easily lethal to others. Fighters were very versatile that way, but that's eliminated by easy healing.
("Do you have the feat for that" is a disease the game suffers from yeah, but it's one caused by the splatbook proliferation. Another reason the game works better with only a select list of books.)
@SevenSidedDie a select list of books does nothing for that since it's a cultural thing; you either establish a culture of needing the feat or not, and the number of books available is irrelevant because the books establish the idea that you're "supposed to" have the feat or skill for that right in the PHB
From experience, the fighter gets lots of spotlight time, because there are many challenges that they're uniquely suited to tackle. That might not be a versatility of abilities, but it's a versatility for the character as the player's conduit to the game.
@KRyan If you only look at their sheet, yeah. But as a means of interacting with the game, they can take risks others can't afford, so they get to do more things than is obvious from their sheet.
@JoshuaAslanSmith spiffy. I picked up Reaper's swag bag from Reaper Con and have metal minis for the first time (my collection up to this point was a single solitary Bones mini I grabbed from a local games shop to see what they were like before we committed to the Kickstarter)
@SevenSidedDie that still is only relevant if the threat is HP damage, and they cannot take that much more HP damage than others, particularly since if a combat comes up later being low on HP is much more relevant to them than it is to ranged and magical characters.
Enough that the memetic strength of the prevailing playstyle at the time wasn't in danger from those few PHB feats. It only gained overwhelming strength with the proliferation of feats. (Again, yeah, WotC's fault.)
@KRyan The culture is established now, yeah. And it's a self-defeating culture that complains the game is broken, so perhaps should consider the root of the breakage.
I agree with that. WotC wanted (like before) to support many play styles. They wanted that, so they didn't encode playstyle. They didn't realise what their streamlining implied in isolation.
@SevenSidedDie which makes your argument basically "if you ignore the cultural norms that 3.5 itself hints at, and use the cultural norms of 2e, which 3.5 never mentions, espouses, or facilitates, the game works better"
which I also doubt on its own merits
but even if I stipulate to that, it's a really limited argument
@SevenSidedDie this is simply untrue, and not for the first time in this conversation, not to mention many of our previous interactions, I find that you are hand-waving my experiences, opinions, and perspective as "theoretical" or "doing it wrong" and that's infuriating and insulting
@KRyan Not exactly, but close. Edit it to "the cultural norms prevailing for 25 years previously." They had no idea they were undermining those. That is the paradigm shift: whether playing it according to "what works well" is correct, or playing it according to "how the rules imply the world works" is correct.
@KRyan That's a good example of paradigm incomprehension. They're not ignored or not cared about, they're either mitigated by GMing practices or they're not actually problems culturally.
@kryan @sevensideddie hey guys, could you take this to a seperate chatroom? Your on topic of course, but your constant back and forth is flooding this chatroom out
@KRyan To explain that would require explaining the culture, which requires much more willingness to investigate it on its own merits than I think you have right now, from the "I would hate those games" comments. :)
wherein the only difference becomes that I tend to try to make such agreements explicit
@SevenSidedDie you are more than likely right that it would be a fruitless endeavor, and that is certainly a bit of narrow-mindedness on my part (but then, I don't have endless free time and have to be judicious about how I spend it, so I have to say "that doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy, even if I don't really fully grasp it and it just might be if I gave it a shot," since I don't have the time to do so)
@KRyan Used to be that the agreement was "what the GM says, goes", which worked when the GM was good (and was awful when the GM wasn't). That is a strength of the new paradigm: bad GMs get mitigated by the rules-first approach.
basically, long story short, Oberoni's Fallacy is that it isn't broken if you can fix it. And so I feel like your argument is fallacious in those regards: you seem to be saying that because the DM can exercise his authority to prevent cases of improper wizard "I Win" buttons, and to allow fighters to do things beyond what the rules state he is able to do, there isn't an imbalance between them. I would argue that there is, you're just fixing it by doing that.
and that's getting a bit semantic, as an argument, but it's a source of major frustration for me in these discussions between us
because I see the system as broken in various regards if the rules themselves are, even if the DM can fix it
so when you say "it's not broken at all if the DM just does whatever"
@KRyan I am. Oberoni's Fallacy is that a game isn't broken because "but Rule Zero!" It's only a fallacy in the paradigm is was invented within, though. D&D 3 is a special case because it was written with the assumption that the DM was the gatekeeper of the rules, but it crucially failed to say that strongly, and then it evolved a culture where that wasn't the case.
because it sounds less like "you have to change things to fix them, but you can" (which I... will agree with as long as we define "fixing" as "good enough to keep the game running when people aren't dicks about it"), and sounds more like "it doesn't need changing, you're just playing wrong"
@SevenSidedDie by gatekeeper here, I understand you to mean both that he controls them, and also that for the most part the players shouldn't know them (or should act like they don't)
@KRyan Yeah, it can seem like that. The argument is more that these things were never written to exist except through the filter of the DM. Where 3.x is broken, even in teh paradigm I'm describing, is that it fails to say that.
@KRyan Yeah, and where the new culture evolved from. The game is terrible at explaining itself. WotC's failure, yeah. Partly, I get the impression, because they wanted to pass off d20 as a universal system, but didn't develop it to actually be universal inherently.
@Zachiel I don't think it's a failure of "resistance," I don't really buy into the "power creep sells books!" theory (particularly since, as written, later stuff tends to be far more balanced), I just think very grievous mistakes were made (again, particularly early on )
@SevenSidedDie well, I certainly agree here: my most-starred comment in this chat, as I recall, was something along the lines of "D&D 3.5 lies to you."
@Zachiel Oh yes, very much so. They have a huge staff to pay, after all. They're a victim of their own success. That was true of TSR as well, but the rules' construction didn't allow for the same kind of interpretation in isolation. The attempt to streamline and tightly define everything did that in 3.x.
@KRyan while later stuff tends to be more balances, the more matareial out there to combine the better the characters you can do. The power creep is not "buy the new book" in this case, it's "buy any book you don't have yet".
For a counter-example, GURPS is hugely broken if every rule is used, but it's explicitly written such that every rule is not meant to be used (in fact, every rule would be self-contradictory and impossible to play). The game says the GM assembles the rules, and that's super-obvious to players. You can charop it, but there books convey a culture of "but the GM will crush it if need be". The books are honest about what they are.
@JoshuaAslanSmith Yeah, very much it lies to itself, too.
@Zachiel Later stuff adopted the new culture/paradigm, so paid more attention to balance. It was a sinking ship though with giant holes (that used to not be fatal holes, because it was a land-car before!). Hence 4e, which was built for that paradigm from the beginning.
@SevenSidedDie I find this kind of gaming to introduce a different problem - a problem I have with RPGs in general: it takes options uder the player's nose, lets him smell the beautiful bouquet, then makes the GM bans look as evil shackles
@Zachiel I think that's more a D&D problem though, because it had a shift from "optional books are for GMs" to "optional books are for players". That was a very explicit shift they made too, for business reasons.
@SevenSidedDie the only part where I think we are still not in agreement is that I'm not sure, historically, that I buy that they were originally trying to do one thing, failed at it, and got something else, and only at the end figured that out and tried to facilitate what they actually had
@Zachiel You don't get that in GURPS as much, because the books are all presented in a "this is useful if you the GM are building a campaign that would benefit from these details".
@KRyan If they were trying for the second paradigm from the get-go, they would have made what became 4e instead. There are so many lacunae in 3.x, especially 3e, that only make sense as an evolution from 2e, because they match 2e's lacunae.
@SevenSidedDie actually, where I was going with that is... I more get the impression that, even from the very beginning, authors were writing two different things
I think some authors were writing, effectively, for the new culture from the get-go
and I think other authors were writing for a 2e-style
@KRyan Yeah, they were. The options then were very, very firmly grounded in the fluff though, and refluffing wasn't a concept that existed. Hence, if you wanted to use option X in guidebook Y, you had to beg the DM for a tribal jungle campaign, or something.
@SevenSidedDie Oh you're talking about my "problem with all RPGs"? That's easy. Since D&D puts those OP characters under my nose, it's no use telling me ther's no such problem in, say, Dogs in the Vineyard, because I will ask to play D&D instead where I can play the OP character and have fun by basically winning the game at character creation save evil DM stopping my efforts by fiat.
(and I think the ones writing the former were the ones with a greater interest in mgaic, and the ones writing the latter were the ones with a greater interest in warriors)
@KRyan Oh, that's definitely possible. When I speak of the authors, I really mean the core 3e book authors. Even then there was possible divergences, but the unified voice of the books does bend toward certain authors.
@SevenSidedDie (I also think refluffing is critical to an enjoyable RPG game)
@SevenSidedDie basically, there just seems to be this super-sharp divergence between magic and mundane, right from the beginning, in terms of the things they were expected to be able to do and handle
@Zachiel Yeah, and for people who like the charop sub-game, some RPGs are simply not even worth looking at. GURPS is, again, not worth looking at for that, because winning that game is trivially easy without a GM selecting the campaign options.
@SevenSidedDie I build concept-characters for GURPS 4e every now and then. I don't even know if they're viable for play but I don't really care. I just list all the things my character would have XD
@KRyan Some games are designed where the fluff is integral, like Apocalypse World. You can refluff, but then you're actively changing the core of the game, at which point you might as well use its built-in, trivial facilities to construct the character options from scratch.
Basically people tried to "refluff" things into other things that impied getting more effects out of the same spells and said "no, I don't want refluffing, it breaks the game"
@SevenSidedDie The aforementioned Dogs in the Vineyard comes to mind. You can refluff the whole game but you need to find a situation with the same kind of tension or the rules become ineffective.
@Zachiel My objection to refluffing in D&D is mostly aesthetic. It's not designed for it explicitly (though its design doesn't inhibit it either), and I come from the 2e-era fluff-is-rules paradigm.
@Zachiel Yeah, at which point it's almost a different thing than refluffing in D&D, because it's not piecemeal, one ability at a time, it's the whole game at once.
For example, what do you think about my character, a circus acrobat that I built using Scout for the skill-based bonus feats and the ability to escape ropes automatically? (I had an hard time justifying mimetism... bad me)
@SevenSidedDie "refluffing" in my mind is just "same mechanics, different image/in-game justification" If the mechanics are all generic, and the listed options literally are just some mappings of fluff onto generic mechanics (or all mechanics are fluff-less), then yeah, it may not be necessary to refluff
that's a different thing than I had in mind though
@SevenSidedDie I'm not familiar enough with your examples to really have a side in the discussion, sadly
@SevenSidedDie but this I just don't get; I mean, what should Zachiel have used? Or should Wizards have explicitly printed some kind of acrobat or circus performer class, which would get the same skills?
@KRyan Well, think of the Paladin's Code, your favourite awfulness in 3.x. That absolutely doesn't belong in second-paradigm 3.x, because it's enforcing arbitrary fluff with rules that are problematic in all kinds of ways.
Why can't I play that dweomerkeeper of oh-so-not-Mystra Kelemvor who goes around casting free true resurrections on people who was not supposed to die yet?
choose the class which has mechanics the most closely fit what your character is trying to do, build that class well, ignore any and all names and descriptions for things you use mechanically to achieve it. I built wolverine in 4e. the system saw him as a two weapon fighter (race:wilden) weilding a katar in each hand. The players saw him a cigar chomping fuzzy candadian with blades coming out of his hands and some serious mobility
Erin - Kind Of
This part of what Erin said is right:
Erin thinks that the DMG guidelines are flexible and we should
consider the cost of the Ring of Cure Light Wounds in context of
other, existing magic items.
DMG p. 282 says something pretty similar in the bottom right corner (SRD ve...
