@JoshuaAslanSmith generally I think 1 hit 1 attack for now. It really sort of depends on how well the monster can generate their own advantage. For the most part just looking for a benchmark on which to test builds at various levels
@JoshuaAslanSmith does it have wings and teeth and tail?
@JoshuaAslanSmith not sure yet. I think I'm putting parts of my regular group and some others through the first bits next week Friday, and maybe some Covenant students another night. I'm pretty flexible though, so pick a night and I'll make it happen (I'm free after about 730ish when the kids go to bed)
@JoshuaAslanSmith and a "don't fight this or you'll die" warning :)
working on the wizzy right now, finally got spells all picked out, need to actually get it closer to a post form instead of more random thoughts/character construction list
So I am thinking about making a tool to allow me to basically build monsters faster. Something that incorperates the rules for Ephermal beings in nWoD GMC, and prents them at the right time. and warns if any are broken.
@Oxinabox Silverlight was meant to be the new flash, but it came in at a time when people were no longer caring as much about flash. If it had come in a few years earlier, things would've been much better for it.
It could've hit the ground running, but by the time it arrived the ground was no longer really there.
the modern power of CSS3, HTML5 and the incredible amount of JavaScript libraries to do everything totally trumps Silverlight.
heck, having something written in Silverlight is now kind of a bad thing, because then it can only be extended by doing further work in Silverlight. It cuts you off from the realms of possibility in HTML/CSS/JS available nowadays.
How can I translate the following jquery code to Dart? I'm having difficulty getting the alert callback to work using js.interop.
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(function () {
$('p').hide('slow', function() {
alert("...
@Oxinabox I strongly recommend that if you want to learn about HTML+JS+CSS, you also learn some actual vanilla javascript. Do go ahead and program in Dart or whatever you prefer, too - I prefer Coffeescript at the moment, which is a very different beast to dart. But also take time to understand the language you're using at the bottom level.
In part, so you can actually read and debug your javascript in the browser (I'm assuming you can't just debug straight Dart code), and so you can do that with other libraries if it's necessary (it will be, sometimes)
also in part because JS is quirky and weird and it's good to understand it.
@JonathanHobbs You can debug using the build of Chrome that includes a Dart VM (it comes with the editor), but that won't help you if there are problems with other browsers.
also in part because then you can actually program in something that isn't dart, and you can do stuff like enter raw JS into the browser console to experiment, debug, etc
@Grubermensch Yeah, I wouldn't call that adequate if I could only debug in Chrome :'(
though I'm glad it has something like that at least
@JonathanHobbs You actually use the editor's debugger, which is nicer, and also has better structure than Javascript, for which debugging is horrible in any browser.
(at work, we have to debug sometimes in IE8. Do you know that in IE8, every Object output to the console is output as {...}? There isn't even any way to expand it. It's just a string. Every object looks like that. It is the most useless behaviour I have ever seen.)
@JonathanHobbs I mean it's not really either. They're just using the Blink engine for rendering the page. But that caused them to dump a lot of the features that made Opera Opera.
The setting: 1930s Tibet, a monastery in the Himalayas.
The party: - A German adventurer secretly working for Germany to discover whether--and how--a monk in the monastery has lived for 300 years. He speaks German and Tibetan. - A German porter, big on muscle and loyalty, low on brains. He speaks only German. - A British investigative journalist looking for her friend Professor Travers who recently disappeared in the area. She speaks English and Tibetan. - An American private detective also looking for Professor Travers. He speaks only English.
I based it on the lost Doctor Who episode "The Abominable Snowmen."
There were yeti, and strange metal spheres, and creepy Tibetan monks.
There were scenes like one PC wrestling the other to the ground and apparently trying to saw his arm off, screaming "I'm doing this to save your life!" in a language the subdued PC understood but nobody else did.
(They were robots controlled by metal spheres which channeled the intelligence of an incorporeal being who'd possessed the high Lama and was trying to create its own body.)
Doctor Who is very deeply connected to the Mythos; the Great Intelligence is Yog-Sothoth, for example.
Great Vampires, Fenric, the Gods of Rrrragnarrrok...
New Who's need to explain things too much gets in the way of it, though.
Anyway, Cthulhu Dark's insanity mechanic was awesome.
My players did a great job, and apparently (despite of them being named Kyle Cean) they genuinely got the wibbles from the story.
And the "success is default" thing was actually really great for a Mythos game.
Instead of "can I succeed?" it became an issue of "can I matter?"
In CD, success is automatic unless someone thinks failure would be interesting, and even then failure is unlikely; instead, you roll to see how you succeeded on a scale of barely to brilliantly.
I wasn't sure how that'd work in a Mythos game; all the Mythos systems I've looked at seemed to focus on making things hard for Investigators to do.
Instead, it was great! Fighting didn't happen because it's got the rule "if you try to fight, you die." But anything else was fair game, and it really drove home the idea that the Investigators were nigh-powerless to affect the Mythos events.
It took on the tone of, "Sure, you can do that, but will it matter?"
> To know how well you do at something, roll: > - One die if the task is within human capabilities. > - One die if it’s within your occupational expertise. > - Your Insanity die, if you will risk your sanity to succeed. > Then your highest die shows how well you do. On a 1, you barely succeed. On a 6, you do brilliantly.
If the Insanity die is the highest, you roll it again to see if you gain one Insanity point (you start at 1 Insanity, and hitting 6 drives your character retireably insane).
If someone thinks it'd be interesting for you to fail, they can roll a single die and if they get higher than you, you fail. But that's not common.
You can always re-roll once, but your Insanity die has to be part of the re-roll.
And that's the core of the rules. There's a little more--cooperating and competing, and the ability to reduce your Insanity by suppressing Mythos knowledge once you hit 5 Insanity.
Things like "resist mind control" usually can only be done with the Insanity die.
('cause it's not within human capability or occupational expertise for most.)
Oh, and the adventure-making guide was very helpful.
It did a good job formalising the "slowly revealed knowledge" progression.
The clause in "competing" about how on ties, the more insane person wins? Totally came up multiple times and made lots of sense.
Handy hint: I rarely take players out of the room for solo scenes, but it worked well for this. The party happily separated itself on more than one occasion and when a single Investigator was going to run into something really Mythos-y, I'd take that player outside.
When he returned, his Investigator would invariably act strangely and change his previous behaviour somehow because of what had happened, but he wouldn't really communicate with the rest of the group well about it. The players were awesome about that.
I didn't have to say "don't tell anyone," and in fact they were free to have their characters communicate the info in-game. But it hardly ever happened, at least not intelligibly.
Oh, and it's important to enforce the "succeeding on an Insanity check means you're just holding it together, and gaining Insanity means you freak out" thing. We tend toward third-person narration of our PCs in this group, but I had them be in character for the freakouts as much as possible.
The party split up constantly. I think they were together three times in the course of the game: at the start, in the beginning of the "second act," and at the very end.
@JonathanHobbs Yup, but also the two Tibetan speakers.
the whole audio journal thing was partly because I half expected my character to die
also, like we talked about before, I had finished reading Dracula recently, and I figured it would be pretty cool to emulate/nod at the story telling mechanic in that
and it also turned out to be a possible way around the condition I set myself to not tell the other PC's what had happened in the room with the mind controlled head monk guy
even though no other PC ever actually got the chance to listen to it
I thought it was a nice touch, especially considering all the things that most of the people writing said journals found out eventually through the course of the book
not all of them would have the best reasons to think they were going to be able to manage to tell their story any other way. for various reasons
Has anyone played multiple characters simultaneously in the same D&D adventure? Is that frowned upon or would it be unbalancing? For example, give players x no. of XP and let them build one mid level PC or several low level PCs by spending XPs like cash.
@RobertF I've done it , and it works well if you know the system it crashes hard if players don't.
Oh, sorry, I didn't read the end where you said multiple low level pcs... That's not going to work well. a bunch of level 3 chars isn't the same as 1 level 5 pc
@GMNoob - OK thanks - so borrowing from 3.5 level advancement costs table: if 1st level PC costs 1,000 XP, 2nd level 3,000 XP, 3rd level 6,000 XP, would a single 3rd level PC be more powerful than 6 1st level PCs?
@RobertF The problem becomes obvious when you consider area effects. These can easily knock out a large number of lower-level characters while not providing a signficant impediment to higher-level ones.
Ok, this will be trickier than I initially thought. I'm also considering a single player campaign inspired by the old Avalon Hill game Source of the Nile, where the player builds a team of adventurers & has to find the optimal mix of classes.
@RobertF I think it's best to start from the challenge rather than the solution, not least because (as the questions I linked earlier show) not everyone does feel that the power curve on casters vs non-casters starts out imbalanced the other way before casters outstrip their counterparts.
So you may be looking for a solution to a problem which isn't there.
Thanks, good advice. BTW I noticed the 3.5 DMG doesn't quantify hireling's cost by class & level (they're all assumed to be 0 level?) - that would be one way to quantify relative cost of PCs by levels or level & class. NPCs can be 1st level or higher for any class, but I haven't found a table for hiring NPCs.
Wasn't one solution to navigating the Tomb of Horrors to hire a bunch of hirelings/followers & send them ahead of the party? Or was it cattle - same thing I suppose.
Currently in my game we've run 3 sessions (1 scenario and started the second) but not had any main NPCs, not planning to have one till the end of the arc
It starts with the FAE mook concept: instead of skills or approaches, you list one to three things the NPC is "good at" (+2 to rolls) and another one to three things they're "bad at" (-2 to rolls).
My addition is that you also give the NPC a number of aspects based on their importance to the story, and for each aspect relevant to the action they get +1 or -1 to the roll as appropriate.
The purpose of a main NPC, as I see it, is to a) create continuity within the plot by providing a personal touchstone, and b) give a sense of a living world with pushback and its own inertia rather than an environment for the PCs to manipulate as they please
I like the fact that supporting NPCs forces me to make them have focus, they can't be everything, but they give the PCs something significant to push off of
but my problem is that so far either they're combat beasts the PCs won't take on head on, or they PCs trounce them so thoroughly I don't get to concede
once the fists do start flying, we haven't been combat focused ...
(It works for social stuff too; the mafia boss is immune to social stress unless...)
Here's a more general concept that my hack is built on:
Enemies will try to stay in their areas of expertise and force the party to fight on their own terms. The party needs to manipulate the conditions of conflict to its own advantage.
Then the tension and challenge isn't in "beating up the CEO," but in "getting to a point where we can beat up the CEO without his bodyguards shooting us." Once you move the conflict to your own turf, it becomes easy.
(This is also good in terms of catharsis, I've found.)
How can I translate the following jquery code to Dart? I'm having difficulty getting the alert callback to work using js.interop.
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(function () {
$('p').hide('slow', function() {
alert("...
