@Aaron there's ways in which it doesn't jive with natural geography and how maps tend to look, so it would not look entirely satisfying compared to regular maps
e.g. let's compare against a square map of our own world courtesy of XKCD:
(caption left in as appropriate, haha)
The islands are smaller and much more spread out.
yet given that, they're enormous
your islands are snuggled up together more like an archipelago
@Aaron not so much "more water" as more space, and more relaxed spacing. from a look at that map i get the impression part of your thought process was "there is too much space here, i should fill it in with land" - maps can contain large amounts of negative and positive space in irregular arrangements.
Plate tectonics, glacial movement, volcanics, weather patterns, all combine in often unpredictable but not random ways to shape a landscape.
A collection of islands alongside a coast will be grouped differently than a collection of islands in the middle of an ocean, because they have different causes.
@Ben editing it out isn't sufficient, if you can view the edit history of chat messages (like this one, click the left arrow and see the 'history' link)
@Sandwich @Miniman yeah I thought that, but I'm thinking I want to go with a bit more of a supportive role. We currently have 2 barbarians, myself, and a rogue (with no health) and a mage (again with no health)
So I was thinking maybe I should take something that could be bit more supportive. And in all honesty, I don't really need to be able to do more damage
@Miniman Yeah. The DM recently revealed an NPC "Dragonborn" with a tail. (My guy is a Dragonborn). So I got jealous of that. Then in the last session I found out he had wings... WHAAAAT??
Turns out he was a half dragon from the monster manual
Hey... Is "breakaway" armour a thing? The NPC I mentioned above had it so he could just pop off his chest plate and fly off... or is that a special rule..?
@Ben breakaway armor doesn't tend to exist because... y'know... if you can break it away, it probably isn't fastened in so sturdily your enemy couldn't break it away too.
Which means you're basically wearing pottery for armor.
In 3.5, it could be a matter of using the arcane arts to attune with your very very distant dragon ancestor, or of gaining the psionic self-control to redefine your physical self.
And if it is fastened in so sturdily, well then you're wearing regular armor that's very carefully strapped in everywhere.
But actually there's probably ways to model that so it's faster to remove/put back on, but actually I don't know much at all about medieval armor so who am I to say. :D
@doppelgreener -- well, it's not a concern for personal protection. Most reactive armor tiles I'd suspect are breakaway/easily detachable though for field servicing reasons -- using a bunch of fasteners to try to hold a shaped-charge tile down wouldn't fly with the field mechanic who has to put replacements on :P
I love half-dragons. And... anything that isn't human, really. The standard race selections in 3.5 and Pathfinder have always chafed. xD I do like that they've got dragonborn, aasimar, and tieflings in the core lineup in 5e, but I'm still like [reaches for more].
But even then, you still have to have a GM who allows the cooler stuff. :P Mine is definitely willing to work with me, but some things are just too obscure or powerful depending on the game. I have at least gotten to play a catfolk.
I'm just waiting to find a GM who will let me use 3rd-party spells... I really want to surprise everyone by swarming Primal Dragons with a level 12 druid... lol
Yeah. In my case, I want to be something that is cool flavor-wise, but I don't want to deal with its coolness conferring it way too much power in mechanical terms, as is so often the case with nonhuman things in 3.5. On the flip side, I get tired of being enamored of options that are cool but not very useful.
I feel constrained by the need to be reasonable (power-wise) yet effective in games like 3.5/Pathfinder. I mean, within those constraints, I can do a lot. Still, it's not the most RP-optimal character creation for me.
@Pixie I learnt a long time ago to not go for what I want to RP, because it always ends up being the same thing every time. I try and make something different every time, and then see how far I can push it :)
@Pixie I prefer pathfinder cause everything is available online, so I don't spend hours leafing through books looking for an exact page... The fact that there is so much available definitely helps though.
@Pixie Yeah, I love the PF rules compared to the D20 SRD. Now if only I could find 3-4 people who are online around the same time as I am so I'm not sitting waiting in PbP threads, I could actually get somewhere :)
I'd really prefer to get into Fate or something though. I don't dislike Pathfinder, but playing it is mainly convenience. It's what my friends play, etc.
Fate looks amazing, but it really looks like a back and forth style game, and I don't know if it would work online at all... Unfortunately, all of my gaming is done online because I have 0 friends.
@Nyoze Online? Depends on the format. Works fine in an active chat session, works fine over Skype, but I suspect it would not work over a slow-paced play-by-post.
@doppelgreener -- I suppose it depends somewhat on the forum you're posting to. having a rich PM mechanism (basically private, multi-party forum threads) + notifications does help, I suppose
@Pixie Nothing tabletop works that well in play-by-post, in my experience, but most of it is workable if people are willing to be patient and dedicated.
@Miniman Kind of the general rule, it's true, but it's better for some things than it is for others. Tabletop games are designed with, well, the tabletop experience primarily in mind, which generally means fairly rapid responses to move the game. The same is not true of many sorts of freeform.
@doppelgreener -- aaah. I see -- I was using the term "PM" because as I said, thread derailment is hazardous to attempts to conduct PbP games on non-dedicated-to-purpose forums
For a test I chose Crusader, and got: Places 1 - a gaping portal to Hell; Objects 2 - a horse without a rider; People 4 - a hunter, stern and cruel; Circumstances 1 - possessed. So the party hears rumors of demons in the area and goes investigating, to find a riderless horse. Yay, horse. Unfortunately for them, its rider had gone through the portal and now come back possessed, and is tracking them.
@Shalvenay Now pick one of the icons in the list (just scroll through until you find a name you like).
because the situation I was going to make up was "you are an elf, creeping through a thick fog, when suddenly you feel rocks underfoot, and then a metal object. This metal object appears to be long...and you can hear a "whoooooooooo" sound far in the distance with your elf ears"
On PBP and its viability, I simply could not play the way I do in some of my freeform games face-to-face or even in chat. The actual need for time and reflection makes it impossible or at least kind of pointless to do live. I enjoy the method and the results, in some ways even more than tabletop where certain factors are working against me.
@Pixie Freeform, yes. 100% I wouldn't dream of freeform live. In chat, I have before, but a good freeform would go for months, and we usually need to refer back, so chat was never the best place for it.
@Nyoze By "live" there I meant "in a single session," so chat included. To be clear, I do freeform in chat too, but it's a different kind of freeform than what I do in a PBP setting.
For a long time, I wasn't comfortable playing IRL at all because I'm really bad at talking. >w>;; I can write fine, but when I'm trying to actually talk, it's hard to make my thoughts come out properly, especially depending upon how tired I happen to be at the moment.
To this day, it's not my favorite thing, but other aspects of an IRL tabletop experience are appealing enough that I wish I could do it more.
I don't know... I started on tabletop RPGs, then when all my friends stopped talking, I went to freeform online... I don't know if I could pick between the 2 now. Both great, but completely different.
Interesting...I started in tabletop, briefly dabbled in online freeform, then ran like hell away from online freeform swearing never to return. (And then got back into tabletop.)
There are lots of different potential experiences with freeform, and even at its best, it's not for everyone. But there are definitely a lot of things that can go wrong.
There's an online roleplaying group called Blue Dwarf, where the game is set on a mining ship that was sent out to look for the absent Red Dwarf. (This will take a very very long time.) They work out pretty well given the adventurey/comedy stories they go for.
(Players can post and lead whatever scenarios they like, as long as it is not "we actually find the Red Dwarf.")
I've been doing freeform since I was... 13 at least, maybe a year or two before. Mostly forum games. I haven't really had anything active on a forum for years now, though. Gradual changes in my communities led to it being less fun for me, and it got harder to keep games running as well. I haven't ever really found a replacement.
Thinking back, it's kinda weird having been present on a site for over a decade and having watched trends evolve. xD
That's the fluid nature of the internet, and social interaction in general.
Anyway... I'm bored. Does anyone want to head over to the Back Room and play around with something? Also, can someone show me how to link correctly? :\
@Nyoze If it's certain types of links (youtube, SE question/answer/chatroom, and a few other things) and you post the URL entirely by itself, it will automatically give you a nice little box for it. For anything else, you do it like... hmm. I'll have to reverse the brackets so it won't parse.
@Nyoze ]link title[)link url(. Except do the brackets and parentheses the right way. xD
Links stymied me for the longest time, though. I can't remember what it was, but I kept doing something wrong, consulting the FAQ, thinking I had it right, yet not. :P Maybe I was putting a space between the brackets and parentheses.
Heh. I gotta get back to reeducating myself in web design. I've had webspace I'm paying for forever and I hardly do anything with it.
I was actually quite serious about learning when I was a kid, but I was also quite... bad. I went back and looked at some of my old sites before Geocities closed, and they were hilarious. I think a very broken Angelfire still survives somewhere.
I have no idea what it looked like at the time I created it because it sure didn't work on a modern browser.
@Pixie I... Would be terrified if any of my old sites were still active. I actually get to do a couple of hours each week with work (Beats sales!) so I'm starting to learn again.
@Miniman I always thought it was some obscure new Pokemon that I haven't paid attention to... <_<
@Nyoze I was going through an old email account, and Webs (which used to be Freewebs) had emailed me in 2014 to let me know that over 50 people (or bots) a month were looking at my decade-old Sesshoumaru fansite. I was like, "..... why"
@Ben Yeah...I try to be fair to it and tell myself it'd be a good game if I'd never played the originals, but it's just so much less good than they are.
A flying realm; An umarked potion; A mad wizard (Mad, I tell you); Struck by a curse
The potion is obviously what takes the party to the flying realm. B plot in this adventure is finding the potion's counterpart in order to get back home.
When the party first arrives, the wizard of course appears mad. Mad as they come. However, the curse has actually been laid upon the realm. The wizard is the only person who wasn't maddened by the curse.
A ghost pirate had been plaguing the high seas. Defeating him in combat, as hard as it is, does nothing: he keeps coming back. The only way to get rid of him is to return his stolen treasure to his grave... at the bottom of the sea. To get there, the party decides to enter the tunnels left by the Tarrasque, safely asleep somewhere below the world. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
That was my third idea, after "drain the sea with portals" and "bring the moon much closer so low tide is really low". Which are all "brilliant" in their own ways.
@Sandwich While you're probably right, we're dealing with the kind of brilliance that brings the moon closer to the earth to drain the seas to get rid of a ghost pirate.
