a lot of complaints I've heard from friends regarding various D&D games with strangers is because of other players going for things that were good from their character's story perspective, but not a good roleplaying experience.
@doppelgreener Exactly. I'm really not thinking of this happening overnight, and even if I do end up carrying it out, there's going to be some extreme planning and cooperation involved, and even then that'll only be if everyone is willing to cooperate.
If one person says, no - I'm going to scrap the plan :)
Well... at least for everyone involoved. I'm thinking I might leave one or two of them out of the loop, (but only the ones that are not directly involved)
That is to say, if I’m planning to kill Bob, I’d talk to the GM and to Bob, get their consent, plan it out and all that jazz with them so they know exactly what will be happening. But I might leave Dave and Joe out of the loop, just to see the look of surprise on their faces when it happens, but fill them in later on :)
So going back to my question about dragons blood... the monster manual suggests one method of becoming a half dragon involves a ritual with dragon's blood. How much is unclear, along with the purity of it. Is that ever defined anywhere or is that just up to the DM?
@Nyoze Some games clearly separate effect and fictional method as a crucial piece of the design, some deliberately make them inseparable, and yet others are ... vague, at best, about the design's stance of their separation/mingling. Most games fall into the third category, for better or worse.
When it comes to How compared to What, I'm always reminded of the Cleric spells. You spend 1 hour doing Something, and you are gifted with spells in return. One would assume that everyone's version of meditation or supplication changes, and it's usually hand waved, but it's still there somewhere.
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> The shifting labyrinth (ed: of the Stone Thief, the titular living dungeon) fits with the 13th Age ethos, too – it’s not a dungeon crawl, it’s a dungeon stride boldly forward and don’t worry about mapping every 20′ x 20′ room.
@Miniman yes, the nature of dungeons are widely understood in the 13th age setting. and as you can see from the picture, it's kinda obvious.
i will assume that the reason Miniman is suddenly silent is that his mind has been totally blown
That's what I always assume when I say something and no one responds: they can't figure out a reply worthy of the brilliance.
And yeah, living dungeons are great. They provide an excuse for putting whatever you want into your dungeon: the thing continuously gobbles up places, often along with people, and rearranges them inside.
I think so - there may be stuff in the Eyes of the Stone Thief that elaborates. But I wouldn't be surprised if they spontaneously awaken. Would really suck for the original owner of the dungeon.
That was unexpected. Not arguing, it does make sense. Just surprised it took so long for someone to decide it was opinion based. (Referring to my latest question about party betrayal)
Though I suppose most of my confusion comes from the fact that a lot of my questions get the same treatment (seemingly opinion based), but they never get closed..?
@Ben There's a certain category of questions that are right on the line between broad but still answerable, opinion-based but can come under GSBS. They tend to accumulate close votes slowly, and are quite likely to get reopened.
For example, yours already has a reopen vote (and it got its first close vote about 15 hours ago).
That dragons in D&D question is very specific about D&D, which is a shame. Because my first response was "D&D dragon party in Fate? Easy. D&D dragon party in D&D? Hahahahano."
D&D is all about humanoids killing dragons. You'd be fighting the system all the way to play a dragon in it. Which is a shame, because I remember being excited about the idea when Draconomicon came out.
@Nyoze That's the point. Fate lets you make up whatever you want. D&D has non-trivial mechanical investment in humanoids. It's not a bad thing, just a thing.
@Magician Yeah, well... If you could anything you wanted and not worry about the rest of the system, it makes even the attemp of balance kinda pointless.
The problem with HoN is that you take the characters from Dota, buff the offense up to the level of someone in LoL, but don't increase their defensive ability. At all.
@doppelgreener So, imagine if someone played a mod on Minecraft, and decided that it would be a better game if it had a dedicated engine, because it doesn't really work within the constraints of Minecraft. So they go make their dedicated engine, and somehow end up with something that's harder to use and far less fluid than the original mod.
And there are some interactions with champion abilities, such as an ability that steals a huge amount of another champions mana leaving low mana champions useless in a fight
@Miniman Yeah, pure damage. LoL doesn't have a lot of CC at all that isn't slow. By contrast, almost every hero in Dota has access to at least one stun.
League does have some relative balance in its degrees of games from bronze to challenger tier
Some champions get better the more skilled you are ( Khazix, Rengar, Akali, Katarina ) some champions get worse the more skilled your enemies are ( Master Yi, Heimerdinger )
Such as shops. I struggled with shops. League of Legends was just like "hey! hello! what do you want! here it is! go kill things!", dota had me running around like a headless chicken trying to assemble my next items
Okay, free background. I lied to my partner for a couple of years and tried to play games behind her back. Gaming and moderation don't go together for me, it's an all or nothing deal. I'm going for nothing.
chimpanzees have a warning call for "aerial predator!", and a warning call for "ground predator!", which compel nearby chimps to rush to the ground or rush to the trees to escape the danger.
they also use these calls to lie like [bleep]s.
if a chimp finds a large trove of food up in the trees, they'll sometimes give the aerial predator cry. all the nearby chimps will rush to the ground, while the chimp in question stays in the treetops and stuffs their face while they can with whatever they can find.
eventually, the other chimps figure it's safe to climb back up again. and when they do, they'll find the other chimp... and they won't be mad at all. they'll just find the original chimpanzee munching away, and then join him or her and quietly eat the rest of the food with them (which is somehow significantly less abundant than before!)
they have enough of a concept of others' minds to be aware of how they can manipulate the other chimps, but it seems they aren't able to make the mental leap of "heeyyy... wait a minute, they lied!"
> Chaotic characters follow their consciences, resent being told what to do, favor new ideas over tradition, and do what they promise if they feel like it.
i hear from our older community members that the alignments started out in BD&D as literally just sides in a fight, absolutely nothing to do with personality
then around the time of AD&D or AD&D 2e, people were calling for mechanics to describe personality, and someone decided alignment would also be appropriate for that, so alignment became both the side you were taking in the cosmic war and a description of your personality
I'm still down with the "alignments started as an attempt to express the sentiment that goblins are evil so it's ok to kill them and take their stuff" theory.
@Miniman specifically the theory that alignment existed as a mechanism to make players feel OK with the idea of entering a cave, committing indiscriminate genocide and killing everything found therein, and leaving with everything of value they found?
@Nyoze it absolutely totally fails as an accurate description of personality and any nontrivial situation, which is understandable given it was made for a trivial situation: those guys are evil, go kill them and take their stuff
There's multiple failings in alignments as a nontrivial device. First but only tied for the most major, the authorship is inconsistent. As KRyan and others have expressed multiple times in various alignment answers, given any single act, you can find at least one book that would support it belonging to each of the alignments.
Second and also tied, the alignments are not mutually exclusive. Take the alignment descriptions for any core book. The terms used are not exclusive from each other. Any real person can contain many qualities from all of good, evil, law, chaos, and the five neutralities. There is no incompatibility or incongruence in putting all of them together, they can mostly fit together just fine.
And other things.
There's a lot more I could say, but those are two of the big ones.
The biggest issue with paladins is when their partners' behavior is judged as if the paladin himself had done the deed. If your DM is willing to avoid that pitfall, may I suggest...
A paladin who does not expect non-believers to obey the laws of his faith. He hopes that through his shining examp...
@Sandwich Like I said, no one's stopping him from doing anything particularly, through character alignment or otherwise. It's not that he's trying to do anything and people are stopping him , it's more that I think he feels he doesn't have anyone on his side
D&D-style alignment axes are always overlimiting because they obviate the internal conflicts which define humanity. Depending on the system/edition, alignment is also internally inconsistent to the point of uselessness.
This imbalance in motive is one of the fundamental problems with presenting alignment as an axis; the geometrical structure implies equivalency where there is none.
Most discussions about alignment run into a particular problem: the people involved in the discussion talk about Good and Evil in real-world subjective terms based on our own worldviews, when D&D is talking about something else entirely.
It's a universe where Good and Evil are objectively measurable using spells like detect evil, and where they're Powers in their own right with the ability to imbue life, grant spells, and create entire planes of existence.
In a world like that, whether you think you're doing right or wrong becomes almost irrelevant to your alignment.
Unfortunately these are philosophical issues which D&D isn't really interested in examining.
It's a combat/adventure system, and alignment is a rough tool for furthering that agenda.
Like putting a dot at the very top right would mean you're vehemently opposed to anything that deprives someone of their freedom, while the bottom right of Chaotic good would mean you care more about personal freedom than the freedom of others, being closer to neutral than good yeah?
Friendship, shared bonds of experience, common goals, similar interests--all sorts of things let people with very different worldviews ally with each other and even be buddies.
At this point I feel like every new alignment discussion is just a re-arrangement of ones I've already had. Valuable for people who haven't gone over the ideas yet, but kinda dead-horse-y for me.
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