@doppelgreener I've run both 3-1 and 3-2 a bunch of times, if you're looking for some input. (If not, sorry to be only reading Adeptus' last message and missing the context.)
@nitsua60 The group Greener, Trogdor, and I are in is looking for a free one-shot adventure that showcases 5e's strengths and can be run using only Basic (free) rules.
With the free release of the 5e Basic Rules, I'm looking for an adventure to introduce myself and my group to 5e (in the spirit of this question): we want to try the system before deciding if we'll invest resources in the edition.
The adventure should be useable out of the box with only free Ba...
@doppelgreener I'm not sure an edit that only changes "FATE" to "Fate" is really necessary; it doesn't increase clarity or anything. (Also, we don't know in that particular case if the querent is using post-acronym Fate or an older version of FATE.)
(Geopolitically, it's the CNMI--they're a Commonwealth--but that's... not an entirely unfraught issue and it's generally politer to say NMI unless the Commonwealth bit is absolutely necessary to the discussion.)
Historically, before WWII Guam was the only Mariana Island owned by the US. After the war, the US got all of them, but the UN was watching over their shoulder with the NMI because the US hadn't had those islands before. That oversight led to the NMI getting a different political status than Guam, which the UN couldn't justify watchdogging because the US had a prior claim before the war.
@Ben So wrt your question, a lot of people are saying "suck it up death happens deal with it". I don't agree with that, but I have to say that this might be a great opportunity for you guys.
Your current party can't rest, and doesn't have the tools to deal with the permanent injury you've received. Also, you took a permanent injury because you couldn't afford to die.
The sad fact of the matter is that you're missing the vast majority of the tools the game expects you to have.
Some dead players could potentially reroll as characters that would help you move towards a more balanced party.
one of the things brought up in the other question is that some people - GMs or players - like to play in games where death has realistic chance of happening.
That is to say, we would hope to keep our current characters and use them beyond level 5. Because as you may well know, you do sometimes get attached to your characters
@Ben The thing is, this is a problem that's only going to get worse. A party composed entirely of "I hit it with a stick!" can work, but only if the DM is putting in a crazy amount of work to make it work.
The game is not designed to handle the party you guys are running, and it's very difficult to adapt for that purpose.
Just as the game breaks down when confronted with a flying party, it breaks down (though in the opposite direction) when confronted with a non-magic party.
Even a Paladin or a Ranger would go a long way to making things viable.
I'm not disagreeing with any of that. Death happens. There's no avoiding it. And the game really just go by how the dice rolls. But my qualm is that we are only level 5. We're really only just starting out.
@Ben 1/3 spellcasting and Int as a secondary means the Eldritch Knight's spellcasting is not useful offensively. It will almost invariably be better for him to attack then cast a spell.
@Miniman Ok... So I re-read what you have been saying, and I missed your point initially. Correct me if I'm wrong but you're suggesting that killing off a few characters would give us a chance to make some better ones, to even out the team a bit?
That makes sense, and I agree with that. It would certainly make life a lot easier if we had coordinated a bit better earlier.
However, truth be told: I don't want to do that just yet. My point is, we're only level 5, and I don't really want to die so "young".
Well, there's the "general of an army of the damned, riding a skeletal horse that gallops through the air on hooves of flame."
And the "Prim and proper noblewoman who maintains her family's political power by implanting necrotic tumours in half the citizens of her city, through which she can spy on and control the hosts."
Then we had the "Pathetic outcast who would rather animate corpses to be his followers than take the effort of making actual friends and allies."
It's not exactly necromancy, but the undead yuan-ti priest using his fleshcrafting alchemy to single-handedly resurrect his extinct race by slowly and secretly transforming a human city into a new yuan-ti capital was certainly a malevolent manipulator of life forces.
And he taught the art of raising the dead to a desperate lizardfolk chieftan who used necromancy to swell his numbers in order to hold back the humans attempting to invade his swamp.
We haven't done much with necromancy in Fate yet, but our main campaign has a Crystal Skull which seems to attract and collect souls. Its current owner is using the Skull to collect everyone in his cult into a single shared mind.
We also had a villain who bound a wise and powerful ghost to her service, to act as an advisor.
Seriously though, the instant I got out of D&D I stopped having pure necromancers and instead had people who used necromantic-style powers in conjunction with other things.
The Crystal Skull guy is all about having a cult that will survive the apocalypse.
In addition to having a hivemind to coordinate and make things more efficient, his cult was working on reverse engineering modern technology to run on pre-circuit-board systems, because they believed the apocalypse would begin with massive solar flares that would short out anything with circuit boards or long wires.
(In other words, they were psychic dieselpunk doomsday cultists.)
Even in D&D 4e, where I had the guy who made friends instead of making friends, he also dabbled in mind control.
His theme wasn't necromancy, it was "making friends."
Whether by dominating your mind or animating your corpse, whatever.
So yeah: Necromancy isn't an end, it's a means. Differentiate necromancers and flavour them according to what goals they're using necromancy to accomplish.
Gaining the wisdom of the dead, leading an unquestioning army, resurrecting a long-dead civilisation, making friends that won't leave you, secretly controlling your rivals...
I once designed a church of Wee Jas that was dedicated to impartial justice and the proper order of things. One of their self-appointed tasks was making sure people met their proper fates. Sometimes this meant proper burial rights and the occasional vampire staking or zombie beheading, but it also meant they claimed legal jurisdiction to judge murders.
Keeping the dead in the ground and keeping the living out of the ground before their proper time.
They despised resurrection and reanimation magic, but were fine with spells that let you chat with the dead.
(The skulls of their wisest priests are kept in a creepy reference library/catacomb beneath the church, and with the right spells you can ask them for advice.)
That church came out of studying the supremely messy history of Wee Jas over the various editions and trying to reconcile them.
Look at that portfolio: Death, Magic, Vanity (Love), Law.
I wound up with her being a goddess of destiny.
Some things in life are inevitable, and if you accept that she's there to celebrate with you in the good and support you during the bad. But if you try to buck the inevitable, she's there to shove you back on the foretold path.
Im working on my edge of the empire campaign trying to wrap mine and the my players heads around the rules as we adapt to a new system cue whole new world from aladin
no were running a few canned adventures (one came with the GM screen a player bought) after we ran the beginner box with the pre gens, this is using player made characters I also have a free adventure lined up from the published to follow on afterward and then I'll start writing, having a sandbox style campaign with the players afterward
Im convinced the dice mechanics and their resolution will in time make it a very fast, thematic, and narrative driven experience, but right now the learning of said dice mechanics is still a hurdle
@Mystagogue even sader is tool recs are off topic too
yep chat is definitely the way to go, sometimes I wish there were an affiliated reddit or forum or something where everything that has been excluded for policy reasons could still live
Anydice questions are still on topic as are rpg related statistics questions in general, but saying can someone reccomend a form fillable pdf char sheet for X system or I need a map making tool that does X Y and Z are off topic
A mechanical charop rec question is probably the only rec type question we still would have in topic but youd need to be explicit about your goals and requirements, I need to a melee class that deals the most damage in a single round (and then list your constraints)
@Smurfton part of the problem with game recs specifically was that the problem wasn't newbies; high-rep users were not complying with the rules because they disagreed with them.
tool recs just got knocked off topic with them, and meta settled (but not permanently, open to change) on the stance that asking for a tool recommendation to accomplish a task was a bit of an XY problem; instead ask how to accomplish the task, and answers may include recommendations of certain tools as a portion of the answer.
i dunno what the impetus was, but there was just a history that extended to before 5e's conception that people were recommending games they'd never used for a comparable situation, or sometimes even used at all.
because it showed up in a google result or something and they said "here, maybe {actually terrible RPG, or we just have no way of knowing} will work for that thing"
I have only played what was formerly known as XP, but I found a thread on Paranoia-Live which goes into more detail. Once again, only the original post, by The Bad Kind of Puppy, is useful, so I will quote the most relevant parts here:
The upshot of everybody being clearance ultraviolet is th...
meanwhile others would say "here, use this game, here's what it's about", then someone would ask "okay but have you played it? and have you used it for this situation?", and certain members would be outraged by the notion that they actually have to say they've used it, and would be indignant at us doubting them. but if they don't say so, we can't tell their answer from the other kind of answer.
@doppelgreener But if they don't imply (very strongly) that they have, in fact, played this game that way, how would they be able to say how well it works out in that system?
@Smurfton it's got a couple of problems which are usually big red flags. first, your answer is 95% not your own writing, but something you don't actually have the rights to reproduce. this is an ethics/legality issue more than a quality issue though. the other red flag is a quality issue: you haven't played both games, so you can't tell how accurate what you're quoting is, neither you nor i can tell whether this is the raving of a lunatic or someone who really knows their stuff.
@Smurfton They were neither implicitly nor explicitly giving enough assurance the game could do what the question was about, and objected to the idea of having to provide that assurance.
and lots of answers that had the same problems as doppel describes where people didnt have experience doing it saying yes run 2nd edition monsters as in 5e with no porting itll work fine
5e became for me the do anyting you want edition which to a certain degree it is from a rules standpoin tbut a lot of bad bad advice was being flung out
The problem is that apparently nobody in the history of ever actually played High Programmers. Not even among the people on Paranoia's forums. While, true that Allen Varney is a better source, I thought that quote better addressed the answer than Canageek's did. The question was also 4 years old at the time, and still had no answer
(I'm also being influenced by not wanting to lose 40 rep)
@Smurfton nobody here seems to have played both and consider themselves a worthwhile source of information and are willing and able to write out an answer comparing the two.
@Smurfton Regardless of some justifications we could make about "this answer's better than the other" and "maybe it's better than nothing", it is still a problem when an answerer does not really understand the answer they're providing, and going "here i found this, maybe this'll do, i don't know"
simply because it does not inspire much confidence that it's an accurate answer
it could be a really accurate summary! though i view answerers as people who need to be the second-to-last gatekeepers of quality, and be able to vet what they provide.
High Programmers amounts to spinoff where you play what amounts to the ruling class in Paranoia, instead of as troubleshooters (your job is to find trouble and shoot it). XP (which isn't even called that anymore, because of Microsoft) was the version released before Troubleshooters.
That finding trouble and shooting it pun is still amazing, one year after reading the rulebook.
@Mystagogue The chat would be happy to try and help. Between us we aren't as diverse as the main site, but we do represent a fairly wide cross-section of RPG experience.
I have only played what was formerly known as XP, but I found a thread on Paranoia-Live which goes into more detail. Once again, only the original post, by The Bad Kind of Puppy, is useful, so I will quote the most relevant parts here:
The upshot of everybody being clearance ultraviolet is th...
