Many games/groups grant the GM more authority and more leeway than is perhaps necessary or even healthy.

Got your back, @Shalvenay =)

But getting a neat ability out of it after death was kinda worth it

It sounds like you've maybe got a group that equates the GM's role in the game with a certain amount of social power as well.

and as I said, there were no mechanics for it in AD&D

So, I'm unclear on your question.

@BESW at the same time though -- what happens when the GM and/or setting refuse to give the players a set of story-norms to work with?

I was wondering if you'd allow the PCs to meet the big bad

@JesseCohoon Absolutely! I'd go out of my way to make that happen, because an off-screen vague menace is boring.

AND if they did so under a flag of truce, for the big bad to break it (basically you aren't supposed to do that)

The more personally the players understand their villains, the more dramatic and engaging the story is.

@JesseCohoon personally? I'm all for it, because interaction is good, although I tend to lean away from the notion of a singular BBEG in the first place.

@JesseCohoon that's a CE/LE distinction there, btw, if you ask me

@JesseCohoon That depends on the kind of villain and the kind of story.

he was a lich

That's not what I mean by "kind of villain." I mean, what motivates him, what are his values, what are his goals, who are his allies?

@JesseCohoon that doesn't really say anything. I've played around with BDFL liches in my head :P

There's no solid set of rules for what villains can or can't do. They're individuals.

@BESW exactly -- and furthermore, villains need not even be characters in any classical sense of the term

a system of perverse incentives could be a villain, for instance

well it was an interesting question

Long John Silver will respect the flag of truce for only as long as it suits him because he's a devious dirtbag who exploits every situation to his personal gain, but the Shredder will honor it even to his detriment because he places great value on his dignity and reputation.

and not having a right or wrong answer it couldn't be posted on the main site

+1 for the TMNT reference!

@JesseCohoon I've had turtles on the brain lately.

@BESW A Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster'll probably fix that.

@nitsua60 dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/rules-answers-june-2016

(added to my answer)

@Adeptus Great, thanks. To me, that pretty well seals it in the "yes, you can" camp. Glad to see you use it. (It does, to my mind, put the screws to another of Jeremy's statements that "targeting is in integral part of casting a spell, and is rarely isolatable," but that's his problem.)

(And my problem with paying any credence to Jeremy's tweets.)

@Adeptus I still think the Magic Missile example is the weaker part of your answer. In fact, I think it'd stand fine on just the SA quote. (Personally.)

(But I'm very glad to see an answer with better backup than "well, timing isn't important, because there's a Divination school.")

@nitsua60 I still have no idea what that's supposed to mean.

@Miniman Yeah, I think that literally every answer lower-voted than that one was better than it. At least I can elevate @Adeptus'.

(Well, not the most recent addition; but as of a little while ago every other answer seemed, to me, better than the vote-leader.)

Giving the interned back its 88 fake points....

I currently have 36 internets saved up myself

But how many interneds do you have?

0

I don't have any, myself.

hey there @Sandwich

Heyo

how're things going?

I just eat Chef boyardee Beef Ravioli for dinner

Its cheap and good

@nitsua60 haha :P it's not a real Reuben though -- I come from the home of the original McCoy in that regard xD

@Sandwich Hmm... you must be the one who scared away this guy.

I scared away a guy?

How did I scare away a guy?

@Sandwich (Sorry, still riffing on the not-quite-a-joke about eating things that relate to usernames. Me: Reuben, you: sandwich. You: Chef Boyardee, that guy: beef.)

Ah

Do you know the story about my username, Nitsua?

@Sandwich Nope. And I'm afk ten minutes, so everyone else bear the suspense of waiting?

I'm sure everyone else knows, but I'll tell you when you get back

@Sandwich Back

Welcome back

Ready for the story?

Fire away.

So I was GMing an adventure in 3.5, and the group I was playing with didn't have the good sense to bring any trail rations or survival skills to a dungeon crawl, so they soon found themselves lousy with hunger

@Sandwich LOL.

Inside the dungeon they find an innocuous looking Sandwich on a table inside of a well furnished, but rather old room inside of a temple.

So they pick up the sandwich and eat it. A while later, their hunger unsated from only splitting a sandwich among them, they go into their pack to find the sandwich they had just eaten hours ago

So they eat it again.

This repeats for a while before their stomachs begin growling hungrily

[crosses fingers]

So they continue eating the sandwich

Whenever they eat it it reappears on the person who took the last bite

@Sandwich -- that is awesome.

To compress a long story short, The sandwich is a cursed item. Instead of relieving hunger, it exacerbates it. Makes you more hungry. You can't throw the sandwich away. If you do it reappears on your person. If you eat the sandwich, it reappears on your person.

They roll constitution checks to withstand extreme hunger

Two pass out(normal failure) and one dies outright (rolled a 1).

Sandwich triumphs over adventurers

o wow...that's just crazy

What could/should have been their way to deal with it? Have members take turns being the person to have to eat the sandwich that day? Or was it as simple as "just don't eat the sandwich"?

The only way to get rid of the sandwich is to place it back on the plate inside of the temple or to feed it to an adult dragon. You can also not eat the sandwich. But if you don't eat the sandwich after 24 hours it changes to match the appearance of another food item in your possession.

I got the idea from an idem called a lodestone.

Its a rock that weighs you down to a great degree, but when you attempt to throw it away it reappears on your person

@Sandwich Nice.

@Sandwich what would happen if you intentionally tried to spoil it?

Clearly, it'd get yummier.

(i.e. left it sitting in a bag next to the moldy bread)

The sandwich was sitting in the temple for a long time

It isn't affected by molds and the like

:P must be quite low on water content then

Nothing can taint the flavor of the sandwich.

Its delicious enough to require a will save to stop yourself from eating it.

(I was actually thinking of trying to get the fungus to eat the whole entire sandwich :P)

It's probably one of the best cursed item's I've ever created

Hence the name

@Sandwich oh, it's an Oreo =)

WB @besw

Why didn't you just say so? =D

@Sandwich [wave] Moved to a coffee shop for lunch/work.

Pretty good design for a cursed item if you ask me

I really like it

I've never really gotten into curses.

Cursed items are fuuuun

Great ways to screw with players and make them second guess their macguffins

I prefer "cursed" items that aren't really hard to get rid of, but instead offer a very hard choice.

You throw one cursed item into a treasure pile and they'll second guess every treasure they ever get forever

More of the "cursed with awesome" variety.

@Sandwich Yeah, see, I don't want that effect.

Neither of those (screw with players, make them second-guess) strike me as enjoyable in and of their own right.

Ten foot pole paranoia bogs everything down in pointless minutia.

yeah, my thinking with cursed items is items that are just out of control -- people think they want an effect, but somehow it got turned up to 11, 12, or 20, and now there's the consequences of such extreme effects as the curse

Well remove curse is a relatively easily accessible spell

@BESW like "the curse is the cost of a thing"?

@nitsua60 Yeah

The item effect is awesome

But you eat six times as much food

I can grok that.

@Sandwich What do you mean?

@BESW how would my "the curse is the awesome cranked up to 11" item theory fit in with that?

Curses with a cost

My "best" example of the pure implementation of that is a custom curse from 4e, bestowed on a thief who stole from the tomb of a saint dedicated to the god of thieves.

It was just description

He gained the ability to make an attack with the steal skill, which dealt damage and produced a valuable ruby.

He also got a bonus to all thief-related skills, and a commensurate penalty to all other skills.

The damage of the attack and the value of the ruby scaled with the bonus.

So it made him a really great thief but a really poor everything else

Every time he used the attack, it increased the bonus/penalty by one.

So now he's got interesting/hard choices.

Heh

That's pretty nice

Effectively, the god of thieves said, "Wow, you're so dedicated to thievery that you're willing to steal from ME. Let's double down on that for you."

It was pretty easy to remove the curse once he decided to. There wasn't any mystery about how to do it, and it required no unusual resources or downtime or anything.

The choice is what was interesting: how far was he willing to go? Once he reached that point, making it hard to enact the choice wasn't going to be fun.

Eventually he would be so good at thievery that they could steal the panties off of a woman without removing their pants without them noticing

A true god among thieves

His attacks were dealing fistfuls of d6s and the pain of his target was literally turning into rubies worth thousands of gold, but he couldn't do basic camping or lore checks.

What if the lore checks were related to thievery?

Nah, his bonuses were strictly for thieving itself.

So, that's an extreme and literal version of the kind of thing I prefer to see in my games.

Benefits and drawbacks that force interesting choices and awesome moments.

@BESW -- what if the benefit was itself the drawback? (i.e. curses based on the idea that there can be too much of a good thing, even without other drawbacks explicitly introduced by the curse)

That would depend on implementation.

Could he steal someone elses skill at using another skill :P

To be appealing to me, it would still have to be useful/fun/awesome to use the benefit, to a degree that the drawback is debateably worth the benefit.

If your awesome strength is so overpowering that it always defeats the point of what you're using it for, that's not cool.

@BESW basically, the challenge becomes "how do you make it so you can actually use a benefit of a magnitude that is normally beyond the span of control of a character?" basically, being able to engineer around the overpowering parts

If your awesome strength is so overpowering that it always creates some major problem in addition to successfully doing whatever you were trying to do, that's cool.

AKA you punch someone so hard that you take 100ft off the top of a mountain

But the mountain happened to be where a red dragon was living at the time

In order for risk/reward analysis to be interesting to the story, the risk and the reward have to be somehow balanced enough to make the choice non-obvious.

For example, in ARRPG super-strength lets you automatically succeed at anything a normal human could try to do, and lets you roll to try things a normal human could never do. But any time you use your super-strength, the GM can offer you a fate point to have something unexpected and bad happen also.

The example given is Atomic Robo tied to a support beam in a villain's HQ. He uses his strength to break the bonds, but breaks the support beam too: now the rest of the scene is taking place as the lair collapses around them.

But he's free to act: he got what he was trying for, it just added another complication as well.

Closer to the "cursed item" topic, I like the idea of items with agendas.

They aren't cursed per se, but they shape the story more than an item usually would.

In Shadowrun, there's the idea that if you have too much reflex-enhancing cyberware, you end up reacting faster than you can think. So you have to be careful not to shoot the waitress who taps you on the shoulder.

hey there @RollingFeles

@Shalvenay Hey-hey!

How do you do? :)

OK here

among other things, pondering draconic grooming habits

(because I suspect they have at least some, to keep bug splatters, grime, etal from turning them into bricks)

@Shalvenay Probably similar to lizards. (What a lizard's grooming habits are, I don't know...)

@Adeptus the thing is, lizards don't have to worry about being too buggy to fly :P

I have a book, bought when I was in school. Book was written after Harry Potter trend became worldwide. I can't remember neither name or author. It was russian and the book itself was some kind of fan fiction. It was written from the Harry's name as if he become dragon researcher.

It was something like dragon encyclopedia by Harry Potter.

Although, It has nothing to do with HP, it's fun book. Some lore ideas were great.

@Shalvenay I'm thinking dust baths.

But I can't remember anything about grooming :)

Mostly because the visual is adorable.

@BESW that's...interesting. I'm actually not sure how well that'd work to get like bug splatters off without leaving junk behind on the wing leading edges where it'd undo all that hard work

@Shalvenay Assuming dragons are generally immune to their own breath weapons, I don't see a big challenge in burning/freezing/melting off most of the detritus.

And this is, of course, assuming they aren't in a world where they can just cast prestidigitation.

yeah, prestidigitating it off works I'm sure

A dragon's probably also the centre of a symbiotic mini-ecosystem with lots of scavengers and groomers.

@BESW Hi! I was thinking about DW and I wonder how long it take to play one DW session in general and chatizen game in particular.

@BESW good point

@RollingFeles Having never played DW... [shrug]

@Shalvenay Not to mention followers and hirelings.

[imagines a clan of kobolds scrabbling over a dragon with crude push-broom-like brushes and home-made soap]

@RollingFeles How long does a session of any RPG take? I've had sessions from 2-3 hours to over 12 hours.

@BESW I have read a book that had,... sort of ape orc things, some of which worshiped dragons, unfortunately they also had some terrible slightly veild racial stuff going on,... so not the best in that regard

I've had satisfying sessions that last as short as half an hour, but at least an hour is usually the minimum. But again, never played DW specifically. And it DOES have chargen, which is usually not a big deal for the shorter games I've played.

(Roll For Shoes, I'm looking at you.)

@RollingFeles In my experience you can have a surprisingly-satisfying one-hour session. Surprising if you're used to D&D, that is; many comig to DW are, being that they've chosen a PbtA that tries to capture the feel of D&D.

@Adeptus Well, in my experience DnD session take about 4 hours. 2 is too short session in general. I mean, how long it take for... erm... full session?

My players in one RL game keep gawking at how much plot/story we seem to cover relative to the 5e and 3.5 campaigns they've played.

@nitsua60 hey! thanks! That is what I looked for :)

I'm sorry that I haven't expressed my question well.

Two-hour sessions are great, and longer than three-hour sessions start to feel like those twenty-hour-weekend D&D-binges of my youth.

nitsua got it =)

My only PbtA game was two sessions of Monster of the Week, each about three or four hours including character creation and a lot of "wait, how does this system work?" During that time we covered the same basic ground as the 6-episode-long Doctor Who story I based it on.

yeah

Monster of the Week insisting that I, as a player, didn't get to completely look under the hood,..... that was confusing for me

I have 2 dnd sessions almost each weekend and it's 8 hours minimum. I'm running one of these, so plus prep time. It's fun, but too often I feel myself exhausted. I'm thinking about researching other systems for full sandboxy campaign.

@RollingFeles Yeah, I'm so much happier in systems where two to four hours of play can fit a whole short adventure, instead of... one fight.

4e's fights would soooooo not work for us now XD

Heh, no. Back then we'd often play for five or six hours straight and be lucky to have two fights.

Now we hardly ever play for more than four hours at a time.

@BESW dnd 5e can fit two fights and some non-combat talking :P

Question for all involved =)

I think we're looking at about 2 or 3 hours per session?

yeah, about 2-3hours per session

yeah, I think it is too late on a weekday that feeds into another weekday for me to participate

@trogdor It's something like 11am to 1 or 2pm on Tuesdays, for us.

still, I am glad it seems like it will work for most people who were interested

Which I can clear by working into the night instead, so long as no clients or students need me at exactly that time.

@BESW yeah, I checked it and got the same time

heck, that is a little late for me even on a Saturday

I must admit I'm looking forward to this monday

@trogdor "late"? It's the middle of the day.

oh, has the time set for this changed?

cause last I checked it was 11PM to like, 2 AM

11*am* to 2*pm*

anyway, that just means I still can't make it, just for different reasons

yeah.

Unfortunately, I'm waiting on a call to see if I'm teaching all day or half day next week.

@BESW yeah, I didn't even look at that earlier because last time I checked, I recalled seeing the symbols switched (whether I was making a mistake at the time or not)

As of yesterday it wasn't sure if I'd be teaching at all then, but now it's just "Will I get an hour of DW chargen before I have to leave for work, or will I be dropping in for half an hour during my lunch break?"

You're a teacher BESW?

@Sandwich My primary job is as a self-employed graphic designer, but I do contract work as a computer program instructor.

Graphic design ninja

This coming week I will be teaching either MS Word or Adobe Photoshop, as well as continuing to work with a blind man to familiarise himself with Macintosh Voiceover and develop workflows for his daily computer activities. I'm also finishing up a theatre poster and starting a flyer for a university division.

Good day everyone.

[wave]

Mornin

We'll have Cyberpunk in our RP night too, it seems!

What setting/system?

[plugs for Aeon Wave]

And I'm convincing a friend to run her own My Little Pony meets Lovecraft -crossover that was terribly fun last time, by what I've heard.

@BESW The Cyberpunk!

@kviiri oooh. If there's a writeup or anything like that I'd be very interested to see.

@BESW Sure, I'll ask her if she's got anything :)

@kviiri I don't know what that is. Do you mean Cyberpunk 2020? or GURPS Cyberpunk?

I've got a project on the back burner with the working title My Little Psyche: Friendship is a Fragile Barrier Holding Back My Seething Neuroses, but it's hit some stumbling blocks.

@BESW Uh, possibly. He always just refers to it as just "Cyberpunk" and I've seen the book maybe twice. It's a very brutal system, he says.

Not GURPS, afaik.

I met the GM who did that MLP game for the first time when she was a player in one of my one-shot games, a very over the top adventure of Finnish teenagers fueled by energy drinks and doing tricks on their mopeds. Her character melded with a nightclub, walked across the Gulf of Finland over to Estonia, then back and fought with a police station. The entire, actual, concrete building.

tremendous fun!

Nice.

I'm reminded of the RFS session which started with two warehouse store salesmen vying for Employee of the Month, and concluded with the warehouse being annexed as an independent nation by pro-gun agitators.

Heh!

It's fun to go totally over the top sometimes.

I haven't played a single game of RFS, ever. I totally should.

It's almost not a system at all; leaves a lot for the group to decide.

Scene framing, action granularity, turn priorities, everything.

I like to use it to introduce people to RPGs because of that: we can cover a lot of different ideas and tools in a very short time because the system just rolls over and lets us do whatever works.

But if the group (and especially the GM) isn't consciously aware of making those choices, or doesn't have a lot of playstyle tools to call on, it can get kinda wonky.

Yeah.

@kviiri Where they special rules for fighting against buildings ? I am having a hard time imagining how this happened but it definitely sounds over-the-top fun !

Still, I've used it in one-on-one games and for groups up to nine.

@AnneAunyme No, but it's alright - since both participants were buildings it turned out pretty well using normal combat mechanics.

@AnneAunyme I'm not sure what system they used, but many systems use the same handful of mechanics for a wide variety of actions and contexts; it just requires a re-positioning of the relationship between rules and story.

Basically one of the PCs got their hands on some unspecified controlled substance, tried to slip it into the drink of an antagonist but blew the roll and accidentally got the glasses mixed up (poisoning one glass out of many is a trope that NEVER gets played straight - something invariably goes wrong).

So the dosed character started feeling sensations that weren't really there, and since I was already committed to keeping at zany as possible, I decided that the trip could as well have side effects for others to enjoy as well.

So they literally melded with the night club.

The final struggle against the police station was quite intense. When the nightclub crashed against the police station the rest of the party just leaped inside, like a huge boarding action between buildings.

@BESW And yeah, this is true, also.

Although building-on-building might warrant its own move.

If I were running an Apocalypse World Engine game, it'd probably just be the normal combat moves but with different triggers.

eg, a building can trigger the attack move against another building, but a human would probably need a mecha or some explosives to trigger the attack move.

A human attacking a giant living building would be more likely to trigger the Defy Danger move.

(or the GM would just decide it triggers their own "golden opportunity" moves to have something awful happen)

One of the things I like about games such as Roll For Shoes or Fate is that their actions don't just scale in size easily, but also in scope. A Fate action could take a split second or a week or even represent years of work you've already done long before the campaign started. It can affect a single person or an entire planet. Just depends on your context and narrative permissions.

@BESW Hm, good point.

AW2e handbook (and first edition supplemental material) includes guides on how much damage a building can take, along with heavier weaponry ruch as mortar pits.

A building is expected to collapse at about 8-harm iirc - and harm doesn't exactly scale linearly against them.

Rats, my GM is not willing to adopt the "declare you prepared something in advance" -move.

He never struck me as a hardcore simulationist but he argues that it's like a deus ex machina is players can simply declare they did something earlier.

And that players should just, well, declare the preparations they're doing in advance. Which is a bad idea in my opinion...

mmm. I don't know your GM, obviously, but I'm not sure that either simulation or avoiding deus ex machina is underlying that choice.

As a GM I wouldn't want my players to spend ages preparing, nor would I want to hear their preparations because it might influence my own decisions.

Not that I'm saying he's lying, but that he's not necessarily sure exactly why he's making the choice; in my experience that kind of preference is more down to valuing strategic preparation.

eg, what he's against is being able to make preparations when you know they'll be useful instead of when it's just an informed guess.

@doppelgreener [wave]

@BESW Hello!

How's life on the other side of the world?

@BESW Life's good.

Everything in London is slightly smaller than in Australia, except for the servings of chips and the beers, which are much larger.

Oh, and mcdonald's burgers.

Is your integration into the system going well?

@BESW Yeah, well... I'd honestly not like to know what preparations my PCs were making.

@kviiri Aye, I'm generally not in favour of anything that has the group spend time on stuff which is likely to prove pointless.

If it was seriously helpful for them, they'd pack everything. Puncture-proof tires, minesweeper chains, etc... and I'd either have to throw those obstacles on their way to make the planning feel worthwhile, or then I'd have to subvert them by throwing something they didn't account for.

"Oh, you've got puncture proof tires? Well they have a huge electromagnet that grabs your car from above. You're stuck."

@BESW I integrated surprisingly smoothly. I just moved into my own room (in a shared apartment a friend of a friend owns) the night before last, which I think is good to call the last part of the integration.

I also think making planning a feature of PCs rather than players is a good idea... in fiction, a character's ability to think ahead is valued highly, so why not reflect that in the game?

@doppelgreener Excellent! [starts the Countdown to Culture Shock clock]

@doppelgreener I absolutely loved Fish and Chips when I was visiting England (and Cornwall. Is it Wales or England?)

It was when the Rihanna Curse was in full effect. Didn't bother me a bit though - no one goes to Great Britain without expecting the absolute worst weather possible.

@kviiri This is an ongoing point of contention between various playstyles. I'm not a massive fan of "I don't have to know how to swing a sword or cast a spell in real life for my PC to be excellent at it, but my character's ability to socialise and strategise is directly tied to my own capacity," but it's common enough that I used to think it was just the way things were.

@BESW that's already happening in a lot of little ways. Streets are different, people casually jaywalk in ways they wouldn't in Aus, you can buy alcohol in stores (and corner stores have a wall behind the counter LINED with spirits), the mcdonalds burgers are slightly bigger but the big mac secret sauce isn't as good, everyone has a pint to relax instead of a coffee...

there's no cafe culture like in Australia, there's nationalities I'm not used to at all, etc

@BESW Yeah, I think the same way about it. It's been bugging me ever since I realized that it works that way for many games.

Of course it depends on what the game is going for.

British culture is also very subtly sarcastic in a lot of ways, so I worry one day I'll try to compliment someone on something and leave them feeling gravely insulted. :P

@kviiri Right: I'm totally down with games like A Penny For My Thoughts which blur the distinction between yourself and your character quite aggressively on all levels.

AFK a while! Lunch time!

I felt really weird going to a British safari lodge when I was in Tanzania. People all around, giving me more napkins, moving my chair so I wouldn't have to, even carrying my plate...

I'm not really used to being treated as that superior to anyone else. We don't have that kind of social classes here, hardly ever even situationally.

Yeah, around here that sort of thing is almost entirely generational.

In some Pacific Island cultures deference to one's elders gets really extreme. The Chamorro culture isn't as radical as some, but it's still a major element.

It's weird how off-putting being pampered can feel.

Before that experience, I would've assumed it to be fun.

Indeed.

The last time I played AW as a one-shot, I picked five playbooks in advance and let the players choose from them, based on questions like "ok, so which one of you is all about firepower?" and giving them the Gunlugger, and so on. Worked like a charm.

rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/76764/… <-- credit where credit's due, for the idea

I think I had Brainer, Driver, Gunlugger, Battlebabe and Skinner. This time I think I'll substitute Hocus for someone, and they'll be the "central" character.

Oh durn. Forgot to write up my botch.

One botch in

@SevenSidedDie I was surprised last night to learn we even had a elemental-evil tag. I considered pulling it off those 4 questions, then went to sleep instead. Glad to see I wasn't along in thinking that one might be not too useful.

What on earth is an elemental evil anyway?

@nitsua60 Yeah, imaginary +1 to that.

@kviiri I think it's a 5e UA

Or, apparently, a published adventure from the 80s

@UrhoKarila @kviiri It's one of the well-known adventures, like the Tomb of Horrors, that has become one of the D&D adventures, if you see what I mean.

It's had 5 remakes that I know of.

@kviiri Classic Gary Gygax/Frank Mentzer mega-module from 1e; really the first (that I know of) that crossed the 30-or-so page boundary between one- or two-session adventure to 80-plus page mini-campaign.

@Miniman I've heard of the Tomb, yes, despite having a fairly limited DnD knowledge :P

it's infamous

3e, 5e, boardgame, videogames x 3, sorry, 6 that I know of.

@UrhoKarila It's been rehashed in a number of ways

(that Miniman just enumerated)

In the context of 5e, "Elemental Evil" refers to both the "Princes of the Apocalypse" adventure (a ToEE remake), and the content provided in the "Elemental Evil Player's Companion".

Also, now that I think of it, the season of Adventurer's League in which the adventure was played.

What exactly makes Tomb of Horrors so deadly, anyway?

Explain it to me like I'm level 5.

From the introduction of ToH: "this module is intended to challenge players, not characters."

No saving throws on anything, no skill checks.

If you want to find a trap, you need to describe how you're prying up the flagstones.

Ah, that's different from what I imagined.

Good lord

I thought it was only conventionally difficult.

I'm not sure if that sounds fantastic or terrible

Fanrible?

It's just a different playstyle.

@nitsua60 It's not tightly coupled to a particular system is it?

@nitsua60 Hmmm, I dunno. Maybe I've been talking to BESW too much, but if you're ignoring all the mechanics of the game, you're not really playing the game, right?

Doesn't sound like one I'd particularly enjoy, but to each their own.

A "successful" run at ToH likely involves a lot of character deaths, and a bunch of speak with dead castings to get some info about "but what'd you see just before you died?"

Might be fun to run some weekend, assuming it works with 5e

@Miniman We talking original ToH?

I sort of assumed Tomb of Horrors would be a conventionally hard DnD adventure with lethal traps and terrible monsters.

@UrhoKarila 5e designers recommend Mines of Madness (freely and legally available!) for a similar experience in 5e.

@nitsua60 My limited, post-era knowledge of it, yeah.

@UrhoKarila Fair disclosure: I haven't actually run it myself.

Because in that case there's a lot of mechanics that are written in which most people ignore, but ToH requires. There's detailed notes in 1e on how to accurately map a dungeon you're exploring, and how much time that'll take, and what equipment, &c. If you don't do that, and it kills you, well that was a choice.

@UrhoKarila But I did flick through it - before they even get into the dungeon, players have a chance to instantly die. So it has that old-timey feel, but definitely don't let your players get invested in their characters.

@nitsua60 Fair enough - almost everything I know about it is based on hearsay.

@Miniman Oh, that's not true. Some of those early deaths take quite a while!

@nitsua60 Talking about Mines of Madness.

@BESW She apparently doesn't have any logs or anything from her Cthulhu-pony game. It was apparently "just some CoC scenario" except ponified and made slightly easier.

There's a spoiler.

@Miniman Sounds like a decent one-off session/campaign.

@Miniman ahh... nvm.

akf

afk

@UrhoKarila Yeah, I think it'd be a fun one as long as no-one let it get to them.

For a Doom-esque "hell is made of meat" feel, try the Womb of Horrors!

So, if it's intended to challenge players, not PCs, does that mean there are no skill checks at all?

Level 1 characters equally likely to die as level 20?

@kviiri That's what I've heard, but hyperbole is likely. If you're still awake when nistua gets back (dunno about timezones), he'd know better.

As I understand it, the first person to clear it basically got an army of disposable mooks and went through on a trial-and-error basis.

@Miniman Heh!

@kviiri I'd like to imagine that he recruited them by yelling "For Science!"

They, uh... should've included a mechanic about wages spiking to account for the risk...

@kviiri As much as I'd like to imagine otherwise, I don't think they were volunteers or getting paid.

7PM, still at the office

I love and hate days like this.

@UrhoKarila You might want to clarify what size categories actually mean, and how a Tiny creature isn't a 2.5 foot cube.

@Miniman Yeah, going through that right now. Trying to figure out how height generally correlates to the smallest dimension of a torso takes some time

@UrhoKarila Yeah, I really wish the game actually gave anything to really go on for this >.<

@Miniman Wouldn't it be nice

Alright, the extended work is up. There are a lot of assumptions, but I'd like some extra eyeballs on it

@kviiri back. Morale checks were a real thing back then. Also, going on quests to find rumors from sages about those who'd made runs at it in years past so that one could speak with the dead was a real thing. Also, getting on your deity's good side and communing.

Again, I think it really does work well when players and GM go into it taking it at face value: a challenge for players.

On a scarcely built, warehousey area of the town tonight. It's very quiet here.

Eerie, spooky.

A place between places.

There's a huge warehouse, with a partially open sliding door, showing a huge stack of shopping trolleys.

@kviiri This sounds like Dresden Files

@UrhoKarila Yeah. I have this weird feeling that something creepy indeed does happen if one strays away from the well-trodden paths and explores at random.

At least I tend to find objects in curious places.

@kviiri Had a surreal experience walking my dog the other night -- we had no fewer than 3 streetlights flicker & die as we approached them

Started getting genuinely unnerving near the end

@UrhoKarila nice answer on the Tiny creatures, btw. I love answers that show some research and a worked example.

@nitsua60 Thanks! It reminds me of a 'biophysics' class I took a few years back

Just improvising measurements, rounding aggressively, and getting an answer that is surprisingly useful, but not at all precise

@UrhoKarila wow, spooky!

@Miniman is it worth noting--nested at the third note-level on this answer--that while none of the psionic attacks are based off of STR or DEX, that the situation will disadvantage OP's initiative rolls?

Good morning, humans.

120 more points till I get that guud 10,000

@kviiri Thanks for asking.