So, one amusing (to me) pasttime is writing people's obvious lies into head-canon, and then enjoying the world I live in as a result. So in this case, I like to imagine a much younger Miniman having actually found a giant, slumbering dragon somewhere in the Northern Territories, having been adopted by the local culture as their golden child, having trained (via montage, of course) to stand toe-to-talon with this dragon, and having finally slain the beast. And now nobody on the internet believes him.
@nitsua60 If you knew what I am (it's on the left), you'd have skipped the training montage and the going toe-to-toe. Me and three of my buddies could take out a dragon like that.
@Shalvenay I don't think anything beats Holger tossing a [spoiler] &%^&((#^^@#) [/spoiler] in and watching the ensuing explosion in Three Hearts and Three Lions
(BTW, an absolute must-read if you've ever played in a system with alignments. IMO the stuff actually makes sense if you contextualize its original conceit.)
(One of the best kid-presents I ever got: my son's godfather sent him a copy of Busy Town with little humorous commentary/notes scribbled all over the place. "Who'd want that many pickles!?" &c.)
An interesting idea for a wizard who is about to lose:
True polymorph, target self, select "antimatter cow". Reasoning: A wizard probably knows about the balances in the universe, and so would suspect (if antimatter is known to said wizard) that antimatter star systems exist, therefore the antimatter cow is rational to posit.
Physicists have been over the tables. There are no known or plausable sets of physical laws that don't have antimatter, and we have one of the only ones known with viable chemistry.
I found something really impressive. At 5th level with 3 days prep time, killing off a Tarrasque is possible; and it's more worth it to XP farm it as it regenerates than trying to get a with to make it stay dead.
For reference, this probably gets you pretty close to the right energy cale for the anti-cow. I'm doing gamma-calculations in my head past 11pm, but I think it's pretty close....
so yeah, come to think of it, the T swallowing a bomb would be screwed -- the blast wave makes way more sense as thunder damage than it does as bludgeoning
it would shrug at shrapnel and any thermal effects
In this case we ended up ruling that the bludgening resistance goes bye-bye because T could not deflect the blocks by any means due to not possessing high enough attack. It's not at all like somebody's swinging a base.
@Joshua That's not what bludgeoning resistance is meant to represent - you're dropping tonnes of stone on a creature who's hide and skeleton are so tough that they literally can't be damaged by impacts.
(Also, physics and D&D just don't mesh well together. You can say that being hit by something going fast enough heats things up, but as far as D&D is concerned, it doesn't.)
I'll have to check it out later. Right now I just used the extra half hour from finishing my class early to polish up my poster design for my client meeting, and have just barely time for dinner between.
Thanks, but it wasn't anyone I really knew, just someone on the IRC.
Parted with a message "<name> has left for better hunting grounds, send condolences to <nick>".
Probably very creepy to sudo as the deceased and turn on the IRC screen one last time, see all the dozens "are you ok?" highlights and wipe that last bit of presence away.
hi all, quick question about d&d 5e, is it allowed within the rules for a spellcaster (Cleric) to change their initial choice of Cantrips over a month's rest period (with access to a center of learning)?
@sequoiad If you ask your DM, you probably don't need to bother with the month's rest and so on. Just say "Hey, I botched my spell selection - is it OK if I make some changes?" People are pretty reasonable.
I mean, at this point we're mostly playing games (and using playstyles) that make the nature of player/character "intersemiotics" so explicit that MGS is laughably out of context.
@sequoiad Saying "It's what my character would do" to justify an action that disrupts the enjoyment of other real-life people in your game, as if a player is not responsible for their character's choices.
Common examples by my experience are people playing characters that fit the game poorly (like pacifist characters in combat-heavy games), or are poorly motivated for taking plot hooks, or are poorly motivated for team participation ("I'm chaotic neutral, setting people on fire is what I do!").
I've seen surprisingly many "edgy" characters who respond to plot hooks with "what's in it for me" and then need to be persuaded a lot to take the quests.
One GM I know makes this sort of agreements with the players: "If I give you a plot hook, if it's an obvious plot hook, just take it. In exchange, I guarantee characters giving such plot hooks aren't going to screw you over. Seriously. I don't want to waste time with you trying to guess their true motivations. This isn't that kind of a game."
On the other hand, some gaming groups like playing paranoid conspiracy theorists in a world that's out to get them.
It's really down to play style, there's no wrong way to play an RPG so long as everyone involved is safe and happy. But often a group will assume everyone has the same play style without actually checking, and the clash of inaccurate assumptions causes much real-life drama.
Aye. My group loves being able to act as co-conspirators as players against their characters.
At one point we had a PC get replaced by a shapeshifting villain for a whole storyline. Everyone at the table knew it, and that let everyone participate in the charade gleefully, and choose the best, most dramatic moment for the final reveal to their characters.
(The PC's player took over playing the villain for that time.)
mmm. The D&D trifecta of intense time and effort sunk into a character, often extreme punishment for relatively minor mishaps, and near-total concurrence of character and player agency, makes it a rough hurdle to get over.
If I lose my DnD character, no matter how cool their death is, there's hours of effort put into it. In AW I can revel in their gory end and start a new one in five minutes.
In Fate, death happens when the group feels it's a good time to die--otherwise failure means that Awesome Story Things happen, like being captured or humiliated or... kidnapped and replaced by the villain.
No dying to a really lucky squirrel, unless that squirrel was your arch-nemesis.
AW2e makes character death optional. It's even more interesting than just dying to create a new char - instead of dying, characters' lives "become untenable". Their player chooses between gaining Weird, losing Hard, coming back as a different playbook or just dying.
@BESW Sounds just the way I like it.
For example, a character left for dead can come back as The Faceless for revenge, or Brainer for having had some bizarre near-death experiences.
That same character who was replaced by a villain for one adventure, had previously spent a whole story arc missing in time and space while his player experimented with a parade of different "guest" characters.
@Nox Without a problem I'm trying to solve, it'd be shoved over to Mathematics as not requiring RPG expertise.
Good instinct, though! It's always nice when chat produces mainsite-worthy content.
(I have a long-standing offer that whenever someone suggests a topic move from chat to meta, and it does so successfully, I'll give them a free bonus or re-roll in the next game I run that they're in.)
Most any roll in Dungeon World that isn't a damage roll is 2d6 plus the relevant stat modifier. The results (barring explicit exceptions in the move) fall into the following three categories:
Failure (6-)
Partial Success (7-9)
Full Success (10+)
How likely is each outcome for the various modi...
Well the thing is, it's not necessarily suitable for Math.SE since they expect one to show their work first. What if one is utterly clueless about probabilities?
Yeah, but you're clearly trying to understand the probabilities of PbtA dice rolls. There is a lot of AnyDice question pondering the probabilities purely for fun, for "hack the system" reasons or what have you.
@BESW I might have thought the same about my "probability to survive death saves" question. It seems like a good simultaneous self-answer seems to save those ones?
No, it's a boring KSBD. And that's pretty much an only boring thing about it, can't recommend it hard enough.
The art is great from the beginning, the setting is a planar deity-level story (with a fish-out-of-water protagonist from our world) based loosely on hinduism, I think.
The reason I'm mentioning it is that it's supposedly getting an RPG incarnation - killsixbilliondemons.com/ksbd-rpg . And comment sections throughout the comic lead me to believe that the creator was shopping around for the suitable system and commenters offered to do the PbtA hack for him.
That's reasonable. I was fond of lurking around the old Narbonic comments back in the day.
But I personally have developed a strong wariness of any Western fiction that can be plausibly described as "inspired by Hinduism." (Or Buddhism.)
PbtA is definitely an interesting choice for a narrative franchise, though.
As I understand it, PbtA is a good engine for "I want moments like these" design goals, while something like Fate is better for "I want stories like these" design goals.
PbtA seems to be at its best when distilling a large collection of diverse stories (sword and sorcery, post-apocalyptica, monster hunting) into their essential shared moments and spitting those back out as moves.
@KorvinStarmast you've got a missing hard line-break in your rangeric-focus question, around the level 2 spells. But I can't figure out how you made ones that look like that, so I can't edit one in for you =\
I tried that, but I couldn't seem to get it to take. Rather than butchering his post for such a minor effort, I figure Korvin can just nab it next time 'e's around.
Most any roll in Dungeon World that isn't a damage roll is 2d6 plus the relevant stat modifier. The results (barring explicit exceptions in the move) fall into the following three categories:
Failure (6-)
Partial Success (7-9)
Full Success (10+)
How likely is each outcome for the various modi...
