Has anyone handled damage over time concepts in a non-turn based game like Dungeon World? If so, how was it managed?
For example: A PC sets an NPC on fire, the burn damage occurs over time. In DW, there are no turns and time passes abstractly. What systems are there to best deal the damage over ...
Has anyone handled damage over time concepts in a non-turn based game like Dungeon World? If so, how was it managed?
For example: A PC sets an NPC on fire, the burn damage occurs over time. In DW, there are no turns and time passes abstractly. What systems are there to best deal the damage over ...
I am currently DMing Curse of Strahd for a group of 4 players, including a dwarven life cleric, a circle of the land elf druid, a dwarf fighter, and a half-elf barbarian. After rescuing a few children from some hags, they tried to return them to their parents. After realizing that one of the chil...
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As part of upgrading the entire Stack Exchange network to use secure HTTPS links internally, our meta site has had a very tiny move to a slightly ...
@Karelzarath I dunno, given the vast assembled folklore that all suggests seeing the future is a) useless and b) actively harmful, I think seeing into the past is about as good as it gets!
I posted like, one of my only questions for a long time like early last year or something, and the Oracle posted it in chat like, at most an hour afterwards
@Karelzarath I watched something recently and 5 minutes in was like "He's the bad guy." My friend who told me to watch it was very disappointed, and asked how I knew. "Wishes are bad. Anything that grants wishes is BAD. Anything that grants wishes without any apparent motivation for doing so is so fundamentally bad that Voldemort should be scared of it."
@Adam Is it easy for you to put a finger on that cite? I playtested the next adventure/hardcover coming out, and would be pretty interested to see anything that's been said about it since then.
Stack etiquette question: There is an old question to which I posted an answer in which I argued for one side more vehemently than my true beliefs on the matter, because I wanted to provide the opposing case to an answer (in my opinion a good one) which was already there, so as to allow voters to decide which they found more convincing. I just noticed that the other answer has since been deleted.
I came upon a question, where the asker referenced the rules incorrectly (the question in general was also rather hard to follow). Later on someone edited the question and formatted the incorrect reference as a quote.
I tried to help out and edited the question, so that it included the correct ...
@BESW Biological engineering is something I'm super keen on & seems great for solarpunk. For example: instead of putting shampoo in a living animal's eyes for testing, just grow the relevant organs & hook the nerve cells up to a machine that knows what signals are bad. Grow replacement organs for surgery, develop organic technology that can efficiently do what inefficient machinery currently does.
Microorganism-based recycling of what have been typically considered nonbiodegradable products is part of that.
Well, to my mind the really juicy solarpunk stories are about the early days of those ideas, when it's become clear that sustainable practices are necessary and people are trying to figure out what that means.
On a small scale it's contemporary stuff like recycling initiatives that combine practical mechanics to make recycling easy, affordable, and accessible with social mechanics to make recycling desirable.
On a larger scale it's re-writing basic social constructs like materialism or zero-sum political structures.
It's not about having a sustainable world society, it's about the struggle toward a sustainable world society--which includes figuring out what that means in the first place, and being wrong.
I think of the solarpunk ethos as the point where enlightened self-interest and selfless service intersect on a global scale, and the technological and social movements which that intersection produces.
@BESW ooooo. that actually sounds really engaging.
like, early days: people engineer dragons to till fields & act as vessels. they're peaceful omnivores. then the dragons start going nuts and killing people and burninating the countryside. what's going wrong? how? why?
@Vyoma If you're asking about lore, that would make for a good main site question. In particular I recommend stating what research you've done so far to determine it, and if there's answers in previous material, what makes you suspect they might have changed. ("They changed before in a previous edition transition, so I want to check this time" is an example of a decent reason.)
@doppelgreener On a practical contemporary level: some businesses use unsustainable techniques for quick profit without caring about long-term effects or the impact on others (immediate self interest); some businesses use sustainable techniques because it's good marketing (enlightened self interest); some businesses use sustainable techniques because it's good for future generations (selfless service).
> ORACLE OF THE FINITE PAST: You can use Notice to see anything that happened anywhere in the past ten minutes with somewhat-murky-but-generally-pretty-good clarity.
My vision of solarpunk is about society's shift from immediate self-interest as a driving concern, to long-term, enlightened self-interest with a growing dash of selflessness.
@BESW And there'd be people fighting against that, because they're more interested in the now, and want to keep people interested in the now, because people looking for more long-term solutions is hurting business.
...In 1385 DR, when the Spellplague struck and ravaged across Faerûn, contact was lost with Evermeet. All of the permanent portals ceased functioning and efforts by the other fey kingdoms on Faerûn to reestablish contact have failed, and it is largely thought that Evermeet was destroyed. What is little known is that Evermeet was in fact transported into the Feywild and persists there. Only an echo of the physical island, without any structures or inhabitants, now remains on Toril....
@doppelgreener Since our ideas for a solarpunk RPG were sparked by the vision of harvesting old satellites for rare metals to recycle, I've been thinking about something I heard recently--that some people are legitimately considering the pros and cons of strategically blowing up a number of orbiting satellites to turn the area outside our atmosphere into a cloud of shrapnel that shreds other satellites... and anything else, like missiles and space shuttles.
We aren't old enough to remember the paralysing terror of the first Russian satellite going beep...beep...beep... over American soil.
But anyone for whom disabling communication is a means to an end, it'd be ridiculously easy to just shred the entire world's satellite system in a way that makes it nigh impossible to restore.
@BESW hardcore, wow. that's a good potential plot to engage in with solarpunk. someone wants to shred the satellite network because they think it will help the sustainability cause; others who learn about this and are also trying to work on that cause are alarmed and now have to try to stop it.
During the Russia/Chinese Communist alliance in the... 50s, I think? The Chinese tricked the Russians into building their new embassy with chimneys that were specially shaped and lined with acoustic tile so the Chinese could listen to everything in the embassy through a shallow tunnel dug in from off the property, without any electronic devices.
They didn't have the infrastructure to compete with America and Russia in miniaturisation and high-tech spy gear, so they substituted precision acoustic engineering.
"Oh, our winters are so cold and our electricity is unreliable. You should have fireplaces to keep warm in case the heaters don't work. Here, we'll help you so you stay within your deadline."
[shrug] Whether you're going for complexity, age, self-contradiction, breadth, depth, the Egyptian pharonic pantheon will beat up everything else and take their lunch money.
@BESW Yeah, seems likely. Star Wars has had a few decades to fill in all the corners of its lore they could and answer all the questions. The egyptians had thousand of years to fill out everything with multiple answers, even dozens at a time, all of which were probably true even if they contradicted each other.
The question asks me to both define the question and give the answer. There's nothing to chew on because it's literally "every idea is equally right provided it's consistent within itself." If "richest" and "most detailed" means "most adaptations" and we're limited to modern intellectual property, Sherlock Holmes is probably the hands-down winner.
@BESW Oh right. That brings to mind: @AlexStybaev, this is a gorilla vs shark question. As in, the parameters for the question are arbitrary, and different parameters will give you a different answer, so you can define the parameters however you like to get yourself whichever answer you like.
Oh, maybe you can use it without internet? He says it's not a client but a webapp but also says you can use it without internet. So, IDK.
Key points:
"At launch, players will be able to access SRD content and build and view a small number of characters with a free D&D Beyond account. We don’t have exact pricing nailed down, but you will also be able to buy official digital D&D content for all fifth edition products with flexible purchase options. You can pay only for the D&D content you need. If you only play fighters, for example, you’ll be able to just pick up the stuff you need to track swinging that giant two-handed sword. This is NOT a microtransaction model - we aren't forcing anyone to buy the content in small chunks - it can stil…
@LegendaryDude There are some sweet new local storage technologies that allow you to actually build off-line web applications. I studied them a bit while I was working on a certification. Basically, a copy of your content will be stored locally, and it will serve you that local copy as long as you are offline. Once you go online, it should be able to translate everything over seamlessly
@Adam Of course, yeah. I mean I can think of a few ways I'd do it off the top of my head using SQLite and like, a prepackaged Django app or something. It's just not clear what Bradford means because he kind of contradicts himself.
"D&D Beyond is a responsive web application that can work on any device - definitely not a desktop client or mobile app only available for iOS or Android. We care a great deal about offline capability, and you'll be able to access your characters, etc. just fine on the terrible WIFI at those conventions. :)"
So is it that the terrible WiFi won't be a burden because the app will work offline?
If it's a webapp and my content is stored online, and I'm just using it for the first time on my phone and the WiFi is terrible then I still can't use it offline because my content won't be synced.
Because I created my stuff on my PC at home, not on my phone. I dunno. I don't have a problem with how it will work (I'm not typically one to attend a con) over bad WiFi or anything.
@Vyoma Evermeet was already a place of seclusion/retreat for elves before the Spellplague. (That's the reason that very rare elven-controlled portals were the way to get there.) So if your moon elf is also a noble and attached to Evermeet, I think it'd make sense to say they were caught "on the outside" when the island moved/portals lost contact. That's 'only' a hundred years ago (to the 5e timeline), after all =)
Yup. Anything that can just load the site once on your device should get a usable local copy.
Some features that require a connection, like unlocking new content, will be disabled in offline mode I'm sure. But other than that, I'm confident that they can build it so that it works pretty well offline.
I have confidence that it will work well regardless of connectivity, assuming they live up to what they've said it will do. I'm just curious about the nature of the app.
They say it's not going to be a client, so will it be accessed in the browser?
And if it's accessed in the browser, how useful is that if you can't get a connection? What if you've just cleared your browser cache? What if your browser automatically clears cache regularly to save space? I don't think it's as cut and dry as they make it sound.
If I had to venture a guess, I'd say they'll be leveraging the HTML5 appcache and localstorage. I forget exactly how it works, but the technology exists to cache whole webpages. And while there are ways to clear this stuff out, the ability to at least offer some service while offline is immediately better than "you can't access it at all offline"
That guess based purely on similar sounding effect. I have no idea what the technology will actually be
@NautArch my personal baseline for "simple" in RPGs nowadays includes an RPG with seven bullet points for the entirety of its rules, and another one with only one stat and which has its entire game sit on one side of an A4 piece of paper.
the most annoying thing with Savage Worlds is that it basically required the Savage Worlds handbook AND the Rift deluxe rulebook in order to make a character
@Adam Well, that's how it's supposed to work. My players have buried them, put them in wells and sealed the well, dropped them in lava, and just generally come up with all kinds of ludicrous BS.
Again, it's always situational. We were: (a) outside, (b) within quick hailing-range of our airship, (c) *possessed of an airship*, (d) wizard had slot and spell, (e) had an archer (fighting style) battle-master (for precision strike) sharpshooter (for range), (f) cleric *bless*ed the archer, (g) had a magical stone that could turn into a boulder to drop on it, (h) hadn't used the boulder within the last week, (i) DM was amused enough not to rule (reasonably) that the aerodynamics of frog-drop were sufficiently different from boulder-drop to make the idea of hitting the frog--no, wait, it's…
The thing is, you never hear the stories of when [insert "broken" mechanic here] was just kinda underwhelming. (a) plenty of times players choose better options, (b) we don't tell many stories of our mediocrities.
One of my group's all-time favourite moments was when the Bard told the Manticore a joke. The Manticore fell 400 feet to its death, laughing all the way.
@NautArch My group fought a young green dragon once that, through a combination of BS and smooth talking to the DM, we had gotten grappled, pinned, prone, and we all started beating it to death.
@Miniman I'd probably rule that being possessed of wings makes one "autorotate" (or whatever the proper term would be for a wing-flapper) and cap the falling damage it could take. Maybe even enough to knock it out, but you need that manticore to reappear plenty of times throughout the campaign, always trying to remember that punchline.
@Miniman max falling damage is quite likely not to kill the thing, anyway. If at 1HP it's about 25% likely to survive, and it improves to about 75% as HP goes to full.
@DForck42 Roll for Shoes is the RPG that consists of seven bullet points, and Lasers and Feelings is a free one-page Star Trek: TOS parody; the link to the PDF is on the right hand side (or just click here).
So, err, please go fix it to make it work better for what the site needs. Bearing in mind that this thing (or something like it, maybe on Meta) need to exist to guide people to resources for problems we can't fix here.
@LegendaryDude Except you need something to fulfill this purpose and also Mxy slapped a bounty on it to get more answers, so, uh, that's not actually a solution.
I mean, unless people just stopped asking for "how the heck do I design a game?" entirely.
@AlexP rpg isn't a game design qna, it's an rpg qna. also, asking for external resources tends to be off-topic (I dunno what rpg's culture is like when it comes to this, just the general concensus on other sites)
@nitsua60 I enjoyed running that game of Roll for Shoes so much, and it was such a joy to re-read that liveblog of it (@BESW thank you for recording that.)
This post is likely of interest only to those who are curious about networking and security protocols, or Stack Exchange infrastructure projects.
As part of upgrading the entire Stack Exchange network to use secure HTTPS links internally, our meta site has had a very tiny move to a slightly ...
I came upon a question, where the asker referenced the rules incorrectly (the question in general was also rather hard to follow). Later on someone edited the question and formatted the incorrect reference as a quote.
I tried to help out and edited the question, so that it included the correct ...
