TRPG General Chat

DForck42

20:00

@NautArch no, spellcasters, people that can't math, and players that don't know what they're doing slow down the game

SPavel

@ACuriousMind I've only ever played the video games. It was OK.

But I did run a Dominant Ideal Ardent once

That was a lot of dice

ACuriousMind

@SPavel Ah, I meant because in the non-video game rolling 15 d6 at once is not rare

DForck42

I did a oneshot with a lvl 14 warlock with hex

SPavel

15 is not much for a 3.5e blaster mage

LegendaryDude

The deafness condition doesn't impair verbal spellcasting. #DnD https://twitter.com/Jarun2972/status/843856984260665344

Tweeted by JeremyECrawford on March 20, 2017 at 6:16 PM

DForck42

20:01

3d20 + 3d10 + 3d6 (for hex I think?) for each eldrict blast

LegendaryDude

That is a change from prior editions.

SPavel

You can rock 30d6 just off an empowered delayed blast fireball

NautArch

@Adam i play this partly to roll dice. rolling more dice doesn't slow it down for me, it makes it more fun.

SPavel

Honestly though, d6 isn't that fun to roll

d20 is the most fun die

Adam

@NautArch I more mean that there is a limit. I agree with you for the most part. And rolling a lot of dice sparingly is super cool. But, for example, the paladin in my group rolls 2d6 + all of his extra smite damage, and the DM let's him reroll 1's and 2's on every die because of his feats

NautArch

20:04

@SPavel not gonna argue that :) also why my 5 year gravitated to the d20 for chutes and ladders

@adam mine does as well (for my paladin) and you know how much longer it takes me to pick up and reroll all the dice vs the d20? about 1 second.

SPavel

I was mathing out a skill check variant where you could roll extra d20s but it didn't math well

NautArch

and it makes my paladin smites feel gooooooood. which is kinda what they should.

Yuuki

I mean, different people feel good about different things. Some people just like high numbers, in which case the one roll might be better because you have a better chance of hitting max damage.

Adam

They feel good for you. And even I agree they are fun to watch for the first couple of times. But when 4 other people at the table are just sitting there while you roll 20 dice, then reroll 10 dice, then add all of it together 3 or 4 times a game, it gets really annoying

Yuuki

And some people, like you, prefer rolling lots of dice.

NautArch

20:07

@Adam good point. although as I said the amount of time it takes me to identify the 1s and 2s and reroll them for just my 2d6 vs my d8s is very very small.

Adam

I like rolling tons of dice too, but I'd rather free up as much time as possible to have more rolls in the game, rather than fewer rolls of larger instances

Yuuki

@Adam Yeah, I remember playing with this one guy who rolled a homebrew Wild Mage in 3.5e. He'd Wild Surge on Disintegrates and roll like 20d6 with rerolls and all sorts of things. Luckily for us, he was a bit of a math whiz so it progressed quicker than average, but I could definitely see that getting real old real quick.

Adam

Especially If I can roll, at most, 4 die at once and only one or two other people can enjoy rolling fistfulls of dice

NautArch

and as @DForck42 said, the time difference between rerolling those dice and waiting for casters to decide what to do or others to decide what to do is minimal.

my paladin mostly attacks. I spend nearly no time figuring out what i'm going to do.

Adam

I'm not saying your way is wrong! I'm just saying that if I myself were at your table, I might not like that as much. It's whatever. We're not trying to convince each other

NautArch

20:09

@adam hehe. fair enough :) I'm just saying your emphasis that it slows the game down is pretty minimal. And I'm pretty sure that unless you're the DM, watching your smitin' paladin take more HP off his target is a good thing.

SPavel

Yeah, not everyone can throw fat stacks

Karelzarath

@Adam There is one true way to play!!1!!one!

SPavel

It helps that I'm pretty handy with mental math

NautArch

ONE!!!1111!!!!

SPavel

UND EXACTLY ONE

Adam

20:10

@NautArch Not when he's done it for the 6th time, it gets lame

At least I think so

NautArch

Funny thing I've noticed (which i'll guess I'll learn in a few more years) is that I do mental math as New Math.

which i basically taught myself

SPavel

Yeah, full attack until meat points reach 0 is not super fun

But if you want to play a spellcaster, plan ahead

eimyr

@NautArch as a DM watching players killing your monsters is a good thing too. Monsters exist to be killed by PCs.

NautArch

@adam i hear you and hadn't really thought about the rest of the table getting frustrated. We generally do like it when each of us do well. And if it took me forever to reroll and add, it'd piss me off.

LegendaryDude

@NautArch "new" math is the same as old math. It just teaches math theory a little bit better. The old way of "carrying" or "borrowing" doesn't teach you why you do it, just that you should do it.

NautArch

20:14

@eimyr true, although as a DM it's always kind of sad to see your big bad guy go down in one hit because your paladin critted and dropped 110 damage.

SPavel

Never make the challenge "lower the guy's HP"

I always assume that if the party melee performs a full attack upon a guy, the guy is dead

And plan out encounters with that in mind

eimyr

@NautArch goblin dice

NautArch

@LegendaryDude from what i've read, new math is less about 'carrying and borrowing' and more about moving things to 5s and 10s and calculating the difference. If it's not that, then i'm not doing new math and i'm doingNautarch math

LegendaryDude

@NautArch Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.

NautArch

@SPavel definitely not how my DM runs things

LegendaryDude

20:15

@NautArch The old way of "carrying" or "borrowing" doesn't teach you why you carry and borrow. That is, it doesn't teach you the underlying mechanics of numbers and their relations.

SPavel

Difficult terrain that prevents charging, illusions, favourable terrain...

DForck42

players that don't math well tend to frustrate me more than anything

Karelzarath

@SPavel Wait, difficult terrain prevents illusions?

DForck42

I'm just like "why can't you add two numbers together"

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 Not everyone is as able as you

SPavel

20:17

This is why I love Knockback and Knockdown - give it to a big guy with reach, and he can not only interrupt a charge on an AoO, but also toss the sucker back where he came from and trip him on top of that.

@Karelzarath No, those are separate strategies. Use difficult terrain to prevent charging, or illusions to conceal the real target.

My best illusion was to make a 20ft pit appear one square in front of the real 20ft pit

DForck42

@LegendaryDude but it's simple addition... you literally learned how to do that 20 years ago...

SPavel

It wasn't combat or anything, but it really caught the PCs by surprise

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 It's really not that simple for some people.

SPavel

"Oh, a trap, let me jump over it"

donk

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 To some people, numbers don't make sense. They just jumble up on the page and they can't make anything out of them.

Yuuki

20:19

@LegendaryDude After several years of tutoring my sister on math, yes. Some people just don't have a head for numbers. Alternately, I suck as a tutor. Probably both.

LegendaryDude

Abstract concepts are difficult.

DForck42

@LegendaryDude that, I understand. and would probably not recommend them playing dnd.

Yuuki

@LegendaryDude Yeah, she's pretty much described it to me like this. She sees numbers on a page and they just start to blur together.

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 One of my best friends is like this and plays D&D and we have a ton of fun almost every Saturday.

SPavel

There are classes that don't need numbers

DForck42

20:21

@LegendaryDude how do they do it then? (not being snarky, genuinely curious)

SPavel

I once built a guy to roll dice as infrequently as possible - he could take 10 on almost everything

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 Slowly and with a lot of re-rolls.

"Oh wait, I forgot what my first die roll was."

Karelzarath

@SPavel Like bards. They give numbers to everyone else.

SPavel

Bards are good, most casters just point to a person and say "you there, give me an arbitrary amount of dice rolls"

LegendaryDude

Yep, our bard mostly just rolls a d4 every now and then.

DForck42

20:23

@LegendaryDude for that reason is why I like to roll all of the dice at once. so I need 6d6 I just roll 6d6

i COULD remember, but it's easier and faster to see them and add them together

at least for me

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 Yes, but... well, he ... is a little odd. So he'll roll 6d6, then move the dice he's counted, add them all up to the wrong number, then we have to kind of decipher where he went wrong, and then he looks back and he doesn't know where he moved the dice to.

So we don't know which ones he's counted and... we just ask him to re-roll.

It's not always like that, just sometimes.

DForck42

ahh

does he have memory issues at all, or is it JUST with numbers?

LegendaryDude

He is dyslexic (so he has a hard time with the rules) and more than likely dyscalculic. And yes, he has severe anterograde amnesia from a brain injury.

Karelzarath

That explains it.

DForck42

@LegendaryDude ahh, that's unfortunate

LegendaryDude

20:27

His ability for recall in the very short term is non-existent.

But he'll remember 20 minutes later.

DForck42

ok

LegendaryDude

Having a conversation with him is fun though because he will suddenly change the subject to something else, having forgot about the current subject, then 15 minutes later he will switch back to the original subject as if he never missed a beat.

DForck42

that would still frustrate me (cause I'm me) but I'd be way more understanding and patient

LegendaryDude

And I'm probably making it sound way worse than it is. You'd never know something was wrong if you met him.

SPavel

"So, about those Russian knife jugglers..."

DForck42

20:29

@LegendaryDude ok

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 Oh, don't get me wrong. It can be incredibly frustrating. It's just that we love him anyway. :)

DForck42

i once tried to explain that there are orders of magnitude of infinity to my fiancée, and it broke her brain

@LegendaryDude :-D

LegendaryDude

And with a little bit of help, someone to sit next to him and watch his dice rolls, and someone to help him understand the rules a bit, a lot of the frustration can be mitigated

SPavel

Orders of magnitude of infinity isn't even hard to imagine though

DForck42

@SPavel well, she's not a math person

LegendaryDude

20:34

so I'll text him at random times, "Hey, did you know your character can do X? You should read it on pg N."

DForck42

i think her lawyer schooling ate that part of her brain

SPavel

Imagine that you said every number. One, two, three, etc. It would take infinity time. Not imagine you said every number twice. One one, two two, three three, etc. It would take twice as long.

LegendaryDude

"hey check out this spell, it's really cool. not sure if you've seen it"

DForck42

yeah, we've got a player at our 3.5 game that doesn't really know how to play the game, so we just kinda tell him what to do

at least in combat

in social situations he's perfectly fine and a joy to play with

SPavel

Maybe he should play a warlock

"Here is a d20 and 10d6. Roll them all every round, then pick an enemy."

Karelzarath

20:38

@SPavel heh

@LegendaryDude Priming the pump on his memory, so to speak?

DForck42

@SPavel he's playing a rogue

SPavel

Full attacks are scary

Flanking, stealth...rogues might be the hardest mundane character to play

LegendaryDude

@Karelzarath Yeah, once it's in there he's got it, it's just very short-term stuff is easily forgotten.

@SPavel If it's 5e this isn't a problem, no iterative attacks so-to-speak

SPavel

Aren't there bonus attacks?

Also I believe he said 3.5

DForck42

@SPavel i did say 3.5

Anheuser

20:44

he walked into the bar carrying a sawed off shotgun and sits at the bar and orders a whisky hey ya' hillbillies

wrong type of rpg

abort

LegendaryDude

@DForck42 oh, missed that

@SPavel There are... attacks, extra attacks (only the fighter gets more than 1) and possibly bonus action attacks.

Anheuser

what are you kids playing

Yuuki

@Anheuser Yeah. Especially since "hillbillies" would spell it "whiskey".

SPavel

moonshine*

Karelzarath

@Anheuser A bazooka is also the wrong type of RPG

Anheuser

20:47

@yuuki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky when you drink this stuff enough you can call ti whatever you like.

Yuuki

@Anheuser "Whisky" is typically used for non-American varietals while "whiskey" is for American-made.

Per the NY Times:'

> Up until quite recently, The New York Times tackled the problem by spelling everything the American way (with an E), regardless of the spirit's country of origin. From Kentucky bourbon to Islay malts, everything was "whiskey" to The NYTimes. But then, last February, the venerable newspaper made a decisive change.

After receiving a raft of complaints from some serious Scotch whisky drinkers, the paper re-tooled its approach to follow that of many specialized spirits publications, spelling each type of spirit according to the way favored by its country of origin. So, while American-produce…

LegendaryDude

I prefer the term uisce

Anheuser

Why do you assume that I am american?

LegendaryDude

@Yuuki The Irish also tend to spell it whiskey

SPavel

He didn't, but your hillbilly would be American

Karelzarath

20:49

Did you just assume my nationality?

Anheuser

oh shit you're right

Yuuki

"Hillbillies", as far as I know it, is an American colloquialism for rural Americans.

Anheuser

well, I don't pretend to know about hillbillies.

SPavel

No, it's much more specific

Karelzarath

@Yuuki It's pretty specific to the Appalachians.

LegendaryDude

20:50

@Yuuki A specific sort of rural American, though.

Anheuser

My cousin gotten eaten by one in the movie deliverance.

SPavel

"Redneck" covers a wider range of rural people, but even that's far from all-encompassing

LegendaryDude

@Karelzarath I might include those from the Ozarks as well.

Karelzarath

Bumpkin or country bumpkin is more general.

SPavel

Bumpkin is more pejorative

Karelzarath

20:51

@LegendaryDude Good point.

Yuuki

It's also not American-specific, IIRC.

Anheuser

My grandma called me a country bumpkin once...

Karelzarath

Hillbilly is pretty damn pejorative. :D

SPavel

It's not

People self-identify as hillbillies

Anheuser

I didn't mean to start a debate lads and lasses.

LegendaryDude

20:52

@Karelzarath The most famous hillbillies were from the Ozarks, after all.

SPavel

Rednecks, too

But not bumpkins

Adam

People also self identify as other pejorative things

Karelzarath

^

Anheuser

I met a rapist once who self identified as a rapist.

Yuuki

That's not really a perjorative...

SPavel

20:52

^

Karelzarath

[redacted political commentary]

Anheuser

okay...

DForck42

there's also hick, but that one feels more insulting than the others

SPavel

"Rape" is a crime. "Bumpkin" is an insult.

Anheuser

I met someone who lose a million bucks who self identified as a gambler.

SPavel

20:53

"Gambler" is a hobby.

Anheuser

But...

Karelzarath

gets out the popcorn

Anheuser

I would use it as an insult.

SPavel

If I called you a gambler, that's not an insult.

Anheuser

I'd be insulted!

I calculated the odds good sir!

that is not gambling!

Karelzarath

20:54

@Anheuser Then you clearly don't know when to hold them or when to fold them.

SPavel

As long as the odds aren't 100% you're still a gambler

Anheuser

I know to fold my arms in when I dive out of a fast moving vehicle.

LegendaryDude

@SPavel Calculating the odds doesn't... yeah, that.

Anheuser

What about counting cards.

SPavel

Still not guaranteed

Anheuser

20:55

Does anyone know how to do that by the way?

Yuuki

@SPavel So what if they're 0%?

SPavel

Basically you just need a really good memory

Karelzarath

I'm sure someone does, yes.

DForck42

@Anheuser there are several different systems, but it's usually a point system

Karelzarath

@Yuuki Then you're a fool, not a gambler.

Anheuser

20:55

I mean specifically here you....

A point system.

GreySage

@SPavel Was I a gambler when I looked for a job?

NautArch

@Anheuser with math.

DForck42

ie, you keep a running total in your head, when you see certain cards you add to the total, when you see others you subtract

Anheuser

if a card is worth 10 then you count it as minus one?

Karelzarath

@GreySage If you payed money for an uncertain outcome, then yes.

DForck42

20:56

when the number is at a certain threshold you general know that the coming cards are going to be high

LegendaryDude

Gambling requires two things: risk and uncertainty

Anheuser

@NautArch ...

Yuuki

Counting cards is easy. 1, 2, 3, 4... all the way until 52.

DForck42

multiple deck shoes makes these systems more difficult

Anheuser

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 ..... = infinity.

GreySage

20:57

@DForck42 Pretty much, the idea is that when the point total is at a certain point, you are more likely to get 2 10s, leading to a usual win

@Karelzarath I used my time, and time is money, so...

NautArch

@Anheuser sorry, it's been a long day. launched our new website...still waiting on the DNS to propagate.

Karelzarath

@GreySage Not if you're unemployed it's not. ;)

GreySage

@Karelzarath haha, fair enough

THiebert

are questions about miniatures on topic?

Adam

@Anheuser I thought it was -1/12 or something like that

Anheuser

20:57

@DForck42 @GreySage so then would you still be a gambler if you're using mathematics to know that your chances of winning are much higher.

@Adam noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Adam

;)

Karelzarath

@LegendaryDude Not wagering? I suppose that could qualify as risk.

LegendaryDude

@Karelzarath Your wager is your risk

You are risking a certain amount of value on an uncertain outcome

Anheuser

...

LegendaryDude

Please keep it clean.

Anheuser

20:59

Sorry.

But seriously.

SPavel

@Anheuser It sounds like more of a kink

Karelzarath

:36243795 Dude, you're at, like, an 11 and I need to more at a 5.

;)

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