These alignment questions are tricky, i'm wondering if there's something we can do to help inform people as to why they're tricky in the Help section for the site or something.
@Adeptus There was a lifeboat being assembled (a few weeks ago, IIRC?) somewhere. Methinks reddit, but I'm not at all conversant in that scene.... (cc: @Adeptus)
@doppelgreener Hmmm. It just seems that, especially with 5e, alignment will always be subjective/opinion based. It's entirely dependent on the world you're in and judging character actions on your particular view (based on your country/religion/etc) isn't the right way to do it.
@eimyr I clicked on something, but didn't receive any sort of pageload that made me confident a vote registered. Mine was for AA, if you care. (My reasoning: that sounded like a game I haven't played/tried to play before, where LE seemed more like games I have played.)
I did answer (that question is a huge case of XY, by the way) but it appears they've pretty much settled on the Y despite it being a very poor choice for all parties involved.
@NautArch not only that, but alignment is just like ethics: it's opinion based and changes on the way you look at the situation. On top of that, from what I understand, there is no rule to follow your alignment anyway. An honest man can lie every so often.
@Szega Did you read the question after the edit? They apparently built their character somewhat poorly and were granted an extra feat as a sort of power-up to catch up on the other characters.
@NautArch D&D's alignment system has been pretty broken forever, and simplistic enough it'll collapse and implode on itself if you so much as look at it funny.
@doppelgreener But because most folks have very specific moral views, it's hard to separate what we think about morality/ethics/alignment from the world we're playing in. It's the same issue we have in looking at past societies and civilizations and judging them.
@doppelgreener OTOH, he's also got a following among people who really like how (many) indie games are very thoughtful and verbose about design choices, and are just glad to see somebody doing that sort of work for D&D. There's such a limited pool of well-reasoned design thought being elucidated in the D&Dverse that even a weekly expletive-laden jerk-screed can be rather successful.
@Szega Exactly, but as a Level 13 Paladin with a +3 modifier, I generally don't risk my actions on saving throw related spells, and kinda bummed that my DIvine sense is now limited to 3/day.
The way OP's GM seems to be based on the very minute descriptions the posts give me sort of reminds me of my first experiences with DnD 4e under a reasonably novice GM. He was also a very weird combination of strict and loose rules, usually picking whichever option hurted the game more (inadvertently, of course).
Like, if there was a rickety bridge over a stream, and we had to roll a Dex check to not fall of on crossing it, we'd have to roll it every damn time. We wound up crossing the bridge thrice, iirc, and every time one of us fell into the river and was rescued by the others. It was fun for the first time,and a pointless distraction the next two times.
@ShadowKras I'd say combats :) The best defense is a good offense is kind of a problem in 5e. It's often better to go for the kill ASAP and fix whatever needs fixing after.
@Adam usually things that are gm-dependant will become weak choices if the gm feels it breaks whatever he was planning for an encounter, and soon stop being used.
(ie: illusions, divinations and enchantments)
its hard for the gm to argue against "i do 6d6 damage"
@NautArch that's true for most editions of d&d
Ironically, killing things fast is not a good idea in Dungeon World.
@Szega I believe it's whoever clicked on the link. Thought that gets a little strange if the person who's being prompted doesn't have chat-permission. They still get presented the option (because the page doesn't validate network-wide rep before generating that prompt/link) but then if they click on it their attempt to create a room fails.
@eimyr Aah, I've caught up now, so I assume you rang just to notify me that @MrLloyd is here. Good to see!
I think that one divination thing for wizards is cool in DnD 5e, where they get to pre-roll some d20's at the beginning of the day, and use each of these rolls once as a result of any d20 roll for the day.
It's simple, it's intuitive and it's reasonably well integrated with the rest of the game, which makes it cool.
@kviiri I would argue intuitive. I would require the wizard to interfere in a way to get the benefit. They choose when to use it. That sounds like an action to me...
@Szega The range of rolls and the range of results are significantly different, even at low levels. I've played with a Diviner. It works really well as is.
@kviiri I dunno--strikes me as a GM who wants to try and help but also is very cautious about breaking anything, so just wants to stick with book-options. And then they misunderstand the thing about proficiency which is understandable (after all, you cannot stack proficiencies, so perhaps that means you can't have the thing that would lead to the second proficiency?), but correctable.
@Szega Diviners don't get much,though. Divination spells aren't often cast, so they don't get the bonus slot recovery that other schools get as often. I like the mechanic, both in function and in my fantasy of what's happening.
Is your fantasy break because of the crossover between the table roll and the in-game event?
@nitsua60 Meh... If they're adding it as a bonus, outside the normal progression, they've already broken away from book options. If the character build was faulty at that level, the right answer is to rebuild. Even Adventurer's League allows a complete rebuild before you play at L5.
@Szega Hmm. THat's an interesting point that I didn't think about.
Although a different way of looking at it would that basically the roll didn't happen (it did, but the Diviner in the game "sees" the actual future...the players have it wrong )
It's a metagame resource, a way for the players to have a small degree of control over the randomness of the dice. A lot of more recent games have them.
@nitsua60 To me, it seems they're letting the worst possible reasons getting in the way of fun, even when it should be obvious that it can't be broken worse than the option suggested by the GM.
@Szega The players at the table make the rolls to determine what happens in the game itself. While that's still happening, the wizard in the game does something and basically overrides what the rolls were. There effectively was no roll.
You could say that he saw that "if you sidestep left beside a red mushroom, you will get hit", then warns the fighter when he sees the situation (> force a low roll on the enemy)
All I'm trying to say is that I don't think there's much need to be dumping all over the GM. It's easily explained by someone who (a) wants to help and (b) wants to deviate ad little as possible from the rules while doing so. (And, unfortunately, had a simple misunderstanding of one of those rules.) Please remember that Be Nice applies to people offsite, too.
Yeah, it's not an after-the-fact override. It's a "Well, the fighter is pretty beat up, but I'm not worried because I know he'll land the killing blow." The player then assigns his saved good roll to the Fighter's attack (or maybe his save against something that could kill him).
The divination thing is actually a very unusual move from DnD. It allows both author mode and "retcon", both mostly seen in games going in modern directions.
Or post-modern, even!
I have a recurring debate with my Apocalypse World GM over the use of retcon or flashback moves suggested in the book as optional moves. I think they're awesome.
I sort of wish our DnD had them too but we have enough in the way of houserules already, I guess...
I'm a fan of giving players limited control over the dice and the broader control over the story. Of course, it helps that I have players who understand the difference between the two. They embrace the concept of "failing forward", where a failure for the character can be a success for the game because it tells a better story.
One thing I encountered recently and really liked was the Momentum/Threat system from Modiphius upcoming Star Trek game. When a player rolls really well, the "excess" successes convert to Momentum. When they're facing a critical task, they can then spend Momentum for extra dice. If there isn't enough Momentum, they can give the GM Threat to do the same thing.
The GM uses Threat to add dice to NPCs in the same way Momentum is used by the PCs (though he doesn't generate more for good rolls, because he tends to make more rolls). There are also other character abilities (selected somewhat like Feats in D&D) that trigger on spending Momentum or generating Threat (rerolls, for instance).
Myself, I am a bit disappointed at having to do stuff for my characters. For example, it's my duty to decide whether my character, when storming towards the enemy stronghold on his mighty post-apo truck, installs an anti-mine flail or puncture proof tires when able to afford just one. I know next to nothing about post-apocalyptic countermeasures.
My character, on the other hand, should be allowed to make that decision based on the information available. That's why I love the flashback thing. When something unexpected happens, I can declare that my character was actually planned for this and roll snake eyes to see that the plan was absolutely horrible.
@BESW This reminds me... Someone made a comment about Doctor Who and gardening - specifically companion planting. So I said, "you mean, like planting a Rose next to a Pond?"
I don't doubt that. Failure can make for fantastic drama. But I always link to that post whenever I hear the term "failing forward". It's practically a reflex at this point
Also, when I think of "failing forward" first thing I think of is three-stooges style slapstick where the bumbling heroes fail at everything, but somehow make forward progress because the plot demands it. Second thing is dramatic failure.
@Adam Definitely the later... dramatic failure. While I've usually got a metaplot, the character's actions or inactions (good or bad) are always capable of making it take a sharp left hand turn.
Kinda like the Bubblegum Crisis game I was running. They did the job they were paid for - recovering a particular person from a damaged US Navy submarine. They failed to tell anybody what happened... that a nanotech weapon made all the boomer (android) crew members go nuts. Afterwards, they headed to Cape Cod to lick their wounds.
So, what does the Navy do? Tows the damaged ship to the closest port... Boston. Which of course exposes the entire city to the nanoweapon. Chaos ensues. When the characters finally return from their little vacation, they find the entire city surrounded by a military quarantine. Woopsie. :)
@NautArch It was. Especially because one of the characters had a rare medication she needed to live. She snuck past the cordon, and to her house. When she gets there, her nurse boomer has her condo filled with dead bodies of people that look kind of like her. The boomer is standing there, syringe in hand, stabbing a corpse in the back repeating "You need this! This is good for you!" over and over. :)
Site-related question: I saw that @doppelgreener was kind enough to translate the spreadsheet into a table for my answer. Is there an easy, copy/pasta, way of doing that or is it a manual process?
Gotcha! I started looking for a "how to table" but then gave up because of the aforementioned sleep need ;). BUT now that I have a sample I can do it right in the future ;)
I might have to see if Brackets can do that same trick that Sublime shows. Somehow paying to a text-editor hurts my soul.
@ShadowKras - I didn't immediately see the syntax commands when I posted. Also figured that the OP might want a downloadable file for offline use.
Copying the table like @doppelgreener so that the next time I have to post a question/answer with tabular data I don't have to refer to an external file.
@BanjoFox I'm so entangled in my own weirdly (evil, to start with) configured emacs these days. So I tend to use replacements like %s:\t:</td><td>:g for those needs.
Oh, yes, there was a time when I had to use Windows. Emacs worked okay-ish once I got the right things sorted, but didn't play nicely with interactive python interpreters etc.
(And it's not like Emacs doesn't have its flaws, like eg. with big files with long lines. But I think I won't get rid of it anytime soon.)
To see how any formula was written in any question or answer, including this one, right-click on the expression it and choose "Show Math As > TeX Commands". (When you do this, the '$' will not display. Make sure you add these. See the next point.)
For inline formulas, enclose the formula in $......
Arrays
It is often easier to read tables formatted in MathJax rather than plain text or a fixed width font. Arrays and tables are created with the array environment. Just after \begin{array} the format of each column should be listed, use c for a center aligned column, r for right aligned, l for...
that second post is the reference for how to make tables
It saddens me, in a "there's nothing to do about this" sort of way, when a perfectly good answer I put down is losing the vote to another perfectly good answer that says the exact same thing, but was A)Posted after mine, B)Says almost exactly what mine says.
@godskook A longer explanation on the differences, mostly.But the verbosity/formatting is the major difference. You've got the same base content - it's that the other answer has more verbiage explaining it.
@BanjoFox although that is often the difference between many answers. There can be one answer to a question, but different ways of explaining that answer.
@BanjoFox, I don't believe he reworded my answer as much as had the same thoughts to the same question, and while mine was first on the page by a good 3 minutes, verbosity is killing my relative vote-count.
@NautArch - I know. While browsing the list of questions I saw a LOT of redundancy -.- @godskook - Hrm, Okay I think I understand now. Higher verbosity == more upvotes?
Essentially, yeah. Although not that I think that's particularly ~wrong~, but it is disheartening for someone like me who finds being verbose like that difficult.
You and I are probably in the same boat then. I have to do a lot of technical writing and PREFER fewer words to explain something. Makes for faster reading.
@godskook Agreed. I prefer to keep my answers simple and direct, in order to quickly and accurately answer the question at hand, and I don't tend to include semi-relevant metadata.
@BanjoFox It's the chat's first name! (It was an error @doppelgreener had in the chat list at some point: Our chat showed up as JEFF. That's how it got that nickname.)
My Plan A for tonight just got bungled. DM says the item I was planning on levitating and dumping in the water is 501lbs...and technically attached to the ship itself.
it's a metal sarcophagus.
Plan B is now active. Place Immovable Rod on top, activate. Cast heat Metal on sarcophagus.
@MadMAxJr nah, much more simple. Just figure lid has to move up to get off. Placing the immovable rod prevents that. Heat Metal cooks whatever is inside the sarcophagus.
but it's nuts. We have a fighter (sword/board) with 22 or something. My paladin is 20. I just assume I get hit now because the DM has to throw stuff at us that can hit those guys.
Assuming an underwater game has dealt with breathing in a one-and-done fashion, how is it different from an aboveground game where everyone can fly? Serious question: is it just the nautical flavor, or am I missing something that I don't realize I'm missing, staying abovewater all these years?
@nitsua60 being a owner of the aquatic adventures book and having played a full-flier 3D combat in Pathfinder, they have similarities, but there are several differences, specially when current and buyoancy is a factor.
@godskook aesthetics are a nontrivial contributor to making a post pleasing to read, which is part of what helps it succeed -- and part of the divider between things we enjoy reading and things we don't.
@Papayaman1000 in my experience, if you convert a 15-20 RP race from PF to 5ed, the race will be balanced with what the 5ed core races got. Its usually the core PF races that are weaker than core 5ed races, but not by a significant margin. Even so, i would suggest converting abilities so they have a similar effect and text to those on 5ed races.
The PF undines being a 8 RP race, are fairly weak compared to the 5ed races, but if the player is okay with a direct conversion, the race isnt completely bad. Unless there is absolutely no use for a water speed in your game. Regardless, I would simply reskin the aasimar stats, and replace the Celestial Legacy spells with water-themed spells and call it a day.
Oh, and replace the aasimar resistances with resistance to cold damage.
The Red Bandits have boarded the train, hidden among the other passengers. They wait an hour or two - to be sure the train is far from any city - then, on the boss's signal, they all pull out their weapons. The boss shouts, "Everybody down! This is a robbery!"
As they thieves rush from car to ca...
@NautArch Also cross fingers there's not a lot of swell rocking the ship, or maybe just that the DM doesn't think of that. ;D
Or maybe the DM doesn't agree with most of those answers and considers immovable rods to be relative to the nearest large frame of movement reference, so it'd be fine on a ship? Possibly a good idea to do some limited experiments!
Our group wants to run sporadic one-shots, and we haven't found an efficient way to sort through the published mini-dungeons/short adventures, either on the FG store or through Steam.
Currently, we search for "mini-dungeon" and then have to check each, one by one, to see the level range. Is the...
Destruktor pointed out that not everything on that list is on FG Store. but it still seems better than nothing. Plus Google search for name of mini-dungeon does produce results elsewhere.
@BanjoFox I also find it frustrating when I write something I like and then someone points out flaws in it, but I also appreciate that the collaborative-improvement process here does result in some very finely-crafted answer material in the end.
@SevenSidedDie - I suppose it is more that I would like to respond with something to the likes of "This is what the FG Support team provided". However doing so would not add to the value of the answer.
Part of me also wants to kick oneself for not validating the list. But it is also possible that FG will have all of them in the future.
If the FG support team provided the list themselves, then keeping the whole thing as the answer sounds like a good thing. You just might want to put a footnote at the end saying that someone pointed out that only some of them are in the store right now.
@NautArch But it wouldn't be the spell doing stuff, it would be the DM looking at the situation and (potentially) thinking, “That's a mundane furnace now” and ruling that furnaces do things. This is definitely in DM ruling territory though, so Know Your DM™!
@SevenSidedDie Yeah, I'd be kinda miffed if that happened, but I could see it. I'm not sure this DM would that, but he may. I'm willing to risk it for the Cool Hot Idea.
ButI have a feeling it may not matter and that whatever is inside won't be stopped by the Immovable rod
I know pathfinder's immovable rod can be destroyed, because it is actually a difficult to move rod. And causing damage to the rod means moving the particles around from their normal position, which is the opposite of being immovable. So if we removed the clause about the str check and it became truly immovable, would it be damaged?
I was fixing it, internet hiccups broke the message halfway.
From what i read online, current locomotives can pull over 30,000 pounds of weight, so the rod would likely be pushed against the train and deactivate.
5e Tables? We generally don't do item damage unless bizarre circumstances and DM wanting to do something (like when my paladin fell 60+ feet and I lost a potion.)
@BanjoFox It depends how strong the door is. If the door can withstand 8000lbs, then the rod would deactivate. Otherwise it would push through the door
@GreySage - hrm... good point :) In that case any door, on the train for instance, that -COULD- withstand the pressure would probably cause the train to hesitate momentarily until the rod deactivated itself.
@NautArch - Full disclosure: I tend to follow the "make sh!t up" rule so that my games can flow and "feel" better.
@NautArch Mine do, if I'm playing a traditional game. I don't treat PC-owned/carried objects as different in the world simulation, so going swimming without protecting one's scrolls, books, bowstrings, and etc. would be like you or I diving into a swimming pool carrying a (non-waterproof) smartphone.
@SevenSidedDie you remind me of this one time playing Iron Kingdoms, when one of the characters went swimming with the equivalent of a steam-powered magical full plate. It didn't work for a few days after that and some engineering checks to fix it.
Our group wants to run sporadic one-shots, and we haven't found an efficient way to sort through the published mini-dungeons/short adventures, either on the FG store or through Steam.
Currently, we search for "mini-dungeon" and then have to check each, one by one, to see the level range. Is the...
