It's on the "Dishonest Conversation Tactics Bingo Card" along with "can't you take a joke" and "I was doing a social experiment." Honest use of devil's advocate is in a pre-conversation agreement, not as a post-conversation excuse.
Well, Devil's Advocate is a term that comes from the practice of the Catholic church, and originally meant a designated cleric, who was supposed to find every single piece of dirt that could stick to an otherwise highly esteemed individual during the process of beatification. A position no one would take willingly.
@trogdor You should watch it. It's a parody of high school hero animes with the most ridiculous premise possible. The totally abused the animation budget and didn't hold back on the jokes.
@eimyr the thing is though,.... I have like 50 anime recommendations that I still need to get to and even less time on my hands than when I took my hiatus on watching them
doesn't mean I won't give it a look, but I have too much of a good thing in that department for the foreseeable future
@BESW ok, that might depend on what I would normally consider Cyberpunk, and I think as long as no one says anything further I don't think it's a big deal
> Lich of sense. Because of your grand age and wisdom, you get +3 instead of +2 when invoking aspects to explain things to people. You also get +2 to Overcome with Lore in social situations, but you're weak to droning on about how things used to be, the current generations don't know how easy they have it, nobody respects their undead elders anymore...
> Lich of cents. Your thriftiness and financial sense gives you +1 to Overcome when haggling over deals. You also start each session with a pockets of spare change and shinies aspect with one free invoke.
> Not a Lich of Sense. You get +4 when creating advantages by Quickly confusing people with your babble, but you can be compelled to make choices without thinking things through.
> Knock some sense into you. You can communicate telepathically with someone, but you gotta punch them to do it. You didn't make the rules. You'd change them if you could.
> Lich incense. The smoke from this creepy stuff has this world and what you're pretty sure is the afterlife overlap wherever the smoke is, for as long as the smoke is there. You can use Lore to reach out to denizens of the afterlife. Warning: horrible stuff may occur.
> Lich license. By properly identifying yourself, you automatically succeed at overcoming authority-based obstacles to raising the dead. You also get +2 on Resource rolls to gather necromantic materials. However you can be compelled to get delayed by bureaucratic red tape, surprise inspections, and similar hassles.
@nwp Have you've ever had one of those cotton candy swirl yogurts, where one half is light blue and the other is pink? If you mix the two halves together you get a light kind of purple color. It looks like that.
Possibly in a Weird gumshoe narrative. Investigation of occult and magical crimes, and stuff. He'd be a Lich forensic scientist / detective / something.
Is it bad form to answer your own question if somebody else's answer gave you inspiration for your own answer? Specifically the answer I got on my ghost question helped me come up with a counter argument.
@Adam You are fine to post answers to your own questions, and you are fine to build on other answers. Both will incur extra scrutiny so make sure it's a good answer.
In general it's bad form to basically post a self-answer that's strictly just a subset of another (without any individual improvement/additions) and accept it, since people will see that as not giving credit where it's due: that other answer deserves the tick, people will feel.
Also "counter argument" compels me to mention: make sure you're directly answering your question, not so much responding to that other answer. I'm sure you may understand this, but I'm saying this just in case. :)
@Adam Personal Opinion: It'd only strike me as bad form if A)you're over-pillaging someone else's answer such that the better solution is to upvote/accept their answer or suggest improvements to their answer or B)you accept your own answer in contravention of voting.
@NautArch Personally, I'm starting to lean towards "it can", mostly because I think that would be cooler. But I still feel it's worth seeing the answers that come in.
Tormenta RPG is a very popular game on Brazil, with many expansions, there's two main systems, one based on 3.5 D&D and other based on Pathfinder, many brazilian players speak english and search for answers in this language, mainly for GM techniques, i think a Tormenta (or TormentaRPG) tag would ...
You know, I'm starting to add a lot more of those "fails by 5 or more" effects to all my creatures. I really think the game would benefit from having more of them, even if it pushed things a bit more to the deadlier side.
for example, last session, my party fought a warren of Troglodytes and I decided that if they failed their save on the stench by 5 or more, they would not only be poisoned, but they would be stunned by the stench until the start of their next turn too.
Of course, the save is pretty low, so that never actually happened
It does suck, but I'm okay with that. The players are allowed to do sucky things to the monsters. So sometimes the monsters do sucky things to them. Plus, the chance of that actually happening was something like 25-30%, not including any bonuses they got from spells and such. Plus as soon as you save from one Trog, you are immune to the stench of all of them for a whole hour. I felt that the drama was worth it.
@Adam The monsters aren't there to enjoy the game, they're there to be killed.
In general, symmetry between monsters and PCs isn't absolute. Mind control versus monsters is another example that tends to work dramatically worse on PCs.
The monsters don't know that. As far as they're concerned the monsters want to win. I believe that my world has to be absolutely vicious, even to characters as heroic as the PCs. Obviously not every super fail mechanic is "if you fail bad, you lose a turn", and frankly, I don't think that I can describe why this works just in chat alone.
@kviiri I don't believe that's true. I feel like I must view the world, as a real thing. And though I definitely curate the experience to try to make things as fun as possible, I believe that it would be a disservice to my players to think about the game world too much through that kind of "The world is only a game" scope.
@kviiri I don't think their "deciding" to stink. They just stink. And creating a stronger effect makes for a possibly more interesting battle because of the increased risk. Not for every table, but definitely works for some.
@kviiri Oh, that yes. But that goes back to what I said about curating the experience to have more fun. Yes, the world is a game, and some decision are purely mine to make. But other decisions I feel I must view as if the monsters were real; as if the monsters were making the decision on their own. Because me and my players value that kind of game, and that kind of drama. If you don't believe that, it's cool. Good on you. But it works for us. We have fun. My players have fun.
@NautArch I don't mind the stronger effect, but as a player, and a GM, I feel taking away turns always goes very awkward. It's not like DnD battles are streamlined, fast, brutal romps even without losing turns.
@Adam I just don't see how losing turns equates to making the world more real.
It doesn't make them real, I think we ended up talking in circles. It's just the kind of game my players like. If you and your players dont like it, that's fine, but it works for us. Plus, there was no guarantee that they would lose a turn. If you don't like it, don't do it. We like it, so I'm going to do it.
There's no hit point system, but instead a more "realistic" damage system where getting hit would instead stun you if the damage wasn't major (Shaken). When Shaken, the character could only move during their turn, for half speed, unless they succeeded on a spirit check with a Raise. (the latter part was later errata'd to reduce stun-locking, that any success is enough)
@Adam I just want to be absolutely clear I understood you correctly: your players actually like losing turns?
@NautArch Well, I think it oversells a bit in that sense :P
I didn't find it as fast and furious as their tagline says. Nor fun, for that matter, but I guess we were playing it quite differently than what the system expected.
@kviiri hehe. We were looking at SW: The Tomorrow Legion. Built two characters for it to get a feel and it seems crazy. My friend was saying "expect death"
@kviiri Obviously not, but we like the drama of potentially disastrous consequences when they fail their saving throws really badly. In this one case where the thematics fit, that means that they if they failed a super easy saving throw really badly, they lose one turn. I'm not taking turns left and right every which way to sunday.
> Staff-chucks. Once per session you may channel a spell through these in order to have it affect everything nearby at the cost of having no control or finesse. After you've finished casting your spell, roll another 4dF beside your original 4dF. For each plus among all eight dice, choose something nearby and give it an aspect of Catastrophically destroyed or Horribly on fire with no free invokes. Then the GM does the same for every minus. The same thing can't be chosen twice.
@NautArch In one combat, our main soldier-type (eg. the character who had pretty much no identity than shooting or hitting things) was hit pretty badly and suffered an overarching -3 to all rolls while being Shaken. While he had put a lot of skill points towards shooting, brawling and being overall intimidating, he had a fairly low Spirit stat, which is used to break from Shaken.
And that -3 wound penalty carries on to Spirit checks, and the foe had a special ability that prevented fate chips from being used to eliminate shaken or reroll checks.
@kviiri I'll say that as a player I've never minded missing a turn (stun, banished, force-caged, what-have-you) or even an entire combat. Frankly, I enjoy sitting back a minute and seeing what they'll do without/for/to me.
IIRC the gunslinger guy had a d6 in Spirit, so with a -3 wound penalty, he had a 11/36 chance to even get to act during his turn. And when he did get to act, whatever he did also got a -3 wound penalty.
So he basically hung around, bored, playing Hearthstone when the rest of us were fighting, because his character was so useless and incapable he had basically no agency at all but to moan and whine.
@kviiri IME combat dragging has a lot more to do with playing every violent encounter out until a massacre's complete, all in turn-time. "You-all have this well in hand and won't even need to expend any real resources to wipe them up; let's all take d6-1 damage and fast-forward to 'they're all dead or incapacitated, you choose,'" can easily shave ten minutes off of a this-has-become-trivial encounter.
I don't do it every time, or even many times, but probably at least once a session.
(Unless players as a group want to play the board-game a little longer.)
And encounter-design -wise, I tend towards lots of weaker enemies instead of few or single stronger ones. They play out better in my opinion, but are slower to run.
...and judging by WotC constantly changing the solo monster rules between the editions, neither do they.
@nitsua60 Legendary actions and that buff the monster, but I feel they're missing that feel of progress you get when you mow down a horde of orcs a handful at a time.
@kviiri Sure, though I'm not thinking of them so much as buffs as I am in terms of narration/pacing. "5 PCs unload, then monster does its thing" just sucks in my book.
@NautArch That's been the last few sessions in my game too. Mostly because they somehow manage to find the "if the players charge into this room, all available creatures come to attack them and fight to the death" hatchery/nursery room during this last adventure.
Eg. a dragon could be composed of Body, Left Wing, Right Wing and Tail. Killing the body kills the dragon, but taking out the Wings can disable wing swipe attacks and flight, while taking out the tail makes the dragon unbalanced for several turns (advantage on attack rolls against it maybe?) and disables its tail attack.
@godskook Heh.
Yeah, I don't think single boss fights were ever a forte of DnD.
@kviiri @BESW's most effective "single" boss fights involved creating multiple enemies and treating them as parts of the one boss: for example, a dragon with a head, body, claws, and wings, and each one would have its own place in the initiative and be something the players could attack.
His experience was that solo monsters don't really work very well since it's so easy to just stun them and make them irrelevant, and kill them off super quickly.
@kviiri You've pretty much described exactly what they did. Often they had parts that did healing, damage, protection, etc. Depending on how your group was built, it lead to different tactics. If you had the right types of attacks to bypass the protection, and enough raw damage to outpace the healing, you could go right for the head. If your group was tough or quick-healing, but low damage output, you might be able to tank the damage bits while whittling down the boss' protection bits.
@T.J.L. I think the most memorable one from FFX was Sinspawn Gui, which was also "the boss that screws you up if you didn't understand how to level your characters".
Everyone GMs in turn. We were stupid enough to start with the most experienced ones, so now we have fresh GMs running their first adventures for level 6 people... must not be the easiest start possible, eh?
@kviiri Depends on your approach. If you aim for good combat, that's definitely a challenge, but the overall plot is easier to to continue than to conceive
@kviiri Well, part of the problem is that "boss fights" are purely a construct of games. Such things don't really exist in real life. Not like that, not for Humans.
@godskook One arrow from one goblin can knock out some level 1 characters in one shot. Two goblins could kill one level 1 player. No clue how 3.5 was, but low level 5e is really dangerous.
@godskook 5e they're about the same except it's 6+con hp and 10+dex AC unless they start out with mage armor and are willing to spend one of their 2 first level spells on it
@godskook a huge metal vehicle with multiple modes of attack, impervious to regular attacks but with limited battle awareness and well-defined weak points is.
@eimyr Tanks are a bad example of a boss fight. Depending on the tank and the gear of the soldier, it can range from anywhere between "the infantryman is screwed" to "rocket tag", but in no instance I can think of is it likely to be a prolonged epic battle I'd expect from a boss fight.
@eimyr I'm going to keep pounding that point because that's essentially the way RPGs actually need to go to make "boss encounters" more engaging: add more mooks to them and stop making them singular entities to fight.
@eimyr also, if a tank is fighting a group of infantry without supporting fire from other tanks, or infantry accompianament, someone messed up BIG TIME.
All the olden myths about strangling the Grendel and dukin' it with the dragon are motivators for having epic boss fights in fantasy RPGs, it's just a matter of making them mechanically interesting.
Then again, counterexamples exist. David got Goliath with one stone. Maybe it's a parable about the futility of the quest for good boss fights?
we're entering a realm of semantics and fight nomenclature. What makes a boss fight a boss fight? Is it the number of combatants on each side? Is it the power mismatch between sides? Is it the length of an encounter? Is it it's survivability? Eh, I'm, out I think
I don't know enough about bosses and epic combat to contribute meaningfully
In my campaign, a 'boss fight' is just a cool, memorable fight. Whether that be because of a single strong enemy, or just the villain, or a complicated mechanic
@godskook Yeah, that's what 5e does (they have Legendary actions and Lair actions), but I'm more concerned about the fight becoming a sort of HP grind. Normally, the players get excited when something dies, because it's a tangible sign of progress in the battle - that doesn't happen if there's only a single monster who keeps accumulating mechanically non-significant wounds for several turns.
Mechanically significant wounds, on the other hand - like the dragon losing a wing and its ability to fly because the crafty PCs would target them, is another thing entirely, and something I intend to try.
@nwp Yeah, I was thinking of some sort of AoE resistance that keeps the damage reasonably potent but not to the point of making fireballs a no-brainer.
@kviiri But by the same token, if the dragon is, say, flying, and the player can target the dragon's wing, why not just target the dragon's body? Killing the dragon asap seems to me to be the best course of action to minimize damage, assuming no other factors that I'm unaware of.
@Adam It's a matter of calibration, I'd say. If the wings have low enough HP but high enough utility for the dragon, it's a very good tactic for the players to target them.
Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker had these giant robot tank bosses (gee, that's a first!) that had destructible parts. It was quite cool. The best DPS strategy was to target their AI pods, but disabling some of the nastier weapons first was still worth it.
Maybe the dragon gets 1 legendary action for the wings, 1 for the tail and 1 for the head. Losing the wings essentially makes it lose a legendary action.
My players slew their first dragon in the last session! It was a white wyrmling. They were really spooked by it because the first breath attack it made dealt huge damage and they all happened to stand inside the AoE cone :P
Now they have a fancy-ish title (sadly, "Dragon slayer" doesn't translate that well to my language while retaining its sense of marvel) and lots of fame - always a big deal when a party pulls off a classic milestone of heroic deeds.
@eimyr Nah, it would just be the monstrously long "Lohikäärmeentappaja". Or maybe "lohikäärmeensurma" (surma being a common suffix which is a bit like "-bane" in English). I settled for "Käärmeensurma" which is literally snakesbane, more poetically wyrmsbane.
In general I try to avoid English in my campaigns, because everyone already enjoys their popular culture in it most of the time - I want to give them something new for a change... so my place names and characters tend to be Swedish :P
@eimyr We usually refer to things by their English names if they're rulebook terms or specific equipment. Years of fantasy video games and that have made most of the items like chain mail, halberd etc much better known than their Finnish equivalents :P
@kviiri My first language is Polish and I have to say, some words that describe specific pieces of armour are just not there. We also have some very well known names for weapons that we have no idea what they were.
e.g. "kord" or "kordzik" which is supposed to be like a messer or a large knife, or possibly seax or... we honestly have no idea.
@eimyr Heh, I see what you mean. I don't think anyone in our party knows the Finnish word for glaive except me, and even I am not sure if it's more accurately the word for bardiche.
I play with CK2plus mod which doesn't have De Jure empires except HRE and Byzantium, but some important kingdoms like Poland have special decisions to form an empire. Everyone can use the custom empire decision, of course.
out of those 4 names one is a modern invention, another doesn't mean what you think and a thing that is named by it doesn't have a distinct name at all.
@kviiri In one of the ercent patches you can create a custom empire anyway, but the requirements are quite challenging
@eimyr Would you happen to know why the legendary king of Poland is called Piast the Wheelwright? Wikipedia doesn't give any reasoning for the sobriquet.
Was that simply his job before he became awesome and unified the land?
and since he was essentially an usurper, it would be important for him to create a "folk hero" myth around himself, and having roots in a commoner (esteemed and necessary, but nevertheless) occupation would serve that quite well
So he's not only known as Piast the Wheelwright, but also as Piast the Ploughman
so assuming he's a historical figure with a myth around it, he might or might not have been an actual ploughman or wheelwright, but anything is a guess by then.
@NautArch Druids are allowed to use scimitars, yes? Is that scimitar made of steel? What about iron or bronze? Obsidian won't work, that would just shatter.
If they can use a metal sword, then I think what little metal is in "studded leather" is negligible.
@GreySage Leather squeaks anyway. Let's say you get a blunt hit to the chest. Would you rather have the energy nicely dissipated by the padding or transferred to the stud, which is nicely driven between your ribs?
