@BESW My favorite of his is the "ever-North chariot." A differential in the axle feeds into a dial-indicator on the chariot that always points in the same direction as you initially set it, even as the chariot turns under it. (For approximate values of 'always.')
ICYMI: New 4-packs of Fate dice in both Fire and glow-in-the-dark Midnight varieties release December 4th! You'll be able to get these through your FLGS or direct from us in just a few weeks. MSRP: $6.
> Hijacker. You get +2 on all rolls to use a vehicle you stole.
> Drive it like you stole it. When using a stolen vehicle, you can ignore 2 stress by narrating how the vehicle is put out of commission by the attack.
> Cover. What Cover? When you give your real name to a target while on a secret mission, you get armor:2 against all social attacks from that target for the rest of the scene.
> The Gump. Once per session you can reveal that you were low-key involved in a famous event in order to justify placing two free invokes on an existing aspect.
And this is a stunt-on-request I made for a friend:
> Just like in the movies. Once per session your character can choose a specialized skill and act as if they have training in it for the rest of the session. However, you can be compelled to get it wrong because you're just doing what you've seen on TV.
@Yuuki If you're doing some of the repairs yourself, don't forget about the home repair SE.
And that drywall is covered with paper (aka cellulose) and if it gets any kind of mold in there while wet, the only way to get it out permanently is full replacement.
incidentally, that's why bathrooms should be at least partially done with concrete board.
I suppose I could see printing off a map, but I find something very satisfying about the tactile aspect of a battle mat. The ability to edit on the fly is great.
Plus you can supplement with things like a small pile of paper squares to indicate the chickens, pigs, and sheep the players used to add confusion to an ambush.
@HadesHerald I've had good success using quarters of the map to represent different floors in a building, and/or "this floor is like that one, but the center rooms are missing in favor of X"
@nitsua60 Since the party was planning an ambush in a city, I let them pick features of the surroundings (what kind of shops, etc.) and do some basic prep for it. They chose to ambush a caravan of three carts by putting two carts of their own in nearby alleys, then box them in. The carts were full of various farm animals to be released into the streets as a diversion.
Still an all-time favorite D&D moment. Particularly after the halfling crawled under one of the carts, then the wizard polymorphed him into an elephant.
@HadesHerald I recommend using them for city maps as well, and sometimes important buildings.
@HadesHerald For important re-usable maps like a city that you need to save between sessios, I'd use paper. A battle mat can stain if you leave it on too long
If you have more storage space than you need for a binder or folder, you can consider going to an art supply store to buy a roll of paper
@Shalvenay I haven't looked, as 1-2 battle mats has always been sufficient for me. I'd guess that there's some kind of draftsman/draughtsman supply company that would sell you something like that
I mean, 25x30 is the size of my smaller chessex. When I want paper, though (which is a lot of the time) I use those large sheets you get 100-in-a-pack for $5 from a moving/packing company. Perfect to scribble all over, roll up, tear, &c.
Some of you who are D&D AL players may find this WOTC survey on it worth filling out. (They're also asking for people who haven't AL'd to fill it out.)
ugh .. just realised why a particular behaviour from a certain GM sounds so familiar. He'd often joke about, but then would also follow through claiming he warned us, and rules are rules, and that's what the die rolled. Any time he's called on this contradiction and caught out in an impossible set up he'd fall back to "I was just joking".
"Your PCs can do anything" ... "If your PCs decamp from the Village of Mary Sue's to that castle you found, they all become NPCs because this campaign is all about the story of VoMS"
Is there a d&d version ruleset that provides guidance on modifying monster stats by reconfiguring the balance of their stats? For example, take a typical ogre, subtract points from HD and AC and add points to Damage ... to make a "glass jaw" or "glass cannon" version.
There's nothing in 1e or 2e (which is what I'm familiar with), but I'm vaguely familiar with the concept and wondering if there are other rulesets I could plunder from.
I've also seen mention of archetypes on mobs in 5e (Sniper, Brute, etc) but don't know if that's just flair, narrative/behavioural, or even if they terms are defined. Googling for those terms isn't helpful.
You could either change a monsters type to get its stats to be more like what you wanted, or use a homebrew set of rules to balance those stats better
By end game you kinda needed to do the second one, during the time our group was playing it at least
@nitsua60 OK cool
Pretty excited
@Erics 4e had that kind of thing too, in 4e those governed the role of the monsters and dictated both what kind of abilities they would have and what stat distributions they got
Brutes had higher HP and damage but had lower defences
Snipers had mostly ranged abilities and good damage with most likely lower HP and defences
There were also skirmishers which were characterized by abilities that let them get in and out of melee a lot
I think they basically had lower HP but higher damage
hmmph, really thinking of finding a different group now .. around our table significant time is lost in combat converting die roll to AC hit (mental arithmetic not strong points here), so i worked up a tweaked version of our PC sheet that listed out AC 0–10 with boxes to write the relevant number. GM response: "We have mandated character sheets, so .. no."
@trogdor yes, this sounds like the key design point for that archetype
Would it be ok to post a "thank you" question in Meta?
Basically I want to say thanks to the community for the way this stack is run. We keep answers and questions on topic and well organized. I've seen too many things in other stacks that are endless list generation questions, unmarked duplicates, non-answers, or even comments or answers that ignore details blatantly described in the question itself. We don't do that here, and I appreciate it.
A handy property of expected values is that they're linear, so you can just sum expected values of single dice to get the expected value for a roll (in this case, 2 * 4.5 = 9)
> It's horrible! Once per adventure you can spend a fate point and designate a target. That target will be stalked by Pennywise until you use this stunt again.
When I was a kid, I used to make my own scenarios for Heroes of Might and Magic III in hopes of sharing them online at some point. I already was pretty good at English, but I occasionally mixed up some words... like "infernal" vs "inferior".
That in itself is it's own tool. "Did he say inferior? Really? Like, he just gave away that his army is inferior compared to ours? We have this in the bag!"
@Erics On the one hand, "rules are rules" and "that's what the die rolled" are objective standards to maintain a fair game. The DM has the responsibility to fairly accept what the die say, but also has the superpower to sometimes decide when a die roll is called for in the first place.
@Erics That said, this looks to be very toxic, and the old saw "no gaming is better than bad gaming" makes me inclined to say you should consider either leaving or trying to gracefully oust the DM.
@JoelHarmon One of my major GM pet peeves is people who say they are "impartial" and "fair" because they let the dice decide. As if letting the dice decide isn't a choice in itself.
3
But it's an honest mistake and an easy one to make - new GMs in particular often have little guidance on how to do their thing.
A fair bit of "Nah, no die roll needed this time. Nor this time." followed by "Oh, I'm gonna roll this time contrary to the established expectation, and the roll is the roll" ... yeh, nah, bad.
I don't mind situational rolls-or-not. Like if it's very obvious it will be a non-event, or serves no story purposes (i.e. just a mechanic that slows things down). Rolling when it's a pivotal story/narrative is also OK.
One of the reasons Apocalypse World clicked for me, but I realized it only ages after I first played it, is that it makes the rolls open in all ways. It's obvious to the player why are we rolling, when the roll is successful, partially successful or failed, and what are the outcomes for each - except for failure, which is often left for the GM to decide.
It takes some introspection and analytical thought to realise in PbtA the choices you may/must make on success/partial success/fail define the difficulty through the severity of consequences.
@BESW I think that's true in many systems, but not all. In the ones where it's false, the DM has much more leeway in deciding the outcome anyway. (Powered by the Apocalypse comes to mind here)
@JoelHarmon Yes and no. Plenty of games take the scenario out of the GM's hands partially or entirely.
@eimyr 'bout a year ago, Nits ran a Discord game of Dungeon World for a few of us, as part of helping VI find RPGs she could use comfortably with limited sight.
When I played Night Witches I had this realisation that I can solve a problem in this way using this move but I will risk making these choices OR I can find a different approach.
On reflection, I think that's exactly it--I didn't have a sense that the outcomes of a failed roll would match the action taken according to my sense of proportion.
@JoelHarmon In Apocalypse World, compared to DnD, I'd say the GM is far more constrained in the broad strokes while more empowered in the minute details of the scene.
And it also helps explain why I was a little more comfortable running a PbtA game, even though it was with a system that failed quite miserably at explaining itself to a PbtA newbie.
and then I looked at it and went: huh, so going into enemy fire means that I definitely get one of these 4 bad things and possibly more... welp, makes sense in a war drama
A player seizes by force and chooses to "impress, dismay or terrify" their enemy - the GM has to respect that, but gets to choose how the character in question works when shaken to that degree.
@eimyr For me, that's the thing that makes it good for “I don't play D&D, but…”, and therefore a decent PbtA starting point for people who might not otherwise play non-D&D games
