@GreySage I have no clue. I think it's the only stat that they couldn't hack into boosting well, and they used permanent ability drain stuff that drained wisdom as well
I just wish that I could find a campaign that I could get my Palalock-candidate moving in (Paladin/Warlock multiclass, definitely better in 5e than 3.5e)
@Trish going as an undercover saboteur for a first RP is pretty bold, damn. I also see the problem of "I wanna ruin everyone elses fun because they told me no"
Also "they have no idea that I'm playing" buuut also "they won’t even know who’s sabotaging them"....If you're a PC's EX, he's going to know you. Unless she's playing separate?
@Asteria I'm not sure I have great compassion for the ruined fun of people that told her she couldn't play because she's a "girly girl" in the first place. The whole setup is dysfunctional, not only her attitude.
@ACuriousMind don't get me wrong, I'm the first one to bite at the bit when someone says "You're a GIRL. This is a BOY game". But I also understand wanting to play with your partner
It teaches askers they don't have to clean up their questions, because they already got responses without any effort to meet site standards. It also keeps other users with the same problem from being able to search for the answers; it sidesteps the site's sorting-by-voting system; and nobody else can edit to improve the quality of the answers.
Comments on questions need to stick with how to improve the question.
@BESW do you run into the "troubleshooting suggestions in comments" norm on other Stacks you are active on, btw? (kinda curious as to how you handle that if you do work with/encounter it)
There are many reasons to allow comments-as-answers, yes. But those reasons do not, have never, and likely never will, outweigh the drawbacks in their effect on the quality of the site and its community culture.
@Shalvenay It happens on Physics all the time, especially on closeable homework questions. They're not allowed as a norm, but just like the answer-comments here, they happen regardless from time to time.
And yes, there's often grey area between the two extremes and each site can handle it differently according to the context of its topic.
@Shalvenay If you need to do that, then it's probably a question which needs discussion to answer and may not be a great subject for the Stack format in the first place. Each Stack needs to figure out how to handle its own topic scope.
@BESW yeah, I just hit 20k in DIY.SE and am trying to help improve things, but it's a rather hard row to hoe in the face of large quantities of hit-and-run users and not a lot of coordination
@Asteria -- as a sidenote: what systems do you play in, btw? (curious :)
@ACuriousMind hahaha, yes xD. I've done some tag cleanups/burninations (although those can be frustrating due to the slow pace one has to take them at), have written entire tag wikis from scratch, and a few other things. it doesn't help though that I'm mostly a specialist (i.e. someone who doesn't cover the site's domain fully) -- means I stay "hands off" with quite a few questions
@Asteria mostly synchronous/chat-based freeform, or asynchronous/play-by-post?
Ok, my players did not bake their weapons into bread now... but they were terribly frightened of the half elf sniper that can aim for both eyes with one arrow and still score a hit with any roll but a 20.
And they looked in horror as Darrag the smith walked up on that one ork, lifted his hammer one handedly... and took off his jaw, tongue and teeth in one strike.
@Trish that half-elf sounds like he'd be in good company with a certain Finn who made his name during WWII...
@Trish OTOH -- hands Darrag a sheaf of blueprints "Got a commission for ya'. Need a con-rod pair for an EMD 8-567C. Shouldn't be too terribly hard for a skilled smith like you, no?"
@MikeQ xD. so...we're running a mutant version of the Sunless Citadel to help get some new-ish players up to speed and have some good times as well :) the initial stages went crazy-wild with a big mess of wild magic + fungus zombie regen rats, then we slowly made our way through the rest of the top end
kobolds were easy, good chance for the bard to break out her diplo chops. we have one kobold with the party now, hopefully he lives up to his reputation xD
also, my palahack got to take her turn at being the smartest member of the party. yes, the big ol' half-orc lass has more brains in her head than the bard or the high elf rogue for that matter, and def. more grey matter than the barbarian, that's for sure
(p.s. the barbarian is a DMPC from a homebrew race of celestial ooze people)
Gunsmith, the artificer specialization from UA, came out earlier this year. Their weapon is a Thunder Cannon that has absurd range, and damage that begins at 2d6 and increases by +1d6 every odd-numbered level.
@MikeQ It's not quite as bad as you've made it sound, though. They modelled it directly off the Rogue - the damage progression is the same as Sneak Attack, and the spellcasting progression is the same as an Arcane Trickster.
Yeah, but... robot butler? I mean, it's not absurdly overpowered on its own, but when you sum up the benefits from across the class, the end result is definitely at a relative advantage.
@Asteria -- if you want to try your hand at joining me and Nyoze in a 5e dungeon run, we're looking to start one up in ~30mins if you can make or grab a char now?
@DaveTheGame I’ve been really pleased with what I’ve seen of the SCRPG system to date. Feels like Marvel Heroic got better control of dice pool sprawl, went on a second date with Fate, and took some fashion tips from the card game.
So, who wants a thread on the role of women during the viking era?
Too bad, you'll get it anyway ;)
Okay, so let's start with the key thing: Most of the times, girls were married off at age 12-15, generally to cement alliances. They were expected to know how to run a household.
It's also bad at stories about characters who simply don't really have complications happen to them, or experience uncomplicated successes without significant setback.
I could play Steven Universe in Fate, but I'd probably look at other systems first, like Cartoon Action Hour. I probably couldn't play Adventure Time in Fate, because there's usually just one twist of a complication.
Because Star Wars has become a sprawling franchise, no single system can effectively encompass all possible gameplay styles: you can play espionage or politics or adventure or tactical battles or just run a bar.
There's Star Wars d20 and three games by fantasy flight. (But even when a fictional world has corresponding games, that doesn't make those games always the best way to explore a story in that world.)
Since I was thinking of proposing something easy to catch on to for my relatively inexperienced table (folks were talking about doing Star Wars in DnD ffs)
and I've been curious about trying FAE for a while
@BESW Stargate is a very effective example. The official system doesn't achieve Stargate narrative at all and actively contradicts it. Lots of franchise tabletop RPGs are pretty bad.
Reading this gaming industry retrospective I ran into a few phrases which confused me.
The d20 bust caused by 3.5e (2003) and the over-saturation of d20 products ran right into the Great Recession.
What's "the d20 bust"? I came into RPGs shortly after 3.5's release, so I can't compare befor...
The d20 SRD prioritises physical conflict as the primary mode of problem-solving, while the Stargate SG-1 TV series tends to treat physical conflict as a backdrop or intensifier for emotional or scientific problem-solving. It was a fundamental mismatch at a very basic thematic level.
An anime like Gurren Lagann (including super spoilers bits we shouldn't go into) or Kill la Kill can be great for Fate. That's mostly because the world has a status quo the heroes are setting out to change. (This means they can be proactive and competent, and experience drama along the way.)
That also avoids the Western superhero story issue: in Western supers comic, it tends to be that villains are the proactive ones, and heroes are only reactive. Heroes are guardians of the status quo. Many of the stories around heroes like Superman turning evil are based around the hero deciding they want to proactively save the world. That makes Fate's Proactive pillar compromised in a Western superhero story.
@Skyler If you can dig up a clip of the Vader/Luke fight at the end of Episode V, I'll try to find time later tonight to talk about how it could be Fately.
This is a weird sort of scenario in Fate. We can look at film scenarios like this and decide it's a conflict based on stuff that happens at the end. But in Fate, we're working from the beginning and want to see where it goes. Conflicts are usually unwarranted, but bodily harm is not a thing we have mechanical facility for in Contests.
I'm doing a lot of other stuff, but I'm slowly writing up the moves and... Vader's doing a lot of creating advantages on Luke's aspects.
> Vader makes a few offensive gestures with his lightsabre, but Luke blocks them easily because Vader is actually Cleverly creating an advantage to place a free invoke on Luke's aspect Don't get cocky, kid! He succeeds with style and says, "You have learned much, young one."
> Luke, emboldened, rushes Vader to Quickly attack. Vader's got three free invokes and uses them all to defend Quickly (he's not very Quick on his own) and get a success with style that leaves Luke Disarmed.
Well you aren't a wizard so it is normal for your spells to not to be as epic as a spell belonging to a wizard.
On the plus side you get the daily called 'Create a half-race' spell like ability which allows you to create any half race going as far as half golems.
@MaikoChikyu 5e Bard is actually pretty heavily magical. They get access to 9th level spells and all.
They're a bit short on dedicated combat spells, though, but they have Magical secrets to make up for it. Magical secrets allows them to learn spells of any class, even ranger spells usually not available to anyone else.
forcecage is pretty neat, but we often fight larger than 10x10 monsters. just not sure howmuch i'd use it. I"m thinking of grabbing the xanathar 5th level Synaptic Static instead.
Well there's an example: the party decides to fight someone they weren't supposed to fight. The GM has to conjure a stat block, preferably a balanced one.
Then stat blocks for whoever responds and reacts...
@kviiri yea, we went up against of bounty hunters that were PC builds and we cleaned house. Most battle XP we've gotten, but then next battle was significantly harder against monsters.
I try to let my players change the political landscape a bit. I use a persistent generic setting and my players love it when they encounter something that they caused. It's much harder to pull of permanent changes with monsters unless they are extremely high level ones.
In D&D your characters can accomplish heroic feats. At lower levels it might be breaking the castles gate or fighting off ten assasins and at higher levels it can be holding 200 strong force at bay or purging a city from all of it's criminals.
D&D doesn't play into that much at all. It's part of why BESW's group and my group each decided we were moving to Fate (and then we wound up playing Fate together).
@BESW would recall that he had a game with a new player who was coming up with all kinds of amazing ideas he loved and wanted to use -- but since the rules had no framework on which to support them, or actively resisted them, he had to say no to every single one of them. When he did have games going really well utilising players' ideas, it was either without regard to the system (since it wasn't helping them do it) or in active resistance of some part of the system trying to invalidate it.
Myself, I had a D&D game that was heavily invested in players entering a world and changing its political landscape totally. D&D was mainly about the fights, but the most fun parts of this game where everything else outside the fighting. So likewise in that game D&D itself was busy getting in my way with its system expectations, and in the most fun parts of the game I was hardly using the D&D rules at all.
We each decided a game like Fate better supports the kinds of stories we want to tell, because it not only didn't have to be actively resisted and spited in order to tell them, but it actually supported and propelled us forward through those narratives.
E.G. in a Stargate SG-13 story, @trogdor and I can happily and actively pursue schlocky Stargate tropes and since Fate helps propel us through that gameplay, we chose that game to run it.
For other games we've utilised other systems, e.g. Cthulhu Dark helps propel us through actual horror games.
@MaikoChikyu (For these purposes, consider Pathfinder and D&D to be equivalent, since they pretty much are barring minor nuances about how they do their thing.)
For example, fighting 200 enemies would require 200 initiative rolls, and have very slow turn progress unless the enemies were somehow hacked to represent more than one enemy combatant at a time. A better, but again unintuitive option is to treat the whole combat encounter as a sort of skill challenge, but that takes lots of GM skill to pull of well.
I like FATE but FATE has you become a relatively normal human. You cannot summon gargantuan creatures. You can't take 20 arrows and say:"That tickled." Those are the kind of adventures my players like to see.
FAE actually has a rather interesting (seeming?) omission in its rules:
> Conflicts are used to resolve situations where characters are trying to harm one another. It could be physical harm (a sword fight, a wizard’s duel, a battle with laser blasters), but it could also be mental harm (a shouting match, a tough interrogation, a magical psychic assault).
Is it just me, or should that also include the stipulation that the participants are capable of harming each other?
If we literally had a situation where the PC is against a group of archers that can't do anything to harm her, I would probably shift the stakes. The archers are only shooting in desperation, in hopes the arrows provide enough distraction for some of them to escape.
Yep, I'd say it's a Contest but they're also a bit weird in FAE srd:
> When two or more characters are competing against one another for the same goal, but not directly trying to hurt each other, you have a contest. Examples include a car chase, a public debate, or an archery tournament.
Does it have to be the same goal? Clearly not quite - a car chase has somewhat different goals for the participants.
So I guess by that logic a conflict could have the hero's goal be the capture of the archers, and the archers' goal the escape of at least some of them.
Most of the philosophy of how fate core works is embedded in the core book rather than accelerated, and accelerated is just summarising it — we'd still use a contest in that scenario.
The contest would be to see who can achieve their goal first: the archers get away or the hero captures them.
Yeah, I'd say that's comparable to the car chase example.
Of course this is a game of different assumptions than DnD, where one'd probably have the archers loose arrow after arrow at the protagonists who would wipe them out to the last one standing.
In fact, I'd say Fate, when played by someone who wants to respect the conventions of the genre, probably fulfills heroic fantasy tropes way better than DnD.
It can be argued whether DnD is designed to support the heroic fantasy genre though - I think a credible case can be made for DnD being a sort of genre of its own.
The typical D&D experience is primarily reactive, where the GM sets out troubles and the players set out to resolve them, and then respond to challenges put in their way (and Dungeon World simulates that effectively in ways Fate can't)
A fate heroic fantasy game would have to set up a status quo or visible impending situation the heroes challenge -->
An anime like Gurren Lagann (including super spoilers bits we shouldn't go into) or Kill la Kill can be great for Fate. That's mostly because the world has a status quo the heroes are setting out to change. (This means they can be proactive and competent, and experience drama along the way.)
@doppelgreener Indeed. Go Fate if you want to do proactive heroic fantasy, but if you're seeking a more DnD-like experience with specific DnD tropes, DW is the easier choice
The scenario that propelled me to make a Fate heroic fantasy game was of that variety: the players were arriving in lands with a great number of high-impact situations teetering on the brink, including two separate potential wars brewing (one a civil war). The players would be positioned to decide how the dominos fell.
Each would have some special feature too, to make them a bit more interesting.
"On the left wing, there's Jaunty Jack's choppers. Fifty freaks on bikes, toting uzis and sawn-off shotguns. Center-left, Numb4r's retinue. Seems to be mostly freaked out peasants who don't want to be here. Center-right, Bonoch's posse, scary mercenaries with small arms but they've also got an AT gun. Right wing, Elmo and his Edibles, a (literally and figuratively) colorful bunch already dancing wildly covered in nothing but filth and paint."
AW has rules on how a gang inflicts and suffers damage and the added narrative bits provide cues for the players to expand on. Although I would really love to have them actually be Aspects of the gangs.
Reading this gaming industry retrospective I ran into a few phrases which confused me.
The d20 bust caused by 3.5e (2003) and the over-saturation of d20 products ran right into the Great Recession.
What's "the d20 bust"? I came into RPGs shortly after 3.5's release, so I can't compare befor...
