Ahh... gotta run. My full AL party's back together for the first time since November. Our last member--the paladin--is back today and we've worked out a good narrative way for them to reunite. He sent an animal messenger with the phrase "look to my coming on the first light of the fifth day." We had space in the message for "at dawn look to the east," but they've failed so many navigation rolls he figured they only had a 1-in-6 chance of facing the right direction =\

@nitsua60 bahahahahaha

@nitsua60 nice

@nitsua60 "Nitsua Sheep stands alone."

Mmmmh I need to prepare some pregens for a game at a Con. I have tree players. How many pregens should I ready?

tree players?

@Zachiel A copse

@Zachiel a fourest

maybe six

unless that is too much

but that seems like a nice number to give everyone a decent number of choices

@Zachiel I don't know how many but you should probably have a lot of Druid options.

@Zachiel 2, do musical chairs for odd man out.

@trogdor LoL. I GM for threeants

lol

@Zachiel Maybe some formian characters then?

Or thri-kreen, but I never liked thri-kreen.

Jokes apart. Three players, and the game is Symbaroum. I will go for six.

@Miniman wha? you monster :P

@Zachiel six will leave an extra choice per player, which I think is a decent amount

I shouldn't think you need more than that

if you objected to it being too many I could certainly more than understand that of course

> Dine & Dash. When you use an overcome action with Athletics to move at least two zones, you can target one creature in a zone you're moving out of with the same overcome action. If they fail to defend against it, you bring them along with you.

XD

@trogdor I mean, I like them from the point of view of a lizardman (crunchy snacks), but I'm not a fan of them as a concept.

@Miniman why?

(I kinda like em)

I mean, I can admit that maybe they are not put together in the best possible way, but as a concept without the sorts of general things that people could say are wrong with orcs, I like Thri Kreen a lot

they do both have some aspects injected into their "racial character" that could be dispensed with

@trogdor The three-armed thing, mostly. Antmen is an idea I can get behind (hence formians), but that plus three arms plus psychic powers just makes them feel like a mishmash.

@Miniman ah, not all of them have psychic powers though

at least in 4e they didn't all at least

Troggy's most familiar with 4e Thri-Kreen, which toned down the psychic stuff a lot.

@BESW fair enough if most if not all other editions had that more amped up

Also his Thri-Kreen character was just terrifying. He was a grab-and-go ambush ranger.

in 4e they still have sort of a "some of our leaders are psionic" thing going, but they don't all have psiconic stuff

Did they still have chameleon abilities and no need for sleep in 4e?

@BESW fighter actually

Ah, okay.

@Miniman no chamelion stuff, and instead of sleep they did sort of a hybernation thing

mechanically a lot like elf trance

which in my oppinion just made him scarier because you couldn't just focus fire him down

he wanted you to swarm him and try that

XD

Interesting. Also I don't know where in my head four arms turned into three arms. Probably cos they're called thri-kreen, I guess.

@Miniman four arms is best number of arms

@trogdor There's a clip I'd love to link here, but I don't have an accessible source for it. Anyway, I'd be totally okay with a four-armed race whose thing was that they had 4 arms. Thri-kreen just has too many things, and honestly four arms is such a big thing that I don't think it really fits alongside any other things.

(No idea if that'll make sense)

no it does

in 4e though, those arms are only mechanized two ways

their racial power, which every race gets one of

and something about being able to carry a slightly heavier load of stuff for encumbrance

they also get feats they could take represented by those arms, but again, so does every race get racial feats

one of the things I love about 4e is that having something ridiculous like 4 arms does not make you overpowered

What about 4 brains for more spell slots?

(their racial power is an attack they can make against multiple adjacent targets as a minor action, but only one time per fight, and at a relatively low fixed damage)

@Yuuki it has nothing like that

again, why I like it so much

hey there @Yuuki and @Asteria

Rocket engine wings?

@Yuuki Has there ever been a "more brains = more spell slots" link? Discounting ogre magi here since their extra brain just makes them smart enough to cast spells at all.

> Armies in my sleevies. Once per session you can make a melee attack which targets any number of enemies in your zone using the full value of the attack.

@BESW lol

@BESW Once I read the name of that aspect, all I could think of was Capone Bege.

(A guy whose ability is that his body is a castle with a miniature army inside it.)

[googles] Oh, One Piece. That's why I don't know it.

((Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but yeah.))

@BESW I didn't assume people would understand the reference :)

@Miniman anyway, I think I can actually easily understand why you don't like them now, and I think it has at least almost as much to do with mechanizing all the things that go into them, as it also does with the fact that maybe they have too many of those things going into them

I think part of why I like them so much is that 4e mitigated all that stuff a looooot

and 4e is the only system I know them in

@trogdor Yep, pretty much. Just too much going on.

this is fair

Well, also, actually.

Formians are giant ants who communicate psychically, allowing the queen to command any of her colony at any time.

It's a coherent (at least to me) idea. It fits together very well.

mmm

Whereas thri-kreen, at least to me, feel very incoherent.

So I guess I'd be happy for them to have all those different things if it seemed like they made up a single coherent idea?

@Miniman they sorta do to me,... bugs do actually often do the specific kind of hybernation they have during winter

That actually makes sense of a few of my likes/dislikes in this area.

@trogdor 3.5 saddled the basic Thri-Kreen model with at least a half dozen psionic abilities, just straight out of the box.

(and no, being a desert does not mean it is hot all the time)

@BESW yeah that would be silly

bugs have multiple limbs more than us, some bugs are good at jumping

and of course they may have trouble comunicating with humanoids who have vastly different mouth parts

all this stuff made sense to me in 4e

Yeah, but to me at least, this is like lizardmen who can change colour, look in all directions at once, have super-long tongues, and can run on water.

and the Thri-Kreen art sold it all to me

Amazing how 3 of those abilities are from the same type of lizard. Chameleons are hax.

@Miniman they did none of that stuff in 4e

@Miniman I really liked the thing where lizardfolk have different subspecies that map to things other than "crocodile."

Like, there ARE lizardfolk with color-changing, and with poison, and so forth. But they're each specialized.

again, I think part of it is a system disconnect

@trogdor They've never done those things in D&D that I'm aware of. I'm just making the point that those are all lizard things, and they're all cool, but if you showed me a race with all of them I wouldn't be a fan.

And for Thri-Kreen, well. Dark Sun.

I won't claim 4e Thri-kreen are perfect, but they are missing a lot of the weird extra stuff more or less

@BESW See, that's cool. I would definitely play as the lizard who can squirt blood out of their eyeballs XD

@Miniman Don't forget that thri-kreen are poisonous, too!

@BESW Dark Sun was a mess still, in 4e

I wish I had noticed it before I tried to run it

@BESW yes,.... but this is one of the only 4e features they had that not all or most bugs actually have

multiple limbs is practically all bugs, for example

I get that the jumping and the venom are not necesary, but I still liked em

> AAAAAH. Once per scene by squirting blood out of your eyeball you can make a mental attack with Physique targeting everyone in your zone.

I sorta wish more races in games like D&D had more "we diverge in strange ways from humans" stuff going on

@BESW I love that!

I mean,... elves and dwarves, for example, are just tall thin humans with different attides and life philosophies, and short stout humans with different life philosophies, respectively

that is all fine but,... more different stuff please?

@trogdor Thri-Kreen are psionic pretty much because Dark Sun. They didn't originate in that setting, but it's the version they're best known for and Dark Sun has this thing about slapping psionics onto everybody.

that is why I like stuff like Thri Kreen, and I guess the extra gloss just doesn't bother me as much as it does you

@BESW yes, again I agree that it doesn't need that

psionics could be completely removed from Thri-Kreen and I would be more than happy with it

as was though, I was free to ignore it entirely in 4e

@trogdor Your new avatar is cool, btw. Where's it from?

> By order of the Queen. You are in constant psychic contact with your hive queen. She knows everything you know, and can tell you anything she wants to. You get +2 when carrying out her commands.

> Sluuuurp. You have a super-long tongue which lets you do tongue-related things in adjacent zones. Ew.

@Miniman it's one of the bosses in BoF 3

D. zombie, D stands for Dragon but,... dragon zombie doesn't fit the text boxes they had

thanks for asking too, I always enjoy some interest in these avatar changes

> Independent eyeballs. You get +2 when creating advantages with Perception, and you can use Physique to create advantages by unnerving people with your stare.

> Speed exploit. When you use an overcome action with Athletics to move at least two zones, you can ignore water-based obstacles in zones where you neither begin nor end your movement.

(With some tweaking, that's also a stunt for the Flash.)

> Faster than physics. When you use an overcome action with Speed to move at least two zones, you can ignore physical obstacles in zones where you neither begin nor end your movement.

hey there @Rubiksmoose

@Shalvenay howdy

how're things going?

can't complain. you?

doing alright over here

may I ask what systems/genres you play in btw?

atm 5e almost exclusively (but FATE possibly on the horizon and PF in the past)

ah

so generic fantasy, genre-wise, basically?

yup! pretty much the standard stuff. I have a friend who wants to run Apocalypse World at some point in the future so that could break a bit out of that box, but that's where I am right now for better or worse

ah yeah I did miss the genre part of your question didn't I? Oops

nods do you usually homebrew, or run premade stuff?

I find myself homebrewing when I run games, almost exclusively -- haven't ever run a premade module, and only played a handful

well, maybe a double handful

Continuing the trend of boringness - usually premade

But when I DM stuff, I always mod them fairly heavily to suit my needs, but never a from-the-ground-up homebrew

@Shalvenay That is really cool. I think we'll do more of that in future, but we're in the middle of a full campaign path right now and its still going strong. We've gone from level 1-10 now