Apocalypse World has a pre-made luchador-ish class, "The Faceless". Basically a masked human capable of stupendous violence. Or a mask on a poor human who can't really fight it. Depends on the interpretation I guess.
Yuch, the rules for monk powers seem to be specifically made to prevent grappling and shoving being an effective part of the monk's ability set (before extra attacks at least).
WotC simply can't let me have fun can they!?
Flurry of blows works after grappling/shoving but the usual bonus action unarmed strike requires the Attack to involve an attack with a monk weapon or an unarmed strike...
@BESW Play in whatever you've been doing the past 2 weeks came to mind but since Miniman won't be there that might not work. Alternately Stargate. I'd like to run Blades in the Dark for y'all at some point too but it'll be a few more weeks before I can read it through.
@Rubiksmoose I think that's how I discovered meta in the first place--I set off a bit of a storm at one point, then heard wind my action was being discussed at "high levels." We've all been there!
(It's sort of a status-by-meh thing: we can't possibly lay out a rulebook that covers everything, so we trust that when something feels a little off to someone they'll say something and a discussion will ensue and participants/observers will come to creater consonance....)
@doppelgreener I see you deleted my comment on the other one involving forcecage. I think that's at least still related due to it being about too small a space?
@goodguy5 I actually think it can be reopened and will vote to do so in a moment. I cleaned out a bit of the comment-litter still hanging around. Does it look like I nuked anything still needed?
@NautArch if a "possible duplicate of..." comment gets auto-generated, it also gets auto-deleted when that particukar duplicate closure goes through. No use saying it's a possible duplicate anymore when the dupe redirection message at the top of the question says it is certainly a duplicate, right?
@BESW I just want you to know that reading your comments (in chat and elsewhere) is always an enlightening experience. I have actually written my first "rules says this, but I found that this works better" type answer as a result. Not sure how it will be received but I think it is a good development for me. So thank you. :)
@BESW I figure the stack is for sharing expertise, meaning part of the time it is for that -- just "do the rules let me do foo" "yes, provided you have a level in foomancer" -- but part of the time it is for synthesizing all this expertise you described which fully transcends RAW. And it just so happens, it is more often than not the second that people need; there's almost always advice to share on execution.
@GreySage I'll say there's enough complexity there (in the decision to reroll) that I'd never try to work it out analytically, I'd just enumerate all the possibilities. And by "I'd enumerate" I definitely mean "I'd write a program to have a computer enumerate." And by "I'd write" I definitely mean "I'd use programs others have written."
The Great Weapon Fighting Fighting style states the following:
When you roll a 1 or 2 on a damage die for an attack you make with a melee weapon that you are wielding with two hands, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll. The weapon must have a two-handed or versatile property for ...
@GreySage if it's for the PS to your max-damage answer, I'd probably just point out that it has a strong likelihood of raising the damage by about 10 points, at most it could possibly raise the damage by 25. The distribution of differential damages is left as an exercise to the reader =)
Sorry, no, that's not what I'm saying. In both cases we'll stipulate that 1-2 (or 1-3) will be rerolled. The GWF calculation you've probably seen already figures in the likelihood that a 1 or a 2 is rolled in the first instance in order to be rerolled.
But the distribution's quite a bit more interesting. If 5 of your 40 are 1s--not a terribly-unlikely proposition--then the expected gain is 2.5 per die.
With GWF you have 2d6 and you'll reroll 1&2 results once. Getting to choose 5 results out of 40 to reroll is quite a different scenario.
You've got better than a 99.9% chance of having 5 1s to reroll out of 40d6. You've suggested that the calculation should be 5 * 0.75, where to first order the result's much closer to 5*2.5=12.5
As you say, it depends on what you rolled.
The average increase on each individual dice you reroll will be (Dice roll average value, I.E. 3.5 on a d6) - (current value of dice you are rerolling).
As an example, if you're rerolling 3d6, one of which came up 1, one of which came up 2, and one of...
@GreySage I want to say that I agree with your comment as a whole, I just think that the first line can help spread a misconception about the Attack action, and it made me uncomfortable.
@doppelgreener we haven't started any sessions of playing it yet, we have been doing the character creation/world building stuff so far (last time we played Lady Blackbird instead of continuing what we were doing before)
Negative evidence is fine, it's just that there are two cases - either 5e is faster, or 5e is not faster. If 5e is slower, or if 5e is about the same, it still goes in the same bucket.
@doppelgreener mod team on the prowl!
There should be a badge for getting your question edited differently by n different mods within m minutes of one another
> [...] sword, spear and bow-wielding warriors; powerful Babalawo and Nana priests, who control the forces of nature; nangas, who cast powerful magic through their nkisi statues [...] an angry Creator-God, scheming nobles, powerful, and often frightening, ancestral, nature and supernatural spirits, mighty warriors and hunters, fierce battles on the pyramid-strewn savannahs of Kamit, or in the fighting pits of Oyo.
I was hoping that we could maybe play a game of Ki Khanga this coming Saturday, because African fantasy is in the air this month, but the mechanics and structures of the game really disappointing.
@BESW I'm happy that it was well received and seems to be good. I actually had parts of what became that answer in comments, but they didn't feel right there. And I thought about the whole thing for a while and realized that I could weave those ideas into an answer that would hopefully be insightful. I'm glad you think it worked out.
@SPavel I realize that is most likely a joke but,... we have enough trouble in our wider culture of gaming as is with women not being as accepted as they would like
@trogdor The mechanics themselves are.... very old-school traditional and fiddly. And the game doesn't offer any sort of guidance as to the KIND of story to tell with the mechanics.
You start with 120 point buy on seven basic abilities and four calculated abilities, and any left over points you can spend on skills, talents, and other things.
I like the Motivation part of character creation--you might be adventuring to gain acceptance, or to do good, or out of patriotism or responsibility, or just for the thrill of it.
It's weird that there are twice as many complications as motives, though.
Are the complications for the motivations? Like - went to adventure to gain acceptance BUT the other warriors changed what was cool so I ended up dethroning the God-king for nothing
Or: became an adventurer out of patriotism BUT while I was away, my country was overrun by Mongols somehow
The Griot sets a difficulty number. You draw a hand of cards equal to the rank of your relevant trait (like Agility 4 or Wisdom 8), and lay down a number of cards from that hand equal to the difficulty.
If you run out of cards and still have to play down more, draw them and play them immediately.
21 = High Success. 17-20 = Full Success 16 or lower = Partial Success 22-25 = Failure 26+ = Fumble
But! If all the cards you played are of the suit that matches the kind of action you were taking, that raises Full or Partial Successes to a High Success.
Lower difficulty and higher skill ranks makes full/high success more achieveable; high difficulty and lower skill ranks makes results unpredictable; high difficulty in general encourages you to undershoot so that you at least don't overshoot.
@SPavel Eimyr has been thinking about how to model a "succeed by so much that it's bad" resolution system not to punish players like a jerk DM, but because it actually helps tell certain kinds of stories.
I like concepts such as: - You are so good that this task is trivial; you didn't learn anything. - You over-invested in this task, and used up time/resource better spent elsewhere.
These tell similar stories to succeed by so much that it's bad
Though there are some cool things, like the BOLT spell: draw one card per rank you've put into the spell. The highest card is the damage you deal. If that card is a suit that matches the kind of magic you're using to cast BOLT, draw another card and add it to the damage.
The only sensible treatment of "succeed so much it's bad" I've ever seen is in Total War games - in Rome II, if you become politically dominant within your realm, then corruption spins out of control, and if you become too militarily powerful, other nations will band together against you
Or in Shogun II, where becoming too influential in Japan leads to the Realm Divide against you
In other words: the thing you succeed at, and the thing that's bad, are in related but separate domains
What's the story about? We have a whole continent of people we could be and things we could do, but the closest thing the text comes to in terms of suggesting what the game is for is a sample adventure that's a pretty ordinary escort mission with a moral twist.
It's got the same problem that most D&D expansion settings have: cool new wallpaper on the same old game.
The game's opening flavor crawl gives the ancient history of the world, in which the creator spirit was so enraged by an attempt to storm heaven that he clove the continent almost in half with his adze, and his rage mutated many of the people and animals in that part of the world.
So now there's an army of were-sharks, were-dolphins, and were-octopuses who sail the seas in ships made from the bones of extinct dragons, whose only duty is to gather up the monsters and quarantine them on islands in the north.
That's what I want to play. I want to be a soldier in the terrifying army of guardians who protect the world from monsters... often by killing anyone who tries to sneak onto our forbidden islands.
You know what the text wants me to do? I'm not sure the text does either, because the most specific discussion of the kind of things a group might do is on the blurb on the back of the book, and even then it doesn't sound sure of itself.
@doppelgreener Why not? What about "I want to be a soldier in the terrifying army of guardians who protect the world from monsters... often by killing anyone who tries to sneak onto our forbidden islands" can't you render in 3.5?
> Will you delve for lost artifacts in the ruins of ancient temples? Strap on beaded armor and an nkisi necklace to battle undead legions as they storm your city upon the backs of skeletal camels, or defend your village from a swarm of ravenous impundulu? Whether you're making your way through the magical forests of Wandatu or fighting to survive in the pal oil-lit back alleys of Sati-Baa, you and your team will need all your wits, combat skill, and magic to make it through.
@doppelgreener There is plenty of mechanics support for non-lethal combat resolution, and doing cool stuff. Both require system mastery, but that's a stylistic choice and not a flaw.
Half the book is dedicated to the setting. I can look up the major imports and exports of each nation, and how many soldiers are in their standing army, but it doesn't have any bits that talk about what sorts of adventures one might have there, or how an adventurer might even relate to it. Just border policies about registering magic weapons.
@SPavel it doesn't get brownie points for non-lethal mechanics.
i am disagreeing that D&D 3.5e is actually a good system for it, and "but it has things that could do that!" doesn't make the system as a whole appropriate for it.
On the other hand, there's an extinct race of psychic sand monsters whose minds survive in their dead bodies beneath the desert, and so powerful psionicists can enslave their dead bodies to their will and force them to fight.
@doppelgreener I don't know what you want from a system, then. Having things that can achieve your goals, to me, means the system is suitable. Let's leave it at that, if you prefer.
@BESW Silk Road meets Pokemon?
From your description, I get the impression that the writers went "oh I have a cool thing we can add to the setting, what if...." and then just wrote it in the margins
@Rubiksmoose I especially like that idea because usually game designers go "let's make the PCs weak and frail so they have to use wits and negotiation" but this is the reverse
A One Punch Man PC would be able to end any encounters that he knows about, instantly
@doppelgreener I mean, I don't know anything about it except what I've heard from people like you, but I get the impression that it'd be a great Cthulhu Dark twosie.
Normal: A dungeon master can technically throw an encounter of arbitrarily high CR against the PCs and smear them on the walls OPM: the PC can technically throw a punch of arbitrarily high power against the monsters, and wipe the floor with them
Dear Ki Khanga: Your heading styles are atrocious.
I'm intrigued by divination, though! Very curious what it looks like in game play.
Divination is a special skill that you can use to get answers to questions which may fundamentally change the adventure, because the answer is determined by drawing cards.
@trogdor I know it's unreasonable to be so focused on the layout, but this book would still be nigh unusable even if the content were ten times better.
Major game-mechanic symbols are printing as unicode error symbols so you can't tell which symbol they are. Headings and subheadings are indistinguishable. There's no index.
If it had just been a solid OSR with an African setting that would've been... underwhelming but not actively infuriating.
Actually, on reflection, a solid afro-retro OSR would be pretty awesome, since I'm interested in experiencing OSR gameplay but the subculture is too toxic for me to get close.
The Great Weapon Fighting Fighting style states the following:
When you roll a 1 or 2 on a damage die for an attack you make with a melee weapon that you are wielding with two hands, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll. The weapon must have a two-handed or versatile property for ...
As you say, it depends on what you rolled.
The average increase on each individual dice you reroll will be (Dice roll average value, I.E. 3.5 on a d6) - (current value of dice you are rerolling).
As an example, if you're rerolling 3d6, one of which came up 1, one of which came up 2, and one of...
