@RafaelSantos I'm not BESW, but I had a spell casting monster in a recent campaign. I just treated monster's spells as moves they had that were trigger just like damage. This means I would give the players soft moves like "the cultist throws a bolt of magic" allowing for defy danger and then would hit the players with the magic if the failed a defy danger or if they partialed on hack & slash.
I'm skimming the surface a little here, this might be better as a full question
@RafaelSantos I'll note that a bunch of the things you've listed as troublesome are things that remove players' agency. If you petrify a character then it's really hard for that player to narrate how the character does something to trigger one of their moves. Ditto mind control, paralysis, &c.
They may, OTOH, be good chances for another player to trigger a move. Spout Lore or discern reality, for instance.
^ players really don't like losing agency. But that can be a good thing sometimes. If you properly forcast the move it can be more compelling for the PC to avoid getting hit than just damage.
"They're not turned to stone, they're actually encased in a thin sheen of stone. We've got to break them out quick!"
@WheatWizard absolultely--signaling ahead of time, even tell them straight-up: "you're going to the medusa's lair to try and tackle her. What are you going to do when she turns one of you to stone?"
The best fight I have ever GM'd was against a spellcaster that would wipe players memories with one of his moves. The players were really didn't want to lose their memory.
@nitsua60 Turning to stone is an interesting one. I'd probably have a bit of a puzzle to unstone them once the rest of the party defeats the gorgon. It would suck to be petrified, but that is kind of the fun, it makes the gorgon rather dangerous and needing your friends to free you makes for a good party dynamic I think.
@WheatWizard I think I'd give the petrified character's player a giant burrito with instructions to only make statements in-character with an over-full mouth of food. And pass a note to the other players saying that when the burrito's eaten, the petrification's complete.
@trogdor As long as the player has a fair chance of avoiding it I would say it is ok. The threat of losing agency makes the fight exciting. And there is no threat if you are not willing to go through with it. I would consider it part of the GM's think dangerously.
@nitsua60 I had a player whose barbarian got transformed into a rock. He grabbed a rock, put it on his character sheet, said he was going to rage, and made angry muffled "mmMMMMmm" noises on his turn for the duration of the spell.
Hmm... the nearest Mexican place would close by the time I got there. And the next-out one I can think of might well be closed by the time I got there. Those of us in rural areas need some sort of app that compares clock, drive-time, and restaurant closing times.
That whole principle is one reason I often like to invert the InSpectres-style paradigm where success means the player narrates and failure means the GM narrates.
If the player narrates failure, then they get to lean into it voluntarily.
@trogdor But it's easy in D&D for the player to still be able to play, even if their character's trapped in a soul-prison or something. You give them the monsters to run for the rest of the fight, or take a break from the "main" action and ask them to describe to the table the feeling of having one's soul removed from its body and stuffed in a ruby, or....
@trogdor I'd love to try some 4e some time. I've heard that it's excellent at being designed to do a thing and then actually achieving that thing. Possibly the best among all ten of D&D's editions.
@nitsua60 @Miniman I really loved 4e and I personally wouldn't mind playing it again sometime, but I don't have the books for it anymore,... And I am not even sure there is still a place to get em?
I can't remember if I deleted the PDFs I had because I thought I would never touch it again, or if I just forgot to store em on a flash drive
I wouldn't necessarily recommend really high levels though
They are cool, but the scaling between monster stats and PC stats is wobbly starting around level 15 or so
If I recall correctly
Which is sad because level 30 characters are awesome
But in most cases that right there is the problem XD
@KorvinStarmast I did start with that, and I do have the sorcerer in the mix, plus a monk. The necromancer was for extra characters (but I only have 3 ATM). The rogue is going TV to be an arcane archer, which is a fighter archetype
I tend towards cat, personally - if there's a situation I'm especially interested in, I'll tend towards spotlight hogging, but tend to be passive otherwise.
@RafaelSantos I've slowly moved toward a life-habit of GMing only for groups that contain players who also GM. That way when I need a week or something I don't feel the slightest hesitation about saying so.
I've had similar challenges, both with getting group buy-in to try new systems and with getting people to feel comfortable GMing anything at all.
My solution was a long-game process of changing the "landscape" of how people at the table viewed their role in the game. I didn't set out to delibera...
@KorvinStarmast I kinda thought it was going to be with 10 standard zombies and one beefed-up one, so we could see just how bad a TPK it would turn out to be. (Which is why I only expected it to go 20 minutes, not an hour-plus.)
At one point I realized with the to-hits that they had we'd have almost-certainly been better off if I'd dropped fog cloud in the first round--disadvantage might have dropped our hit% to 50, but theirs to, like, 10.
Yeah, the optimal tactic, at least to my eye, was for you to wade in and rogue to snipe whatever was close to you, and me to play "clean-up" and drop whichever target one of you managed to not drop.
@Shalvenay I don't think it's so much a downside of ToTM as it requires groups using ToTM to think a little differently. Announce much more about intentions than actions.
@nitsua60 I like your answer on this even though I disagree with it a bit. Is it worth making my own answer that would be in broad strokes very similar but differ in a few details? Similar to what I put forward in chat earlier?
We benefit greatly from a diversity of approaches, explanations, experiences.
(I'd say that even if I didn't, also, have some reservations about that answer. I can't put my finger on what it is, though. And I got tired of staring at what I'd written but not yet posted, so figured maybe some keen-eyed readers might be able to help me figure out what I was badly explaining or understanding.)
There are a couple details that uniquely identify the system as 3.5, and from that clue, the question is clearer. I rewrote it to fix the structural problems, but had the whole thing reverted.
@fectin You're right about D&D 3.5e being the system, but that's not really the point. Further, the rest of your edit really is guessing. There are some other unclear details in the question, like "is this an NPC or a PC?"
"he wanted to play an orc knight and all that entails" suggest it's not an NPC, which is odd, because it seems like he's asking about an NPC.
So yeah, editing to make the question about an NPC might actually ensure he gets answers that are useless to him.
@WheatWizard on a side note, do you know were i can find good DW character sheets? I like the ones on the official site, but they have some mistakes, like the thief missing backsteb...
I'm doing my own on MicrosoftWord, but they "don't look fancy" hahahah
@kviiri I'd also mention the game of Roll For Shoes in which someone played a bear, and halfway through the game somebody asked "Wait, can the bear talk?" and we rolled and discovered that it was in fact just a bear.
Story fodder: In Kebra Nagast, there's a story how King Solomon becomes an idolater: the Pharaoh's daughter, whom Solomon totally has the hots for, lives in his court and Solomon allows her to worship her own idols (which is itself "not cool", I guess).
The Pharaoh's daughter challenges Solomon by trying a ribbon across the doors of her shrine and releases locusts inside, and tells Solomon to go inside without undoing the ribbon and kill the three locusts. Solomon bends under the ribbon, inadvertently bowing to the Egyptian gods, and slays the locusts, sacrificing for them too.
For a King fabled for his wisdom, Solomon seems to have been quite easy to bamboozle.
I told this story to my SO, and her response was practical as usual: "he should've crawled in butt-first".
@fectin Reverting was correct, we don't guess. But also bear in mind sometimes when we've been quite sure... but then it turns out the person is playing Pathfinder or D&D 5e, and they were confused because they thought the PHB2 they saw in the shop was relevant to their game.
If we just go "oh, that must be D&D 3.5e", tag it 3.5e, answer to 3.5e, we find that out much later and only after there will be a lot of work setting things straight.
@doppelgreener Or some wicked homebrew concoction, or, especially in the case of 3.5, somebody's indie game that they designed to fix all of D&D's problems having only ever played D&D 3.5 and no other RPG ever.
Sometimes I wonder how many DnD players there are who don't know or understand how significant the differences between the editions are (and as a likely consequence, don't know what edition they're playing)
@BESW Yes or a blend of D&D 3.5e/Pathfinder, which changes the context in questions like that ("there's these awesome items in pathfinder")
@kviiri Lots. Lots and lots. Lots and lots and lots. And then there's the players who think D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder are radically different games. And then there's the players who assume every game is just like theirs.
@kviiri Also, a lot of old-school players started with a Monster Manual from one edition, an adventure module from another, a setting supplement from a variant edition, and may have never seen a PHB or a DMG until years later.
Character concept: Ronky the Tinman. Formerly the mighty dark sorcerer Rondellarrog, his reign was ended in a heroic man transforming him into a small, animated tin figurine. He's on a quest for atonement and redemption, but is easily frustrated by his diminished stature and magical powers. However, turns out that being merely inches tall does have its advantages...
@BESW Grim Jim ought to have a brother called Grave Dave.
(When I was digging through Kickstarters for the Cool Stuff pin, I learned again and again just how wild and weird RPGs can be... and how easy it is to think that one's own experience comprises the whole of it.)
@JoelHarmon I started my RPG adventure GMing 3.5 at level one, but my first time as a player, a few months later, was around level 12. And the campaign after that started at level 30.
My second 30th-level character lasted most of the second session.
My third 30th-level character had to be retired because they made the rest of the party unnecessary.
The fourth character was mostly support, but was literally unkillable without defeating a demigod and bringing down the united wrath of the entire pantheon on the head of the assassin.
(Demilich with a phylactery in a popped bag of holding, in a campaign setting where extradimensional spaces like bags of holding are protected by the only unilateral defense treaty agreed upon by all the gods, and guarded by a demigod under their united protection.)
I've only tried max-level characters in oneshots. Campaigns just don't seem to have much hold when half your party can rewrite the universe, and the other half can kill whole armies of baddies without breaking a sweat.
I've never really played a max-level DnD game, and I don't quite see the appeal. Based on Monster Manuals and such, I'd expect it to be more or less the same as before except the numbers keep getting bigger.
Like, literally the reason my first character died was that he was immune to all spells level 1 through 8, but someone on the other side had prepared Power Word: Death.
But, as I said, that particular group was... different. They ignored racial HD when calculating ECL, and had a custom magic point system which I handily broke and rode like a trained parade horse.
Everyone was trying to min/max, and had been for years. I'd been invited because I had a reputation for being good at fostering RP scenes.
...I wound up with characters I didn't ever bring to the table because they would've embarrassed other players who were trying to min/max.
Ugh. Having run 3e and then 3.5 for a few years, I'd tried my hand at an epic campaign. We started at level 15 or so, with an intent to level up quickly and decide the fate of the world. We didn't make it to epic levels.
I'm not convinced 3.5 is actually playable at epic levels. I mean, I know people have played it that way. But I suspect it was more of a Stockholm syndrome situation, where all involved just agreed to pretend it was D&D and by the rules.
The thing that bugs me, I'd expect people to stop being an adventuring party when they reach those epic tier power levels where they can literally shape the world.
BESW, thinking: I keep stealing the spotlight with my characters because I'm more useful in more situations than anyone else. I know, I'll make a bard who's nothing but support! You can't steal the mechanical spotlight with a bard. BESW, preparing: I'm a genius! An invisible, intangible, inaudible bard who does almost nothing but buff other PCs! Let that spotlight try to find me now! Other player, the next session: So I've been working on a new character, and I think I figured out how to make a really OP bard.
@Magician Sure, but this was more about how proud he was of having "broken" the bard... and how he really really hadn't and a cursory glance at my sheet would've made that so painfully obvious.
There was this Finnish quiz show where they asked the name of the invisible child in Moomin. The contestant remembered it wrong and tried to salvage by saying that there's actually two invisible children in Moomin, but the other never speaks and therefore no one ever notices her.
@BESW Sure, but you'd still have people trying to do the same thing, and comparing attack bonuses or biggest damage they can deal. And someone's gonna come out an order of magnitude better off.
I'm planning to surprise my party by having my monk fall in love with an NPC in our campaign. I'll write a love poem to her before the next session, when we're due to separate.
The monk, being still bound to a higher purpose, knows they cannot form a relationship, but believes in acceptance of the emotion more than suppression.
I'm a bit of a poet myself, but I plague my friends with all sorts of doggerel rhyme often enough outside the table that I haven't really taken to using that in-game, as a GM or as a player :P
Except for Kihna the Bard who punctuated his spells with short rhymes, especially vicious mockery.
(I once placed the party in front of a fish pond full of koi who uttered prophetic haikus for scraps of food; but the prophecies were entirely contextless.)
I improvised the haiku on the spot, and all of them came true before the campaign was over.
Granted that was partly because the players were expecting them to be fulfilled, so did the work of interpretation for me.
But for such a long-running and relatively free-form campaign, I was very proud to have accomplished that.
Most of the prophecies led to exactly what I was planning them to do, and created some great tension when the players noticed things they thought would be relevant.
In one of my games, the party was investigating a haunted forest and they stumbled upon a small tomb. They started arguing over whether to loot it - half of them were for looting, the others were against it on moral grounds.
The tomb's inscription read: "Here rests General Marcus, slayer of a thousand foes". Now, I had intended the tomb to be flavor only and I hadn't thought of them trying to loot it. Surely desecrating a tomb, especially in a haunted forest, should have terrible consequences, but I didn't want to derail the session into that. And any serious consequence would've felt like a "gotcha", if you know what I mean.
Also, I didn't really want them to quarrel over a non-important tomb and the possible aftermath, so when they opened the tomb, turns out it wasn't an actual grave. There was a neat sword with the inscription "General Marcus" on it.
No corpse to bother.
I had planned for them to find a magical sword later that session, but it conveniently filled the void that was inside the tomb.
In 4e I introduced the idea of puzzle shrines, little out-of-the-way wall niches or tiny buildings that you might stumble across while dungeon-delving. Each of them posed a question that a devotee of a particular sect would know the answer to, often a philosophical riddle or interpreting the moral of a parable. If you could solve the puzzle, the shrine would give you a blessing.
It was a good way to recharge powers when the narrative made taking a long rest illogical.
It was also a great way to do worldbuilding, and sometimes to hint at the nature of the dungeon or foreshadow something that would be important later.
> The stone walls of this nook are carved in heavy bas-relief, depicting a sword-wielding half-orc beset by a hill giant, a frost giant, and a fire giant. A plaque of ivory and gold reads, in Giant:
My master is a powerful man. I am hard and steep-cheeked. I am the survivor of hostilities, Of fire and file. When I make men weep, I wear red. When I do not, my master is dead.
The answer is the sword wielded by the hero in the bas-relief. Touching the sword gives a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls until the next extended rest.
(In that campaign, half-orcs believed they'd been made as the perfect balance between human intelligence and orc physicality; their shrines reflected this.)
I wish there was an RPG written from the point of view of some non-human race, with that race being the "+1 to two stats of your choice" and humans having some other quality than "versatile, default, masters of their own fate".
Eg. from the point-of-view of a nomadic race like orcs, they'd probably emphasize the humans' ability to get along with each other and construct large fortified towns. And they'd probably call them "cityfolk" or something like that.
Actually now that I think of it, in Master of Orion the human speciality is being friendly to all races. Everyone else has one or more favorite enemies or is just universally loathed, except by humans whom everyone gets along with.
Humans Are Delicious, where you play as dragons, ogres, etc and humans are considered small, weak, but underhanded and clever
Also - reminds me of the Uplift War books, where one of the sapient races is literally a shapeshifter so humans can't come close to competing on the "adaptable" front, and instead earn a reputation as environmentalists due to the skills we gained cleaning up Earth to look good in front of the other spacefaring races.
Because humans are also the youngest race on the scene, we also get all the garbage planets that nobody else wants anymore, so it works out.
I'd play a game where each player is a dragon trying to amass a hoard (gold is XP, right?) while battling hordes of horrible humans and trying to protect their treasure. Hells, it should be a competitive game where one player is humans and the other is a dragon, and then you swap after each raid/raid.
@Frezak There's a board game (I forget the name, Delve or something) where one player is a dragon, one player is a hero who wants to slay the dragon, one player is the tribe of goblins who wants to kill the hero without being eaten by the dragon, and one player is the cave in which this is all happening, who wants to bury everyone.
There is also a Thief who wants to rob everybody and escape
"Gaze at my emptyness all you wish," said the old cavern, "but gaze not upon my walls, nor my floors, nor my ceilings, for they are not meant for your eyes."
In today's episode of "kviiri eating his old army rations to not waste food", meat and macaroni stew with tomatoes. I predict disgustment, but I really dislike having to discard edible food.
