> Feel the burn. When a fate point is spent to invoke one of your consequences against you, you get that fate point at the end of that turn rather than at the end of that scene.
> Pain mage. When you invoke a consequence to improve one of your magical actions, you get the value of the consequence as a bonus to the roll, instead of +2.
> There is power in suffering. Once per session you can spend a fate point to add +1 to a roll for every consequence in the scene.
> Damn the consequences, full speed ahead. If you have a consequence in recovery, you can reset it (no longer in recovery, treat as if you just acquired it) to gain fate points equal to 1/2 the consequence's value.
If you're on the ground and someone you care about is falling from above or almost directly above you, can you catch them with Feather Fall as they get into your spell's range?
Yeah, this is tabletop RPG chat. There's just a LOT more than D&D out there.
For example, in D&D 4e feather fall is a free action triggered by a creature falling, so there's no question about reaction times; that's baked into the power already.
And in Dresden Files Accelerated your magic is tied to a particular way you do things--with guile, or force, or flair, etc--and it'd be hard to justify being able to cast a spell fast enough to intercept a fall unless your associated approach is Haste.
In D&D 5e, feather fall has a casting time of "reaction" so it's a question of how that action type interacts with the narrative. I don't know 5e very well, but I imagine someone else here can help.
There's this silly Suplex build in 5e, where you go Totem Barbarian, and choose Eagle at 3rd and 14th level, which gives you bonus action dash, and turns your movement speed into a fly speed until you end your turn off the ground. With the Wood Elf race and Mobile feat, it lets you use your entire turn to drag someone you previously grappled 82 feet into the air
, who you piledrive back into the ground for 8d6 damage to the both of you, or rather half that for you because you're raging and the ground deals bludgeoning damage, which you resist.
you can do that every turn
well, until they break free, then you have to spend a turn grappling and hitting them normally
A spellcaster using Haste on you increases the fall to 110 feet, which causes 11d6 damage per turn
Use your background feature for a Retainer, a squire that can cast the Thaumaturgy cantrip, so they can follow you around and into battle to make various eagle screeching sounds to accentuate your Roaring Skies Suplex Piledrivers. Also, you're a Luchador
Playing a flying race (the only one in the group) and still low level (10hp/13AC), we seem to be encountering many creatures with longbows. I was thinking about somehow getting the feather fall spell (multi-classing/magic item/other party member to take it) but wanted to know/confirm how it worke...
@BESW In 5e the reaction trigger is when "you or a creature within 60 feet of you falls." Which reads a little ambiguously to me... is it when a fall starts or when you/creature-within-60 is falling? But the first line of the description seems (to me) to clarify it in the more-permissive direction: "choose up to five falling creatures within range."
This question follows from this question: What Are The Minimum Stats To Cause Fall Damage When Grappling Plus Jumping?
In my answer to that question, I came up with the following minimum stats to pull off a jumping grapple:
Strength: 10 (standing long jump of 1.5')
Height: 5'8"
Mov...
@nitsua60 I think, given 5e's focus on narrative understanding rather than literal rules interpretations, "falls" can be understood as an ongoing thing.
@Miniman Really good. Kids are healthy and (generally) happy, school year's coming to an end, and I finished a nine-night run playing for a show. In one piece!
(Though it's going to be a while before I want to listen to Queen again.)
Then there's @NautArch... prolly Great Old One-powered rages. It's an extra rage, but it doesn't end until he gives a plot-twisty sentence to end a scene. And the sentence is in italics!
(Hmm... that implied critique of Lovecraft's style may be two or three hops too far to reasonably expect anyone to follow. That's my sign to go to bed. Because the clock had just struck eleven!)
Often what we recognize as the obvious plot arc is just a standard scaffolding on which to hang the point of the story.
"Plus Points" is a good lighthearted introduction to thinking about what genre each section of the Bible is written in, and why the genre you're reading it as can fundamentally change the meaning of what you're reading.
To be fair to science in this particular case, though, apparently all vulture bees are American so it's likely Samson either just found some bees who made really bad real estate choices, or that it's purely symbolic and probably invokes some older, now-lost story or idiom.
Hm, upon re-reading chapter 14 of the Book of Judges it never actually says the honey is made of the lion, just that there war a beehive in the carcass.
> Sweeten the deal. You know a really messed-up druid who can provide you with corpse honey. Your Rapport checks made with the dead and the undead are automatically one step more successful, but the GM can compel you to do a favor for your druid friend once per adventure.
@Magician yes their bones shall furnish my furnace errr sorry no just the usual brookie stuff. One of the few things I'm relatively comfortable making :)
> Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender asks: "Does everyone want a drink?" > The first logician replies "Maybe." > The second logician replies "Maybe." > The third logician replies "Yes."
@MikeQ Oh, those are what you get when a wizard brings a Bee Movie meme video to life.
Living memes are like living spells: self-sustaining intellectual constructs given form and motive force to terrorize the innocent and bewail their unnatural lives.
> THIS IS FINE. Level 19 Meme, Medium Elite Controller HP 360; Bloodied 180; Initiative +13 AC 33; Fort 31; Ref 30; Will 32 Speed 0; Immune: gaze Saving Throws +2; 1 Action Point I'M OKAY WITH THIS (aura 5): Creatures in the aura have -5 to saves. ON FIRE (Basic attack; Standard, Melee 2; Fire; target: one creature). Atk +21 vs Ref. Hit 2d6+7 fire damage and grants combat advantage (save ends). GROUPTHINK (free action; Triggered when a creature fails a save within the aura; target: All creatures within the aura). Atk +21 vs Will. Hit ongoing 15 psychic damage.
Speaking of bards, I just found John the Balladeer, an anthology of short stories by Manly Wade Wellman about a man who wandered the mountains of North Carolina and faced supernatural challenges armed with his quick wit, deep knowledge of occult folklore, and silver-stringed guitar.
Looking forward to reading it, and he sure sounds like a great RPG character.
> Silver-stringed guitar. You get +2 when overcoming or defending against evil by playing your guitar.
Manly Wade Wellman (and what a name!) was a Weird Tales author at the same time as Lovecraft and Howard, but outlasted both of them and made his mark with the John the Balladeer stories in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the late 40s, and continued to write until he passed away in the mid 80s.
@MikeQ Yep. This one is a Q-like trickster that hails from a realm where music shapes reality. They're weak in their own world, and want more power by conquering the Material plane. However, their more humane side is genuinely curious about the workings of the Prime Material, which makes them far less interested in just destroying stuff. They want to try everything.
After all, they're an artist in a way... and causing all kinds of glum misfortunes to befall the lands they conquer feeds their creativity.
> At 1st level, the Unmarried has the ability to not have a spouse. At 3rd level, the Unmarried *still* has the ability to not have a spouse. At 5th level, they become immune to *Ceremony*'s wedding rite and cannot be forcefully wed. At 7th level, they feel lonely and get a cat companion
Closer to gameplay, this BBEG's thing is not that they're insanely powerful. Their music carries only a fraction of the power it does in their home realm. But they can't be slain by conventional means either, instead simply blinking back to their homeworld as a marred vestige of their former power that regenerates over the course of a couple of weeks. This, combined with their ability to bond with various evil actors in the world, is what makes them dangerous.
They hail from the realm of music, yes. Hearing's the thing there :)
The plane of smell is the next campaign.
(now I'm really glad that DnD didn't include sense-themed planes like they did with elements and alignments)
> Tactilia, the Realm of Touch > Odouros, the Realm of Smell > Geusis, the Realm of Taste > Opticon, the Realm of Sight > Auralia, the Realm of Hearing
(if it wasn't DnD there'd also be planes for the sense of balance and body position and such)
Buy the supplement to get access to Giggleon, the Sensational plane for the Sense of Humor, and Serius, the Sensational plane for the Sense of Self-Importance.
So I thought I had come up with an absolutely ingenious world, which is based on the idea that there was a once-powerful civilization that had some really fancy technology they left behind when they collapsed, and the current civilization is very primitive compared to them but is slowly learning to use all the gizmos their predecessors left behind
Then I realized that I had reinvented Medieval High Fantasy.
Sometimes the fallen empire is more implicit than explicit, but eg. usually the older some magical item is, the better - this implies some sort of lost knowledge or power the ancient ones used to possess.
Yeah that's always... The only thing "different enough" I can think of, is High Fantasy worlds usually are "degenerating towards normal", eliminating other races and magic and all that makes that world interesting, and postapocaliptic worlds are "degenerating to nothing", either barren lands or alien-esque new fauna and flora eliminating us mammals from the world :P
One of the more interesting cases of fantasy settings, Might and Magic, had a rather complex magitech world where a lot of "fantasy creatures" were actually aliens or something, and magic was actually highly advanced technology at least to a large part.
The developers also created the highly popular turn based strategy game series Heroes of Might and Magic which was set in the same universe, but didn't pay much attention to stuff like "the demons are actually planet-devouring aliens, not literal beings of Hell".
huh... I played a LOT of Heroes of Might and Magic, but never completed a campaign of it. And obviously never played the "might and magic" (sans Heroes) games... I never got that impression from what I played
[grin] LotR is about trying to reverse an ongoing apocalypse. The ancient empires are already shattered: the dwarves have just barely scraped themselves back together, Mirkwood is falling to the spiders, Lothlorien and Rivendell are evacuating, the ents are going extinct. The kingdoms of men are lawless and corrupt. The old technologies like mithril and palantirs are lost and any remnants are horded; the angelic guardians are giving up and letting their corrupted rivals take over...
Anyway, come HoMM III which appears to be a pretty normal fantasy game where Angels and Titans fight Demons and Dragons
But it was not really meant to be just that
The first expansion Armageddon's Blade was supposed to feature a new faction, the Heavenly Forge that paid a lot of homage to the MM series' scifi bits.
But the fans got mad, specifically the ones who had never played MM beyond HoMM and who got the impression that this was scifi being shoehorned into a fantasy franchise, which wasn't exactly accurate
So the Heavenly Forge was replaced by the rather boring (and OP) elemental conflux town :<
@BESW but on the way they are leaving the world just as plain as it can be, regular non-longlived-numenorean humans, no elves, dwarves disappearing, elves leaving, no more magic, etc... All bland and unsavory, so it can connect to our non-magic past, and give the story the impression that "long time ago, this happened"... Wich I hate. I read fantasy for the fantastic things... And a lot of times by the end of the story you get a regular run of the mill medieval world...
@Helwar Aye, I'm increasingly focusing on the awesome modern epics like Broken Earth and Binti, and feel the "must-read classics" are... not really must-read or classic.
You might also like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which is a bit more traditionally fantasy.
I was increasingly underwhelmed by that series the more I read, until I dropped it entirely.
It gets slower and slower, and the characters get flatter and flatter.
I'm currently reading the Obsidian and Blood trilogy, which are urban fantasy murder mysteries where the detective is the High Priest of Death in 15th century Tenochtitlan; so they expect the apocalypse every day but are working very hard to prevent it.
Guys, I have a question, but I'm not sure wich SE should be better... It's about a book I'm writing, so it's worldbuilding. There priests have reality bending powers (they power up the spaceships and "teleport" them around the galaxy). And I thought they could "teleport" away parts of someone, like for example, a tumor, or the appendix if needs extracting... But I'm no doctor so maybe that would cause internal bleeding and horrible death? So maybe ask this in a medical SE? But, it's all magic...
@Tiggerous yeah, that one. However her name is spelled, I haven't read it once, just listened to it :P
@Tiggerous I dunno, right now she's all over the place. One moment she tries to be down to earth, next moment she's glaring at you from her proverbial high horse. It's jarring :S
Since you guys love eagles, I have a cool video about a Russian guy who barely survived encountering one. In Soviet Russia, 6 HD eagles attack you on the fly. youtu.be/N65ALqiBW_o
@Tiggerous Is that the one that covers exactly one day in Randland?
@Helwar I feel like they'd certainly take it over at WB. And you might get a really good, medically informed answer. But you'll also get ten that may be no help at all.
@Tiggerous I feel like Sanderson deserves a Hugo or something for finishing off the series.
(Both for the tackling of the task and the quality of his product.)
@nitsua60 Can't remember exact timings, but book 9 climaxes with a 'big thing' happening. Book 10 is 800 pages of people debating whether or not the 'big thing' has actually happened and what it means if it has.
@nitsua60 It was definitely a herculean effort on Sanderson's part bringing it all back together.
@Miniman While that grapple jump thing tried for our Cheese meta, it seems that it didn't quite make the cut. @nitsua60 Melee arrows would be better if I'd chosen two weapon fighting style rather than archery.
@BESW And how it's (with magic added) the situation in a variety of places after empires fell: central and western Europe, Central America (After the Mayans fell) ... Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC in central Anatolia ...
@nitsua60 I'm good with that. Now all we have to do is find one.
@BESW Yeah, WoT (aka Waster of Time) began to drag around book 4 or 5; Jordan fell in love with side characters to a certain extent ... but I kept picking up books until 8 or 9 at garage sales/second hand books, since I was traveling by air a lot those days. Kept me occupied on the plane.
I seem to have made some sort of error on my mobile phone and the stack main site is coming up in desktop view (but I don't have it checked to do that).
is there a site setting i'm missing or accidentally pressed?
@Tiggerous tried that and tried that - i'll try the cache clearing. not sure why i haven't done that yet. Everything is okay in firefox, but chrome is wonky (on android)
and that did it :)
grazie!
(fyi, i did try turning it off and and on again first..)
@Helwar Cookies are a way for a web server to keep track of a client (maintain its state). This is a bad way to do things for a variety of reasons. Stateless (RESTful) resources don't use cookies but rather tokens. REST also uses HTTP methods heavily, which can be safe (such as GET: no matter how many times you use it, the resource does not change) or idempotent (such as PUT: now matter how many times you upload the same file, it is still only changing server state once)
I'm a web developer, but I'm veeeeeeeeeery out of sync with new technologies (i've been out of my medium for quite a few years). I have been seeing that buzzword "RESTful" around, but never got to know what it is
@DavidCoffron Weird thing I just noticed. Manacles don't actually say they give the Restrained condition. It just calls them "restraints". This is different than the net which says "...is restrained."
@SPavel might check it. It might be good for me to do something "new" instead of keeping to what i Know. Especially since in technology what I know gets deprecated sooner rather than later...
@Helwar Indeed, if nothing else it's a good buzzword for the ol' resume
The idea behind REST is pretty straightforward because it's how the Web was designed so 90% chance you'll just be like "isn't this just the normal way of doing things"
It's more about the constraints that you ought to follow
@NautArch correct; if manacles applied the restrained condition, it would say so. (For example, you can move/run with manacles on your hands ... you can't if restrained
@KorvinStarmast Which is just kinda weird to call them "restraints" but not give the condition. IT also implies there really is no mechanical effect beyond fluff and RP.
In one campaign, after capturing a very evil caster, we started off with manacles, but then ended up just cutting the hands off.
and maybe his tongue. We were pretty mad at this guy, but needed him alive for a bit more
@NautArch I don't see the English language as that restrictive; many words have multiple meanings, and the common term for something like that is restraint. The odd thing is the specific usage of restrained as a Condition ...
Yeah, how to disable a spell caster: I think we have a question on that somewhere.
English is the most hackable language I know off... You can place a word, in a place that doesn't correspond it, and MAKE SENSE of it. A) I have made you a jersey B) Don't come near me with that or I'll jersey you to death!
Hmmm, And here I have most of them (I think I am missing one of the adventures ... and ToA has been locked away until we do our thing with chatizens ..
D&D beyond angers me. It's a good thing on paper, but they did it the worst possible way. Instead of developing it themselves (so they have their own right to distribute their own freaking game), a 3rd company did it and WotC sanctifies it. So, as this 3rd company doesn't have the rights and it's not the same company you buy the actual books to... you need to pay them separatedly for the rights of the content.
@NautArch yeah right. But since both WotC and the other company whose name I don't remember wash their hands on the issue naming that they are separate companies....
@Helwar Well if you were buying the physical and the electronice products simultaneously there would be an added cost, because they'd charge even more for the base item - but it would stop you feeling like you've bought exactly the same product twice.
I was thinking videogames mostly, where you had the disc but also could download the game (nowadays if you buy the Disc version of a game, it doesn't allow you to download the digital version either ¬¬)
I dunno, I'm salty on the issue. I'm not swimming in money and the books are expensive by themselves >_<
A workable solution would be keeping physical book costs as they are, but providing a discount code off an electronic copy, so people that bought both would be rewarded for doing so, but book only purchasers wouln't have to also shoulder electronic costs for a product they won;t use.
@NautArch Yeah I know it doesn't hold, but since the actual companies gave that as an excuse everytime someone asked why did they have to pay twice for the same content...
Can I get a sanity check: is my table weird for assuming that our setting has class names as regular terms that people use (since adventurers are frequent in the world)
and a weird crawford tweet on escaping manacles via misty step being DM decision. I don't see how it's a DM decision. Misty Step is Verbal component only. If they're not gagged, why would manacles hold them?
unless this is a sign that manacles become a 'worn item" and could teleport with you
@DavidCoffron right, tell him that too. Make him angry. I think I will avoid the room in three days from now. I don't want to be here if something big falls down on your heads :P
(I think the joke should be clear enough given the avatar he is currently using. In case it is not, ask)
@NautArch Apparently, the San Jose has been found in the Caribbean Sea. The wreck has been shrouded in secrecy because of lingering questions about who owns it. Colombia and Spain both say it belongs to them. The researchers at Woods Hole say they are explorers, not treasure hunters, and are not involved in the ownership disputes
@KorvinStarmast Wow!I wouldn't be surprised to see A&M involved with this soon (or the institute of nautical archaeology). Thank goodness a legit science organization found it.
@NautArch I figure that the Spanish and Colombian governments will find a way, through their lawyers/agents/representatives, to come to a compromise in due course.
If I have a question that has been ambiguously answered in the answer to a related question, should I ask a new question, or just ask for clarification in chat?
@ColinGross not about hiding rolls. It's about whether the player knows they're getting the +1. THe player can still give their result, but the DM would add the +1s.
The simple answer is that the DM knows, and makes sure to add the +1 in his head, and thus cue the player when a "would have missed" attack hits. Provide clues/cues. (A short rest thing will likely sort out the remaining mystery)
@KorvinStarmast absolutely, but that's a bit of a metagaming. YOu can't (and won't) prevent it, but worst case is it leaves the player scratching their head.
This question follows from this question: What Are The Minimum Stats To Cause Fall Damage When Grappling Plus Jumping?
In my answer to that question, I came up with the following minimum stats to pull off a jumping grapple:
Strength: 10 (standing long jump of 1.5')
Height: 5'8"
Mov...
