@KorvinStarmast with apologies for extreme obtuseness, in a recent comment when you say "a feature of this request" do you mean of the meta.SE request for comment, or of my meta.rpg post? (Thanks.)
@JoelHarmon I'm enjoying it. I'm into part 3; Vin's been into the LR's keep (and barely survived) near the end of part 2, if that helps you locate me in time.
Did anyone warn you that the plan for that world is a trilogy of trilogies, the third trilogy isn't out yet (but a novella is), and that this world ties into a much larger Cosmere setting?
No, but I lived through The Wheel of Time (rereading the entire series start-to-n each time a new book was released), so I think I can handle just about anything =)
Well, that's not quite true. I didn't start until 4 or 5 books were already out, so I'm probably 6 readings of an RJ book shy of that ^^ description.
@nitsua60 The big epic novel series, Stormlight Archives, has released three of a planned ten books. Each of those is over a thousand pages. And I'm impatient for the next book to come out.
@JoelHarmon (Which he did an amazing job of, btw. Anyone who gave up on Jordan around book 9 or 10: I suggest you grunt through and get to the part where Sanderson takes over. He writes like it's old (books 1-5) Jordan, but pulling threads together into a tight weave (Weave?) rather than just spinning them out.)
(Which I guess is just a really long-winded way of saying the horrible truth: "the series got a lot better when the author died.")
@nitsua60 I gave up on him around book 6 or 7, when I complained to a friend that the books were getting way too slow, and being told that it really slowed down around book 9.
No small part of that was the female characters in particular were nearly indistinguishable to me.
@JoelHarmon I think EWoT has decent one-page versions of each book. [rummages]
Oh, no, I'm thinking of EWoT's summaries which are broken out by chapter. But each chapter's about a paragraph, so you can cruise through a book in 20 or 30 minutes. See encyclopaedia-wot.org/books/acos/index.html for example.
OMG, the title of the Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt movie that I always pronounce in my head "sesevenen" is actually "seseventeenen"!!!
(except the mantle is the Phlogisten and the crust is the cave walls that as you dig through gravity increases exponentially and you can't progress further)
(The boat you-all were entering into turned into a killing field. But there was plot to be had beyond that TPK, so we said "let's use the magic of a jump-cut to see you walk into the next room with a file of dead bodies--not yours--in the background.")
Around the site there are many things that are abbreviated examples are:
D&D/d&d/DnD all mean Dungeons & Dragons
LTH meaning the dnd 5e spell Leomunds tiny hut in This question about the interactions of familiars and Leomunds tiny hut
Are these ok to use? The first example is one that is used...
I guess I'm going to end up being my own expert; I'm trying another long sequence that should end up with a pressure suit because somebody wants to rule against me about the interpretation of flying speed
I'm just looking for a stupid sealent because I don't thing mending's going to create the correct composite when I cast it on a brokeh sphere with my head inside it
If the decanter of endless water rocket works with theoretical efficiency it would provide 2520 feet/second^2 of acceleration. If I can get 1/30 of that I still get 2.6gees of acceleration. See you.
@Miniman Doubtful; it's from the "inner sea" series of splat books where they started experimenting, resulting in a bunch of original albeit strange material
Yes, I saw that. It doesn't tell me what the thing is.
What idea is lurking behind the term?
And why is it necessary to assume that one of the two biggest names in RPGs is the originator of whatever that idea is, rather than (as is usually the case with "new" things those franchises put out) it being something relatively common within less broadly known RPGs for many years before being popularized in the big names?
It's got (somewhat verbose and scattered) advice on how using many narrowly-defined skills impacts the gameplay vs using a handful of broadly-defined ones, with example skill lists including one that has Move Quietly, Find Secret Passages, Lockpicking, and Pickpocketing, and another that just has Breaking and Entering, and Stealth.
(I'm looking at a 2005 PDF reproduction of the 1995 printed Fudge rules, so even the re-print handily pre-dates Pathfinder and 4e.)
Back up another 10 ten years. King Arthur Pendragon:Chivalric Roleplaying in Arthur's Britain (1985) has an Awareness skill that covers all the five senses and the "sixth sense" of imminent danger. Interestingly, recognizing faces and remembering their names and how you know them and what their coat of arms is, got its own Recognize skill.
According to my GM (he's been in the game since 1e, and it's basically his life) apparently True20 came out with it first, that both Paizo and Hasbro adopted
I submit that it's not uncommon for people whose "life" is D&D, to be unaware of RPG trends outside that sphere until they are picked up by D&D-adjacent spaces.
"Skill merge" is just a consolidation of the skill list
Games since the dawn of games have added/removed skills as made sense for their paradigm. None of these did that in a void, new games' developers didn't re-invent the skill concept every time—they assessed what came before them and re-assessed what skills their system should have, if any.
Whether you go more fine-grained on skills, or go with more broad strokes, depends on what your system cares about.
D&D has tons of skills and mechanics and features that relate to combat because having one single skill about combat would be a problem: it would be The God Skill you put all your points into. Going more fine-grained, dividing that up into many different attributes and skills and sub-mechanics, creates more meaningful choices with the core of the system.
On the other hand, D&D doesn't prioritise Being Friendly as a way to get things done, so it only has one skill for Being Friendly and that is fine and works well.
(And only 3-4 social skills depending on the edition, each given a fraction of the focus of anything physical.)
You divide up skills to the degree they don't make sense being grouped together OR to the degree you need to avoid a God Skill and create meaningful choices and allow players to differentiate themselves. (D&D players have to choose between "ranged" and "melee" and "grapple" and "magic" and "strength" and "dexterity" and "toughness" and so on, there is no one "Be Good At Combat" skill.)
You consolidate skills to the degree they aren't important but their existence is still necessary. (Bubblegumshoe players just put points into "Fight" to see how well they can throw down when it comes to it.)
Bubblegumshoe on the other hand has its focus on investigation. Most editions of D&D have a single Investigate skill because that's all it needs, because it's not super important. (Some don't have that at all.) However, if you had just one Investigate skill in Bubblegumshoe, that would be the God Skill. So instead Bubblegumshoe has tons of different skills for how you investigate, so that you can't be good at all the methods.
So to review: - Bubblegumshoe is about investigation. It's not about wilderness survival at all; that gets no skills. It's barely about fighting, that gets one skill. It has some skills that might come up related to either, like first aid. It is about Investigation though, so it branches up the Investigation skills heavily. - D&D is about combat. It isn't about Investigation much, but that's something people still may want to do sometimes, so that gets one skill, sometimes. It is about combat, though, and wilderness survival to a lesser extent. Since it is VERY about combat, combat gets TON…
D&D in fact is so much about combat that it couldn't do combat with Skills alone and had to branch into tons more deeper mechanics than simply a score on a sheet, all specifically about combat.
@trogdor i'm also considering stuff like Dungeoneering, applications of Arcana to understanding magical hijinks encountered in the wilderness, Knowledge (Geography), the Hunter and Druid skills around favoured terrains and other minor class features like those, Goodberry, etc.
It's certainly not hugely important and doesn't come up much. The system has the basic assumption that surviving in the wilderness is easy for the protagonists barring actual threats to their life made by enemies. It's something that's relevant enough a skill exists, as opposed to it being irrelevant: there is no skill for piloting a spaceship in either D&D or Bubblegumshoe, because nobody is expected to pilot spaceships in either game.
@doppelspooker Though it does make me wonder about the first RPG to present (what we'd recognize today as) a "skill system." OD&D definitely didn't, Classic Traveller definitely did. In between...?
@Joshua Well ok scratch that, there is the official "Book of Vile Darkness" artifact book which states it could be the means to becoming a lich but doesn't actually contain the rules for that.
@doppelspooker Hmm... that doesn't really jibe with my understanding of wargames, though I'm going only on received wisdom and not direct experience there. And I think your point about attributes helps me put a finer point on what I mean by "what we'd recognize today as a skill system."
Bell! Gotta run to class. Induction today =) (Mathematical, not physical.)
@KorvinStarmast Did they not in general have concepts like different attack type bonuses?
@nitsua60 I'm partly working back here from Fate: approaches and skills in that game are both skill systems, and the primary source of bonuses to a roll. (Anything else modifying your roll is something extraordinary like a stunt or invoke.) A skill system could describe your innate physical and mental qualities, or could be your training or knowhow. (But given innate physical and mental qualities can be trained there's a blurry line there.)
@doppelspooker I played a lot of board games, it is very hard to generalize. Sniper, for example, had a lot of 'line of sight' stuff in it. For miniatures games, which genre? Micro armor? Ancients? Napoleonics? But yes, you would have some bonuses to the 1d6 or 2d6 die resolution role, depending.
We also had for Napoleonics/Civil War/Revolutionary War games (And Frederick the Great Era) morale checks and leadership bonuses.
I'm not well versed on war games, so I'm not referring to any particular one. I just know D&D inherited from both Chainmail (a wargame) and Braunstein (ran using a wargame) and the capacity to have various scores you add to rolls came from wargames rather than being a novel invention by D&D.
Certainly there were novel developed applications of it in D&D.
But the mechanical fundamentals of a skill system go way back before TTRPGs even existed and into its wargaming roots.
I'm trying to ease myself into wargames but I don't really know many of them. I used to play Memoir '44 with a friend, but I'd like something slightly deeper than that. Not the full-blown "spend hours to simulate one day" games experience though
@doppelspooker a lot of wargames seperate damage to specific troop types by ammunition.. AP vs tanks, AP vs Infantry, AP vs lightly armored aircraft etc.
but most modern wargames just boil that down to one rile and some bonus
that depends on the type or the enemy.
@doppelspooker infintity gets you a well rounded, playable army for about 100... while Warhammer demands about 500 or more to even fulfil the basics.
@doppelspooker Yeah, the miniatures wargames hobby could get expensive. Though some of us use the Arafix miniatures (plastic) rather than lead figures to keep the cost down.
@Trish If you go into the details of Starcarft, the original, you will find that damage is modified by weapon and armor type. :) For example, firebats are more effective against softer targets and structures, less so than against armored targets like an Ultralisk.
@Trish i remember being very confused about that for a long time because it's so prohibitive, and spoke to a friend who played it: warhammer decided long ago that they would rather have 1,000 players that spend $1,000 each than 10,000 players who spend $100 each. I imagine that's partly because of dedication and investment: buying into warhammer gives you automatically a much more hardcore player base.
@Trish that's always a bad sign when a game is pitching that.
@KorvinStarmast it's not uncommon for modern videogames to have this kind of modelling because they've got the shortcut that a computer can do it and it doesn't need any player to work out by hand the details of a complicated interaction
Am I missing something in these comments? A few people are suggesting I'm being too RAW-happy by suggesting that the word eat necessitates a mouth. I'm just confused.
@Carcer they try to lure people to Wargaming with their shotgun-licensing (it's easy to license just ONE part of a faction for some mobile game or something) and then... they are not called the "Robbers of Nottingham" for nothing.
@DavidCoffron slimes. Check the slimes/goo. Do they need to eat? Do they have a mouth?
@DavidCoffron because it is not strictly necessary for someone's mouth to be involved in feeding, thanks to medical intervention. They are considering it very unlikely that the important part of goodberry is that you taste it with your tongue and mash it with your teeth as opposed to "it goes into your stomach"
eating neither necessitates the possession or usage of a mouth, and English doesn't suppose that necessity, nor do the rules, so I think you're leaning on some pedantic exactness that doesn't really exist
I could reasonably say I eat through a stomach tube and that would not be an incorrect choice of words
I like Labyrinth reasonably much but it has its flaws. It's a pretty difficult game to teach because despite its relatively simply rules, the bulk of the game is a bajillion of event cards that fundamentally change things.
but the thing is that even if your general definition of the word "eat" means using a mouth, to argue that is the only possible way to get the benefit of something that states you have to eat it seems extremely pedantic and counter to intuition
see, this is why people think you're being excessively RAW - you're arguing about the definition of "eat" and "you have to eat it" rather than what makes sense
@DavidCoffron “the plain english definition” doesn't mean “exclusively only a legalistic reading of exclusively only the leading definition in any given dictionary”.
If I may re quote this ... 5e is written for plain english. The plain english meaning of eat involves the mouth ... if one is a human/humanoid. wink I think that there are some monsters that eat with other bits of their anatomy.
@DavidCoffron because people are reasonably considering that the important meaning is that you have to consume the berry somehow and ruling that you HAVE to use your mouth is unfairly specific and unfun in the circumstances
@DavidCoffron Yeah. The DM is I think trying to get his players to be a bit more "out of the box" in their thinking. @Carcer No, they would not. There was some interesting work done in the 70's about what gets absorbed into the blood stream from that orifice, albeit this was having to do with people using that area to absorb heroin when their veins would not stand up to a needle ...
@Carcer Part of our drug education class. (Nose sniffing likewise speeds up absorption, see cocaine and some other chemical mind altering substances ... )
@Carcer It's magic. Why won't it be absorbed? Why will it? Have they tried it yet?
@Carcer I'd tend to agree if D&D physics = real world physics ... but does it? Magic can do a lot of different stuff, and the goodberry's berry is magical for 24 hours.
@Carcer Such as bake it, grind it into powder, and snort it. See what happens.
@Carcer maybe I'm more perturbed by the fact that the answer didn't clarify that their option is a variant on the word eat. It makes it seem like that's a common usage of the goodberry spell
@DavidCoffron Holy Smokes! I just saw on amazon that First Fantasy Campaign book is going for 259 dollars, used. I need to dig deep into my boxed in the attic. If I still have that bugger, I am selling it. Freaking useless as a paid for product when I first purchased in 1977/1978.
But the concept of spells work as the spell description states suggests that this usage should be a creative use of spells and should be adjudicated as such.
@Carcer In D&D 5e, why can't they be? I've snorted mucous from my nose into the back of my throat, and swallowed (inadvertently, when I am sick) so I can see a crushed up goodberry being snorted .. maybe. DM needs to rule on that. (Also, how is the PC drinking fluids? I learned in survival school that you'll die from lack of water before lack of food)
If it is a plot hook, then they need to let it play out rather than trying to circumvent. But as a DM, i'd be much more likely to allow something reasonable (Antimagic field and snip, teleporting food, even nutrient enema, cut and regenerate).
@Carcer Goodberries is actually a malapropism. The original spell was Gooed Berries. It would produce a jelly from various harvested berries and you'd snort the jelly to hasten its restorative effects.
@KorvinStarmast I am definitely not arguing that they cannot be snorted, I think that's a valid way to consume a goodberry and a reasonable approach to try when your alternative is literally starving to death
I'm kinda imagining it's one of three things: - The DM wants the Tortle to die. I hope it's not this one. - The DM is just setting them a challenge where he's not 100% sure how they will/should solve it, because this is a good kind of challenge to set, but I am not sure *this* challenge was a good challenge to set. - This is just a thing where *some* character was probably going to die, and the Tortle was unlucky.
@KorvinStarmast You're welcome, though that's probably more on the answer's author, lol....
@NautArch I did already. @nitsua60 In my brother's game, I have a Life cleric who took magic initiate: goodberry, guidance, shillelagh. She will be offering the barbarian a suppository the next time he demands a goodberry. snicker (We have all known each other for years, this is the group I first played D&D with in the 70's).
I don't know about @GreySage, but one idea that popped into my mind is that if the attacker rolls above a certain threshold but still below the monster's AC, the monster's "armor" takes damage and eventually fails, lowering its AC.
> You imbue a creature you touch with positive energy to undo a debilitating effect. You can reduce the target's Exhaustion level by one, or end one of the following effects on the target. > • One curse, including the target's Attunement to a cursed magic item
@DavidCoffron It is pedantic exactly because you're pointing at what the spell says. They wrote eat. They could have written ingest. I guess nobody at WotC imagined the "can't open my mouth" scenario and therefore nobody cared to be more specific than that. (By the way, everything RAW is doomed to be pedantic).
Like if you took a Goodberry, ground it up into a powder, and huffed it, does that give you the magical effects? What about as a suppository? Blended into a juice and then injected directly into the bloodstream?
I would argue that snorting a Goodberry does nothing for you, because the benefits of a Goodberry are from digesting it, not from injecting it directly into your bloodstream.
Olive Oil is pretty good for you, but see how long you survive outside the ICU if you snort a whole bunch of it into your lungs.
I think where everyone left was roughly that it's a matter of opinion; if it causes interesting consequences in your game/world then it's good, if it's good flavor then it's good, if it's "just because" then that's a pain
To me, getting it in your stomach where it magically fills it is good enough, but again, D&D is only as good as the DM says (or the players convince them)
I'd be for it if it were e.g. an interesting way Bob the Wizard casts his spells (all of them are either injections or vials) or a decent way to get around someone being bound and gagged and needing sustenance
Though I usually have silly enough games that grinding and huffing a goodberry would be the only way my players would ever consume one if they learned they could
Good news on my problems with alignment. The player himself thought about it and concluded that he wants to play a CG character and doing chaotic things without a... good cause is not how he marks being CG.
(CG stands for Computer Graphics, obviously. That's an alignment in my games U_U)
Today's sesh of CoS was marked with some surprisingly easy moments considering we're supposedly in the final dungeon. Still a bit hard on my memory, this massive castle.
My monk is really shining here, tho. I'm killing things and hardly breaking a sweat.
(Also, I now have 3 separate factions that may or may not want me dead, so I guess I have a "someone gather the materials for a Raise Dead/Resurrection spell, plz" quest prompt. XD)
Yeah; instant communication isn't usually super cheese-able. It can be if you really, really try, but the fact that Sending has caller-ID if they know you makes it less cheesy
@Xirema All the suspension of disbelief you need is the idea that it doesn't matter whether any relativity holds in the world. I mean, in magical worlds, basic principles like Conservation of momentum and conservation of mass/energy are frequently broken
@Delioth It would be useful for betting fraud assuming the 1) world was global enough to have markets for betting on distant events and 2) the existence of instant comms wasn't known
@Yuuki His summary of easy to make mistakes is, IMO, spot on. I will not get into Batman/Superman stuff ... I grew up with them both, and found a different appeal in each one.
I plan to make this a series of questions to avoid being overly broad. Each question will address a particular fantasy species ("race" in RPG terms).
The traits will be based on the content included in this question, though the traits can also be found in this question, which lists all of the r...
Taking Orcs—which already have some really uncomfortable real-world inspirations and stereotypes—and then trying to pack in additional real world inspirations and stereotypes is going to result in some kind of Racist Frankenstein's Monster. The needle you're trying to thread is so fornicating small.
@Yuuki Yeah, but they're still indulging the "ME CRUSH PUNY SKULL" tropes normally associated with Orcs. putting that in a quasi-modern setting doesn't really alleviate that issue.
> I plan to make this a series of questions to avoid being overly broad. Each question will address a particular fantasy species ("race" in RPG terms).
Oh boy, there's more!
I need to go to Costco to buy some more popcorn...
@GreySage I'm less surprised by that. My experience with the moderators here has been pretty good, but depending on which SE site you go to, the moderators can be really bad. Lots of affluent tech-bros with zero social awareness.
Around the site there are many things that are abbreviated examples are:
D&D/d&d/DnD all mean Dungeons & Dragons
LTH meaning the dnd 5e spell Leomunds tiny hut in This question about the interactions of familiars and Leomunds tiny hut
Are these ok to use? The first example is one that is used...
I plan to make this a series of questions to avoid being overly broad. Each question will address a particular fantasy species ("race" in RPG terms).
The traits will be based on the content included in this question, though the traits can also be found in this question, which lists all of the r...
