Maybe you're not at a place in your life where you can put in the time it's going to take to be a relevant part of that world, so make your peace with that and play a bit part for somebody else instead?
It sounds like to some degree that has to be happening already.
@MikeQ The law of the area, taken from the setting, is that nobody can use transmutation spells that change your appearance in town. While the spirit is "don't scare people", different lords apply the law differently in their city.
@MikeQ it's some sort of self inflicted medical condition.
I mean, have you ever heard of the story of the meatgrinder? There's this guy who plays indie RPGs and he says "the game doesn't work if I do that", which is a little bit like saying "my hand hurts if I put it in the meatgrinder". Well, don't put your hand in the meatgrinder, man. Which translates to "don't cast that spell, it's not like you're weak without it".
I've had several cases where I rebuilt or abandoned a character because its mechanics, while extremely effective, were making it hard to actually play the game the way I wanted to, with the people I wanted to.
Right now the character wants to be good and he wants to save as many people as possible
But -I- am cheap and I don't want to spend gold on divination spells, on writing and spreading messages, on making gifts to poorer adventurers (other PCs) or on charity. Which makes me wonder if I'm able to roleplay a good character at all.
But, for the build to work, I need to be good, because D&D 3.5 has spells tied that work differently according to the alignment >_>
Well, you can roleplay a character with a specific good intention who isn't able to fully realize it because of their other priorities or personal hangups.
I think that could work if he was on the road to become a high level cleric, higher level spells not given to him until he manages to solve his personal problems. But I cast level 9 spells already.
That's up to you. I'm just saying, plots aren't puzzles to be solved, they're stories about people, and often a major part of that is "There's an easy obvious solution but because of who I am I will make things harder for myself and others."
A big part of my roleplaying journey is figuring out how to make and play characters whose foibles create interesting problems the group likes to face, rather than getting in the way of our fun.
Significantly, that's about the players' fun, not the characters'.
I often look for quirks and hangups which make it harder for my character to accomplish things alone, and push them to seek out support and accompaniment.
@BESW I have planty of those, but I also bear the responsabilities that come with being an high level character in a game with characters spanning from level 1 to 30. Have you ever heard about the problems that many tables have with powerful setting NPCs like "Why con't Elminster come and solve it?"
@MikeQ Well, I'm the high level NPC now. Why am I not solving problems? Why am I not doing things one expects from someone with my wisdom and life experience? Why an I indecisive? Why did I have to tell some friends that I couldn't help them (I didn't follow that adventure, so it would have been unfair to join - offgame reason) and why did I decide that the right thing to do was to avoid those friends in order no to be reminded of my failed duty?
D&D 5E. Player casts Fireball inside a wooden building. This obviously sets walls and such on fire. Are there any good rules somewhere for handling fires within combat?
Something like, give the fire a spot in initiative, and on its turn it spreads 5 feet further. Maybe set some sort of clock until the building collapses? I can try making stuff up as I go along, but I don't feel completely confident in my improvisation skills yet, and I find it handy to have a starting point.
Yeah, I figured that was probably the case. I guess I'm hoping somebody knows of some house rules that could help.
The Wizard in the party just got a Wand of Fireballs, and they may be smart enough to just firebomb the Bad Guy's Lair from outside, or dumb enough to start throwing them around indoors.
There just seem to be a lot of effects which "ignite objects", and very little guidance about what that means. Obviously the rules can't cover everything, nor should they, but I wouldn't mind a bit more direction.
@PeterCooperJr. what sort of wooden construction are we talking about here though? a type IV heavy timber or log building with timber rafters supporting tile over battens for the roof is going to behave very differently in a fire than a type V-B light-wood-frame building with lath-and-plaster wall finishes and a thatched roof
@Shalvenay I dislike in-fiction deviations from common earthly experience/verbiage for no reason. Like if your world calls movement toward one pole "Brenf" and the other "Kerels" while the sun rises in the "Trepso" and sets in the "Hreton."
@nitsua60 for normal table-scale play, the tenday is rather superfluous, yes. however, it's a rather important concept in D&D based PWs (NWN servers, for ex) as the ingame clock (at least in NWN) runs 10-1 with realtime, leading one IC tenday to equal one RL day
Hey, btw, just realized it's Saturday night and Mike, Korv, Shalv, and I are chatting. In case you're curious I just got off the road from three days bopping around families' houses.
@MikeQ Days and weeks are good to about one part in six. I.e. days rarely go more than 30 hours.
@Shalvenay going through two big changes higher up in the org ... so the amount of utterly superfluous email and noise has accelerated. I see it dying down in the new year ...
@nitsua60 Yeah. The reason world-building exists in RPGs is to provide a world that's enjoyable to play in, and while weird timekeeping schemes could be enjoyable, I've never really seen any value in them that outweighs their cumbersomeness in games where timekeeping is actually important.
@kviiri Tell that to whoever invented the complicated and completely plot-irrelevant backstory to justify having the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months be called "Seventh Month," "Eighth Month," "Ninth Month," and "Tenth Month."
It starts the year on the day in which the Sun enters Aries, as seen in Tehran; there are nineteen months of nineteen days each; two of our Holy Days are the first and the second day following the occurrence of the eighth new moon after the New Year; and the days left over that don't fit into any month are just "extra" days between the eighteenth and nineteenth month--usually four, but sometimes five, depending on the Sun and Aries, which is how we get our leap year calculations.
(And days change at sunset rather than midnight.)
I like that the leap year just happens without any fuss.
And the lunar-based holy days are because they're celebrating events from prior to the religion's starting date, so they're grandfathered in from the Islamic lunar calendar used by the people they happened to.
(They're the birthdays of the Founders of the religion.)
Our week is still seven days, with Friday the last day of the week and the day of rest. There's also 19-year cycles and 361-year supercycles; the 19-year cycle is a relatively common thing in calendars, historically.
Our month names are a bit more intuitive than the English ones, usually relating to an activity associated with the month, but in archaic words that aren't really that commonly known. Which may be a relief because November is "the corpse moon" or "the death-omen moon".
For D&D-like calendars, when I ran campaigns where it seemed useful, I'd get a regular American calendar with the lunar phases and solar equinoxes/solstices marked.
I'd pick four major gods; each season was dedicated to one, with the opposite season's god getting a week-long festival around the equinox/solstice, and the other two gods getting single-day celebrations at a thematically appropriate lunar event.
So if Monday is the market day, unless one of the player insists on having the honor of being the weekday keeper, it's Monday when they arrive if I think them arriving on a market day would be suitable for the story
Ok, I retract the part about laziness, it's certainly true but I think I have a better reason to do it --- it's not an effective way to spend one's effort as a GM
Regarding worldbulding, I've been commuting to work over an unusually long distance (by my standards) the last couple of weeks so I binged Goblins the webcomic over a couple of train trips. I haven't been one of those people who thinks the DnD worldbuilding makes a lot of sense for years but the comic really hammers home the point that "adventurers are just people who become more powerful by killing other people".
I imagine the comic would've been supremely tedious to read as anything other than an archive binge, though. Plot arcs taking over a year to resolve despite only taking a couple of hours in real life time... well, let's say it's strangely appropriate for a DnD satire :)
The basic premise of Goblins is that a group of goblins decides they should change the game by using the magical loot instead of just guarding it and becoming adventurers instead of being just XP fodder. It starts out as a zany DnD parody but gets rather dark quite fast.
I never liked the Elder Scrolls series with much zeal, but the two games I've tried (Morrowind and Skyrim) are rather neat in their departures from the most clichéd fantasy world
Skyrim is wintery, Morrowind is a mish-mash of primarily Levantine and Ancient Rome with some really alien influences (houses built into giant mushrooms) thrown in
Guys i have a quick question. I am looking for maps for a game i am running taking place in a city but most of the dungeon and dragons maps seem to be describing dungeons(Duh.) Anyways do any of you know which books contain battle maps for cities?
@MaikoChikyu Waterdeep:Dragon Heist has one or two, but that's about it. (Trollskull Alley, and one of the chases has a nice map that would be good for a city set-piece, too.) I can't think of any other WotC products that get any urban love.
I picked up a product called "Dark Cities: 100 scenarios for urban adventures" a while back but I haven't used it at all. No maps, but I liked the text-descriptions enough to download it.
@nitsua60 really, that's what the DM staff told me.
In other news, now I remeber why I don't DM 3.5e anymore.
Building pathfinder NPCs is even worse, with all the extra things they can do. And I'm just trying to build a level 3 cavalier with a single archetype.
I had had this happen to me several times. I have chosen one citation style that I generally apply in all my answers since some date, which goes like Book < edition> <(year)> p##. Year and edition are optional.
Now, I had to do partial rollbacks due to people messing up my citation style here, ...
Wizards.com itself has a massive collection.
Finding exactly what you need can be tedious, but for sheer volume it's hard to beat the wizards.com galleries and archives.
The Art & Map Gallery and the Map-A-Week Archive are both free, and give access to most of the maps published in D&D 3.5 phys...
@V2Blast I'd suggest that when you see a typo or obvious error go ahead and fix, but if you find yourself looking at multiple edits of the same "type," particularly on the same author's posts, take a moment to either check with the brain trust whether those seem good (here or on meta, for example) or go ahead and ping the original author first. Worst case: people disagree with you and the internet's no worse off than before you noticed the thing. Best case: someone's grateful to you for being willing to do the scutwork of mass-editing, or someone learns something from you that they're happy…
On a different note, anyone have a suggestion for US-based acquisition of large (100'-plus) tarps on the cheap? I'm thinking of stepping up my backyard ice rink game this year =)
I had had this happen to me several times. I have chosen one citation style that I generally apply in all my answers since some date, which goes like Book < edition> <(year)> p##. Year and edition are optional.
Now, I had to do partial rollbacks due to people messing up my citation style here, ...
