I think it's more akin to football players trying to please the public with a bit of show and not only the dry results 1-0 game won. It's a show after all.
@BESW Because I see other people managing it somehow and I don't really want to feel like the stupid one. Also, I like the tactical side of D&D.
@DavidCoffron Very specific example from my game #1. There are items you can only buy after getting to level 21. Getting to level 21 is not just about amassing enough XP, it is also about doing something really epic in-game. I can't do anything really epic because I refuse to buy subpar items I will then need to sell (at a very small loss, but at a loss nonetheless).
"here's tons of gold! also, magic loot you can't ever buy!" "great, what do we do with the gold?" [long pause, big shrug] -- providing gold as a toy that's no longer required for character building, by taking item necessities out of the picture and providing them out-of-band with character earnings, seems pretty neat.
@DavidCoffron Very specific example from my game #2. I can't go talking to dragons empty-handed, can I? Even if talking to a dragon is crucial to save the world as we know it. Or casting spells to restore life to an area, or casting the more powerful divination spells that would solve problems without lots of people dying.
4e hit a middle ground, where most of your progression-necessary material was dropped in its final form, with extra handfuls of fungible material which were expected to be used to fill in gaps with consumables or extra items or the like, but it wasn't really gonna hurt if you spent it RP-ly.... but 4e also didn't care enough about tracking that sort of thing, so you could just RP spending gold without actually ticking it off your sheet.
At least our game did away with quest gold rewards being tied to what we actually loot, so enemies can be strong without gifting us a lot of gold and we can also let the enemies run or spare them without looting them, without any backthought
This is Free Trader Beowulf calling anyone ... Mayday, Mayday ... we are under attack .. main drive is gone ... turret number one not responding ... Mayday ... losing cabin pressure fast ... calling anyone ... please help ... this is Free Trader Beowlf ... Mayday
(Like everything else in 4e, the economy mechanics worked just fine if you only tracked them for combat stuff and let everything else come out in freeform.)
@BESW The fun thing is I never really noticed that until, running a Pathfinder game, I noticed how much gold players were losing for having done the morally sensible thing.
But it takes trusting your GM that your RP at the expense of mechanical efficiency isn't going to get you punished by encounter designs which assume more optimal resource expenditure for combat effectiveness.
@Zachiel D&D 3.5e says you can only do that a certain number of times per level then, and it had better be extremely worthwhile in largely resolving and moving plot forward, otherwise you just can't afford to do it and need to find other solutions. So, if you have difficulty working through those situations... [gestures generally at game] that's exactly how it works.
@BESW also requires some firm control of continuity that your actions are going to move plot forward proportionate to the expense
as opposed to one GM not being in the loop of what another GM did, and sorta missing the impact of that huge expense and not giving it the gravity it needed in moving the plot forward or resolving problems
@doppelgreener does the answer change if I say that I have over 4300000 gold pieces stashed away? It's not like we don't have enough money to do that sort of thing. Heck, I gain between 3k and 6k gold every single day. It's just that I don't like spending on immaterial things, while still envying how cool thos things are when others do it.
...it's a fictional world of fictional characters and fictional stuff, the only real things are the people you play with and the choices you make together. I understand that there's a psychological pressure to think of some parts of the world as more tangible than others, but...
A potion of healing is just as much a thing you buy in order to tell a story, as a bribe for a dragon or a meal for a beggar.
The difference is that the manual quantifies the story impact of one of those things, but you have to trust your fellow participants to make the others valuable. But the same is true of the potion at the end of the day.
@Zachiel The answer doesn't change, because all I am saying is that you are basically saying "I want to spend my money the way the game makes me want to spend my money and I have trouble accepting spending money any other way" and, well, that's how it works, it is zero wonder you have that difficulty.
like, yes? it is meant to make you want to spend your money only certain ways.
so when you want to spend your money only those ways, that is the game doing the game's thing.
D&D isn't a system for telling stories. At best it tells about events. The ability to infuse an event with moral or narrative meaning, to thread multiple events together into an arc, is left entirely to the participants. When you spend gold, you're spending gold on events which you hope can be infused with meaning: drinking a potion to survive a tense battle, or bargaining with a dragon to save the world, these are both just events to which gold was the price of admission.
@Zachiel Is there a reason you can't do "something epic" without the subpar items? Or is there a specific epic thing you are aiming for? Maybe w can help you find a way to do the epic thing without the loss
Events which you and your co-conspirators can make triumphant or funny or poignant, and thread events together to create stories... or just let them be chugging a potion to get some hp, and rolling Diplomacy against a dragon.
@DavidCoffron yes. Dragons want to be gifted things.
But that was admittedly one of my worst examples. There's a lot of other things to do that are not parlaying with dragons, luckily
@DavidCoffron For example, my charisma only allows to cast one spell persisted with divine metamagic. My build calls for at least two. But I'm not buying that +6 cloak, selling it and then buying a +12 when it costs more than buying a +12 straight out.
Or same thing with the weapon that doubles my damage on a charge
I'm way less effective than any other character my level and the GMs don't feel that my stubborness is a good enough reason to make my character's life easier. Nor do I want them to make my life easier, or I'd feel insulted.
@Zachiel How familiar are you with opportunity cost theory? If you can't buy the straight +12 cloak because of some other limiting factor then it is more expensive than +6 into +12 regardless of the gold cost (even if someone else could buy the +12 outright)
@DavidCoffron I'm familiar with it (as I'm familiar with the sunken cost theory that gets often named along "play a different game"), it's just that I don't want to surrender to it (to them)
@Zachiel So, what value does your character place on that +12 cloak? If the opportunity value is greater than the difference between the +6-sell-+12 and the +12-straight-out, it is still a worthwhile investment
It is even possible that the extra costs of buying the +6 cloak right now will be less than the money I'm losing for not getting quests right now, but I'm sort of trapped in a "It's their fault, not mine, so I will keep bashing my head against the wall" kind of logic.
@DavidCoffron Also, I don't want to recognize that as a worthwile investment mainly because one of the two sides of the equation is not known until it happens.
@BESW It's a +6 cloak, +6 gloves, +10 armor, +10 shield, +6 amulet, three other +1 +6000gp weapons, and several other things. Which would also cost 10% less if I were able to have them bought by merchant PCs who can only get that discount once per month (and I don't want to monopolize them)
And also where does the value line lies between "item that I should get at a 20% discount" and "Item that I can get at a 10% discount" and "item that I should buy at full price"? I have no idea.
Well that's just... a design which encourages needlessly antagonistic play in a system already built with elements which pit PCs against each other in that arena.
@Zachiel What is your character's motivation to adventure? Is it just the money? If so, and the character has decided it is no longer monetarily sound to do so because of the barrier to continue expanding his/her horizons (the convesrion cost of the +6 cloak), perhaps the character retires in search of a different method to get money. If that isn't the only motivation, there are other non-monetary "costs" that you can recuperate from the +6-sell-+12 exchange. That's what I meant by
"what value does the character place on the cloak"
A lot of this is sounding like you trust neither the GMs nor the system to provide you with the experience you want, so you aren't taking the risk in order to avoid giving them the opportunity to disappoint you by either living up to your mistrust OR proving your mistrust unnecessary.
So you've got three options: close the loop, take the risk of disappointment, and see if the GMs can make the system do more than it's designed for; close the loop, take the risk of never getting to play the game you want, and leave the group; or continue to circle in a dissatisfied holding pattern until the stress gives you a non-fictional ulcer.
How can we factor in the fact that at the beginning of this character I was happily buying items such as a chainmail just for roleplaying purposes and then I stopped doing that?
I will say that part of sunk costs in D&D, in my experience and observation, is an increased aversion to risk-taking the longer one's spent with one's character.
Because in D&D, levels and items and gold are bought with real-life time at the table, and losing them means losing agency at the table.
That is, the real-life time one dedicates to the game is directly proportional to the amount of influence one can have over the experience of playing the game... but that influence can be lost to bad dice or risky choices, leaving one with reduced control over one's real-life control of the game despite having spent so much time at it.
@Zachiel so is not buying the cloak causing you, as a player, stress?
Since the character seemingly couldn't care whether he/she has it or not; and doesn't want to be charged more (indirectly) than someone else buying it outright
This is, in my experience, unique to D&D-like games. Most games don't turn real-life time into control of the game so directly, or hazard its loss so casually.
The only other category of game I know of where this dynamic exists and is tolerated... is gambling.
@BESW Surely having bought items that turned out to be useless has harshened the problem in my case. Risky choices feel riskier after metting failure (or maybe the risk fells the same but the losses sure look enough altready).
@DavidCoffron I find myself involved in out of character discussions where I argue that the cloak doesn't really do anything for me at this level anyway. And in a lot of discussion with people that say "just spend, you will not stop gaining gold and you will be able to buy the other cool things too"
@Zachiel Is the peer group / player group calling on you to raise your PC's power because the lack thereof (or the perceived lack thereof) is slowing the group down?
(The discussion here is reminding me of why I don't really like the WBL system ...)
There's also this thing about not having enough mastery to the game to be actually able to recognize traps or to know the difference between what I really need to have my character survive and what is not as effective as it seems, which builds into what BESW is saying quite nicely.
@Zachiel That sounds like a situation where the group is not understanding your motivations for not spending. Perhaps you just need to explain the level of frugality you are trying to employ, or perhaps they will never understand, and you should just ignore their pestering (if possible). There might be another solution, but I'd have to know more about the table dynamics to make a recommendation
@KorvinStarmast There is no proper group. Those who are pushing me to spend money and get a working character are doing that in order to get me to be happier about the game (possibly hoping I will stop complaining?)
@DavidCoffron I guess it's the unknown. I have never got to this level before while playing D&D except with a character that was designed from the start to avoid the problem altogheter (she's basically an NPC who doesn't want to get involved in dangerous things)
@KorvinStarmast Also is making me appreciate that Fate lets me give my character Resources 5 and then leave it at that. They now have a Superb amount of resources. They could probably bargain with a dragon, possibly experience a temporary setback of wealth if things go badly, but then later return to status quo of Superb wealth.
@Zachiel Have you considered seeking a sponsor? Someone who can cover that additional cost on your behalf (the exchange cost of the +6 cloak), in exchange for a return if it ends up being a worthwhile investment?
This is like Bruce "Where Is All That Money Even Coming From!?" Wayne's thing: he isn't tracking spending, his status quo is just Insanely Rich.
(And spending it all on gadgets for fighting crime, for some reason, instead of investing in the school system and public service and rehabilitation processes and breaking the school-to-prison pipeline and so on.)
@doppelgreener Wayne isn't throwing his money down a rat hole where he has no control over the results. (The variability of success in the ideal that your propose is all over the map, and is in the hands of hundreds, even thousands, of others). Being a rich and eccentric multi bazillionaire, he prefers to have control over that which he's applying to fighting crime.
@DavidCoffron there's a character who offered to buy me some specific items when they get enough gold. It's hard to find someone for everything but it might work. Thanks!
@doppelgreener I like that in games that use it, like the Burning Wheel or V:xX
@Zachiel Say the loss is 500 gp (how much you lose for buying and then selling the cloak). You ask another adventurer to cover that cost, and if the fruits of the purpose are warranted, you return to them 750 gp (say if the first few quests you take gain you more than that). That way you don't have the risk of losing that 500 gp for nothing, and for the players who are insisting that you will get more out of the purchase than you would lose, it forces them to put money where their mouth is...
@doppelgreener Traveller (original) in a lot of ways resolved the problem differently, in that your PC is front loaded, and then your group (when I played) were always trying to get stuff or a ship or a better ship ... man, it's been a long time.
@KorvinStarmast it's just that, being a fictional character in a medium controlled by the same writer, every investment he makes is either a good investment or a reason for a crisis that had to be in order to foster the story.
@Zachiel Incentivizing others to invest in you is a good way to motivate the assistance you would need (and it fits a hyper-frugal character to keep a ledger like that of which adventurers have invested into your gear)
@KorvinStarmast To expand on the description of my game: I'm now playing as a resident of small town A, where I live with a single PC whose player says nothing at all about my choices. Town A has also a pretty large organization (a guild) with people following a guild-oriented questline: I'm in touch with two of their players out of game, and one just tries to build some trust in me, the other one is the one who has stemmed these conversation here with a "I can't help you, I build and play characters in a completely diferent way than you".
...but death might happen or not, while costs will happen for sure if I decide to spend.
@BESW ... Did he use the solar mirrors to beat Dracula, or did he use the stored electricity to defeat him (which was technically solar energy because that's totally how energy works)?
> Although a physically realized device would inevitably lose some of the trapped light due to material imperfections, the researchers expect that it should be possible to completely compensate for this loss by incorporating some form of optical gain like that used in lasers, so that in principle the lifetime can be infinitely large even in a real device.
> Vantablack is composed of a forest of vertical tubes "grown" on a substrate using a modified chemical vapor deposition process (CVD). When light strikes Vantablack, instead of bouncing off from it, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected amongst the tubes, eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat.
The third law, despite being latest stated by a decade, is the best known and most widely cited. It appears only in the 1973 revision of the "Hazards of Prophecy" essay[5]. It echoes a statement in a 1942 story by Leigh Brackett: "Witchcraft to the ignorant, … simple science to the learned".[6] Earlier examples of this sentiment may be found in Wild Talents (1932) by Charles Fort: "...a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic," an…
When I was a kid, I drew schematics for a "infinite lamp" whose idea was that it'd be a cube of one-way mirrors to trap light from outside and then just keep it on your nightstand to shine with all that trapped light inside.
Later I realized that if it traps all light inside, it wouldn't shine but appear dark, and just a tad later also that one-way mirrors of that kind don't actually exist.
@goodguy5 Yep, basically it's an exaggerated version of how a normal window works too
(it's hard to see inside unlit rooms from outdoors during daytime because the reflection from your side of the glass obscures the more meager light coming from within --- while at the same time you can't see your own reflection well from the darker side)
A few months back one of our tabloid newspapers ran a collection of "tell us the funny stuff that happened between you and your neighbor". One of the stories had someone living on the other side of the courtyard having had one-way mirror glasses installed on their balcony, and then the guy had been hanging out there starkers, thinking he'd be invisible --- but the glasses were installed the wrong way around!
Either it's a fancy new metamaterial or the boundless well of "re-tell the same joke you heard as if it was a personal occurance and hope tabloids don't know any better"
Suppose I was playing a wizard. I say to my DM, "I ready my Magic Missle. I cast it when I take damage, at the attacker." When the time comes, do I need to make a constitution saving throw immediately before I cast to avoid losing concentration?
@Zachiel Are you particularly stressed about this crusade? I know I would just ignore them but if it causing you grief, it might be something to bring up to a group moderator/admin
@DavidCoffron Nah, I'm just on a countercrusade. It's about telling this person that it doesn't really matter if I'm losing more resources this way than just accepting some small losses. It's just that I hate losses more than I hate missed gains. It's mine now, I wwant to keep it, it doesn't matter if I could gain more overall.
@Zachiel I see nothing wrong with that philosophy if you are enjoying the game while employing it. That's the most important part; are you enjoying playing (as long as it doesn't interfere with other people's enjoyment, which this shouldn't)
@DavidCoffron Unless I'm forced to think about that part, mostly yes.
There's moments when critical events in the setting approach where I feel like a Good (the alignment, this time), powerful (With great power, as Spidey would put it) and courageous character would have to risk his life, and I'm not ready.
@Zachiel Then that's fine. Your character arc doesn't have to be the same as that "good, powerful, courageous character". Many interesting characters have very different story arcs.
Or not a bad game, but a bad game for you personally. The sentiment that I wish you'd play something else hasn't gone away, and I'm reluctant to help you because I'd rather not enable you continuing in a game where my only exposure to it is how it makes you miserable.
@DavidCoffron I have probably made the wrong character for my enjoyment, but I was in a hurry and... well, I promised Brian Ballsun-Stanton that I would have created the character that came out from a conversation in a sidechat here.
Relating to the edits occouring to this question: Is it the question in the title or body (if they mismatch) that is considered the 'real' question asked?
Of course, I was in a hurry because those were the last days of "change character with a lower XP penalty than usual"
Which ties back to me thinking about the math first and to what I like to play later. And I guess I have the same problem with every game out there, not just D&D.
@Someone_Evil Ask in comments which is the intended one.
@Someone_Evil The body is the real question, the title should only merely describe the question, and if the title is asking something altogether new and different to the question content then it is unclear and we need clarification (and maybe the question needs to be closed).
@Yuuki My main worry is that it's not making you all miserable. Today it looks like we got something productive and it was a smooth conversation with interesting things to learn even if you're not me, so I'm satisfied, but I'm also wanting to drop it right now. Taking risks is not my forte.
In this specific case; the body originally included two examples (of spells with a certain effects) one of which was in the title. The one from the title was then removed from the body to make it clearer. Changing the title doesn't materially alter the question, but the accepted answer replies to the example used in the title meaning the one that is no longer mentioned in the body.
Meanwhile, I was reading the Angry GM's musings about narrative structures (the whole thing is not relevant enough to warrant a link, but it is a good read if you like Angry's confrontational style). And there's this point where he talks about the difference between the Overworld and the Underworld, people getting initiated to magic, or the force, or parallel dimensions. He talks a bit about how that has been lost in the latest D&D editions, with people being full fledged heroes out of the box. And I was thinking that it's a large part of how D&D 3.x works, even in my game. Low level charac…
OP removed the booming blade part of the question in a very early rev (around the same time as Korvin answered). Then didn't remove it from the title. Then accepted an answer that answered somewhat part of the question they removed but not reflective of the new question.
Or maybe my suggestion to roll back to the original was the best
it seems that is what Korvin just did.
But now it has the issue that the question is pretty confusing IMO :-/
@Rubiksmoose yeah. @Someone_Evil Thanks for your efforts, the initial question got a poke from Naut Arch regarding scope, which is what I think got the first edit to happen. Not sure, we'll wait for the OP to return. I'll remove my comments under the question as it's now on hold.
@Ben Honestly, makes sense to me. Dragon's breath is basically call lightning, except you're giving someone else the ability to determine the location and timing of the hits. It's still a spell that is doing AOE targeting, if awkwardly through someone else's actions. I feel like the game is more consistent about treating 'spell targets' as 'anyone affected by the spell' than 'specifically people literally designated as targets in the spell text'.
He goes into this in more depth in one of the earlier sage advices, ~21:30 into the podcast.
@DavidCoffron Ah I just forgot to reply to this one and I found it on my unread messages in the main site top bar. The motivation of the character is making the world a better place where everybody works together to defend life itself. Failing that, civilized life.
@JoshD There's a game whose only reason to exist is playing murder misteries in England. Just one moment, I thought I had the name in my profile but it's not there.
It's called "A Taste for Murder", by Graham Walmsley
The game has two phases, in the first one no player knows who's the murderer. You build up a family situation where all characters have reasons to kill each other, then one of them is actually killed (with a secret vote).
In the second phase the player of the killed character will play the policeman who investigates on the muder, questioning people while they try to frame each other.
@JoshD well, you can ask him to play with you, then XD
@doppelgreener my only game of it was sort of ruined by players with different skill being in the same game. I don't really like those chessmaster-style players who manage to frame you by lanting truths in previous scenes that will ultimately either frame you or save them in case they got framed. Especially because the player wanted to convince us to change a rule in order to get it his way.
I mean, it was a cool character, a guy that was more smart than his father, blamed it for having ruined everything, got to boast about knowing the king and in the end, when framed, told the cop that he couldn't go to jail because the General wanted him to go to war (the General would have made sure that the character died at the first mission since he was the culprit, but as a hero of war)
we have one who just argues his point past the realm of refutability, twists words, etc. We can't really do any murder mystery type thing because he's just so good at getting his point across and refuting any counterarguments
It was just bad to see himself use a weird first name and then stating as a fact that I, his father, were a stupid guy who thought it was a name from ancient greece. Also, other brothers he introduced in the narration had weird names, just to build on the fact.
In any case, A Taste for Murder decides who the culprit is based on dice results and scene outcomes, so if he's good at twisting it around, it's ok if he turns out being innocent (or not framed). Or at least this is what I recall
@doppelgreener At least, I got the impresion, having never read the rules myself, that in the end the culprit is taken away and goes to jail. Admittedly, the story was way cooler his way, but I felt like some rule was being broken by the looks of the other two players
I'm just a bad loser and being on the short end of the stick (or what the correct idiom is) was awful. At some point I thought I was playing just to frame him. Had I been better at this chess-like style I would probably have had more fun myself (Like in that Montsegur1244 scene where someone introduced the fact that I had made her daughter pregnant. It was eqully problematic but that time I just found it cool that it could be done.)
@doppelgreener If memory serves me well, yes, that's how it works.
@CollinB IIRC AngryGM has some decent blog posts about planning traps and encounters, if you can put up with his irritating stylistic tics.
(I can, for the record, but usually just about a post at a time)
I found his treatise on traps, polemically labeled Traps Suck, to contain many interesting and well-conceived ideas. Plus refutation of exactly the kind of traps I hate so... yes, I found it agreeable :P
My A Taste for Murder game also had the problem that we sort of got to the point where every thing I could think as a further revelation about the true motives of a different character that wasn't just more of the same felt dull. We had some unlucky rolls and the game dragged.
Andecoctically, my problem with traps in published D&D/PF adventures is that it's never stated how one could disarm them, and it's hard to think on the spot about traps that can be sabotaged, disarmed, jammed and everything you can do to a trap.
@CollinB Overall, personally I think Tucker's Kobolds and similar twists work the best when you already have played with the same characters for a while and observed how they usually solve their problems --- then you inject, essentially, the minimal obstacles that prevent the same ol' thing from working this time, but nothing that completely incapacitates the group.
@kviiri I've played Dogs in the Vineyard. It's a game about moral quandraries basically. You're playing in a vaguely 1800s alternate history rural America. You are Dogs, who wander from town to town within your extended Mormon community to resolve issues. Dogs are entrusted with absolute moral authority by the faith, their word is absolute. So now you are here, and there may be problems, and you have absolute authority to resolve them.
However, solutions aren't cleanly available, and the game is designed to escalate conflicts: they escalate from Speaking to Physical to Fighting to Guns. If you roll well you can resolve a conflict without escalating, but if it's not going your way, you can always escalate it to the next stage to get more resources to resolve it your way.
(Physical is things like shoving people but not all-out fighting.)
In the game I played, one of the most upstanding citizens of a particular town had recently become a drunkard and a disturbance. He'd lost his way, the woman he fancied didn't fancy him, and some other things had gone wrong for him as well. We decided he was demonically possessed and tried to exorcise the demon, and barely succeeded, but it lead to some emotional wounds for one of the characters.
Nitpicking: you can also escalate from guns to melee to speaking on whichever order makes more sense. The relevant thing is that the higher you are on the scale of danger in the order that has beeen stated by Doppelgreener, the harsher the possible consequences. I mean, unless someone escalates to gun, nobody is gonna die at the end of the scene. Which means that yes, escalating could get you more dice, but do you really want to risk that someone gets killed just to prove your point? Most conflicts in DitV end with one of the parties conceding early because they don't want the consequences.
Another person was basically creeping on a girl that didn't fancy him. We confronted him about it to ask him to stop, and that turned into a full-on fist fight. We managed to stop it at the Fighting stage, before guns came out. But, shooting him would've been entirely on the table: he didn't have a gun, so when I say guns might've come out, it would've been just ours. And you can imagine how that would've ended.
This sounds super interesting, although I think my group might have an issue with the religious content. I'm personally really interested in tackling questions of faith around the table but some find it a touchy subject
It is entirely possible that your handling of a town can spiral out of control enough that there will be no village left by the time you leave. But, you are a Dog: you are an absolute moral authority. Whatever you did there was Right, because it was you that did it.
But, also, that aside, DitV isn't enjoyable to play for me simply because the rulebook is terrible. It is extremely poorly laid out. It is almost impossible to navigate it and find information, even when I found it not ten minutes ago. When I am searching for information it is almost impossible to find it. All of this is doubly true when I'm in the middle of a gaming session already.
It is a lesson in why proper layout is a thing people can be experts in.
Basically "hey, young people, take a gun and go solve problems however you see fit" - especially with an aftertaste of zealotism - is going to get someone into far larger problems than those the towns they visit start with.
It will make you appreciate all the clearly laid out information, with good headings and tables and lists and chapters, that other RPGs you've played have, and perhaps the skill and thought and hard work and revisions that were required to get them into that state.
@doppelgreener No, because the people I can ask too are too busy, you know, actually performing those specific tasks based on past experience with similar products.
Also, nobody ever reads the manuals. Calling the help desk is the first option for everyone in the world. I'm basically just in the "write the things that the law says must be included" sector. :P
Oh, hm. I haven't been able to look through the 5e PHB, but let me ask you this: when you have a piece of information you'd like to find: 1. do you know roughly where it would be after surveying the table of contents or index? 2. are you able to find that spot quickly? 3. are you able to find the relevant heading or section relatively quickly? 4. do you find the information on the first read-through, not the second or third? 5. are you able to do this again when you need the same information half an hour later?
Our group tried doing Shadowrun 5 a year or so ago, and trying to use that rulebook to build a character seemed like a nightmare. Might've been one of the least organized ones I've seen.
@doppelgreener to be fair, I use D&D Beyond to look stuff up most of the time, which is much easier. (and I have a PDF of dubious origin that I use just for Ctrl+F-ing stuff, since DDB doesn't let you filter search results to just one book)
I'd probably give the 5e phb middling marks on organization. I think the 'big' topics are grouped together and indexed OK, but IIRC the index is missing some of the more niche terms you may be looking up, and has a lot of "[Term A]: See [Term B]" without just directing you to the relevant pages directly.
@V2Blast I think better search is at least on their roadmap, thankfully. I asked about it in one of their Q&As.
I would rate 5e PHB as a B- at best for organization. But I suspect it might be among the better ones for games of similar complexity and amount of material.
@CTWind "middling" is where I'm at as well. There's some things, like Stealth, Visibility, etc. that are difficult to compile rules for, but most of the big stuff is organized decently.
However, given the amount of resources WotC has it should be better
@V2Blast Nailed the example I was going to say as well
@CTWind the index is absolute insanity. Whoever thought that that was the best way to do that should literally be fired. I want to flip a table every time I have to use it.
Hide is here: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/combat#Hide Unseen attackers is here, later in the same chapter: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/combat#UnseenAttackersandTargets and Hiding sidebar is here, 2 chapters earlier (the sidebar header doesn't have a page anchor, so I link to the one right above it): https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/using-ability-scores#Initiative
I can find and locate all of the information with relative ease. I have a little trouble putting my finger on Feats in the physical book because the section feels like it's longer than it actually is, imo.
And then whatever is in chapters 7,8,and 9 I assume are useful, but I don't know them by hearts.
Oh, also, almost all the rules are written as a guide through your first time doing them, but not as a quick procedure reference for the next many times you do it. There's summaries that don't contain all the detail which I used instead.
I also almost wish 'Custom' background was given a headered section as prominent as all the 'premade' backgrounds. So many people assume that's not a baseline supported thing.
@doppelgreener eek. Well I've heard good things about the system at least. Maybe it will get a major revision in a new edition? (he said knowing how unlikely it would be)
@V2Blast Yeah, the flow for looking up hide basically goes "Oh, there's a hide action. Ok, lemme look up the details of how to hide in this other chapter. Oh, you can hide if you're not seen clearly, lemme look at the rules for obscurement. Oh, there are 2 levels of that (besides 'none'), can I hide on either? Oh, wood elves and Skulker-feat-takers can hide in light, guess I can only baseline hide in heavy obscurement except when the DM otherwise rules I can't be seen clearly."
Hiding's not terribly complicated when everything's in one place.
I'm running through Lost Mines of Phandelver with a new group of players. One of the characters' backstory was that they were born to a noble family but were abandoned at birth (because they are a tiefling). Because the character was abandoned early, they do not know that they have this heritage....
- When someone cannot see you (via heavy obscurement, blindness, or DM fiat) you are allowed to attempt to be hidden from them. Your position is known by creatures aware of your presence unless you are hidden from them. - You can use an action to attempt to hide, at which point you roll a stealth check. That result is the DC for perception checks for creatures you are hidden from to detect you. - Creatures you are hidden from use their passive perception to constantly check for their awareness of you. Creatures who are actively looking for hidden creatures can also use their action to make …
Michael Prescott, my favorite two-page scenario writer & illustrator is Kickstarting a compendium now. An example of his sort of stuff can be found at his site here (and he releases a free-to-the-public one about once a month), KS is here
My DM has introduced a house rule affecting opportunity attacks, and I am trying to understand the implications of this change.
The new rule is this:
You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach or moves inside your reach. To make the o...
Fantasy grounds launched their kickstarter for their re-architecture of the FG client into the Unity engine. (Apologies if this was already posted and I missed it)
@Ash I thought maybe somebody photoshopped an "I voted" sticker onto a box of cereal so I wouldn't have to, but a google image search for cereal voting got back a lot of partisan nonsense. So I tried cereal "i voted" and the link above was the first result.
My dog is actually like me (in a way). He just doesn't get sick, and the last time I visited the vets with him, they told me I can't give him worming/flea tablets anymore, because they will actually make him sick.
Suppose I was playing a wizard. I say to my DM, "I ready my Magic Missle. I cast it when I take damage, at the attacker." When the time comes, do I need to make a constitution saving throw immediately before I cast to avoid losing concentration?
My DM has introduced a house rule affecting opportunity attacks, and I am trying to understand the implications of this change.
The new rule is this:
You can make an opportunity attack when a hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach or moves inside your reach. To make the o...
