it is quite complex to build a character, but at-the-table is usually not too bad
Lots of room to mix'n'match stuff, tailor your character in small ways
"RMSS" ('Standard System') brought a lot of stuff together.
It sounds v complex to explain it, but works ok.
Base System is Roll d100+Skill Bonus, try to beat 100 (but partial successes on lower rolls)
skill Bonus is bulit from Ranks in Skill (on diminishing returns) + 3 Stat Bonuses (e.g. a Skill might have STR/STR/DEX) + <assorted potential bonuses>
RM's origin was Arms Law, a replacement for D&D combat system. Followed by Spell Law ... and eventually Character Law, and was turned into it's own game
(They also made a cut-down version "Middle Earth Role Playing" (MERP), which, as you may guess, was tailored for Middle Earth! :)
Although your HP do go up, main damage to worry about is "critical hits" - extra effects such as Stun, Bleed, 'No Parry', building up to "Broken Arm", right up to "Decapitate"
Everything is codified on Tables. Roll your dice, add your bonus, look up your result
A snippet from one of the Critical Hit tables (looks like "Crush", such as a hammer or mace, or even some blows from a broadsword, or against heavy armour)
3 types of Magic: Channeling (Divine), Essence (Wizardry), Mentalism
You can buy any skills you like, but each class has a Costing for each category. Fighters get Weapon skills cheap, Rangers get Outdoor skills cheap, etc. You're very limited how many Ranks you can buy per level, even in your cheap skills
right, makes some sense so far. what assumptions (other than "medium-to-high fantasy") does it make about the world things are being set in? (for ex: if one wished to rearrange the palette of peoples to choose from?)
There are Elves and Dwarves, and High Men and Common Men, and that sort of thing ... all have their Mechanical Bonuses (stat-bonuses, Adolescent skills, etc). Mainly quite traditional
But you can tinker the setting as much as you like, re-skin things
@BlackSpike yeah -- is it typically run in a balanced-encounter style where most progression comes from combat, or more of a take-things-as-they-come style where not taking fights is a valid/expected choice?
(there is the exploding dice ... roll a 96+, roll again and add. Roll 1-5, roll again and subtract ... repeatedly ... I've seen Dice Rolls of 400+ !!!)
@KorvinStarmast Yup. Remember a Cyberspace (rolemaster cyberpunk) car chase . PCs trying to get away ... trained drivers chasing them rolled 70-80 (total) .. so, low-level-PC, what you got? <roll ... roll .. roll ... 426!)
sort dice do cool stuff all by themselves sometimes. My brother rolled on my cleric the other day, casually. 00 (100). Yep, she's pregnant. (And yes, she'd had a dalliance ...) We are working through the RP on that since we agreed that IC she does not yet know for sure ...
The good news is one of the other PCs has a cleric, so if I decide to retire her we have a few ideas for my replacement PC to find the party ... but we have a bunch of sessions of play before at.
@V2Blast Salt marsh? We have five peeps. Son +4. Every other Monday. next one on Monday. We'll see if we wrap up the intro stuff or not. I had a disappointing turn out last time we got it together. :(
we have a couple of weeks where nobody can make it coming soon, so I want them to get this as the stepping stone to chapter 1 salt marsh ... we began to play when the other DM burned out so i was winging it until the adventure got mailed to me etc.
@Shalvenay no idea, as there's not even a heart beat yet. Last discussion with my brother is that we may in first trimester have her retire to monastery where she entered the cleric profession. But we have not locked it in.
her back story included a younger brother who is a gifted musician, but not old enough to adventure for sure.
@NautArch alright here. while ToA may be going on hiatus, I'm getting to try Fellowship on for size, and want to do some House of Bards stuff at some point, too, in addition to the DW game I'm running
The spell Find Steed allows you to cast a spell and have it also effect your steed.
While mounted on your steed, you can make any spell you cast that
targets only you also target your steed.
In the targets section of the Players Handbook it states:
A spells description tells you whet...
"Solved" characters are what happens when a character's interest and drama is all in their backstory with no ambitions, goals, or problems remaining to solve during play. When making characters, avoid knowing everything about their histories because it's fun to discover that during play, and make sure to give them some disatisfactions they have not yet resolved which can drive them during play.
Hmm. Does anybody here have a favorite session pacing mechanic, a tool for cueing the group to know when it's time for a story to move from beginning to middle to end, or it's time for a dramatic reveal, or that sort of thing?
@BESW Thanks for the elevator pitch. My back stories are "why I left home" mostly. The character's real story is just beginning after they leave home and see the world ..
Seems like an easy problem to solve. I'm pretty sure it won't take more than two iterations of unleashing a planetbuster at the earliest opportunity to get kicked out of a group.
@KorvinStarmast Looks honest (maybe?) but may need its own chat for elaborating and discussing their issues. They may also be having technical issues with their SE account.
After that nice question about players trying to kill the unkillable, I suddenly wondered if I actually could kill the Lady of Pain. Most of my junk doesn't work to good off the material plane but my way of moving neutron stars around is pretty destructive to anything that happens to be where I want to put one.
@Joshua I am not sure how the Lady of Pain handles a neutron star. At the least, I suspect she'd look over the rims of her glasses and say to you "Genre mixing again ... really?" And then banish you to the Barrier Peaks. :)
@JoelHarmon Thank you Joel, I wanted to get other eyes on it and other takes on it.
@Joshua it is my guess that the Lady can out planeshift most PC's if it comes to a duel. Or get a few of her minions to greet said plane shifters if they get tiresome. X^D
@KorvinStarmast I'm mentally outlining an answer now. The gist of the problem as I see it is some players like to optimize things. This includes their build, their turn, and their companions. That... doesn't always turn out well.
@Shalvenay Things are fine, just finished up a session. Not really time for talk--I have to be up again in six hours to get to the hospital for (elective-ish) surgery.
Just trying to "clear the decks" a bit before I'm out of commission for a while.
Maybe--I may be perfectly up and running tomorrow afternoon, I may be dropping everyone an "I'm sorry, but I'm still laid out on painkillers" note on Saturday afternoon. I have no idea.
@Shalvenay Jeeze, Shal, that's not light reading. Medicine was late to the show, my sister in law was involved heavily about a decade ago on the lessons learned from aviation in terms of process control. She was surgical nurse, got to be part of the local pilot program.
Those two links are not what I am reading tonight, I need serious head down to chew on those. but i am glad to see the thinking behind those papers getting thought. Yeah.
@KorvinStarmast and yes, I am very glad there are people thinking that way, even if the pendulum of organizational-political culture sometimes treats this sort of thing rather unkindly
It turns out, I'm learning, that you can "turn" middle-aged. Pass a kidney stone, lose a parent peacefully to old age, get two hernias, and start teaching a kid to drive all in one year. That's middle-aged, right?
@KorvinStarmast Yeah--I've definitely passed that point between "I hurt something, nurse/exercise it for a while, and it gets better" and "I hurt something, and now it'll just hurt. Forever."
@trogdor I called our nurse-on-call service, after crawling to the bathroom because I was nauseous with pain. She asked me to rate the pain on a 1-10 scale. I said: "nine. But only because I ruptured a kidney once, and that was a 10."
@Joshua No idea. Lady of Pain isn't statted (in my version of Plane scape) so I am not sure if she's killable. But she can be annoyed, which seems to never work out well.
@Joshua But as I ponder that, I deem that a neutron star on her might work if she is otherwise distracted. But I ask you to please not do that. If you kill Lady of Pain, we don't get Planescape in 5e, and that would just be bad for the whole world.
Well, she better not send any minions she doesn't mind losing outright. The very first trap kills entire parties less than level 17 outright, no save. These aren't your DM traps. These are don't you dare disturb me style PC traps.
@Joshua Fair point, though when it comes to minions, I always got the impression that "there's more where they came from." (Are you XP farming her minions! 8^D )
Following on from the question How can I make sure my players' decisions have consequences?:
I'm frustrated as a DM because I feel like the different players / PCs in my group want different things, and perhaps this group is doomed to fail.
The wizard / the wizard's player (sometimes I struggle...
KAPOK HEARTS v0.3 Feedback welcome! I think it's almost ready for playtesting, just needs tables for objectives, obstacles, and settings.
I added a third character feature, QUALITY, alongside FORM and PLAYSTYLE; I tinkered with the outcome table; and I made some significant additions to the epilogue mechanics.
@MikeQ: For the moment, while I'm resting I've been depending on mechanically blinding the scrying sensor; unfortunately they way this works means I'm also blinded.
Directly pulling from this Q/A about who controls a summoned steed's familiar, I am wondering what the find familiar spell targets.
Does the find familiar spell target the caster, a point in space, the familiar, or something else I may have missed?
I'm going to play Fire in the Lake, a four player wargame about Vietnam war with two complete strangers and one partial stranger (I've met her twice and hardly know her)
Exciting times with board games although the subject matter is mostly familiar to me through glimpses of American pop culture
@trogdor My reference point of arousal has regressed slightly in order to accommodate post-labor activity where we move cellulose pieces over a larger piece of cellulose. I try to remedy the situation by consuming a brew of oxidized leaves with caffeine.
@trogdor I cope with it fairly well, and I guess on good days I find some excitement in stepping out of my comfort zone in general :) but I understand, and wish everybody else did too, that different social situations aren't equally easy for everyone.
My mother hails from an era where people were far more driven by norms. She has a pretty clear picture of how a person should behave, how often they should visit their in-laws etc. And my big brother's SO being a model in that respect makes it even worse
So my mother keeps making these subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at me, her or my relationship with her. At times I'm almost offended how thinly veiled those jabs are
And the worst part is that they have their "understanding" of how things "should be", and therefore don't listen to you when you try to explain how things are.
I have been very self-critical lately, which has really helped me to understand what I need, what my issues and problems are, etc. One habit I have is both good and bad... I try and see the problem form everyone's perspective, which is good, but the bad habit I have is that I try and justify everyone's point of view.
@trogdor Yes. The ability to view things from other people's perspectives is a good habit. But imparting your own assumption instead is just as bad as when people do the same to me, even if it is justifying their negative actions with reasonable cause.
@trogdor Wolf spiders, mantises, and some bees are comparable. They have (relatively) large visual cortexes, which means visual communication, which means they put more points into intelligence and social skills
I personally don't mind spiders but I do check my privilege of living in a country where spiders are small, don't generally bite humans, and the few that do are negligibly venomous anyway.
Makes it much easier to appreciate them as fly-catching roomies.
Interesting question --- I think phobias are usually defined as "irrational fears" and I'd argue the same level of fear might qualify for "perfectly reasonable" in Australia and "overreacting a bit aren't we" up here.
I'm immediately suspicious of that kind of statistic, because country wealth will ALSO heavily influence the nature of data collection for its inhabitants.
Hey, @Ben, I've got an idea for a kinda radical twist on LLKM mechanics.
Cards no longer grant extra dice, they're all rule-bending powers. Instead, everyone has [ X - Y ] dice where X is a fixed number like 5 and Y is the number of power cards the monster has.
Anybody else who wants to give feedback on that is welcome too, of course. @trogdor.
Both Head and Body cards already have features like Breath Weapon (can attack an extra target) and Radioactive (successful defense penalizes the attacker's next roll).
If I can think up more of that kind of thing, I think it'd be really cool.
Cards would still be like hit points and when you run out you lose. But it's a balance where more cards means more options but less power and as you lose options you gain power.
@PierreCathé We're talking about this game I wrote which is currently waiting for me to write a new version based on previous playtests.
Bought and read the Fate Accessibility Toolkit yesterday. Found it to have respectable amount of nice stuff in it, but also some stuff that I found seriously questionable. Posted a longer review elsewhere: reddit.com/r/FATErpg/comments/chkrti/…
And for the purposes of the story I've divided a character's doing-things into two parts. Stuffing is literally the soft fluffy material inside a teddy bear, so I'm using it to represent the toy's physical existence. Stuff related to its shape and its relationship to other physical things.
In English "heart" is often used to represent emotion, sensitivity, and understanding. So I'm using it to represent non-physical things, both social and mental.
Gumption is not a stat on its own; Gumption is a number that determines your ratio of physical-to-non-physical effectiveness.
Basically I'm asking "Are you better at trying hard and not giving up when you're doing things with your body and your physical surroundings, or when you're doing things with your mind and your friends?"
@PierreCathé "Kapok" is a kind of fluffy plant material that came from a giant tropical tree's seed pod, which was used to stuff teddy bears --and furniture and pillows!-- until synthetic plastic stuffing became cheaper.
Hmm. Let me try to explain Gumption, Stuffing, and Heart by describing another way I could have written the rules to get the same effect.
I could have made Stuffing and Heart as two different skills. One for physical actions and one for mental/social actions.
And then instead of Gumption I could have told you that you have five points to divide between those two skills, but you've got to put at least 1 point in each.
And then when you roll a skill, you're trying to get under the number of points you put in the skill.
Gumption is just a way of saying "divide 5 points between two skills" without actually saying that.
Damage was packaged per-power-line for almost every instance of damage determination.
If it said HIT: 2d6+STR radiant damage and save or take +CHA fire damage that would mean it's all one instance of damage but two damage types, and all from the same source.
But if it said HIT: 2d6+STR radiant damage EFFECT: save or take +CHA fire damage that would be two different damage instances, two different damage types, still the same source because it's all the same power inflicting the damage.
BUT if you had an attack power that said HIT: 2d6+STR radiant damage AND you had a different power that said TRIGGER: When you deal radiant damage EFFECT: target saves or takes +CHA fire damage that would be two different damage instances, of two different damage types, from two different damage sources because it's two different powers--any radiant damage power could have triggered the save-or-fire damage power.
Also, a lot of effects differentiate between "dealing damage with an attack," "dealing damage with a dice roll," and just "dealing damage."
So there's complexity, but it's standardized so you can be very clear on how stuff will interact even when you're making new powers or feats, you don't have to check compatibility with EVERYTHING ELSE EVER because it all uses the same basic checks and balances.
Like, you will almost never find a feat that gives extra damage when you deal damage; they deal extra damage when you deal damage with an attack. That way you can add cute little "damage happens" features to classes without worrying you're going to accidentally make some random feat into a totally overpowered combo.
I’ve been having a problem in DnD. I love the game, perhaps too much.
I keep finding myself trying to control the other players (telling them what they should do, or where to go), and I want to stop. I’m ruining everyone’s fun. And I don’t know how to stop!
I want everyone to have fun, but I’m ...
The spell Find Steed allows you to cast a spell and have it also effect your steed.
While mounted on your steed, you can make any spell you cast that
targets only you also target your steed.
In the targets section of the Players Handbook it states:
A spells description tells you whet...
Following on from the question How can I make sure my players' decisions have consequences?:
I'm frustrated as a DM because I feel like the different players / PCs in my group want different things, and perhaps this group is doomed to fail.
The wizard / the wizard's player (sometimes I struggle...
Directly pulling from this Q/A about who controls a summoned steed's familiar, I am wondering what the find familiar spell targets.
Does the find familiar spell target the caster, a point in space, the familiar, or something else I may have missed?
