About this question. It seems the pdf was leaked but wizard's then took it down. Due to caching, I have access to the text but I am questioning if it's ok or even useful to share it.
@BESW really you need a withdrawal penalty of some kind as the mechanical impetus for encouraging acquisition/consumption, if addiction is something you want to model in mechanics at all
but yeah it's not a system that lends itself to nuance
I am well aware that the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but listen to me if you will. We are currently playing D&D 5e, a nautical adventure. I asked the DM if I could have a mermaid fall in love with my character and have her as a wife later, except what fell in love with my character was ...
@MarkWells Well that's the fundamental idea. You're addicted to the consumption of them, so when you purchase them, you need to buy more because you always want them on hand.
You're not addicted to the purchase of them, you're addicted to the effect - thus creating a need for more of them.
As for what's going on, I don;t think that's anything to do with the site. Users don't get blocked from chat - they just need minimum rep to be able to jump in AFAIK
That re-route sounds more like a firewall thing
The only thing that might be site specific is the commenting, but that would be related to your rep.
@goodguy5 The first part you can also (easily) do on DDB - arguably better, since it has even more filtering options. But yeah, I would love if DDB made it possible to print spell cards/monster statblocks in a, uh... optimized for print way (the current format does not look good when printed).
@goodguy5 Definitely quite overpriced, but most fashion items are. And, like all fashion, subject to taste :P
@doppelgreener That's hilarious.
I like that the arguments are never over the translations of the descriptions... (though in seriousness, I assume that's because most of the card text is a series of game terms with standardized phrasing)
Whenever I post an answer I immediately get downvotes. This always puzzled me as there never seems to be a reason for it.
I tried posting a comment asking if downvoters could please leave a comment so I can correct any problems. I received a lot of comments which is great, and fixed some problem...
@MikeQ Still need to actually build the character, but I have an idea for my Descent into Avernus character. Zariel tiefling bard, either Swords/Valor subclass down the line (I haven't read the guides/comparisons despite opening the tabs :P) - or maybe Lore but it feels unflavorful and would only make my choice paralysis worse. Faceless background.
Kinda taking inspiration from Zuko as the Blue Spirit in Avatar: The Last Airbender; I'm thinking they did something bad in their past and are maybe being hunted for it (or shunned), hence being a masked vigilante of sorts? and are working to make up for their bad deeds in the past maybe
has anyone played DiA and used the "Dark Secrets" mechanic?
it seems like the group mostly just made their own characters in a vacuum (and all of them are not native to Baldur's Gate) so I'm maybe thinking of mining it for inspiration for my own backstory
I'm (sporadically, slowly) working on a homebrew campaign, in a new world. So far, I have mostly worked out a world-shaping historical event; one city; and a pair of BBEG's with some "cut scenes" to introduce the first, & then pass the torch to the second. I only have very vague ideas about the adventures in between, though...
@Adeptus I think if you just set the stage and use some early adventures to nudge towards plot, it's best to let the players explore and build adventures and plot movement based on their actions.
@NautArch Well... the first BBEG is an orc warlord. Intro would be escorting human General to parlay with him, BBEG killing him, chaos breaking out, & BBEG escaping to continue war vs humans. Overarching goal will be kill BBEG to break orc tribal alliances & stop the war. Steps towards that? 🤷‍♂️
also wondering if anyone's used the Faceless background, in terms of when/how the party would discover the character's true identity. long-term deception is unsustainable (and probably undesirable), so I was thinking that it'd happen sometime during the Baldur's Gate portion (either "accidentally", obviously done in cooperation with the DM - or intentionally once he gets to know them)
@NautArch No idea. I'm running another game at the moment, so I don't even know when I'll run this new one. Probably start at 1st? Maybe 3rd, so they can dive right in to subclasses?
@V2Blast interestingly, my current character has a bit of that type of backstory. I'm not looking at it as long-term deception, but more that I disclose more of who I am as I bond with the party.
@NautArch I guess it depends on what the general is a general of, and how many body guards there are. Even 4 or 5 lvl 1 characters is a powerful force by normal standards.
True, and that can be included in the story if it makes sense as well. But I still think jumping right into that intro seems fast. I prefer to give my players, and me, time to figure out who their characters are and what they're interested in so I can work on a more interesting and integrated story as I get into a primary plot.
We've all got different DM styles, that's just mine :)
My initial idea was that they do some quest, return the king's lost widget, and as a reward, he makes them escorts for the general... or something like that
@Adeptus ah, that could work! An honor guard would make sense. But again, why is the King sending these folks on a quest? How did he get introduced to them?
I can think of some possibilities. Open call for adventurers "recover my widget & you shall be rewarded". Or they just happen across it in the loot of the monsters they've killed & recognise it as the king's.
I'm running a game for a group entirely made of engineers and programmers.
One of them approached me with this custom spell, and asked me to include it into the game.
Brew of the Boosted Brain
Casting Time: 1 minute
Range: Touch
Components: S, M (a few spoons of coffee powder and a...
Does a Glyph of Warding have its own agency in the game?
The case of the nasty Drow, invisible evil Sprite and the blue Orc.
Some specifications for the trigger of a Glyph of Warding are more obvious than others. For instance, I am a Dwarf Cleric and set a Glyph of Warding (Explosive Runes) u...
Has anyone played Forbidden Lands? I got invited to a game. It sounds like a very OSR game and I'd like to hear what kinds of experiences you've had with it
Definitely didn't sound like my favorite genre but I'm considering it to be worth a try, esp. given that the GM is explicitly one of those "You join if you feel like joining, leave if you feel like leaving, skip if you feel like skipping" types and that warms my heart a lot
this answer currently suggests swimming while wearing a full suit of metal armor would be a reasonable thing to do in real life. In actuality, jumping into water with a full suit of metal armor on may well end in your death. While most people are, I hope, educated enough to realize that the phy...
3.5e is a very exploitable game and I am vaguely aware of a number of ways to make it highly probable that my character will be the first to move in any given combat encounter. To name just a few examples: Pun-Pun has an arbitrarily high bonus to initiative, Supreme Initiative appears to do what ...
GOOOOOOOOOD MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRNING RPG!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is serious gaming! We're ready to rock it from the Feywild to the Outer Planes! Is that just me, or does that sound like a Nicolas Cage movie? National...Treasure!
We've got a weather report from the Elemental Plane of Fire. Dwayne, how's the weather there? It's hot! Damn hot! Can you give us any more detail? Fool! I said it's hot! You got a window? Open it!
I am looking for advice... I have a NG Cavalier and I'm looking for options to deal with non-combatants such as women/children orcs after defeating the warband or opponents you get to surrender. I dont want to kill them, but can't take them with us and dont want them to become combatants later (especially at inopportune times).
most of the time there probably isn't any "good" option there
if you can't take them with you, and you don't have some nearby authority you can hand them off to, you either kill them or let them go, presumably with some amount of scaremongering about what consequences await them if they continue their inconvenient ways
There might be spells and other character options which help deal with this specific problem if you're willing to invest the resources in them.
though, ultimately, this is kind of just the tradeoff you have to make - if you show an enemy mercy, they might come back to get you later, and you just have to accept that that's the price of this kind of being good
@Carcer 1e didn't have the cavalier class until dragon mag #72 came out, and it makes no mention of how to deal with survivors, other than the chivalric code being codified in the article.
The thing about the morally good choice in this situation is that you have to accept that there's a non-zero chance that they come back to try to get revenge for some reason. That's what makes it the "hard" choice.
If you could easily guarantee a way to get these people out of your hair permanently and not have to kill them, then it wouldn't be a dilemma.
@KorvinStarmast Yes, thanks for the feedback. I'll print out pregenerated character sheets, and get a few of those spell card decks to help manage spell info
It's still very rough. I asked a few others who I can rely on for... let's say sharper critical feedback, to point out the cracks and flaws in structure and concept
For example, the early encounters don't seem to have any in-game reward or consequence
We also restructured the exploration phase for a more modular approach, so that each area has a theme and a reward, but the challenge in an area is independent. So regardless of which areas the PCs navigate to, the DM can control what challenges they face, depending on the time & resources available.
Of course. I don't like to distribute unfinished material. The plan is to polish it some more, run it in 2 weeks, get feedback from the players, and then update it again.
You might just want to ignore portent for the calculation and say that the actual answer (when using portent) would be slightly higher than the estimate
Now I'm just afraid to post my answer in case the math is all wrong. I've reached 168 damage on average, will go over it more and probably post later today
@GcL Yeah, was wondering about that one. I've edited out the frame-challengey bit of the comment now.
@MattM I think I have the 2nd or 3rd edition of ADD :P
@Medix2 Dunno the specific context of this question, but Wall of Fire grants a save to creatures literally within the area of the wall when it appears, then automatically does damage to creatures that move through the wall, end their turn within the line of the wall itself, or end their turn within 10 feet of the wall on the side you chose.
@Upper_Case While D&D 5e is likely simply due to popularity, that question's vague enough that it could be a number of other editions or possibly even systems too.
You might be able to find another game somewhere where that combination of words still makes perfect sense, but if the OP comes back and it's a not a 5e question, I will print it out and video myself eating it for you
@Carcer Playing the odds that's almost certainly true, but the OP could mistakenly have used the wrong word, or wrongly ported something from 5e to an earlier edition, or something similar
PbtA systems generally are designed to give much more narrative freedom/influence to the players and draw on improvisation, so it's not surprising that a PbtA game says "don't prepare plots in advance"
That phrase usually means "planning specific events that must occur for the story to move forward". An example of that in the "PCs get captured" case might be that they need to get into a fight and then lose. That can be a problem if the players try to avoid the fight in the first place, or get into it and then escape or win. Then your story that depends on them getting captured can't really move forward
Yeah. You of course need a premise and it's fine to think about things that might happen so that you're more prepared to respond appropriately to the way the players decide to do, but you shouldn't effectively write a story (even a branching one) and expect the players to follow it along
In contrast, if you're planning a (maybe you need the PCs to be separated from their equipment), you can focus on that situation and then improvise a way to make it happen based on what's already going on at the table. If they get into a fight and lose, they can be captured and sent to prison where they're stripped of their gear. If that doesn't happen, some other thing could: maybe they're robbed while sleeping, or anything else
@Ludoss In my experience, planning for possible outcomes is worthwhile because it helps me think about the situations the players are in, even though my players rarely end up causing those specific outcomes to matter
It's only "writing a branching story" if you require your players to end up on one of those branches
I haven't played any PbtA games, so this might not directly apply, but I usually think of it like this:
Any TTRPG will have NPCs, groups, etc., and those will always have goals, resources, and obstacles. No matter what the players do, those NPCs and groups will still pursue their goals by using their resources and dealing with their obstacles.
Prepping a plot means that your story needs the players to do a specific thing, like steal an item that an NPC requires for some plot-relevant plan. If they don't do that, then you have a problem.
Prepping a situation means that you know what the NPC wants, and that they'll use that item to do it. If the players decide to try to steal the item and ruin the NPC's plan, you can work with that. If they don't make that decision, then the NPC keeps the item and uses it to advance their schemes. Then your players have something else to deal with, specifically an NPC that has more resources or is closer to their goal
Not necessarily. Plot could simply include setting, and premise, and what NPCs intend to do. The GM could also present motives and possible goals, and prepare contingencies based on player choice. This doesn't restrict player choice, or require a specific sequence of actions.
@MikeQ In the "don't prep plots" parlance (I'm attributing it to The Alexandrian, but I could be wrong about that), that would be described as prepping a situation, not a plot
> Fate Condensed is an updated, streamlined, 50-pages-or-less version of Fate Core System. It's completely stand-alone and features new refinements to the Fate Core engine that'll have it running better than ever. Call it Fate 4.5, if you like—it covers all the ground (and uses the same skills) as Fate Core, in about a sixth the size.
@RedRiderX It's my second favorite initiative system ever, and my favorite for tactical gaming! We started using it for D&D 4e and it was really perfect.
@BESW I always feel weird about hearing this stuff as a DM. Do I make the enemy move there and make things easy? Do I make the enemy move elsewhere and then we have to break for ten minutes for another "discussion" on metagaming?
But I don't have experience with groups that get hung up on metagaming.
And in Fate, GMs and players are explicitly co-conspirators to make the PCs' lives dramatic and complicated in awesome ways. That takes a lot of the antagonism out of such choices.
I think if I ever do Fate, I'm going to start off with a setting as far a departure from D&D (and similar adventuring party RPG system) as I can manage. Like, I dunno, medical students at a hospital in the afterlife.
@Carcer see medicine in the afterlife isn't about your physical health, lack of policy support for mental healthcare pretty much everywhere has resulted in a demand for rehabilitation and recovery in the afterlife and i dunno, i came up with that after noticing there's a lot of Scrubs videos in my YouTube recommendations sidebar
Check out Evil Hat’s itchiopage, they’ve got some free stuff that might give a good place to start. There’s at least a couple mental health related settings.
The description of the spell says specifically that after the caster has maintained it's concentration for an hour, the spell can be dispelled.
The transformation lasts for the duration, or until the target drops to 0 hit points or dies. If you concentrate on this spell for the full duration,...
Would this houserule be balanced with the bounded accuracy system?
If an attack roll is made and "misses" by one, the defender takes a glancing blow. This glancing blow does not count as a successful hit. This glancing blow deals half damage of the attack to a maximum of 3. This damage cannot...