TRPG General Chat

Himitsu_no_Yami

12:00 AM

I just found an amazingingly helpful script for Roll20 to allow me to copy all of my macros from one game to another

BESW

12:34 AM

Oh nice. Roll20's one of those "so powerful I can't actually do anything" programs.

Ben

1:31 AM

or "I can do everything, but only all at once"

Shalvenay

hey thre @linksassin

Glazius

@Himitsu_no_Yami I don't think you can just uncritically apply a pure D&D interpretation, for all that Overlord is swiping a lot of its vocabulary from there. The one thing that's true about a lich is that they chose to forsake their own mortality for the sake of arcane power, and if that were the actual character history in the MMO (a sunlover who class-changed into a monster) then surely somebody in the All-Monster Human-Haters Club would hassle him about it at some point, even jokingly.

By all accounts the character was created as a level 1 Skeleton Mage Necromancer and just went from there, whatever that means from a lore perspective.

Hot RPG Questions

1:51 AM

3

Q: Can you pull the same enemy multiple times with Grasp of Hadar?

Based on the setting explained by KorvinStarmast in this question, I'd like to know if you can pull someone more than once with Eldritch Blast + Grasp of Hadar if you hit him with multiple blasts (meaning multiple beams or multiple casts of the same cantrip). The spell description states that yo...

linksassin

2:03 AM

@Shalvenay G'day how's it going?

Shalvenay

2:36 AM

@linksassin been alright here, as for you?

linksassin

3:13 AM

@Shalvenay Yeah I'm alright. Work is a bit stressful but not too bad.

Hot RPG Questions

3:47 AM

2

Q: Does the Order of the Scribes ability Awakened Spellbook change the damage type of cantrips

On the newest UA Subclass Revisited, the Wizard gains the ability to change the damage type of spells they cast for the damage type of other spells they have in their book. Is this applicable to Cantrips?

dnd-5e wizard unearthed-arcana archetype

V2Blast

4:00 AM

About to stream the finale of our D&D 5e actual-play podcast, Planeslip: Echoes of Creation, in less than 10 minutes: https://www.twitch.tv/bigdredwun

In a universe adjacent to our own lies a world known as Runia. This world, once peaceful and idyllic, is now threatened by a monstrous being from its prehistory. A group of adventurers known as Whiskey Company have risen up to do what they can to fight this entity known only as Nagat. They have trekked far across the mortal realms in search of the shards of Barrinoth, the Titan of Justice, in hopes of returning him to his full power - and no…

game time!

hope some of you are able to tune in :)

Feeds

4:19 AM

BESW has made a change to the feeds posted into this room

Hot RPG Questions

4:34 AM

5

Q: How should Augury work when the course of action relies on a skill check?

My party's Cleric has just picked up Augury. It's clearly a spell that garners some understandable confusion, but I don't think this precise question's been asked before. How should I, as DM, answer Augury when the good or bad outcomes of a proposed course of action hinge on a skill check, which...

dnd-5e spells divination

V2Blast

6:35 AM

we finished our Planeslip D&D campaign! :)

we also went up to level 20 at the end, not that it mattered for gameplay (we were level 18 as of the final fight last session)

so I can officially say I played a campaign from level 1 to 20

linksassin

6:47 AM

Haha, I've seen a lot of campaigns end that way. They get level 20 from beating the final boss. But never get to do anything with it.

Congrats though.

Will you be launching a new campaign soon?

V2Blast

7:30 AM

@linksassin I think the DM's taking a break from D&D for a bit, at least right now

Technically we "beat" the boss - or, well, the boss's underling; the real boss was basically god-like in power, so we had the god-like being we resurrected (by finding all the ~~Dragon Balls~~ pieces of his power) fight the real boss - by our wizard casting Prismatic Wall. the world-destroying "boss" dragon failed both saves against the Violet layer, and was banished to another plane. After 2.5 years, the DM still hadn't learned to give his boss monsters legendary resistances :P

Ben

8:23 AM

I had a one-off level 20 campaign. That was fun.

Maurycy

Are there any well-known DnD "variants" or derivative systems which have magic system that does not use a predefined list of spells but rather "dynamic" spells? I can't figure out how to phrase a google search to find something like that.

LizWeir

oh, that's an interesting one - I can think of a few games that have fairly freeform casting but none that are D&D-adjacent.

(Ars Magicka and Mage: the {Awakening/Ascension} are my first three thoughts for crunchy games with dynamic spellcasting, but that's an aside that doesn't answer what you want)

BESW

What would you think of as D&D-adjacent? Like, War of Ashes is one of the most D&D-inspired of the modern Fate systems but it's still very much Fate's take on D&D.

Maurycy

TO be fair I am not sure. Let me write everything down: I've been away from DMing for half a decade, then we started running one campaign in Fate, but nothing clicked (the issue was story and characters), then we started another campaign in Fate, this time everything is going great but the campaign is very political and railroaded and while I enjoy what happens I am very unhappy about how I run the game and how much trouble I have coming up with anything.

I realize I miss the old days when I played 3.5e where we played a more typical epic high-fantasy with a lot of cool things happening and whatnots, but I also recognize that playing 3.5e had a lot of things I don't want to deal with anymore.

A humongous list of spells is one thing.

I know I could play an epic high-fantasy in Fate but... I do miss the DnD combat

And we barely use any mechanics of Fate anyway, we might as well be playing a system-less game for the most part

kviiri

8:41 AM

@Maurycy Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Dungeon World and 13th Age both have a DnD-style spell system primarily for combat and a separate, more free-form spell system for other things.

LizWeir

hm, so I think part of the issue might be that the tightly-defined combat kinda pulls against freeform magic - you really need to know what effects are viable in a tactical scene

Maurycy

I probably have an X Y problem. Maybe it's okay to just dust off the old player's handbook and play that with all of the good and bad

LizWeir

but if the problem is the size of the spell list, 13th Age might be a good shout

Maurycy

Or add just enough house rules on top of that to remove the biggest offenders

kviiri

13th Age has an interesting twist in that the spell systems are sort of inter-linked: you can pull off free-form ritual magic as long as it's loosely based on the combat spells you know.

LizWeir

8:42 AM

it's a D&D derivative, but the spell lists are much shorter, to the tune of half a dozen options per level

Maurycy

@LizWeir BESW suggested 13th Age yesterday when I kind of asked about the same, and while I like a lot of the ideas I read the deal breaker is there is no Polish version available

LizWeir

ah, that's unfortunate - saw that exchange but forgot who was talking, sorry!

Maurycy

We all know English but it's super awkward to play a game in one language and have all the vocabulary in another

If I do go the 3.5e route though I'll certainly house rule a bunch of ideas on top :D

LizWeir

oh here's a dumb left-field idea

3.5, but Tome of Battle classes only

kviiri

@Maurycy Heh, cultural differences like this is weird. Finnish TRPG playing is quite rife with macaronic verse, which is almost unquestioned x)

LizWeir

8:44 AM

cut that spell list right down to one book of manoeuvres ;-)

kviiri

I mean every now and then someone says "kokemuspiste" instead of "experience point" and people raise their eyebrows

Maurycy

@kviiri Hah, we do use a lot of words and phrases from English - XP, HP, NPC etc, but that's more of an effect of knowing all of them from video games. Using new vocabulary is awkwarder

BESW

@LizWeir I wonder if there's Polish versions of 4e available? Since Tome of Battle and Tome of Magic were basically proof-of-concept experimentation for 4e class powers.

kviiri

@Maurycy I see :) and I don't mean to sound mocking or anything, I think these kinds of cultural differences are really fun to observe

BESW

4e's got a lot of options during character creation but it cuts them down tremendously at the table without sacrificing tactical interest.

Maurycy

8:49 AM

4e and 5e are for sure released in Polish :)

Not sure about supplemental books though

BESW

Just grab the 4e Essentials and you'd have what you need for a good game.

A lot of the stuff that bothered me about 3.5 in particular is dramatically reversed in 4e, but of course it's still got all the problems endemic to D&Dism in general.

kviiri

Speaking of languages, I made a weird observation yesterday. What is carbon monoxide in your native language? For every language I checked, the substance has only names referring to its chemical composition: carbon and oxygen.

Except in Finnish, it's häkä.

And ok, in Estonian it's vingugaas whose meaning I've yet failed to infer, except I think "gaas" is "gas"

Maurycy

That would be "tlenek węgla" so it refers to the chemical composition, BUT. We do have a common name for it, "czad". Which, interestingly, is also used as a word for "cool" as in "awesome"

kviiri

@Maurycy Ooh! Interesting, the plot thickens :P

We have an expression that if something sells very well, it sells "like häkä" which is kinda weird considering that carbon monoxide doesn't... seem to be a thing that'd be highly sought after?

Maurycy

@BESW Of course, nothing can be simple. 4e Essentials was not released in Polish, but I guess I could just grab the player's and GM handbook? Or are there any differences?

BESW

9:04 AM

Essentials is kind of like a mini-edition of its own. They re-released new versions of the classes in books that let you run the game without needing the original PHB/DMG, but the Essentials material is still compatible with the original material.

kviiri

I mean it was used as substitute vehicle fuel during the shortages, so it definitely is not just a lethal gas waiting to kill you, but it wasn't sold as-is. People burned it themselves on-board.

BESW

If you could get Essentials I'd strongly recommend using just the first couple Essentials books, as those reflect what the devs learned from their earlier mistakes with the edition.

kviiri

9:18 AM

TIL: it's a tradition in the JRPG series Final Fantasy to include a joke weapon called "Excalipoor" which has very high statistics so it is automatically equipped when using the "auto-equip" button, but that's hard-coded to always deal only a single point of damage.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@kviiri Like our siblings in the post above, Ukrainian has a scientific name (several, in fact, some based on atom names, some based on molecule names) and a more 'street' name for, chadnyy gaz (чадний газ), whose most literal translation would be something along the lines of 'burnout gas'. (Also, a similar term exists in Russian too, but with a different morpheme of a pretty same-ish meaning. I wonder if they're both a calque.)

kviiri

At times, I wonder what JRPG designers were thinking...

BESW

@kviiri "We love what Roberta Williams is doing, the world needs more of that."

kviiri

@BESW I had to google her name, but Sierra... yes.

BESW

Too deep a cut?

kviiri

9:28 AM

Naa, most of my knowledge about Sierra is second-hand. I did wet my feet with Police Quest and a few other games of them, though.

trogdor

9:41 AM

they made a game called police quest? XD

I knew they had Kings Quest, I knew they had Space Quest

Police quest starts to stretch the whole quest thing XD

kviiri

Police Quest, in general, stretches belief.

BESW

Police Quest

Police Quest is a series of police simulation video games. Police Quest was produced and published by Sierra On-Line between 1987 and 1998. The first five were adventure simulation games, the first three of which were designed by former police officer Jim Walls. The fourth to sixth titles were designed by former LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates. Both SWAT and the real-time strategy game SWAT 2 still carried the Police Quest name and were numbered V and VI in the series, respectively, although subsequent titles in the series would drop the Police Quest title altogether. == Games == === By Jim Walls... ===

The first one is called Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel so. Yeah.

"The game is the most realistic of those developed by Sierra in the late 1980s"

(The "Death Angel" is a drug lord.)

kviiri

It's one of those insanely hard adventure games, where among other things, you can get instant game over for failing to adhere to a myriad of police procedural regulations, which I think is in a sense cool but 1) probably not very realistic and 2) probably not what people expect for "pursuit of the Death Angel"

BESW

"Yeah, we're making a grounded realistic game based on real-life police procedures. The antagonist is a drug dealer!"
"Great, what's the drug dealer's name?"
"THE DEATH ANGEL."
"...okay, Jim, for a minute I was worried we'd be going off-brand with this one but I can tell it's in good hands."

kviiri

I recall the game begins in a dressing room, where you must get the main character's uniform on within a time limit or you miss a briefing (game over). You'll get to drive a patrol car, but you must perform a complete check on the car before entering it or something obviously breaks (game over). You can drive around the town at your leisure in a driving minigame, but traffic infractions are an instant game over. You can run red lights if your sirens are on, though.

In a surprising twist you are not punished for frivolously using the siren and lights by my recollection.

The only time I played it, I eventually got to a point where I had to apprehend an intoxicated driver but couldn't find the right command

Hot RPG Questions

10:00 AM

6

Q: Can you add your the same modifier to damage rolls multiple times if they come from different instances?

A friend of mine is wanting to do a specific build and as far as I am aware you can not apply a modifier multiple times in this way. Can someone confirm if this is a RAW legal tactic? Scenario: lv 6 tiefling celestial warlock, assuming 16 charisma Cast shillelagh to make staff 1d8+cha [source: ...

dnd-5e warlock spellcasting stacking tiefling

trogdor

10:29 AM

@kviiri the instant game overs for things I don't even know I am supposed to do are exactly the reason I am not interested in playing any of those games XD

kviiri

@trogdor I kinda want to see if it was as bad as I remember though :)

trogdor

I mean, I've seen clips of the Quest games

Maurycy

Aren't the instant deaths or hidden-delayed game overs a defining feature of the text and point-and-click adventure games?

trogdor

mostly kings Quest, and actually I've watched a playthrough of Space Quest, with a guy who even had played it before and still died a lot

@Maurycy maybe of text ones but most point and click games I have played don't even have failure states

or if they do they bring you right back to where you had been before you did the thing

Maurycy

@trogdor I guess the lack of failure states is replaced by extremely illogical puzzles. I never had any success with any point-and-click and all the games which LPs I saw were completely confusing for me.

trogdor

10:34 AM

point and clicks main problem now is definitely moon logic

by that I mean, the people making the game think it's entirely logical for you to figure out you are supposed to do what they made it so you have to do, but you aren't them so you have no idea what they want

and maybe sometimes they even play that up

I'm playing one on and off right now that,... I've had to look up a guide for like, 2 or 3 times because I tried literally doing everything I could think of and still couldn't figure out what to do to progress

Maurycy

I feel like it's a problem with a lot of games that utilize puzzles that require lateral thinking - it's hard to make a puzzle that works outside the context of your own head.

trogdor

but I still do like those types of games

@Maurycy yes

I think that's spot on really

that being said I also sort of understand it

Maurycy

I really like the contrast between La Mulana 1 and 2. I recently replayed them one after another, they both are essentially the same style of puzzles all the way through, but 1 is so horribly obtuse in so many places, where 2 manages to have clues that can be understood.

trogdor

if you make a point and click game you can't always make it too easy to figure out or people will finish it fast and not get as much enjoyment out of it if they are used to point and click games giving them more trouble than that

LizWeir

kind of on topic for this place, really

since that's the base of GM advice like "try to seed every piece of information at least three times"

(because it's more obvious to you than it is to your players)

Maurycy

10:38 AM

@trogdor Oh yea, there is likely no way to have a pointa-and-click style puzzles that are equally difficult to newcomers and genre veterans

trogdor

yeah

XD

but at the same time, it's very weird that you can run into so many puzzles and be like "what were they thinking when they made that?"

Maurycy

Yea well, that's me about every puzzle in any point and click ever

trogdor

fair enough

that's me for say, maybe about 4 or 5 puzzles usually, in most point and clicks I have played

Maurycy

You know, reading through Moon Logic Puzzle on TV Tropes reminded me that I never finished The Fool and His Gold

trogdor

that being said it's partly because I have a habit of just walking around rubbing my whole inventory over every interact-able thing

and often times that gets something to happen

not always though

Maurycy

10:43 AM

@trogdor Haha, funny that it's exactly what I'd do but I was probably missing half of the items I could have at any point in time so it never worked

trogdor

missing items is my number one problem yeah

well also when I run into a thing that isn't obvious what I am supposed to do and rubbing an item on it doesn't do anything

BESW

This is one reason I specifically invoked Roberta Williams earlier; apparently she loved those sorts of frustratingly obtuse puzzles which require either brute force or completely unreasonable reasoning, and that's why Sierra's games are full of them: she wrote the kinds of games she loved to play.

kviiri

11:09 AM

@BESW Not to mention, ones that may make sense only in retrospect

trogdor

@BESW nothing wrong with that if you like it but I certainly will be steering clear XD

kviiri

@Maurycy There's a lot of variation. Sierra generally, but not universally, represented the harsher side of the genre. Others, like LucasArts, generally made their games always-winnable, with few exceptions. Then there's stuff in between, like Legend Interactive's games, where losing is possible and common, but generally is fairer than Sierra

Maurycy

@kviiri To be fair I haven't played adventure games in 15 years or so, and when I did play them I was still a teenager with questionable English-language skills. Maybe my experiences would be better now.

trogdor

well, LucasArts might have made their games always winable but my only example, Grimm Fandango, definitely had a loooot of moon logic involved

kviiri

I mean the worst kind (except if you're into that stuff. No judging) is where a seemingly inconsequential action results in an unwinnable state much later on without any obvious causal link except possibly in retrospect. Legend's parser games avoid that for most part, while still including fail conditions and some really hard timed puzzles

@trogdor Yea. The second year was my unfavorite part of the game, it was so rife with red herrings

trogdor

11:15 AM

I mean, as soon as you pick up the Fire Extinguisher you have to be ready for a constant barage of "that's not on fire"

then something finally is on fire and you can use it, but it's not the end of the use of the item

and you wait the other half of the game to use it for some puzzle there is no hint of it's use for

(and which wasn't on fire)

it's practically a purposeful troll

kviiri

My ex got fed up with Gateway, a parser game loosely based on Frederik Pohl's Heechee series, when the game didn't understand her command "use ladder"

I think "climb ladder", or simply "up" would've sufficed but she was new to parser games, I had grown tough in my juvenile years

trogdor

yeah I also don't like a game that needs you to put in commands and is very particular about what you type

you can say "something that means the same thing as what you want me to do" and still not do what the game expects you to do because the game doesn't reccognize the specific comand you used

XD

that's very frustrating to me

kviiri

I consider Legend's parser to be a very intuitive one, not that particular. It might puzzle some that it generally prefers complete sentences, eg. "ask thom about medallion" instead of "talk thom" which was popular in Sierra

trogdor

it's why I like point and clicks

because I can tell the game "I want to pick this thing up/interact with this thing/talk to this person"

and I don't have to know the commands the creators of the game decided on that will actually do those things

plus, at least for the ones I've played, unless Riven counts, don't happen to have failure states

(Riven has a failure state but the game more or less tells you not to do the failure state thing, so mostly ok, plus it's just the one thing that does it at least as far as I know)

Maurycy

Speaking of text adventure games, I used to play this game called Amnesia which I was super terrified of. First the pressure of doing the initial stuff before you get murdered, and then just staying alive on the streets and constantly getting lost. And doing a lot of save scumming to have any chance of getting enough money and food.

trogdor

11:25 AM

oh man I just couldn't even try to play Amnesia

BESW

@kviiri Assuming "Retrospect" is the name of a documentary about Sierra On-Line.

kviiri

Point-and-clicks sometime do have similar nasty surprises though. Eg. a genre expectation for me was that the game only cares about you interacting with things, but in The Dig there was a puzzle where the correct solution requires one to move around the room in the correct order

And Broken Sword similarly surprised me with game overs, including for standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they're at least of the sort where you can just reload before you died and not do it again

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

I guess I should've expected there to be more than one horror-themed game called Amnesia.

AncientSwordRage

11:50 AM

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica confused me at first too

I only remember playing Under a Steel Sky, and The Discworld games

kviiri

1:08 PM

There's an old, at least partially Finnish-made point-and-click called Alien Incident

It's a dramedic story of Benjamin, who lives with his slightly eccentric scientist uncle in a mansion. Uncle accidentally opens up a wormhole, capturing a spaceborne alien and a spaceship chasing it and bringing them to earth. The aliens kidnap Uncle in order to get back home, so Ben has to save him.

...and it happens on Halloween so the aliens just scamper around in public without arousing suspicion. Not that there's many people to pay attention to them. Uncle's mansion is in the sticks, with only a few residences nearby.

I mainly remember the game's Finnish dialogue which had lots of clever writing

Nevertheless, the English version shall be recommended too. For some nice, clean and merciful point-and-clickies

Glazius

@kviiri It was a game helmed by a former police officer who was brought on to add verisimilitude to the project. To him, that meant that kind of by-the-book day-to-day stuff, and everyone just ran with it. I don't want to say gaming was still in its infancy at that point, but it wasn't ready for a full day at school yet either.

BESW

I gotta say, I do really like the police procedural bits in PC Grant and I would be VERY disappointed if they were missing from any tabletop or video game adaptation.

kviiri

@Glazius Yeah, I was going for a tiny bit of political commentary that not everything seems to exactly happen as by the book as the game'd have one believe x)

A. B.

Raahh

BESW

Yawp!

A. B.

1:20 PM

Yawp!

Er, sorry, very bored.

BESW

That's fair.

I'm trying to stop feeling overwhelmed long enough to get some sleep.

A. B.

Aw.

Overwhelmed by what? but probably not want to explain.

BESW

I've got a lot of projects that have been backing up around the house, and several TRPG design projects I really want to work on, and now I've got a client with a vague-but-urgent timetable for a project that needs me to re-make an InDesign magazine template in Affinity Publisher.

Hot RPG Questions

5

Q: While under the effect of the invisibility spell, would using a wand of pryotechnics break the invisibility?

The wand of pyrotechnics is a common magic item in Dragon of Icespire Peak. The text reads as follow: This wand has 7 charges. While holding it, you can use an action to expend 1 of its charges and create a harmless burst of multicolored light at a point you can see up to 60 feet away. The b...

dnd-5e spells magic-items invisibility

A. B.

Oh, yes, yes, yuck.

Vague-but-urgent is the worst.

Maurycy

1:30 PM

@BESW We're in the middle of having a barely-functional bathroom, and I am varnishing countertops pretty much right now

So I can sympathize with having stuff to do around the house

BESW

Yeah, on top of everything else we've got a plumbing problem that's likely not our fault, but it's still our problem.

And I'm having a lot of trouble getting my work materials organized.

Maurycy

Thankfully for us it's just a matter of repainting the bathroom and replacing majority of things inside

A. B.

Have you written them down, the things you're trying to do? Or as many of them as you can remember, at least? That generally makes it easier to forget about the ones you're not currently doing.

Maurycy

Jeebus, the spell list in 3.5 is horrendous. There's just too much of everything

Adeptus

1:52 PM

Kiddo's computer had a major failure last night. Sudden bluescreen & then refused to boot. I initially narrowed it down to either motherboard or SSD. Spent most of today trying to fix it. Looks like it's the SSD. At least it's still under warranty.

Got it working long enough to copy everything off, too.

AncientSwordRage

2:04 PM

@Adeptus phew

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