In the past I've recommended games and materials made by the creator Swords and Flowers; in light of recently publicized information I recind those recommendations and will not be giving him any more air unless/until the Malaysian TRPG community choose to re-rembrace him.
His presence in those lists is not an endorsement by myself or the creators of the lists.
Karanduun by LIQUORCANIN just had a v1.5.1 update. It is a high-flying, Filipino heroic fantasy Tabletop RPG in a setting inspired by Filipino Myth, Folklore, and Folk Catholicism. You play as young heroes who must make their legend known and become a legendary Karanduun by making God (whichever oppressive system and tyrant that is) bleed. And the new layout is BEAUTIFUL.
@kviiri Given that it started by posting a bunch of complaints about the establishment out in public view, "Punk Protestantism" actually seems kinda redundant.
(though a lot of things could be substituted for "respect" there...)
@NautArch audiobooks are tough for me. I can't really listen to them while driving, because apparently I (gasp!) actually focus too much on driving.
Listening to them while I'm puttering or running or doing chores... I really despise the tempo/cadence of almost every one I've tried.
Exceptions are books I know really well, and books where you're telling me a story rather than reading it to me.
In the first category go the Harry Potter books, which we've listened to (Jim Dyle version) on many long car rides. In the second category go Gladwell and Carlin and... maybe that's it, so far.
@BESW Podcasts are alright for me. But reading to me... I can't even follow readings in church. Except, generally, the Gospel reading which I know well enough once I hear the first line that I'm still only half-following, but that doesn't hurt.
@nitsua60 I once attempted listening to an audio book while installing flooring; I would either lose track of the story quickly, or forget what number I was just looking at on the tape measure.
We occasionally go to a fantasy/scifi fan group locally - not quite a book club, but they generally talk about books. One time, they had a talk about an author whose style was "I'm telling you this story (but I've written it down)" - I wish I could remember his name, because that would probably be perfect for audiobooks.
@Adeptus You mean the style of the written work was like that, or that when they spoke publicly it was with prepared remarks that they then told-but-didn't-read?
> I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it. - Margery Allingham
I'm in a campaign where it's just me and my boyfriend, my boyfriend being the DM. He's very literal with D&D rules and has argued that a rat can carry 15lbs. Rats have a strength score of 2. Carrying capacity is Strength Score times 15, halved if Tiny. I think this is completely ridiculous that a...
I'm running a game for 4 people, 1 of which has played DnD before. I have only ran a 1st session. This session lasted for about 5 or 6 hours, and it seems that it was a lot of fun for them. I will run the "Dragon of Icespire Peak" campaign, but haven't even started the 1st town or quests.
At the ...
My answer to this question about balancing combat powers has reframed it to be about being a new DM with new players.
I've said why it's a bad idea in general, I've given some advice, but not answered the question as written. Due to the value in the answer, especially for new DMs should it be tag...
@AncientSwordRage It's a cool frame, and I think I agree with it in theory while in practice I just want D&D to go sit in a corner while Wizards thinks about what it's done.
D&D is a problem and has been for... ever... but the problem with D&D right now is Wizards of the Coasts' abusive and exploitative practices as a business and employer. If Wizards can straighten itself out somehow, D&D can follow as the company matures and its employees become more diverse.
If Wizards doesn't straighten itself out, no amount of changing Wizards products will fix the awful influence Wizards has on the industry.
Pammu did a thread earlier today about TRPG industry in the Philippines. I won't link it here because frankly I don't trust everyone in this room to be mature about the Pinoy cultural aspect of the thread, but: a major influence on Pinoy TRPG community functioning is the fact that since their country doesn't have a TRPG industry of its own, or access to crowdfunding services like Kickstarter, WotC is even more the holy grail of TRPG jobs than in America and Pinoy designers hyperfocus on it.
This leads to Filipino TRPG spaces bifurcating into WotC aspirants and everyone else, and the divide can be very unpleasant.
Indie devs around the world face a similar bad choice: create third-party material for D&D and sell it on DMG and hope to get WotC's attention, or come to terms with never even hoping to properly support your family with a TRPG job.
Nick Butler asked D&D 5e creators on Twitter "after you have built your audience, what stops you from changing platforms?" The answers are often heartbreaking.
Anyway! I love the idea of games that lean into what makes us uncomfortable, and a lot of great games already do that!
I'd never play it with strangers, but playing Dog Eat Dog with a particular group of friends was astonishingly good. Awkward, uncomfortable, eye-opening.
And We Forest Three is a solo TRPG that made me squirm.
Heh. And there's a game that I don't mention in chat much anymore because its premise made people so uncomfortable.
On the other hand, rpg.se meta once had people arguing that the site should be neutral on the subject of a TRPG designed as a white supremacy recruitment tool by a convicted murderer, because D&D is about orc genocide and we allow that. [expansive shrug] I always thought that was more a reason to finally sit down and have The Talk About D&D, myself.
(Worth noting for future readers that the consensus was pretty firmly against being neutral/willfully-blind in that ^^ case, in case they don't go spelunking on meta.)
[wave] Hi! La mort de l'auteur gets waved around a lot as if it were some timeless truth rather than a nuanced complaint about a specific literary analysis custom fifty years ago.
@BESW I very much see that, and i'm talking less about looking at the author to understand the work and more about appreciation of works by authors who have done bad things.
Yeah, it's okay to like flawed stuff; otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to like anything because humans are all exceedingly messy. It's what we do with the liking, how our expression of it can improve the world or fail to do so, that's the big reflection.
Absolutely. If we have to ignore a thing's flaws in order to like it, we're dooming ourselves to disappointment.
But when a thing's causing harm--like legitimizing harmful ideas, or funding harmful companies--then our appreciation of it, flaws and all, stops being the most important part of our choice about how to interact with it.
user15026
12:59 PM
@BESW I am now full of both trepidation and curiosity!
Yeah, well. We know there's better choices than settling and we can make them without needing everybody's approval. And sometimes people see how much fun we're having and want in!
You for Me by Speak the Sky is an in-person epistolary game for two, written on both sides of an index card. You're soldiers in a terrible war, writing letters to one another as the fighting rages on. You know each other so well that as you write, you can hear their voice in your mind.
@ThomasMarkov What's interesting, is if they added another Artificer-esque multiclass contributor you could have 3+3 = 4 or 3+3 = 3, there's a problem with either method of rounding if there were two that rounded up
yeah - the 100 day one occurred as a possibility, but the few seconds between looking at what badges they had and seeing it was the 100-score answer one and working out how that happened were Very Confusing :-D
I think what i'm looking for is a reasonable explanation of the mechanics. Not necessarily "what is the purest raw", but how does this work/what guidance can there be for a table?
@Someone_Evil Most likely. Any sort of enclosed space, but that's generally going to happen within corridors are at entrances to rooms (which I guess in a corridor) :P
Corridors, like dungeons, comes in many shapes, sized, paints, colours, and flavours
@NautArch I'm inclined to say "Sure" were it my table (I think I have, but can't recall), because the alternative is often to have players not able to do something on a turn because of clumbing in some geometry, and that's less fun (for everyone)
@Someone_Evil I've waffled. At times I"ve allowed crossing in, attacking, and taking the OA. BUt then it's over and the rest of the party can do it with impunity.
I don't do a lot of combats in tight spaces with a grid. For that it's usually theater of the mind, and used to involve a little sand flip timer to increase the sense of clausterF and urgency.
which reminds me it's one more thing to implement on foundry.
@GcL Id like to see more detail about how creatures are compelled to move out of the space. The rules seem concerned only with ending your move there, not what happens if two creatures find themselves in the same space at the start of thier turns.
I am seeing some magical items that refer to natural weapons, but I can't find information about what they actually are. I don't remember seeing it in the Player's Handbook, and googling it isn't finding anything. Can anybody tell me what they are, and where the rules for them are found?
If it m...
@ThomasMarkov Sure. You start your turn there. You can't willingly end your turn there. Taking no movement is willingly ending your turn there. I feel like there was a question about that somewhere.
So, I got intrigued by grappling after reading The Grappler's Manual for 5e. It didn't mention if wild shape attacks were considered unarmed strikes, especially in regards to the Tavern Brawler feat's last bullet, which enables a grapple attempt after hitting with an unarmed strike.
It doesn't s...
@Himitsu_no_Yami "On your turn, you can move a distance up to your speed. You can use as much or as little of your speed as you like on your turn, following the rules here." Staying put is moving 0.
Interstingly, The Tabaxi feline agility gives some direction here "Once you use this trait, you can’t use it again until you move 0 feet on one of your turns."
@GcL If they're in constant, undefined motion, doesn't that mean their exact position is undefined? Applying Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to combatants shows that they can be in the same space, albeit breifly :p
Also, the maps aren't projections telling us the surface is actually flat or on a sufficiently large body as to be effectively flat over the scale of the continents.
Also, don't try using GIS systems to make fantasy maps for RPGs... unless that is your table's idea of fun already.
@Himitsu_no_Yami with the caveat they are given very little specific authority simply on the basis of being auhors, it may be quite a learning experience for them.
but i'm sure most of them are already aware their system is nebulous such that it requires entire sites like ours just to explain how any two pieces connect
@GcL to the contrary, there's plenty of RPGs with quite straightforward unambiguous rules. you might notice there's not many rules questions here about fate-core, and that's not simply a function of how frequently people in our community play it.
Clarifying the mechanics of liches and their phylacteries and sufficiently generalizing (to avoid unbounded list answer) how possession of the phylactery of a defeated lich could be used.
Definitely an understandable close, but I think my answer got to the substance of the question and covered at least most permutations of things to do with the phylactery.
@Someone_Evil I think anything you could do with the phylactery can be generalized to "put it in a place where someone wants it to be" or "put it in a place where someone doesnt want it to be"
The question does obviously invites unbounded list answers, but I was trying to sidestep it by including all possibilities in general terms.
D&D: if you mix two arbitrary parts, very likely it's unclear how they interact in part or in whole. many systems: if you mix two arbitrary parts, very likely it's totally clear how they interact in part and in whole. that doesn't require total unambiguity
our site thrives on concrete cases where two things are put in the same space, it's not clear how they interact, but sufficient rules expertise and research and cross-referencing can arrive at a likely correct conclusion.
D&D is popular, but the frequency that such research is required as two things interact is a multiplying force on that popularity that generates the sheer amount of rules questions we get.
you don't see people asking this many rules questions about how two mechanical features of fate or PBTA interact because that is generally pretty clear.
@Himitsu_no_Yami Not my absolute favorite, but there was the staff of the drunkard. Once per long rest, the wielder may invoke the staff to know exactly where the nearest tavern is.
Upon arriving at a tavern, the staff recharges and will indicate a new tavern.
@NautArch I think an archdevil specializing in Warlock pacts and soul contracts would trivialize the distinction between owning a soul and owning the object that soul is inseparably bound to and is the key to the soul's eternal destruction.
@doppelgreener While I don't disagree with you about D&D's ambiguity (whether intentional or not), it's also by the far the most popular TRPG and will therefore have a lot of questions. But now i'm debating for debates sake when I ultimately agree with you.
in its industry position as Babby's First RPG, I think 5e is also getting the lion's share of questions which are trivially resolved by reading the book
answering some questions involves expertise in reading different parts of the book and knowing you need to put them together, but also an awful lot of questions are just "this rule is explained on this page here"
@GcL Well, that I agree with, there are many questions about how to manage Fate that are not suitable for RPG.SE. But they are not questions about "how do these parts even interact in the rules."
How do I cast a spell? with the Fate or PtbA tag is likely to get closed pretty quickly. In D&D it at least has an answer before it gets closed as a dupe.
This is like asking "how do I hack a computer in D&D?": that's not actually in scope. It's not that it's confusing how two parts meet, it simply isn't something with a defined answer within the game, because D&D does not have computers or hacking.
5e has 16k questions. 5e plus "social" has... 32. gm-techniques has 382. Homebrew-review has 336. new-players about 110. group-dynamics 80. problem-players 160. problem-gm 46.
I am not criticising D&D for failing to answer how to hack a computer. I am criticising D&D for frequently making it difficult to understand how well-defined parts of the game interact.
I've done a few vehicle sequences in our campaign so far, where I drop my party into a situation that requires one of them to pilot a vehicle and react to environmental challenges thrown at him as a result of his piloting abilities.
I've used Dex checks to accommodate overcoming this, but I'm cur...
I just know in my subjective and biased experience, a large number of 5e-dnd questions have been "My reading of this rule does not agree with my intuition of reality" where they are reading the rule right and "how do these rules interact" where the answer is kinda just... re-reading the rules OR finding some random far-away other section that happens to clarify
@Medix2 that's definitely a thing and is kind of an issue in D&D 5e's design that it's quiet about
It simultaneously indicates things generally work as they would in reality, while also providing very specific rules that don't correspond to reality at all, and ... that doesn't resolve all that elegantly when those two forces meet.
@doppelgreener Which is punting the rules to the players to implement. So the Fate rules can leave the ambiguities there to be addressed by the authors players of their own game. I don't think Fate and D&D are good to compare and contrast.
Ask someone who plays Masks or Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World how magic works in those games, and they will give you a specific well-defined answer.
Is lumping all PbtA games together a valid aggregation for comparison to D&D, or are you thinking of those specific implementations when talking about PtbA?
"like dnd" seems about right; different D&D editions aren't aiming for the same thing, so I think that might cover how we're then putting Monsterhearts under the same broad category as The Sprawl despite them being for very different play experiences
@HellSaint We use them interchangeably here but in this case what I am saying is that "PBTA" as a concept is not intended to actually be played. Kind of like how the d20 SRD is not, specifically, intended to be played. It's a game engine. It has mechanics, parts, and philosophy that you're meant to utilise it to implement your own specific games. You don't play it, you use it as a designer.
@GcL I am talking about PBTA games, i.e. games running on the PBTA system.
sorry, I have not been communicating that very well.
The ones I've played—Monsterhearts and Masks—are fairly clear in terms of how parts interact and lock together when we put them in the same vicinity as each other.
Fate Core is somewhat of a kit for throwing together your own thing, but can also be run as-is using the parts it offers you. Those parts are pretty clear. The optional add-ons are pretty clear. Once you pick up a specific Fate game, like Masters of Umdaar or Atomic Robo, it's still just using the same parts, and how those interact are pretty clear.
@Medix2 I did scroll up and see I was describing PBTA directly though, so [facepalm] i goofed up there
D&D 5e mostly runs into the issues it has because new content tends to operate on the basis of creating new exceptions rather than operating on common mechanical parts.
@GcL There's specific formulas for creating stunts. I don't think I've yet run into edge cases with them where they somehow conflict, speaking earnestly.
@GcL Those are design-time questions rather than play-time questions. Having ambiguous situations or conflicting mechanics during design is fine—it's something to address and resolve. Having those in a finalised released product is not very fine.
As in, as a designer of a game, I will have tons of rough spots. Hashing those out and ensuring there are answers available for the players is my job.
In terms of Fate at least, that's difficult to do wrong unelss you go out of your way to pick very unusual mechanics that actually need tailoring to, like the weapon/armor dice.
Most of the parts of the system you pick out are just "use this as your method of defining skills" or "use these as your stunt templates" and "use this set of names for your aspects" and ... that's kind of it?
The majority of definition work provided by Masters of Umdaar is that it's picked out a certain set of those, and then provided a bunch of flavorful stunts, and also provided a race/class list (which simply go into a single aspect slot).
Those all click together just fine.
The majority of definition work of Atomic Robo was that it decided you should use modes for defining skills, and then defined four standard modes plus a bunch of additional ones. It also created a Science skill. And then a bunch of stunts. And that's more or less it.
@doppelgreener In that sense, you can think of the DM in D&D as the game designer. The books are guidelines for how to design your game, but ultimately it's your job to define how the non-defined weird interactions between two parts work
It also created a new scene type, called Brainstorming, which is a scene structure utilising existing mechanics so it's pretty clear how anything from elsewhere in the game interacts with it.
For me, what's weirdest about 5e is that folks seem to want a large ruleset. But they also want to be able to rule as they want. And that often just creates a constant confusion as to "are we using the rules, or are we going by our own?"
Most DMs are not even equipped to be game designers. Basically, I expect a game to have answers to all the situations I can account for because I am not an expert at the game. I expect the actual experts—the designers—to have already given me the answers.
D&D is full of unanswered questions, which is a problem, and that we can fix those problems does not mean they were not there.
Other games do not leave me with tons of unanswered questions.
And that includes every single one I just talked about.
You might not be aware — because it is currently empty and you don't see an edit button — there's a space on the main /help page which is editable for diamond moderators. It's the space between the search box and the list of articles. It seems to support full CommonMark, so formatting, links and ...
@NautArch Honestly, part of the reason why I ask about rules in here despite not playing with any of you is that I just like to talk about how mechanics work.
So uh... I was about to say I found something that makes ToA's death curse negligible for some possible characters based on race. And while that's true I also just realized it also prevents the biggest advantage in the entire module from affecting those characters
@HellSaint So following your multiclassing 5e-dnd question, were you planning on asking something like "what are the ramifications of letting half and third casters all round their levels up when accounting for multiclassing?"
i've seen the author specifically describe it as a PBTA game, but from what i understand they've significantly developed on the system to the point it's basically its own thing now (hence Forged in the Dark)
and yes, "it doesn't at all" or "it's not in scope for the system" is a fine answer :D
playing a Redemption Paladin in a D&D module at the moment. party fighter just took a sneak attack for 50 damage from a Rogue-type enemy with a poisoned weapon. While I had Rebuke the Violent available.
that makes up for all those "eh I don't feel like it's worth using this for 8 damage" rounds.
Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with backgrounds from D&D 5e.
It happens a lot that the story you create for your character sometimes is not well aligned with what happens afterwards in-game. If you are a Lvl 1 Warrior you maybe can say you fought in the frontlines of a bloody war, and now are...
A party I'm running for are going up against an aboleth as a late-game "boss" (but not the "final boss"). They are currently Tier 4, level 17 to be precise, so a basic CR 10 aboleth is not going to stand up against them and will not be able to provide the climax I'm hoping for in this part of the...
@Someone_Evil I don't recall what the occupational cut off for one of the labs was... something like 15-20 milligrays and you weren't allowed back in until September or July or whenever you got your new exposure badge. I don't know anyone that ever got that much... and there were some varied backgrounds for sure.
One was a history major from Indiana that became a surgeon. Another was a Jamaican native who originally intended to be an engineer, but ended up as a surgeon.
I would like to break the stereotype that rogues are always super stealthy sneaky types that appear from the shadows and strike and then disappear, for me that makes the flavor of the game not as fun and reduces the amount of decision making in-game. This is the reason I haven't considered playin...
So, what happens if I start a bounty on a question, the bounty expires with no new answers added, and the only answer on the question is both not accepted and has a negative score? Does the 50 rep just vanish into nothingness?
So, in Overlord (the anime, which borrows heavily from D&D 3.5e from what I've heard), prepping for this fight MC just cast 26 spells at least 23 of which were just self buffs. How does that compare to actual 3.5e? (I know that edition has a lot of nonsense that can happen, ie lawnchair wizard, so I'm curious)
In the finale session of the last PF campaign I was in, we spent the first hour or so just allocating buff spells and consumable buffs, before going to fight the villain. And we still lost.
In older editions of D&D, clerics (and other support/buff-focused casters) could effectively out-fighter the fighter, by casting a handful of self-buff spells that scale with their caster level. There was no class balance.
so for that char...his "automatic" buffs (the ones he uses before any serious fight) consist of 9 self buffs...atop that, he has 1-3 weapon enchantment spells (the quantity is situationally dependent), 6 situationally dependent buffs (counting Haste, which he doesn't use that much), and 4-5 AoE buff spells
so, max buffs for him add up to 23 spells :P although 5 of them would be partywide at that point