Also divorcing what I wanted from what my character wanted was just mind blowing for me
It can totally be the same thing
But it also doesn't have to be
And the best part it being able to use that mindset to create your own conflict
So you can do cool ideas about what you have to face or what happens to the character or any number of things you wouldn't normally be in control of or have influence over if you assume the same interests as the character at all times
I was playing a mercenary. Joined a group (the game was just a straight 1:1 rip from Skryim, which I had not played but everyone else had).
And there's this guy that asks you to retrieve, I think a gauntlet or something? Anyway, we agree to do it and on my honor as a mercenary and such.
And we find the thing and there are spiders all over the place and the players are like "hey this thing opens a secret passage that we should check out".
But like we agreed to take this thing back so I basically say "no" and it's a whole thing. and we have to have …
Hrm, that's actually a really good example of how video games can reconcile ludonarrative dissonance in ways TRPGs struggle to.
"Oh look a side quest" has a very different tone in a video game where you know that the main story line will be literally paused until you return to it.
But in TRPGs it's more common to assume that the main story is ticking along while you go haring off on whatever distraction you've found. So choosing to explore a random tunnel is a weighty choice that risks characters losing things which are important to them, like reputation and honor.
It's also a matter of presentation: what is the purpose of adding a side quest if it's not intended to be followed up on?
Most of the people I've GMed for, would assume that the presence of a secret passage means there's something I want/need them to find at the end of it.
Like, I've been throwing out a few distractions in the last few sessions because they just spent like 2 months IRL in the same location and I wanted to switch things up a bit for their first excursion out of the city, but it's a little bit comical how, like, I put down one encounter with a Gold Dragon who is doing Wildlife Research, and suddenly the party are dedicating themselves to assisting her. =D
I think the first time that happened to me, a player decided his character was gonna strike up a conversation with a random traveling salesman in a marketplace. I threw out a line about how it gets kinda lonely on the road, and the next time I knew the party was pooling their money to buy the guy a dog.
I have a character that can swap locations with another via teleportation as an action. Another has the equivalent of the Polearm Master feat. If the Teleporter swaps locations with the Polearm Master on the Teleporters' turn, and an enemy is within range, does the Polearm Master get to use his o...
@BESW see, some of my players would suggest burning whatever’s down it or tossing in FOOF (or your favorite chemical that teenagers should not be taught about in high school but the chem teacher knows about anyways and mentioned in class)
@BESW Yeah, I can't stress this enough. Social inertia is also to be considered: the simplicity of running across a side quest and deciding whether or not to follow it is very different in a video game played solo than in an RPG played in a group.
@kviiri That's something I like about a lot of the one-shot systems I've been using more recently. They're only for one story so that's the story you tell. It's the variations in the telling that make it interesting.
Our next to last session ended after we agreed to help a bunch of dwarves clear bullettes from their mine. Yesterday's session started with a recap, plus a GM-provided description of our way to the mine, and we started already there - the GM had no problem just pushing the plot along and starting it where he wanted us to be.
@AncientSwordRage JS has a lot of good parts, yep. Gets in the way way less than Java does, at the cost of being easier to shoot oneself in the foot with and less straightforward in many ways
one of my favourite quirks is that the "less than or equal" and "greater than or equal" are hard coded in the language to be "not greater than" and "not less than" so where x>null === false x <= null === true
@kviiri failing is the best way to learn, so I'm happy with that
@ThomasMarkov Nothing personal, I'm just not a fan of the platform (and am looking forward to not cleaning the dead links up when it gets decommissioned).
@ThomasMarkov Apologies if my comments to that question on the decanter seemed unfriendly. I think the problem was in the querent not being clear at all.
I opened dndbeyond.com on my phone last night and got a banner ad for "unlock character sheet bonuses when you pre-order <whatever>". That does seem to be strange.
@MikeQ If you get a chance, can you send me the text on that UA / Fey spell we talked about last night? I can't find any UA that refers to such ... is it recent?
@NautArch No, I am still hoping for your insights... mike gave me some good inputs, I'll send you my response to him so that you know what a few of the intentions are that he found lacking ...
@NautArch Thanks, I am hoping to also hear from Shal and Nits in due course. The party is not at any risk of activating any of the more powerful features, however, they have already been subjected to one attempt to repossess it (I used a DDB Blood Hunter NPC and some thugs; it was a heck of a fight).
@ThomasMarkov Hmm, good question. Naut, Shal, Nits, Mike and I played together in ToA, as did Trogdor. If you can send me your email address by a secure means (there's a one time messaging thing kviiri and naut used before that I can't remember how to find) that is how we established contact initially. V2 also joined us in ToA.
@KorvinStarmast To be transparent, I definitely couldnt DM. Im trying to get into a shcedule to preach at church every two weeks, so I just dont have time to prepare adequately.
@ThomasMarkov RL hasa priorities, of course! (And I hope the church thing works out well ... we just had a deacon report 'quarantine' due COVID exposure and my wife has put us on a two week haiatus from church) (We sit through Mass on EWTN of a Sunday morning as the alternate ....)
@ThomasMarkov Our Monday group finished up a bit later than we usually do last night; the dawn came early this morning. (Hoory for Coffee!!) Doing Isle of the Abbey from Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
@BardicWizard I think that there is a cantrip that allows you to move 5 cubic feet of earth per casting, so you could undermine the foundation (I think?) and eventually a corner of it tips over/comes crashing down. Not a "boom" but cheap.
@trogdor RPG psychology 101, brought to you by trogdor. (That's great advice, by the way, in my experience)
@ThomasMarkov That's the one I was thinking of. It takes a bunch of casts, but when it comes to sapping and mining, that one's a nice little cantrip ...
@trogdor For sure, and yet, once one does that and discovers how that interaction works, it's almost "why didn't we think of this before?"
@KorvinStarmast I cheesed a skill challenge with it. My DM had a grove with poisonous spores on the ground, and walking through it kicked them up and required periodic CON saves. So I used mold earth to dig a trench through the grove. My DM objected, "wouldnt moving the earth upset the spores?" When I pointed out the excavation is instantaneous, essentially the earth is teleported, he ruled that it wouldnt upset the spores at all.
@ThomasMarkov careful gardener is careful with his soil ... 👍
I am doing a very small happy dance right now That River in Brazil company just advised me that my Ice Wind Dale book has shipped. Preorder savings for the win!
@BardicWizard OK, then I got nuthin since I don't think there's a spell that does that kind of thing. I suggest you check the DMG for the firearms and stuff, and also check Descent into Avernus (if yo have it) for the various demon machines and what they do to structures.
This is because I like making GMs ban things, mostly (the list of spells I can’t cheese anymore includes all of the Wildemount stuff and a good bit of the PHB spells. I’m barred from playing one of my favorite characters, Akra of Syail, because she could deal a whole lot of fire damage a turn and I used it to argue about thermodynamics)
> You also can't use it to create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship, such as jewelry, weapons, glass, or armor, unless you have proficiency with the type of artisan's tools used to craft such objects.
I once said something about liquid nitrogen in character and the rest of the table looked at me like I was crazy...because what I had just said was total nonsense in the setting.
You need to be sure that saying the words "fluorine" and "oxygen" makes more sense than saying "julisnocket" or "truglibo".
@ThomasMarkov oh, the game is called “cyberpunk wizard exploitation” and it’s set in an alternate San Francisco around 2050ish, where magic and science are commonly mixed, well at least in the government’s secret spellcaster slave lab
Also, point of order, I don't intend to encourage or enable disruptive play. If you have a pattern of having things banned by DMs, maybe that's something we should talk about as friends.
Can’t steal it. All 4 of our characters are wanted by the government (mine for being a sorcerer that isn’t enslaved, the artificer for stealing state property, the paladin for domestic terroism, the rogue for terrorism)
The monk's martial arts ability states:
Your practice of Martial Arts gives you mastery of Combat styles that use unarmed strikes and monk Weapons, which are shortswords and any simple Melee Weapons that don't have the Two-Handed or heavy property.
I am specifically asking about a shortsword, w...
@ThomasMarkov we are all also wanted for breaking out of jail, into jail, and then out of jail again. Including ...two counts of murder I think? Edit: 3 counts. Forgot about the wraith
FFS, I wrote a comment reply to @NautArch on that question asking about making True Strike into a lvl 1 spell, got distracted, forgot it was there, and didn't hit "Add Comment" for like 2 hours
Unless someone is taking an option for flavor (in which case the actual usefulness is irrelevant) you should alwys hold things against the highest standrad
Otherwise you can;t usefully gauge how good an option is.
No, you don't compare to the full data set, because you get lots of irrelevant data that brings the average down. You compare against a similar data set that has the same use-case
If you're going to make that case, it needs to be made.
If the use-case is getting advantage, then the comparison is against faerie fire. FF gives more potential advantages, but it's also a save. True Strike just plain works.
Most of them, if not all, are save based, unless you elevate a low-level spell, but all of those scale terribly compared to the damage higher level spell output.
@NautArch Cool, you've found the single use case where the spell is good. Still not worth converting it to a level 1 spell and, in fact, actually makes it even worse than it already is
Sure, dealing damage with an attack roll is a use case, but it's not the use case
The use case is "I want to deal damage"
Which means you compare it to all damage dealing spells, not just the ones with single attack rolls
So I could lob a Fireball for 8d6 damage in an area, with a save that still makes the target take half, and next turn throw out a cantrip for more, or I could cast True Strike this turn and cast... what next turn for more damage that Fireball + Other Cantrip?
Anyways, the reason you always compare to the best is because you can tell if it only slightly falls short, or if it's at a significant disadvantage compared to the best.
@RevenantBacon Insert here my usual rant about DnD 5e deciding blasting your foes with a fireball is not an attack x)
@AncientSwordRage Ooooh I forgot. I've been tutoring new programmers at the university on a hobby basis for almost ten years and it turns out natural languages also have their share of weird comparison logic
There was one exchange student, French in origin, who had lots of off-by-ones in their break conditions until I found out why he'd been misunderstanding some of the material... in French, "inférieur" (literally "lesser [than]") and "supérieur" (literally "greater [than]") correspond to the operators <= and >=, and he had assumed that's the case in English too. A perfectly understandable mistake to make, of course, but I'm a bit weirded out by how that works xD
@kviiri How about English using 'between' to often mean 'between these two entities, but also could be either of them too' (e.g. 'integer between 13 and 15 hours' having three 'legal' answers).
"between <time> and <other time>" is pretty benign though since time is for most purposes continuous enough to not really need to consider the inclusion or exclusion of the endpoints
But it does get used more often with days where one doesn't normally do a thing at night.
Not *quite* maths, but an annoying usage related to time I've seen in local academia: 'permanent state' used to mean 'state at the current moment, changing instant to instant'.
'What is the subject's permanent heart rate?' 'Permanently it is 90bpm, but it was 45 when he was at rest.' Arg.
Eg. if I say I'm doing something between 13 and 14, I don't see what difference does it make if I start the exact moment the clock strikes 13 (y'know, theoretically) or the very next moment after that, and whether I end at exactly 14 or the last moment before that.
Because again, continuous time
For days, it's much harder because a day isn't a moment of time in the same way
The monk's martial arts ability states:
Your practice of Martial Arts gives you mastery of Combat styles that use unarmed strikes and monk Weapons, which are shortswords and any simple Melee Weapons that don't have the Two-Handed or heavy property.
I am specifically asking about a shortsword, w...
