that there is a distinction, yes, I know and understand... but that's kinda my entire point – area of effect spells were considered attacks in DnD 4e without any issue.
There are probably better use cases to demonstrate the point.
@kviiri Right, they made two separate mechanics - attack rolls and saving throws. One depending on a static modifer of the target and one depending on a static modifier of the agressor.
@kviiri I mean, technically, that's exactly what happened. Besides, 4e is the deviation in the data, not 5e. Every other edition had saves for AOE effects
@ThomasMarkov ah, not sure. But we really like this one. But we really like rolling dice.
although the max DC values get kind of nuts. I usually end up balancing a bit with the monsters save or when they have to create a DC to make it more like theirs.
@kviiri because it makes spells less "all or nothing". If you're fighting a crowd of goblins, and you roll only a single die to determine if your Fireball was successful, then either all of the goblins save, or none of them do, with no variance.
@kviiri Why would I be making a separate "attack" roll against each target? Am I also rolling separate damage as well? It doesn't make sense to do one but not the other. The targets roll because the spell is [this powerful] and they have to defend against it, not the other way around
@RevenantBacon That... doesn't really make any sense to me. You're making separate rolls against each target because you might hit some and miss others.
@MarkWells I"ll generally suggest 1-2 skills i think are relevant (or skill/ability if I think it's special) and then ask if they have a reason to use something else.
If someone makes wheelbarrows with square wheels for all eternity, and someone makes a round wheel, should I be happy switching to square wheels just because "the round one was a deviation"?
I keep bringing up that 4e did it differently, and arrived at an equally consistent system without the need to bother oneself with "wait, who is attacking now" etc.
@RevenantBacon Sadly the world doesn't work in such way.
(and, as a proud representative of "people", I did prefer it)
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica the former is usually 'in between" as a prepositional phrase, which seems to have been shortened into "between" over time in spoken language ... the "in" being implied by the context of the conversation.
I feel like "you roll to hurt someone" is not significantly different from "you roll targeted attacks, and AOE attacks are defended against"
If that's such a significant sticking point for the players, maybe try something a little less mechanically intensive that 5e until they get used to the general flow of how games work
@RevenantBacon Which is... kinda the point I'm making! As in, if the distinction is not that meaningful, why make it meaningful at all? (Also, why deny that sweet rolling of a handful of d20's from the wizard casting the fireball)
@kviiri The defense is not "if you don't like it don't play" the defense is "if you're having trouble with simple mechanics, try going in the kiddie pool before you go in the Olympic pool"
"Having trouble" is not some binary thing that stops one dead in their tracks because the game is hard and advanced. It's those little things that make you need to stop and ponder for a while instead of just doing what you wanted to do, i.e. smash that fireball into the giant's face.
And in this case, the complexity is redundant and doesn't add value.
@RevenantBacon I don't think the comparison is really possible to make, since games where the players always roll tend to be far removed from the genre of DnD and therefore have usually very different kinds of rule complexity
@KorvinStarmast I understand that's the way it works in DnD 5e, the point I was trying to make is that the DnD 4e model reached the same effect without having a separate mechanic for each
@kviiri Thomas Markov's point on load sharing is also a good one. There is more "defender agency" versus an AoE attack than in a pin point attack depending on the defender's class features.
That's a matter of taste, as I see it. This has apparently been about beaten to glue, so perhaps I ought to not make it worse. (PS: Nits came up with a neat "large group saves" tool that we have adapted to my brother's world. Works well enough) Way less rolls.
@KorvinStarmast oh yea x_x if it's of any consolation, my studies have been progressing nicely after the quiet summer
Of all the things in this wold I expected to make studying easier, Crusader Kings 3 would've been in the bottom percentile, next to "sudden apocalypse"
But eyy. I'm looking forward to 13th Age too, I'm part sorry for not having had the time and energy to start it yet but at the same time glad I didn't rush into it while having so much other work and funtime stuff on my plate
The Precalculus Teacher, a CR e^(πi)+2 humanoid, whose special action is breaking brains with unreal roots of polynomials (wisdom save vs boredom, if that fails an intelligence save which if it fails you lose 1d4 points of intelligence and 1d100 points of sanity)
When creating a variant human you get an extra skill to be proficient in. Does that skill have to be from your class skill list, or can it be any skill available to any class? For instance, if I'm playing a variant human barbarian, can I take acrobatics as my extra skill?
@DForck42 zoom and roll20 for one, just zoom for another, and zoom and email for one (though that’s through the library so there are more limitations in place)
we use roll20 for a battlemat and a dice roller. With zoom we can see each other (and this is the group that I’ve been in since middle school, so it’s also socialization time)
Also, my brother is running two via discord/roll20 (discord for notifications and off-day chatter), and is in another that is being done similarly. My roommate is in one that's being run via discord and something else, and another one that's via discord alone.
also we’re too cheap for anything fancy so we change zoom meetings every 40 min, and our off-game stuff is by a group text that’s been called “[school] Gamer’s League and Writer’s Guild” [sic] since 7th grade
even though we’re all graduated and all but one changed schools for High School
@BardicWizard When I began with roll20, we used roll20's native audio and video, in late 2014, but over time something began to get buggy (and we were all using different browsers). Right now, when I sign on with a new game the default audio and video come up; I wonder if they ever fixed the bugs?
@KorvinStarmast I have used all of those in the past. Skype was the worst by far (used to much bandwidth) Vent and TS were OK, but very simplistic. Discord has, so far, been just right.
so, one of my players doesn't have dark vision, so he's walking around in this dark dungeon with a light that's like 10-20ft diameter. he's an artificer and had a fly potion. there was a 30ft ledge they needed to get up (not knowing there was an easy way to get around, lol), so he chugs the potion and flies up to the ledge, landing right next to some demons. he spends the first two rounds trying to anchor the rope and then jumps off the ledge.
the remaning players kill the demons from range and then ascend up into the room. during all of this, the bard was ritual casting animal messenger on a bat cause the demons only sensed through blind sense
True Strike is often considered as a poor or at least very situational cantrip, as is also discussed in the question Why would I ever cast True Strike?. On the other hand, the answers also show that there are indeed situations in which the cantrip can be very useful. I like these scenarios, and I...
@BardicWizard You have to wait until your next turn to get the benefit, that's the problem. Somone did the math and showed how attacking twice, once on each turn, is a better option.
@BardicWizard True Strike lets you use two actions to make a single attack at an advantage next turn. Without true strike, you can use two actions to make two attacks without an advantage, which is usually better.
How do you all feel about Ability Score and Proficiency swapping outlined in Adventure league's next season? https://media.wizards.com/2020/dnd/downloads/AL_PGv10_0.pdf
@Axoren i personally am opposed to it, but only because I feel like it makes it more about the mechanics than the character. I am fully in support of redoing race to be less problematic, but I think this method is not the best way to do it.
Yeah. I like the homebrew race design balancing document that gets passed around anytime people make homebrew races around here, and I wish WOTC would start with something similar and actually start to fix race by balancing.
And then, that’s when we start to talk about what races are stereotyped as and how to change that.
Start with the stigma attached to races such as orcs, especially. Why do orcs have to be brutes and evil?
We want to avoid the situation where every player is always inventing a new race whenever they make a character. Pathfinder 1e had a series of alternate racial traits that were way overboard in this regard. I'd rather we not go the way of making 5e impenetrable by new players.
Races and Subraces could have been the solution to this if the 5e designers could stick with a reasonable rubric and regularly release existing races with different flavors.
I think real change is going to require real mindfulness about why certain things are the way they are, and facing down the problems with bioessentialism rather than just its symptoms in play.
It's very hard to divorce this racial tradition from a game that's built its empire off of a long history of games that didn't change much with time in regard to how the people of its setting are represented.
There's all these stories that were told based on the premises that All Drow are Evil, and All Orcs are Violent. The world they present us is shaped by those rigid notions.
Aye. There's a certain amount of "this is not where our energy should be focused" with trying to fix D&D's bioessentialism when Wizards of Coast's bioessentialism continues largely unchallenged.
Not that I think D&D's problems should be ignored, just... pulling down statues of colonizers doesn't stop colonization, it's not the front of the fight.
That said, have I mentioned The Thousand Cousins recently?
Oh, if we're talking about that, I'll also re-up my mention of Carly M. Ho's The Thousand Cousins as my favorite fantasy setting in terms of handling orcs and other humanoid "races."
Kickstarter: Brinkwood: The Blood of Tyrants by Erik Bernhardt. A castlepunk Forged in the Dark roleplaying game. Mask up. Spill Blood. Drink the Rich.
Kickstarter: Best Left Buried: Deeper by SoulMuppet Publishing. A new version of the rules light fantasy horror roleplaying game, Best Left Buried.
Johnstone Metzger wrote a twitter thread about American detective fiction which is not for "people who only read books and don't also play them."
The BOLT Roll20 Macro Pack by Ben Warren. This is a simple, quick game tool that you can use for your Roll20 games of BOLT. This is to help set up rolls that are Set Back and Pulled Forward, and to display the Auxiliary Die separately.
@BESW Related to this, things like tiktok and instagram stories are giving people new ways to express themselves, I feel like they're a step backwards for accessibility.
then again, half the captioning solutions out there seem to want to take things a bridge too far by trying to automagic the captions into existence, with half-hilarious-mangling-results
@Shalvenay When I see people communicate entirely though the sticker based captions that exist in places like TikTok I can't help but think "You're so close!, you're typing this out already! TikTok just needs to make it literal text!!"
@RedRiderX I'm moving from PDF to epub for publishing my TRPG noodlings, because it's so hard to make PDFs that are genuinely accessible across multiple fronts.
A major reason why publishers like PDFs seems to be that they can expect it to reliably render as intended on most devices and readers (relatively speaking - because the comparison is to format that are widely unpredictable across devices and software).
I nearly ripped my hair out testing Goblin Court on a TTS reader because for some reason Affinity's PDF export process... means TTS readers can't see the last line of text on a page if it touches the bottom margin of the text box?
@BESW I don’t have an easy way of rendering epubs (downloading from the internet and opening them doesn’t open in the right app all the time), which is why I would probably just download the pdf and deal with it
@RedRiderX There's a thing called... Portable Web Publication? that I want to learn more about but haven't sat down to research, mostly I've found long tedious convention lectures on YouTube that assume expertise I don't have.
It looks like it's basically an epub-like that's browser compatible?
@BardicWizard Yeah, that's part of why I think I should include the PDF; even if it's ostensibly for printing, it's still gonna make some peoples' digital lives easier.
Liam Stevens wrote a twitter thread about "how looking at a Te Whare Tapa Whā health model has me thinking of #TTRPG game design slightly differently."
(Note: this was Warhammer's attempted "solution" to the Orc Problem as well, but it was not clearly telegraphed, relied on cultural context that was unavailable to their widening audience, and so rotted on the vine.)
(Troika has a similar attempt to satirize British colonials using exotifying language, but it's too coy and winds up being indistinguishable from straight-faced Orientalism.)
(What I've learned from this is mostly that satire needs to be clearly flagged, and preferably implemented by those harmed by the target of the satirization rather than those who feel superior to them.)
Mhm. cf "just a joke," "just asking questions," and "I don't think I agree with this but."
(I don't agree with that butt either.)
One of the reasons I wrote Goblin Court to be aggressively positive and frame it around goblins living their best lives, is that I don't feel competent to enact a full-throated takedown of the hegemonic elements of the game. So I focused on chipper, unflinching opposition to the misery of the Court.
In almost every game I've seen or heard about, the goblins make some effort to enact the Queen's demand and whether or not they succeed is the context of the denouement.
I have no opinion about whether this is right or wrong, I don't think that's a useful lens to look at the game. I just love seeing how people engage with the spaces I've placed in the text.
Because however you engage with the Queen and Court, the mechanics are about the small joys and cooperation between goblins, and how the Court doesn't understand these things. Those are what I've made sure emerge in play however you fill the empty spaces.
When creating a variant human you get an extra skill to be proficient in. Does that skill have to be from your class skill list, or can it be any skill available to any class? For instance, if I'm playing a variant human barbarian, can I take acrobatics as my extra skill?
