Q: What should I do? A: I have thought about this particular scenario, and while I have not experienced it myself, I believe the best way would be to do "x"
I think that is (while not the best) a perfectly legitimate answer. To go with what you were saying' we always want supported answers, but that doesn't mean that unsupported answers aren't acceptable either, they just need a bit more attention to confirm their validity.
So I've started playing Sekiro again. My first time around, my experience was biased by the Soulsborne series. But now that I'm playing it again, I'm having a lot more... well... "fun" isn't exactly the right word... :P
@Ben Basically yes. Ideally that answer would be more like "I have thought about this scenario, I have not experience it myself, but I have experience these similar situations where things worked out like X. Based on that I feel the best way would be to do Y."
But even as is. It is a legitimate answer to the question.
Oh same. I don't really enjoy the gardening, but it's regular, easily controllable, and helps me mantain some semblance of belief that I have control over things in my life hahaha
user15026
@Ben this is why I like my easy to care for houseplants and the tiny garden pots on my balcony, because like...then I can grow stuff and in hte case of the balcony pots, I can EAT IT TOO.
user15026
and it's something I can do and care for and control.
I think it's a particular bit of it. Either you eat the middle of the leaf but not the outside or the outside but not the middle, I don't remember which. Something it's as well to be sure about before you try it!
@BESW I call games like Cozy Town, Fiasco, A Penny For My Thoughts, and Microscope "storytelling games", because the activity the game cares to moderate is who gets to add to the story and in what order, rather than providing a means to resolve disputes among players in different roles.
I don't think they're off-topic for the site because a lot of the problems running or playing them are also problems in RPGs with story-scoped dispute resolution, and there certainly isn't enough volume for them to stand up a site on their own.
@Glazius Storygames is certainly a category I'd seen before, and does seem to cover the RPG-adjacent games where you are not as, or not at all, focused on actually roleplaying (playing in a role).
In a 5e game, the DM claimed that a sword forged of adamantine would not take any damage from a spell's magical fire. In this instance, it was an animated sword that was attacking us, and therefore a creature, no longer just an object. His rationale was that once forged, only certain kinds of dam...
@nitsua60 yup that is clear now, I think the "of course" is kind of redundant (if you want to change that, then you can also add: In this case[,] ... that stat block[,] ... critical hits[] rather ... of session[,]
Yeah, it's a monster the DM is using, it doesn't have to follow the RAW.
@nitsua60's answer is awesome, though. Some bounty coming his way.
if i remember
"what's good for the goose" is the technique I often employ, but it's usually the other way around when a player wants to do something off-script and powerful, I always make sure it's okay with them that if I approve, it's okay for me to employ against the party.
@Akixkisu Not really. By that definition of RAW, anything is RAW if the DM permits it, but that strips the phrase RAW of all of its utility. The utility of the phrase rules as written is to identify rules that I can go find written down in official source material.
Whether a rule or ruling is RAW can be determined independently of whether or not a particular DM chooses to use it.
@ThomasMarkov what should i do in my current campaign? new people just keep joining and although they are all low level there's like now 7 or 8 players
they would wipe a hatchling off the face of the earth
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I've also seen it used to talk about games like Apocalypse World with story-scoped resolution, where you e.g. roll to do battle and then directly decide how the battle went, rather than making an intermediate series of tactical decisions that would ideally result in the same "how the battle went" tradeoffs.
Apocalypse World is a very story-concerned game, and requires the same willingness and ability to adapt a story to prompts that a storytelling game requires.
But it's not a game where the rules are primarily concerned with who should be telling the story and when; it binds itself up in a lot of game objects, too.
@BaconyRevanant I think I heard about this. give them one big guy to make them feel awesome and give them a bunch of small guys to challenge them. does that sound right?
@Catofdoom2 if you don't feel comfortable DM'ing that many players (8 is a LOT!) you could try splitting them up into two separate groups. Also, remember you can always say "no, you can't join because this campaign is full"
@Catofdoom2 You absolutely should stop adding new people at this point. Most of the time, things in the game are balanced around a 4-6 player party. Don't relegate anyone to plying the role of an enemy though, that will get complicated
As for balancing encounters, since most any pre-made encounter expects 4-6 players, increase the number of enemies by roughly 50% to account for the extra players
Powering up the already-present enemies is really tricky, because the combat will either turn into a slog of beating through a massive HP pool, or you're gonna overdo it and start 1-shotting PCs
Since, for obvious reasons, you can't have 1/2 a dragon, adding a handful of kobold minions should do it OK
ok-ok hear me out. a dragon over-lord that has an army of dragon borns and even dozens of dragons. do you think that could work when they level up a bit?
@Catofdoom2 I don't know if you've tried a session yet with that many players, but it's really hard. I've run games of that size, and things take a while to not go very far, and that's also with experienced players and DM.
So, when I level up my character in PF1, I choose a new class, add its feature, then skills and feats. But what if I want to add Signature Skill Feat as my level 5 feat. It requires 5 skill ranks in any given skill. But the PRD says
When adding new levels of an existing class or adding levels of...
Tables are really rough on screenreaders and other consumers of web accessibility features. Getting them right is an art, one I have practiced a bit professionally, though I remain a novice. The overwhelming majority of options available to web designers to improve accessibility with respect to t...
It seems obvious to me that the Epic Feats are imbalanced - that is to say, that there is a great disparity in the relative power of the feats with comparable requirements - but a lot of this is made hard to quantify because the feats that appear the most broken cannot easily be taken at level 21...
We have community check-ins that represent a snapshot of the time they describe. These snapshots are useful when one contextualises what the metacommunity perceives as pressing incidents, remarkable developments, and concurrent issues of that period.
There is nothing that stops users from voting ...
@Akixkisu It definitely got my sheepy-sense going, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to say "just go talk to your GM, don't go looking for strangers on the internet to make you feel righter." In a nicer way, of course. (cc: @ThomasMarkov)
@NautArch On the other hand, I feel like 7-10 is a table-size that if you can push through, you get to marvelous new lands. The HS club will occasionally run a 12- or 15-person table with a GM and asst. GM, and they have a lot of fun.
@nitsua60 yes GM plus an assistant really helps a big table move.
For the original question, though, you can do it in 5e if the Players all get on board and make decisions in combat NOW when it is their turn. You have six seconds, give me a decision. I've only had that work out twice, though, and some players simply will not get off of the "oh, wait, it's my turn, let me see" bus. (I have to m ajor offenders in the game I DM in my brother's world). My "OK, you dodge, next!" works, usually, to get my point across.
But out of combat, with 8 players, is a whole different set of balls to juggle.
Without player buy-0in on being decisive, it's easy to lose focus.
I have used that "make a decision or you dodge" in smaller groups as well ...
What are some of the best alternatives to HP? My group is currently think-tanking other ways to handle combat other than HP. We've generalized combat to the following objectives: Opposition is unable/unwilling to continue fighting, Party does not need/want to continue fighting, and for the third objective, we can't really word it properly, but something like "stakes are no longer at stake" is the closest we got.
What we're lacking is a measure. How do we decide when the opposition is done? How do we decide when things are safe?
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica A numeric representation of ability to fight. When it's gone, you can't fight. When it's there, you can still fight. When you have more, things that take HP are less likely to make you unable to fight. When you have less, things that take HP are more likely to make you unable to fight.
Because I think at least some systems describe HP as including not just the degree of wounds/lack-thereof, but also willingness to fight, luck, and other stuff.
I know how bad of a measure HP is of anything that really makes sense, but as a measure of "can still fight", that's what it's best at.
An open problem is having HP make sense. One thing we've experimented with was something like a Wounds system. Your body gives up once you've taken enough Wounds of enough magnitude. However, we later saw that we could convert these to equivalent amounts of HP.
I understand the counter-question can be an unsatisfactory reply. But depending on how broad the definition of 'HP' is, and on how much abstraction your system has, it might be borderline unavoidable without making things less fun / make less sense / other issues.
The one benefit of the Wounds system was that things like Level 1 Wounds would equate to less and less HP-equivalents as they were applied to targets of higher and higher defense. It naturally made a scaling defense system with simple rules.
However, it was almost impossible to translate to non-in-person games because we used wedges on a circle to indicate the effect of a wound.
Contrast GURPS HP, WoD/ST Health Boxes, Age of Aquarius Wound Pyramid, AD&D HP (whatever edition), and FATE Stress and Consequences. To some eyes they are all just HP. Others insist how a given system's thing is Definitely Not HP.
From what I remember about Fate, challenges can be quantified as a list of obstacle aspects, and the challenge is resolved when all (or most?) obstacles are resolved. Particularly difficult obstacles may have multiple checkboxes (like HP), but most have 1 each.
@ThomasMarkov We did come to that conclusion, which is the problem. However, in the implementation, a Level 1 Wound meant a different amount of HP to different people.
For some defenders, a Level 1 wound would be Fatal on its own. For others, it would deal 33.33%
And it wasn't just that one defender has 3x the HP
@MikeQ So things like "To win this fight, you must [ ] Cut chain to Chandelier. [ ] Free the Caged Animals." ?
Dunno about the specifics of what you're describing, but "the animals are caged" might be an obstacle that needs to be resolved, whereas "the chandelier can be cut" might just be another aspect in the scene.
I would definitely say that for FAT at least, stress boxes are NOT equivalent to D&D HP, in most any sense. If you use up all your D&D HP, then you begin to die. If you mark off all your FATE stress boxes, you get Story Consequencesâ„¢, which often don't involve you dying
Some other differences: You can mark off a stress box for things other than physical damage
Of course different systems will be not mutually identical. But it's more a matter of what is the general concept of 'HPness' that makes a given subsystem described as 'HP (possibly by another name)' across various systems.
In WOD, there are different types of wounds; bashing, lethal, and aggravated damage. Different types of creatures were affected differently by these types of wounds.
Since it's too hard without using scripts or crafted tools to use, I don't mind sharing the wounds system as it was conceived. (Defense - Attack) -> Wound Rank n. The wedge associated with n covers 1/(3+(n choose 2)) of a circle if it's 1 or more. Rank 0 covers half and negatives are all full-circles. Healing was expected to be wedge-based: heal the most recent wound, heal your largest wound, transfer one wound to target, etc.
E.g. some people insist that a wound model subsystem is 'HP' is only when you have zero bad effects until you lose the last one. And yet GURPS has a thing called HP and when you are low you suffer problems already.
well, the problem isn't so much with the encounter design so much as it is with scheduling. we got through half of the content in the first session (they wanted to do more shopping than i expected) and we've missed the last four weeks because of various scheduling issues
people not wanting to play because of heavy workloads, people straight-up forgetting that we agreed on a weekly session, etc.
What we're currently doing is getting a couple of players to run one-shots while a main game is on pause because some critical players aren't available.
We're one session from ending that campaign.
But we really don't want to end it without everyone.
As a result, on those days when a primary game is cancelled, someone steps up and there's something to do for everyone else
@nitsua60 Mine was through virtual and a pure dungeon crawl, but it was absolutely fun. Probably more fun more since I don't need to wait for usually 10+ turns before it was me again :P
user15026
9:47 PM
@BESW My grandma always said that the only reason we thought she was good at plants is because we never saw the ones that didn't make it
It's also kind of relevant to my history of playing RPGs. Some of my best characters are simply the ones that lived long enough to go through their arcs. The ones that died become footnotes even though they had potential. People used to think I killed my characters off because I didn't like them, but with chat-logs as my witness, I always tried damn hard to survive.
There was one game I was in where I was the only player whose characters died and it happened with such astounding regularity.
My Barbarian failed a number of saves in sequence and was Coup de Grace'd by a pack of ghouls after throwing the wizard to safety. My Cleric of Erastil cast Shield Other on our Sorcerer before we entered a villains lair and we were both hit by Fireball, so I took 1.5x damage and immediately went under (saved the Sorcerer's life). My Fighter ran in to save the Rogue and the Sorcerer from a Wall of Fire and managed to save them both (they would have died otherwise) but was slain by cultists.
My Hospitaler Paladin was seen as my best character because he lived to End Game through astronomical amounts of self-healing and damage reduction.
Could probably have a session based around NPCs making logical fallacies pretty easily. Survivor bias is a simple one: "Town praises local heroes for returning alive from a skirmish against enemies, makes them the defensive force for the town. They survived because they ran, not because they fought. Party needs to step in and stop an oncoming assault." False cause: "Party goes into Temple to investigate. Earthquake happens. Party has to regain the trust of town and convince them it wasn't them."
Slippery slope would be a fun one because you could include an actual slope that is slippery.
@Axoren generally the style is there is something to solve and barter for - revamps the combat encounters to either puzzle solving or social rp, depending on what you go dor.
If you still want combat encounters without revamping them, then you can also barter... I think I have described it somewhere before.
Offer bartering resources to solve encounters.
I once had an RP-table that wanted to try how a "real" dungeon feels like so I prepared a complicated dungeon with multiple complex traps, puzzles and several creature-encounters.
The whole dungeon was an attrition-based set-up of multiple dungeon...
This is just one style of resource bartering, you can pretty much adjust it as convenient.
Though you don't have to resource barter. You can also favour barter etc.
Bubblegumshoe uses "cool" instead of HP; it's a currency that you spend to achieve a lot of different things, and the action which wipes it out fastest is earnest conflict.
Similar but different: Endurance. We once had a fight that went on for 10 rounds, for the players that lasted 3 hours, for the PCs it lasted a minute. You could give individual players a stat, or you could just have an overall stat for "combat", limiting the actual fight overall. If a fight lasts more than "x" rounds, the fight ends, and another means of resolution needs to be undertaken.
My group has also managed to passively avoid combat for three sessions now, simply through rp.
That is to say, it wasn't exactly an active choice, but the RP led to the avoidance of the combat; we convinced the DM that the NPCs beleived we didn't want to fight.
A big challenge with HP is that it encourages a default of "to exhaustion" rather than "to satisfaction." I'm still looking for a combat system that effectively supports goal-oriented conflicts.
I have a party of 8 players and more continue to join (against my wishes). How would you recommend challenging low-level (4 or lower) players that are in a large group? How do I give everyone a chance to be in the spotlight without rushing through or ruining some stories?
The trivial answer, of course, would be "Wish", but perhaps there is something more specific that I overlooked.
I'm asking for a plot-device in my homebrew campaign. The idea is that the big baddy (a necromancer) brought a legendary character from history back to life to do his bidding. All the n...
@HotRPGQuestions There was a template for this in 3.5, except the creature retained its free will so you'd need to use another effect to enslave it.
Necropolitan, I think it was called. Instead of a traditional level adjustment, the template made the target lose a character level to balance out the 'benefits' of being undead.
But any free-will undead could be dominated by an evil cleric of sufficient power, easy peasy.
i wonder if the eggshell or membrane of chicken eggs are one of the things that humans selected for in domestication. i've recently tried cooking with quail and duck eggs and it's a lot more difficult to crack those eggs than the domestic chicken
like the membrane seems much tougher on quail eggs and duck eggshells don't seem to break as easily