TRPG General Chat

Hot RPG Questions

00:18

3

Q: Is there a combined Wizard and Sorcerer in 3.5?

Is there a cross wizard and sorcerer type class or a way of achieving the following. Some of the spells selection are limited like a sorcerer and other slots can be prepared like wizard?

BESW

4

Q: Is the Ultimate Magus the only arcane dual-progression class?

I am looking for a class to continue the prepared/spontaneous progression that the Ultimate Magus (Complete Mage variant, p. 77) has. Everything but 3rd-party publications is valid. Is there something similar to the Ultimate Magus Prestige Class out there?

dnd-3.5e prestige-class

MikeQ

@BESW So it's less of the actual lore of what happened, and moreso about how & why locals create legends about aspects of their everyday lives?

BESW

00:34

In part, yeah.

I don't think you're gonna be able to boil it down to a pithy statement. I'm thinking about how aesthetic, identity, history, story, and community all meld into and inform and reinforce each other to make each place and the people who live there unique and distinct.

And how as a GM there are a lot of different hooks I can use to find a way into that distinctiveness, and to communicate it to players.

It's not just about making a tableau or writing some lore, it's representing and integrating complexity across many channels.

And often I'm not gonna have all of this pre-made; I'm a big fan of the okapi butt style of worldbuilding. But thinking about the ways that complexity and distinctiveness manifest, gives me a lot more kinds of okapi butts to wave at the players.

And when the players go tracking down a particular okapi I've got a firmer grasp on how to flesh it out.

To go back to Charleston Green, I said "two and a half" stories because there's two versions where the physical events are identical but the motivations are different: in both, the US government provided paint to the residents of Charleston to help with repairing the damage done to the city in the Civil War; it was the cheapest paint available which meant it was black, and the residents mixed it with other colors before using it to create the deep dark Charleston Green.

But in one version of this account, they mixed the paints to make it last longer: this is a frugal, practical account of Charleston identity. And in another version they mixed the paints because they didn't want to live in drab colorless homes; this represents Charleston identity as valuing beauty and not being content with the minimums given to them by others.

And either way, it's a story about how local agency in the Civil War reconstruction created a visual identity which is still preserved and valued a century and a half later.

MikeQ

00:54

Ah ok, so it's related to a community's values and identity. The okapi butt metaphor lost me a bit... Do you have any examples from play?

BESW

And it suggests a distinctly different kind of complexity compared to, say, New York's ubiquitous scaffolding (which has the story of NYC being a place that's constantly rebuilding itself, but the history of it is a well-intentioned but poorly written safety law which makes the scaffolding cheaper than actually doing construction work).

Most people who see Charleston Green just notice that the city has a unique and pleasant color choice tying together many disparate parts into a more cohesive whole. In worldbuilding that'd be the okapi butt; a flash of something which mostly just suggests at real complexity and identity to the city, but doesn't actually show it

Apr 16, 2018 at 9:51, by BESW

(For reference: "Worldbuilding and the Okapi's Butt," by Ursula Vernon.)

> The important thing is that the reader get a sense of vast, uncanny history and weird things happening just out of sight. You don’t want to drag the world in and put it on the dissecting table—that way lies Silmarillion-esque prologues—you just want them to catch a glimpse of it, like an okapi’s butt in the rainforest, and go “Whoa. There’s a really big animal over there, isn’t there?” while it glides away into the shadows.
It’s a form of writer’s sleight-of-hand. It’s making it look like of course you know all about this, and the reason you’re not going into it is because it’s not really…

Charleston Green gives me a new kind of okapi butt to put on a stick, and the stories about it give me new tools for thinking about how to build the rest of the okapi as needed.

Phoenices

02:21

The thing is, sometimes I have to also make the okapi's hind legs, because some fraction of the time players investigate and I don't have more than an okapi butt on a stick. And then, 3/5 or 4/5 of the time, all the players see is an okapi butt, and 2/5 or 1/5 of the time the okapi's face is mildly misshapen, as if it were created at the last moment. I'm told that the true way to handle this is by getting better at improvisation; I am, but it's slow.

BESW

03:01

While the radio narrator and the novelist can rely on the audience's imagination to fill in the implied spaces, the GM can explicitly recruit the table's contributions for setting the scene and fleshing out the world. This is a technique that first clicked for me in the GM advice of Lady Blackbird, which frames it as "listen and ask questions, don't plan."

@Phoenices This is where TRPGs divert from video games and films dramatically, even more than from books and theater: unlike the author or dev team, the GM is not reliant on their own contributions to create the world. The "theatre of the mind" is a term imported from radio but it still fails to capture the true power of the TRPG table in reifying the imagined.

I love to flash an okapi butt and then ask my friends what they saw.

A familiar comparison might be the "expanded universe" material of sprawling franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, or Doctor Who, where hundreds or thousands of authors over multiple generations have taken even the tiniest sliver of a butt on a stick and built it out into novels, games, comic books, audio plays, and spinoff shows. We can do that at the table, in real time.

The last example is an example of an okapi butt: "these people are far from home" is the butt on a stick, and then I recruit my friends to help me figure out what the rest of the animal looks like by asking "is this normal?"

Hot RPG Questions

03:40

5

Q: What mechanics allow you to target an Unseen Servant?

It appears that the spell unseen servant creates a shapeless force that is neither an object nor a creature. Because it does not fall into either of those categories, what mechanical options are there that can target and damage the unseen servant?

dnd-5e spells targeting

Phoenices

04:18

Sorry, wanted to respond earlier, but it's Spring Fridge Cleaning and I had ten containers to clean out. One had an entire tablespoon of mold. Eurgh, the smells.

Anyway, yeah, asking the table about stuff is something I want to incorporate at some point; I'm currently reasonably uncomfortable with it, but I have some ideas to get better at it.

BESW

There are some systems which gamify it, that can help--especially if there's trust issues at the table, a game like Microscope can set some boundaries.

Also, something that made Lady Blackbird's advice especially helpful is the examples of leading questions. Instead of "what happens?" it's "'[thing] is true; tell me more."

That's where the okapi butt comes in, it's the [thing].

Bardic Wizard

06:10

@BESW huh, like the nooses painted all over Placerville and its nickname of hangtown?

BESW

That's a grim example, but yes.

Hot RPG Questions

9

Q: How can I stop forgetting to use my abilities?

I'm playing a D&D 5e character in Curse of Strahd who's currently an Arcane Trickster 7 / Divination Wizard 2. Today I died, and it wasn't until 3 or 4 turns later that I realized I could have used Uncanny Dodge to halve the damage from the last blow I'd taken while conscious and kept myself from...

dnd-5e player-techniques

Bardic Wizard

@BESW Yeah but it’s the thing I could most easily picture and explain — there’s like four or five things that hold true for individual neighborhoods but very few things in my area actually work like that if they’re not planned (probably cause the west coast has a lot of planned developments, and I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t count “all the natomas houses have the same four paint shades because the same builder made all of them”)

BESW

Sometimes that kind of thing is deliberate, as a choice to show solidarity/allegiance or establish branding.

Bardic Wizard

@BESW huh, now that I think of it yeah

BESW

06:17

Other times it's practical, like the distinctive stepped roofs in Bermuda which collect rainwater for household use or the scaffolding protecting NYC pedestrians from falling debris because the fines for the scaffolding are cheaper than making the buildings safer; or just a coincidence of geography and convenience like the white-and-blue color scheme associated with Mediterranean homes or the white-and-red of Spanish colony homes.

Or most often, like with the last example, some of all of the above.

And at some point, something that was practical or coincidental may become familiar enough to become a kind of identity-assertion all on its own. Then it's deliberated perpetuated long after its original cause; this is probably what happened with Charleston Green.

@BardicWizard Honestly yes, "this whole area paints its houses in a distinctive limited color set" is a great example of coincidental locality.

Around here, you can tell that a house was built within a roughly two-decade span because they all used the same concrete mold shape for their balcony and stair bannister uprights.

Bardic Wizard

@BESW I’ve lived in places like that cause there’s a single builder for all of the development and it never seems like an identity, but it is a thing to notice that you get used to after a while — differentiating houses by relative location rather than color or size mostly

BESW

There's even a song with a line about housing developments like that:

> There's a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same

AncientSwordRage

10:32

> LISTEN AND ASK QUESTIONS, DON'T PLAN
When you're the GM, don't try to "direct" the action or plan out
what will happen. Instead, ask questions—lots and lots and
make them pointed toward the things you're interested in. Like,
Cyrus gives Naomi an order within earshot of Lady Blackbird,
but the Lady's player doesn't register it right away. Naomi goes
to follow the order. So I ask Lady Blackbird's player, "How do
you react when the Captain orders your bodyguard around? Is
that okay with you*' And then, when it's totally not okay," What

Bristol, UK has these. I forget the story...

AncientSwordRage

10:47

I asked on history se. Let's see if they like the Q

BESW

11:21

@AncientSwordRage Thank you!

AncientSwordRage

@BESW any time ☺️

I use ocr.space but if you need it, ping me and I'll help

BESW

Ah I was about to ask what you were using, because that text was the first time it's been obvious you're not typing it out by hand.

Paul Czege wrote a twitter thread reviewing Momatoes' The Magus.

Ballad of Conjurers: An Adventure Opera TTRPG by Nathan Blades. Inspired by '00s JRPG melodrama, speed-build a world and summon powerful Elementals!

Trapped In A Cabin With Lord Byron by Oliver Darkshire. You are on vacation with Lord Byron in his holiday home, but the weather has trapped you and your friends inside the house. Only the strong will survive.

"InThe News - Feat. Dino Park, Tattoo, Micro circuits, Night, Pass the Spring and more"

@BardicWizard LPHSrescue, vintage quilt stuff edition.

r/momatoes "A small Reddit nook for discussing and sharing news, content, play experiences and more of games by momatoes—including ARC, The Magus, Capybara Capers, Imaginarium and more."

AncientSwordRage

11:42

@BESW normally I'd format it but this time I did..n't

NautArch

13:20

@BESW And the original source for the idea is right by @BardicWizard.

NautArch

13:40

The hidden rules question is starting to look potentially problematic to me. Answerer are coming in with their own definitions. @GcL was right in their comment about the question needing OP's definition in order for us to accurately answer.

BESW

Has anybody invoked the "old rules as lingua franca" OSR principle yet?

Because I suspect a not-insignificant amount of "no hidden rules" is in conversation with the OSR's use of early D&D as an understood reference point and its treatment of the game as a puzzle to be solved.

NautArch

14:00

I don't think someone has gotten to that point...yet.

But not only is "hidden rules" not defined, but the comparison is 5e vs...*everything else*.

NautArch

14:22

I'm also not a fan of the recent answers way overusing/overanalyzing the tables in the books and ascribing waaaayyy too much to their general usefulness and connectedness to the other parts of the rules.

BESW

Given that we've identified parts of the rules/tables interface that show signs of poorly edited copy-pasting from 3e...

NautArch

exactly

We all complain about how poorly the rules are written, but they are so well integrated we can attempt to reverse engineer one table from another.

But it's pretty established that the devs were not thinking that deeply.

BESW

I don't expect these texts to be perfectly edited and composited, but I do expect people to read the texts with a level of scrutiny proportional to the evident level of care, revision, and research which went into them.

NautArch

15:12

Whoa there. Let's not get carried away with approaching rules text skeptically.

TheDragonOfFlame

16:33

@NautArch I feel like knowing dice statistics before homebrewing a mechanic using dice is a reasonable question

NautArch

@TheDragonOfFlame Yeah, that's why I was said it's still helpful for you.

I just don't think it's as helpful as the feat you're trying to create and how it would work with that feat.

But it's a decent initial guidance (if you can get a good answer.)

At the end of the day, it's not statistics that matter, but gameplay.

TheDragonOfFlame

I’m not entirely sure why the question got downvoted so much

NautArch

We shall never know what evil lurks in the heart of stackizens.

I'd just take the learning, work on your homebrew, and then post the question. THat'll likely work out much better.

As an aside, I made a magic item that gave a rogue at my table a crossbow that could repeat as a bonus action. But if successful, the damage is a percentile roll with a blowback effect if it hits.

Someone_Evil

@TheDragonOfFlame The fact that it's a consideration you're making in relation to homebrew would probably be a good thing to mention

As to downvotes, showing your own attempts (eg. where you got stuck, why you're doubting them) would also be good additions

NautArch

The more I think about it, the more similar GWM is with the -5 being a close functional equivalent to disadvantage @TheDragonOfFlame.

I'd definitely take a gander at those answers.

Akixkisu

16:56

@NautArch the caveat being that they stack

Hot RPG Questions

23:26

4

Q: Is it mathematically better to roll one attack or two with disadvantage?

Rolling one attack with advantage is worse than rolling two normal attacks (because we have two attack rolls either way, but only one vs two chances of dealing dmaage). However, what of the inverse situation? Is it better to roll two attacks with disadvantage, or one normal attack? Since this wil...

dnd-5e attack statistics advantage-and-disadvantage

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