I've always thought encounter = single combat or skill challenge unit; session = unit of continuous play for a group (varies by group); adventure = unit of narrative catharsis.
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I am wondering if it would be excessive to split up questions requesting RAW answers and actual experience answers. One example would be if I took this question and reworded another question modeled after it looking for essentially the same thing except instead of the ...
@somori I really like the philosophies behind D&D Next... but I can't see Wizards of the "our developers are on crack and our quality control is mythical" Coast making that kind of comprehensively modular system be much more than playable at best.
Reminds me of recent computer OS design choices: trying to meet the whims of everyone instead of appealing to a small enough demographic that you actually can do what they need.
@somori I'm mostly just amused that both Apple and MS are making the exact same bad move simultaneously, by releasing desktop OSes that mimic their mobile OSes.
But, um. I'm the guy who gets to teach 400 Superior Court employees, from security guards to judges, how to use MS Word because the new system requires it, when they were all perfectly happy using Word Perfect. I have seen their pain.
@BESW WordPerfect still exists? I thought that died around 1995... No wonder you're struggling since the WordPerfect User Theft layer was written out years ago. Apps are different though.
...I just think they don't have the quality control to make it work, and the more they succeed at it, the more it'll shatter the RPG community more than it already is.
[shrug] to continue the imperfect OS metaphor, Apple and MS co-existed for a long time by each catering to a broad but generally non-overlapping niche.
Apple started out with the under-the-hood market, and MS rose up to provide for the casual user. As MS became more under-the-hood friendly, Apple fell and then rose again with the iMac to provide for the casual user that MS had started to take for granted.
Now they're both trying to corner all the market, and in the process failing to really meet the needs of any demographic except the most middle-of-the-road user who is proficient but doesn't need a professional system.
There are also parallels in the computer/video game market with WoW and Halo respectively capturing previously untapped demographics.
@somori If so, it's not a death, just a collapse until someone else rises to the top.
(I thought The Death Gate Cycle was a good example of a series that managed to Have a Philosophical Point without sacrificing the story or characters to it.)
@somori Alas, poor Golden Compass. You deserved so much better than the sequels you got.
@somori I set my first D&D campaign in a rough copy of the World of Air.
...when they found out the floating islands were suspended by flammable gasses, it was a matter of minutes before the island we were on exploded and we fell for two straight sessions.
We took out a dragon and three flying elven warships on the way down. The cleric survived by banishing himself right out of the campaign and back to his home dimension.
The monk and the ranger turned themselves into a crude hang glider fashioned from bedrolls.
....The fighter gave up and just fell like a stone.
Speaking of falling, I'd like to share a boss fight mechanic I ran yesterday. The party really enjoyed it, and given that I've seen some concerns 4e fights are dull...
The party came in through a hole in the ceiling, to a featureless cubical room about 35 feet in each dimension (I would've done 50, but I couldn't fit that on my map).
And made sure the party understood how the net of a cube worked, where the floor was, which sides were walls, and which was the ceiling they'd come out of.
The boss had flight and (hover) and enough reach to hover in the middle of the cube and reach all corners of it.
The party was forcibly slid (no damage; it turned slow enough they just slid along the sides instead of falling) to the nearest edge square on the new floor, and had to make medium-level Acrobatics or Athletics checks to avoid falling prone.
@somori Yes.
I also gave the boss an immediate reaction (recharged by turning the room again) that was triggered by a PC moving onto a new square of whatever was the floor at the time. Close burst 1, targets reflex, all creatures in burst. Effect: the floor in the burst falls away revealing a ten-foot pit. Hit: the creature falls into the pit. Miss: the creature is slid to a square adjacent to the burst of its choice.
I drew the pits on the map as they appeared, because it was possible to use a pit to stop your forced slide when the room shifted, winding up in what was suddenly a hole in the wall.
The whole thing (together with giving the boss +2d6 damage vs prone targets) gave the strong impression that the boss was in total control of his environment and merely toyed with the players.
@somori That happened! I rolled so the floor became ceiling in a single move and the guy who hadn't climbed out of the pit yet was forcibly dumped out.
The gimmick was a little confusing at first, but my players loved it. Not least, I imagine, because they're already fascinated by 4e's physics-bending movement rules.
(Technically, from an in-game perspective, they were in a rolling sphere rather than a cube that turned from one side to the next.)
reworked the wealth/single item question. @Ernir sorry for lifting the accept answer, hoping keeping it 'not answered' will generate more attention, plus as it stands now it's not as specific for RAW
@LitheOhm my rule of thumb has been 1/4 or 1/3, depending on the power level of my campaign. I actually find that 1/4 is better because it encourages more well-rounded item choices.
@somori It's got goblins dressing each other up as halflings to train a bear to kidnap halflings so they can have halfling stew. The inevitable goblin casualties are an acceptable part of the training process.
All you need to do is get the moisture in the kernel hot enough to vaporise so it turns to steam, expands and makes the kernel explode so it's inside-out.
You can skewer an ear of popcorn and pop it over a fire.
one thing I hate about being wilder. Not knowing which powers to take to make myself effective. I have 1 Power of up to 5th level off the Psion/Wilder List and one Expanded Knowlege Feat so Any 4th or lower level power off any Psionic class list.
Are MUDs, MUSHes, and similar text-based roleplay platforms that implement RPG systems in an mostly or entirely automated way on-topic?
Case in point: Has Shadowrun 4 been implemented as a MUD or similiar? This question quickly generated close votes and it seems like there's a contentious or pot...
I reported this answer earlier as not an answer. It states something relevant to the question, but isn't an answer to the question.
My report was declined with the reason: "declined - flags should not be used to indicate technical inaccuracies, or an altogether wrong answer"
I was not reporting a technical inaccuracy, or a wrong answer! The answer is fine, it is technically correct and everything, I didn't even downvote it!
And, since it was apparently misread, my comment was "This is true"
Followed by a mention of the errata the user was thinking of, since they couldn't remember which it was at the time.
So I was verifying the answer was actually correct, and stating the source. But it's still not an answer. The question is "Is teleporting considered forced movement?". The first answer responded "No, forced movement is only pull/push/slide." The second answer was "You get a saving throw against teleportation into dangerous terrain" - that's not an answer to whether it's forced movement, nor relevant to the broader context. But it is relevant enough to be a comment.
@JonathanHobbs I'm rather new; what result does one expect to get from flagging an answer?
[Due diligence: All I've found in the FAQ is that "abusive, extremely off-topic, inappropriate," or "bad things" can flagged and it results in removal. At best that answer needs to be edited with a cited quote of the relevant material (it does say "not forced movement") so I'm thinking flagging has some application I don't know about yet.]
@BESW Clicking "flag" on a question will present you with the flag options, which describe all the circumstances for which you might flag a post.
For an answer, the flag options are that it's spam (advertising bots do surface here on rare occasions) or that it's "not welcome in our community" (the content is offensive, abusive or hate speech - this option does get used sometimes)
Or that it needs moderator attention. The reasons in there are "other", or... that it is not an answer. The description for the not an answer report reason is this: "This was posted as an answer, but it does not attempt to answer the question. It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether."
It is common that a new user will answer a question with a piece of information that is in all ways relevant and helpful to the question, but isn't actually an answer in any way. Hence the "It should possibly be (...) a comment."
Users with enough rep tend to leave those responses as comments. New users don't see the option to add comments, and thus just respond as if this place is a forum.
@JonathanHobbs Ah, thanks for the clarification. Doesn't the linked answer say "It's not forced movement" as its opening line though? Could do with a citation and maybe a block quote from the source, but it looks answery to me.
I suppose. But that answer was already given, with all necessary citation, and all but four words of that answer should be a comment. The user's not so much answering the question as mentioning something off-hand that's already been stated, then offering some useful information (which should be in a comment)
Yeah I think you have seen what I didn't see. I previously interpreted that as just putting aside the topic in question in order to give a response with some relevant information, the purpose of that answer just being to inform the asker about the will save.
It might count as an answer by a narrow stretch, though one that doesn't cite anything nor say anything the previous answer hasn't already said.
I suppose, but I was just a bit annoyed because they had completely misunderstood my previous report - thinking I was reporting it for being incorrect when I in fact found it very helpful and correct!
I won't mind if they decline me now. I guess they might since it does answer the question, though it isn't much of an answer. It would be better off just as a comment providing good information, instead of an answer that's probably going to get downvoted a bit more.
@JonathanHobbs Hm. That's a puzzler; if the guy had 13 more rep I'd say someone should leave him a comment graciously explaining the whole "should be a comment" thing, but that seems cruel if he can't do anything about it.
Yeah, he can't, and generally the response for someone clearly trying to leave a comment (or saying "I can't leave comments yet so I'll just post this as an answer") is that they can't leave comments yet, and there's a reason for that, so they should wait until they can.
@BESW Though in this sort of case, it's short enough to fit as a comment, so the mods have the option of converting it into a comment on the main question.
@JonathanHobbs I see that. Sad, though, as he has a good comment to leave and he's being downvoted for it so he's even further from being able to leave it.
@BESW Yeah but he has a really good answer elsewhere that has already completely negated his downvotes, and he'll probably reach 50 rep soon and be able to leave comments. :)
@JonathanHobbs I do overall think this system works very well. Part of the reason I joined rpg.se was to be part of this amazing example of reward and punishment as the twin pillars of justice and civilization.
Yeah, it does work very well. It works especially well on this site - the mods and users are courteous beyond what I've seen on other SE sites, and always take time to explain things to the users.
@JonathanHobbs I was in love when I saw a meta post about how to make new users with bad questions/answers still feel good about joining when you tell them they aren't doing it right.
Honestly though, I find the FAQ low on crunch--or maybe just hard for me to find the crunch I'm looking for.
(Lots of stuff about what to ask, how to ask, how to behave, but not a lot up front about the system itself. I feel like there's a RAW/RAI moderator disagreement in the background or something.)
@BESW Yes there is a lot of absence of crunch, mainly because all but the first section of the FAQ is generic. This site gets to pick how its first section reads, but all the other sections are the same across every Stack Exchange site. Every site does things a little bit differently, so there isn't much generic crunch it could express without contradicting this site or that one.
@Cat Nothing wrong about that. I've been enjoying watching the questions from someone new to 4e come up the last few days and seeing how it makes us go back to the books to make sure that's a 'real' rule and not a house rule or an assumption.
I've messed around with time travel a little, but mostly only forward-moving so causality isn't much of a problem.
Cthulhu mythos is a collection of books/games/films/etc about Terrible Unfathomable Beings from Beyond the Stars whose Very Existence is Anathema to Mankind and Knowledge of Them Will Drive You Mad.
@Cat I hear ya. I've gone through something like 15 players in three years due to schedule changes and leaving island and so forth. After March I'll be down to one.
I look forward to your FATE questions, if any, because I think that'll be our single-player system of choice.
@Cat The author of the Cthulhu mythos (and all related) was fascinated with a particular idea: we are incredibly, mind-bogglingly puny creatures in an unfathomably large universe, and more insignificant than our language can suitably express. There are also things in this universe which we will never and can never quite understand no matter how hard we try.
So his writings often involve creatures that make us seem very small and insignificant and which are beyond our understanding.
(I'm bouncing between FATE --probably Dresden Files as we both like the books-- or trying to solo 4e, or maybe Mouse Guard, or d20 modern SG-1... you get the idea.)
@Cat I appreciate horror; my players are really into it. Sadly I can't really do much with it as a DM. I lean toward sympathetic but still vile villains: understandable stuff.
@Cat Yes. [grin] It's about mice who have established a precarious civilization holding back the wilderness and its animals, and the players are the brave few who defy their mousey natures to maintain that way of life for the others.
First off, two paragraphs on DMG 161 (deluxe ed, not sure if the #s are different there).
@JonathanHobbs Yeah, I said it was just two paragraphs. I'm getting you more content now. The Manual of the Planes cite is probably the most direct non-vague stuff I'll find.
(I think that page is wrong; it probably autoformatted when I downloaded the pdf.)
Strange Constellations, Dragon 403.
Yes, @somori is right. PHB3 p 4 discusses the first exposure of the Multiverse to the Far Realm via the shattering of the Living Gate, thus creating shardminds.
(So anything with shardmind lore is likely to have Far Realm stuff in it too.)
(Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, roughly for players and DMs respectively.)
All the crunch is uploaded to the Compendium (and thus to the Character Builder and Adventure Tools) between one and three months after the magazine comes out.
I also found a lot of Far Realm stuff in adventures. The Tear of Ioun three-part adventure (published in three consecutive Dungeon magazines) has a good bit.
Long story short: there's a place outside the multiverse that some curious gods broke into during the Dawn Wars. It's so unlike anything we can comprehend that it's physically and psychically corrupting to even think about. All aberrants in 4e are either from there, or influenced by it.
My rule of thumb is that if it looks like a mutated version of a non-aberrant, it's influenced by the Far Realm.
If it has no terrestrial counterpart or template, it's from the Far Realm.
For example: long before 4e illithids were established to breed by producing slugs that they implant in humanoids' heads, which then hatch and take over and mutate the host much like that guy who turned into an Ood in Doctor Who.
MM3 has a planet as a level 35 solo boss. It was thrown out of the multiverse into the Far Realm at the dawn of time, and has become corrupted, twisted, and angry.
I've spent a lot of time gathering up all the little crumbs I can find about the Far Realm; it figures as a major player in my current campaign.
Being that it's Points of Light, and how that setting is deliberately vague and contradictory to give DMs a better feeling that we can make our own worlds, I haven't take it all seriously. But I like knowing what's there.
I have even formulated my own 'reasoning' for the Far Realm's actions.
@JonathanHobbs Yeah, I liked that.
There's a sidebar about how to actually run a fight against a planet. It is.... less than helpful.
The Far Realm fluff is full of weird little things: like that illithids and aboleths are mortal enemies and fight on sight.
I figure that as the DM of a Far Realm campaign I should have at least a vague explanation in my own head for why it acts the way it does; something that could actually drive a mortal mad if they knew it, preferably.
Canon: the Far Realm appears to be trying to get into the multiverse and destroy it/corrupt it. Psionic powers are the multiverse's defense against this; it even says somewhere that the number of spontaneous psionic powers in an area seems to relate to Far Realm activity.
I took that and the womb/organs image of the Far Realm in the Manual of the Planes and decided that it's analogous to an infection: psionics is like white blood cells attacking an invader.
But to make it horrifying, I imagined that it's actually the opposite: the multiverse is a tiny speck of order and physical laws in the vast limitless madness of the Far Realm, and the FR's attacks are also like immune system responses.
Our immune system has three basic responses to invaders: break it down, encapsulate it, or render it harmless.
You can thus see all aberrant action in this light. Why are so many mundane creatures getting corrupted into aberrant forms? Rendering harmless. Why do some aberrants attack nearly everything on sight or seem to destroy the physical laws? Breaking it down.
You can probably argue that there are Far Realm agents working to rebuild the Living Gate to encapsulate us too; perhaps the Living Gate was made by the Far Realm.
This might have occurred to you, but going through that canon, there could have been countless other specks, too, and this is just routine for the Far Realm now (though not necessarily for its inhabitants, who may be completely oblivious) - just breaking down the "infection" of stability. Some of the Far Realm's inhabitants could have been the survivors of such universes (if you could really call them survivors)
This helps explain why different Far Realm things do different things and sometimes come into conflict: they each have a different immune system function.
@JonathanHobbs I'd thought of the general idea, but I hadn't thought of the survivor thing. loves
Also you mentioned losing players regularly: you could take your game to Roll20.net and run it online; that way location and schedules won't be as much of an issue. I have trouble just pinning down regular times for D&D with my local friends, so we're taking our next campaign online in order to be able to do it in the evenings or whenever.
You probably have a positive feedback loop with your players being inspired by you in turn, and then back again ;)
@JonathanHobbs It took me long enough to figure out this group (it's very different from my last one), but the switch from 3.5 to 4e made things click for them.
Ah, that is why it sounds familiar, as if it is significant enough I should remember it somehow, but don't. I've heard of Guam in connection with the war.
America gets a little nervous when Guam comes up. We're an unincorporated territory, which means I'm a US citizen but can't vote outside local elections (and the Congress, for which I can vote for one non-voting member, can dissolve our local government at its whim).
This hasn't happened yet, but basically we're we're a militarily strategic location and our status means we can't say much about whatever the military wants.
Still! Great little tourist island, tropical paradise with more species of fish than all the Hawaiian islands, reefs, caves, waterfalls, rivers, beaches, grasslands, forests, a lovely, generous local culture with great artery-hardening culinary traditions influenced by the Spanish...
We have the world's largest grossing K-Mart, one of the strongest earthquakes in the last fifty years (with no casualties), and the weather is between 70F and 95F all year.
[/pitch]
What part of Oz are you in? A friend of mine just visited from... Perth, I think.
Apaprently it is! I live somewhat near an area that has or had a BESS school.
I haven't heard of that before today though. We're just... an Australian state that is large and has a bunch of people crammed into one of its corners.
There is plenty more reason to know about Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne or Perth.
Actually I had a lovely time at my Catholic high school. They were loving and tolerant and let me hand out candy on the Baha'i days of gift-giving and charity.
@somori I'm reasonably sure that's one reason it gets wild sometimes.
That is super. I heard about Baha'i back in high school and have always had some respect for it, though I have never once met someone with any connection to it.
I consider it my responsibility to tell people about the Baha'i Faith, but the laws are very clear that if anyone tells me they don't want to talk about it, I should give them that courtesy and change the subject.
...if there were badges for derailing the rpg chat, I'd have at least five by now.
@somori It was about the nature and definition of religion, faith, and philosophy as it pertains to governmental oversight. In any forum but this, I'd debate that 'potentially' rather strenuously.
@JonathanHobbs My mother's traveled to Brisbane several times in the last few years to attend conferences about the learning that's been going on regarding how to give local communities agency in their own spiritual development. It's a thing we're learning how to do around the world, and a lot of great experiences are coming out of Australia.
And I hope to go to Sydney someday to visit the temple there.
@somori Sure, be all complimenty.
http://info.bahai.org/article-1-6-7-1.html [second one down; I've only been to the one in the US]
I must say again that I've been impressed by this forum. I've only seen one thing that might have become a flame war. It didn't, and I got called the classiest insult ever so that's a double win.
All of the temples have 9 sides and the calligraphic form of the Greatest Holy Name of God at the apex of the ceiling. After that it's left to the community to determine its structure. The vision is that eventually there'll be one in every town, but we're just now reaching the point where countries, rather than continents, are building them.
Related to this question.
I am wondering if it would be excessive to split up questions requesting RAW answers and actual experience answers. One example would be if I took this question and reworded another question modeled after it looking for essentially the same thing except instead of the ...
