Long day--down to the tip of Manhattan and back. But I got to listen to Maron interview James Hetfield, Bruce Springstien, Derek Trucks, and John Larroquette, so that's nice.
@SevenSidedDie In the 1st edition of Mage: the A-something there's a rote (ie, pre-designed spell, as opposed to the usual on-the-fly reality-bending) called "Semi-Auto CAD/CAM". It lets you combine 2 guns - for each success, you can replace one attribute with the same attribute of the other. I worked out that you only need 2 successes to make the best possible gun - take a revolver & a SMG, give the SMG the concealability & damage (per bullet) of the revolver.
Maybe minor, in a game where the players have supernatural abilities, but definitely not fully analysed for balance
Has anyone in here tried the Kingdom Building rules from Pathfinder? I'm toying with a colony based game, and it seems like these rules could come in handy.
I'm mostly curious about how difficult it is to still have regular adventuring in the game.
The rules specify that each Kingdom Building turn is 1 month, so I guess they could decide some turn actions, and then I could introduce adventuring via events between turns.
@trogdor That's sorta how it looks to have been used. In general though we avoid having a tag for specific game's books/products/rules-section, so [pathfinder][realm-management] is probably the tag set to use for questions about Pathfinder's Kingdom Building rules section.
@SevenSidedDie fair enough, I was curious about if that was a thing too, IE making sure tags are not too numerous about one overarching category that already has a tag
@trogdor That's much murkier. It's like, the more questions [thing] has, the more likely we benefit from having a specific tag, regardless of whether it could fall under another larger tag. Where to draw the line is hard.
In this case though, unless I'm missing something, [kingdom-building] and [realm-management] mean the same thing, they're just (Pathfinder's term) and (generic term).
plus, I imagine the usefulness of having a [pathfinder Kingdom-building] tag can be taken over by including the fact that you are using that in the question title
@SevenSidedDie yeah, that was my guess as well
I just was not sure if that meant anything that would forestall it's possible removal
that being said, it isn't like I plan to use it myself,... basically ever
@trogdor The tag field is freeform, so if someone writes something and it doesn't match (or nearly, for plurals) an existing tag, a new tag is born.
@trogdor Yeah, anyone can. The control is that every new question gets eyes on it, so if there's odd tagging it quickly gets fixed. Sometimes though, a new tag is left to see if it grows legs, so to speak.
Also tags can't exist without questions to live on, so there's no way to make one without asking a question with that tag, and so new tags get the same kind of scrutiny that new questions do.
@trogdor Surprisingly not so much work. Regular users can retag easily enough that it's only the ones in a grey zone of “maybe useful…?” that end up surviving long, and then we can all see if they're practically useful. And then if not, normal retagging can handle small cases, and for big cases there's a quick tool for mass renaming or synonyming.
@nitsua60, @JoelHarmon and @SevenSidedDie I need your GM wisdom and DW experience. Is it okay to run a combat with 12 bandits and 3 PCs for almost more than 2 hours? On one hand I feel that combat was more or less intense, on the other I think that it took too long.
@Shalvenay run a game yesterday. Realized I'm far from good at GMing.
And mine brave heroes just escaped from a dozen cultist who tied them and drag them somewhere in a cart. It took more than expected and my players haven't still met aloe.
@RollingFeles Probably OK, but you'll get faster with practice. My own combats tend to take too long, still. The trick is not to think of it as merely trading damage, so that things are always happening to change the situation in unpredictable ways. Keeps it interesting, like the rest of the session.
@RollingFeles Were your players engaged? Or bored? 2 hours could be far too long or just the start of a fun session--what's making you think it's not right?
@SevenSidedDie interesting how another site tackled possible trolling in meta....
Well, I couldn't came up with any unexpected idea in this situation. So, they battled a bunch of bandits, who almost always died from single hit. I tried to make it intense by keep them surrounded and endangered from different directions. Thief was having fun. He never allowed anyone to engage him in direct combat. He jumped over or ducked under the cart to be outside of enemy attention and then he backstabbed them. Sometimes just killing them at spot, because I thought that it's logical.
Did the bandits fight to the death? I mean, as a practical matter, if a group of 12 besets a group of N, and 3 of 12 die without doing any grievous harm to any of the N, I assume 9 would run away.
Paladin just tried some crazy stuff like taking board from the cart and then using this as a weapon. Grapple, disarming and jump attacks. In the end he said something like "meh, well we messed with some weaklings. Ok. It doesn't feel much different from dnd" which, honestly, left me surprised, because his stunts wouldn't be rewarded in most cases in dnd.
The thrid was a new player. Cleric. He was always surrounded, but tried to experiment with magic(using Light rope in order to blind enemy) and he said that he liked it very much.
@nitsua60 only last one tried to run. I thought about that too late.
My party also prefers to see dice rolled in the open, so I've had to learn to creatively doctor encounters myself.
Change the Numbers
Instead of changing your rolls, change the numbers you're adding to the rolls or comparing the rolls to. If you feel you have to justify this, perhaps monster's ...
That would, obviously, cut combat-time. I often forget about it, too, which is why I have "OBJECTIVES, TERRAIN, COVER, VISIBILITY" written on the side of my table-tent that faces me.
@nitsua60 I think I need this reminder for myself too. I noticed that last session almost lacked any surroundings descriptions. (Pity, I noticed it after the session).
Well, thanks all of you for your thoughts! A lot of work on my GM skill on the way :)
there may possibly be some civilizations that were not mixed bags, my definition of that would include that they would have to have not been warlike, not have slaves, and have equality well established regardless of what different people were like to each other, I have never read about, heard about, or seen one that hits all of those points perfectly
some have even claimed they do while blatantly abusing at least one of those points. (and no I don't at all mean to single out any civilization of today, plenty of examples both now and in the past)
just, on a level of looking at a civilization as a whole, as much as I would like to declare that some of them have hit the "no longer a mixed bag on the large scale" point, even the best ones still have a problem with at least one of the points I mentioned
usually the equality one, because that is a lot broader than one might possibly think at first
Background
I'm the DM of a role playing group. Improvised rule set.
I've created a world for my players where I have tried to be as close to 16th century reality as possible, with the additions of magic and phantasmal beasts being extremely rare and stigmatized to even talk about among commoner...
Buh. He's still on about "game's off for at least a month". Oh well.
And another game just got dissolved because of scheduling issues (since my exams interfered with it for two weeks straight and the GM went all "screw it, I'm tired of this, game's over guys").
Yeah, one of the players suggested that. I'm not going to participate this particular weekend, however, since I already have plans which the game cancel allowed me to make.
Next weekend I might do it myself though. Test out 4eLite before I unleash it on an actual campaign :)
Whelp, I decided to try play by post. Pathfinder, which is a first for me. I used to think the whole "special snowflake edgelord" thing was a myth and/or a bad joke.
Well... where to start? Let's see. Kellid, but super pale, like deathly pale. Also 6'0", last of her family name even though having a last name almost never happens with Kellid. Infamous tribe known for torture and murder. Has a three syllable name after the inclusion of an apostrophe, even though Kellid typically have very short names. Named even the basic items super edgy stuff. Basic wooden shield and all.
I'm sure I missed something, I think this character is supposed to be the new tribe leader but must go off on a quest with the rest of the party first for reasons to prove herself.
@doppelgreener Something about proving herself worthy of leading the tribe. In itself not bad, but it's probably tainted for me with all the other stuff I read before getting to that part.
I decided to go with a fairly basic character concept since it's my first PF game. Raised by the church, thought the teachings were super cool, just wants to protect the weak.
I'm playing a character where he worked on a family farm, then helped his village survive the famine after a global cataclysm as a druid. The village stabilized with his help, but after a while his parents sent him off into the world because they felt like his talents were wasted on a farm they could maintain themselves when everyone else out there was suffering.
Yeah. I like snow :) The only downside is when city service can't clean snow as fast as it falls and many roads have fewer lanes because of snow that shoved to the side of the road. Our small city experienced a lot of traffic jams this winter.
@Fibericon See how it goes. To that person they are the protagonist of their story, and they've got a lot of story they're really keen on exploring.
In retrospect, all of the characters I make have a piece of myself in them representing something I'm trying to deal with in real life. RPGs give me an opportunity to deal with, or possibly even overcome, that topic in a safe environment, like how Star Trek could deal with real-world racial and cultural issues via Aliens Wearing Different Types of Funny Hats.
Someone like that may themselves be trying to explore some personal issues, like a desire to figure out some confidence for themselves, and ordinary teenage / young adult angst.
@doppelgreener I agree, but I also feel like those racial stereotypes exist on races to give your playing world consistency. When you have a bunch of so-called "edgelords" doing their edgy thing and completely bucking the racial trend it can harm that sense of consistency. Then again, it can make for great comedic effect when they meet another of their own race and start receiving strange looks.
But otherwise, unique snowflakes are totally cool with me in a fantasy RPG; isn't that what we're playing games for?
@Shalvenay Not really. I return from England Feb 7, am going to need a few days to catch up on life, so I imagine Feb 13 would be a date I could start assuming all goes well. ( <-- @BESW)
Yeah, I do intend to give it a shot. There's one thing that kind of seems like a red flag to me though. The GM knows he's running mostly for people new to PF, and thus restricted character creation to three books. This person... did not stick to that restriction, and then threw a fit when the GM reminded them of the restriction, even though he agreed to consider allowing it anyway.
@LegendaryDude Woof. I think everyone else complied in my case. We were mostly new, so we didn't want to get overwhelmed anyway. I saw cool stuff for my cleric in guides that I realized I couldn't have and didn't give them a second thought.
I'm not seeing how he got that, but then again, I'm only looking at core. It specifically says it's a max of 5d4, and even that shouldn't be achievable at level one.
@Shalvenay @BESW although it's been long enough that it's probably wise to double-check people's schedules. Could be that Monday evenings aren't still the best time.
i was thinking about playing around with an artificer, making stuff for the group and myself sounded like fun. my dm asked me not to cause it was a tier 1 class while everyone else was playing tier 2-3
Same. We switched to 5e from PF about a year ago and haven't looked back.
Within that year we've had so much buy-in compared to PF
We ran a PF campaign for about 3 years and I bought the only hard-cover in that time
Nothing was really needed because it's all online
But since we switched to 5e, we've had 4 players in our 6-person group buy the PHB, we have two DMGs, two MMs, two Volo's Guides, and we have the SCAG book.
I think Wizards is doing a pretty good job on that front.
@LegendaryDude I'm also really glad for the PHB+1 guideline they use. I know it's mainly an AL thing but it's such a good idea, especially for giving them design space so they don't have to worry about how 2 different splatbooks interact.
@CTWind I haven't played AL, but I'm pretty sure being limited to PHB+1 would bother me. It does make it easier for DMs and it prevents a lot of the problems that might come up, but wouldn't that limit you to the spells you can use?
Or is it only the character options that are limited, and all spells from all sources are valid?
Even then, it prevents you from being a Firbolg Storm Sorcerer, which is something you should definitely be allowed to do. :\
For AL I believe it's fully limited to PHB+1 for anything you use. I like that generally from the perspective of 'introducing someone to the game doesn't require too much buy-in'
But if your group's already done the buy-in there's nothing forcing you to use AL rules. None of my games have bothered.
Perhaps a good home policy if they get to the point of having a lot of supplements is PHB+1 is always good, and just check w/ DM first if you're using more.
>VtM was designed before charopping was a common passtime, before even the Internet was available at home. It was intended to be the anti-D&D, where players could actually focus on their PC's story and angst despite being a powerful creature of darkness, instead of combat and loot and gaining power.
However, I can't understand the reason why does it even include numbers and rolling dice in that case. From my experience, any system with numbers, dice and creating a character using points makes people think about optimization and gaining power -- at least …
@Baskakov_Dmitriy That's not a question anyone but the designers can really answer, but I can tell you from experience that just saying things work in a certain way and not having some sort of system in place to adjudicate that tends not to work unless you have a group who really trusts itself.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Plus, rolling dice is fun.
When we (my RP group) played VtM it was all about power. Power in-game, not in the metagame. Sure you optimize your character in certain ways but only in order to support how you want your character to behave in character.
We had one player who was very into the metagame and charop and we let him do it because it was fine, but you'll find that kind of charop falls apart very quickly in the Storyteller system because of the way ability checks work.
Everything passes so the ST starts increasing the difficulty just to normalize the success chance
But we also just wanted to play angsty goth superheroes (we were already mostly angsty goths at the time), so YMMV.
The next Star Wars film has a title now: The Last Jedi
It's official. STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI is the next chapter of the Skywalker saga. This December. #TheLastJedi… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/823561256078548992
The one time I tried to play a VtM character true to the lore and the setting, it was boring. Honestly. I played a Toreador who liked art. And he went to art shows. And he didn't like fighting, or conflict, or anything that's the fun part of role-playing. It was awful.
@LegendaryDude I have experimented with melee Tremere/Assamit Sorcerer builds recently. Based on Blood of Potency. But questions about this were not liked here -- because other VtM players here are clearly against charoping.
after all the sequels only claimed there was a light and dark side, and jedi and sith, and focused on these things & a small number of people so they could deliver an effective story about them. it is the prequels that go full tilt and imply these two sides & organisations are synonymous, and the new films are paying that no heed: there are non-Sith Dark Side users, and force users with no membership to either organisation at all (as ought to be the case).
@Baskakov_Dmitriy The answer's right there again: charop was not considered normal or common when VtM was designed, so nobody thought about it when designing. Designs didn't protect against it or even really consider the possibility. Having numbers doesn't mean the designers expected/wanted charop, it means they were thinking “that's how RPGs work”. VtM was designed before design theory existed; it predates the concept of System Matters.
I think you're taking the 27 years of design innovations after VtM was designed for granted.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy And on the same note, I suspect your questions aren't being downvoted because VtM players don't like charop — I suspect they're being downvoted because the answers are often obvious when you don't assume the rules were designed with charop in mind.
Chat regulars: Do we want auto-spam-detection messages? There is a bot called SmokeDetector that is maintained by some SE mods. It watches for suspected spam in SEs and can notify and/or autoflag. It's already watching RPG.se. Do we want Smokey to post to RPG General Chat about probable-spam it sees? Message frequency for RPG would be about 1 per 3–5 days.
@LegendaryDude That's what I'm thinking. I'm in favour. I expect most chat regulars will be, but due diligence and maybe there's something I'm overlooking. :)
I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, I think we're pretty good at catching spam ourselves. (Is there anything to make one think we're not?) On the other hand, it's so low-frequency that I can't see it harming anything. Question: does spam-flagging that's prompted by a smoke detector message act any differently than any other spam-flagging? In summation, "meh."
@nitsua60 Our spam flags in response would be the same. Mostly what the messages would do is speed of “spam in the stack!” being said here — its response time to suspected spam is under a second. Very minor bonus, it would give us a local record of suspected spam, although right now we can already go look at Smokey's main chat room for that.
The benefit is pretty marginal, so I think it comes down to whether chat denizens would be excited by the feature or find it annoying.
@SevenSidedDie I'm not sure it'll be a great benefit, but it doesn't sound like a great evil either so I'm willing to give it a shot and see if it surprises me.
@SevenSidedDie This, plus a lot of the 2e and Revised VtM materials didn't even tell you what higher level disciplines ( > 5 dots) could do because it was assumed that (a) most players would never play a vampire of that power and (b) if the storyteller needed powers for disciplines with > 5 dots, they'd make it up because it's probably a very low generation vampire. Hence your point on the lack of a "charop" mentality.
If it had been designed with charop in mind, I think the rules would tell you either a) disciplines cap at 5 dots or b) disciplines powers go all the way up to 10 dots and each power is defined.
Instead, you ended up with a bunch of clan books, with > 5 dot discipline powers loosely defined or hinted at throughout those books.
I like that they are asking the important questions: "Was it cute, like modern-day otters? Or, at this size, did it switch over to straight-up terrifying?"
I just wrote a comment on a quote from 4e's DMG and just before hitting send I realised that the comment has absolutely nothing to do with the question or answer
And, while probably a wise one, it has no place there
@LegendaryDude Dark Ages made it a bit easier to see what higher level disciplines could do (some already described in the core book + 2 extra books to cover allother higher level options for high & low clans)
@Ahriman The point is though that disciplines aren't like, D&D spells. They have very loose mechanics and in general are very loosely defined, because the mentality was that the Storyteller and players would kind of fill in the gaps on their own. Also I've read multiple accounts of the design sessions for VtM and I'm pretty sure everyone was high.
It was a bit of a ramble on traps and how the DMG specifically mentions they need to be disarmed or destroyed to count as being overcome. Even though just figuring out where they are and getting rid of enemies (with forced movement) would do the trick as well - the trap'd never serve its intended purpose again.
VtR prevented this by the torpor rules, which made any xp investment into higher level disicplines a gamble that you could loose at any time. Which promoted more spreading of combo disciplines
And I try not to mix Dark Ages with VtM Revised because, though they are compatible, Fishmalk is pretty upsetting as a big fan of actual, thought-provoking demented Malkavians. And so I take nothing from V:DA seriously.
The funny thing is, I think individually each of us desires to play that kind of slow-burning gothic punk political horror campaign, and we've done it to some degree, but collectively, when it comes down to it, we just wanted to set things on fire.
The last campaign we played, I ran a paranoid delusional Malkav who was subtly aware that Gehenna was coming (aren't they all?). And that campaign actually did end with Gehenna.
Gerald of Wales on a demon-assisted human lie detector living in the neighbourhood of 12thC Caerleon...… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/823477496838496256
My flexible Monday group has become quasi-regular now, because the three very regular players (and I) have committed to, for the moment, mostly play Firefly, which included the commitment that the pilot, captain and mercenary would be there nearly every session.
This also means I really need to get a better grasp of the rules. I have a rough idea of what they want, but I think they expect more dice rolling and more plot points going round the table.
I managed a few rolls this session (maybe 2–3 per player?) but it feels like the mechanics would want more. Also, I probably need to read some AW hack doing space opera to get a better feel for my moves and principles. Some of them are in the Firefly rule book (stated in a way where I thought “This looks like *W would phrase that as a principle!”), but overall, I still have problems finding my way around that book.
Background
I'm the DM of a role playing group. Improvised rule set.
I've created a world for my players where I have tried to be as close to 16th century reality as possible, with the additions of magic and phantasmal beasts being extremely rare and stigmatized to even talk about among commoner...
