@RedRiderX Nah, it's great. Seriously. I've got a group of 9 year-olds learning to play through the Starter Set, and it'll easily be a year before they get through level 5. Then it's time to decide they like it enough to "buy more classes and levels!"
Even if you're an adult and you get through that in a month of weekly sessions, it was $20 for the whole group (and maybe another $10 for some more dice) to decide whether this is a hobby you'd be willing to drop $50 at a time into.
I have a challenge for D&D DMs: have a magical creature give your players' characters a difficult and arduous quest, offering great and bountiful treasure in reward (they won't say what). When they complete it and return the creature explains to them cheerfully and completely unironically that the treasure was the friendships they have forged. (Then, out of interest, tell us how they responded and whether they did a violence upon the creature in response.)
But I think were going a bit too far out of scope here: a dice set doesn't really care what you're playing, what you're using them for, or even if you are using them correctly. They are True Neutral :P
@Ben and because greataxes are used almost entirely by barbarians, is why I said that
I mean, a fighter Could... but it's vastly inferior to the greatsword, especially with the GWF fighting style
ok, let's face it, greatswords > greataxe, and only time you wanna use em is when you're a barbarian because the extra crit dice goodness when using d12s
If they meant the nearest star other than the one you're orbiting, it'd be about 4.25 years (using our own neighbor stars as an example) before you saw it and felt any radiation-related effects, and some amount of time longer than that before any shockwave or the like hit you. (I don't know what % of the speed of light supernovae particle ejections travel at)
@doppelgreener My players wouldn't get so far - when they hear someone has great treasure they would rob that person or... interrrogate... him until he tells them where the treasure is.
Looks like @byharryconnolly’s Fate supplement for his epic fantasy thriller trilogy is PWYW for a limited time: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/179962
I'm thinking of it as a counter-compel, which works well both ways.
"Because [aspect] exists, it makes sense [bad thing would happen]." "Aha, but because [other aspect] is true, it makes sense [bad thing would be mitigated/avoided] and [good thing] would happen instead."
With invokes, that's exactly how it works. I spend a fate point to say an aspect is significant and helps me, my opponent does the same, we're back to square one.
With compels, as proposed, both aspects are significant and cause/negate trouble, yet the latter one gets an invoke as well.
(I don't mind that in general, what's more invokes between friends)
Well, no, it's not "back to square one." Both invokes change the story in unique ways which aren't denied or overwritten by the other invoke. They're both true, they just change each others' context.
Eeeeh, tbh, the fp trade in conflict is the weakest part of the system to my eyes. Yes, stuff being On Fire is significant and helps and we draw attention to it, but all too often it's an exercise in addition rather than actual drama.
Proposed change to the proposed change: instead of giving a free invoke to the aspect that prevented the trouble being compelled from happening, handle it as a mini-compel of its own. Your character is an Unrepentant Thief so you were about to steal food from orphans, but you thought better because you were Raised on the Streets? Sounds like you want to have a scene about that, instead, great.
City guard are Vigilant and were about to arrest you, but Cult of Fire ignited something and drew their attention instead? Cool, there's now a fire.
To my understanding, Lines is "we won't do this" (agreed upon beforehand by the group) and Veils is "this happens in our story but we'll pan away from it."
And I totally get where he's coming from: saying "I don't want to have an X experience" by the very nature of making such a statement already makes X explicit in its existence, so I agree that it's not a removal tool, but rather a "pretend it's not there" tool
" it generally had the effect of erasing the content of play [2], rather than playing it out in a vague sense and then moving on" - I think this description fits Line in Lines&Veils
The X-Card can behave that way, but it's not the only option when the card is used. The presence of the option there is, I understand sufficient for his problem to be a real problem and I don't mean to obscure that.
And in my experience, invoking the Veil is usually accompanied with a shared understanding that the Veiled thing was Important.
half a dozen folks in an otherwise excellent group (again, not a convention) who I know were awkward enough with the Xcard that it was thought of as a "take a break, rewind time, pretend never happened" one size fits all solution
absolutely, and that's why I think this piece is important, because it shows a perspective that might be new to a lot of people, even some who are otherwise very aware of mental health problems
I'm gonna pass this on to my group, for sure. At the very least our resident psych professional will find it fascinating and potentially useful.
I think part of the reason my experience is different is that in my group, most of the assumptions in the Luxton technique are already pretty much baseline normal for us.
Over here I similarly usually assumed once Xcard is thrown and the break is over, what happens next is a result of an honest discussion, with X-card-thrower holding the reins.
@BESW It's a bit similar to the O card by Brie Sheldon, isn't it? but made explicit and overt, rather than relying on group cohesion
I have a friend who wants to use RPGs to explore some of her own un-dealt-with or being-confronted issues (I'm not sure "trauma" is the right word, though it should be).
And I'm in talks with some local social activists about using RPGs to create discussion spaces about some major issues that are difficult for people to talk about.
So this is very useful, thank you.
(Generational trauma is Definitely A Thing I Am Encountering more and more in my RPG spaces.)
Not homebrew, but not 5e, either:
AD&D 2e Tome of Magic Table 2: Wild Surge Results.
It's a d100 table with 100 entries; while some overlap with the PHB5e's wild surge table, there are at least 50 entries in the 2e table not on the 5e table.
Given the closeness in 'feel' of 5e to 2e (as oppo...
@eimyr We're supposed to tape ourselves into our houses and stay away from the windows for two weeks. So, it's more like Cold War era American bomb drills.
"Duck and cover! Your plywood desk will save you from the falling rubble long enough for you to die of radiation poisoning."
@BESW "If the mushroom cloud is smaller than your thumb, don't do anything, you're far enough. If it's bigger, don't do anything, you're fucked anyway. Also, you're blind just from looking.
It was on Undercurrents some time between 6 July and 10 August. Had an upbeat melody but a rather angry, disillusioned tone. The theme seemed to be disposable entertainment? One of the verses was about picking up some not-very-talented white guys from middle America and making them into a boy band.
Urgh, I know that feeling. I have bits of lyrics or melody sniplets in my head all the time and then I get this profound sense of satisfaction when it happens to pop up in the radio half a year later.
Are there any more combat-focused RPGs that provide more options than what D&D does? I'm finding that a lot of my table is avoiding martials because they're just not interesting to play for the most part.
@NautArch DnD 4e has lots of options for martial classes, at least. There's also 13th Age, which I've come to understand is like "4e done right" but I can't personally vouch for it since I haven't gotten my friends to agree to try it yet.
The worst thing is when you had a song stuck in your head, then it stops playing in your head without resolving which song was it, and now it's hard to remember which song was hard to remember.
And everytime I have that, I get a bit of the New World Symphony playing in my head, because it was a particularly long-lasting "uuurgh, what is this song" earworm for me and everything else associates with it :P
@NautArch 13th Age at least seems very cool, from casual reading of the SRD!
@doppelgreener I normally go with people saying the villains have something valuable or that the good NPC will ask his contacts to deliver something to not have them kill everything on site. Though I kind of want to explore the possibility of letting them kill the nobility - and showing them the consequences :D
We just want to have different ways to approach combat problems besides "Hit it". Casters can do a lot of different things and get creative, but martials can't in 5e.
@NautArch DnD 4e in a nutshell: it doesn't have spells as a special game mechanic like 5e does, for instance. Instead, every class has powers. Martial powers are called exploits, arcane powers are called spells, divine powers are called prayers, but mechanically they're the same. Everyone gets a roughly equal amount of powers and a varied selection to pick from.
Nominally, each class has its own power list to pick from, but many classes within the same role (eg. fighter and paladin are both Defender roles) have lots of similar powers available.
What makes 4e amazing is that despite the homogeneity of its basic power structure, each class and each specialization within a class has a uniquely different play feel.
Powers come in three categories: At-Will powers can be used anytime, and often are the "basic attack" for the character. Encounter powers can be used once per encounter (more specifically once per short rest, which is only five minutes in 4e), and daily powers can be used once per day (or once per long rest).
The "Essentials" version (the latter half of the expansion) is designed to be a slightly simpler stand-alone addition, but it's still crunch and a half.
Do so! It seems good to me and I would like new perspectives on it.
@NautArch The thing to know about DnD 4e, though, is that it's designed as a balanced game combat-wise, more so than 5e. Encounter difficulty balance seems far more precarious in it to me than it is in 5e.
A large part of that has to be bounded accuracy. In 4e, if you pit your level n party against creatures of n+3 or greater, the combat may or may not be very hard but it will be very slow because things tend to have crazy-high AC at greater levels.
yep, instead you apply special modifiers to monsters. Or use MM monsters with those modifiers applied. Eg. if you want to challenge your level 3 party, put them against "Level 3 Elite" monsters instead of "Level 6 normal" monsters.
The absolutely lovely thing about 4e was, the maths in it worked. Eventually. And once you learned how the system operated, you could fairly easily build an encounter of desired difficulty for your party. After 3.5, whose idea of properly building a complicated encounter was "playtest it yourself beforehand", this was quite novel.
@eimyr Due to litigation and lobbying by the Rogue's Union and Assassin's Union, guards of all varieties are legally required to ignore the squeaking of leather when it's dark, so long as it remains more than few meters away from them. The government was mostly convinced by an Assassin's Union No Leather Protest Week wherein they only wore cloth and the death rate suddenly spiked just for that one week -- everyone agreed leather was better.
@doppelgreener wait, so you're saying that they wear leather for what reasons again? But they use subversive politics to convince everyone that a bad idea is a good idea because it has the opposite effect of the one it really has?
@doppelgreener Leather armour is the trickle-down economics of D&D.
@NautArch I don't personally prefer 13th Age over 4e, but from a practical point of view, 13th age is in print and supported by its publisher, while 4e is not in print and its publisher has destroyed basically everything it had supporting that game (deleted all the web articles, shut down Insider subscriptions, etc).
One thing I'm a bit skeptical about in 13th Age is the effects that trigger on raw die rolls, for fighters for instance. It sounds like it might take getting used to.
@NautArch D&D 4e has fun powerful crunch I enjoy using a lot and some classes I'm completely in love with. Nothing really catches my eye in 13th Age's crunch, and I have difficulty understanding how I should be using its narrative elements as a player. So, one just clicks for me and the other doesn't click much at all.
Eg. 13th Age fighter has an ability, "Counter Attack", that states the following:
> Once per round when the escalation die is even and an enemy misses you with a natural odd melee attack roll, you can make a basic melee attack dealing half damage against that enemy as a free action. (The attack can’t use any limited abilities or flexible attack maneuvers.)
@kviiri Those are fine. I didn't have any trouble with those. I did, however, forget that I had an ability that triggered on certain numbers the time I played it, but I was looking out for the other one (which triggered on even numbers, I think).
But since your character will only have a small number of abilities, you won't have a lot of them to keep track of.
@doppelgreener I think I'd personally be fine with them, but I wonder how my party would fare. They tend to not be very careful with their combat option readings...
eg. when we played Deadlands: Reloaded, I think I was the only one to use double taps, intimidation and the like.
There's a ranking of class "difficulty" in the book, classes like barbarian or paladin mostly just hit enemies, and have a once-per-battle ability to hit harder.
@NautArch They're simple on purpose. Fighter is moderate, with flexible attacks. Bard gets those + spells and songs, while commander or martial druid (from 13 True Ways) get even more complex
And finally there are monks. We've just kind of accepted that our monk will hear the enemy is three moves away, get there anyway, hit them three times, learn she missed twice, then say she did hit them anyway. Monk bullshit.
@kviiri Err. Well, you're almost entirely correct, and I just can't read. Sometimes, especially at low levels, you don't trigger anything, it's just an attack.
@Magician Yeah, if you don't get any possible options, right.
@NautArch Fighter in particular seems to be quite big on getting those special attacks that trigger on certain die scores.
In DnD 4e, IIRC their justification for fighter encounter/daily powers was roughly that they're moves very hard to pull off consistently, so it sort of abstracts that you won't have suitable openings more than once in a battle/day.
The 13th Age way is somewhat more intuitively the same idea.
@godskook Meaning that a caster has a toolset of different spells that can affect a combat. WHether it's different damage types, command/control, buffing, etc - there's a lot of options and the player can improvise more on what to do given the current situation.
Martials (in 5e) tend to not have any options besides shoot it from far, hit it from close.
So, monks, probably the most complex martial class in the game atm. They get a number of disciplines, more as they level up. Each discipline has an opening attack, a flow attack, and a finisher attack. They grow in power, as you can guess. The monk starts with an opening attack, and can follow it up next round with either another opening attack, or a flow attack. Likewise, a flow attack can be followed up by an opening attack or a finisher. That's before getting into spending ki points.
@NautArch In 4e, the big thing of Fighters is not actually even hitting things, it's getting hit themselves. Or more broadly, defending others. I assume 13th Age carries at least some of that with it.
@NautArch AFAIK, 13th Age has powers for the fighty stuff, and narrative mechanics like backgrounds and (icon) relationships for non-fighty stuff, and both are relevant to combat. (Somehow. Like I said, I don't really "get" how the narrative mechanics should be getting used.)
@NautArch I remember hearing about a power in 4e called "daring rescue" I think. It was a daily power where, if an ally was knocked out, the character would immediately rush over to their side, attempting to provoke as many opportunity attacks as possible. At the end of the charge, the downed ally was healed, with a bonus depending on the number of OAs that were provoked.
@Magician That sounds more interesting than the description of the DnD 5e monk class. I should probably read up on that and see if I can use some of that in a homebrew way for 5e.
4e Warlord has a cool power called Windmill of Doom. It hits for ok damage (iirc three times the normal weapon damage) but also allows all allies adjacent to the target to make an attack against the target.
I didn't find the described power, but it could be in some other book :<
Windmill of Doom kinda demonstrates what I like in 4e: it's gamey, but in a thematically appropriate way. If the character is an inspiring leader and a warrior, it makes sense for their special abilities to work best when co-ordinated with others.
Sometimes a person doesn't have "The Exact Perfect Answer" but tries to help with some suggestions or a bit of brainstorming, after all, there's multiple playstyles, but frequently i see those "secondary answers" being downvoted, which of those behaviors would be considered appropriate?
Not 100% on where to ask this as I couldn't find an AnyDice centric chat or similar, I'm looking for probabilities in a dice system where a lower value is desirable, and a characters skill determines which dice they roll (D20 for unskilled, then D12, D10, D8, D6 and D4 is most skilled) while the difficulty of the test determines how many dice they roll (keeping the lowest value)
Just checking I'm reading this correctly (I really need to get around to learning AnyDice!) the outputs show the odds of rolling each value, each output is for a different dice and the difficulty is always 2?
Not homebrew, but not 5e, either:
AD&D 2e Tome of Magic Table 2: Wild Surge Results.
It's a d100 table with 100 entries; while some overlap with the PHB5e's wild surge table, there are at least 50 entries in the 2e table not on the 5e table.
Given the closeness in 'feel' of 5e to 2e (as oppo...
Sometimes a person doesn't have "The Exact Perfect Answer" but tries to help with some suggestions or a bit of brainstorming, after all, there's multiple playstyles, but frequently i see those "secondary answers" being downvoted, which of those behaviors would be considered appropriate?
