Nowadays I'm casually working on two tactical combat systems, with the first being a wuxia-style system designed for low-bookkeeping battles between PCs and swarms of enemies, and the other being about blasting aliens with laser rifles. The latter is intended for introductory RPG oneshots mainly.
@goodguy5 Nope, but I know of the system. It's not exactly the thing I seek/sought though, I basically wanted a system for a similar high-fantasy feel that the DnD world has without the mechanical trappings of being a DnD derivative.
For more context: party has killed a bad guy, and looted the body, and found "encrypted messages", and I basically said "I'll get back to you later on that."
So I'm expecting someone to solve these out-of-session over the course of the next 2 weeks or so.
I wonder where the DnD trope that dwarves make good clerics comes from
I'm not very good at Tolkien outside LotR (and only passable at LotR lore too) but based on the small (snrk) sample of dwarves we see in LotR, they seem neither particularly wise or religious.
I think, working with the big 6 stats, I'd have given elves the wisdom bonus and dwarves the intelligence one.
Dwarves have that kind of smarts that allows them to carve efficient dominions under the rock. Elves have that kind of smarts that allows them to avoid the follies men and dwarves wind up partaking in.
@Yuuki Well good point, the shortness in wisdom might make sense from the "elves are too proud of their own elvyness to see the world for what it is" thing.
I do find it interesting that fantasy socioeconomics inevitably turn out to be elves = upper class, humans = middle class, dwarves/gnomes/orcs/etc. = lower class.
> Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory and the author of The Allegory of Love, maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional".
So I guess his position was that it wasn't technically allegory.
> If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in The Pilgrim's Progress] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality, however, he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.
@SPavel I’m all for descriptivism, but the concept of popular acceptance doesn’t mean that everyone has to abide by every definition but rather that there’s some critical mass or consensus of opinion.
@nitsua60 I am going to quietly snip "that AL requires the recipient of clone to pay per p.7 of the ALFAQv7.1" down to "that AL requires" in your comment until we get confirmation. :P
@doppelgreener Sure--I wasn't trying to answer, I was trying to see whether I was even looking in the same place OP is talking about. (They mention "FAQ.")
regarding that armored monk subclass, I can'decide if the thing I want to say is a comment or a beginning of an answer....
and I don't feel like getting fussed at for "no answers in the comments"
"My main question when I see new classes/features: Why are you doing this? What aspect of the current options doesn't fit your needs mechanically or thematically?"
@goodguy5 that would not be answering for sure. You are asking clarifying questions. I'm not certain the answers to it will help write an answer, but it is definitely not a comment answer (IMHO)
@Rubiksmoose On the Discworld, only ceramic golems can afford to be atheist because everyone else gets incinerated by the gods' wrathful lightning... ;)
@Yuuki The latter more. Played a tiefling Mystic who believed that all the gods were just lucky beings that have accumulated too much power and that anybody could do it if they tried hard enough. I believe he was trying to slay the celestial dragons for some reason as part of this grand idea.
@ACuriousMind Heh. I was doing a project with Qualcomm once and the engineers had to work in a Faraday cage. I took [too much] enjoyment in telling them to get back in their cage and work.
@Rubiksmoose In Discworld this is pretty much true. Anyone can become a god if enough people believe in them, and gods die when people stop believing in them.
D&D has a unique definition it uses for atheists which is more in tune with the real-world term for anti-theism (rpg.stackexchange.com/a/116133/1204). Atheists acknowledge the gods but actively oppose worship of them.
Nonbelievers are not common in their settings, but someone who's never witnessed actual divine presence or intervention in the setting might have reason to doubt their existence.
@SPavel I've always wondered about atheism in D&D. It seems pretty clear that Gods exist (there's proof.) But I guess it's the statement that they call themselves, but they're just superduper powerful?
@doppelgreener Which would make them less of an Atheist and more of an Agnostic.
@NautArch No, agnostic is a separate thing entirely. Gnosticism is a wholly separate axis that describes how certain you are in your belief, whatever that belief is.
@doppelgreener Really? I had always thought that Atheist is a straight up NO to gods and once you say "i'm waiting on evidence", then you enter gnostic territory.
Nay. Think of it like two axes. One axis goes from "athiesm" (I don't believe in a religion/deity/god/etc) to "theism" (I do believe in that stuff). The other axis goes from "agnostic" (I don't know for sure this is true) to "gnostic" (I know for sure this is true). That gives us: - Gnostic Atheist: "There's no such thing as god, and I'm completely certain this is true. Evidence points to this and/or no evidence points to the contrary." - Agnostic Atheist: "I don't believe there's such thing as god, but I can't know for sure. I'd be open to the idea there might be."
Myself I'm an agnostic atheist. I don't have strong belief in any given faith. I'm fine with people who do have faith, and it can be very constructive. I'm open to the idea there's a god or an afterlife but I've got no real reason to believe there's either. I do my best to be a good person because I can be. I'd consider myself a secular humanist as far as affiliation goes in this general category.
@doppelgreener I have financial debts and work schedules that keep me concerned on the now rather than the cosmic long-term life, meaning, and existence. If I exist in six months, I think that's just /dandy/.
I'm not asking the computer the meaning of life, existence, and everything. I'm asking the great computer where the HECK this code error is coming from. I have a deadline.
Honestly, if they're all knowing, I bet they have access to the QA build of Earth, and I really wanna get in good to see if I can get a pull request to take a look at it.
I have so many bug reports for the existence tracker.
I'll understand if they don't want me forking earth and making my own build.
@Maximillian That was the view of early Slavic Christians. They continued to worship the pagan gods alongside the newfangled gods because Heaven is a pretty neat feature but it doesn't help us with the crops so I'm going to make a quick sacrifice to Perun, brb
@NautArch The sanity sounds fun. Madness was...ok in our experience. Really more annoying than anything most of the time. (We are playing OotA right now)
@Rubiksmoose He didn't say he wanted to incorporate madness in his game. All TTRPG games are by default in the state of madness. He wanted to incorporate sanity.
@Rubiksmoose Would be an interesting rule set. You start out as mighty invincible murderhobos, and after you take enough sanity damage to your madness, you lose the will to slaughter and pillage.
At the end of the campaign, depending on how much madness you have left, you either settle down in a nice suburb or become a hedge fund manager
Hearts of Iron actually does this fairly well - at the start you might think you have a large manpower pool, but after you run half a million men into the Maginot Line, you suddenly don't have as many as you thought
@Yuuki Naturally there will be madness-boosting options
For example, Rage
None of the murderhobos can die but barbarians are also resilient in their madness, due to a commitment to murder that goes beyond that amateurish wizard
@Yuuki Degrees of death: alive, slightly dead, mostly dead, death, megadeth, killed dead, superdead, not invited to Jessica's sweet sixteen party but everyone else is going, raised as a zombie and then killed again, and chunky salsa.
@SPavel yeah, i'm trying to think of how to answer it. Ultimately, the answer is DM decides. But things that take away player agency suck. Happened in one of my games (PC triggered an event where his soul swapped with an NPC), had we not resolved it, he'd have lost his character's personality and had it replaced by the DMs guy.
That one time when one of your players calls down lightning elementals while flooding Scotland, and another one summons the Elder Gods through a Quidditch hoop. Just another #tabletop #RPG #GameNight running #FateCore cc @EvilHatOfficial
@NautArch I disagree. "How" is a process that includes "who" implicitly.
If the decision is by dice roll, the dice decide. If the decision is by popular vote, the players decide. If the decision is arrived at by reasoning X, Y, Z, then the person who gets to reason decides.
A thing I love about Blades is that I, as a GM, can say "No, that is straight up going to kill you" and it is on the player to make that not so. Makes me feel like less of a jerk, and lets me really bring the consequences.
@doppelgreener And then there's a third axis for the level of intervention in everyday life that's expected from the god you may or may not have evidence for believing or not believing in... faith is complicated!
@BESW On the one hand, I'd love to not be convicted for first-degree murder. On the other hand, an argument can be made that half of the magic is the atmosphere.
> Vapemancy. By creating and manipulating great clouds of vape smoke, you can create magical advantages with Lore, and get +2 to do so. But you are weak against (can be compelled) popular opinion.
If the Dreadnought misses his first attack is he stopped from further movement? Also, if the PC makes the strength save does that stop the dreadnought from further movement?
