@KorvinStarmast the asker specifies he wants RAW. I was not sure if you were misunderstanding the sleep spell (or the bugbear chief) and actually thought your solution was RAW or if you were thinking on the same line as me - you are already making a homebrew, why do you care about RAW?
anyway, @KorvinStarmast, I didn't mean to discuss or belittle your answer. Sorry if it seemed like that. I just wanted a clarification on either how you see that being RAW or that you didn't care it wasn't. I'm fine with either or both.
We aren't here on the Stack to read the rulebooks to people. We're here to help people learn how to synthesize the mechanics, the non-mechanical text, the social context, our personal experience, the learning of the broader community, to apply all that to a particular real-life problem someone's having and find a solution for it.
I was taken to task in one of my first questions here in comments, as I tried to sort out the combination of palading smite spell and the summoned steed, by an answerer chiding me for trying to cram the RAW attitude into a 5e context. This happened more than once.
I can do the RAW thing just fine, and have done on this site. But what this person was asking for isn't RAW, and you (@HellSaint) were correct to call out a frame challenge in the course of your answer. It is a homebrew question, not a RAW question, as you clearly identified early on..
The asker, himself, asked for a RAW answer though. Otherwise I wouldn't care. That's the only reason I thought clarifying how the solution is RAW or clarifying that you think a non-RAW solution is better than what he is asking for.
For the bolded phrase, I completely agree with you.
I cited a RAW example, which fit this XY thing well enough as I saw it, and I noted in comments that I'd advise against trying to overcomplicate a custom monster. We'll see what others think.
Again, I think you were correct to, in your answer, make the point of a frame challenge in re what was being asked for. My answer applies my own experience of trying to figure out custom monsters across a variety of editions: one can try to become "too clever by half" in creating custom monsters. The latest Mord's book is a good case in point.
" Given that you are homebrewing this, you already have room to work to make this fit into how a Bugbear Chief works. I'd advise against over complicating the design, as it can be tricky enough to get a custom monster "just right" already. Suggest that you not tie your own hands. " - this comment is pretty much the clarification I wanted :P and I think this is an advice so valid that it should be put in the answer as well.
I am running a Horror RPG one-shot, in the Don't Rest Your Head world. I have a scene in which the PC's need to get info from an NPC that you can think of as an information demon.
The NPC is not nice, but not currently hostile. I wanted the players to have to do something special to get the information - a wager, a competition a game.
If it's an information demon, it values information, yeah? Maybe it challenges them to tell it some dark secret, or other information that the demon doesn't know.
Yep - they could trade information as well, or bet the information they want versus their memory of their only child, or their ability to recognize faces.
Something suitably surreal and horrible, appropriate to the setting.
The only idea I could think of was some altered version of blackjack. (Altered so it would be a bit of a challenge to think about strategy).
What about... each character has to confess some information that they otherwise would not want their peers to know - To the demon, this is valuable information
I thought they could do some sort of game where they bet hands, not realizing the demon meant that they lose their actual hand... Or maybe they bid their fingers. Something, again, horrible.
I am really asking for a good game mechanic for a horror story.
I like the idea of secrets - it's appropriate for these characters... I am not sure how to run it. They each put a secret in a jar - and get to pick n-1 of them? Or bid to pick one?
Or how about, the demon lets each character ask a question. It then responds with a question (presumably something incriminating/damaging). If the character answers the demon's question truthfully, then the demon will answer the character's question truthfully.
The Jenga mechanic is a good one, but it's hard to imagine Mr. Horrible playing Jenga.
Question trading is a time honored tradition. I think that I could string it for a few rounds. In DRYH, characters have secrets and are pretty strung out. It might make for a good scene.
I could have them flip a coin so see who gets asked a question too - making it more stressful and more interactive (players like to feel they are acting).
I thought of riddles too. I would have to find some appropriately macabre ones. The players might be a bit challenged to come up with riddles on the spot. Could you come up with a half dozen? I would be herd pressed.
Yeah - Trivial Pursuit and party games might not work.
In DRYH, characters have Madness Talents (surreal superpowers, like making moths appear on objects to tell their history). They get them because they are strung out and on the edge. They usually cross over from our world to a dimension called the Mad City, where nightmares live.
I am not familiar with games like DRYH. There are no hit points, there are no weapon stats. It's all about the story. Players have a lot of freedom to shape the play.
It will be odd/weird/challenging/exciting to try something this far from my GM comfort zone.
Currently, the duplicate notification says
This question already has an answer here:
and links to the "original" question. I find this, at least, misleading, considering we close questions as duplicates if the questions are duplicates, not if "This question already has an answer somewhere e...
Lol, I went to meta.se to create the question about the Duplicate notification there, got +100 Rep in RPG.se because now I have >100 rep in other SE. But I only have >100 rep there because I already had >100 rep in RPG.se. What a loop.
Some booths work under win7, and those can contact our site perfectly
I have GUESSED, after much searching that win xp can't decode SHA256, so can't verify the certificate... But the company that has our certificate is useless and they just say "upgrade to a better windows" instead of ofering us any help
i have called 1and1 (our hosting), and they said to call Symantec, that she has our Cert. I called Symantec and told us that it's 1and1 problem, not theirs.
I called microsoft and they just told me that i am working on obsolete software and can't or won't offer help
the most helpful thing I've got, is from one of the guys at microsoft that gave me a link to post on their forums, so "maybe some user knows how to fix this"
well, I know this sounds a little harsh, but considering Microsoft itself dropped Win XP support.... 4 years ago I can somehow understand their attitude. Which obviously doens't mean you are any less in trouble.
For tonight's dinner I fried up leftover whole wheat spaghetti, cut short, in sesame oil with teriyaki sauce, ginger, garlic, and crushed red pepper, to use as a base. Then I sautéd carrots and vegan hamburger in olive oil until they started to blacken and added chopped tatsoi stems at the end. Put that aside and went back to the pan to steam the tatsoi leaves (torn into pieces) with a bit of soy sauce. Served the veggies on top of the noodles.
@BESW I think I said it before (== some years ago) but I will say it again. You should start a "Cooking with BESW" room and post the actual recipes/preparation step.
@trogdor "Twice as much lemon juice as you're comfortable with," "fill it up to halfway with cranberry juice," "ginger salabat until it stops dissolving," "fill the rest of the pitcher with red zinger but leave a few fingers at the top for sparkling water."
@trogdor LucasArts had generally a rather good direction for their point-and-clicks. They wanted to avoid the pointless "difficulty" that was common with other adventuring games (best known from Sierra)
most recently,.... not very recently to be fair but most recently none the less, Goodbye Deponia (no not about ponies,.... despite how that would be the assumption given,.... my avatar and such)
I tried to get my SO to play Legend Interactive's Gateway with me. (it's excellent btw)
It's a text-based game with a graphics window included. A weird mixture :)
Anyway, I praised how effortless the parser is (because I, as a bit of a retro gamer, have some experience with harder-to-use text-based interfaces). She got fed up when the game didn't understand "USE LADDER".
To her defense, she's a few years younger than me, but that and my generally greater attraction to the old things is enough for her to have missed the text based games, so she had less experience in general by far.
@trogdor Omg I hated so much Deponia, I don't know why... I came from playing Chains of Satinav and Memoria, and then BOOM! Deponia. Random nonsensic story with random nonsense puzzles :(
Or instead of islands, planets, towns, kingdoms, realms, etc. Basically any plot that boils down to collecting X identical McGuffins or activating them or anything.
@kviiri to be fair, it was a joke. You don't want to play Takashi's Challenge. It is bad, it is poorly designed and has very debatable gameplay elements
it really did feel at the end like the whole time the game had been trying to teach me to think like this vile idiot,..... and it sort of suceeded at the end there even
But seriously, if old text-based adventuring games and sci-fi don't put you off, try out Gateway. It's loosely based on the Pohl novel of the same name. In the near future, humans have discovered an abandoned spaceport of a disappeared alien species, the Heechee, and people called Prospectors are pouring in to button mash the countless ships inside in hopes of reaching caches of Heechee technology around the universe through their FTL Tau drives.
@Helwar never heard of it before, the screens somehow reminded me of that old Shannara pc game (a game that I somehow want to forget too, but for different reasons)
Most prospectors return empty-handed. Some die by exiting the Tau space near a supernova or a black hole. The ones who actually find something become filthy rich.
? nope, sorry, I just dazed out after discovering a bunch of commented out unit tests in a bunch of code I was looking at.
That said, since @trogdor was lamenting Deponia to not being about ponies, maybe he should try My Little Investigation. Which I never actually played but should basically be Ace Attorney with ponies.
@trogdor actually, I've never seen your profile picture big enough to know that it was indeed a pony, and I knew what Deponia is so there was little chance of me confusing it :P
I had not played practically at all for the last year and a half, and rather lazily for a year before that. I was really worried I'd have to learn pieces from scratch
Muscle memory still knows how to do this though, and I think spending some time away has actually made it easier for me to play from the notes instead of just muscle memory
TIL room operators can only move messages from one public space to another public space, so things that really need to just go away can't be fully removed from the public eye except by diamond moderators. That seems bad.
> GM: Uncle, would you say your gang is more your hunting pack or more your enforcers? > Uncle's player: Are those my only choices? How about they're loyal, good-hearted, upright boy scouts? > GM: Oh, so like, a cult? That's cool.
It has that emotional-affirmation-without-simplification thing that Steven Universe does so well, where everyone wears their hearts on their sleeves and is supportive of each other without that making the social conflicts contrived or meaningless.
It's also got a learning-life-skills component, because scouts and badges.
And a solid dose of dangerous-but-beautiful wild magic.
I just started reading ORUN so I'm thinking that its "paths" advancement mechanic might be in order.
In ORUN, your Auras each have a list of experiences associated with that quality (one of Grace's trials is losing an important contest; one of War's trials is forging a peace treaty to stop a conflict). When you've met a certain number of an Aura's trials, you gain a point in that Aura.
And your Skills do the same, but instead of narrative keys a Skill's trials are just when you fail a task with that Skill.
There's also a provision for players to reward each other with trials during play.
I figure badges can be like Auras, with particular narrative keys you need to hit and then you get bonuses to things once you've hit enough of those keys.
The rest of ORUN can get tossed, though. Overcomplicated for no particular reason.
You play as the troubleshooting emissaries of beings who achieved apotheosis long ago, and your purpose is to help nudge civilization back towards enlightenment.
@BESW The Mauna Kea cows, in 5e, would have advantage on their Stealth/Hide checks ... even when moving. Thankfully, they are not polearm wielding cows as found in Diablo II ... 8^o
It's a two-column skill system (I like those!) so you start by examining the narrative of your character's situation to identify both the Aura and Skill you're bringing to bear on the action. Add together the numbers for those two qualities.
Then the GM determines a situational modifier which is added or subtracted from your total based on the context.
Then you need to check for two or three other kinds of potential bonuses and add them.
THEN you add that total to a 2d10 roll and check that total against a chart, which may tell you that you need to negotiate with the GM to determine which of multiple outcomes will actually occur.
> Two Column Fate basically uses two lists of skills, approaches or similar. When it comes time to make a roll, the character takes one from column A and one from Column B, totals them up and makes the roll. Structurally, this is very similar to a classic “Stat + Skill” model, and it could be used for that, but the real utility of this model is to handle much more interesting cases.
In ORUN, the two columns are Aura and Skill: Auras are Grace, Harmony, Light, Spirit, and War; Skills are Adapt, Covert, Culture, Entertain, Inspect, Interface, Learning, Motion, Medic, Rapport, Repair, and Weapons.
@kviiri I am certain that from the number of people who have run LMoP, and who participate here, at least one has run into this situation and can offer "here's how it worked out."
Basically most traditional RPGs define actions through "how good you are at doing <certain thing X>". Eg. in DnD 5e, for instance, to persuade someone you have a Persuasion skill and a Charisma modifier
Fate Accelerated (and to a much lesser extent, Apocalypse World) instead rank characters by their abilities to engage in certain kinds of actions, broader families
Eg. a character can be good at doing things Forcefully in Fate Accelerated, but bad at doing them Quickly.
Accelerated's "approaches" mechanic trades out the "What things are you good at doing?" (Athletics, Intimidation, Lore) question for the question "How are you good at doing things?" (Forcefully, Quickly, Flashily)
Having both approaches for "how" and skills/disciplines would intuitively allow for a lot more nuance than either side alone, without making the rules much more complex
@Helwar In Fate, everything's run on ranked Approaches or Skills, and then your character has stunts (kinda like feats) which give extra bonuses in specific situations.
