TRPG General Chat

12:09 AM

Game Design 1o1 by erhonlime. This is a set of rules for designing games / A set of rules is a game / This is a game for designing games

2

Dee Pennyway wrote a twitter thread about "Why is Mnemonic anti-canon” and "why the anti-canon approach is important to me."

Sent to Die by Ajey Pandey. An OSR funnel about soldiers in a dungeon.

Joshua

I decided a heavy water well is not fair.

user15026

@trogdor grins indeed :D

BESW

If you back Indigi-Show 2020: A Modern Indigenous Art Convention: Sandy Pug Games will give you a free copy of anything on their Itch page; and Ajey Pandey will give you Bolt, the Mage Pack, and Weapons Trained At Gods.

Shalvenay

@Joshua LOL

BESW

12:27 AM

Free TTRPG stuff for backing Indigi-Show 2020: A Modern Indigenous Art Convention: Sandy Pug Games; Ajay Pandey; Loot the Room

3

Max Kämmerer made an online play aid for Wanderhome (free playkit version) by Jay Dragon.

"Guard vs AC and Health" by Orion D. Black. "This is a loose design idea to fix specific issues with D&D's combat system."

trogdor

12:49 AM

@Ash XD

Bardic Wizard

1:03 AM

Anyone want to hear a funny story? It’s from a recent session of one of my gaming sessions

MikeQ

I want to hear one or more funny stories.

Bardic Wizard

So we’re breaking an NPC contact of mine, loosely based and named after John Wellington Wells from The Sorcerer (because My character has about a million false identities named and based off of G&S female characters), out of jail (long story why he’s even in there), and everyone with a bone to pick with him picked the same day to come break him out (us), kill him (probably, some drones with missiles), or recapture him (dude with a shotgun, SFPD officers, and FAI officers).

This is a long one, by the way

Joshua

(was afk) Is bardic going to finish?

Bardic Wizard

Before the session, I text the GM that my paranoid sorcerer with a tongue of rubber (look, I sing patter, so does she) has a code phrase with JWW.

@Joshua I am. It’ll take a while cause one message will be too long

BESW

1:19 AM

@BardicWizard You can get a lot more wordcount if you use shift+enter to force a line break, but the tradeoff is it makes most markdown fail.

Upcoming Kickstarter: Arium RPG by Adept Icarus. "The game is centered around collaboratively building your setting and even some of the npcs before play."

Hot RPG Questions

4

Q: Can I use Holy Water for an "additional weapon attack"?

With my 3rd level Gloomstalker, can I make a regular attack and then use Holy Water for my Dread Ambusher additional attack? The crux of the issue is the description of Holy Water and Improvised Weapons, where it's unclear if the Holy Water can count as a weapon. The weapon in my other hand is a ...

Bardic Wizard

Given that her entire goal is to be “more paranoid than everyone else”, it’s something only the two of them know about, compounded by the fact that he only knows her in her identity as Gianetta Gondolieri (one guess where that’s from), means that nobody in the session actually knows what’s up when I sing out the first verse of My Eyes Are Fully Open, from Ruddygore, at the top of my lungs as my action during combat.

@BESW I’m on mobile. It won’t let me do it

Bardic Wizard

1:35 AM

No response. And then when we find him, the artificer (yes that one) says “we came to break you out because Fiametta said she needed to save you”. He’s confused, and says “I don’t know any Fiametta”. I show up, having cast disguise self, and start singing, again. JWW sings back the first verse of My Name is John Wellington Wells from the Sorcerer (well, the GM just says it fast, but still).

The party just looks at me, and I feel justified in putting all my proficiencies into stuff that makes me good at duping people. And then the GM and I laugh.

I am so proud of myself

MikeQ

I don't get the joke. Is it that your character is a sorcerer? I'm not too familiar with Gilbert & Sullivan so a lot of this is going over my head.

Bardic Wizard

Pretty much, a sorcerer singing the sorcerer. Sorry. It’s one of those things that sounded better in my head

Joshua

1:55 AM

Shrink item used to be much more powerful. I had the brilliant idea to double-shrink (casting shrink item on an already shrunken item) a bunch of marble blocks to little cubes and set all their command words to Kaaaaa. Idea was to polymorph self into a giant eagle, fly about a mile over the battlefield carrying them (probably in a little sack) and give the command word. The damage is stupid huge for such low-level spells.

Bardic Wizard

@Joshua nice

Joshua

2:29 AM

Saw someone willing to fight Demogorgon a second time for the privilege of naming him Jackass.

Hot RPG Questions

5:29 AM

5

Q: Mechanically Speaking, What is the Best Alignment for a Cleric?

So I for a while now I've thought that from a purely mechanical standpoint true neutral is the best alignment as a cleric; you can worship any deity because they will always be within 1 step; similarly, with aligned spells you are not restricted so long as you either worship a concept or have a t...

pathfinder-1e optimization alignment

BESW

@HotRPGQuestions North.

Bardic Wizard

5:50 AM

@HotRPGQuestions Tomato hair summer... I mean chaotic.

BESW

The idea that neutrality is a lack of stance, rather than a stance in itself, galls.

Yuuki

6:13 AM

@BESW What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

kviiri

7:42 AM

Neutral is "good but with trees and such"

BESW

@kviiri I just watched SF Debris's uncharacteristically vitriolic "review" of Jurassic Park II, and a major sticking point with him was how the designated heroes were defined by that exact quality despite it being obvious nonsense.

kviiri

@BESW I haven't seen that but I can believe it x)

Adeptus

> You're semi-evil. You're quasi-evil. You're the margarine of evil. You're the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough.

kviiri

That sounds something like it could be from Undertale

Adeptus

My quote? It's from Austin Powers 2

kviiri

7:47 AM

Yea x)

There's this old roguelike with uncharacteristically heavy CRPG elements, Omega, that has a lot of alignment restriction stuff like "you can't join the Thieves' Guild until Chaotic" and "you have to be sufficiently Neutral to be a Druid"

BESW

Generally speaking "do nothing neutrality" is an active endorsement of the status quo, which in most worlds is definitely an Evil choice to make. JPII's version is extra infuriating because they basically took "the T-Rex won't kill you if you don't move" and turned it into a virtuous life philosophy.

kviiri

Which is funny 'cause Druids wind up... accumulating lots of faux-karma that way. Keeping things in balance is a lot of work and usually involves doing lots of micro-corrections. Or I'd believe it does, since I haven't ever played a lot of Omega.

Maybe it gets easier later on

The game's a real heartbreaker, I tell you that. I dare you to try it, it's open-source and everything. It's clearly a labor of love and bottomless enthusiasm for many things, but a very shoddy game in terms of... y'know. Actually playing.

Other roguelikes, perhaps most significantly ADOM, took pages off its book while sticking closer to the core gameplay mechanics, which makes them much better to play. But in cutting away the excess, it's of course not quite the same

V2Blast

I've totally forgotten Jurassic Park II... I think I watched it, anyway

kviiri

I've never REALLY seen Jurassic Park 1 either. But popular culture osmosis does its trick well

Nature uh finds a way

Adeptus

ha

BESW

7:59 AM

@V2Blast If you remember it, you remember one of these three things: the T-Rex rampaging in San Diego; the scene where they hunt dinosaurs from trucks with lots of advanced equipment; the bit where two fully stocked camper vans fall around three people dangling from a rope inside them without anyone getting a scratch.

kviiri

in this case, nature uh found a way for the quotable bits to propagate despite me never seeing it

kviiri

8:10 AM

I've also never seen E.T. and until a few years back, Star Wars

doppelgreener

9:42 AM

So given yesterday's short discussion about how D&D's faux polytheism-but-actually-exclusionary-monotheism, I got to wondering: what RPGs handle polytheism mattering but as actual authentic polytheism? As in, at a basic level, characters believe in a pantheon, turn to different gods for different things (nobody turns to Athena for a good harvest or Demeter for luck in battle), and may have specific gods they follow because of their path in life but not to the exclusion/disbelief of all others.

trogdor

Great Ork Gods (sorry) XD

Carcer

@doppelgreener I mean, the Forgotten Realms has that, as described - it's only the actual divine servants of deities who devote themselves exclusively to a single god

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@doppelgreener Exalted? Trying to only follow a single specific god in Exalted is . . . probably outright impossible even if one wanted to.

doppelgreener

@trogdor you're right!

Carcer

the setting is pretty clear that, for instance, your common farmer probably takes chauntea or someone like that as their patron but they will make prayers and offerings to any other gods as and when their portfolios are relevant

trogdor

9:53 AM

I mean, it's actually disapointingly better at being Polytheism than D&D XD

or at least IMO

BESW

@doppelgreener There's plenty of games made by people from religious backgrounds with multiple divinities.

trogdor

I don't think Great Ork Gods is an actual like, good example of polytheism though

BESW

Several of the games I've linked here are rooted in various South-East Asian faith structures, by people from those cultures. Filipino TRPG dev culture, in particular, draws heavily on pre-colonial Filipino cultures for their own fantasy settings.

doppelgreener

@BESW Mainly I'm asking because I'm interested in how RPGs have handled it to the extent of it mattering beyond a background detail.

BESW

(Diwata ng Manila calls themself diwata for a reason!)

doppelgreener

10:00 AM

Forgotten Realms might have polytheism, but it doesn't surface in D&D's game design, and it's fairly common that it's conditioned players to operate with monotheism or allowed them to do so without conditioning them otherwise.

MikeQ

WoD: Scion? It uses real-world mythos and pantheons.

doppelgreener

13th Age also has multiple significant figures (I don't remember what they're called), but they're not deities so much as just powerful figures with whom you may have some kind of positive or negative relationship.

BESW

I haven't delved into most of the games enough to know how much such things manifest explicitly in the game design, but...

Carcer

@doppelgreener sure, with few exceptions your character's religious affiliations have no mechanical significance unless you are a divinely empowered class of somekind where singular devotion is expected

BESW

Jul 7 at 7:17, by BESW

At PercyPropa's request, Pammu wrote a twitter thread of indie Filipino games and creators for people to check out and follow.

doppelgreener

10:02 AM

@MikeQ Does it mechanise the character's relationship with a pantheon?

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@MikeQ Wait, Scion is becoming part of WoD now? I thought it's standalone.

Carcer

does Warhammer/40K's Chaos Undivided count?

MikeQ

@doppelgreener IIRC they're called "Icons", and they're presented in a way that doesn't make big absolute statements about how divinity works

BESW

A lot of the people on that list are doing SWORDDREAM RPGSEA stuff rooted in their Indigenous cultures.

kviiri

I think DnD 4e and maybe 5e too pay lip service to polytheism, something like "Usually people worship more than one god, and depending on circumstance" but it's not like the game didn't have plenty of opposite reinforcement too.

MikeQ

10:03 AM

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I don't know the legal status. All I know is that Scion is built on the White Wolf / World of Darkness system.

kviiri

For example in 4e, Clerics worship a single god, period, and even the character sheet has a single short field labeled "Deity" because you have one.

One.

BESW

Buko Juice Games in particular faces the Filipino supernatural head-on.

doppelgreener

@BESW Noice!

MikeQ

@doppelgreener It's been a while. Player characters have a patron deity, as they're literally the scion of said deity, but they also get stuff from that deity's pantheon.

kviiri

Another aspect of religious diversity commonly missing from TRPGs is that the same god can have a variety of religions associated with them

BESW

10:05 AM

And then stuff like Karanduun is. I mean.

trogdor

@doppelgreener do you mean the Icons?

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@MikeQ Ah, in the sense of being a system derivative. Speaking of WoD, polytheism also seems to work in MtA, largely because anything works in MtA, and thus of course some of the mages' paradigms are that they call onto a pantheon of gods for different kinds of help.

doppelgreener

@trogdor i do :D Mike also mentioned this

BESW

Or check out Maharilaka by the same creator?

trogdor

yeah I saw that after I typed it XD

doppelgreener

10:06 AM

@BESW Gosh, that gave me some goosebumps reading the description. I like that.

BESW

Tampalasan is Filipino OSR sword-and-spear but I don't know how much it mechanizes divinity.

You might consider Astounding Tales and the Gods who Sing Them, it's a Filipino game about being a god that nobody pays attention to anymore.

doppelgreener

@kviiri Good call. Like the Abrahamic God is at the center of many different faiths: Islam, Judiasm, Christianity, Bábism, and the Baháʼí Faith to name just the ones I know of. (And then several of these have significant divisions: Christianity has Catholicism, various forms of Protestantism, and once upon a time Catharism.)

BESW

And Jamila is a powerhouse of games about intimate relationships with the non-mundane, from risking your own ties to the past in order to plead with the Spirits of the Forest in We Forest Three, to reclaiming colonized spirituality in Balikbayan.

kviiri

@doppelgreener Yea! And yeah, with Catharism and other extinct denominations it gets even weirder. IIRC the Cathars were a part of a continuum of Christian-Gnostic movements that basically believed in the Abrahamic God being the Evil Demiurge, the creator of the material world (with Christ being sent or adopted by the Good Demiurge, the creator of the spiritual world)

And while the "creator of the world" bit is easily agreed on between both sides, they have very distinct perspectives on what that means... I wish this kind of nuance was in fiction more often

doppelgreener

So far from what I've scraped together, we've got:
- The character picks a pantheon as well as a deity they're the genuine descendent of (Scion) and receives benefits according to both these choices.
- The players have various positive/negative relationships with various deities (Great Ork Gods) or pseudo-deities (13th Age)
- You *are* gods, plural (Astounding Tales)
- The game is fundamentally *about* dealing with the multiple gods of a pantheon, whether you're assisting them, fighting them, fighting for them, or working to revive them.

BESW

10:18 AM

Or, have you seen Ehdrigohr? It's a Fate Core game by a Black Lakotah dev.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Gods and Monsters has PCs as gods that are part of a pantheon . . . and that can change depending on various things, like personal actions, or how other gods manipulate one's followers.

doppelgreener

I am not sure how much those games in the last bullet point mechanise polytheism, but they at least present gameplay wherein monotheism wouldn't make any sense.

MikeQ

Yeah, the bullet point about setting is kind of iffy, otherwise we could count Theros despite being D&D

BESW

In a lot of cases I think the more accurate a game is in depicting a person's relationship with a multitudinous conception of divinity, the harder it will be to recognize whether it has any mechanics specifically dealing with divinity.

It's been my personal experience and my learning through texts and conversations, that a lot of ways of interacting with divinity don't make a lot of distinction between the divine and the mundane in a way that would make sense to separate mechanically.

doppelgreener

@BESW Sure. For example, a game authentically representing Christianity wouldn't have anyone deriving any magical powers from their faith, because it doesn't work that way, and it would not have literal physical demons either.

MikeQ

10:24 AM

That makes sense. If a deity supposedly has domain/influence over particular things, then mundane things of that type would be part of said influence.

BESW

Or "domain" isn't really a relephant concept. Supernatural beings can be.... neighbours.

MikeQ

Domain, dominion, influence, etc. (Maybe I'm missing the point?)

BESW

I'm gonna DM you a twitter thread in Discord, @doppelgreener . It's maybe a bit too personal a thing to add directly to this so-far-very-abstract conversation.

@MikeQ Not every god is the god of something.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

Hmm . . . the topic of influences/domains/&c. reminded me of Nobilis - another one of those 'PCs are deities in a pantheon' games.

doppelgreener

Basically the thing driving this question is that D&D makes theism matter, but in the worst way available within its own conceit—it gives people a setting that's ostensibly polytheistic but in various ways conditions players to operate on monotheism rather than celebrate the existence of a pantheon, and mechanically the only players to whom their diety truly matters are characters who are expected to be singular in their devotion.

And it got me wondering what games could do to actually have polytheism and actually make the polytheism itself matter, without letting players, even by accident, go "yeah so I just worship this one god and none of the others play any meaningful part in my life ever".

Or multitheism!

BESW

10:31 AM

I've spoken at length in the past about my ideas for an as-accurate-as-possible political thriller fantasy campaign in Egypt circa 1455 BC.

It boils down to "treat them like relationships in Bubblegumshoe."

doppelgreener

@BESW That would be rad.

BESW

In many faiths, spirituality is not separate from daily life, and spiritual beings are not separate from earthly existence. Belief is not an issue, that's like asking "Do you believe in your neighbour?" It's how you treat your neighbour that matters, and ignoring them doesn't make them ignore you.

Whether that's a diwa, or a Taotaomo'na, or mąʼii, a lot of the basic principles of respect and coexistence apply.

@doppelgreener I probably wouldn't even have a separate pool of relationship dice for Egyptian deities vs Egyptian humans. The only difference would be the narrative justification for what your relationship points do when you spend them, and what happens when you run low on them.

kviiri

Another common religion misconception is that all religious law/tradition is moral in nature

AncientSwordRage

This whole conversation is rad, an it's reminded me of a question I wanted to ask about Theros

BESW

@kviiri heh. That one is very clearly explicated in my faith's texts.

kviiri

10:44 AM

(or, as a related but distinct point, that all religious law/tradition is intended to apply to everyone)

BESW

@kviiri Hah yes, that too.

kviiri

@BESW Baha'i has... urgh, apologies for the lack of a better word, but "grandfather clauses" accepting religions preceding it, yes?

BESW

Heh, that's one way to look at it.

We believe that God sends Messengers to humanity periodically, to guide and inspire us, and that as humanity's capacity advances the nature of the Message changes to meet the needs of the time to which its Messenger comes. So religions are different in specifics but the Source is always the same. But further discussion of that would probably be better carried on somewhere that's opt-in.

doppelgreener

11:02 AM

@BESW Yeah, that's a good call.

@AncientSwordRage :D

kviiri

@BESW That makes sense

BESW

11:19 AM

BTW @doppelgreener:

Sep 2 '19 at 4:50, by BESW

"Best Practices for Religious Representation, Part I: Check for Traps," by James Mendez Hodes.

"Did you miss out on backing Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall? You can still late-pledge for this awesome game!"

The Llama and the Farmer by Mitchell Salmon. A supplement for The Sol Survivor about the bond formed between a peasant and a talking animal ruler.

Setting Sun Jam Hosted by Sivad's Sanctum. In the Light of a Setting Sun is a rules-lite tabletop role playing game of wild west adventure and shenanigans. Originally a hack of Nate Treme's In the Light of a Ghost Star, Setting Sun has since grown into its own beast. Got an adventure idea? Hacks? Zines? Weird supplements that no one asked for? Well, saddle up and hit the open range, pardner! Devour Setting Sun and see what comes out on the other side!

Jennifer Kretchmer made a compilation of Accessibility in Tabletop Resources (Google Drive link).

Thomas Markov

12:22 PM

@AncientSwordRage answered your theros question

BESW

historical prop: "Blank Bertillon Fingerprint Card" by Setheus (blogspot link to explanation with GDoc link to printable PDF)

RevenantBacon

@BESW So I read this article, and overall, I'm not exactly impressed.

It seems to come from the position that people are, in general, stupid, and don't have the ability to separate fictional religions that someone made up for a game with real religions

> In a system in which magicians can trap souls in crystals, do single-soul and multiple-soul models function differently? Can you support all of them, or must you negate someone’s worldview?

Like, what?

BESW

Given that the author has professional experience with exactly that subject and has written extensively about his experiences with people's prejudices at the table, I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not making wild leaps of bad faith.

Or I could point out that he clearly does think people have that capacity, or he wouldn't be writing the articles in the first place--but many people aren't realizing that capacity, which is born out through my own personal experience as well as the accounts of many of my friends and acquaintances, and people on this very site.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@RevenantBacon Probably depends on the setting's cosmology. Presumably in a setting with soul-capturing, souls do exist. The question becomes whether in this hypothetical setting multi-soul entities exist or not.

RevenantBacon

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica No, my point was that he seems to be saying that if it works in a particular way in the game, that could "negate someones worldview" in real life. That's the thing that has me ... confused I guess you could say

BESW

12:34 PM

Ah. It sounds like you haven't read the material he pointed toward at the beginning, as an assumed foundation for the article.

RevenantBacon

@BESW The historical practices article?

Carcer

@RevenantBacon without reading, I suspect the argument might be to do with the fact that people with some spiritual beliefs are used to them being completely ignored or invalidated by default in tabletop games

BESW

But even within that article, I feel like he makes it quite clear. A single-soul cosmology is not fictional.

Defaulting to a single-soul cosmology in game design privileges a particular real-life religions paradigm as the default/normal/assumed way things are for the target audience.

Fiction is not independent of real-world context.

Any argument that begins and ends with "but people know fiction isn't real" is rooted in a denial that fiction emerges from and returns to real people.

2

@Carcer Got it in one.

AncientSwordRage

@ThomasMarkov thanks, will read in a minute

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

@RevenantBacon Well, unless a setting's cosmology is MtA-ish 'everything is true and nothing is' (and in a way even then!), an in-setting comsology will conflict with someone's real-life view. There are game settings with single-soul, multi-soul, no-soul, soul-agnostic, and MtA-ish-everything-is-true cosmologies. Each one of them will make some of the outside-world views untrue in-setting.

RevenantBacon

12:40 PM

So, as a person who's religious beliefs are generally not represented in TTRPG's, I can say that those same beliefs not being represented in games has not, literally even, made me feel invalidated as a real person in real life

BESW

Excellent! You are not everyone.

Thomas Markov

To be frank, there's even intrafaith debate within Judeo-Christian theology about single-soul cosmology.

BESW

Plenty of people have written a Very Great Deal about this subject and they do not demand that you share their experiences, but it would be reasonable to believe them when they talk about their own experiences.

Also. You seem to be reading a h*ckuvalot into "negate someone's worldview." In the context of that paragraph it is NOT making the claim you're attributing to it.

RevenantBacon

I'm not saying people haven't experienced/perceived things in particular ways, I'm just not understanding why the experience came out in that way

BESW

I mean. You kinda are saying that even if you don't mean to, what with saying that it's "stupid" to have that experience.

There's a ton of resources available on the subject if you want to learn more about it.

MikeQ

12:47 PM

It could help to look at it as another barrier of entry. If the game tends to mirror the worldview of people A but not people B, then those parts of the game could be intuitive to player A but not for player B, and result in some disconnect when those parts come up.

4

BESW

But if you continue to first assume that perspectives you don't immediately understand are stupid or bad faith, I'm not sure what reading more is gonna do.

@MikeQ Yeah, Hodes talks about this. a lot.

kviiri

Even if not a barrier for entry, it's a shame if a topic of such diversity and nuance as religion gets consistently neglected in the major franchises of gaming

BESW

There's all kinds of interviews and essays, many of which I've linked here, from people of various marginalizations--race, queerness, (dis)ability, class--talking about the experience of loving a hobby that doesn't love you back.

> How does your fiction’s cosmology hold up if different individuals think of souls in different ways? In a system in which magicians can trap souls in crystals, do single-soul and multiple-soul models function differently? Can you support all of them, or must you negate someone’s worldview? Are you okay with that?

This is not actually saying that real-life beliefs are being negated. It is saying that by using a universally single-soul cosmology games like D&D negate alternative conceptions of the soul within their own fictional setting. It reifies a world in which only one conception of the soul can be true: in this setting one religion is right and all others are wrong or simply do not exist.

RevenantBacon

To paraphrase, the base statement is: "It doesn't reinforce my worldview, so it must hate me", correct?

BESW

And he's pointing out earlier in the paragraph that such a setting is reifying a particular real-world conception of the soul, a conception which is already dominant and default and often ignores other faiths.

@RevenantBacon No.

vicky_molokh- unsilence Monica

1:00 PM

@RevenantBacon That seems like a harsh way of putting it.

BESW

That's a gross oversimplification to the point of uselessness.

RevenantBacon

> There's all kinds of interviews and essays, many of which I've linked here, from people of various marginalizations--race, queerness, (dis)ability, class-- talking about the experience of loving a hobby that doesn't love you back.

But it really seems like that's the argument being made

BESW

So the only alternative to love is hate?

I'm too tired and grumpy to continue a conversation that keeps leaping to the most extremely uncharitable interpretations of an intersectional, multifaceted experience that literally cannot be reduced to a pithy slogan because it is shared by such a broad, diverse set of people. And I'm barely the voice of any of those people, so I urge you to read what they have to say.

Thomas Markov

@BESW To be fair, players interact with the ficitonal cosmology using a different set of epistemological tools than they do with the real world. We usually approach ficitonal worlds from the top down, being told what is objectively true about that world's cosmology. In contrast, our real-world epistemological tool kit is bottoms-up; we observe and conclude based on what we understand about the world around us.

2

What is missing from the religious sociology of D&D is in-universe widespread disbelief of what the players know to be objectively true about the setting.

BESW

@ThomasMarkov While true as far as it goes, you're approaching faith from a scientific stance and that's not gonna hold up in practice--which is one of the problems with the D&D approach, really.

Thomas Markov

1:06 PM

The difficulty here is symptomatic of the general difficulty about role-playing games: separating a player's meta-knowledge from the player character's universe knowledge. It's far more difficult for me to roleplay a character that fundamentally disagrees with what I as a player know to be objectively true about a setting's cosmology.

kviiri

@ThomasMarkov Are you talking about the fact that it's hard to present struggles of faith in a setting where clerics who regularly perform miracles with the power bestowed by gods?

BESW

Neither I nor any group of mine has ever found meta-knowledge to be a struggle except when we used its avoidance as a justification for poor communication.

Thomas Markov

If a particular setting actually did the work to normalize this fundamental disagreement with objective setting properties, I think it would be easier.

BESW

The value of "don't metagame" is alien to my experience.

Thomas Markov

And to quote you: "Excellent! You are not everyone."

BESW

1:08 PM

@ThomasMarkov Or. It could choose to make certain setting properties non-objective.

Thomas Markov

@BESW This would be really interesting. I'd like to see a D&D setting taken in this direction, but I doubt it will happen, objective knowledge is, at this point, a staple of their setting-building model.

kviiri

Or "fact" – I think it being hard is in part due to the very construction where religions are structured as a mish-mash of monotheistic and polytheistic tropes without fully understanding either

BESW

@ThomasMarkov Right! But it's not a general difficulty of TTRPGs, it's sequestered in a subset of a subset of playstyles. Outside of rpg.se I haven't even talked about it with people online for years.

@ThomasMarkov 4e did it.

Not to the extent I would have liked, but they very much did embrace the non-objective nature of any truth outside a combat block, and outside PCs even that was only guaranteed to be true for the duration of the current combat.

kviiri

Ahh, 4e. The rejected savior.

AncientSwordRage

Someone needs to fork 4e like 3.5 did into PF

BESW

1:12 PM

The exact same NPC could be statted with NPC rules, minion rules, boss rules, depending on their role in the story as expressed through that moment's combat scene.

Plenty of systems since have taken the notion even further. We talked about anti-canon recently.

kviiri

@AncientSwordRage 13th Age is something like that. It draws a lot of non-4e inspirations, but the design philosophy is practically gushing with 4e-ish innovations

BESW

At the end of the day I have little interest in rehabilitating D&D of any sort, only picking its bloated undead cadaver for interesting spare parts.

kviiri

One of my favorite parts about it, compared to 4e, is that it actually bothers to explain that "yes, this may seem weird to you but it is indeed completely intentional and here's why we did it". (That's a property I generally love in RPG rule texts)

Thomas Markov

@BESW It's worked well enough for me in real life, and I'm just trying to bring my real world experiences to the table of gaming like everyone else.

BESW

@kviiri I'm trying to work that in my own designs more!

Really struggling with Walkies With Grim though.

Deadline's coming up!

I need to rubber-duck it but I've never been able to actually use a rubber duck, I always need to talk to an Actual Person.

kviiri

1:18 PM

4e had solid ideas, but as is usual with DnD, they're presented in a matter-of-fact fashion without feeling the need for much explanation (there are occasional exceptions, but in general the rule texts are more concerned with what than why). But even as a skilled player, I feel such explanations bring considerable value. They teach us what experience the designers wanted and arm us to make the changes that fulfill the experience better (or change the course towards an experience we want).

BESW

Gosh yes.

kviiri

I think it even makes us better players, because it hints at things to be aware of.

BESW

Though at the same time, I keep trying to imagine an Annotated Goblin Court and I think it would destroy a lot of the game's purpose.

kviiri

Heh x)

BESW

Part of what makes Goblin Court work is that I left a lot of things unsaid because I don't want to reify them.

Several parts of Goblin Court are defined by the spaces I've made but didn't fill, for the players to fill in or not. Even if I call attention to those spaces and tell players that's where they can fill things in, it will call attention to the darker themes underlying the game and break the whimsy which keeps it from being too grim.

(It would also have a strong potential for nailing down what the themes are, which would immediately make the game didactic and also wrong. By implying its allegory I let people make it as relevant to themselves as they're comfortable.)

On the other hand I feel like Traveling Librarians would benefit from being as transparent as possible.

@kviiri Going back to 4e for a moment, there's an unintentionally revealing section where they pull back the curtain a moment and explain their thinking about skill challenges in the DMG. But the math is exactly backwards to their intent.

doppelgreener

1:29 PM

@BESW I remember that being described by someone as an anti-canon method of conveying the setting. Forgotten Realms is a setting with strict canon: these are all the events that have happened, these are the people and powers that were involved, here's why they happened, here's the state of things, here's everyone's beliefs, all nailed down and very exactly specified. If you want to add or change anything, you're semi-obligated to develop a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the setting.

BESW

Because they revealed their intent, though, several people were able to develop much better home brew variants which accomplished the actual goals.

doppelgreener

An anti-canon setting like D&D 4e's Points of Light says "Here's the basics you have to know! Here's some general ideas! Go!" and if you want to add or change things, go right ahead, since all the records we do know are subjective and very likely partly or entirely wrong anyway.

It's not as far as an anti-canon setting can go, but it's pretty far in that direction.

But it means you're under no obligation whatsoever to know basically anything about the setting in order to develop on it. You can just go hog wild introducing whatever you want to wherever at whatever point in the timeline, and since all knowledge of the world is basically subjective stories handed down, hearsay, and guesses, there's no canon for someone to say "Hey! That didn't happen at that point in the world! What really happened was ..."

BESW

What makes it anti-canon at all, in my mind, is that it goes one step beyond "you can change things if you choose" into "you must choose to change things because we have given you internal contradictions to resolve."

doppelgreener

@BESW Oh, yes, this

BESW

Or--you can be at peace with ambiguities in the setting.

doppelgreener

1:34 PM

Like it's not "here's a single coherent account of the world, available for modification", from which any deviation is, you know, a deviation from the norm. Instead 4e gives you multiple contradicting accounts for any significant part of the setting. Everything has at least three stories and not all of them can be true. There's no "true" version of the story to be had, there's only your game's version of the story.

If it did present a single coherent account of the world, we'd be in the same realm of canon as Forgotten Realms.

BESW

Jun 2 '16 at 2:27, by BESW

Just like Nerath collapsed anywhere from a few decades to a few hundred years ago, and Arkhosia and Bael Turath may have been a few hundred or a few thousand years ago.

doppelgreener

That is also a nice part. It can go totally unanswered, and characters in the world can have arguments about what really happened.

BESW

> An obscure legend claims that when Corellon put out Gruumsh’s eye in a primeval battle, part of the savage god’s essence fell to earth, where it transformed a race of humans into fierce half-orcs.
Another story suggests that an ancient hobgoblin empire created half-orcs to lead orc tribes on the empire’s behalf.
Yet another legend claims that a tribe of brutal human barbarians chose to breed with orcs to strengthen their bloodline.
Some say that Kord created half-orcs, copying the best elements from the human and orc races to make a strong and fierce people after his own heart.

doppelgreener

And for any table that hasn't actually read about Nerath or Bael Turath or Arkhosia, they do not have to know or care. The world is not even a little bit lesser for coming up with your own account of how things got the way they are now.

BESW

(That's the very first non-mechanical paragraph of the half-orc PC page. Is it still gross? Yes. But it's a brilliant example of letting ambiguity settle on your setting like a fine sifting of confectioner's sugar.)

doppelgreener

1:38 PM

@BESW I appreciate you articulating this, also.

BESW

I set my 4e campaign during the war between Arkhosia and Bael Turath, which (as above) is in the distant past of the setting's materials. So I spent two years with my nose deep into the way 4e communicated its lore.

And the freedom that gave me, to have all these delicious prompts so I didn't have to start from scratch, but to be able to pick and choose, use, discard, revise, as I chose, was a great stepping-stone into the kinds of Fate campaigns I'd run in the future.

I probably wouldn't have ever thought to stat up Director Parrish as pure ambiguity if I hadn't spent that time with 4e's approach to lore.

KorvinStarmast

@doppelgreener Not sure how 'authentic' it was but MAR Barker's polytheism (two pantheons of five deities each) for Empire of the Petal Throne worked out well and gave shape to how divine beings directly interacted with the world. He borrowed ideas from a lot of different sources. In that respect it was a little bit of a mish mash.

doppelgreener

@KorvinStarmast Thank you!

BESW

In a Fate campaign, I had a mysterious director of a supernatural organization, and all her mode aspects were phrased as rumors. For example, her BANTER aspect was "I think she can read minds" and her SECRET AGENT aspect was "They say she can turn invisible".

doppelgreener

@BESW I remember this and I enjoyed the way you handled her characterisation.

KorvinStarmast

1:45 PM

@doppelgreener As ever, glad to be of some small service. Hope all's well on your side of the pond. We just missed being in the cone for the tandem of tropical storms heading into the Gulf (one of which is going to be a hurricane by the time it hits Louisiana).

doppelgreener

@KorvinStarmast I am about to have (possibly up to) gale force winds tomorrow and the day after so here's hoping it doesn't cause any problems with one of my outer doors not closing properly right now...

BESW

@doppelgreener [grin] She was fun to play. And also almost completely lifted from C. C. H. Pounder's "Warehouse 13" character Mrs. Frederic.

Bardic Wizard

@BESW did that ambiguity come into the game? Did the players see it? And if so did they like the ambiguity?

doppelgreener

@BardicWizard I am one of the players (alongside @trogdor) and we enjoyed it. I think we actually contributed a rumor each.

BESW

@BardicWizard It was never a major focus, but the mysterious nature of their new director and the question of whether she had any unknown loyalties was something everyone chose as part of the campaign-building session at the start. If the campaign had continued longer we might have eventually focused on her more.

Bardic Wizard

1:50 PM

That sounds like a fun way to construct a character. Did there ever turn out to be a single “true” description?

BESW

As it was, we had this character sheet when she came with us in the field for a mission once.

doppelgreener

We were part of a clandestine organisation that existed to handle and contain Weird stuff in the world. Naturally, whoever was running the show had to be pretty special. The Director being defined almost entirely by rumors meant we didn't actually know 100% what her deal was, and leant mystery and power to her position. We had a minimum bar for how awesome and kickass she was, but no maximum.

@BardicWizard Never

BESW

I used that character sheet to play Director Parrish on an adventure when someone else was GMing. (we shared the GM role; anybody who had an adventure they wanted to run for a couple sessions would do so.)

Bardic Wizard

That sounds super cool.

BESW

And as you can see, I specifically chose all her abilities to maximize the "how did she do that" ness.

> I’LL HOLD THEM OFF. Once per session Parrish can spend a fate point and remove herself from the scene in order to prevent an imminent threat from appearing in that scene.

Heroic Awesomeness Just Off Screen was a specialty.

doppelgreener

1:54 PM

As it was, we spent the first arc of the story without paying special attention to exploring who Parrish was yet. The second arc was spent on a moon drifting through the solar system. Soon into the third arc, we had some major changes happen in our group, so the game got put on ice indefinitely.

At the beginning of the third arc, things had changed significantly, and we jumped into the middle of that difference with a new team.

Bardic Wizard

What advice would you give to someone trying to build a similar kind of ambiguity, especially in characters and a handful of specific events, into a setting? This gives me ideas

BESW

You say a moon drifting through the solar system, I say a broken Atlantean colony ship hurtling toward the Sun while emitting strong enough magical EMF to fry every post-silicon device on the Earth in passing... potato/tomato.

doppelgreener

If we'd kept going, I think in the third or fourth arc we might've been ready to interrogate who Parrish really was in the story.

@BESW oh, right, impending cataclysm and all that, I forgot about that bit.

Bardic Wizard

@BESW that’s a little bit of a harsh difference

doppelgreener

well. i did say things had changed significantly :D

BESW

1:58 PM

We fixed the onboard crystal-intelligence and parked the colony ship in orbit around the Earth so it did become a moon?

doppelgreener

@BESW our moon is just a starship nobody's piloting anywhere at the moment

so, yes, i think so

Bardic Wizard

That sounds like an interesting story.

BESW

But when we got back to Earth everything with a silicon chip had fried, and Magic and Weird Science had come out of hiding to fill in the gaps and save everything from going full apocalypse. London is now lit by Faerie Lights and the Los Angeles electrical grid was powered by the Star Trek film lot where the engine for the Enterprise actually produced power so long as everyone on the set stayed in character.

If it had continued we'd've had some fun "dealing with how things are different" storylines. Our previous HQ is now a state-sized toxic magical event for Reasons Not Yet Known, and we'd just started rooming with a very "we told you so" smug dieselpunk apocalypse cult that one of our PCs used to be a member of.

doppelgreener

@BESW And then we went in to investigate anomalous power surges and outages coming from the set, only to find William Shatner was running the ~~power plant~~ ship. And then through sheer force of will and determination, he made the whole set manifest into the actual ship, which promptly began to suffer existence failure even as it took off because all the Extras in the engine room were panicking and breaking character because they weren't being paid for this!!

BESW

@BardicWizard So, in the light of [gestures above] a big way that we injected ambiguity into our games was simply to not look for answers we didn't need.

Only explain things if the explanation is needed for the story, and leave everything else as space for another story to grow in.

doppelgreener

2:05 PM

Oh, yeah. Our game thrived on that.

Bardic Wizard

Hmm. As a GM who habitually plans too much, I might find that hard. But honestly that sounds like it’d be really fun, if people knew that the truth was relative.

doppelgreener

Most questions of "how can that be?" or "what is that?" or "what's this mean?" we raised, we didn't answer yet unless we needed that answer (in which case someone had opportunity to declare it, or we could make a Brainstorming mechanic kick in sometimes). Instead, we agreed "wouldn't that be interesting to explore and find out later?".

BESW

We needed a boss. Okay, we have a boss. We need something to call her by; Field Director Amanda Parrish. She's the field director of this ancient international Weird Stuff Collecting ~~Cult~~ Organization, so she must be pretty awesome. How awesome? We don't need to know that yet.

"I don't know" is a story hook, not a hole.

And if the stakes are important enough to the characters that they have to stay on task, "I don't know" is a promise of a future story rather than a sidequest for right now.

HOW did a fusion-powered goldfish get into a Russian nuclear power plant's cooling tank? We don't know and right now we need to GET IT OUT OF THERE.

@BardicWizard A lot of my most fun prep is coming up with a question that we will play to answer.

Sep 18 '18 at 8:53, by BESW

- The only scene you have full control over is the opening of the session. If there's something you think "this MUST happen," have it happen first.

Bardic Wizard

So it’s ambiguity on everyone’s part, not just the players. I don’t think I got that at first.

doppelgreener

@BardicWizard Correct. It's not that the GM hadn't provided the answer yet but had one kept secret in their notes. There wasn't an answer.

BESW

2:11 PM

I use the fact that a GM only has full control over the opening of the session, to establish an interesting question that I want to know the answer to.

Sep 20 '19 at 10:23, by BESW

The thing about creating characters with agendas they're pursuing, rather than plot points I'm trying to hit, is that I don't have to worry about contradicting anything that hasn't hit the table yet. All that's true is what everyone knows, and what the table hasn't seen is not yet true, only possible.

doppelgreener

Also, related, we rotated GMs. There was no single person in control of the setting, we shared that responsibility and whoever wanted to pick it up could do so. All that definitely existed was what had been established in conversation previously. If anyone had secret notes, that didn't mean anything until they arrived at the game table.

BESW

I often had notes for "what I'll say if nobody else comes up with anything," but my goal was to throw those notes out.

Bardic Wizard

That sounds harder to do but way more fun. And I can see how it might be useful in a rotating GM setting.

The Oracle

0

Q: Convince me I shouldn't stop visiting RPG.SE

It's been my experience over the past couple years that the RPG stack is becoming more about rules lawyering and less about how to have fun with the game. It's reached the stage where it seems impossible to write an answer without it being busted in comments and downvoted because it's always seen...

discussion questions answers

BESW

I used to be a massively overprepared GM. It's part of why I burned out.

Asking questions that I don't know the answers to, is how I was able to continue GMing.

I got to share the load with my friends. Which meant I spent less time prepping, but also meant I got to share in the surprise of discovery!

doppelgreener

2:16 PM

@BardicWizard In a rotating GM setting, I couldn't imagine it working otherwise. How can you GM when someone else is ostensibly still the owner of the world and is the final authority on saying what's what? I'm sure others could make it work, but I can't personally imagine how it would, and I'm not sure I'd want to do it that way. We cooperated really well and I enjoyed how we did things.

BESW

@BardicWizard There's several games specifically designed for rotating GMs, but in my experience a majorly useful conceit is the "team that goes on missions." It's like a TV show with a "job of the week" pattern. Each adventure is a mission so you've got a clear frame for why everybody's doing the new thing this time, and a clear vision of when the adventure ends.

We'd aim for one to three sessions per adventure; long enough to tell a little story, get a little character work, but not so long that it got boring or that GM was hogging all the time.

doppelgreener

The "team that goes on missions" things means you also can pick from an arbitrary cast each session. This means when one player takes up the GM role and can't play their character, you don't have to have a reason they've vanished from the story briefly—they're back at HQ or off on their own thing! They were here last session? Sure, but that mission was days/weeks ago!

BESW

I was kind of the "head GM," I got the ball rolling and probably ran as many sessions as everyone else put together. That's partly because I usually feel more comfortable GMing than running a PC, and partly because it's just sort of how my group usually operated.

But I had no authority over the plot or settings beyond being the GM at that particular moment, and even then--like I said, it's always about playing to find out together.

Bardic Wizard

@doppelgreener I have done that — sort of. One game I’m in is a D&D5e setting built on the premise that many spells can be used and abused to be a source of useful energy or do things that improve quality of life, and so anyone with magic is in theory enslaved or imprisoned. The original idea was mine and the current GM, and so far he has most of the notes on the adventure so far. I have plans for one adventure in the near future, as does another player. Everyone has some kind of secret notes.

BESW

When I played PCs, I had a roster of "guest characters" like the social worker who did a ride-along for one mission to make sure that Greener's character was being treated well.

Bardic Wizard

2:21 PM

@doppelgreener yeah. I run a school game with a mostly static cast of characters, and a library game with a much more varied group. It’s really hard to build around a non constant group with long term plans, so maybe I should try the ambiguous thing for a while.

doppelgreener

@BardicWizard What I'm imagining however is you can't have a situation where you go and say "and then this happens" as the GM, and then the other person with their own secret notes says "ah, no, that can't happen, because secrets. Not because of anything we've established, but because reasons I have written down for later. You have to do something else now."

BESW

Trogdor was running that session. We went to a hell dimension and they tried to trick us with lots of confusing paperwork but my character lived for complicated paperwork and wound up tricking the demons.

Bardic Wizard

@doppelgreener any time someone disagrees they can try to come up with a good IC reason, but nobody gets to disagree because “future plot stuff”.

doppelgreener

I mean, we could negotiate "hey, could we manage that differently? I've got some cool plans with XYZ, so can we make that have something to do with XYZ? I think it'll be fun that way." — and then we can talk and say yes and do it that way.

BESW

@BardicWizard Having been someone with year- and two-year-long planned story arcs that I brought to satisfying conclusions, I feel like campaigns with long planned stories are missing a lot of the best parts of the medium.

Long pre-planned stories can be great for novels and TV series, but TTRPGs are a collaborative improvisational medium and the more we lean into our ability to be surprised by the things that happen when we improvise together, the more I feel like we're really tapping into the full potential of the thing we're doing.

Bardic Wizard

2:25 PM

Probably true. I’m running (same library game) a thing where I have an idea about the ending but no idea how or even if it’ll get there. It’s nice to see what they come up with.

BESW

I came up with some very nice campaigns, if I do say so myself. My friends certainly enjoyed them. But nothing I planned on my own could possibly compare to the delightful surprises that came out of asking my friends to improvise with me.

Another thing for variable-attendance groups: one-shots.

Even if you're the only GM, one-shot adventures can be amazing tools. You can tie them together into a story by having them take place in the same setting, and the story is about the growth of the characters who recur in multiple stories.

But they are also self-sufficient for people who only show up rarely.

It also gives the group freedom to experiment because the stakes in a one-shot are significantly lower: whatever goes wrong you haven't committed to more than a single session.

You can try out weird characters or settings or test new systems.

When we were doing that Weird Stuff campaign we're talking about above, that lasted for a year or two I think but probably one session out of every three or four was a completely unrelated game of Masters of Umdaar or Bubblegumshoe or Lady Blackbird or whatever struck our fancy.

And sometimes we'd play the same campaign but in different systems! We had a session of the Weird Stuff campaign where everybody was plagued by waking dreams that granted them powers connected to something that was bothering them. So we ran that session with Don't Rest Your Head rules.

(Oh, and I ditched XP and leveling completely. We chose a system where leveling up wasn't particularly central to the game and just did lateral character changes as each character's story justified them.)

(This meant that missing a session didn't have any impact on your return--even telling people to just level up to match the rest of the party, means they have to spend time figuring out a build instead of playing.)

doppelgreener

@BESW And oohhh, boy, did that one matter. My character did some Magical Nonsense that later turned out to be things they were really capable of and wasn't just because of the waking dreams. Because these were Waking Dreams, they could also be Nightmares with Bad Things, and wow did my character have to confront some trauma in her life which immediately came up as a character arc we explored.

Us running a session in another system entirely was very good.

It helped us raise questions we never would've thought to ask otherwise.

BESW

2:41 PM

I loved it!

And another time, while our PCs were in the ---moon-- Atlantean colony ship, we took a couple sessions to try out a brand-new system, Monster of the Week. So we rolled up new characters and ran a MotW adventure about what was happening meanwhile back on Earth.

Thomas Markov

3:23 PM

New D&D hardcover book announced: Tasha's Cauldron of Everything

2

Yuuki

@ThomasMarkov Tasha's Hideous Laughter, Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound, Tenser's Floating Disc... Mike's Hard Lemonade?

AncientSwordRage

@ThomasMarkov laughs hideously

Thomas Markov

@Yuuki You read reddit too? :p

Yuuki

@ThomasMarkov :D

Ben and Jerry's Ice(d) Cream?

AncientSwordRage

> customize your character’s origin using straightforward rules for modifying a character’s racial traits.

Thomas Markov

3:28 PM

> straightforward

Ill believe it when I see it.

AncientSwordRage

Likewise

MikeQ

And to think I was just introducing the system to some friends by saying it didn't have as many expansions and options as in 3.X...

AncientSwordRage

@MikeQ it still doesn't, but that isn't hard

Thomas Markov

We only have 3 monster manuals, 3.X had like 15

@TheOracle buys 11 foot pole just to not touch this

Yuuki

@MikeQ Plus, the 3.X splatbooks had things like spells and feats that were more easily accessible than subclasses.

AncientSwordRage

3:38 PM

Whereas 5E even has a spell that's so hard to get, it's not even on a class list

Thomas Markov

@AncientSwordRage that one from ravnica?

@AncientSwordRage I answered my own question two months ago

AncientSwordRage

@ThomasMarkov yes

@ThomasMarkov also yes

Hot RPG Questions

4:10 PM

5

Q: How does spellcasting interact with Improved Duplicity?

Trikery Clerics get this Channel Divinity option : Invoke Duplicity. ... As an action, you create a perfect illusion of yourself that lasts for 1 minute, or until you lose your concentration (as if you were concentrating on a spell). The illusion appears in an unoccupied space that you can see w...

dnd-5e class-feature cleric spellcasting illusion

doppelgreener

4:59 PM

@AncientSwordRage which spell is that??

MikeQ

They can't tell you because the spell is so hard to get.

doppelgreener

I see, that makes sense.

@Rubiksmoose That's a great meta answer.

Rubiksmoose

[blush] thanks :)

Thomas Markov

@doppelgreener See question I linked, the spell is encode thoughts

doppelgreener

5:14 PM

@ThomasMarkov oh, nice one :D that's quite the learning restriction they discovered

RedRiderX

5:39 PM

> * Gain guidance on running a session zero.
> * Customize your character’s origin using straightforward rules for modifying a character’s racial traits
> * Try out rules for parleying with monsters
> * Subclass options for every Dungeons & Dragons class
> * Group patron

This feels like the kinda stuff I would expect to see in a 6e

Or at least a new players handbook

All depends on the execution but very promising.

Thomas Markov

@RedRiderX But not a Xanathar's Guide II: Tasha's Boogaloo?

RedRiderX

Xanatha's Guide did have a lot I guess.

Thomas Markov

(which definitely should have been the title)

RedRiderX

Oh also this is the first sourcebook with Sidekick rules right?

They've only been in the essentials kit until now I think.

Someone_Evil

6:06 PM

@RedRiderX Other than UA, I think so yes

AncientSwordRage

@doppelgreener Encode Thoughts

doppelgreener

6:42 PM

@AncientSwordRage got it, Thomas linked me to an answer about its unobtainability too!

Hot RPG Questions

7:04 PM

8

Q: How do I handle a player exploring the entire dungeon with his familiar?

My Warlock player has Pact of the Chain and Voice of the Chain Master Invocation, and likes to explore all the dungeon before going inside. The imp turns into an invisible spider and goes through the ceiling to all rooms without hard doors. In practice, this ends up becoming a 1 on 1 conversation...

dnd-5e familiars dungeon exploration

Bardic Wizard

7:43 PM

Does anyone have advice on using D&D beyond on mobile? It’s really slow on the webpage.

Hot RPG Questions

7:54 PM

5

Q: Can I gain Piety from multiple Deities on Theros?

There is a character in the Theros Beyond Death MTG cards who appears to have gained Piety from two deities at once, Eutropia, the twice favoured. Her flavour text reads: Nylea speaks to her in the windblown leaves; Thassa in the rushing tides. Is it possible to replicate this using the piety r...

dnd-5e religions-and-deities theros

Mark Wells

@HotRPGQuestions The lack of good answers to this question makes me wonder if there was any dungeon exploration in the 5e playtest process.

V2Blast

@BardicWizard I haven't really used the site much on mobile, but haven't had issues on the occasions I have. Which parts of the site are slow?

You could download one of the mobile apps (the original D&D Beyond app that's a compendium reader, or the DDB player app that has character management functionality) to download some of the stuff for offline use, which would ostensibly remove loading times (aside from when updates need to be downloaded)

V2Blast

8:14 PM

@RedRiderX At least one of the paid tweets by social media folks mentions that the Sidekicks rules will be published in there as well

RevenantBacon

8:52 PM

@MarkWells I would expect that there wasn't. Wizards claims that the "three pillars" are exploration, combat, and social interaction, but the game is designed as a combat game first and foremost. Likely they were mostly focusing on the combat damage balance over any other design points

Yuuki

@RevenantBacon The three pillars of D&D are combat, exploration (of combat mechanics), and social interaction (how one interacts with other people, vis-a-vis swords).

Mark Wells

@Yuuki This is consistent with the XGtE approach to classes, where you can be a Cleric of Swords, a Warlock of Swords, a Bard of Swords, etc. It's like someone gave them a defective Tarot deck.

(Relevant comment from Justin Alexander)

Yuuki

@MarkWells Xanathar's Guide to Swords.

Mark Wells

@Yuuki *Everything (i.e. Swords)

Yuuki

@MarkWells I mean, running out of resources definitely feels unfun and the question is how do you introduce logistics as a game mechanic while avoiding the situation of bad logistics feeling just plain terrible?

I mean, the standard reaction to running out of things you can do is "guess i'll just die".

RevenantBacon

9:00 PM

@Yuuki I think you meant "Social: How one decides who gets the pointy end of the sword first"

Mark Wells

@Yuuki That's why I'm generally in favor of not taking away "things you can do". Like, the D&D mechanic of going unconscious at zero HP? Yuck. At zero HP you should be fighting your your life against Shia LaBeouf.

trogdor

@doppelgreener lol XD

Yuuki

@BESW I loved Mrs. Frederic. She was never openly displayed any ridiculous supernatural powers (or at least she didn't up to the point I stopped watching Warehouse 13) but she had this sense of gravitas to her that left you hanging on her every word.

Himitsu_no_Yami

9:24 PM

Playing through Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Red Rescue Team again and getting my tail handed to me

AncientSwordRage

9:49 PM

Alternative Conflicts in Mouse Guard (working revision 0.7) (pattern with pdf link)

Hot RPG Questions

10:24 PM

3

Q: Trying to identify this adventure

Many years ago (24+) I had a set of 4 warhammer fantasy roleplay adventures split between 2 books. Each adventure was to try and claim an elemental gem of power, the gems where tremendously powerful and when combined and at the end of the adventure it was suggested the world ended. At the time I ...

dungeons-and-dragons product-identification wfrp-2e wfrp-1e

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