I've had a couple of random thoughts over the last couple of years... the latest being that the reason Tyrael turns into a man after removing his wings is because he was no longer entirely an angel at that point
At lvl 9 the Monk class gains this ability
[...you gain the ability to move along vertical surfaces and across
liquids on Your Turn without Falling during the move]
Now my question is, if it can move acros liquids, why can't it run upward through a heavy rain?
I keep having this discussion with...
Lucas Rolim wrote a short twitter thread about the value of worldbuilding that considers "how the flux of magic works, and how it is produced and consumed."
Amr Ammourazz is asking on twitter for "recommendations for indie TTRPGs that do a solid job of dual axis resolution."
@BESW I posted (a version) of what wrote here in response to Kazumi Chin's tweet wrt Verbs, processes and aesthetics, as a reply to that tweet. And they said it was helpful to them
It had a lot of tables for pretending that D&D economics weren't just using gold as a measure of expected utility in standard adventure scenarios, and that included a section on jewelry.
@BESW yeah, So did I, and unfortunately, I dmed for so many people who had that edition and its quirks incorporated. Players get very specific ideas about how things work and that was in sanctioned 5e play almost as bad as JC on Twitter.
Moving to 4e let me see that my problems with 3.5 weren't with the system so much as with the D&D franchise and its baggage as a whole, because even in a much better system I still had a lot of the same struggles at the table.
And I'm probably lucky that Fate was my major path into other kinds of TRPGs because it was very very clear about being Not That.
@BESW maybe. I believe the best and worst is its market dominance. It makes it the most accessible game that is culturally and socially widely accepted and relatable. It is bad. But it makes inviting people to play the game and the likelihood that they will accept so much higher than any other ttrpg.
Yeah. As above: only speaking to the system itself and not the real-world space it occupies.
(DichotomousPrime and POCGamer were just talking earlier this evening about how the market presence of D&D is largely due to Gygax's talent as an IP rep and salesman which has perhaps never been equaled since in TRPG history.)
But I can also put on my Design Hat and look at how the systems themselves succeed and fail, what engages players and where it gives room for them to engage themselves, and I can try to learn from that.
(This is something I've noticed the last couple of years, as I write my own games and participate in designer spaces more; conversations on the same topics that happen between consumers of TRPGs, can be VERY different than between creators of TRPGs--and both of those inflect around access points like language and income.)
@Medix2 What I was trying to describe is the following situation:
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where the bottom line is ground, the dots represent the rain and the dotted line is the platform the Monk wants to reach.
It seems to me that the word "across" in the description of the feature does not have any role in saying that you can not rain walk
Generally speaking, anyway, I find that unique movement types in that sort of game are often limited simply by virtue of the entire party not being able to follow.
Often a simple modification like "the lowest highest check applies to the whole party" rewards players for making unique characters whose different abilities complement each other, rather than forcing players to repeat abilities across the whole party in order for it to be useful.
Yeah, I do a version of this with stealth. I make everyone check, and as long as there aren't any very low rolls and the majority succeeds, they're doing alright
Or you get to the kinds of games I write, and that sort of minutia is just left out. I'm fond of "I'm helping!" mechanics that invite the table to decide how far they want to stretch each case.
It can end up getting into a Metagame thing of "What skills haven't we covered?" But that's why I try to design parts of the world to actually make the character choices my players have made matter
Like, I'm not gonna just have a puzzle that requires XYZ skills if none of the PC's have any of those skills. Well, unless I'm making a point about "you can't do everything"
@Medix2 Yeah, I got a lot of learning mileage out of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple because its entire schtick is "You have a single weird and niche way you help people, so every time you win a draw you have to come up with a new way your one thing is the right thing for the situation."
That really helped break me out of "puzzles and tools need to be designed to match" attitudes toward design, and pushed me into "the real puzzle is justifying how your weird tools are the right ones for the job anyway."
My favorite TTRPG experiences are probably the ones spent in systems where you have to justify how your weird abilities skills and tools fit the job anyway
It's a game where you assume success no matter how strange or improbable, and spend your creativity collaborating to make it as strange and improbable as possible, then individually describing the triumphant success.
Played Puppy Day tonight. We adopted a snack-stealing fanihi (fruit bat), a hyperactive carabao (water buffalo), a glow-in-the-dark dragon, and a cactus with a severe underbite.
@Akixkisu Yeah, really I prefer 4e, where you had the highest modifier roll the dice and gave a bonus to the outcome for every additional PC trained in that skill.
"The active player rolls and everyone else justifies helping" makes me happy. I put something like it in Goblin Court.
@BESW I make players do this when they want to help. I ask them to explain how they're helping, then I grant advantage to the other player or let the second player roll, their preference
What should I do if a SAC ruling invalidates a previously accepted answer of mine? Should I edit the existing answer to be correct or submit a new one and hope it gets accepted?
If it's functionally an entirely different answer, I'd be inclined to treat it as a new answer and edit the old one to say "[thing changed], I'm wrong now."
> "These facts are all true to the best of our knowledge, however since I am surrounded by weirdos, I take no personal responsibility." - Sam the American Eagle, "The Muppet Show" season 1 DVD extras.
I answered this question and the answer was accepted. However I was reviewing it today and found in the new SAC that at some point they specifically calrified that Twinned Spell can't affect spells that can target objects. SAC page 6, top right
Sometimes, not that rarely, rules change in RPGs. Answers that were good become objectively, definitely wrong overnight, through no fault of their writer.
The accepted course of action is to do nothing, hoping that the previous voters realize the change in the facts, and modify their votes accord...
A rule has been changed, and an answer that was correct became wrong. The recommended course of action is to downvote and wait.
However, downvoting is not possible if you upvoted earlier, because your vote is locked1.
I know it is discouraged to change an answer just to make your vote change p...
There are a great many questions about the 5th edition of D&D that were asked prior to the release of all of the core books. Some of those questions are now outdated, since additional detail is available in the DMG.
For better or worse, these outdated questions have accepted answers. As a result...
Wait, what's the actual change? It doesn't seem to invalidate anything up the last paragraph before the hrule, and I see no issue with addending the SAC ruling there
@Someone_Evil SAC says a spell that can target an object isn't eligible to be twinned. My answer said as long as you aren't targeting an object, you can. But we know that spells that can target multiple creatures, like Chaos Bolt, don't count, so the same logic seems to apply
I'd say just edit in this case. I don't think the change invalidates the reasoning nor the approval your answer has recieved. You may wish to keep some indication that the SAC entry is newer that the original answer, and maybe some light on the ruling being ignorable for a given table
> Invoke Obscure Ruling. Select a combination of skill and action, like "Shoot" and "Attack." So long as you are in a scene, you always have permission to use Lore to Defend against (oppose) that action/skill combination regardless of whether the specific circumstances make sense for you to do so.
> Arbitrary Arbiter. At the beginning of each session, roll 1d10 for each digit in your core manual's page count. Their result, in order, is the page of the manual which you can ignore or re-write for the duration of the session.
@Someone_Evil Can you move the comments on this question into a chat room? It's getting rather long as we try to figure out what actual book the Op is talking about
The SAC is official rulings. But that extremely particular section about Twinned Spell isn't even rulings, it's instead an explanation of design intentions intended to help a GM come to their own conclusions
But yeah, all my twin spell questions were completely irrelevant once Crawford was made no longer the official rulings maker. And nobody understood what I was asking to begin with, so yeah...
Like, I stopped using tweets because people would downvote answers for using them, not because I thought they lost a lot of value. Meanwhile, if somebody asks a question about something in another system and I have the means to ask the devs or find their insight on the matter, I just do so
@Medix2 Right, but that's the point of slowing down, throwing all those "rulings" out, and saying "Ok, this document will fix all the questions. Give us some time to work on it and add things as we consider them more carefully"
Just seems like there's a big anti-Crawford crowd but I can go quoting the designers of other systems all I want and people don't leave comments explaining to me how useless dev insights are
JC I'm sure is a fine person but he said a lot of stupid crap on twitter and it makes my life as a DM harder because people that don't know how to read the rules look at his ancient tweets and say "ThIs Is WhAt ThE rUlEs DeSiGnEr SaId!" as if he couldn't ever be wrong
Other games also haven't actively retconned their own game designers, to my knowledge
so JC is in this position where there's an official document that says all his (and MM, and Chris P) previous comments are to be tossed in favor of said document.
@ThomasMarkov I'm pretty sure the spell has been updated to say that, now. Let me see
> Any attack roll against an affected creature or object has advantage if the attacker can see it, and the affected creature or object can't benefit from being invisible.
@Medix2 A good answer utilizing dev commentary should put the dev's ruling into context. "Here's the dev's ruling, and here's how the official rules support this ruling". Answers that totally ignore the written rules and just quote dev commentary for the ruling aren't good.
@Medix2 Here, even though your RAW section just says "???", you put that confusion into context by mentioning the opposing answers that both claim to be RAW.
I badly want to put "This answer has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit this screen." in my edit but I know I shouldn't
My feeling on designer intent with D&D is that there is a really severe split between what is demonstrably "correct" according to officially published rules and what actually makes the game progress (or even work at all, in some cases). I'm not sure I've encountered a game where "the rules say [x]" was less useful. Not useless, exactly, but with a lot of purposeless formalism
I get why people are interested in that information, but it's preposterously overvalued
@Medix2 Oh I'm 100% down for rules and expectations. But people seem to expect a chess-like level of precision, balance, and limitation in the rules for D&D. And it just isn't there. When there is a question or a dispute it is very rare that I see an officially correct answer which has much to offer beyond its official status
For a question with an obvious answer, like "can I destroy an object with Eldritch Blast", I simply don't see using the officially wrong answer as having much impact if it were chosen
It's shades of "can my character wear a hat?" (in my game tonight, we spent the entire last session plotting to steal a hat and succeeded, so I've got hats on the brain)
Probably by writing "No" at the top somewhere. I suggest in a title.
Same thing with the Aside that is longer than the answer. The lede is buried. I don't know what the point it is trying to make until the end. Actually, I'm still not entirely sure on the intent of that section. My guess at a succint point of it is "There are good reasons Sage Advice Compendium is now the sole source of official rulings."
OP mentions a podcast that established some erroneous beliefs that are partial reasoning for the question in the first place. I try to explain that that's flawed
Would reorganize that to avoid interleaving the nystul's and dragon breath examples. 1) SAC is sole source of official rulings. 2) Dragon breath is an example of why. 3) Here's how the SAC ruling affects nystuls
@ThomasMarkov Rain falls at 500' so standing on top of a rain drop means you're falling at 500'. The other rain drops are falling at 500 as well, so to run up the "escalator of rain" you have to be moving faster than the escalator is going down.
We're about to go into an [spoiler](underground city) where [maybe spoiler?](http://a time conduit) has been discovered by Mindflayers and one of the party members [probably not a spoiler](is merged with Crenshinibon) and we're building an 11th Town.