I question I pose to you all. pointless and irrelivant, but then again the best ones are. Why do Kobold have a Level Adjust in 3.5e if they pretty much have no benefit to being one its all negatives.
IT IS ALWAYS MORNING the great novian has spoken
it is always half past 2 in the morning at all times to be precise
I like kobolds; never managed to play one yet though. I'd play a sorcerer kobold with massive delusions of grandeur who called himself "The mighty immortal dragon Kabbaz" or something
@Rob I don't think. I've gotten the impression there are a few more encounters in this adventure. If there is anything climactic then things went to shit.
@DForck42 been all right. ended up having to do a brake job on my car this weekend. Only to realize that I need to fix my caliper in addition to just the pads/rotors :(
@DForck42 our normal 4e game is wrapping up for the year next week. We're all too busy around the holidays and our DM's wife is having baby in Jan so we won't be back to that until late Feb at the earliest. Should have some good one shots between now and then
so the first place that i had 2 phone interviews with, cancelled my in person interview because the job requires a bachelor's. i was qualified otherwise
the oracle shop (i have no oracle experience but a lto of sql server experience) never called me back. my friend allan who works there told me they hired someone.
@Novian I believe monster-PC stats often exist largely for DMs to more easily create unique NPCs. The fact that they can also be player characters is a bonus.
@somori Yes, though I'm not sure furries are really relevant. But it seems to me that the developers' intent of including nigh-unplayable templates is pretty explicitly to aid DMs in making NPCs.
@waxeagle Everhart's 4e encounter question is specifically asking for a "single encounter" rather than an entire session or module. Is there a particular encounter in the modules you're recommending that stands out as suitable?
@waxeagle I have a love-hate relationship with 4e skill challenges. The concept is great, but I had to use an entirely re-designed third-party system to make them actually fun to use.
@somori It became that, for sure. I'm trying to track down the line, though... there's a line somewhere in one of the core books that's explicit about "These templates are intended for making NPCs, though your players will ask to use them too." Later splatbooks bought into the idea of monstrous PCs more.
@BESW I get that. It's an odd thing. We've got them tightened up a bit. trying to get them beyond die chucking "I roll x" has been a challenge for our group, but it's one we are working our way out of.
but it's somewhere I think the system does actually have a good idea, the execution is just largely dependent on the group to buy in
@BESW Yeah, further back in that line of logic for 3.x was making PCs and NPCs equivalent. 4E improved that by taking away the assumption that players and non-players use the same rules to simulate their abilities.
That guy did a lot of number-crunching to make the success/failure rates more reliable, and introduced some cool extra bits. A lot of the basic features of his system pop up in official 4e modules as Something Cool You Get To Do In Just This One Challenge.
I've also found that putting skill challenges into fights is one of the best things you can do. It forces important choices about action economy and adds tension to the fight (just make sure you've scaled the fight with it in mind).
@BESW I've yet to have one where it worked really well. It's something I'd like to try though. Maybe I'll try one out over break. I'll probably have 2-3 sessions to DM
I've done things like "get the door open before the solo boss you cannot hope to defeat rips you apart," "stabilize the poisoned king in the middle of an ambush," and "turn the villain's diabolic ritual on him to give him horrible debuffs."
For me, skill challenges in combat are either about providing a way to turn the tide in battle, or about making the win condition related to the skill challenge with combat as a backdrop to make it harder/more interesting/more intense.
And you can always fiddle with the mechanics: skill challenges where you never actually fail, in a situation where you just really want to succeed fast, can be fun.
@somori Yeah, it's part and parcel with the truly messed-up idea that a level 5 NPC should be a challenge for a group of four level 5 PCs. With the insane attack/defense disparities of 3.5, it made it nearly impossible to build for smaller parties or design swarm encounters that weren't either horrible juggernauts or laughably ineffective.
DMG 172 says that "most monsters are not suitable as PCs," and then goes on to discuss power balance and level adjustment.
The first group in which I was able to be a player rather than a GM had a number of house rules, many of which seemed to boil down to "We didn't read the books carefully three years ago, and now we can't be bothered to change how we play so it's a house rule."
This included ignoring racial HD as a level adjustment modifier for monstrous PCs.
I was asked to join the group because I had a reputation for helping groups role-play well, and this group wanted to see what it was like to not just kick in doors.
Very first session, we wandered into elf-guarded woods and got stopped by a very hostile patrol. "Greetings! I am Alexander Theon, Librarian of the Hypatian Order. I wander the earth seeking knowledge for our collection. Do you have any books I could look at?"
Fifteen minutes later we were having dinner with the local learned.
(Bonus points to anyone who recognizes the origin of his names and the name of his order.)
@somori I got something of a reputation for making PCs who had no combat survival whatsoever, and never needed it.
Theon is thought to have been one of the librarians of the Library of Alexandria, and his daughter Hypatia was a renowned mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer.
Given Hypatia's reputation for being dedicated to her studies, and her tragic death at the hands of an angry mob, it's easy to make a fictional version of her into a minor saint of knowledge.
Anyway, power levels. Umm. My next PC in that campaign was a quarterling.
(Halfling with a permanent reduce person spell.)
With something like +50 to hide, at-will invisibility and shadow step, the ability to dim lights to 90% of their original brightness, and a rock of darkness (like an everburning torch with but darkness instead of light) he could never be found. The party wasn't sure who or what he was, just that people died when he wanted them to.
@MadMAxJr yeah, unfortunately the 3.5 DMG presents that as an XP variant rather than a part of the system, so it's up to GM style--and previous editions were even less happy about non-combat XP.
@MadMAxJr I actually saw this group enjoy RP for its own sake pretty fast. It was still a very combat-heavy game, but they would stop and talk sometimes, or talk during combat, in character.
There... was the time that the bard had a five-page backstory he didn't tell the DM about in which he was really a spy for an as-yet-unknown organization. We found out when he used animal messenger to send a (very damaging) report to his superiors.
A needle-thin bolt of pure fire lanced down from the heavens and disintegrated the weasel in its tracks. The DM turned to the bard's player and said "Next time, talk to me first."
Aside from that incident, that group's role-play generally consisted of making non-optimized mechanical choices that were in line with their characters' actions. Like the time a guy with plot-granted telekinetic powers (which so far he'd used to levitate small items) decided to try imploding a moon with his mind.
"....Welp, guess we need a cleric. Make sure we get all his pieces, or it'll cost more."
I find character creation with player discussion is a lot more boring and leads to fractured campaigns. And yes, I suppose an all rogue party could be problematic... though I did have an idea for a campaign like that once.
What do you mean, lack of healing? One of you is a Cha-rogue and has Use Magic Device. grin
Actually, with all the insane class variants 3.5 has churned out, I can see a very effective and diverse rogue party. Wilderness rogue, thug rogue, tinker rogue, acrobat rogue, faceman rogue....
I've recently had my eyes opened by a lot of systems that *require* player discussion. Dresden Files is so committed to player-discussed character creation, it's required *even for the pregenerated characters in sample adventures*. And I was *amazed* at how much extra depth of roleplay and character design emerged from just five minutes discussion between players.
This suggests it should be possible to achieve the same in D&D. I'd start with the Fiasco technique - don't just pick classes, but ask the players to add relationship backstory.
@Tynam I strongly encourage it in my players. Even those who are agressive about optimizing their builds mechanically will come up with reasonable (if unusual) stories about how their PCs came to have these abilities and what it might mean for their personalities.
@MadMAxJr For my most recent campaign it was "You can't be evil, and you each have to be willing to work with this one organization I'm gonna tell you about now."
@Tynam I really like the DF style, though I have yet to actually play it. My current players so far prefer to have independent backstories and learn about each other in play (less is assumed when all their interactions are on the table), but I've had players who, for example, decided to play brothers and hash out a very intricate history.
@Tynam Have you had any difficulty with players who find naming Aspects challenging? The one time I've done PC creation in DF (haven't played yet, just helped a guy make a character), he found it very challenging to come up with Aspects in the style of DF--short, pithy, nuanced.
I play a few oddball systems. We had a Dark Heresy game (40k roleplay) where it began as four players controlling a group of 12 Imperial Guardsmen (soldiers). By the end of the first session, there were only four survivors. Then they picked characters. The idea was to take all actions possible to preserve characters they found interesting.
@BESW One player ended up with aspects which all revolved around secrecy. She was playing a humanoid hamster from a pastoral culture with a knightly order devoted to protecting the spring of eternal life.
One of the great things about the few DF books I've read so far is --actually, the same thing that made Harry Potter successful. They aren't fantasy books; they're a different genre in a fantasy setting. Harry Potter is boarding school literature (a big genre in England, less in America), and DF is Raymond Chandler type detective fiction.
The history of vampires in English literature and pop culture is kind of a hobby of mine, and I find Twilight fascinating in that regard. It was very nearly a truly brilliant psychological horror story.
Anyway, yeah. I take atmosphere pretty seriously and feel like I'm going to have to work extra-hard on it this time.
