@BrianBallsun-Stanton My naive consideration: an explosion is when all the elements decide they would rather stop being mixed in with each other and would like to be as apart from each other as possible and soon as possible.
I remember you saying something like this is standard fare for Ars Magica. So your sessions regularly involve discussing what is possible and how to make it happen?
@BrianBallsun-Stanton The universe moves on until a scholar walks into the flour mill, examines the machinery, furrows his brow, and says in a puzzled tone: "This should already have exploded."
@BESW That's an explosion? Water is a part of acid! I put hydrochloric acid in my pool the other day. No explosions!
A friend of mine into chemistry loves that. The more water you add to an acid, the more diluted and less potent it becomes. But without any water, acids don't work at all.
It apparently has to do with the unique nature of water: it unbinds molecules. Chemicals in water break apart and float about as atoms. Remove the water, and you may still have the same sorts of molecules you started with. That explains a lot of what we do with water, and why it works with water.
@BrianBallsun-Stanton I need to have actually read Aristotle don't I? I'm 90% sure it was assigned...but I pretty much ignored the liberal arts part of my liberal arts education
The process of alteration is where the properties of a substance are changed. A wax candle alters when it is warmed, becoming softer, and alters again in the cold, becoming hard. These changes come about through al- terations in the relative amounts of hot, cold, dry, and moist particles within an object. Natural philosophers recognize that all sub- stances have a digestive capacity that is their propensity to change, and a retentive capac- ity that is their tendency to remain the same.
a rejection of the retentive capcity could lead to an overabundence of hot and dry particles which then seek their appropriate sphere.
leading to, the untrained, the idea of a roof lifting off, but in reality, is only the particles rejoining the sphere of fire that surrounds the world.
Moist things also tend to be volatile and expansive, filling the spaces in their surroundings.
hrrrr..
so yes, hot and moist.
but that doesn't explain a change in motion
the particles that compose flour in a flour mill are already in the sphere of air, and held down due to their love for the sphere of earth.
thus, an increase in their warm and moist particles would certainly lead to a desired expansion...
but this is a mere text based puzzle. There is a Fighter a Ranger and a Wizard. It is assumed they are all level 5. The Fighter has his hammer, the ranger a great bow. The Wizard has a crossbow.
@Novian As a player my friend's DM once placed an angry dragon behind a door. Said friend's ally kicked the door down, and then said friend made haste to apologise on behalf of his stupid colleague for breaking the dragon's formerly very nice door.
I have a question related question about a question I want an answer to which might count as a question appropriate for this site but might not. Also, question.
I want to ask how to make saving throws in 4e more challenging because they suck. Every effect has a slightly-less-than-50% chance of surviving to the next round, and that includes the round immediately after it was applied (in other words, more than half the time, if you even manage to apply the effect, it won't even reach the stage of doing anything).
Large crowd of standards/minions, one elite, and one solo. Give the elite an aura that deals minor psychic damage to each creature at the start of its turn, and the solo gets a 1/turn power that lets it teleport adjacent to a creature that just took psychic damage.
The mind flayer then used his opportunity-action-equivalent teleport. Trigger: a creature takes psychic damage. Effect: you teleport adjacent to the creature.
It was actually bad for the mind flayer, because he was always in melee range and had already just used his opportunity action for the turn.
That was also deliberate: it made him seem cocky and like more of a threat than he actually was, and made the fight move faster because he was available for damage every turn.
I had a sequence of battles with salamanders, where rank-and-file inflicted ongoing fire damage, while pyromancers and the like had abilities that could only target people suffering ongoing fire damage.
@BESW I'm now considering for my nerf-that-earth-elemental bossfight having a power/ritual that literally just nerfs him, but it takes move and/or standard actions to sustain, and the players have to divide their resources between (a) sustaining the power/ritual, (b) attacking Aatos whilst it's active, and (c) attacking the enemies attacking them
Hehe. Minions are special. Sometimes the best thing they can do is die. So you make their death a burst attack that removes flame resistance, and suddenly, no one wants to kill them.
@JonathanHobbs In general, I found that wasting actions or even making a skill check as a standard action is boring. Players put all this effort into their combat abilities, they want to use them.
rpg.stackexchange.com/q/25437/1204 I don't want to start an edit war but this edit that just got approved is bad. "Can the player use this power targetting his opponent, which would mean his opponent attacks himself?" - The power doesn't mean that, unless you also choose the opponent. "Can the player use this power targetting the player, which would mean the player gains an extra Melee Basic Attack against his opponent?" It doesn't mean that either, unless you also choose the player.
Or, target the opponent and choose the player.
It was clearer in the previous edit.
Because targeting and choosing are different here and this edit is using targeting to mean choosing.
@Novian tl;dr but the door puzzle is simple. "Let's damage the door until it falls" requires way less game time than to solve a puzzle. (And probably roughly the same in-game time)
Hobbs'? Wasn't the s' rule invalid for proper names?
"You use 's except when the word ends by s and is not a proper name (where you use ')". This I was taught. (My teacher also said there are no words with two Ys in English. Mystify.)
So you're teaching the group to carry as many random tools and resources as they possibly can, on the off chance they might come up against a challenge that responds to "you must have access to X" rather than to force or ingenuity?
"Use what's at hand to succeed" can't be taught using an encounter with pre-meditated solutions. It requires the GM to think on his feet and reward the behavior he's trying to encourage.
the last time i had trouble finding my keys it was because i had just worked the 14-hour night shift from Hell and i was so tired that when i got home i left my keys in the lock of my apartment door after unlocking it
so i unlocked the door, went inside, shut the door (keys still in lock), took off my shoes, and passed out face down on my bed for 10 hours
then woke up, started doing stuff, and said, "where the heck are my keys???"
after 10 minutes of searching, it occurred to me that i had been really tired and thus might have done something unusually stupid
admittedly that's better than the time i spent half an hour looking for my glasses before realizing i was wearing them (i'm so nearsighted i can't read normal text 4 inches from my face, so how i failed to notice everything was crystal clear i have no idea)
@novian if you want to teach to your players that nov every problem can be solved by force, have a problem that can't be solved by force. I once had a Sphynx looking for competent people in a valley. She rewarded those who answered her riddle with a quest. You kill the sphynx? You don't get the quest.
nah, you still get the quest, because it's a subset of your true quest: kill everything in the multiverse that refuses to acknowledge your absolute sovereignty
