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AlphaDog posted:No specific penalty for that in 5th ed. Okay thanks. I don’t really mind him doing it. Maybe just make him hit the teammate on a critical fail?
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Nov 30, 2017 22:12
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please don't
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Nov 30, 2017 22:13
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Sanford posted:Maybe just make him hit the teammate on a critical fail? PULL UP! PULL UP!
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Nov 30, 2017 22:14
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Sanford posted:Okay thanks. I don’t really mind him doing it. Maybe just make him hit the teammate on a critical fail? That means 5% of the time, y'know. Don't do it; there's no reason to make the one guy objectively worse (by saying that he's going to attack and injure a teammate 5% of the time) and put the melee guy in danger because 5% of the time he's going to get shot in the loving back regardless of ranged guy's skill and experience.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:21
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We only know this is a bad idea because we did it in middle school.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:26
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Sanford posted:Okay thanks. I don’t really mind him doing it. Maybe just make him hit the teammate on a critical fail? If he can't meet the DC, that means he wasted his turn trying to get a clear shot, but didn't find one. A combat-hardened archer wouldn't take that chance unless they did not care about that ally at all..
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Nov 30, 2017 22:27
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On a critical fail, you should slap yourself in the face to remind yourself that "critical fail, you hurt yourself!" means the most competent swordsman in the world attacking once per 6 second round will, on average, chop their own arm off every 2 minutes.
Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 22:28
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Jack B Nimble posted:We only know this is a bad idea because we did it in middle school.
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Nov 30, 2017 22:28
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Wow, okay, fairly overwhelming response there. I’ll just let him be! Tomorrow’s session should be Wyvern Tor. The book has this simply as “the party fights six orcs and an ogre” and totally unconnected to the main quest, but I’ve got kind of an idea to make it a bit more involved. Can anyone see potential problems or missed opportunities in my notes? - meet a single orc on the road who complains that the chief is making their nomadic tribe stay in one place - learn the chief keeps control with his unbeatable champion ogre, if they beat the champion the tribe will move on - one party member fights the ogre one-on-one in an arena, the rest support him from the sidelines - balance the fight by having the ogre supported by orc archers/spellcasters on the opposite side of the arena - find notes showing the chief is taking commands from The Black Spider (main baddie of the adventure) to tie it into the story When they beat the ogre, the orc they met on the road will challenge the chief, beat him, and the orcs will pack up and go. Party still have the option to just run in and kill everything if they want. Any thoughts? Edit: AlphaDog posted:On a critical fail, you should slap yourself in the face to remind yourself that "critical fail, you hurt yourself!" means the most competent swordsman in the world attacking once per 6 second round will, on average, chop their own arm off every 2 minutes. Never thought of it like that. To be honest we normally just wing it and the players have been pretty inventive with crit fails. When the rogue rolls a one and says “my bowstring just snapped, I’m going to have to spend a round replacing it” I don’t think I need to get involved. If we ever learn the actual rules and stick to them it will be a massive shock to the system. Sanford fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 22:52
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Show, don't tell, the spider guy connection. Make this new ogre that's enabling the chief be a gift from him. Have the road orc complain about "ever since that ogre showed up" and "weird ogre from parts unknown, always doing X."
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Nov 30, 2017 23:02
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Jack B Nimble posted:Show, don't tell, the spider guy connection. Make this new ogre that's enabling the chief be a gift from him. Have the road orc complain about "ever since that ogre showed up" and "weird ogre from parts unknown, always doing X." I’ve given the chief and the ogre a large ruby each and written a note in orcish that says “KEEP TRIBE HERE. KILL ANY INTRUDERS. USE RED STONE TO CONTROL OGRE” and signed it with the spider symbol. The party loving love notes from the Black Spider. I’ve got one for them to find on a rival wizard later that basically says “my dear fellow, if you don’t wish to work together I won’t coerce you, best wishes etc, the Black Spider” that I’ve dyed green because it’s poisoned. They lay them out on the table every session and go over them. No one has questioned that the Black Spider, crafter of Machiavellian schemes, writes all his notes in marker pen.
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Nov 30, 2017 23:14
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Sanford posted:Never thought of it like that. To be honest we normally just wing it and the players have been pretty inventive with crit fails. When the rogue rolls a one and says “my bowstring just snapped, I’m going to have to spend a round replacing it” I don’t think I need to get involved. If we ever learn the actual rules and stick to them it will be a massive shock to the system. The actual 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons rule for critical failure on attack rolls is <no results found>. A 1 on an attack roll always misses, but doesn't have any other effect. A 1 on a death save counts as 2 failures. As far as I can tell, a 1 on a skill check or (non death) save doesn't even mean an automatic failure, let alone a terrible result. The DMG has this on page 242: quote:CRITICAL SUCCESS OR FAILURE Maybe there's something not in the PHB or DMG somewhere, but I can't find it. e: But if the players are enjoying how you're doing it, keep doing it like that. "How did you gently caress up?" is probably the best possible way to handle combat crit fails if you're going to use them at all. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Nov 30, 2017 |
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Nov 30, 2017 23:20
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If your party likes it and you've put some work in it, that'll be fine then, those notes sound good. So the party already knows he's the big And? Are they actively opposing him at this point?
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Nov 30, 2017 23:27
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a critical failure in my experience is cue for everyone else to shout out a hilariously bad/dumb effect for the
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Dec 1, 2017 04:50
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Jack B Nimble posted:So the party already knows he's the big And? Are they actively opposing him at this point? Not yet, but they’ve killed three mini bosses and each of them had one or more notes from the Black Spider so they know he’s trying to control the whole area. I think I’ve given them enough to work it out, they’ve got two ‘tokens’ to ask questions of two different oracles, and I’ve got a couple of NPCs lined up who can help them put the puzzle together if needed. TBH it doesn’t stretch much beyond “all the bad poo poo happening round here is down to one guy, let’s go get him”.
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Dec 1, 2017 08:09
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RE: puzzle chat, cause ya'll move fast when I'm sleeping. A good puzzle can be great. But good puzzles require player priming. Take a look at video games like The Witness and poo poo. They work by teaching you rules, adding new ones as you go along and then requiring you to put your understanding of those rules to test. This works in RPGs too, but you need to establish the rules before throwing players into some devilish puzzle room. So for example, in a dungeon you can do puzzles every once in a while. The first few rooms show the players the rules (and should probably be repeatable) and the later rooms test players understanding. A well-designed puzzle will lead players to that "aha!" moment that makes puzzle games enjoyable. This is the good poo poo and what the aim of any puzzle should be. These puzzles can never be the type of improvised solution that works well in most other tabletop RPG situations. Any improvised solution will add more rules. It might work for a one off puzzle but then the whole design is different and more about clear visual cues sparking the imagination of players in order for them to work out a solution. The sunflower story someone told is a good example of this. Not really a puzzle, but more like an obstacle. For god's sake, never do the old PC adventure game type bullshit that requires a special item, easily overlooked, or some convoluted piece of pre-knowledge. Having been, I poo poo you not, been question why I don't know enough Sumerian mythology to solve my GMs puzzle I know first hand that this will get you a flipped table and one less player. In short, want to make a puzzle in your RPG? Go play The Witness and think about how that does puzzles.
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Dec 1, 2017 09:03
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I gave my players a riddle-like prophecy earlyish in my campaign, and they came up with way better interpretations and plot hooks from it than I ever could have so I did most of those instead. They flooded an entire demon-infested port city with the help of a ‘grateful’ kraken instead of taking the remaining army and abandoning it because I had a line in there about ‘brackish breath’. Destroying a (fallen) city to fulfill a prophecy is pretty much the most Player Character thing to do, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.
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Dec 1, 2017 13:59
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SafetyTrain posted:RE: puzzle chat, cause ya'll move fast when I'm sleeping. This is all extremely good advice, for video games. If I'm playing a super-genius in an RPG and you present me with a thing that the super-genius could solve instantly and still make me work through it myself, that sort of undermines the point of playing such a smarty-pants in the first place.
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Dec 1, 2017 14:45
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Lynx Winters posted:This is all extremely good advice, for video games. If I'm playing a super-genius in an RPG and you present me with a thing that the super-genius could solve instantly and still make me work through it myself, that sort of undermines the point of playing such a smarty-pants in the first place. Yeah, fair enough. I would argue that you could have a conversation with players about expectations that would solve this. But that criticism can be levelled at any puzzle mechanic in an RPG. Really, any non-dice rolly mechanic tbh. Same thing with social interactions that awards players that are verbose. In any case, I totally agree that you kinda need to gauge whether or not you're players even want to play a game with puzzle elements like that. But if they do, I still think that's the way to go.
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Dec 1, 2017 15:50
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Put puzzles in your game if your players enjoy puzzles, in the same way you'd put melodramatic romances in if your players enjoy those. If you're not dealing with them via mechanics, they're pretty much orthogonal to normal gameplay and should be basically treated as a minigame in a video game - fine if you like the minigame, annoying if you don't.
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Dec 1, 2017 16:06
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Zandar posted:Put puzzles in your game if your players enjoy puzzles, in the same way you'd put melodramatic romances in if your players enjoy those. If you're not dealing with them via mechanics, they're pretty much orthogonal to normal gameplay and should be basically treated as a minigame in a video game - fine if you like the minigame, annoying if you don't. If old school style puzzles work for your group, that's great! But there's a lot of groups that they don't work for, and meanwhile puzzles and traps have become a staple of dungeon crawls. Players want and expect to get the cool moments puzzle solving and trap dodging provide in things like the Indiana Jones movies. So it's useful to dissect why standard puzzles and traps don't work for some groups, get at what players and GMs really want out of them, and come up with ways to get the same effect while avoiding the pitfalls (pun intended) of the classic puzzles seen in various modules.
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Dec 1, 2017 16:19
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Zandar posted:Put puzzles in your game if your players enjoy puzzles, in the same way you'd put melodramatic romances in if your players enjoy those. If you're not dealing with them via mechanics, they're pretty much orthogonal to normal gameplay and should be basically treated as a minigame in a video game - fine if you like the minigame, annoying if you don't. Yeah, I agree with this sentiment I don't really like running puzzles or playing games with puzzles. They tend to just make the smart players feel smarter and the dumb ones dumber. Especially if a player's characters isn't directly representative of their actual puzzle solving ability (the 5 int barbarian solving all the puzzles on his own, while the 18 int wizard drinks soda and wonders wtf is going on) On the other hand, I have a friend who builds entire campaigns around his puzzles. His last one he came up with his own coordinates system and had the players pickup artifacts across the world, which they eventually put together to work out it was an ancient map. They then had to cross reference where they found the artifacts with the positions marked on the ancient map so they could triangulate the position of the mcguffin to stop the BBEG. It was epic to hear about, and his players loved it, but I think I'd cry if it was me sitting at the table trying to do cryptography and trigonometry for fun He's designing a new game right now where the calendar is based on the position of 3 orbiting moons and events that happen at different eclipses. Again it sounds awesome, but oh God it's complicated
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Dec 1, 2017 16:19
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kaffo posted:Yeah, I agree with this sentiment
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Dec 1, 2017 23:15
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Looking for somewhat basic advice again - I need a gold sink. The Phandelver adventure gives out plenty of loot but has nothing and nowhere to spend it. I had an idea of getting them to pay to restore the town - walls, guards, watchtower, etc - and was wondering if there were any resources for that before I start writing a load of stuff out. I’m also totally open to alternative ideas. I just don’t want to get to the end and go “congrats, you’re all billionaires, game over”.
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Dec 3, 2017 09:17
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Spending money to outfit other parties could let the players accomplish goals they don't have time to do themselves. You can get an idea of the costs by looking at the starting gold of level one characters.
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Dec 3, 2017 09:33
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Ask the players! If their character doesn't have any other goal than "get filthy rich" then that's great: you and the player both get to learn things about their character: what does this murderhobo do when they actually end up filthy rich? Because if they don't have plans for how to spend their money, then other people sure do. They can expect new "friends" to be popping up by the day, competing for the opportunity to sell them overpriced stuff that doesn't work. Or various orders, cults, magical experimenters, and suchlike all in need of financial support for their crazy schemes. And if instead of getting filthy rich they want to stay filthy rich? The safest way to look after it is to invest it in lands and property and suchlike. Of course, that then means you now have a whole raft of responsibilities when enemies start showing up to wreck your day. Basically, your adventurers becoming super rich is a brilliant way to create plot hooks for them: don't think of it as a problem you need to get rid of, think of it as another problem they need to worry about.
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Dec 3, 2017 10:14
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Some Fucker Stole All Your Gold is a pretty classic plot point. Optionally, return training rules and make them pay gold to level up (don't do this) Optionally, require a certain amount of debauchery and general wasting of gold not connected to training to level up (maybe do this) Optionally, mix the stealing with the debauchery, and some poor PC is gonna wake up mostly nude in an unfamiliar room without any of the party gold, and there's a landlord banging on the door, demanding he explain what he did to the rest of the inn, and he knows he had far too much gold to legitimately burn it all on a night on the town, so some shenanigans have taken place.
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Dec 3, 2017 11:12
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Also bare in mind gold is loving heavy Like said about, having poo poo loads of gold usually makes way more problems than it solves. But that can be fun and interesting You'll have to find out if the players want that kind of puzzle/problem, and "ok you have 10k gold and it's now a literal small mountain and moving it is not only slow, it's also obvious. What do you plan to do with it?" is a good way to find out what they want to do This can lead into buying capital like suggested above, which is interesting and fun Or just dumping the lot into something dumb, like a bunch of overpriced magic items or they get outright swindled Or they hire some dudes to carry/protect it, do they trust these dudes? Are they tough enough to stop other dudes nicking it the second the party turn their back? Or they find some dnd bank/vault/other rich dude to store it. How safe is that? What if the players are contracted to help defend the place as long as they have gold there and there's now a loving dragon or army heading down to raid the place? Or do they go "gently caress that" and pour it down a well, or leave it with a begger. What happens then? Tldr; remind them that the gold is a thing, might be a problem to keep and suggest they do something with it... Then lever their plans hard Almost anything they do will make you grin hard behind your DM screen and them go "oh poo poo"
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Dec 3, 2017 11:35
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Sanford posted:Looking for somewhat basic advice again - I need a gold sink. The Phandelver adventure gives out plenty of loot but has nothing and nowhere to spend it. I had an idea of getting them to pay to restore the town - walls, guards, watchtower, etc - and was wondering if there were any resources for that before I start writing a load of stuff out. I’m also totally open to alternative ideas. I just don’t want to get to the end and go “congrats, you’re all billionaires, game over”. fuckin siege machinery there is not the player alive that will balk at the chance to buy a ballista. Maybe have the smith give them a quest for a part, or blueprints. Basically just think of money as new problems, that the players choose while (or en route to) getting awesome stuff. e: also money means they can play in a bigger arena if they want - influence a town, or even a country if they get enough. Make multiple opportunities with a range of risks for them. sebmojo fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 11:49
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ProfessorCirno posted:Some Fucker Stole All Your Gold is a pretty classic plot point. i had one amazing, completely improvised session where a big bag of gold changed hands at least six times, it was loving hilarious.
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Dec 3, 2017 11:55
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I have hinted to my players that a trained war bear is purchasable if they have enough funds and I need to figure out what to do when they inevitably scrounge up enough cash.
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Dec 3, 2017 13:37
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You give them a trained war-bear, because that would be rad as gently caress. On the topic of disposing of gold, I once played a ridiculous Bard in a beer-and-pretzels D&D 3.5 game. After we'd cleared out whatever dungeon we were doing that week, we'd come back to town loaded with loot. All the other players were like, "I buy magic armor," or "I buy a Ring of Invisibility," or whatever. But I embraced the fact that my chosen class was useless in any sort of real adventuring role and eschewed all of that stuff, instead rolling an exploding D6, multiplying the result by 100, and saying that was how much money I spent on ale and whores. I remember there were a couple of times where the exploding nature of the die led to hilariousness, where it ended up going something like, "OK, when we get back to town, I drop...  ...1500 gold pieces on ale and whores. Now keep in mind, I only have 800. But I spend 1500." It led to several occasions where I was surreptitiously waking up hung-over colleagues in the early, early morning so we could get the hell out of dodge before the bill came due.Between that and trying to charm my way into every noblewoman's bed, I got us kicked out of more towns...
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Dec 3, 2017 16:43
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A trained war-bear isn't just a bonus to them because they can fight better. It's also a bonus to you, because there's no plot that isn't going to be improved by the presence of a trained war-bear.
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Dec 3, 2017 18:54
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Jack B Nimble posted:EDIT hey Anyone have quick suggestions for what questions I can ask my players as they build out my capitol city? It's an ongoing Google hangout but I'm running out of ideas. More for minor colour, but: - what’s the city’s chief export? who controls the trade? - which noble is having an affair with a commoner? - you owe someone money here — who, how much, and why? - someone in your family always dreamed of coming here — who, why, and why couldn’t they? - three rumours about the ranking religious person (you pick one that’s true, one that’s false, and one that seems true at first but can get the PCs in trouble if they believe it) - why doesn’t anything grow in this one patch of land? - who has blackmail material on the captain of the guard?
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Dec 3, 2017 19:13
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Ibblebibble posted:I have hinted to my players that a trained war bear is purchasable if they have enough funds and I need to figure out what to do when they inevitably scrounge up enough cash. Some Fucker Stole Your Trained War Bear. Alternatively, it has some fear that the party isn't privy to. At the apex of a battle with a big bad, a fight the team appears to be handling easy, the fear is triggered and oh poo poo Bigby the Bear is going apeshit and now we have to fight him but don't kill him ahh poo poo
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Dec 3, 2017 20:51
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*staring down uncooperative noble* You're making freckles upset. You don't want him to get upset.
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Dec 3, 2017 20:53
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Someone else buys the warbear before the players get to it. They have to track down the purchaser and do whatever task the purchaser needs the warbear for first in order to be given the warbear afterwards.
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Dec 3, 2017 21:10
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Pleads posted:Some Fucker Stole Your Trained War Bear. VanSandman posted:Someone else buys the warbear before the players get to it. They have to track down the purchaser and do whatever task the purchaser needs the warbear for first in order to be given the warbear afterwards. Don't do this poo poo. If I offered you an ice cream sandwich for cleaning out my garage, and after you spent an afternoon pulling all of my bullshit out to the curb for the garbage pickup I then said "Oh, sorry; I had to give the last one to someone else, guess you'll have to go track them down for it :iamafag:" you'd rightly call me an rear end in a top hat and probably wouldn't talk to me for a while. If you offered your players something powerful and they do what you told them to to get it, either give it to them and start bumping up the difficulty of future encounters to compensate, or just level with them if it's too powerful and would ruin the fun of the game.
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Dec 3, 2017 22:57
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Or if your players aren't big babies they go on a short wacky sidequest and form a bond with the thing for their struggles beyond "we paid money for Bigby"
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Dec 3, 2017 23:22
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 08:13 |
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If your players want to buy a trained warbear and they go through the rigamarole of collecting enough gold to afford the trained warbear, then yeah, don't dick them around any further. They collected the gold and held off on spending it on hookers and blow; they've already jumped through your hoops. Just give them the drat trained warbear and call it good. Seriously, who could be reluctant to give their players a trained warbear? Bears are awesome. Adding one to your game can only make your game awesomer.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:23
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