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Arrrthritis posted:The main concern I have with PDQ# is that it wouldn't harbor enough character development Actually, I think that a bare-bones system actually harbors more potential for character development than a strict one: with fewer mechanics structuring the character, the player has more room to use his imagination. Now, some people need structure to help flesh out their character, and that's fine - you can't always come up with an interesting and complex character right off the bat. But trust me: if people want to take their character in a certain direction, they'll do it - mechanics be damned. Just let your players know that you'll reward creativity, and they will give you ample opportunity to reward them.
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May 15, 2010 05:04
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Burning Wheel can probably do what you're looking for if you want crunchy. Mouse Guard is basically Burning Wheel's less crunchy little brother and could be reflavoured if you want less crunch. I'm sure reflavouring Mouse Guard would work, and I or others could tell you about that, but I'd rather tell you about Burning Wheel right now. Reasons why Burning Wheel would work: Has crunchy bits that work well (it's not broken like 4e skill challenges) for things other than combat. Should work well for large overarching plots and plans and handle non-combat situations just as well as combat ones - much better than D&D in this respect. There is plenty of character development - it's skill based, i.e. players develop skills and stats by using them. Moreover, the characters' beliefs will change as they accomplish goals, and this will further develop their characters. PVP combat should work fine if it comes down to that - certainly better than D&D. Improvisation is easy! I know that this is less of a concern in PbP than in live games, but you can stat out an NPC in seconds once you know what you're doing - give him a few traits, some beliefs, make up some stats and/or skills only if you need them - This guy's an old grampa with a bum knee so he'll get speed 2. The books have lots of good DMing advice and a lot of the things built in to the system are very useful for ANY system, so you should read it anyways. There are rules described in the book like "Say yes or roll" and "Let it Ride" which are really more rules of good DMing than rules of the game. All of the crunchy parts are OPTIONAL, so you don't need to get bogged down with a slow combat or duel of wits if you want things to be fast. The book is divided into the hub and the spokes (the mandatory bits) and the rim, including more detailed systems for resources, relationships/circles, combat, duel of wits, sorcery, and more. I'd love to play in it, or even to help you run it. So there, if you use Burning Wheel, you've already got a player or helper who knows the rules at least. Problems I can think of right now: Finding people who know how to play will be more difficult than for something like D&D. Related to this, there is a system mastery issue as there always is with crunchy games. Newbies will not necessarily pick up on what's important until they've had a session or two under their belt, so you will end up with people wanting to fix mistakes they made at character creation. I'm not sure how well the combat would work in PbP. I know it's been done, and if you like I could find you examples. Combat would have the same issue that you already pointed out about 4e - when one side is in a fight, the other side might be progressing through hours or even days of in-game time while the other is dealing with mere seconds of combat. However, if you want to remove the crunch of combat you can simply reduce it down to a much simpler way involving just a few rolls at the expense of having dynamic and detailed combats. This simplification is built-in to the system.
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May 15, 2010 05:49
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The Ugly Duchess posted:Actually, I think that a bare-bones system actually harbors more potential for character development than a strict one: with fewer mechanics structuring the character, the player has more room to use his imagination. Now, some people need structure to help flesh out their character, and that's fine - you can't always come up with an interesting and complex character right off the bat. But trust me: if people want to take their character in a certain direction, they'll do it - mechanics be damned. Just let your players know that you'll reward creativity, and they will give you ample opportunity to reward them. Oh! I meant actual numbers development, not character direction. Sorry about the confusion. I'm positive PDQ# would harbor actual character development, I like working with it. The only problem I have is that characters can get their fortes at +6, and then they have to get some new fortes. While I think that works in other settings, I'm trying to go for a big difference in power from beginning to end. While at the beginning they might fumble with the sword a bit, by the end I want them to be capable of Dynasty Warriors levels of ridiculousness. I did look up Burning Wheel- could you go more in-depth on how it works? It seems to have a system not unlike New World of Darkness/Exalted. How do Beliefs come into play? Do they work like PDQ#'s Foibles? How many popular/known is Burning Wheel, and would my characters need books to be able to play it?
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May 15, 2010 06:33
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Arrrthritis posted:I did look up Burning Wheel- could you go more in-depth on how it works? It seems to have a system not unlike New World of Darkness/Exalted. How do Beliefs come into play? Do they work like PDQ#'s Foibles? How many popular/known is Burning Wheel, and would my characters need books to be able to play it? Beliefs come into play as the main way players earn Artha, which they can spend to get benefits on some of their rolls. They will want to get Artha, so they will want to come up with beliefs that involve other characters and involve their immediate goals so that they can be sure to act on those beliefs and earn themselves the Artha. Good beliefs should tell the GM what the players want to see/do and how they want to be rewarded. As a GM you are encouraged to challenge them on those beliefs and even to play their beliefs against one another, leading to personal or intercharacter conflict. So they are somewhat like PDQ#'s Foibles, but they are distinct from them. They need not be character deficiencies, but they should be something that will generate or drive conflict. Burning Wheel also has Traits, which are maybe more like Foibles superficially, except again they need not be negative. The way skill development works is that beyond a certain point, in order to progress further you will need to log "challenging" tests, and that means attempting tests that are impossible: the objective will be higher than the number of dice. So you can take the failure but advance your skills, OR you can spend some Artha to make the test possible by giving you extra dice, rerolling failures, etc. and still advance your skills. This part of the system really pushes players to get away from the defensive mindset and push their characters to take on tasks where they might fail. If you're only taking tests where you've got a high chance of success, you'll never get any better. In the same vein, it encourages DMs to make things difficult for their players - it's the only way the characters will improve. Since you're talking about maxing out fortes in PDQ, I'll talk a bit about skills and character creation. In terms of skill development in Burning Wheel, the sky is the limit, but you can control how powerful players are when they start off during character creation. Character creation uses "Lifepaths" which are selected and which simultaneously give stat points, skill points, trait points, and a bit of backstory. Limiting your characters to 3 lifepaths will start them off fairly young and not very powerful, while giving them 5 will make them quite powerful indeed. Of course, the books have more detailed advice on this. Will the players need books? If you don't want to get into the optional systems on "the rim" then they should be able to play without books just fine with just a bit of teaching. The base of the system is not at all difficult to learn or keep track of. However, character creation would be very difficult without books. If you run it without the optional crunchy bits and if you are prepared to basically collaborate with every bookless player on their character creation, then you could do it. The more optional systems you want to include, the more mandatory the books become. Especially combat. If you want to use the full combat rules, you'll need everyone involved to have access to the books. The two core books come together for $25, which is quite a good price for the amount of content. They contain everything you need as a player or GM. How popular/well-known is it? I'm not really sure. I heard about it on these forums and went to their forums to learn more about it. It's had good reviews on rpg sites, and it's been around for about 7 years. I would say it's pretty well-known among people who are interested in indie rpgs, not well-known among those who don't. I have no idea how many people on this forum know how to play.
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May 15, 2010 15:28
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Does anyone know of an alternative to Obsidian Portal for online campaign management? I used it once before and while it seems very convenient on a core level, the wiki formatting code it expected to use was just awful, and it offered up no real tools to help put together a good looking character page.
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May 15, 2010 16:44
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I'm running into some trouble in a campaign I'm running and wondered if anyone here had any suggestions: I've wanted to DM D&D for the longest time, but growing up I didn't have many friends who were interested. Thanks to the internet however, I'm currently running a 4e Dark Sun (winging it) game over maptools. The party has recently played through “A little knowledge...”, which I haphazardly adapted for 4e (4e is a blessing as it makes throwing things together on the fly so easily, but this is part of the problem...) Basically my problem is linking encounters together. I always seem to add far too much “travel” time between places and it's boring my players. Trying to compensate, I've thrown together a small side “dungeon” where the group chases a thief through a cave filled with suitably weird Dark Sun flora & fauna. But this is just a string of combat encounters, and they aren't particularly engaging ones at that. Does anyone have any hints for a newbie DM in keeping the pace moving, keeping players engaged (most of the time it feels almost as if none of them are paying attention) and stringing encounters together (interesting encounters) with meaningful out-of-combat interaction. Any help would be appreciated.
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May 16, 2010 23:18
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I don't envy you - it's hard to keep a PbP going, and I have resolved never to host one for that reason. I admire that you're trying to save it before you scrap it, but don't be afraid to cut your losses if your game gets beyond saving. Whether you complete this game or not, you should try a few PbPs as a player so you can learn what works and what doesn't before starting another one. If travel time is boring, then skim over it. You remember the Indiana Jones movies, right? Remember how they would convey long trips by showing a red line moving across the map? That's what travel should be like. If nothing interesting is going to happen on the trip, then don't show the trip. "You sign on with a trader's caravan in East Bumfuck. After a few weeks, you arrive in West Adventureland." Also, don't be afraid to ask your players what would interest them - they know better than you do.
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May 17, 2010 01:11
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Here's a pretty mundane question: how do people come up with town/city/geography names? I'm trying to sketch out the world map for a 4e game I'll be DMing soon, and I'm pretty new to the whole process. I'm not going to plan out details for every little farming town, but I want to give the idea that there is adventure/settlements/stuff in those vast expanses between the "important" cities or quest points. Actually, any tips on where to just steal map ideas from? I have a sort of three island nations set up enough to support my skeletal plot, but it really needs some fleshing out. I tried Googling Forgotten Realms maps - the only campaign setting that came to mind. It didn't help that much (maybe I found the wrong maps), although I was able to get some ideas from it.
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May 17, 2010 02:41
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Okay so I'm running my second campaign (my first one lasted maybe three sessions) and I'm just wondering, How do you come up with plot on the spot? I have a general story going on where the characters are developing an arch nemesis and then they'll be put in a situation to pursue and eventually defeat him and get lots of treasure. When I plan out for a session I typically write out a decent plot line to run through, but I hear all of you guys saying you do it on the spot. Any tips to be more fluid and less static?
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May 17, 2010 07:15
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MrMortimer posted:Okay so I'm running my second campaign (my first one lasted maybe three sessions) and I'm just wondering, How do you come up with plot on the spot? I have a general story going on where the characters are developing an arch nemesis and then they'll be put in a situation to pursue and eventually defeat him and get lots of treasure. When I plan out for a session I typically write out a decent plot line to run through, but I hear all of you guys saying you do it on the spot. Any tips to be more fluid and less static? I usually plan a handful of set piece encounters, and then let the players decisions get them to those sets somehow. Might change the set occasionally, but the monsters are always gonna be what I planned the night before. Keep your treasure parcels prepped before hand as well and drop them where they seem appropriate.
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May 17, 2010 07:58
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lighttigersoul posted:I usually plan a handful of set piece encounters, and then let the players decisions get them to those sets somehow. Might change the set occasionally, but the monsters are always gonna be what I planned the night before. Keep your treasure parcels prepped before hand as well and drop them where they seem appropriate. Perhaps I am just thick, but let me try to explain where I get stuck up, because I'd really like to get better at this. Lets say I let my party loose in a town and they end up getting into trouble and getting in trouble with the guards and it escalated to a fight, how would I come up with the stats on the spot for the guards? Just fudge it as best as I can or is there any place in the books I could look?
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May 17, 2010 08:04
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incogneato posted:Here's a pretty mundane question: how do people come up with town/city/geography names? I'm putting together a arabian style campaign setting and to get names I went to google maps and zoomed in close on the middle east and grabbed names from there. I also flicked through a few wikipedia articles on ancient middle eastern history and grabbed some names from there. I changed most of these names a little, adding syllables from one to another etc. If your setting has a basis in reality, say, medievil europe, you can use this method easily. Zooming in on maps helps because you can use village names no-one has heard of. Europe has a lot of different languages that most of your players will have an idea about, so maybe choose one or three linguistic areas and stick to them. Different areas for different nations/cultures in game, etc.
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May 17, 2010 08:43
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MrMortimer posted:Perhaps I am just thick, but let me try to explain where I get stuck up, because I'd really like to get better at this. Lets say I let my party loose in a town and they end up getting into trouble and getting in trouble with the guards and it escalated to a fight, how would I come up with the stats on the spot for the guards? Just fudge it as best as I can or is there any place in the books I could look? Just prepare a couple batches of stats ahead of time and skin them appropriately when something happens. So say you have the stats for a minion, an artillery, a brute, and a skirmisher. The players walk into a town, pick a fight with the guards, bam the statblocks become guards -- maybe a bunch of minion recruits with some archer artillery and a couple heavily armored elite guards. Later, the players are in the forest and get jumped by wolves, you just use the skirmisher statblock for the wolves. The players aren't going to notice that the wolves and some of the guards in town have the same AC or tohit bonus. Just say the wolves savagely bite them while the fast guards slice at them with their long swords. If you're feeling saucy, give the wolves a special "wolfy" ability on the fly, like the ability to knock people prone.
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May 17, 2010 11:36
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MrMortimer posted:Perhaps I am just thick, but let me try to explain where I get stuck up, because I'd really like to get better at this. Lets say I let my party loose in a town and they end up getting into trouble and getting in trouble with the guards and it escalated to a fight, how would I come up with the stats on the spot for the guards? Just fudge it as best as I can or is there any place in the books I could look?
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May 17, 2010 16:48
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Chernori posted:Just prepare a couple batches of stats ahead of time and skin them appropriately when something happens. Pretty much this. The quick and dirty math is that the system is designed on a to hit roll of 10, the rogue should be hitting a bit more often. Some classes hit a little less, talk to the character op folks about that one. HP is a set scale based on role and level, check your DMG for that. And the enemies should hit on 10+ against your characters with middle of the road defenses, easier against the squishies, and harder against the guys with high defenses. It's basically learning to bullshit really well. EDIT: Also, attacks should do the standard damage expressions from the best page in the book or the back of the screen. lighttigersoul fucked around with this message at 18:52 on May 17, 2010 |
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May 17, 2010 16:53
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Haha, so as far as D&D goes, we never moved on from 2E, and when he asked about stats for guards, I was just like "What the hell does he means? 1d6 Hp if they're classless, 1d10 for first level fighters, 19 or 20 Thac0 and Ac based on armor". Sometimes I forget that the game got more complicated.rock rock posted:I'm putting together a arabian style campaign setting and to get names I went to google maps and zoomed in close on the middle east and grabbed names from there. I also flicked through a few wikipedia articles on ancient middle eastern history and grabbed some names from there. This is pretty much the way to do it. The main area I run in is loosely Slavic, so I have a couple big lists of place names from Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Russia that I pull from. Swapping out syllables between names gets you even more options. Leatherhead fucked around with this message at 18:53 on May 17, 2010 |
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May 17, 2010 18:50
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incogneato posted:Here's a pretty mundane question: how do people come up with town/city/geography names? I'm trying to sketch out the world map for a 4e game I'll be DMing soon, and I'm pretty new to the whole process. I'm not going to plan out details for every little farming town, but I want to give the idea that there is adventure/settlements/stuff in those vast expanses between the "important" cities or quest points. Just figured I'd give something back with some articles I read ages ago which gave me some pointers on nerd-prime cartography: How to draw maps: http://zompist.com/howto2.htm How to draw sinusoidal maps: http://zompist.com/howto3.htm These are pretty neat, as is the website as a whole, which sports a lot of info on world-creation and conlanguages.
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May 17, 2010 19:23
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rock rock posted:Google maps and . . . wikipedia. Ah, that's so obvious and so wonderfully simple. I don't know why I was beating myself up over finding fantasy setting maps. Thanks. Anisotropic Shader posted:Map creation. Nice, thanks for the links. I'm not much of an artist, so I think at least initially it'll just be hand-sketched, but I definitely would like to gussy them up eventually.
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May 17, 2010 21:24
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Being a poo poo artist can be really cool. If you hand your players some crudely drawn sketch on rough paper, you can say 'this is the best map you could find at the local bazaar', rather than just giving them a flashy computer printout of a map that no one in most campaign world would have the knowledge to make. Edit: those map making links are really cool, but does anyone have any tips on drawing coastlines? Vaginal Vagrant fucked around with this message at 22:01 on May 17, 2010 |
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May 17, 2010 21:56
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incogneato posted:Ah, that's so obvious and so wonderfully simple. I don't know why I was beating myself up over finding fantasy setting maps. Thanks. I might also recommend Campaign Cartographer. The UI is frustrating at times and it can be a little pricy ($45) but from the YouTube tutorials it seems like it's pretty powerful. Here's an example of the first part of an island I did in about a half an hour just from watching the Youtube videos:  Click here for the full 759x753 image. To find a land mass I liked I basically just scrolled around the world in Google Maps till I found an island that suited what I was looking for (Cresent-ish shaped, mountain range).
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May 17, 2010 23:47
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That is New Zealand. Your players are going to recognize that as New Zealand.
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May 18, 2010 00:13
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Yup! It's New Zealand. I imported a PNG of NZ and traced it. I'd forgotten to put that it was the island I'm copying. I'll probably end up doing something different as the current CC3 file I've got is the wrong scale and I've messed up the layers. Still, CC3 is really nice!
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May 18, 2010 00:33
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Mikhail Gorbachev posted:That is New Zealand. Your players are going to recognize that as New Zealand. Dude just flip it 180 degrees vertical and nobody will notice it. I like AutoRealm for map generation software, personally. Fake Edit: unless they're sitting on the other side of the table 
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May 18, 2010 00:43
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incogneato posted:Here's a pretty mundane question: how do people come up with town/city/geography names? I'm trying to sketch out the world map for a 4e game I'll be DMing soon, and I'm pretty new to the whole process. I'm not going to plan out details for every little farming town, but I want to give the idea that there is adventure/settlements/stuff in those vast expanses between the "important" cities or quest points. Another thing to remember: people are generally pretty retarded about naming a lot of places. Chances are anything near a big landmark is going to reference that landmark. Anywhere founded by someone important or birthed there is going to reference that person. Immigrants will carry names with them from their home countries. Resources will be referenced. Throw in a few of those with the nonsense names and the environment will seem a little more organic.
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May 18, 2010 04:47
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Hey dudes, I'm GMing nWoD Mage for the first time in a few days as both my first Mage game and my first nWoD game and I wanna know if there are any snags in the rules I should be aware of before I go off stumbling blindly into Supernal realms. My specific questions are: 1) What level of threat should I expect two mages (one matter and fate focused, one death and mind focused) to take on, and what should I be worried about allowing them to do vs. not allowing them to do? 2) Matter is crazy and the dude playing the matter mage is a physics nerd. I know that radioactivity is only for five dot matter mages, but where do I put my foot down regarding him turning poo poo in swimming pools into cadmium or similar stunts? 3) Should the players get warning about covert magic being used on them even if they don't have their sight on or similar? It seems like some of the more subtle domains like fate or mind could gently caress someone up without a lot of notice. 4) If I throw these guys at vampires with a bunch of dazed thralls around'em, should I go easy on the paradox even though there are mortals near? It seems kind of ridiculous that the Sleepers can watch vampires turn into bats and move faster than trains but can't believe a wizard's shooting said vampire with lightning. 5) Are there any supplements that are really worthwhile and/or really broken? I've browsed through the Supernal Tarot because I like the symbolism and pictures,  but that's about it.
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May 18, 2010 08:49
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Jimbozig posted:Reskinning is great, but sometimes it just doesn't suit. In those cases, if you have D&D Insider, you can just open up the compendium, search for "human", filter by level and then pick on that has reasonable powers for a guard. Something like a mercenary or thug or footman or whatever, as opposed to a cultist or wizard. Then search for archer, filter by level, and pick one of those. Maybe grab two kinds of melee (skirmishers and brutes, for example) and one kind of artillery. Copy the statblocks somewhere you can have them all up together (this is all even easier with Masterplan!) and you're good to go. I'm not sure if you're telling him to look up monsters and make stat blocks during game time or whether you're telling him to make a whole bunch of stat blocks ahead of time detailing every possible encounter, but both of those solutions seem like they'd make DMing much more difficult than it needs to be.
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May 18, 2010 10:43
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Chernori posted:I'm not sure if you're telling him to look up monsters and make stat blocks during game time or whether you're telling him to make a whole bunch of stat blocks ahead of time detailing every possible encounter, but both of those solutions seem like they'd make DMing much more difficult than it needs to be. With the compendium you don't "make" stat blocks at all, you open the page, type in your search name and add any filters, and bam, instant stat block all done up for you. It takes maybe 30 seconds.
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May 18, 2010 15:27
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Fenarisk posted:With the compendium you don't "make" stat blocks at all, you open the page, type in your search name and add any filters, and bam, instant stat block all done up for you. It takes maybe 30 seconds. Where do you get this Compendium?
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May 18, 2010 17:41
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Impermanent posted:Hey dudes, I'm GMing nWoD Mage for the first time in a few days as both my first Mage game and my first nWoD game and I wanna know if there are any snags in the rules I should be aware of before I go off stumbling blindly into Supernal realms. Some answers from my Mage game, which I've been trying for a few months now. 1: No idea, honestly. I'm kind of flying blind until I get more of a hand on how relative power levels work, so my best advice is, if you think there's any chance of players getting torn up because you chose an overbalanced threat, give them an out somehow. 2: A lot of the issues with Matter and similarly  -y arcana get resolved in a fan supplement called The Arcana, which details exactly what you can do at any given level in an arcana. I can't find it anywhere around, but it's done me a world of good in figuring out what's what, compared to the terrible descriptions in the core book. Matter has a lot of restrictions on the complexity and content of what you can transmute, for instance, based on arcana level.Additionally, any spell that directly harms someone is probably an attack and has some inborn limits, to keep people from using Life/Matter to turn someone's blood into strychnine and killing them instantly, or some other wacky bullshit. 3: I'd say you should let them know something is up, if it's genuinely something strange. Covert magic isn't necessarily hidden, it just doesn't directly gently caress with the laws of the Fallen world. 4: Tied into the previous, a vampire is natural to the Fallen world, and they can use their cool magic poo poo all they want. The power Mages weird is alien, and is subject to the world itself and the Abyss trying to punish them for breaking the laws. So a mortal might disbelieve that a vampire just shapeshifted, but he'll capital-D game-mechanic Disbelieve that a mage did the same thing. 5: Tome of the Mysteries. It's basically the real corebook, with more world detail and an expanded and clarified set of improvised magic rules. Additionally, all of the books on Orders and the Seers will give you much more detail than the brief sketches in the corebook, if you plan on doing anything with mage society at all. Hope this helped, I'm still trying to get my footing in Mage, too
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May 18, 2010 19:59
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MrMortimer posted:Where do you get this Compendium? A DDI subscription, which also gets you the character builder and adventure tools (just monster builder atm). It's 10 bucks a month for 5 licenses. Seriously, I was die hard against DDI and the idea of paying for it, but I caved when PHB3 came out. I regret not getting it a long time ago because the character builder alone is worth it, and the compendium makes prepping for games and improv during games so easy it's ridiculous. It's like google for every 4e book ever released, right at your fingertips. Oh, you want an items for a player on the spot? Let's see, they could use an arm slot...and you want it to involve grappling...and level 9-13. Aha, 2 seconds in and you're presented with any item that fits those parameters with all stats, the source, etc. Same goes for powers, monsters, rules, and more. The cost is not an arguable point, period. 10 bucks a month across a group of 4 is less money than a loving bag of chips.
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May 18, 2010 20:23
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If you're running 4e, you're better off getting a few months of DDI than any book they make. It is a phenomenal value.
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May 18, 2010 20:30
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Impermanent posted:2) Matter is crazy and the dude playing the matter mage is a physics nerd. I know that radioactivity is only for five dot matter mages, but where do I put my foot down regarding him turning poo poo in swimming pools into cadmium or similar stunts? "No." Or, tell him that the same mechanics that require a higher arcanum rating for gold apply to such substances -- too much metaphysical weight attached to them. Throw on some bullshit. Which is "no" but with a reason. quote:3) Should the players get warning about covert magic being used on them even if they don't have their sight on or similar? It seems like some of the more subtle domains like fate or mind could gently caress someone up without a lot of notice. All mages have an unseen sense that tells them when magic is done in their presence even without Mage Sight. I think you have to use Prime to hide it. quote:4) If I throw these guys at vampires with a bunch of dazed thralls around'em, should I go easy on the paradox even though there are mortals near? It seems kind of ridiculous that the Sleepers can watch vampires turn into bats and move faster than trains but can't believe a wizard's shooting said vampire with lightning. You could argue that ghouls are touched by the supernatural and don't invoke Paradox, but that's not in the rules as written, I don't think. Also, don't go easy on the Paradox -- it has nothing to do with what people will believe and everything to do with what the Fallen World has to say about physics and reality.
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May 18, 2010 20:48
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Found that Mage - The Arcana book in some torrent, hosted it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/388927867/Mage_the_Awakening_-_The_Arcana.pdf.html
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May 18, 2010 23:16
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Thanks guys - that Arcana book is doin' me a world of good in figuring out how to work with the system. I'll probably say that any kind of highly reactive metal is charged with too much resonance to be created without too high matter score. Or something. The rules clarifications are great, too - I'll keep that Prime tidbit in mind in case I really do want to ruin their day.
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May 19, 2010 00:33
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That Arcana book is pretty good, but could do with some editing and some clarifications in places. If I get bored I might have a crack at tightening it up. In particular, there's a couple of places where the guy has put his own assumptions about Practice in place of what the writer's have said, and while it's pretty harmless it could do with a bit more explanation.
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May 19, 2010 01:47
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Maddman posted:If you're running 4e, you're better off getting a few months of DDI than any book they make. It is a phenomenal value. unfortunately I run a 3.5 game. I'm guessing DDI wouldn't help then?
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May 19, 2010 04:54
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MrMortimer posted:unfortunately I run a 3.5 game. I'm guessing DDI wouldn't help then? It's both easier and harder in 3.5. Most of the math I mentioned above works in 3.5, the difference is, now you have wizards who are just going to say 'gently caress that' and lay them down.
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May 19, 2010 04:57
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lighttigersoul posted:It's both easier and harder in 3.5. Most of the math I mentioned above works in 3.5, the difference is, now you have wizards who are just going to say 'gently caress that' and lay them down. I'm doing an Ebberon campaign which has a fuckton of magic to begin with, so I have to deal with that anyway. Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll be sure to post how the next session goes!
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May 19, 2010 21:34
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MrMortimer posted:unfortunately I run a 3.5 game. I'm guessing DDI wouldn't help then? I might be able to help then. There's always page 113 onwards of the DMG for NPC stats. I'll try and type up a bunch of stuff a bit later on how I stat NPCs on the fly. The real challenge is coming up with those NPCs on the fly though. Are you more interested in running story focused games or sandbox type worlds?
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May 19, 2010 22:41
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rock rock posted:I might be able to help then. There's always page 113 onwards of the DMG for NPC stats. I'll try and type up a bunch of stuff a bit later on how I stat NPCs on the fly. The real challenge is coming up with those NPCs on the fly though. Are you more interested in running story focused games or sandbox type worlds? I'm trying to do more of a story right now, just to get the party to get to know each other, I've set up an arch nemesis and I'm just coming up with plot on the fly now. If the players say they want to do something else, I wouldn't be against just running a game on the fly.
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May 20, 2010 03:09
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