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P.d0t posted:To answer your questions with questions, how would the players figure those out? Would it be guess-and-test, or would you allow monster knowledge checks that tell you about the weaknesses? Or both? The key should be to make sure that the status effects degrade gracefully, and intuitively, for solo monsters. So I don't think "Immobolized is for Melee, Stun is for Ranged" would work well. I'd instead do something like: normally, the solo has 3 attacks per turn. If dazed, lose one attack. If stunned, lose two, but doesn't stack with dazed. Dominated is stunned, but one of the lost attacks can be forced against one of its allies, or maybe itself. The solo can opt to ignore Immobilized and Slowed by giving up another attack. The point is, whatever you throw at it, it does something useful, and within the general realm of what you'd get against a standard monster. Ideally, the translation to solo monsters would be a general rule, not something that every solo monster handles individually and differently. quote:Might that cause a death spiral? So does killing/dazing/stunning individual members of a multi-monster encounter.
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Sep 11, 2013 04:11
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Here's an idea that's percolating in my head as I type this.. Why not have solos be like a hydra, or something similar. Maybe have all damage target a single pool of HP, but status effects target a particular appendage. Say, a dragon with a claw/claw/mouth/tail; if you daze the tail, it can't tailswipe, or something. This sorta seems to fit with Mearls' earlier posts about "solos are all REALLY REALLY BIG creatures"; this sort of thing wouldn't quite work the same with the bossfight against COMMANDER EVIL, mere mortal man of Owning. I might just be distilling exactly what other posters had in mind with this, but I think this might make it easier to balance solos w/r/t group-monster encounters. Hopefully.
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Sep 11, 2013 04:44
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P.d0t posted:Here's an idea that's percolating in my head as I type this.. Well it seems to me that a solo that's COMMANDER EVIL shouldn't just be like a WoW raidboss where it's just some guy that's crazy tough (tougher than the whole party) for no good reason. A single entity that takes a whole party to bring down should be something really big and huge and tough, and COMMANDER EVIL should always have minions/summons/reserves just because that's how things work. Admittedly appealing to verisimilitude isn't a good way to design things, but something that appeals to a player's intuition is probably not too bad as a start.
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Sep 11, 2013 05:00
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Daetrin posted:COMMANDER EVIL should always have minions/summons/reserves Yeahhh but that's where the line blurs from "a fight against ONE really tough dude/thing" (solo) to just "a really tough fight with one dude/thing that is obviously the leader of the other mooks" (elite?) edit: VVVV you're doing it right P.d0t fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Sep 11, 2013 |
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Sep 11, 2013 05:06
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When I had the PCs fight Mechathulhu, a monster the size of a building in 4e, I did it by taking an Elite, giving it the HP pool of a Solo, but then also having a number of additional monsters in the fight (Right Arm, Left Arm, Tentacles, etc) with unique stats and their own action pools, with triggers that, on their death, subtracted an amount of hit points from the Solo body equal to their total hit point pool. So you've got something like this:  plus two arms (lvl 6 soldiers) and 4 tentacles (lvl 5 strikers), each of which, upon defeat, subtracted 90 and 80 hp from Mechathulhu's HP pool. It adds up to a single encounters worth of monsters, but it feels like you're fighting one big monster.
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Sep 11, 2013 05:06
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Daetrin posted:Well it seems to me that a solo that's COMMANDER EVIL shouldn't just be like a WoW raidboss where it's just some guy that's crazy tough (tougher than the whole party) for no good reason. A single entity that takes a whole party to bring down should be something really big and huge and tough, and COMMANDER EVIL should always have minions/summons/reserves just because that's how things work. What if he's not COMMANDER EVIL, but COMMANDER EVIL'S TRUSTED LIEUTENANT who is no leader of men, but as fierce as a tiger? Like, say, Lu Bu, the Flying General. Just a man, yes, but a man that required an entire party of adventurers to tie him up and a coalition of nations to kill him?
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Sep 11, 2013 05:29
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I don't know how good it would be but if i was making LU BU supreme badass who can fight you 5 v1 and still have a shot I would give him 5 turns and maybe the hp for 4 or 5 people give him a nice spread of initiatives so that he doesn't get to attack 5 times in a row but make him really mobile so he can be all over the battlefield.
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Sep 11, 2013 06:25
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I made some fantastic chocolate chip cookies the other day. They're a minor variant on the standard recipe from bags of chocolate chips, but with a couple key differences that make them a lot more delicate and hard to make properly. Here's the recipe. If you're a foreign, convert it yourself. These colors don't run. 2 cups of flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 cup of butter 1 cup of granulated sugar 1 cup of brown sugar, packed 2 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1/2 bag semi-sweet chocolate chips (go light on the chips or the cookies will completely fall apart) Preheat the oven to 350. Mix the flour, salt, and baking soda while you melt the butter. It is very important that the butter be liquid. Mix the sugars, eggs, and vanilla into the melted butter. Mix that into the flour and stir until it's dough. Fold in the chocolate chips. The dough is going to be a lot softer than a normal cookie dough because of the melted butter. With a melon baller or other small scoop, drop six evenly-spaced scoops onto a standard baking sheet. They are going to melt out pretty far, so don't put more than six on a sheet. Put the sheet in the oven while you scoop dough onto another sheet. Don't bake more than one at once. At some point between 8 and 10 minutes they should be flat, crinkled, and just starting to brown. Take them out and let them finish cooking as they sit. They should be slightly underdone when you remove them. This is key, do not overcook them. It can take a couple pans to figure out. Let them cool while you bake the second pan, then carefully slide them with a spatula on to plates. They are going to be close to falling apart while they're still warm, so be very careful. Let the second pan cool while you add more dough, and repeat the process until you're out of dough. Let the cookies finish cooling before you try to eat them, or they'll just fall apart. If you did it right, you should have incredibly soft discs of butter and sugar that are basically the best cookies you've ever had.
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Sep 11, 2013 09:41
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First of all, Mechathulhu is awesome though I may be biased because I actually got to fight him. Second, I've read some cookie recipes that claim the secret to producing soft and chewy chocolate chip cookies is to both A). specifically use dark brown sugar (a lot of recipes don't specify, I know that dark brown sugar is "richer" and has more of a molasses-y flavor to it but I'm not sure how it affects a baked goods texture/consistency) and B). add a couple teaspoons of cornstarch to the dry ingredients before blending them into the wet, which is something I've never considered before. Anyone here ever tried something like that or is it experiment time?
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Sep 11, 2013 10:06
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Elfgames posted:I don't know how good it would be but if i was making LU BU supreme badass who can fight you 5 v1 and still have a shot I would give him 5 turns and maybe the hp for 4 or 5 people give him a nice spread of initiatives so that he doesn't get to attack 5 times in a row but make him really mobile so he can be all over the battlefield. This is kinda how post MM3 solos work already. They're one big bag of HP with actions on multiple initiative counts who lose those actions to shrug off status effects.
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Sep 11, 2013 15:13
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Solos basically need to be as much like four or five enemies as you can get them to be.
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Sep 11, 2013 15:47
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Thinking about it, I was getting tied up in genre expectations. There don't seem to be many genres outside of RPGs where you have solo person vs. group and the group can win, but with effort. Either that person is so skilled they can roflstomp groups (even groups of 'heroes,' like Lu Bu) or they're just a mook so they go down instantly. Usually it's group v. group, solo v. solo (duels!), or group v. monster. So playing into that set of genre expectations (which of course isn't the only way to play) a regular, non-monstrous guy isn't appropriate for a solo encounter (though he would be for elite). Maybe it's just that WoW has left me with a bad taste for inexplicably over-sized humanoids that can be beat on by five (or ten, or twenty-five...) people for minutes on end?
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Sep 12, 2013 02:33
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5 + people having to fight one person who isn't a monster, but is just super badass/skilled/whatever, is like a story as old as there are stories. Having a regular sized humanoid be a solo is fine, there's no need for it to be a giant monster or dragon or god or anything (though it can be). It's not any more or less believable or realistic or verisimiwhatever then say, dragons existing.
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Sep 12, 2013 06:19
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okay, so i made some Good Fuckin Pork Chops, and heres how you can also eat like a loving champion and not be a fat piece of poo poo. step 1: get good pork chops, the kind that are part dark meat part light meat, not the poo poo they sell at like walmart step 2: take them out, season with salt, pepper, thyme step 3 leave them sitting for a half hour on the counter step 4: hot pan olive oil step 5: 4 minutes each side ,medium heat (or higher if your stove sucks) step 6: cover, rest your meat (like after a big j/o sesh) for ten minutes step 7: chop some roma tomatoes in half so the stem end will rest flat on a plate remove the entire inside part from the stem end, all of it so its a nice bowl step 8: cover those fuckers in oregano, thyme, basil, parsley step 9: hot pan olive oil step 10 cook em a little on their bottoms, turn them over onto their edges and turn up the heat a bit step 11 take those fuckers off it takes like two three minutes to cook them sometimes less stepp 12 when the meats done resting, uncover, remove pork chops, heat again step 13 add wine, a little more thyme, reduce tell its thickened a bit step 14: put sauce in roma tomato stem end bowl, parm in the other tomato half. add a sprig of fresh thyme, sprinkle a little sauce around so this poo poo looks professionally presented step 15 eat that poo poo im the gordon ramsay of trad games
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Sep 12, 2013 06:48
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Nihnoz posted:Solos basically need to be as much like four or five enemies as you can get them to be. This is pretty much the crux of it, but the other half of it is running the fight in such a way that none of the "wires" are showing.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:54
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goldjas posted:5 + people having to fight one person who isn't a monster, but is just super badass/skilled/whatever, is like a story as old as there are stories. Having a regular sized humanoid be a solo is fine, there's no need for it to be a giant monster or dragon or god or anything (though it can be). It's not any more or less believable or realistic or verisimiwhatever then say, dragons existing.
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Sep 12, 2013 10:16
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Daetrin posted:Maybe it's just that WoW has left me with a bad taste for inexplicably over-sized humanoids that can be beat on by five (or ten, or twenty-five...) people for minutes on end? That's because comparing WoW to a tradgame really breaks down in this aspect. If you want a video game's analogue to the solo boss battle look to stuff like Suikoden II's fight against Luca Blight. Luca isn't a 12 foot tall man, he doesn't get a ridiculous transformation into a dragon or vampire swarm or anything. But he is powered by one of the plot important magic runes and is considered the most deadly fighter in the world. This is enough for your entire rebel army to be terrified at the prospect of fighting him. Your normal soldiers have absolutely no chance against him. The leaders of the rebellion jump into suicidal skirmishes with him to give your party half a chance. And he gets somewhere between 9-12 attacks per round depending on how you count multiple slashes or him stabbing half your party in the face. He's human sized and mostly just an amazing swordsman jacked up on magic runes. But when you get within swording distance he's a force of nature.
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Sep 12, 2013 22:24
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Razorwired posted:That's because comparing WoW to a tradgame really breaks down in this aspect. If you want a video game's analogue to the solo boss battle look to stuff like Suikoden II's fight against Luca Blight. Low level WoW stuff tends to work pretty well, lots of cultists and caves full of beasties and gangs of bandits instead of just solo guys, and really it even works for a lot of the extraplanar demons that have been a running theme throughout the series' lifespan. It just starts getting a little weird once you start dealing with all these guys that are supposed to take on entire raiding parties for no apparent reason than "they're someone or other's general I guess"
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Sep 12, 2013 22:30
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Razorwired posted:That's because comparing WoW to a tradgame really breaks down in this aspect. If you want a video game's analogue to the solo boss battle look to stuff like Suikoden II's fight against Luca Blight. The best thing about Luca Blight is that he isn't even that jacked up on magical runes - from what I recall, the Beat Rune doesn't actually give him any abnormal power or strength. He's a monstrous beast because that's just who the gently caress he is.
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Sep 13, 2013 00:04
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The Beast Rune is the reason he gets three turns The Beast Rune isn't the reason he can kill a character with each attack each turn.
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Sep 13, 2013 00:13
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Daetrin posted:Maybe it's just that WoW has left me with a bad taste for inexplicably over-sized humanoids
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Sep 13, 2013 17:56
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Did anyone notice, by the way, just how ASTONISHLINGLY badly Wizards have hosed up their forums now? THe quantity of quality grog to be mined from the Next forums has dropped considerably D:
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Sep 13, 2013 19:29
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thespaceinvader posted:Did anyone notice, by the way, just how ASTONISHLINGLY badly Wizards have hosed up their forums now? THe quantity of quality grog to be mined from the Next forums has dropped considerably D: Thank God the RPGsite and ENworld wells will never dry up.
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Sep 13, 2013 20:17
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thespaceinvader posted:Did anyone notice, by the way, just how ASTONISHLINGLY badly Wizards have hosed up their forums now? THe quantity of quality grog to be mined from the Next forums has dropped considerably D: Oh? What happened?
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Sep 14, 2013 00:52
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They got new software. It's incredibly lovely, to the point (for instance) of ordering the forum threads by original post date, rather than last post date. That alone has basically killed useful discussion. Not to mention the fact that for most of the first week, none of the old thread links would work. And the groups all got lost. As did the friends. And the wiki. And most of the blogs. Also, there are no breadcrumb trails on any page of a thread bar the first. And the new posts link for any given thread is broken (looks intended to be a relative link, but lacks the right syntax, so tries to be an absolute link to a relative location, and thereby, breaks). It seems to have been built in drupal, which is apparently decent software but needs some user-side hacking to actually be *good*, and Wizards are lovely at digital anything. And all of that is ignoring the horrifically bad layout, with about 75% of any given page being whitespace. It's pretty much killed any meaningful discussion in the areas I visit routinely. E: actually, looking at it this evening for the first time, a lot of this poo poo seems to be fixed. Still pretty inexcusable that it happened in the first place though.
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Sep 14, 2013 01:09
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thespaceinvader posted:They got new software. It's incredibly lovely, to the point (for instance) of ordering the forum threads by original post date, rather than last post date. That alone has basically killed useful discussion. Not to mention the fact that for most of the first week, none of the old thread links would work. And the groups all got lost. As did the friends. And the wiki. And most of the blogs. Also, there are no breadcrumb trails on any page of a thread bar the first. And the new posts link for any given thread is broken (looks intended to be a relative link, but lacks the right syntax, so tries to be an absolute link to a relative location, and thereby, breaks). Oh my goodness all the post titles are in all caps. That's quite painful to read.
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Sep 14, 2013 03:50
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thespaceinvader posted:Did anyone notice, by the way, just how ASTONISHLINGLY badly Wizards have hosed up their forums now? THe quantity of quality grog to be mined from the Next forums has dropped considerably D: They appear to have broken everything except basic posting including the majority of user experience guidelines. Today was the first time I have ever seen any forum code overflow into someone's post. Edit: This is the post I was talking about, http://community.wizards.com/comment/49237911#comment-49237911 DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Sep 14, 2013 |
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Sep 14, 2013 05:16
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DalaranJ posted:This is the post I was talking about, I remember seeing similar things happen with their previous forum's text editor widget, if you deleted across some kinds of formatting or otherwise confused it. Wonder if they're still using that same widget.
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Sep 14, 2013 06:36
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It's actually amazing. Every time WotC changes or updates their forums, they get worse. And there's absolutely no bottom to this barrel.
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Sep 14, 2013 07:28
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Razorwired posted:Luca isn't a 12 foot tall man, he doesn't get a ridiculous transformation into a dragon or vampire swarm or anything. I read this as 'vampire swan' at first, which I actually think would be pretty terrifying.
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Sep 14, 2013 15:33
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Splicer posted:WoW raid bosses are huge so that you can see them. Think of a normal WoW end-boss fight, the amount of spell effects and so on being thrown around. Now imagine that fight except the end-boss is shorter than the tank. How would you even know where it was? That doesn't apply to Tabletop games. Likewise with the big city NPCs for city raids and such. Its still a little bit disconcerting when Emperor Karl Franz is 12ft tall.
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Sep 14, 2013 16:15
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Der Waffle Mous posted:Likewise with the big city NPCs for city raids and such. It was a long time ago but a Blizzard employee posted about this once. The gist of it was that important characters aren't really these hulking giants in game but rather the larger model represents how much more notable they are to your character.
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Sep 14, 2013 19:39
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ProfessorCirno posted:It's actually amazing. Every time WotC changes or updates their forums, they get worse. And there's absolutely no bottom to this barrel. And this is the company that tried to build an edition around having a virtual tabletop. THIS company, that can't even design their own website properly.
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Sep 15, 2013 00:58
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Misandu posted:It was a long time ago but a Blizzard employee posted about this once. The gist of it was that important characters aren't really these hulking giants in game but rather the larger model represents how much more notable they are to your character. Not to mention that when two hundred characters - many of whom are larger than human - surround him and beat him up with swords, he kinda gets lost in the manpile.
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Sep 15, 2013 03:41
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Maxwell Lord posted:And this is the company that tried to build an edition around having a virtual tabletop. THIS company, that can't even design their own website properly. Come on, you can't render such negative judgment based on such early impressions. This is clearly nothing more than an open playtest of the forum... and the full release will fit your individual preferences and desires perfectly! It will also have modules
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Sep 15, 2013 05:01
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Maxwell Lord posted:And this is the company that tried to build an edition around having a virtual tabletop. THIS company, that can't even design their own website properly. The virtual tabletop designer did a murder-suicide--which is essentially the only reason we don't have one--and the game's builder tools, while flawed, are still powerful and more than any other game can boast. I wouldn't much mind a company attempting to make a virtual tabletop that wasn't heinously overcomplicated or just plain lovely, though I have yet to fully investigate roll20. That's a thing that deserves a project with some money behind it, let alone a 3D ui.
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Sep 15, 2013 07:24
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Mm, the VTT designer was a very unfortunate thing - but the converse is that, with the best will in the world, a company with a revenue stream as big as D&D's (and it should be pretty big) should be able to afford to pay to have something programmed by a company that can eat the loss of a single, even a critical, employee. If one of the game design team left right now, the game shouldn't collapse; the same should be true of the digital arm.
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Sep 15, 2013 08:55
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:I wouldn't much mind a company attempting to make a virtual tabletop that wasn't heinously overcomplicated or just plain lovely, though I have yet to fully investigate roll20. roll20 isn't without its flaws, but it does all of this and is astoundingly easy to use.
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Sep 15, 2013 14:32
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http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130916 The high- and lowlights... * skills are back as part of the core game. * sorta 4e-style; no skill points, just trained vs untrained, with Expert thrown in. Bonuses smaller, due to bounded accuracy. Scales with level. * skill list is slightly longer than 4e, but not the clusterfuck of 3e * intended to be flexible, so different stats can influence one skill. * Alluding to a 13A style of backgrounds as an alternative system.
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Sep 16, 2013 15:57
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Yeah the bit about using different ability mods for the same skill isn't really well explained, but we've done similar things with 4e in my groups, i.e. a Charisma (Stealth) check would be used for disguise, an Intelligence (Streetwise) check for appraise.
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Sep 16, 2013 18:02
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