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What is the best version of El? This poll is closed. |
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| Elminster |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Elmara |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Entwine |
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13 | 4.19% |
| GURPS |
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99 | 31.94% |
| El Kabong |
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153 | 49.35% |
| Elves |
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5 | 1.61% |
| Total: | 310 votes | ||
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ayy lmao ______/ 
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Aug 23, 2014 05:09
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 10:47 |
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Cassa posted:What were they doing? Just trying to hold the box out for as long as they could? Yeah, it was for the release of Ptolus. You hold the big honking book out in front of you and the person who lasts longest gets a free copy. I was there that year (2005?) and wanted to do it, but as mentioned you had to win a lottery to participate. Likewise, my friends and I didn't get in and so we just left without ever following up. That was also the year Ed Greenwood cut in line in front of me at the D&D booth and I got to meet MC Chris (not at the same time). Do they still have That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Aug 23, 2014 |
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Aug 23, 2014 05:15
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Cassa posted:What were they doing? Just trying to hold the box out for as long as they could?  That was the insanely large and heavy Ptolus book Monte Cook came out with that year. I think it was $100, and the one who held it the longest won a copy. I talked Mike into doing it; he was my ringer. The plan was, I was going to buy it from him for half price, but after going through all that he decided to keep it (for real, he deserved it; that was more than $50 worth of effort). From what I hear, he even ran a campaign in it. On the downside, he was completely wiped for a full day after that, as you might expect from a challenge like that. (The other dude cheated, too; he should have been disqualified several minutes before it ended, but that's neither here nor there.) Man, those were the days. I miss fake-swordfighting, but I'm married, out of shape, and have two young kids now.
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Aug 23, 2014 06:20
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Plague of Hats posted:Do they still have
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Aug 23, 2014 06:36
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Songbird to Big Egg, the package has arrived. Repeat, the package has arrived.
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Aug 23, 2014 16:06
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"If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly .... It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals, for that will maintain freshness in the campaign" - This quote has been discussed before but never in the August Personage of Elminster Chat Thread I believe his whole point was that since the system was fundamentally imbalanced that the gamemaster (sorry, judge? Referee?) had to constantly tip the scales as the campaign progressed and the power shift from fighter-types to wizard-types occurred ... but I love that at no point did he seemingly try to just fix it. Unless someone far more versed in The Gygax tells me that Dangerous Journeys or Lejendary Adventures was such an attempt, but I seem to recall those continuing caster supremacy.
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Aug 24, 2014 23:18
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Okay so I'm reading Pathfinder material and let me just say: Svirfneblin in Golarion are so much more interesting than Svirfneblin in the Forgotten Realms that it is amazing.
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Aug 24, 2014 23:28
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Quarex posted:I believe his whole point was that since the system was fundamentally imbalanced that the gamemaster (sorry, judge? Referee?) had to constantly tip the scales as the campaign progressed and the power shift from fighter-types to wizard-types occurred ... but I love that at no point did he seemingly try to just fix it. Unless someone far more versed in The Gygax tells me that Dangerous Journeys or Lejendary Adventures was such an attempt, but I seem to recall those continuing caster supremacy. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Aug 24, 2014 |
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Aug 24, 2014 23:28
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MadScientistWorking posted:I thought in earlier editions Wizards slowly became less effective with how the save system work. From what I've gathered the balance did exist its just that it was balanced in one of the most moronic ways possible. Yeah, in Basic D&D, saves were based on your target, not the caster. So early on, the Wizard only got one or two spells, but almost nothing could resist those spells either - level 1 monsters had worthless saves. But once you get to level 10, 15, what-have-you, you have a dozen powerful spells all ready to go, but each spell has maybe a 30% shot at working because most everything has really good saves now. If you found a monster's weakest save and used a spell to hit that, you might get a 50% shot of having that spell actually work, and there was no way wizard-side to improve your odds of spell success. This is generally why damage-dealing spells used to be king, because even on a successful save, half of 5d6 or 10d6 damage is still a good chunk of damage. While Finger of Death could instantly kill them instead, chances are it would just do nothing at all. So Fighters were still important, because they could consistently hit, deal damage, and never be hit, because the save system benefited them just as much as it benefits the monsters.
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Aug 24, 2014 23:55
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Quarex posted:"If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly .... It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals, for that will maintain freshness in the campaign" - Nah. Gygax actually did balance the system pretty well - but balanced it in development rather than design (Gygax was a terrible designer, but no RPG in history has had more or more successful development work put into it than oD&D, and he was working off Arneson's base design). One of the balance points was that all spells with the exception of your first were magic items that you needed to find by looting dungeons. Giving wizards lots of spells is like turning the fighter into Iron Man with magic items. Unfortunately lots of spells would be two spells per character level...
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Aug 25, 2014 00:18
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neonchameleon posted:Nah. Gygax actually did balance the system pretty well - but balanced it in development rather than design (Gygax was a terrible designer, but no RPG in history has had more or more successful development work put into it than oD&D, and he was working off Arneson's base design). One of the balance points was that all spells with the exception of your first were magic items that you needed to find by looting dungeons. Giving wizards lots of spells is like turning the fighter into Iron Man with magic items. Somewhere in one of the early issues of Dragon magazine he discussed a bit more about his desires to keep wizards balanced. He wanted all the classes to be balanced, and things like material components, spells per day, weapon selection, magic item availability, hit points and such were intended to do that. Unfortunately a lot of the things that kept wizards in check were not fun and people dropped them. Each version of DnD since then has had less and less focus on these aspects of the wizard. Also early on it was assumed that players were also using Chainmail, which gave fighters all kinds of extra tricks beyond "I swing my sword at it", but no version of DnD actually included all the Chainmail rules in the package.
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Aug 25, 2014 01:20
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Okay so I'm reading Pathfinder material and let me just say: *in the voice of Lion-O from Thundercats* What the gently caress is a Svirfneblin?
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Aug 25, 2014 01:22
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How many fantasy species are based off the initial nordic myth of "little man what lives under the ground" anyway?
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Aug 25, 2014 01:26
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Do you count all the various subrace spinoffs because then it'd easily reach dozens
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Aug 25, 2014 01:32
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:*in the voice of Lion-O from Thundercats* What the gently caress is a Svirfneblin? Underdark gnomes that only exist to be The One Good Underdark Race so that you can go "Oh no we have to go save the Svirfneblin from the Urghdafn."
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Aug 25, 2014 02:29
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:*in the voice of Lion-O from Thundercats* What the gently caress is a Svirfneblin? That was Panthro you scrub.
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Aug 25, 2014 02:31
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Underdark gnomes that only exist to be The One Good Underdark Race so that you can go "Oh no we have to go save the Svirfneblin from the Urghdafn." They're "good" in the sense that they won't automatically try to enslave or kill you when you wander into their territory.
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Aug 25, 2014 03:09
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Bucnasti posted:Somewhere in one of the early issues of Dragon magazine he discussed a bit more about his desires to keep wizards balanced. He wanted all the classes to be balanced, and things like material components, spells per day, weapon selection, magic item availability, hit points and such were intended to do that. Unfortunately a lot of the things that kept wizards in check were not fun and people dropped them. Each version of DnD since then has had less and less focus on these aspects of the wizard. At the end of the same issue of the Strategic Review I quoted earlier, Gygax took up the question of appropriate Dungeonmastering; he seemed pretty equally confused/disappointed by the groups who ran games where you gained level too rapidly AND the games where you killed half the players off every session--that was news to me, as I always assumed he did love to kill people off for fun. Maybe that was more of a tournament/demo kind of attitude than one for a general campaign. But hearing him talk about how playing 50-75 times a year should result in you being level 9-11 at the most, and that Blackmoor, the oldest campaign in the world at 5 years old, has no characters above 14th level, is emblematic of how quickly progression is supposed to go (granting that someone COULD have been level 20 by then if they had survived the whole time)... yeah. They were thinking and designing at wargame campaign speed, and the newbies were thinking at ... honestly I have no idea I guess. WHIPPERSNAPPER SPEED Though here again is where you see that he actually did have a grasp on design to some extent--he acknowledges that there is basically nothing to do in the game once you start to get to these ridiculously high levels. That is why strongholds and followers and retainers were such a big part, I imagine.
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Aug 25, 2014 06:44
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Quarex posted:At the end of the same issue of the Strategic Review I quoted earlier, Gygax took up the question of appropriate Dungeonmastering; he seemed pretty equally confused/disappointed by the groups who ran games where you gained level too rapidly AND the games where you killed half the players off every session--that was news to me, as I always assumed he did love to kill people off for fun. Maybe that was more of a tournament/demo kind of attitude than one for a general campaign. My experiences are that in Basic and so on death is constant and unexpected at level one, common at level two, and pretty rare at levels three plus. New characters will probably die a few times before one slips through the danger levels, but once you find your 'main' character you pretty much are expected to keep them.
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Aug 25, 2014 07:10
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Quarex posted:Yeah, it seemed like a lot of his early ideas were just kind of disregarded by the practicalities of actually playing the game--though it is hardly surprising to see simplification of overwrought rules. It really seemed like they didn't understand how their game was played when they weren't the ones running it. Original DnD was probably the most playtested game ever made, but all that testing was done by just a few guys with a relatively small group of players, once it got out into the wild things changed drastically in ways they didn't plan for. One of the things I noticed when reading the old issues of Dragon; there was a lot of hand wringing about "Monty Haul" Dungeon Masters who gave away too much XP or too much treasure. At first I didn't really understand, I mean who cares what other people do in their own games, but then I realized that back then it was common practice for a player to have a single character that they jumped from game to game with. Players who might have leveled up faster or acquired a lot of treasure in another game caused a ton of resentment in the players who were "playing the right way". I think this is where the whole "it needs to be difficult and unfun or you're doing it wrong" attitude that permeates so much of the hobby got it's start.
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Aug 25, 2014 07:46
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Quarex posted:I always assumed he did love to kill people off for fun. Maybe that was more of a tournament/demo kind of attitude than one for a general campaign.
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Aug 25, 2014 13:51
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I love the term "Dungeon Vietnam" so much.
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Aug 25, 2014 14:41
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Does it have a Menzoberranzan Marriott?
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Aug 25, 2014 17:30
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Mr. Maltose posted:That was Panthro you scrub. Actually, it was not.
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Aug 25, 2014 17:31
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gnome7 posted:Yeah, in Basic D&D, saves were based on your target, not the caster. So early on, the Wizard only got one or two spells, but almost nothing could resist those spells either - level 1 monsters had worthless saves. But once you get to level 10, 15, what-have-you, you have a dozen powerful spells all ready to go, but each spell has maybe a 30% shot at working because most everything has really good saves now. If you found a monster's weakest save and used a spell to hit that, you might get a 50% shot of having that spell actually work, and there was no way wizard-side to improve your odds of spell success. The other thing to note was HP, AC, and attack differences. Despite being named "d20," the d20 system hilariously doesn't actually really make use of the d20. I mean yeah, it's the main die and all, but absolutely no math was done to figure percentiles. AD&D/Basic was the opposite - all math was built around the d20. And it very heavily favored the warrior subclasses (fighter, ranger, paladin). Take AC. Going off 2e because THAC0, confusing as it is at times, is still easier then constantly referring to a chart, you start at AC10 and THAC0 20. That means, broadly, you need to roll a 10 to hit yourself. Simple enough. The catch is that there are very few bonuses in AD&D to attack. Warrior THAC0 gets better every single level, and that's a bit of a big deal, because unlike many post-AD&D editions, your basic attack number is the biggest contributer to your attack rolls. Enemy AC and THAC0 was typically not very high either. Oh, and those attack bonuses? A good number were Warrior only. This meant no only that warriors could far more easily hit baddies then anyone else, their high AC from armor only they (and clerics) could wear meant they were rarely hit in turn. HP was also a big difference. In 3e, due to the desire to make a universal engine, monsters changed significantly. Pre-3e, there were not different "types" of monsters or different categories or what have you - there was just one "MONSTER" type. All monsters had a d8 for hit dice. They all had the same saves. They didn't have listed attributes because the "verisimilitude" disease only took hold in 3e. Which meant no constitution to HP, though some significantly powerful monsters got a bonus unrelated to stats. Which means HP was tiny. A good rogue backstab actually could insta-kill LOTS of enemies. And a warrior, with their warrior-only weapon specialization and their warrior-only multiple attacks (that you could move before no problem) and their warrior-only damage bonuses were threshing machines. This is why evocation and blast spells were so popular pre-3e - a good fireball actually would clear a whole room (and a good lightning bolt would clear a whole corridor, because pre-3e always assumed a dungeon, thus why you have the two different spells). The HP thing also turns the other way, too. Got lucky with your dice rolls? Only a warrior can really take advantage of that. At higher constitutions, non-warriors get jack poo poo. So warriors had significantly better HP, significantly better attacks, significantly better damage, and significantly better survivability then most other classes. Oh yeah, and after a few levels (not at first), better saves.
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Aug 25, 2014 22:23
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So there's an online Cards Against Humanity clone that is pretty great. Along with all the CAH cards (including PAX cards etc.) and a bunch of dumb fan sets, it now supports custom decks.  Someone did a Trad Games one, it's a WIP but it's pretty okay.
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Aug 26, 2014 12:49
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Ettin posted:Someone did a Trad Games one, it's a WIP but it's pretty okay and I'm a terrible person
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Aug 26, 2014 14:51
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Do you meant the /tg/ one because that has been around for a while.
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Aug 26, 2014 15:03
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no
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Aug 26, 2014 19:53
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what the... oh no, I really liked that expansion... it had funny cards referencing fukken awesome memes like Faptau, the Emprah of Mankind and Commissar Fuklaw of the Angry Marines...
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Aug 26, 2014 20:32
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The Angry Marines list was the most balanced in all of 40k, don't even front
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Aug 26, 2014 21:06
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:what the... oh no, I really liked that expansion... it had funny cards referencing fukken awesome memes like Faptau, the Emprah of Mankind and Commissar Fuklaw of the Angry Marines... cool feel free to play it then
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Aug 26, 2014 21:26
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Captain Foo posted:cool feel free to play it then i did, with you, back in march, or was it february?
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Aug 26, 2014 21:29
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This just reminded me, the latest deadline for the PDF to be given to Far West backers is the end of this month, set your watches, kids!
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Aug 27, 2014 02:09
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He's been saying "about a month" for the past year, so I wouldn't get my hopes up!
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Aug 27, 2014 03:24
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:i did, with you, back in march, or was it february? Wasn't me
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Aug 27, 2014 03:50
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Saguaro PI posted:This just reminded me, the latest deadline for the PDF to be given to Far West backers is the end of this month, set your watches, kids! Although he may be "five or tens days late".
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Aug 27, 2014 03:52
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Has he actually released anything? For far west, I mean.
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Aug 27, 2014 06:46
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Captain Foo posted:Wasn't me Then... Who?! 
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Aug 27, 2014 06:55
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 10:47 |
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A Catastrophe posted:Has he actually released anything? For far west, I mean. There've been parts of the manuscript sent to backers. I have some nagging feeling that maybe the fiction anthology was successfully completed and released, but I'm not sure. All other elements of his Revolutionary TRANSMEDIA Empire have gone nowhere*. I guess he's waiting on the RPG as a keystone to his media empire because that seems like a good idea? (Serious conjecture: None of the other poo poo went anywhere worth talking about and the RPG is going to limp to the finish line where it will lie forgotten by most until his next Kickstarter.) * Like, seriously, how many people even remember that Far West RPG was supposed to be a kick-off to some multimedia franchise extravaganza? There was supposed to be a streaming TV series!
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Aug 27, 2014 06:55
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