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AlphaDog posted:
PST has nothing to do with WoW. 
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Mar 21, 2016 00:43
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Video games are dumbed down garbage entertainment for idiots and children though! 
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Kavingi posted:
A section to read to players and 3 sentence summary of the gist of the thing would be nice.
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Mar 21, 2016 00:50
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I'm running Curse of Strahd for my group and I'm interested in running another pre-made adventure with them once we wrap up, although their characters will be level 10 then. Does anyone have any experience adapting lower level adventures to higher levels? I'm currently eyeing Out Of The Abyss, so would that be a matter of swapping out monster stats for something similar but more level appropriate?
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Mar 21, 2016 19:48
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parara posted:I'm running Curse of Strahd for my group and I'm interested in running another pre-made adventure with them once we wrap up, although their characters will be level 10 then. Does anyone have any experience adapting lower level adventures to higher levels? I'm currently eyeing Out Of The Abyss, so would that be a matter of swapping out monster stats for something similar but more level appropriate? My group is playing Out of the Abyss right now, and it starts with you losing all your stuff and getting captured, and my group, at least, didn't have a chance to recover our equipment before escaping. Might be kind of a dick move to put some well developed characters through that, unless you fudge it to make it work.
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Mar 21, 2016 21:22
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The first piece of Sage Advice's advice this month is literally "Ask your DM." Found that kind of funny but I do feel like it points to an issue where you have this rigid system of rules but some of them are just there for flavor while others are essential game features. Might be nice if the two were a bit more distinct, but that's not a huge issue. The rest are actually decent clarifications, though. I know I've picked a bone before with people about how dispel magic works.
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Mar 22, 2016 02:10
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I love it. Never change, 5e.
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Mar 22, 2016 03:50
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SmellOfPetroleum posted:The Ravenloft book is out. Anyone had a chance to look it over? Got it last week and looks good so far. I'll need to read every bit in detail since you kinda have to prepare the whole adventure upfront as its quite sandbox. Which is good in my opinion. I've pre-ordered the taroka cards you can get too as those will come in handy for adding a bit extra to the adventure. The idea with that is depending on the cards drawn in the reading, it changes the adventure accordingly. It was the same thing in the 4e adventure - Madness at Gardmore Abbey which was pretty good. Been looking forward to running Ravenloft for quite a while now and I'm confident I can adapt this to 4e. The book describes how to flavour things for added spookiness and I like that. Such as casting 'Mage Hand' but it appears as a skeletal hand and even character backgrounds that are horror based. Regions and towns are described well enough as well as NPCs and important characters. There's potential for mini quests from NPCs as their descriptions include things they want to acquire or desire to complete. One thing I did notice is despite the adventure being for levels 1-10. There is a section that pretty much pushes you (as the DM) to get the players to level 3 ASAP. Party enters town of Barovia, mist settles in, forced to take refuge in a creepy house with some creepy kids (who are already dead it turns out). Players do this and they get level up real quick to level 3 by doing a few simple things. I guess this is to play it safe and avoid the weaker levels of 3.5/5e and get to level 3 where the game actually starts. Will WotC be adding maps to their site like they did with DDi though? That would be really handy. I haven't torn out the maps in the back yet but I suspect like most publications it only includes the odd map for boss encounters and not all the other ones.
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Mar 22, 2016 05:38
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I'm gonna end up in a 5e game, probably. I don't wanna be That Guy and destroy everything in front of them to Teach them A Lesson, but I don't want to play something boring, either. Class suggestions?
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Mar 22, 2016 06:33
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Play a Wizard or Bard, except have a sense of right and wrong.
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Mar 22, 2016 06:40
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What about a bard except with a pseudo-warlord gimmick? Only take buffing/debuffing/support spells, and only use Vicious Mockery as your direct damage source. Say you're an ex-officer from the army who controls the battlefield by shouting. Take a pair of signal flags as your musical instrument. Maybe a warhorn too.
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Mar 22, 2016 08:57
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Be a bard. Cast Vicious Mockery by playing Entry Of The Gladiators on your accordian (or kazoo). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QClPwRBy2E4 The first time you do this, you should have an actual kazoo or whatver on hand so you can say "I cast Vicious Mockery, like this" and play the first bar or two of the recognizable part. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 09:14
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armpit-fart and pulling-the-sphincter-of-a-blown-balloon-on-each-side-to-make-a-squealing-noise bard.
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Mar 22, 2016 13:45
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Harvey Mantaco posted:armpit-fart and pulling-the-sphincter-of-a-blown-balloon-on-each-side-to-make-a-squealing-noise bard. I took the Mounted Combat feat to specialize in motorboating
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Mar 22, 2016 13:55
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Bardbarian with a war gong as a shield.
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Mar 22, 2016 13:57
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Kaysette posted:The first piece of Sage Advice's advice this month is literally "Ask your DM." Found that kind of funny but I do feel like it points to an issue where you have this rigid system of rules but some of them are just there for flavor while others are essential game features. Might be nice if the two were a bit more distinct, but that's not a huge issue. They're clarifications because the text wasn't made very clear in the first place. When you can have something cast "As the spell" and not actually be a spell and therefore nondispellable you have hosed up somewhere.
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Mar 22, 2016 14:50
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Sage Advice could be worse. It could be this person trying to position themselves as an expert to teach new people 5e while doing it completely horribly. The advice about theater of the mind is especially horrible.
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Mar 22, 2016 15:34
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Arivia posted:Sage Advice could be worse. It could be this person trying to position themselves as an expert to teach new people 5e while doing it completely horribly. The advice about theater of the mind is especially horrible. Oh boy that link. Sage Advice is ... like you said, could be worse - it sucks that they have to keep rejiggering their own definitions of things because the original material was written so badly. It's just that that Druid question is particular is when they cross over into "is worse", because no matter how handwavey and circular-logic the previous answers were, it was also an answer you could refer to as the at-bottom definition of a thing. And that's the kind of thing that Sage Advice always was: you ask Gary Gygax what a fireball was all about, and he'd tell you. If you didn't agree with him, you went your own way. But it's still important to have a set-in-stone definition to disagree with in the first place.
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Mar 22, 2016 15:46
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Right. If the definition is so vague you're going to be making your own ruling no matter what, what's the point of the rulebooks?
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Mar 22, 2016 15:51
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Arivia posted:Sage Advice could be worse. It could be this person trying to position themselves as an expert to teach new people 5e while doing it completely horribly. The advice about theater of the mind is especially horrible. "Some of this is the desire for things that would be more satisfying but also kind of game-breakingly good, like the companion having full PC levels of hit points and being able to move and act independently instead of sharing an action economy with the ranger." GAME BREAKINGLY GOOD! 9th level spells exist, but a wolf with 50 HP is GAME BREAKINGLY GOOD
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Mar 22, 2016 19:23
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LFK posted:"Some of this is the desire for things that would be more satisfying but also kind of game-breakingly good, like the companion having full PC levels of hit points and being able to move and act independently instead of sharing an action economy with the ranger." That one is my favorite of the posts I read, too! "Rangers are bad, but only if you actually look at the rules for rangers. If you want the feeling of a ranger and don't think [insert any one of many other options with the exact same feels] cuts it, you'll take the lovely design mechanics and like them, dammit. But wait, let me finish that sentence by saying that people looking for the ranger flavor find that ranger doesn't cut it anyways. So ignore the rules/me." Granted, the reason provided is the reason that the animal companion is so lovely, because theoretically having a full second character would be bullshit, it's just that 5e overcorrected by a huge and stupid margin and made it (and its accompanying class) poo poo to 'compensate'. EDIT: It was a tossup between that post and the shockingly condescending and awful post about TotM that was already pointed out. EDIT2: Oh no. Why did I go to the second page. So much nerdrage thinly disguised behind paternalistic bullshit. Wowza. CaPensiPraxis fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 19:49
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CaPensiPraxis posted:
Oh, poo poo. "Games like 13th Age that use relative positioning are often touted as being more ideal for theater of the mind, but honestly? They’re not. They might make some things quicker and easier to handle when you’re not using a map, but this comes at the expense of the game runner being able to actually set the scene and the players being able to freely move their characters through it, which are hallmarks of theater of the mind play." Literally "these games use a different system that totally works to make things easier and faster except, uh... poo poo... reasons. Play 5th!"
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Mar 22, 2016 20:12
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Y'all give me poo poo when I say D&D damages people.
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Mar 22, 2016 21:21
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What sort of scene is he setting where precise distances are important?
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Mar 22, 2016 21:51
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Pretty sure they think near/far/who's engaged is the entirety of how you're allowed to lay out combat, like it's old Final Fantasy front/back lines.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:06
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God drat you, Arivia. God drat you to hell.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:14
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Caphi posted:Pretty sure they think near/far/who's engaged is the entirety of how you're allowed to lay out combat, like it's old Final Fantasy front/back lines. To be honest this wouldn't be the worst sort of setup to frame an RPG combat system around, something akin to Darkest Dungeon.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:28
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chaos rhames posted:What sort of scene is he setting where precise distances are important?
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Mar 22, 2016 22:36
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It's the mythical TotM where there's a vivid and precise scene that's so clear in everyone's mind that it's as accurate as a board, but there's no board because the board ruins everything. Quadratic_Wizard's classbuilding breakdown was posted to Reddit. Most complaints amounted to "your math is off because most feats actually suck" which, you know, as far as criticisms of the methodology (specifically the conclusions) goes doesn't really work that well since the weaker feats are, the less valuable Fighters get. In fact the counter-argument "nu-uh, most feats are garbage!" just further confirms the fact that 5e is balanced for poo poo with not even the haziest sense of equivalence. The wizard numbers can definitely play out in a lot of different ways, but the core assertion, that Spellcasting is treated as one class feature when it's really 40+ tiny class features is pretty substantively demonstrated.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:Play a Wizard or Bard, except have a sense of right and wrong. Skellybones posted:What about a bard except with a pseudo-warlord gimmick? Only take buffing/debuffing/support spells, and only use Vicious Mockery as your direct damage source. Say you're an ex-officer from the army who controls the battlefield by shouting. Take a pair of signal flags as your musical instrument. Maybe a warhorn too. Hmm. A Mountain Dwarf war wizard stomping around in half plate sounds interesting. Being a battlefield commander bard of some flavor (Maybe with skeleton 'soldiers' if I live long enough to poach Animate Dead) could work too.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:54
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Kai Tave posted:To be honest this wouldn't be the worst sort of setup to frame an RPG combat system around, something akin to Darkest Dungeon. My old group has certainly done that when we didn't need any more, and we've also done the normal thing of moving freeform around a drawn arena and estimating distances. I think we've also experimented a bit with a scifi game where engagement was abstracted to "in cover/out of cover" and almost hacked together some sort of advancing-through-cover minigame. (Don't ask me the rules; what little we ad-hocked, we didn't write down.) I just like the way the quote sounds like if you don't have a grid, space just doesn't exist.
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Mar 22, 2016 22:55
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Theater of the Mind does work, I don't think anyone reasonable can say in good faith that it's an utterly trash format. There certainly are games, settings, and groups for which it works well. The problem here is that DnD is in no way designed to make use of (or even accommodate) TotM gameplay. You can try to jam 5e into TotM with a limited degree of success: It will fit, but only after aggressive prodding and judicial cuts. The result makes an already vague and mediocre product even more vague and mediocre, with a dash of unneeded confusion. There's a solid middle ground between "Stick fanatically to a grid with predrawn maps" and "Throw away all visual aides, people who use them are rollplay losers with no sense of fantasy or storytelling". I personally use a whiteboard/laminated sheet to draw rough maps and place important features of the field for player reference. The system doesn't really cope with that too well either, but it's possible to handwave and nod your way through it.
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Mar 22, 2016 23:25
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Caphi posted:Pretty sure they think near/far/who's engaged is the entirety of how you're allowed to lay out combat, like it's old Final Fantasy front/back lines. Kai Tave posted:To be honest this wouldn't be the worst sort of setup to frame an RPG combat system around, something akin to Darkest Dungeon. Since this is more or less what combat looks like in BECMI whenever I play it, I tried (years ago)to just abstract the whole thing to Frontline, Support, and Ranged. If you're in the frontline, you can melee the enemy's frontline with hand weapons. You can attack their Support with polearms. Support is just behind the Frontline. If you've got a polearm, you can attack the opponent's Frontline from here. This is where clerics hang out to heal melee guys. Ranged hangs back from melee and shoots spells and arrows and whatever else. You can't get at the enemy's Ranged guys without going through their line except if you have a cunning plan such as hide/sneaking around them, dropping from the ceiling on them, using the secret passage to pop out behind them, and all that other stuff that happens in RPGs. You can start to execute a cunning plan from any location except an engaged frontline. There are potential problems, but not worse than everyone trying to remember
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Mar 23, 2016 00:29
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The advice given in that column is bad because you can't just say "well think of how books play out action scenes!" because it's a loving book - the people in it aren't wondering about where they are, and you aren't wondering about where they are because there are no decisions to be made, you just read it. And while it's true that "TOTM" can work, you can't do it either just by imagining it either, you still have to depict relative positioning by scribbling on a piece of paper in pencil, or shoving your dice around, or putting bottle caps or potato chips on the table. And, in the case of 5e, it also means completely disregarding the extant rules. Kai Tave posted:To be honest this wouldn't be the worst sort of setup to frame an RPG combat system around, something akin to Darkest Dungeon. It's also how games like Might and Magic and Dungeon Master and Wizardry and today's Legend of Grimrock work, so you know it's legit.
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Mar 23, 2016 00:43
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Yeah. When people say that playing a RPG is like writing a story/book together, they're either speaking figuratively or have no idea what they're talking about. Certainly, you can go back and stitch gameplay into something that is book or story shaped, but the cooperative part changes the form into something else entirely. You wouldn't call a playwright a novelist, you shouldn't call even the very best GMs and players authors - the medium is different and that should be acknowledged and respected. Fight scenes in books don't just happen, if the writing is any good there is loads of planning and thought put in by the author, who controls every aspect of the scene to create the flow and plot. No one (here) is arguing this point, but man... I'm still kind of in shock at how eloquently that blog collects so many misguided and dysfunctional memes of tg players.
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Mar 23, 2016 00:52
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CaPensiPraxis posted:Yeah. When people say that playing a RPG is like writing a story/book together, they're either speaking figuratively or have no idea what they're talking about. Certainly, you can go back and stitch gameplay into something that is book or story shaped, but the cooperative part changes the form into something else entirely. You wouldn't call a playwright a novelist, you shouldn't call even the very best GMs and players authors - the medium is different and that should be acknowledged and respected. Fight scenes in books don't just happen, if the writing is any good there is loads of planning and thought put in by the author, who controls every aspect of the scene to create the flow and plot. No one (here) is arguing this point, but man... I'm still kind of in shock at how eloquently that blog collects so many misguided and dysfunctional memes of tg players. I'm busy converting my GM notes from one of my campaigns into a short story and let me tell you that it sounds almost nothing like the actual adventure. Mostly because I have to give the PC characters personalities since my players can't seem to themselves.  Also, combat will probably be very brief and not take three and a half hours to get through one battle.
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Mar 23, 2016 01:16
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CaPensiPraxis posted:Yeah. When people say that playing a RPG is like writing a story/book together, they're either speaking figuratively or have no idea what they're talking about. I dunno, Fiasco is very close to "telling a story together", and PBTA games can also get pretty close depending on the group. e: Let me know if I missed the point here, like if it's about "writing" as opposed to "telling" as story. Because while D&D definitely isn't a game about collaborative story-telling, there's definitely games that are a good framework for doing exactly that. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Mar 23, 2016 |
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Mar 23, 2016 02:02
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I think he was referring more to the phenomena of every pick up table and Roll20 group trying to stream to Twitch because they think it something was fun to play it'll be fun to watch. They checked out Critical Role or the Acquisitions Inc. podcasts and didn't get that one is literally all voice actors who make a living being funny elves and the other throws the rules out as soon as Chris Perkins thinks they're impeding the show. TotM also doesn't work for 5e because it turns into a DM May I for area spells. It sucks to be melee when the Wizard either always gets to smart bomb all the enemies before you can drop one or the Wizard is constantly spraying you with fire damage.
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Mar 23, 2016 02:26
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AlphaDog posted:Since this is more or less what combat looks like in BECMI whenever I play it, I tried (years ago)to just abstract the whole thing to Frontline, Support, and Ranged.
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Mar 23, 2016 02:28
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Crasical posted:I'm gonna end up in a 5e game, probably. OK. Fighter and Barbarian are dull and the rogue is a bit better (it's the edition with the second best rogue, but that's faint praise). Suggestion 1: Depending on your group, the Master of Illusions. Human variant warlock with the Actor feat (advantage when passing yourself off as someone else). Take the Minor Image and Prestidigitation cantrips. At level 2 take the Invocations to give you Silent Image and Disguise Self at will. (And at level 3 you want Pact of the Book for the thaumaturgy, guidance, and druidcraft cantrips). Have fun causing utter mayhem. Suggestion 2: Ninja Monk. Poor in combat but you get shenanigans like dropping silence on top of spellcasters, and using Pass Without Trace to outsneak any rogue. At level 6 you teleport readily. Suggestion 3: As other people were suggesting, Bard. Have fun with all the spells - and everything else.
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Mar 23, 2016 02:33
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Play a cleric of Loki or another trickster god who is all about playing practical jokes on the party's opponents.
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Mar 23, 2016 02:38
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