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Serf posted:Damage on a miss. Emphasis mine, it's not the end of the world to do that people.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:24
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:The consequence of missing in combat is that the enemy lives another turn / isn't CC'd / whatever. If that isn't bad enough by itself, the enemy probably wasn't dangerous enough to justify existing in the first place. Isn't that the same as "the consequence of failing a Pick Lock roll is that the lock isn't picked"? Hmm. I do like damage on a miss. Do you do that for NPCs attacking PCs too?
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Aug 11, 2017 20:52
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Subjunctive posted:Isn't that the same as "the consequence of failing a Pick Lock roll is that the lock isn't picked"? Hmm. I would say no, unless the NPC is one of the main antagonists. PCs should be special. Assuming that the game you're going for has a heroic tone of course.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:54
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Unknown Armies has damage on a miss for PCs and NPCs if they're using knives. It is meant to make them scary and it works.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:Following my idyll musings at work, I also looked at Mutants & Masterminds (2nd Edition) and tried to create a D&D 3.5 level 1 Human Fighter using the point-buy system:
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Aug 11, 2017 20:59
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I've seen it broken down and damage on miss is a horrifically bad ideas for low level D&D. It's probably fine once you get more robust HP numbers and could represent a growth of competence.
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Aug 11, 2017 21:01
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Subjunctive posted:Isn't that the same as "the consequence of failing a Pick Lock roll is that the lock isn't picked"? Hmm. It's not quite the same because the entire combat is the "pick lock roll", not a single isolated attack. The combat equivalent to a non-forward Pick Lock roll is a party death where everyone dies, or perhaps failing to breach the gates to a castle they spent the last two sessions preparing to liberate and not having a secondary plot thread to follow. e: I personally think that missing is fine if combat itself is expedient between decisions/turns, especially if you do things on your turn other than attack. Like minor actions that aren't just more attack rolls.
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Aug 11, 2017 21:01
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mango sentinel posted:I've seen it broken down and damage on miss is a horrifically bad ideas for low level D&D. It's probably fine once you get more robust HP numbers and could represent a growth of competence. There's a whole lot busted with low-level D&D.
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Aug 11, 2017 21:03
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Halloween Jack posted:The person in question was Frank Trollman, the most immersive designer of verisimilitude alive, and I have to share select quotes because it's too good:
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Aug 11, 2017 21:25
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I had no idea who was behind Sage Advice until now, but in my group in 1999 or so we would frequently consult that column and do the exact opposite of what it said, safe in the knowledge that that was the better option. Worked pretty well.
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Aug 11, 2017 22:19
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Yawgmoth posted:Having interacted with Skip a number of times I can absolutely believe that this went down exactly as he says it. "Sage Advice" is the most ironic name for an article written by Skip Williams, second only to "Good Ideas". 
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Aug 11, 2017 22:34
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"Sage Advice" is literally an ongoing joke in D&D specifically because of Skip Williams. Nobody who paid actual attention to how the game works took it seriously. It was considered "noncanonical" to the game.
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Aug 11, 2017 23:47
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He got the job of writing the article because literally nobody else wanted to.
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Aug 12, 2017 00:13
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theironjef posted:Here's the link: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/161308/DD-Gamma-World-RPG-Booster-Cards-GW7e?src=hottest_filtered. I really need to buy those(and print out a copy of this PDF I have of a bunch of fan content) and maybe finally run a game of Gamma World ImpactVector posted:Just to return the favor re: Gamma World love, if you want to go full nerd you could also get a set of origin and power cards printed: Neat
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Aug 12, 2017 03:09
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Gamma World 7e duplicates aren't a bad thing, it's how you get to the Enhanced Human origin.
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Aug 12, 2017 03:45
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Yawgmoth posted:Tell me this story (here or skype whatever) because I've not heard it and Skip Williams is like #3 on my "game devs I'd like to bludgeon with a cosh" list. hyphz and Halloween Jack already covered most of it, but this is what Quicken Spell was written as in the 3.0 PHB: quote:QUICKEN SPELL [Metamagic] And then this is what the 3.0 PHB said about spellcasting with metamagic feats: quote:Because the sorcerer or bard has not prepared the spell in a metamagic form in advance, he must do so on the spot. The sorcerer or bard, therefore, must take more time to cast a metamagic spell (one enhanced by a metamagic feat) than a regular spell. If its normal casting time is 1 action, casting a metamagic spell is a full-round action for a sorcerer or bard. For spells with a longer casting time, it takes an extra full-round action to cast the spell. Now, to my eye, this means that a spell that normally takes "an action" (3.0 wasn't calling it a Standard Action) instead takes a full-round action. And then Quicken Spell cannot be used on a spell, if the casting time is more than 1 full round, but something like Magic Missile:  should be perfectly within the bounds of the rules interactions. Applying a metamagic feat to it means the casting time is increased from "1 action" to a full-round action, and but then a full-round action, exactly, is still not "more than 1 full round", so you can Quicken it and cast it as a free action. But apparently Skip Williams disagreed with this reading, and vehemently defended that interpretation as wrong. hyphz and Halloween Jack's posts covered the actual flame war between Trollman and Williams, but eventually we get to the 3.5 PHB, and this is what Quicken Spell looks like:  Not only did they have to codify Williams's argument about Quicken Spell working in the precise way he said it did, it also wasn't enough to just say "you can't use this with spontaneous casting", and they also had to write down why it doesn't work, but a reading of the explanation in the rule itself still doesn't make sense! It says right there at the bottom that the reason it doesn't work is because applying a metamagic feat to a spell increases the casting time to a full-round action, but just three sentences back, the limit on using Quicken Spell is still just more than 1 full-round action! So Williams was wrong the first time, and then he passive-aggressively makes himself retroactively correct in the 3.5 revision, but he can't help himself and has to prove how he's right, but his reasoning is so flimsy that it contradicts itself within the same feat description, and it's preserved eternally.
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Aug 12, 2017 03:47
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quote:I no longer champion the notion that the rules as written can be exactly followed like a legal text. 
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Aug 12, 2017 03:59
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Halloween Jack posted:It's the same problem as old editions of D&D where spells have specific, measurable, reliable effects, but noncasters have to negotiate with the DM to accomplish things besides rolling to hit. To reiterate what ARB said, this sounds like the GM was massively misunderstanding how M&M is generally supposed to work--"knock over a building on the villain" sounds like an area stunt to me, and possibly an environmental hazard ("okay but you also risk being hit by debris/the ground is now covered in obstacles") that should not in any way require googling the weight of a building. Area damage doesn't check defense, it just hits but can be mitigated with a reflex save. It also can't be pushed in tradeoff since it doesn't roll to-hit so a falling building would do exactly the attack's base PL (usually the hero's/campaign's PL) in damage and wouldn't usually be a one-shot. Like, dealing with your version of events would get a similar reaction from me but I've played a pretty large amount of M&M and that was not a thing.
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Aug 12, 2017 04:00
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mango sentinel posted:I've seen it broken down and damage on miss is a horrifically bad ideas for low level D&D. It's probably fine once you get more robust HP numbers and could represent a growth of competence. If you mean "it's bad for low level D&D characters to get damaged on a miss" then the immediate response should be "this is an illustrative example of why player characters and monsters shouldn't work the same way 1-1." Alternately "this is why making people slog through three levels where they can die to a housecat is dumb as poo poo."
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Aug 12, 2017 04:08
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A more daring idea than damage-on-a-miss would be converting hits to crits, and crits to ... more crit. If you roll below a target's AC, you deal normal damage. If you roll equal to or above a target's AC, you deal maximum, or perhaps double, damage If you roll what's normally considered a crit, you deal 3x damage but this would require a more radical look at how stats/HP need to be adjusted to compensate. Damage-on-a-miss is recommended because it requires a minimal amount of adjustment of the base game. === Another idea is to increase hit rates, rather than damage. Strike's Miss tokens have been mentioned, and 13th Age's Escalation Die is also an idea, but then 13th Age also does damage-on-a-miss since the Escalation Die doesn't change based on how much you miss. Further, more to-hit tends to lose value later on as your base hit rate gets better and/or you have more ways to mitigate misses, but you could try something like "every miss gives you a +1 to hit until the end of the encounter", or maybe until you hit again. That'd be a very conservative change. mango sentinel posted:I've seen it broken down and damage on miss is a horrifically bad ideas for low level D&D. It's probably fine once you get more robust HP numbers and could represent a growth of competence. This is more a problem with low-level D&D in general having too few HP. Of course damage-on-a-miss is going to feel nasty if you can't even absorb hits, period, and that means that combat itself tends to be a horrifically bad idea for low-level D&D. The solution, of course, is to give more HP, usually to the tune of your default starting HP, plus your entire CON score. So a level 1 Wizard with a d4 hit die and 12 Constitution has [4+1+12] = 17 HP.
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Aug 12, 2017 04:38
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hyphz posted:Unknown Armies has damage on a miss for PCs and NPCs if they're using knives. It is meant to make them scary and it works. Their explanation involves a man in a white suit, white shoes, and white gloves trying to take a marker away from an angry toddler without getting covered in black marks, which is excellent.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:Another idea is to increase hit rates, rather than damage. Strike's Miss tokens have been mentioned, and 13th Age's Escalation Die is also an idea, but then 13th Age also does damage-on-a-miss since the Escalation Die doesn't change based on how much you miss. This is my preferred method. Strike's miss tokens are an elegant way to solve it--you get a token when you miss, you can spend a token for +1 to any future attack roll in the same combat (or, if that roll is a 1, you can make it a glancing blow but still take a strike). The "glancing blow" thing is cool, too. When almost every attack has both damage and an effect, "do you do your damage or inflict the effect?" is actually a meaningful choice. One thing about "damage on a miss" is that it actually works really well with how games with hit points tend to describe what hit points are. If HP is supposed to measure something other than your character's current physical health--if it includes things like near misses, grazes, etc.--having attacks deal reduced damage if you miss instead of no damage helps reinforce that HP represents more than just your wounds.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:08
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That Old Tree posted:Holy loving
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Aug 12, 2017 05:12
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Pope Guilty posted:Their explanation involves a man in a white suit, white shoes, and white gloves trying to take a marker away from an angry toddler without getting covered in black marks, which is excellent. It's a pretty common exercise in martial arts training as well, have two students square off with sticks of chalk or markers or whatever and tell them "try to land hits on the other guy without getting any on yourself" and invariably both participants wind up with "cuts" all over them.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:19
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That Old Tree posted:Holy loving frankenfreak posted:It's hard to believe that Trollman could write that without dying of irony poisoning. The context of Trollman's remarks is that he seems to come from a school-of-thought that's very wary of the power of antagonistic GMs when they're uninhibited by the rules. That is to say, if you don't have clear guidelines on what the game allows and doesn't allow the GM to do, and if you can't quote the rulebook back at the GM when they're going something that's supposed to be "impossible", then you're at the GM's mercy, and they're probably going to gently caress you over the first chance they get, and that's bad. This probably explains why the Quicken Spell thing stuck in his craw: he needed to be able to trust the rulebook, but if it doesn't say what it says (because Skip Williams was contradicting it, as-written), then who knows what else the GM can pull out of their rear end at a moment's notice? This is also why he bagged on Dungeon World/PBTA a lot - if a Miss result means the GM gets to inflict some kind of "Hard Move" on the players, what's to say that the GM doesn't just spawn a bunch of bears on you out of nowhere? That said, this constitutes an essential misreading of the DW/PBTA principles, since Hard Moves are still strictly restrained anyway, but I'm sure you knew that. I don't really believe in that sort of thing, like at all, but I do understand where he's coming from.
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Aug 12, 2017 05:25
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On a related note to "closet fiction" I think the best game that no one ever gets to run is the Great Pendragon Campaign. Like, it's fantastic to read through but it's also sad because there are so few gaming groups consistent enough to play through the entire damned thing. If you run one year a week (which is like, a six-hour session or, even more ideally, two four-hour sessions) then it would take something like two years.
Zurui fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Aug 12, 2017 |
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Aug 12, 2017 06:32
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Zurui posted:On a related note to "closet fiction" I think the best game that no one ever gets to run is the Great Pendragon Campaign. Like, it's fantastic to read through but it's also sad because there are so few gaming groups consistent enough to play through the entire damned thing. If you run one year a week (which is like, a six-hour session or, even more ideally, two four-hour sessions) then it would take something like three years. Yeah. I've been lucky enough to have three consistent, multi-year games in my entire life, and one of those was back in middle and high school.
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Aug 12, 2017 06:48
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Subjunctive posted:Isn't that the same as "the consequence of failing a Pick Lock roll is that the lock isn't picked"? Hmm. No, it isn't. It's the same as "oh no, you didn't pick the lock fast enough and now the guards are coming," which is exactly what good skill check design looks like.
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Aug 12, 2017 09:06
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Harrow posted:This is my preferred method. Strike's miss tokens are an elegant way to solve it--you get a token when you miss, you can spend a token for +1 to any future attack roll in the same combat (or, if that roll is a 1, you can make it a glancing blow but still take a strike). The "glancing blow" thing is cool, too. When almost every attack has both damage and an effect, "do you do your damage or inflict the effect?" is actually a meaningful choice. Strike!'s miss tokens are about as good an implementation of the idea as you can get -- they reduce variance when it really counts, relegating most randomness to the beginning of combat which creates a nice ramp-up to using your big abilities when you know you can stick them. But just in general I never really saw the point in implementing a system of randomly making attacks do nothing, and then doing everything you can to make them more dependable but only most of the time. It's like, okay, strictly speaking that's an improvement, but I feel like we're missing the forest for the trees here.
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Aug 12, 2017 09:11
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Zurui posted:On a related note to "closet fiction" I think the best game that no one ever gets to run is the Great Pendragon Campaign. Like, it's fantastic to read through but it's also sad because there are so few gaming groups consistent enough to play through the entire damned thing. If you run one year a week (which is like, a six-hour session or, even more ideally, two four-hour sessions) then it would take something like two years. Liesmith is close to finishing that one actually
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Aug 12, 2017 11:15
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Kwyndig posted:I don't believe that he didn't sockpuppet at least one of those threads. That would be normal for Trollman. I recall encountering him in the Shadowrun space and him being banned for being a pointlessly argumentative dick on multiple boards.
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Aug 12, 2017 14:09
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gradenko_2000 posted:The context of Trollman's remarks is that he seems to come from a school-of-thought that's very wary of the power of antagonistic GMs when they're uninhibited by the rules. That is to say, if you don't have clear guidelines on what the game allows and doesn't allow the GM to do, and if you can't quote the rulebook back at the GM when they're going something that's supposed to be "impossible", then you're at the GM's mercy, and they're probably going to gently caress you over the first chance they get, and that's bad. I think I still have a quotes file somewhere full of Trollman's greatest hits, like how picking up a bow in 4e was houseruling (because monster default gear wasn't "real"), how being able to drive a car in Shadowrun was OP compared to magic (because you can just drive a car whenever you want and not worry about stuff like drain), and how you had to specifically make battleship armor immune to melee attacks to prevent players from kicking battleships to death. There's a reason I had "Ceterum autem censeo Trollman esse delendum" saved for ease of grabbing. The dude drove me loving insane back in the g.txt days. Ceterum autem censeo Trollman esse delendum.
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Aug 12, 2017 15:21
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Evil Mastermind posted:I think I still have a quotes file somewhere full of Trollman's greatest hits, like how picking up a bow in 4e was houseruling (because monster default gear wasn't "real"), how being able to drive a car in Shadowrun was OP compared to magic (because you can just drive a car whenever you want and not worry about stuff like drain), and how you had to specifically make battleship armor immune to melee attacks to prevent players from kicking battleships to death. Somehow I never stop being amused by rules-as-immutable-physics arguments. I sort of miss reading those in grogs.txt but I don't have the patience to go digging for them at the source.
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Aug 12, 2017 15:29
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theironjef posted:Gamma World 7e duplicates aren't a bad thing, it's how you get to the Enhanced Human origin.
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Aug 12, 2017 15:49
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Evil Mastermind posted:I think I still have a quotes file somewhere full of Trollman's greatest hits, like how picking up a bow in 4e was houseruling (because monster default gear wasn't "real"), how being able to drive a car in Shadowrun was OP compared to magic (because you can just drive a car whenever you want and not worry about stuff like drain), and how you had to specifically make battleship armor immune to melee attacks to prevent players from kicking battleships to death.  Realtalk one time I had a GM use, like, statistics to figure out how we could slowly cut through a 20 foot thick stone door in a Pathfinder module. Like someone asked "can we break down the door?" and he then did all of the mathematical legwork with like "there are five of you, assuming on average that you do 3 damage per hit with your maces and the hardness of the door...." And he finished and we were like "...Kay. Uh. We do that." and he let us and we finished the module early because whoops we spent like six hours tunneling through the exit door. Taking into account what I just said and all of the other stupid, stupid rules-based shenanigans I've ever seen in a d20 product, that bolded sentence is still the dumbest thing I have ever read in regards to mechanical balance in elfgames.
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Aug 12, 2017 16:21
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Plutonis posted:Liesmith is close to finishing that one actually I wish Liesmith were around because I'd love to hear his opinion on it
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Aug 12, 2017 16:40
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:No, it isn't. OK, I can see that.
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Aug 12, 2017 16:53
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If anyone is looking for a few minutes' diversion, I've been writing a series of pulpy swords-and-sorcery stories about characters who began their lives in PBPs here in TG: A Day for Idleness The Empress of Witch Alley The Fête of Thieves Empress is my favourite so far.
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Aug 12, 2017 17:22
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Hostile V posted:Taking into account what I just said and all of the other stupid, stupid rules-based shenanigans I've ever seen in a d20 product, that bolded sentence is still the dumbest thing I have ever read in regards to mechanical balance in elfgames. I can.. vaguely see an argument there? Like, "in a game in which teleportation is available but has a cost, the details of mundane travel must not be handwaved, because if they are it becomes mechanically equivalent to teleportation but without the cost?" It's a really silly way of putting it though.
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Aug 12, 2017 17:24
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Evil Mastermind posted:No, that's exactly his mindset. The rules are there to protect the players from the mean ol' GM. The idea that the GM can just do something without mechanical backing is where the phrase "magical tea party" came from. Which makes it hilarious that he was ever against DW because compared to D&D DW actually has way more rules about what a GM can and should do.
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Aug 12, 2017 17:32
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