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Crit table every time is some early 2000s bullshit game design.
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Oct 5, 2017 00:12
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PMush Perfect posted:Crit table every time is some 1980s bullshit game design. ftfy
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Oct 5, 2017 00:30
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I enjoy the PbtA style where misses let the GM make a hard move, and the agenda is to always move forward and make the story interesting. Having no miss penalty seems kinda gripey
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Oct 5, 2017 00:38
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Yeah, there's a big difference between "you fail and nothing happens" and "fail forward". It just doesn't really work well for tactical games like 4e.
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Oct 5, 2017 00:44
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Some of our best stories came from using the pathfinder crit hit and crit miss decks.
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Oct 5, 2017 01:05
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Coward posted:"Miss a Turn" is a fairly lovely mechanic in boardgames that I still occasionally see budding designers put into their games. If you are running a system where rolling a miss means nothing happens mechanically, as GM at least make it feel like something is happening narratively. Describe the duel and how the goblin narrowly raises its shield to block a strike that would have taken its head off, or how the arrow takes a nick out of the bandit queen's ear cutting short her rallying cry. Just turning to the next person reinforces the "Miss a Turn" feeling I think. I once played a game whose name I cannot recall for the life of me, but it had a card you could draw whose text said something like "Everyone playing misses a turn. The normal turn order is preserved. Assume that each player's turn would have taken 10 seconds." It was a very silly game, but it wasn't until the 2nd time we had that card that we finally twigged that we were being trolled by the game. It was wonderful.
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Oct 5, 2017 01:18
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I don't mind the Hackmaster Crit and Fumble tables too much. It helps that the fumbles aren't "roll a natural 1" but "roll a natural 1 and fail to beat the target's defense roll", coupled with the fact that there is a built in reroll mechanic.
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Oct 5, 2017 01:53
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Jothan posted:"Okay, I kneel down before the altar and-" 
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Oct 5, 2017 04:07
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I did fumbles in my last game for a time, but I got over it and switched to non-harmful comedic effects, like the rogue's arrows getting buried in the cleric's armor and once Randy Johnson'ing a passing seagull.
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Oct 5, 2017 04:55
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GoodBee posted:Some of our best stories came from using the pathfinder crit hit and crit miss decks. How compatible are those with 5e? I'm trying to work myself up to try DM'ing again, and I wouldn't mind spicing things up if they can fit in.
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Oct 5, 2017 05:28
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Kavak posted:I did fumbles in my last game for a time, but I got over it and switched to non-harmful comedic effects, like the rogue's arrows getting buried in the cleric's armor and once Randy Johnson'ing a passing seagull. Actually, comedic fumbles can be handy. I was running a game where two of the characters were in a fight on a roof, and I was trying to think of how to introduce a new rogue PC. The berserker fumbles and throws his magic axe (it's main magic propertly was to fly back to him, at waist height, quite blockably, when he called its name) right off the roof. He and the druid win the (rather easy, as they are both level 1) fight, and they proceed down to street level. He calls the axe, and it promptly tools right to him. Unfortunately the rogue, who IC had no idea there was a rooftop fight, had found the axe and ended up getting dragged down the street with their wrist caught in the strap. (I tend to give my 1st level players a +1 magic item with some special property that has limited, but handy, utility.)
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Oct 5, 2017 05:42
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PMush Perfect posted:Yeah, there's a big difference between "you fail and nothing happens" and "fail forward". It just doesn't really work well for tactical games like 4e. AoEs mess it up a bit obviously.
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Oct 5, 2017 10:48
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Like with many things in roleplaying what works for one group doesn't necessarily work for another. I cannot imagine playing with crit fumble rules myself or with any of my friends. I'll admit it can result in some funny stories but I also just get too attached to my characters and crit fumble rules seem to always get nasty with lasting harm. If my character is going to lose an arm I'd rather it be in a cool story moment and not against a random gerblin.
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Oct 5, 2017 12:02
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the_steve posted:How compatible are those with 5e? I think they probably would work. A quick search found a kickstarter of crit cards for 5e too. They look pretty much the same. They've got the type of damage for hits (slashing, piercing, bludgeoning, magic) and the type of weapon for fails (melee, ranged, natural, magic), each with a witty heading and an effect. The effects were damage, ability damage and status effect. I had the players draw a card and read it whenever it was their attack and then we would all kind of decide exactly what happened. If we couldn't make it make sense, we'd draw a new one. It didn't happen that often. We had one PC get into a scuffle with an NPC and knock his tooth out. The PC got a tooth trophy out of that encounter. We also had the alchemist throw a bomb at a giant spider that did charisma damage. That was the ugly bomb. Of course the fails were more funny when monsters made them. We usually described the PC fails as them attempting something super epic and not working, the monsters were incompetent.
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Oct 5, 2017 12:41
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A good crit fumble rule is that it's a regular old miss, but you can take a crit fumble result to make it a hit.
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Oct 5, 2017 15:40
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Splicer posted:A good crit fumble rule is that it's a regular old miss, but you can take a crit fumble result to make it a hit. You want to expand on that mechanic a little bit? Just not quite seeing how that would work.
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Oct 5, 2017 15:59
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D&D 4E had a rule introduced in the dark sun guide, for one example. If you're using a weapon made out of bone/ceramic/bug-man chitin/stone etc, (Because Dark Sun is metal-poor) and roll a one, you can convert it into a hit, but the weapon is destroyed as a result.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:03
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Samizdata posted:You want to expand on that mechanic a little bit? Just not quite seeing how that would work. Old and busted: roll a 1 and you miss, trip, and drop your weapon New hotness: roll a 1 and you either just miss, or you trip and your weapon, but it falls right into your enemy's sternum (an alternative interpretation: you either just miss, or you clumsily smash your weapon hard enough into the enemy to break both it and the enemy's face)
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Oct 5, 2017 16:04
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unseenlibrarian posted:D&D 4E had a rule introduced in the dark sun guide, for one example. If you're using a weapon made out of bone/ceramic/bug-man chitin/stone etc, (Because Dark Sun is metal-poor) and roll a one, you can convert it into a hit, but the weapon is destroyed as a result. I forgot about that. It has been FOREVER since I've been to Athas. We were in a brutal but fun campaign not long after the setting came out.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:05
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I played around with a semi-PBTA system where on a normal miss you could deal your damage to the enemy and in return they would get to attack you too.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:Old and busted: roll a 1 and you miss, trip, and drop your weapon In the new hotness result, the player would have to maneuver and roll to retrieve the bound weapon, right? The only problem I have with the alternative is breaking magic weapons.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:07
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Serf posted:I played around with a semi-PBTA system where on a normal miss you could deal your damage to the enemy and in return they would get to attack you too. That ties in nicely with the "HP as the ability to avoid damaging blows" concept.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:07
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We used a critical hit table very briefly at the start of a campaign, once. It may have been from a Best of Dragon; one of the new players we'd brought in had a booklet with it in, and askef if he could use it. The DM said sure, but warned us that he'd use it for monster crits too. Being the queen of fumbles, I asked to stick with the vanilla double damage rule we'd used before. We dropped the table after the first fight of the campaign, after the dude who'd requested it lost an eye to a goblin arrow. Lost him and a couple of the other players shortly after that too, but that was mostly a conflict of play styles.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:30
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Samizdata posted:In the new hotness result, the player would have to maneuver and roll to retrieve the bound weapon, right? The only problem I have with the alternative is breaking magic weapons. Yeah the expectation is that you'd still have to do A Thing to retrieve your weapon, but at least you got to hit and possibly kill your enemy instead of simply losing a turn. And the weapon breakage does only work in contexts where you're not expected to keep a weapon "forever". Use a different tradeoff if the player is using a +3 Holy Avenger
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Oct 5, 2017 17:44
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In our Ancient Rome - inspired DnD game, our party just defeated Archimedes by challenging him to a duel with a d10000 wild magic wand. The first few results were inconsequential - my character now has one pink iris, archimedes's pockets are full of ants, etc... Finally, I roll "Target trades places with the nearest trapped genie", and win the duel properly. So... we got three wishes. My friends immediately start arguing about what we want to wish for, while the DM keeps trying to trick them into making accidental wishes. Eventually I speak up, having taken a cue from this very thread, and wish for the world's greatest contract lawyer to appear before us and agree to work pro-bono on helping us make our remaining wishes airtight. After a long in-character and out-of-character discussion, we decided our remaining 2 wishes were a) racism doesn't exist anymore and b) infinite use wand of Gate ...so things are probably going to get weird now. Our session ended with everyone having a big meal at the restaurant we own in Athens, and the vampire character coming out publicly as a vampire for the first time. I erased 'Preferred Enemy: Humans' from my halfling's character sheet forever.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:54
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I like the way Luke Crane describes it in Burning Wheel. The roll isn't to succeed or fail; the roll is to dictate what you want. If you fail, you may still partially succeed, but a complication rises up (the example he uses is "picking a lock before the guard gets here"; failure is that he opens the lock just as the guard turns the corner.). It requires some policing of wording, though.
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Oct 5, 2017 17:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:Yeah the expectation is that you'd still have to do A Thing to retrieve your weapon, but at least you got to hit and possibly kill your enemy instead of simply losing a turn. "The Ork raises his shield at exactly the right moment, resisting the majority of the blow and takes 1 point non-lethal damage. The reverberation of the block sends a tingling sensation up your arm and you lose 1 accuracy on your next attack"? That's "You failed to land a meaningful blow against the opponent, but still hit", but not "you tripped over your own dumb feet and drove your dagger into your chest" I mean, technically I'm suggesting two negative reactions for a single poor roll, but nothing permanent, nothing lethal, a hit was still landed, so you still did something without whiffing completely, and you are at a slight disadvantage the next time you attempt to attack. Seems reasonable for someone in a melee fight.
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Oct 5, 2017 22:44
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Why I love the style of world building where you sketch the bare outlines of a setting and let the players fill in: I'm running Uncharted Worlds (PbtA human-only space opera). I've drawn up a few factions, one of which is the Ecumenical Empire - the only religious galactic empire, which managed to get most of humanity's religions working together in relative harmony in order to oppose the hegemony of materialist scientism that accompanies the interstellar age. Their basic ideology is that humanity must be kept integral, unique and close to its Earth origins, so they're super opposed to invasive genetic engineering, cybernetics and hard AI. When the first session starts, one of my players immediately says that this is his faction of origin and he's a disgraced Inquisitor. Now, this guy loves playing characters like inquisitors, witch hunters, fire-and-brimstone priests and the like, so this is no surprise, and he describes his dude as bearing the overwrought regalia of 40K inquisitors. This kind of sets off my alarm bells because that's not really the flavor I was looking for, but then he says that his character isn't an iron-jawed badass, but rather a scrawny nerdy-looking guy, plus he's chosen the hacker archetype. I ask why this is, and why the Ecumenical Empire would have inquisitors if it isn't a classic theocracy that would enforce a single religion and need to police the beliefs of its inhabitants. He explains that in this world, the Holy Inquisition has nothing to do with heresy and such. It's a bunch of IT specialists and computer security experts who are tasked with the sacred duty of monitoring the Empire's computer systems for signs of self-awareness and exorcising rogue AI programs. They still get to have a prestigious religious mandate and considerable investigative privileges, but in the end the day-to-day of his job is tech support for when your coffee maker asks why you're turning it off. His holy weapons are a toolbox and an array of scripts on his datapad for terminating artificial consciousness before it notices what's going on. I'm not sure why, but this concept really tickles my sci-fi bone - plus it adds a whole bunch of texture to the setting that I've been able to run with 
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Oct 6, 2017 02:17
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Guildencrantz posted:Why I love the style of world building where you sketch the bare outlines of a setting and let the players fill in: That was pretty freaking brill, right up to the ornate uniform. I am still good with it, as long as he changes immediately onsite to stevedore's slacks and a short-sleeved cotton tunic.
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Oct 6, 2017 02:54
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Guildencrantz posted:Holy hacker Countenance ye not the temptations of daemons, neither suffer ye a switch to live
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Oct 6, 2017 02:56
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Guildencrantz posted:Holy hacker
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Oct 6, 2017 07:57
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Jothan posted:
This D&D/Rick&Morty crossover is lookin' good.
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Oct 7, 2017 06:50
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Mendrian posted:This D&D/Rick&Morty crossover is lookin' good. 
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Oct 7, 2017 10:45
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Ignite Memories posted:Eventually I speak up, having taken a cue from this very thread, and wish for the world's greatest contract lawyer to appear before us and agree to work pro-bono on helping us make our remaining wishes airtight. That wish seems really easy for a prepared DM to subvert. For example, the lawyer is on their deathbed and dies right after saying they'll help. Then the genie says that bringing them and having them agree to help were two separate wishes. That's not even the worst thing I could think of.
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Oct 7, 2017 12:09
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super sweet best pal posted:That wish seems really easy for a prepared DM to subvert. For example, the lawyer is on their deathbed and dies right after saying they'll help. Then the genie says that bringing them and having them agree to help were two separate wishes. That's not even the worst thing I could think of. You could, but why? It's a dick move. Players should be rewarded for being clever, not punished.
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Oct 7, 2017 12:23
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Guildencrantz posted:You could, but why? It's a dick move. Players should be rewarded for being clever, not punished. Any GM where you need a lawyer to write a wish doesn't sound like the type of person who would be above being a dick to their players.
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Oct 7, 2017 12:43
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He did subvert the wish a little - the person who appeared to help us was the Oracle of Delphi, who earlier in the campaign had her tongue cut out by Caesar's men. Thankfully our sorceress had some sort of group telepathy bond spell, so we were still able to communicate with her.
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Oct 7, 2017 13:24
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Joke's on you; like any good lawyer, she's going to end up profiting more from these wishes than you are.
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Oct 7, 2017 20:18
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Guildencrantz posted:Spacegame Ugggh I've been wanting to run a space game and a PbtA game for so long, this is perfect. I love this guy's idea, too. Kind of like playing an Avenger of the Raven Queen hunting down undead, necromancers, and the like.
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Oct 8, 2017 01:05
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 15:28 |
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After a grueling and deadly climb up wizard mt everest, literally an entire campaign, the party finally gets to the top of the mountain where all of their greatest desires are awaiting them. They stand at the base of a towering obelisk covered in runes (an index of every magic spell), a small wooden sign with "dragonchat peak ->" points to the very highest outcropping. The first thing they do is look for ghosts(?), and there's a ton of them, "don't be a dick to the dragon!" "be polite to the dragon!" "don't piss the dragon off!" they all wail over each other. The elderly knight is decided as their designated groveler, as he's got the least life left to live and the most manners. He does a great job of flattering the dragon, and it descends from its perch on the obelisk and offers them each a wish, a real one with no monkey paw nonsense. Thief blurts out "I wish I was back at the bottom of the mountain!" *poof* The party huddles for a moment Battlemage: I wish all our friends were alive again Illusionist: I wish all our bags were filled with gold Knight: I wish I could cast all these spells Shaman: I wish we were all back at the bottom of the mountain Thief: . . . poo poo HCFJ fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Oct 8, 2017 |
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Oct 8, 2017 09:46
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