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Uroboros posted:Cross Post Question: Roll20 is my go to with discord for voice in terms of tools, both very simple to use and handles a bunch of cruft for you though I don't use any facecam stuff so I'm not sure. The big thing about 40k is that it, by its very nature, is a very very diverse setting especially in terms of expectations. Some might want to play wacky space adventures in a universe that despises happiness. Others might want to run a cold, cyberpunk noir detective game hunting after the unimaginable cthulu monster lurking just around the corner. Figure out what your group is seeking to play. I've found the best tone that tends to hit home with people is an absurdist adventure story where everyone in the setting is playing things 100% straight about the whole deal.
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Nov 28, 2017 00:16
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So because I'm playing two Barbarian's at once, one in my online game and the other the physical game, I figured I wanted to go something different for the online game. In this game I'm playing a Lizardman Barbarian, and especially with the DM being willing to let me reflavor stuff I'm thinking of going Totem Barbarian and sometime down the road at like Level 9 or so dip into Fighter and take Cavalier. The reason? Being able to put disadvantage on anything within range, being a juggernaut on top of that from Totem Warrior and finally the idea of convincing my DM to let me ride a Triceratops as my mount just makes me giddy.
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Nov 28, 2017 01:30
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kingcom posted:Roll20 is my go to with discord for voice in terms of tools, both very simple to use and handles a bunch of cruft for you though I don't use any facecam stuff so I'm not sure. That reminds me, if you go roll20, immediately disable webcams, microphones, set video/avatars to Name Only. It's all under the settings gear in the upper right.
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Nov 28, 2017 03:47
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Arthil posted:So because I'm playing two Barbarian's at once, one in my online game and the other the physical game, I figured I wanted to go something different for the online game. In this game I'm playing a Lizardman Barbarian, and especially with the DM being willing to let me reflavor stuff I'm thinking of going Totem Barbarian and sometime down the road at like Level 9 or so dip into Fighter and take Cavalier. Just admit that you’re trying to play a Warhammer Fantasy saurus. It’s a noble endeavor.
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Nov 28, 2017 06:59
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Arthil posted:So because I'm playing two Barbarian's at once Since you're probably an expert, what's the best way to build Barbarians, in terms of stats and equipment? 14 DEX, max STR, Medium Armor? 13 STR, max DEX, Light Armor? There seems to be consensus that the naked Barbarian is a trap option (which is why I hate that the equipment package always starts you without armor) 
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Nov 28, 2017 08:14
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P.d0t posted:Since you're probably an expert, what's the best way to build Barbarians, in terms of stats and equipment? So very far from it! I just made another one for the physical game I played at a con is all cause it's what I kinda knew. But so far both my Barbarians are naked and rocking 14 AC for the dwarf and 16 AC for the Lizardman. Captain Oblivious posted:Just admit that you’re trying to play a Warhammer Fantasy saurus. Oh there's no denying it, the picture I used for reference is very similar to a Saurus though leans even heavier on the T-Rex look. Thinking once I get my first totem I'll have him take on some of the traits of the animal he chooses... which is a Triceratops(reflavored bear spirit) of course, so a frill and some horns!
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Nov 28, 2017 08:49
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Maxing Str, because rage doesn't impart its damage bonus to attacks made using Dex. Also if your campaign somehow hits 20, your capstone won't be wasted. As for equipment, the big debate is whether a 2d6 or 1d12 weapon is better because of how Brutal Critical works. But the real answer is ignore that and go polearm master because it allows you to stack more rage damage with the bonus action and reliable reaction attacks that feat offers.
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Nov 28, 2017 08:51
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P.d0t posted:Since you're probably an expert, what's the best way to build Barbarians, in terms of stats and equipment? You can't use Reckless Attack, and don't get the Rage damage bonus, on attacks made using DEX. It's garbage. The best way to build Barbarians is the standard for most martials: STR-focus, Half-Plate, Polearm Master and Great Weapon Master with a Glaive/Halberd. Bear Totem. Though if you have 2 or 3 melee buddies there's a case for going Sword&Board with Wolf Totem + picking up Sentinel for stickiness.
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Nov 28, 2017 09:14
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Arthil posted:so far both my Barbarians are naked and rocking 14 AC for the dwarf and 16 AC for the Lizardman.  Slippery42 posted:rage doesn't impart its damage bonus to attacks made using Dex. Just because your DEX is higher than your STR, doesn't mean you have to attack using DEX  I guess my question is, would the downside from having to use Reckless Attack on every attack be offset from having the slightly-higher AC of a DEX build?
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Nov 28, 2017 15:58
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Arthil posted:So very far from it! I just made another one for the physical game I played at a con is all cause it's what I kinda knew. But so far both my Barbarians are naked and rocking 14 AC for the dwarf and 16 AC for the Lizardman.
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Nov 28, 2017 16:27
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P.d0t posted:Just because your DEX is higher than your STR, doesn't mean you have to attack using DEX Not really, no. Already, a Barbarian more or less defaults to RA to keep up with the damage output of say a Fighter, and the class honestly doesn't have much going for it if you take way it being half-decent at combat. Also, keep in mind that under point buy rules, Unarmored Defense doesn't beat Half-Plate AC until level 8 at best, or later if the DM hands out magic armor. You sacrifice much effectiveness and for so long, for very little in return. The fact is that Unarmored Defense is a ribbon ability that ends up becoming a trap option because the incautious assume it a legit strategy. Like Thieves Cant, you know? There are situations where it might come in handy, and when it does you may feel pretty awesome to have it, but it's not really a core feature of the class.
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Nov 28, 2017 17:47
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Unarmored Defense should be a core feature of the class. The loincloth-wearing Conan type shrugging off blows is just as iconic to me as the huge axe he swings. They just didn't get it right. Like a lot of things. Edit: It really does make thematic sense to also add CON. vvvvv SettingSun fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 17:54
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Merge Str and Con and it would work pretty good!
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Nov 28, 2017 18:07
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Splicer posted:Merge Str and Con and it would work pretty good! welcome to shadow of the demon lord
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Nov 28, 2017 18:09
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Conan wore armor, though  But I get what you mean. It should've been a scaling bonus or a simple 14+CON, but I guess our friends at Wizards of the Coast though the latter would have been too front-loaded on an already heavily front-loaded class, and the former would've made the class progression table of the most loving boring class gameplay-wise look even busier.
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Nov 28, 2017 18:14
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Splicer posted:Merge Str and Con and it would work pretty good! Oh you mean like shad- Serf posted:welcome to shadow of the demon lord ...goddamnit.
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Nov 28, 2017 19:23
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I never bothered crunching numbers on unarmored defense versus. If I'm playing a barbarian it's because unarmored defense is their signature ability. Disappointing to see that apparently using the iconic features of the design is sub optimal.
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Nov 28, 2017 19:56
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Still wish the Unarmored Defense of the Barbarian was based off of Str+Con instead of Dex+Con.
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Nov 28, 2017 20:17
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Would this have worked better? “Barbarian Agility: While you are not wearing heavy armor, you gain a +1 bonus to AC and
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Nov 28, 2017 20:31
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Splicer posted:What levels are they? Both Level 3, not really had moments to buy anything in either game as the Dwarf got to Level 3 at the end of the first session and the Lizardman after two. I suppose I'm not choosing super-optimal things anyway given I'm wanting to dip into Grave Domain Cleric on the Dwarf Barbarian purely on a story reason than anything else. Arthil fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 21:06
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Serf posted:welcome to shadow of the demon lord
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Nov 28, 2017 21:28
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Arthil posted:Both Level 3, not really had moments to buy anything in either game as the Dwarf got to Level 3 at the end of the first session and the Lizardman after two. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just D&D is an absolutely horrible system to do that with because the multiclassing system is a horrible kludge that the player is expected to balance rather than the system balancing.
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Nov 28, 2017 21:28
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Arthil posted:Both Level 3, not really had moments to buy anything in either game as the Dwarf got to Level 3 at the end of the first session and the Lizardman after two. Naked barbing is only good if your GM drops some Bracers of Defence on you. Which they should tbh.
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Nov 28, 2017 21:43
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Darwinism posted:There's nothing wrong with that, it's just D&D is an absolutely horrible system to do that with because the multiclassing system is a horrible kludge that the player is expected to balance rather than the system balancing.
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Nov 28, 2017 21:45
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Splicer posted:That's a poorly written system's biggest crime. Slowly grinding away at people's imaginations through continuous negative reinforcement. For a little more content, I've always approached D&D with the "Render Unto Caesar" mindset. You make the mechanics fit with what you want in the best and most effective way possible.
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Nov 28, 2017 21:58
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I found this survey interesting since this thread mentioned darkvision bloat recently: https://thinkdm.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/darkvision/
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Nov 29, 2017 03:12
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I'm back with another monster design, for a 14th level encounter. The PCs may or may not have other fights beforehand, depending on how they handle things. Using gradenko's monster math as always.  The premise is: the painting is magical in nature, and is inhabited by a sort of minor deity, which safeguards passage to blah blah blah, a demon took over and controls the Goddess to an extent. The encounter will be in a fairly bigish room, with some pillars and furniture to provide cover. The painting is on the wall, and starts in Goddess form. Goddess form has no actions besides the Lair Action, and Chadarnook has no abilities, just actions. I think maybe the Drag To Hell should be increased to at least 30 feet, and the abilities on Chadarnook itself are a little haphazard. Anyone who remembers the Headless Horseman monster I made, it went over pretty well. I had to lower the resurrected HP to 25% because they didn't pull out nearly as much damage as I expected and the fight was running long. The Save DCs are also kinda random. I'm thinking, keep the 18s, everything else is 14 or 11 to match what the monster has on its own throws. The party is: Monk, Rogue, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Warlock/Fighter.
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Nov 29, 2017 04:36
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Splicer posted:14 AC is... not good, especially on a melee beatstick. You can get that with a chain shirt and 12 dex. Bump to 14 dex and you get 15 AC with the shirt, and you can get all the way up to 17 AC using half plate without sacrificing any ASI's away from accuracy and damage. Yeah, I used the standard array for my ability scores so the highest went into strength, second into con, third into Dex etc. Not gonna turn my nose at it if I can get the chance to armor up more though. Definitely willing to take whatever advice would be helpful. The dwarf doesn't really have anything in terms of gold though given the nature of the game I ran him in, we didn't do much looting and pillaging in the six hours we played Curse of Strahd. Arthil fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Nov 29, 2017 |
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Nov 29, 2017 05:53
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It can do an unstoppable 192 damage each full round, aside from its standard actions? If I read that right, that sounds too strong. (I read that as: 3 legendary actions taken between end of its turn and beginning of its next turn. It can choose to use "Absorb Essense" 3 times if it wishes, as long as each use follows another creatures turn. Absorb Essense has no save. Absorb Essense can target any number of creatures dividing damage in any way that totals 64 damage.)
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Nov 29, 2017 05:54
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BetterWeirdthanDead posted:
Oh hey! 
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Nov 29, 2017 05:56
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FRINGE posted:It can do an unstoppable 192 damage each full round, aside from its standard actions? Technically, yeah probably. I won't be running it that way though.
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Nov 29, 2017 06:04
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Personally I'd be inclined to give it a "can't use the same legendary action twice in a row" clause, since I don't enjoy giving an enemy an obvious best action for it to take every time that it then fails to use. Or have it drain everything within 10 feet, so if the animated objects or other enemies get too close, it pulls its essence back from them. Or have it only bust that out when bloodied. Do the possessed objects have 1hp, or do they deanimate when brought to 10hp? If the latter, what is their maximum? Is the Sorcerer going to get turbodunked by 10 animated objects attacking with advantage for a max of 160 damage?
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Nov 29, 2017 06:13
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Emy posted:Personally I'd be inclined to give it a "can't use the same legendary action twice in a row" clause, since I don't enjoy giving an enemy an obvious best action for it to take every time that it then fails to use. Or have it drain everything within 10 feet, so if the animated objects or other enemies get too close, it pulls its essence back from them. Or have it only bust that out when bloodied. Whoops, that's supposed to just be 1 HP total on each. Proofreading is hard. Only doing Absorb Essence at Bloodied seems like a good idea.
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Nov 29, 2017 06:24
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Soylent Pudding posted:I found this survey interesting since this thread mentioned darkvision bloat recently: https://thinkdm.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/darkvision/ First I'd like to take a second to complain about Drow. At some point everybody just decided to ignore the fact that they are Drow when it comes to PCs. You're an elf with a skin condition as far as everyone is concerned. This is most a concession to the rest of the party because having to deal with an entire city trying to kill a member of your party kind of ruins things. Drawback of being a Drow hurts the entire party. This holds true for sunlight sensitivity as well. Basically forcing the party to always work at night. Inevitably somebody won't have darkvision and they need a light source so you have the worst of both worlds. I'm not really sure what people are basing their choices on. Half-orcs have a long tradition of darkvison. It's not that tradition can't be overturned, it's just odd to see it happen. Anything spending a lot of time underwater can probably see pretty well in the dark, and I don't see to many people clamoring to play those races, so balance probably isn't an issue. I think the big thing the chart shows is a reaction to the loss of low light vision. A lot of the creatures like a forest gnome would fit in a category of moonlit nights and overgrown forests. But that's gone and players will continue to do what they have always done, take a light source and count on the gm to forget about it most of the time.
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Nov 29, 2017 07:50
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Throwing Turtles posted:First I'd like to take a second to complain about Drow. At some point everybody just decided to ignore the fact that they are Drow when it comes to PCs. You're an elf with a skin condition as far as everyone is concerned. This is most a concession to the rest of the party because having to deal with an entire city trying to kill a member of your party kind of ruins things. Universal drow racism has always been really goddamn stupid anyway and old FR drow were bad and should be ignored by everyone even the in-universe people edit: not that current drow are much different it's just there are less full covers of bondage matriarchs, so... progress
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Nov 29, 2017 08:57
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Soylent Pudding posted:I found this survey interesting since this thread mentioned darkvision bloat recently: https://thinkdm.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/darkvision/ "Darkvision bloat" was a previously solved problem that WOTC decided to stick their dick into a second time:   Admiral Joeslop posted:I'm back with another monster design, for a 14th level encounter. I'm going to echo FRINGE's comment that if there's a way a monster should be played, it should be written as such. Even if you don't expect anyone else on Earth to ever use this statblock again, it's a good reminder to you from yourself. There's also a bit in there about how the next level of monster design is to use triggers and conditionals to structure them in such a way that simply reading and executing the abilities from top-to-bottom as-written will yield an interesting fight, almost as if was "programmed", similar to how 13th Age does it, but that's an essay and experiment for another time.
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Nov 29, 2017 09:00
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Whenever you write some rules, the best thing to do is write them as if they're going to be used by someone else who has no idea what you were intending except for what's written there in front of them. The goal of monster design should be that the stats and abilities communicate how the monster's intended to be used, and the monster shouldn't break if it's used by someone else with no input from you. Failing that, you should at least include notes on "if you do X, bad things will happen". Or else you'll go to re-use it 2 or 3 years from now and not remember why you did it like that.
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Nov 29, 2017 10:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm going to echo FRINGE's comment that if there's a way a monster should be played, it should be written as such. Even if you don't expect anyone else on Earth to ever use this statblock again, it's a good reminder to you from yourself. That's basically what I was thinking with my spitballing. Restricting its actions means that you don't have to intentionally have it sandbag so hard to avoid wiping the party. Also useful if you want to let someone else use the boss you put a bunch of effort into writing up; they're not going to have all of your supplementary knowledge of how you think it should hold back during the fight. So, revisiting my earlier comments, here are some changes that you might implement and why I think they might be useful. 1) Restrict the use of Absorb Essence by making it not usable repeatedly, not usable unless bloodied, or both. Otherwise there's no reason for it to ever use Flail. Also, if you choose to allow it to be usable repeatedly, bear in mind that you are effectively assuming your party can deal with a monster that they either can't engage in melee, or one that heals 96hp a round while dealing 192hp a round on its legendary actions. 2) Restrict the targeting of Absorb Essence by forcing the Chadarnook to target everything within range. Spreads the damage around so that it doesn't just spike down the lowest HP person, and allows for the possibility of friendly fire. (I love abilities that have the potential for friendly fire, especially on enemies, double especially if you telegraph it somehow.) 3) Reconsider animating tiny objects. I don't mean don't do it, but I bring this up because I've played a wizard who used animate objects to cover people with angry caltrops. Turns out that's a really effective strategy. Unless I'm mistaken, maintaining animate objects on tiny objects has a higher expected damage than casting disintegrate every round. It beats out every other wizard spell for damage except meteor swarm. My experience has been this: either the enemy has no AOE, and it's brutally effective, or the enemy AOEs them down and I move on to something else. It's going to be the same for your players. Either they can deal with it with a spell, or they're going to have to spend a minimum of 10 separate attacks. I would personally rather have a boss animate a couple of large things, rather than glass cannons like animated tiny objects. If the party's AC is not good, the animated objects can probably mulch one PC per round. If you're going to split up the damage among party members, codify it: instead of animating 10 tiny objects, animate 2 or 3 tiny objects near each party member, which go after their respective party members. Ultimately, this depends a lot on your PCs, which you know a lot better than I do. They could be just running at things and hitting them, or they could be animating tiny objects themselves and repeatedly expanding and collapsing Instant Fortresses on their enemies.
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Nov 29, 2017 10:46
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FRINGE posted:Oh hey! Hi! ————— As far low light/dark/infra-vision, I’m realizing that my groups (2e-5e) probably ignored special vision for basic lighting 90% of the time.
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Nov 29, 2017 14:14
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kingcom posted:Roll20 is my go to with discord for voice in terms of tools, both very simple to use and handles a bunch of cruft for you though I don't use any facecam stuff so I'm not sure. Thanks for all the advice. Consensus seems to be a combination of Discord and Roll20 from everyone, so at least I know I am doing what has been must successful. I've been role-playing off and on for the better part of 2 decades, but Dark Heresy and Deathwatch were my only GMing experiences, and my players seemed to respond pretty well for the year or so that we played. I think we struck a good balance between hilarious incompetence and serious agent of the Emperor when needed. We rotated back and fourth between Deathwatch and Dark Heresy, and I made experience cumulative between the two campaigns, so players that were able to attend more sessions were rewarded, and at the same time someone who couldn't make all of one still had some XP to spend by attending the others. Ultimately, what killed it was people making the trip, or having the time. Most my free time goes to painting models these days, but I've been wanting to jump back in where I left off.
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