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Arivia posted:When you've reached the point where you're trying to redefine the terms of the conversation to make yourself come off better, you've lost. Thanks for playing. You told me I was wrong about a term I was using. I conceded that I was wrong and reworded my point. If you still won't engage with the content and choose to define that as a victory, fine with me. e: In case I'm still not being clear: I concede that you're correct about "rules-as-physics" specifically referring to dumb stuff like "the falling rules means gravity must be different". That's not what I was trying to talk about, and I shouldn't have used that term to describe what I was trying to talk about. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 1, 2018 23:59
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mastershakeman posted:Right, but there's limits on this. Do you not realize that? Or are you ok with random enemies being able to attack 10 times as often, even in an antimagic field, because that's how you felt like statting them out? You can't use rules to stop people from creating houserules or introducing things they would like to. The author's power over what the purchaser can use the book for ends at suggestions. A DM who wants to introduce OP monsters at his table is allowed to do so. It's self correcting because either his players are fine with it or they are not. It's contained because if you're not at that table it doesn't affect your gaming at all what they're doing over there. If it happens at your table you already have a built in toolkit for dealing with the problem, which is colloquially referred to as "saying something about it." This may be frightening because you don't have the weight of technicality from a book to back up your concerns, but your concerns are valid anyway, and you must simply forge ahead. Honestly since 5e is explicitly written with villains capable of doing things PCs can't do, you should already be aware of all the above, because you're already houseruling the game in a way the the authors cannot control. mastershakeman posted:edit: an example of using in game rules - the last fight was 'wow those enemy priests look like they just cast a ton of their spells, lets go attack them since they'll be spent.' Under a 'dont bother statting out enemies' guideline you could just be like nope sorry they each have 5x casts of whatever have you, you shouldn't have been able to make an educated guess' Here you're suggesting that the system of not statting up enemies rigorously is the more rigorous system. If your party decides to jump some spellcasters because they just cast a ton of spells, the DM is not required to look at his simple notes for what the spellcasters can do and follow them to the letter. He can just knock half their spells off. Because he's not a beep boop robot that resets after each human interaction to the baseline again.
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Jan 2, 2018 00:00
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Arivia posted:Turning into a bear by weird magic is pretty much the D&D definition of a werebear, hope this helps. If it means something else to you, then you should probably define it that way people can understand it as something different in the game world. What? No. The definition of a werebear is turning into a bear because of a communicable disease/curse. If an orc turns into a bear by "weird magic" I can just assume he's got some weird shamanic rite unique to his tribe or something, I don't need him statted out as a Druid or a Wizard or what the gently caress ever. The idea of thinking that the game world has to be rigidly codified by mechanics to such an extent is legitimately horrifying. How restrictive, and unimaginative.
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Jan 2, 2018 00:00
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Has anyone ported over Psionics to 5e yet?
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Jan 2, 2018 00:03
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Arivia posted:You're welcome to show me examples to the contrary if you have them. I've shown you what the design of various D&D editions promotes, go ahead and disprove that. Show me a status quo sandbox in 4e where it explicitly promotes the PCs fleeing from overwhelming opposition; show me finely-tuned level appropriate encounters in 2e (good luck with how much of a crapshoot encounter design was in 2e.) Every edition of D&D measures both PCs and monsters by some equivalent of character level or hit dice, and so every edition of D&D is perfectly amenable to the creation of either a sandbox in which the difficulty of a random encounter is actually random or a sandbox in which, for some reason, all the goblins around your hometown are level 1 but all the goblins around the big city are level 5. The idea that 2e only allowed for the former while 4e only allowed for the latter was edition wars bullshit about special snowflakes needing to be coddled or whatever. Finding a 2e game that does the latter is easy - just load up Baldur's Gate. Crucially, whether the PCs are special or uniquely possessed of agency has nothing to do with this. Fated saviors of the realm entire might still find themselves running away from a grumpy dragon at level 2. Also crucially, whether NPCs get full character sheets also have nothing to do with this. That the archmage or warlord or whatever that you've just run afoul of is much stronger than you in the GM's imagination/understanding of the setting is much more important than whether they get a full writeup. Maybe they don't and the GM's comfortable just describing a cataclysmic explosion followed by all your characters pulling themselves out of a smoking wreckage a few hours later.
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Jan 2, 2018 00:06
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Arivia posted:I've shown you what the design of various D&D editions promotes, go ahead and disprove that. Show me a status quo sandbox in 4e where it explicitly promotes the PCs fleeing from overwhelming opposition; "Once in a while characters need an encounter .. that makes them seriously scared for their character's survival or even makes them flee" "Use such overpowering encounters with great care. Players should enter the encounter with a clear sense of the danger they're facing, and have at least one good option for escaping with their lives, whether that's headlong flight, or clever negotiation" 4e DMG pg 104
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Jan 2, 2018 00:16
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Has anyone ported over Tome of Battle yet?
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Jan 2, 2018 01:25
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AlphaDog posted:I described an orc who turns into a bear via orc bear magic. vvvvv This is a more thorough way of making the point I spat out about the bomb-making. Of course you can hand-wave away whatever the players want to try and emulate, but there is a sense of narrative believability (and fun IMO) to having the "story of the world" make in-world sense. (Of course there will be by-design exceptions, and those are fun, but exceptions are ... exceptions.) Ferrinus posted:No matter what game you're playing, it's always important to respect the basic premises of the setting so that your players feel like they have a handle on, and can draw informed conclusions from, the events of the game. So in Vampire you don't casually let some NPC breathe fire or walk in sunlight and in D&D you respect the conventions of character level, limited-use magic, etc.
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Jan 2, 2018 01:31
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:the dreaded squid javelineer man isn't really that fast, just coordinated in the use of a javelin in each tentacle This needs to happen, but with darts in honor of days gone by.
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Jan 2, 2018 01:32
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FRINGE posted:vvvvv This is a more thorough way of making the point I spat out about the bomb-making. Of course you can hand-wave away whatever the players want to try and emulate, but there is a sense of narrative believability (and fun IMO) to having the "story of the world" make in-world sense. (Of course there will be by-design exceptions, and those are fun, but exceptions are ... exceptions.) Why would a PC be able to emulate this specific opponent ability without advancing through class levels for it? What makes it different to casting Fireball, or learning druid shapeshifting, or whatever other ability? If I can learn bomb making so quickly and easily that it doesn't affect my class progression, why can't I just learn a wizard's fireball instead? Or a monk's Unarmored Movement? Or an Otyugh's telepathy?
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Jan 2, 2018 02:08
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why is it supposed to be a problem that a player cannot ever learn how to cast Patchwerk's Hateful Strike ability, as long as the GM isn't arbitrarily changing Hateful Strike's mechanics to foil the correct understanding of it by the players?Covok posted:Has anyone ported over Psionics to 5e yet? There's an Unearthed Arcana with it, yes. Covok posted:Has anyone ported over Tome of Battle yet? Quasar Knight has his book about it. There was another goon on here with their own attempt, but I don't have the GDocs link handy.
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Jan 2, 2018 02:26
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gradenko_2000 posted:why is it supposed to be a problem that a player cannot ever learn how to cast Patchwerk's Hateful Strike ability, as long as the GM isn't arbitrarily changing Hateful Strike's mechanics to foil the correct understanding of it by the players? That's what I want to know too! And also where the line is in applying "the PCs have to get it too". I'd guess stuff like a medusa's gaze attack is out of the question, for instance, but what about things like an orc's aggression movement or kobold pack tactics?
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Jan 2, 2018 02:37
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a medusa eye seems like a dangerous artifact likely to attract attention
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Jan 2, 2018 02:38
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FRINGE posted:vvvvv This is a more thorough way of making the point I spat out about the bomb-making. Of course you can hand-wave away whatever the players want to try and emulate, but there is a sense of narrative believability (and fun IMO) to having the "story of the world" make in-world sense. (Of course there will be by-design exceptions, and those are fun, but exceptions are ... exceptions.) To be clear, I'm perfectly fine with AlphaDog's hypothetical shapeshifting orc, on the basis that there certainly exist more means of studying and accessing magic (in game terms, more character classes, or more builds/kits/whateveryoucallem within character classes)(or more eldritch beings you can bargain with, supernatural curses you can contract, etc) than are listed in any PHB. This is necessarily true, or else it would be impossible to ever release supplements with additional player options. It's just the DM's job to make sure whatever weird thing they make up basically squares with everyone's intuition about how magic works and how hard it is to get it, for the same reason that they should make sure none of their NPCs is wearing a wristwatch. So like, we know that a level 7 druid can, in addition to casting a heap of powerful spells, turn into an animal every so often. Maybe some kind of orc nature worshiper can instead cultivate the ability to turn into a specific animal at-will but without any other spellcasting ability or anything. Seems reasonable to me.
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Jan 2, 2018 02:50
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Covok posted:Has anyone ported over Tome of Battle yet? Not quite but I just put this up. It uses a tiered table to expand martial maneuvers from Battlemaster to all classes (casters get less). Magil Zeal was cool enough to let me adapt a bunch of his maneuvers and exploits and I added a bunch of others from 5e playtests. It's aimed directly at balancing 5e back towards martials. Largely inspired by this thread's criticisms and there's goon-thanks in the acknowledgments. We've been playtesting in our group, they like it. There's still a lot of scope for building and balancing in the higher level stuff.  e: oh yeah, it includes a quote from mango sentinel and another from magil zeal. clusterfuck fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 03:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:why is it supposed to be a problem that a player cannot ever learn how to cast Patchwerk's Hateful Strike ability, as long as the GM isn't arbitrarily changing Hateful Strike's mechanics to foil the correct understanding of it by the players? Oh cool, didn't know he finished that yet. Cool to hear he's still releasing things. clusterfuck posted:Not quite but I just put this up. It uses a tiered table to expands martial maneuver from Battlemaster to all classes (casters get less). Magil Zeal was cool enough to let me adapt a bunch of his maneuvers and exploits and I added a bunch of others from 5e playtests. My only worry, and I hope this isn't rude to say, is that this can lead back to the 3e problem where everyone can do what the Fighter does, like all the special fighting maneuvers (charge, etc.) are universal so the Fighter gets less special. As the designer, what would you say to that concern? Once again, I really hope this doesn't sound rude and I'm not trying to grill you, I'm just curious.
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Jan 2, 2018 03:26
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clusterfuck posted:(casters get less) why?
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Jan 2, 2018 03:29
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Covok posted:Oh cool, didn't know he finished that yet. Cool to hear he's still releasing things. Not rude  it's a good question.Fighters get far more maneuvers and their superiority dice are superior and refresh faster. In addition, and this may be worse if uniqueness is a key point for you, many abilities from other classes can be imitated. However, these abilities are weaker than the specialist and usually come later. eg. Bell Ringer -> stun effect -> comes long after the monk gets Stun. Volley fire comes much after the Ranger gets volley. Sneak attack is almost an exception at lower levels as a fighter will use a d8 for damage, however, it's usable less frequently and in rarer circumstances. This is deliberate as I think maneuvers can fill a gap where a character may want to grab an ability from another class without dipping. As you say the risk is less specialness. I'd answer imitation of a skill is the highest flattery. e: it is a good question. If uniqueness if a deal killer, it's also possible to add class restrictions to each of the maneuvers. For example, say you want to add a set of Rogue moves which you like from playing Dishonored and there's no way a fighter should have that, you add them to the appropriate tier and add prerequisite: Rogues. I think with high tier maneuvers this is well worth considering. I'll think about this for updates, thanks! clusterfuck fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 03:36
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NachtSieger posted:why? The fluff answer is that mages spend too long with heads in books and clerics spend too long mumbling to their gods. Martials spend their time training their awesome physical maneuvers. Mechanically, it's balancing martials to give them access to better narrative choices than "I hit it with my sword."
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Jan 2, 2018 03:38
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Ferrinus posted:No matter what game you're playing, it's always important to respect the basic premises of the setting so that your players feel like they have a handle on, and can draw informed conclusions from, the events of the game. So in Vampire you don't casually let some NPC breathe fire or walk in sunlight and in D&D you respect the conventions of character level, limited-use magic, etc. The bolded part is what I'm trying to get at. "PCs gain abilities when they level up in a character class" is a central convention of D&D. It's the core progression mechanic. When people start talking about "of course you can learn bomb making, it just makes sense" or similar things, where does that fit into that progression mechanic? Which class did you level up to gain this ability? Alternatively, I guess, if you're houseruling this stuff, then what part of your class progression did you give up to gain this ability instead? Or is it an extra ability on top of that stuff? What other extra abilities are available? If I can easily (to the point where I still progress my sword fighting skills at the same rate) learn to make bombs, can I learn to make other bomb-adjacent devices such as hand grenades, landmines, or rockets? That sounds like it wants to be a whole character class of its own, not something that anyone can tack on top of their existing stuff. Can I build my fighter a flamethrower? Just a little one - enough to give me a small fire cone attack at the start of the fight. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 03:55
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Speaking of abilities beyond simply "I hit it with my sword!" I was working on something awhile back. Not ToB classes or anything. But a Legendary Hero. Never finished it, and it was cobbled together from ideas I had over the years, stuff people brought up in this or a previous thread, and someone named Yakk over on the ENWorld forums talent fighter stuff they were working on briefly. But they never finished it and I really liked the idea so tried to expand it to a full class. The initial idea didn't have archetypes, and it was fairly piecemeal as you picked talents to advance in as you leveled, so I eventually made three archetypes that gave you one talent, and one pick from two others, that automatically advanced without using any of your limited talent picks. A Legend of Mights talents would see them eventually getting +12 to Str and Max Str, and either +12 to Con and Max Con with not needing to breathe, eat, drink or sleep, or counting as 10,000 men of their size when it comes to performing mundane tasks like digging a trench, demolishing a castle, drinking a lake dry or similar tasks and counting as 6 sizes larger for things like carrying capacity and what you can grapple. These are in addition to the talents they pick up as they level. A Legend of Quickness on the other hand would eventually have speed 70, constantly under a Haste effect as well as a Freedom of Movement effect, able to walk/stand/run on water, up walls, upside down on ceilings and on water. And either able to jump 100x the normal distance or be able to make up to 6 extra Reactions per round. A Legend of Skill would eventually get an extra 9 skill or tool proficiencies and 6 expertises in skills or tools they are proficient in, as well as treating any roll of a 9 or lower on the d20 for a proficient ability check as if it had rolled a 10, basically the 11th level Rogue feature. And either Advantage on all Checks, Saves, and Attack Rolls while enemies have Disadvantage on Attack Rolls against you, or once per round can use a Reaction to roll a 1d20 and add it to the roll, and if the roll still fails regain the Reaction. Of course there are a lot more talents, though I would like more than I have written up. And none of these talents are restricted to a specific archetype. Any of them could be taken with one of the limited Talent choices the Legendary Hero gets.
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Jan 2, 2018 04:08
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Mendrian posted:I always kind of assumed people just made NPCs as characters because they thought it was fun to make characters. I mean, that at least makes a lot of sense. That's how it starts, but then into the DMPC and mechanics-as-narrative-constructs rabbit holes we go.
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Jan 2, 2018 04:45
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Had a really good session tonight with my level 14 group. I'm running a PF adventure path, converting to 5E as I go, and now at high level its referring to a lot of very specific and obscure PF monsters and builds. The weirdest thing tonight was an alien visitor from another plane, described as a "Witchwyrd Abjurer 9". It includes a very specific build with the first 5 rounds of combat already tactically planned, and including details down to its skill ranks in Knowledge(geography). As if that's ever coming up. I wasn't really expecting my players to battle it, maybe talk, so I jotted down 'use the CR12 archmage from the MM'. Done. Of course the rogue walked up and stabbed it mid-sentence. Now I'm running this space alien wizard using an archmage stats. The tactics from Pathfinder were still kind of relevant - it was basically buff up, then kill, and teleport away if things get rough. So it cast Time Stop. The players absolutely lost their poo poo, expecting the campaign to end right then and there in a flurry of time-stopped meteor swarms or whatever. Things were thrown at the rogue's player. But this isn't 3.x and time stop doesn't even work that way - anything offensive cancels the stoppage. And there's that pesky concentration limit. So it cast a fire shield, an up-leveled globe of invulnerability (blocking 7th level spells and lower), then blasted an up-leveled cone of cold at them all. Time resumed, they battled for another round, then it teleported away when low on HP. They tried to counterspell, hoping to kill it now instead of maybe facing it again, but failed the DC check. A fun little encounter. Another hard one was this thing, a 'blossom kami', essentially a badass dryad. So it's a treegirl with a death touch and some spells. I ended up using a guardian naga statblock, flavoring the naga poison bite as the poison touch. Easy. It survived all of 2 rounds and the players never knew their treegirl was a snake monster. ritorix fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 06:11
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ritorix posted:So it cast Time Stop. The players absolutely lost their poo poo, expecting the campaign to end right then and there in a flurry of time-stopped meteor swarms or whatever. Things were thrown at the rogue's player. I feel a fairly decent offensive Timestop spell is Cloudkill. As it does not deal any damage until someone starts their turn in it so you can cast cloudkill on a group, blast them with Cone of Cold or something then they start taking posion damage when time resumes. quote:Another hard one was this thing, a 'blossom kami', essentially a badass dryad. So it's a treegirl with a death touch and some spells. I ended up using a guardian naga statblock, flavoring the naga poison bite as the poison touch. Easy. It survived all of 2 rounds and the players never knew their treegirl was a snake monster. Though it appears that the Tree thing is supposed to be stronger then the naga namely in having a 100 more hp then it. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 06:35
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Are you affected by obscurement, or is it it's own sub-rule? I mean, is it an effect or condition or something, or is it just sorta there? E: PHB page 196, "Darkness and other effects that obscure vision can prove a significant hindrance." is the closest the books seem to have to an answer. e2: Same page, "A creature in a heavily obscured area effectively suffers from the blinded condition...". Make sure you cast your cloudkill last, because it's gonna end the time stop. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 06:48
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AlphaDog posted:Are you affected by obscurement, or is it it's own sub-rule? I mean, is it an effect or condition or something, or is it just sorta there? I would call it more of a result of impediments to vision. That includes both physical blockers like fog and plants, or just being dark - but taking into account darkvision. It's a lovely system that really only applies if you want to hide. You need to be heavily obscured to hide in most cases, with some exceptions (stalker feat, elf in natural surroundings, halfling behind a person, etc). So if you have the stalker feat, you can hide if you are standing 10' in front of an elf (darkvision!) in the dark (dim light!) since you are lightly obscured. Yeah...
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Jan 2, 2018 07:01
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Kruller posted:I'll be DMing my first game starting this Saturday, and I've only got 3 players. I have added a DMPC so they have any kind of healing, since the party is a fighter, rogue, and wizard. Any tips for handling that? I've built him as basically a problem solver if they get stuck, but my intention was for him to be fairly passive. Basically I don't want to accidentally end up with a game where I talk to myself. This got buried under the recent discussion, but my Hot Take is that if you want to make sure that the party has access to healing, give them healing, and it doesn't have to be through a DMPC/NPC. Give them potions, give them extra hit dice, give them special homebrewed class abilities, that sort of thing, but the easiest way to avoid the entire issue altogether is to give your players, not yourself, the tools to do the things that you think is going to be a gap.
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Jan 2, 2018 07:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:This got buried under the recent discussion, but my Hot Take is that if you want to make sure that the party has access to healing, give them healing, and it doesn't have to be through a DMPC/NPC. Yeah I was thinking of giving them all a feat that is tailored to their character as a kind of boost. Alert to the rogue, that sort of thing. Maybe a magical Clippy pops up and says "Looks like you're getting your poo poo wrecked, would you like a potion of healing?"
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Jan 2, 2018 08:03
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Ryuujin posted:Speaking of abilities beyond simply "I hit it with my sword!" I was working on something awhile back. Not ToB classes or anything. But a Legendary Hero. Never finished it, and it was cobbled together from ideas I had over the years, stuff people brought up in this or a previous thread, and someone named Yakk over on the ENWorld forums talent fighter stuff they were working on briefly. But they never finished it and I really liked the idea so tried to expand it to a full class. It's probably just me but one of the things that gets me head scratching about the high level fighter power stuff is really wanting the legendary Herculean powers to not feel too mechanical or standard issue, but to be a mark of divine patronage or mystery. Even if you look at each of those abilities of speed, might, endurance or immortality you can assign a god to each and draw from that to add more flavour to the class design. I really liked the "hero" entries in the AD&D Deities and Demigods as examples of legendary & mythic warriors.
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Jan 2, 2018 08:56
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Kruller posted:Yeah I was thinking of giving them all a feat that is tailored to their character as a kind of boost. Alert to the rogue, that sort of thing. Maybe a magical Clippy pops up and says "Looks like you're getting your poo poo wrecked, would you like a potion of healing?" Splicer posted:Give them all magic amulets that grant them +con mod additional hit dice and allow them to spend and maximise their hit dice without taking a short rest as long as they spend a few minutes recovering their breath. In addition, once per short or long rest:
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Jan 2, 2018 09:42
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Kruller posted:...a magical Clippy pops up and says "Looks like you're getting your poo poo wrecked, would you like a potion of healing?" My main old group have all been playing D&D for around 30 years, and they would love it if you did exactly what I've quoted there. Congratulations on loving nailing it before you've even run your first session. You're going to do great. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 10:06
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AlphaDog posted:Why would a PC be able to emulate this specific opponent ability without advancing through class levels for it? What makes it different to casting Fireball, or learning druid shapeshifting, or whatever other ability? If I can learn bomb making so quickly and easily that it doesn't affect my class progression, why can't I just learn a wizard's fireball instead? Or a monk's Unarmored Movement? Or an Otyugh's telepathy? Its different than "that semi-normal seeming thing cannot be done by you, because." Or using your orc example, you made it a part of the "working world" on the fly, and that lets the players learn that "that is a thing", and gain knowledge about how that piece of the world works. Like having a demon loaded with a special ability works - demons have special abilities and players would not think its a thing to "learn". Having a spellcasting wizard cast spells using familiar spellcasting methods and then saying "no you cant learn that he was just special" breaks the flow in my opinion. Taking (old edition) skills - then it should be possible to mix the bomb powder if you had the right proficiencies and ingredients. That lets the players (if they choose) pursue learning that trick, and buying/hunting/stealing what they need. (Maybe the bomb thing was a bad example. Maybe they saw some apothecary make a really awesome cough drop and feel the need to make one if thats less of a "class" issue. (... although yeah I know sages and alchemists were a thing at some point.)) quick edit - AlphaDog posted:The bolded part is what I'm trying to get at. Basically if the players want to explore the "way the world works" and learn things it usually seemed fun. Having "predictable physics" helped with that. (Im not talking about railgun BS. Just expanded versions of "water makes you wet" and "alchohol makes you drunk". If it turns out that eating some specific bark cures some specific poison and they want to carry a bunch of bark then fine. No need to say "nope you need a magic "cure poison" or too bad. Only that one NPC knew how to eat bark".)
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Jan 2, 2018 11:03
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Riiiight. I think I misinterpreted what you were telling me. I assumed that "making bombs" was making a supply of explosive devices to use in combat. If it's some kind of plot device to be constructed and placed in the right location so <plot resolution happens> then yeah, that's pretty cool. As for "this particular herb cures paralysis, you need to <do preparation> and you can use it out of combat" type stuff then yes, I'm cool with that too. That's how I envision a Herbalism type skill working anyway - "Is there any of that paralysis cure herb around here?" <roll dice> "yep, awesome, give me a few minutes and I'll get Grognar up and moving again". In general, I'm fine with this kind of stuff applying out of combat. I'm not a fan of the idea of gaining new combat abilities by "just learning" them outside progression. I get what you're saying about making them a worse option than "a good attack", but then why would they ever get used? "I learned to make hand grenades, hand grenades suck, guess I'll just keep hitting them with my sword..." just sounds like a huge let-down. I'm also not sold on the "the NPC knows a spell so the PCs must be able to learn it" idea though. Why can't an NPC have a unique spell? I mean, learning spells from captured spellbooks was a pretty big part of AD&D (I mean, it was literally the wizard equivalent of finding a cool magic sword or strength gauntlets), but that aspect of the game doesn't exist any more, so what does it matter if the mad mage of the mountains casts Meat Storm and nobody else can figure out how (or why) he does it? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 11:36
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FRINGE posted:Like having a demon loaded with a special ability works - demons have special abilities and players would not think its a thing to "learn". Having a spellcasting wizard cast spells using familiar spellcasting methods and then saying "no you cant learn that he was just special" breaks the flow in my opinion. Even d&d has class limited spells, why is it so weird that Evil Wizard of the Evil Tower of Evilton maybe, just maybe, is using a magic spell unavailable to someone who spends all day hucking firebolts at goblins.
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Jan 2, 2018 13:02
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You don’t know how he did it and if you want to learn please roll up a new character while your old one spends a few years doing the research needed.
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Jan 2, 2018 13:27
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mastershakeman posted:I don't DM, but play with such an adversarial DM that yeah, I think that's a good example. We've also fought enemies that could do poo poo like that and it became a huge deal because wow! turned out it was a demon prince inhabiting the random goblin's body, instead of just some random rear end goblin that 'broke the rules'. I think Arivia's done a great job of explaining what my gut feeling is telling me, and I really liked that bit about Eberron being different from Greyhawk and am going to read up on it. But that DM could gently caress the party over in equally unfair ways even limiting themselves to the in-game rules. They may not know the Rubber Neck spell, but the DM could decide that character is high enough level to have all the slots they need to escape out of any situation. In other words, both approaches (making unique NPCs that play by their own character creation rules vs making them via the PC creation rules) can be used to make unfair encounters in adversarial play. Being able to study an enemy and plan a strategy for defeating them is nice, but it's not something that can necessarily happen only because the rules for that enemy are exactly the same as character creation rules. You can just have the enemy act consistently, show obvious limitations of their abilities, and let the players make knowledge checks to learn things about the enemy that are harder to visualize. FRINGE posted:If you want the example to be a class ability, then sure. The point is, in general, "that normal(ish) person over there knows how to do a thing, that means its learnable right?" I think I get what you're saying here, but the key things to understand about the limitations of this are that 1) there is no guarantee the player characters will be in situations where they can acquire these spells or skills and still have play move smoothly (i.e. there is a "scope" to play that might make it unlikely for the PC to learn things they see manifesting in the world), and 2) there is no guarantee that the player characters will have the luck to be able to learn that. In fantasy fiction there tend to be events that create really anomalous people, and sure if PCs want they can have their chance to be really, really special (like bards or monks in older editions), but it may be that your character's chances of learning orc bear magic are statistically insignificant. So I don't mind the assumption that if something happened, it is possible to accomplish. However I don't think it's fair to assume that the scope of play the players and DM have agreed on will make it feasible to replicate everything they see. That's why people bring up turning PCs into NPCs to do that stuff: because it means the PC would have to leave the scope of the game. Nickoten fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 14:01
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Nickoten posted:So I don't mind the assumption that if something happened, it is possible to accomplish. However I don't think it's fair to assume that the scope of play the players and DM have agreed on will make it feasible to replicate everything they see. That's why people bring up turning PCs into NPCs to do that stuff: because it means the PC would have to leave the scope of the game.
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Jan 2, 2018 16:27
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mastershakeman posted:Right, but there's limits on this. Do you not realize that? Or are you ok with random enemies being able to attack 10 times as often, even in an antimagic field, because that's how you felt like statting them out? There are abilities valuable to a PC that just aren't relevant to an NPC, and abilities that have far greater utility to an antagonist than a protagonist. PC abilities are based around certain assumptions and if you take them outside this context it becomes difficult to judge how powerful an enemy you've created. Having different creation methods means you can judge how useful something is in each context separately instead of trying to balance them simultaneously. Similarly there's things that are curiosities in the hands of an NPC that can become game breaking if put in the hands of a player. Limiting your bad guys to what the good guys should be able to grab on level up cuts out a lot of story potential. Again, separating PC and NPC creation avoids this. Character creation and leveling up should be fun and engaging. This means at least some mental effort. A GM having to stat up every NPC from level 1 to x means you're probably either overloading GMs or shorting players on advancement options. Having different PC Vs NPC creation methods sidesteps this catch 22 as well. This isn't a rules vs no rules argument, it's an argument for two sets of rules. There's been a few replies to the effect that the NPC set of rules should be almost entirely free-form, and that's a valid opinion, but building them with PC rules isn't the only alternative.
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Jan 2, 2018 19:06
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Here’s a fun question that popped up during an Adventurer’s League game: when you’re invisible, do you need to spend an action to hide? A module had me throw an Invisible Stalker at the party, which has permanent invisibility, and they were very pissed that I didn’t set out a mini for it. Their argument was that it was still technically audible as it flew through the air unless it specifically wanted to be sneaky, which would have involved the Hide action and not attacking, so they should have been able to know what space it’s in and thus be able to get attacks off (with disadvantage) on their turn. They eventually solved the encounter by readying actions to hit the invisible thing as soon as it attacked, but that was contentious.
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Jan 2, 2018 19:16
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blastron posted:Here’s a fun question that popped up during an Adventurer’s League game: when you’re invisible, do you need to spend an action to hide? A module had me throw an Invisible Stalker at the party, which has permanent invisibility, and they were very pissed that I didn’t set out a mini for it. Their argument was that it was still technically audible as it flew through the air unless it specifically wanted to be sneaky, which would have involved the Hide action and not attacking, so they should have been able to know what space it’s in and thus be able to get attacks off (with disadvantage) on their turn. https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?774623-5E-What-does-being-invisible-mean-for-stealth seems to cover all the major points. My takeaway is an invisible creature can always try to hide, but unless it's actively hiding the players still know roughly where it is. I wonder if Passive Stealth could be a useful thing.
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Jan 2, 2018 19:35
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