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Some people prefer a game where their characters can see a zombie without the risk of damaging their mental health.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:19
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Unless you're using it a ton, insanity just amounts to an escalating fear effect.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:26
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Personally I would also prefer a game where your adventurer wasn't afraid of zombies. At least not in a mechanical sense.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:30
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it depends. A level 0 character being approached by rotting corpses that have pushed out of the ground with eyes falling out and poo poo would probably want to at least roll, but if you've seen and hacked apart a few zombies it would stop having such an impact
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Apr 18, 2018 21:49
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The way we've done it in a lot of games is you roll the first time you encounter a specific kind of freaky thing, but zombies #2 through 5000 no longer faze you. Now, a hundred zombies at once might merit a roll.
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Apr 18, 2018 21:53
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Whoof, I hadn't really flipped through the bestiary to see how many things are horrifying, including some low-level things. The insanity section says characters gain insanity "when they witness acts of terrible depravity or experience events that cause them to doubt everything they believe" and to dole out insanity "sparingly and only to reinforce really disturbing scenes," and seeing one barrow wight per day doesn't really feel like it meets those criteria.
Elysiume fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Apr 18, 2018 |
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Apr 18, 2018 23:40
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Okay my attempt to sotdl-ify basic dnd modules: Attack Bonus : 2 + HD/3 + (HD/5 boons) (This is the least clear part - what is their intention/plan in giving monsters boons/banes rather than fixed modifiers? Does it make that much difference given that it's fixed? I might just make this 2 + HD/2 with no boons - less swingy but also less dice-rolling for me. Stats: roughly 8 + HD/2, figure it doesn't matter too much, most monster saves are clear miss or clear hit HP: 4 per HD AC: Unmodified but clamped to ~20.
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Apr 19, 2018 00:00
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They give monsters boons to mitigate the fact that PCs have numerous abilities which impose banes on attackers. The Enforcer novice path is all about inflicting fear and impairment on your targets, so an ogre having a few boons means it doesn't suddenly stop being able to hit the players because one dude made one attack.
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Apr 19, 2018 00:07
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWJZK5zUS50
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Apr 19, 2018 00:26
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Glukeose posted:They give monsters boons to mitigate the fact that PCs have numerous abilities which impose banes on attackers. The Enforcer novice path is all about inflicting fear and impairment on your targets, so an ogre having a few boons means it doesn't suddenly stop being able to hit the players because one dude made one attack. This makes sense - I wonder if there is an intuition for it how to design them. A horned ogre is difficulty 250, which I'm calling comparable to HD 14-16 or so, and it has a +8 with 3 boons. HD/2 + 1 boon I think will be the default, with an option of increasing the number of boons vs flat addons if I want. After all the second and third boons are really just +1 outside of the player giving them banes. I don't know how long I'm gonna run this for but lower level content matters more anyway. It's probably a fool's errand trying to convert between them but Deep Carbon Observatory is such a perfect flavor fit for this game that I gotta try.
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Apr 19, 2018 00:26
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You'll get the best mileage converting the spirit of the adventure rather than the exact numbers. Convert the trends and pace of the module and SotDL has robust enough mechanics to really make that come alive.
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Apr 19, 2018 02:00
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Glukeose posted:You'll get the best mileage converting the spirit of the adventure rather than the exact numbers. Convert the trends and pace of the module and SotDL has robust enough mechanics to really make that come alive.
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Apr 19, 2018 02:11
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Elysiume posted:I mean...at some point the enemies need to have numbers for combat to happen. If he can't convert the stats he needs to separately stat up every enemy. If you know that a particular scene calls for a difficult encounter there's an embarrassment of riches in the form of the core book bestiary and other supplements full of other monsters. SotDL provides a very simple framework for putting together encounters. If the module calls for an enemy with a particular gimmick then it's really not hard to say "okay this is supposed to be a moderately threatening fight so I'll drop in four small demons and they'll have an ability to paralyze the PCs by forcing a STR challenge." Going page for page and converting statblocks is madness, and is an approach that will likely fail to capture what makes this module so intriguing to the person running it.
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Apr 19, 2018 02:28
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So over in the 5e thread, it was mentioned SotDL is a much improved version that everyone should try. I might talk my current DM into giving it a go, but from having read the OP, one of the major points of the game is that it's supposed to run in 10 sessions intervals, accumulating a level a session before ending. We would rather have a more long-term campaign, in the vein of 6+ months at minimum, if not a year. Does only having 10 levels keep the game fresh for an extended period of time?
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Apr 19, 2018 02:31
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User0015 posted:So over in the 5e thread, it was mentioned SotDL is a much improved version that everyone should try. I might talk my current DM into giving it a go, but from having read the OP, one of the major points of the game is that it's supposed to run in 10 sessions intervals, accumulating a level a session before ending. I converted all my 5e campaigns to SotDL and basically if you talk to your players and establish expectations you can stretch the leveling as much as is comfortable. Just level up at the end of a major story arc.
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Apr 19, 2018 02:40
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yeah you can easily go a couple of sessions without leveling if the pace of the story dictates- level when you've completed the scenario/mission/story arc rather than on a per-session basis 10 levels means there are no dead levels, so (as with other D&D derivatives with compressed level scales like 13th Age) every increase is significant also, while there's no expectation that you need to be accumulating magical gear/relics/boons from fae lords, they do exists and can be used to provide non-level-based rewards if desired the forbidden rules supplement also has some basic "epic level" rules you can use to stretch the game if required LGD fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 04:00
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What's the maximum number of boons / banes on a single roll?
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Apr 19, 2018 04:39
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Hollandia posted:What's the maximum number of boons / banes on a single roll? Let me double check my math, but you can choose a cutoff from this table as you desire: 
Elysiume fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 04:40
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there's no cap, but the expected benefit/penalty of boons /banes falls off rapidly after the first
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Apr 19, 2018 04:54
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Awesome, I was sure there was a cap and was going crazy trying to find it in books, Google+ etc etc.
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Apr 19, 2018 04:58
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Yeah your chance of a 6 is 52%, 60%, 67% with 4,5, and 6 boons respectively. It's not doing a ton.
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Apr 19, 2018 05:04
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Elysiume posted:I mean...at some point the enemies need to have numbers for combat to happen. If he can't convert the stats he needs to separately stat up every enemy. So the book I'm using gives me very few numbers - HD, HP, AC(sometimes in terms like "as chain" which I'll translate directly), HP, and attacks/damage. HD represents overall strength which generally translates into attack bonus and saves. It doesn't have to be a perfect conversion and I'm definitely going to crib from existing monsters where appropriate, but I'm gonna be making stuff up as I go no matter what. The damage numbers they give are pretty similar to sotdl damage numbers and I think I can keep them as is and be fine. (sotdl is even stingier with health than basic dnd...bring it on)
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Apr 19, 2018 06:18
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As a rule of thumb, I give out IP when people experience something more horrifying than they've tried before, and CP only when they have done something more lovely than they have done before - if they break their own record in a particularly grotesque or blatant manner, they just get several at once.
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Apr 19, 2018 11:05
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How bad is starting at level 0? I feel like it's going to be more interesting than D&D level 1 - though squishier, between the racial powers and the less swingy skill checks there's a lot going for it. One of my players is pretty keen on just starting at 1.
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Apr 20, 2018 03:53
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Hollandia posted:How bad is starting at level 0? You're playing a survival horror game where everything and anything can pop you. You're characters are all competent skills-wise but are just very fragile in a fight. Doing a 1 or 2 session game of it is fine and is mostly for getting the band together and stopping some smaller supernatural problem.
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Apr 20, 2018 04:00
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Hollandia posted:How bad is starting at level 0? Just start at 1. If you do level 0 tell your players to have like three PCs in mind because with as little as 9 HP on them it's only going to take one lucky skeleton to drop those shits. Level 1 gives you a novice path, so you have more going for you than just the racial abilities. Three level 0 orcs are going to more or less be the same character outside of their professions, but an orc rogue, warrior, and priest have vastly different mechanics and still retain the squishiness of low level SotDL play. But you do you, if level 0 fits what you're going for better and your players don't mind the extremely high chances of death then go for it.
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Apr 20, 2018 04:00
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Glukeose posted:If you do level 0 tell your players to have like three PCs in mind This is literally what we have planned. My biggest reason for going for 0 was that we're all used to D&D 3 to 5, so I want as few complications as possible while getting used to the SotDL mechanics.
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Apr 20, 2018 04:08
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I mean, you can also largely just...not really have combat in your level 0 game. It'll sorta move people away from the fighter classes I guess.
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Apr 20, 2018 04:12
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Then go for it my dude. I'd be legitimately interested in a write-up after it happens.ProfessorCirno posted:I mean, you can also largely just...not really have combat in your level 0 game. It'll sorta move people away from the fighter classes I guess. Also fair. Level 0 is a real survival horror kind of bag though. Combat is high tension for those squishy characters.
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Apr 20, 2018 04:14
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Yeah, level 0 just feels and plays so differently from the rest of the game, if I were to run it for newbies again I'd start at level 1. (The first time I ran it we had a TPK in the first fight...)
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Apr 20, 2018 05:05
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Anyone know a good tradition to synergize with technomancy? Trying to build level 1 characters for this trial run so we can jump in and play. This guy said he wants "blaster + control" which is a little silly but I think technomancy covers both, and he's a clockwork so it's fitting. edit: my thinking is enchantment or arcana Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Apr 20, 2018 |
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Apr 20, 2018 06:24
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Enchantment would be an excellent choice yeah, it's pretty hard to beat for control and it has some great low level options other intellect traditions I like with strong low level damage and control options are Teleportation and Curse (if you don't mind a little dark magic- Pain is one of the higher damage level 1 spells you can cast and is a way to buff your turret + group as a whole.) e: Though I guess I should also point out that Rune's Brand of Doom does something similar [but less powerful] than Pain without the corruption risk and Rune is a great tradition with some decent attack + control options at lower levels. Though obviously Rune's best use long-term is the very strong buffs combined with the Lasting Rune cantrip from For Gold and Glory- which do eventually synergize very well with Technomancy since it lets you power up your battlemech (the above is generic advice of course- like if the clockwork happened to be size 2 they could easily be more effective "blasting" using Battle spells with ranged weapons, or [even less likely with their bad stats] if the clockwork somehow had decent Will then obviously Telekinesis becomes extremely attractive since Dancing Weapon is so absurd [and the rest of TK's spells are not exactly slouches either]) LGD fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Apr 20, 2018 |
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Apr 20, 2018 07:34
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Level 0 PCs in the dead by daylight adventure was pretty fun, but I populated the inn with NPCs and fudged a few rolls.
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Apr 20, 2018 08:33
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Serf did a pretty good job running the lvl 0 adventures he did a while back, but aside from that I've ran a couple lvl 0 adventures for my IRL group, and played in one a different GM did. One resulted in TPK half an hour in as mentioned earlier, the other the players just baaaarely squeaked by even with my GM thumb placed firmly (and heavily) on the players' side of the scales, and the last very little combat, a quick skirmish vs half a dozen fomors, and even that could've gone either way for a while. You really do have to run the lvl 0 adventure differently from the rest of the game.
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Apr 20, 2018 09:20
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Pretty much the only pre-written level 0 adventure that does combat right (that I have read, and I think I've read them all), is "Dark Deeds in Last Hope" which has extremely limited combat consisting of a few human bandits, a single animated corpse and some chump beastmen. Even then there may be 2 too many beastmen. But as a murder mystery, the core of the adventure can be solved without any combat at all, and most of the scenes are about running down clues and following leads to find the killer. It is also obviously the most well-written and produced adventure, as there is extensive support for things like post-adventure path selection and creating the town of Last Hope. This is in contrast to "A Year Without Rain" which is a fun little dungeon crawl but is ridiculously overtuned for level 0. Between the traps, animated corpses and giant spiders, the average group of 4 PCs is going to get seriously banged up along the way. Then they have a chance to encounter a ghoul (which my players never did), who could seriously gently caress them up. There are also a few tiny demons along the way that could also gib a starting character in a good turn. Then there is the boss, a ghost who has a ridiculous stat spread, a melee attack with +6 to hit that deals 2d6 damage, and a special move called Desiccating Kiss. Kiss triggers on a 20+ (so it hits roughly 30% of the time), which allows the boss to make a Strength vs. Strength roll, and if they make that (it has a +6 to Strength and assuming an average 10 Strength that means it will make it 80% of the time) the PC has to make a Strength roll with 1 bane at the end of every round or take 1d6 damage and this effect lasts for a minute. If this damage incapacitates you (meaning your Damage equals or exceeds your Health) you instantly die. Don't forget that at level 0, your Health is equal to your Strength, which means that every attack from the boss has decent odds of taking you down, and even if it doesn't, it also has a respectable chance of afflicting you with a curse that is basically guaranteed to kill you. My PCs fought this thing valiantly, but it still killed 3 of them, and they only succeeded because I let them take control of a construct that was in the room and because I doled out Fortune liberally. There is no way a party of level 0 adventurers can take on "A Year Without Rain" in any capacity with hopes of seeing all the content. It absolutely will kill them. And maybe if combat in SotDL was simpler and you had a PC funnel like DCC that would make sense, but here it really doesn't. I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that most adventures are written by other people, but I can't be sure. I'll run down some of the other adventures later because I think most of them have simple fixes that could make them really playable.
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Apr 20, 2018 11:23
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So looks like I came in on a good conversation. I JUST found this game and am about halfway through the core book, but I'm in love with it so far. I plan on running it for a group my wife and I are having in a few weeks, being a weekly thing. My main concern now is that three of the four players have never player TTRPGs before, and it sounds like level 0 is kinda iffy to start with. I also like playing pre made adventures, though here especially since it sounds like SoTL has a different way of doing them. Dark Deeds in Last Hope sounds good, are there any other level 0 adventures that I should look at, or am I better off with a level 1 adventure?
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Apr 20, 2018 18:05
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You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to do a funnel thing, since the core stats for each ancestry is the same every time, the actually time-consuming part is roling all the tables. An auto-rolling character creator would be nice, but lacking that how could you speed that aspect out? Skip all the non-mechanical rolls until you know they've survived the first adventure?
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Apr 20, 2018 18:09
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Elblanco posted:So looks like I came in on a good conversation. I JUST found this game and am about halfway through the core book, but I'm in love with it so far. I plan on running it for a group my wife and I are having in a few weeks, being a weekly thing. I wouldn't send total newbies up against any level 0 adventure aside from "Dark Deeds in Last Hope" and even then bumping them up to level 1 won't hurt anything. Level 1 is a massive power increase over 0, as it gives some actual abilities to play with, more Health, some stat bumps and more than that an actual role for the character. One of the goals for level 0 adventures is to help people figure out what sort of character they want to play, but I think at this point most people can come into an RPG and say, "I want to be a sword guy" and so you direct them to the Warrior path and get started. Antilles posted:You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to do a funnel thing, since the core stats for each ancestry is the same every time, the actually time-consuming part is roling all the tables. An auto-rolling character creator would be nice, but lacking that how could you speed that aspect out? Skip all the non-mechanical rolls until you know they've survived the first adventure? To me the big bottleneck is the combat. It has just enough crunch to be annoying with big groups. If each player had 2-3 PCs, even just making Insanity rolls would take a while, and tracking all those stats is going to be rough.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:16
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Serf posted:To me the big bottleneck is the combat. It has just enough crunch to be annoying with big groups. If each player had 2-3 PCs, even just making Insanity rolls would take a while, and tracking all those stats is going to be rough. You could do one of those bullshit Eastern Front tropes, 'you've three characters but only one has a weapon, when he drops the next pick up his weapon' nonsense. I was more thinking 'control 1 at a time, the other two assist the first' to pick up some much-needed boons at level 0.
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Apr 20, 2018 18:37
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My podcast recently switched over to Shadow of the Demon Lord, and the players (theres just 2 of them) wanted to do the Level 0 thing and we went with the Funnel idea. First session one player just had one character and the other guy had 3, and I put them through Dead by Dawn. They died horribly, but I suspect it was partially because we forgot Clockworks are immune to fatigue, which plays a big part in the "building" part of that module. Second session, they came with 3 characters each. They dove headlong into The Witching Wood and made it with no losses. We had time left so we did a third level 0 run, because they wanted to, and they lost a couple of characters and all of their meager possessions to The Slaver's Lash.
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Apr 20, 2018 19:00
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