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Spellbinder can use their bound weapons as implements.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:32
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Conspiratiorist posted:Spellbinder can use their bound weapons as implements. Yes, but you have to cast the bound weapon spell first. 
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Aug 7, 2018 17:33
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It's too bad Rob is set on there not being a second edition at the moment, you could fix a lot of this with a few simple rules.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:36
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ban spellguard imo
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Aug 7, 2018 17:39
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Serf posted:It's too bad Rob is set on there not being a second edition at the moment, you could fix a lot of this with a few simple rules. I think the Spellguard / Adept, Time magic, and 3.5-style summons where a summon is just a completely independent entity that takes its own turns were all a mistake. The first issue I'd fix by making those "attack to also cast a spell" abilities require the use of a triggered action (or at least a minor activity) but Accelerate, Twain Self, and independent summons probably just shouldn't exist.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:39
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I think the Spellguard / Adept, Time magic, and 3.5-style summons where a summon is just a completely independent entity that takes its own turns were all a mistake. I do want to say thanks for pointing this stuff out. I have no head for combos like this, and I like to take note so that I can implement house rules and post about them on the G+ page so Rob at least sees them. I don't think most players are in it to make gimmick builds, but its nice to know about in advance.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:41
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Regarding implements... The Teleportation tradition has a level 0 spell (Fetch) that lets you instantly neutralize any spellcaster. (But seriously if you want overpowered spells, the Order tradition from DLC2 has some doozies. Read the level 1 spell Consistency and weep.)
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Aug 7, 2018 18:02
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Looks like the spellcaster Paths (Pursuits?) book is dropping on Monday https://twitter.com/schwalb_ent/status/1027592197636583425?s=20
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Aug 9, 2018 18:24
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dwarf74 posted:Regarding implements...
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Aug 9, 2018 19:20
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Elysiume posted:Huh. Are there no restrictions on targeting held items? Fetch messes with non-spellcasters too, since you can steal weapons. Yeah, he sure did. But that just reduced the damage or made them switch to a backup, rather than completely neutralizing a spellcaster. Since it's 0-level I think it really needs an "unattended" in there somewhere. Edit! Turns out there IS a general rule, and anything targeting an object needs to be yours or nobody's basically. dwarf74 fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Aug 9, 2018 |
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Aug 9, 2018 20:16
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dwarf74 posted:Edit! Turns out there IS a general rule, and anything targeting an object needs to be yours or nobody's basically. What page is this on? I went looking too and couldn't find it, but I might've been looking for the wrong terms. (Or is it a Google+ ruling -- which I don't mind, honestly, the community participation and access to Schwalb is really neat, I just wish it were in a medium with a better interface than Google+.)
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Aug 9, 2018 22:14
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:What page is this on? I went looking too and couldn't find it, but I might've been looking for the wrong terms. Page 113 apparently, or so I've been led to believe.
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Aug 9, 2018 22:41
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dwarf74 posted:Page 113 apparently, or so I've been led to believe.  Yup.
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Aug 9, 2018 22:42
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Elysiume posted:
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Aug 9, 2018 22:55
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Yeah that's not at all inferrable from the text of spells, and players read spell descriptions much more frequently than the combat rules, since they have to do so to choose spells. I think that's one of those things where, while it makes sense to unify the rules across all spells, it should still be repeated in the "target" section of each object-facing spell. Target: One unattended object. There, done.
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Aug 9, 2018 23:21
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So I picked up In Pursuit of Power, the new magician-focused supplement, and it seems really sweet. Basically, you can swap out the general magician talents for focused version of those talents based on the traditions you have unlocked. For example, the Air Tradition gives the following: Swap the generic Cantrip for Air Focus (Cantrip), gaining a rank 0 spell from air and a talent that lets you expend a 0th Air spell to let you fill your lungs with air for 1 hour or until you speak, removing the need to breath. Swapping out Sense Magic for Command the Wind gives you a bunch of minor wind effects to clear away dust or powder, disperse odors, move a light object a pretty good distance, snuff out a candle or lantern flame, or disperse fog and smoke. Swapping out Spell Recovery (or the Improved version) lets you use an action to heal your healing rate and fly up to half your speed Swapping out Counterspell gives you Protective Winds, which activates whenever you cast an Air spell and gives you +2 Speed and imposes 2 banes on attack rolls made against you from thrown or ranged weapons for Power number of rounds There are new talents for every existing school, including a new one (Madness) which will be in Occult Philosophy. Edit: Looking through the cantrip replacements, Death, Song, and Rune are the clear standouts. Death lets you spend a 0th level Death spell as a triggered action when you would become incapacitated to immediately heal 1d3 Damage, once per minute. Rune lets you turn 1 minute Rune spells into 10 minutes 1+Power times per day, and Song gives you a triggered action when you cast a Song spell to spend a 0th level Song spell to increase the range from short to medium, extend the duration from 1 to 10 minutes or change the duration from concentration to 1 minute. Unfortunately, most of the Cantrip replacement abilities seem not worth losing the extra spells for all your traditions from the default magician. Piell fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Aug 13, 2018 |
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Aug 13, 2018 13:13
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I only looked at this a long time ago, but is there someone who's a wizard fighter, but not a fighter who casts spells? Like, you hit someone, and magic happens as you hit them.
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Aug 15, 2018 04:14
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Battle Tradition is filled with spells that are weapon attacks; you could conceivably build a path combination that makes use of this alongside weapon buffs.
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Aug 15, 2018 05:01
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Gharbad the Weak posted:I only looked at this a long time ago, but is there someone who's a wizard fighter, but not a fighter who casts spells? Like, you hit someone, and magic happens as you hit them. I dunno if you've got a hard limit on "wizard" vs "divine", but the priest of Father Death from Uncertain Faith is really goddamn good at melee combat, given that it has access to Shadow, Protection, and Death, and it doesn't gain Corruption from Death spells. The level 2 prayer is explicitly for enhancing melee rolls. I haven't read the new caster book but so far, the FD priest is the best "i'm going to gently caress you up with a big axe" novice path that I've encountered.
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Aug 15, 2018 05:20
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Gharbad the Weak posted:I only looked at this a long time ago, but is there someone who's a wizard fighter, but not a fighter who casts spells? Like, you hit someone, and magic happens as you hit them. I mean magic is spells, so if you don't want spells at all then what you're asking for doesn't exist. Spellguard and Adept both get an ability that lets you cast a spell for free every time you spend an action to attack, though, if that's good enough.
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Aug 15, 2018 05:30
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So there is a Kickstarter going on right now for a bestiary supplement by some folks, but also including Rob. It looks interesting but the pricing of the different tiers is dodgy. It's relatively expensive all around, but some of the monster ideas look cool. I'd like to see one or two sample statblocks, but with Rob apparently contributing, I'm more confident than I would be otherwise. They're honest about the time involved though, as the estimated delivery is August 2019, but I would rather pledge knowing I have a long wait time than expect it to come quicker but actually get delayed.
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Aug 15, 2018 11:38
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I just ran The Witching Wood for five level 0 characters and the system is pretty fun. A void larva absolutely annihilated one of the players after I rolled two sixes for damage, instantly killing them. I also killed a four health clockwork, but there's not much that doesn't kill a four health character.
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Aug 15, 2018 22:41
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I didn't actually realize one of the Clockwork forms reduced health by 5, that's... kind of lame, honestly. Anyways, my sincere advice is don't run level 0 or if you do make all combat avoidable. The game's lethal enough (and takes long enough to introduce more complex character options) as it is. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 03:34
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I didn't actually realize one of the Clockwork forms reduced health by 5, that's... kind of lame, honestly.
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Aug 16, 2018 04:27
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So I've been combing through the Bestiary, trying to build the SotDL equivalent to the MM3 on a Business Card. The good news is that there does seem to be an underlying logic to monster math in SotDL. The bad news is that it looks like it's some kind of demented point-buy system that only Rob Schwalb knows about. Defense values for a particular difficulty tier vary by as much as 7 or 8. Health values are very consistent for DF 1, 5, and 10, but once you get to 25 it's clear that monsters are designed with a large initial health pool based on their intended difficulty and then certain traits are "bought" at the expense of health -- which creates really uneven results. Damage and accuracy are similar; ranged attacks often come at the cost of accuracy (this I actually like, sort of, although I'm not sure it's the BEST way to handle it) and damage is traded off for things like multiattacking or special on-hit effects and so on -- although not consistently, there are a number of monsters that get full damage AND can double attack without the requirement to choose separate targets, and they're a good way to TPK your players. The ugly news is that, bless his heart, Rob Schwalb did the same goddamn thing with Demons that D&D 3.5 did with Dragons: their difficulty tier is deliberately low-balled, presumably to make them more "epic" encounters.  The silver lining is that it's pretty easy to figure out what monster damage, accuracy, and defense "should" be by comparing them to PCs. If you assume the average player's health is 10 + 4 per level (right in the middle of the road for HP gain) then that means that a player can be hit for 3.5 (the average result of a d6) damage 4 times before dying. Almost every DF 1 monster deals 1d6 damage, and the main exception is the Void Larva which deals 2d6 and is a demon (see above). So you can easily accomplish "first level damage forever" in SotDL by setting standard monster damage to 1d6 + (player level - 1). If you want more variance and/or consistency with the way player damage expressions work, you can translate 1d6+3 or higher to 2d6, and 1d6+7 or higher to 3d6 (roughly corresponding to Expert and Master tier.) Comparing monster accuracy and defense to a human Warrior / Fighter / Weaponmaster gave me ballpark figures of 13, 15, and 17 for Novice, Expert, and Master; assuming the player is attacking with a to-hit bonus of +3 and 1 boon, +4 and 2 boons, and +5 and 3 boons, this all hovers right around a 65% chance to hit. Buffs, the Surrounding rule if you use it, and other conditional advantages will take them higher. Give monsters similar accuracy to players (+3 1 boon Novice, +4 2 boons Expert, +5 3 boons Master) and they'll hit the player slightly less often because with good armor player Defense will usually be closer to 14 / 16 / 18 even before taking shields or high-AGI races into account, and higher with those things. (They'll need loot to keep up, though, so make sure to give them the money and/or opportunity to get better armor and the like.) Spellcasters have a harder time stacking boons but they also usually get to target attributes instead of defense. Spells that do direct damage almost always target STR or AGI, so my rough estimate here is that one of those attributes should be the same as or -1 lower than defense, while the other should be around -2 or -3. This keeps things interesting and helps complicate target prioritization, while not giving an unfair advantage or disadvantage to caster attack rolls. (Sorcerers are probably still broken good but that's beyond the scope of monster math to fix.) INT and WIL are trickier because they don't directly correlate to health; a lot of status effect / illusion / etc. spells target them, but those spells are also the most susceptible to immunities or to being conditionally broken, and it's hard to tell exactly how to value this. Frankly though, the existing bestiary has no logic when it comes to those scores to begin with so whatever you do isn't any worse than how it already is. Monster health is more complicated because PC damage varies a lot, but I have a general idea (it's roughly 2d6 per tier for a pure fighter, and casters trade sustained damage for greater utility) and I may ask people to playtest it once I come up with a ballpark figure. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Aug 16, 2018 |
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Aug 16, 2018 17:29
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also a WHOLE lot of the problems with combat in this game can be attributed to the fact that Difficulty is pulling double duty: 25 DF, for example, has to contain both trash mobs for high-level parties and boss encounters for low-level parties and this causes problems re: design philosophy for individual critters the solution is probably to throw out difficulty rating altogether and have a two-axis system where monsters have both a level and a role, which is gonna be a ton of work, but i really love the player-facing side of SotDL so i'm probably going to end up doing it
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Aug 16, 2018 17:52
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How well does SotDL handle mid to lategame, where the action economy in 3.P and even 5e start falling apart for single-enemy encounters? SotDL has fewer instant fight-ending spells than 5e (which in turn has fewer than 3.P), and I know that some later/beefier enemies have similar effects to legendary resists/actions in 5e. It's one of my favorite parts of 5e (in theory, at least, I've never run 5e and have only done a bit of mid to late gameplay), as it allows for many-vs-1 fights without having the 3.P result of the many instagibbing the 1, or the 1 killing one PC per turn until they take it down.
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Aug 16, 2018 18:33
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You need late-game bosses to break expected initiative and action economy. Also a way to negate debuffs. Enough damage output to be a threat. And finally enough hp to avoid a huge alpha strike. Fortunately, all are achievable but they get weird.
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Aug 16, 2018 19:21
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I almost always adjust a value or two on a monster based on the environment and how bad of a matchup it is for my characters. For example I have a paladin who gives out a bunch of boons to everyone. If he's going to be fighting something with a relatively low defense for a few level 7s I can fudge some stats so it's a challenging fight and everyone still feels like they're doing their thing. Flexibility is pretty much required with my group because I don't always know who's going to be showing up. It's a good habit to be in, I think. The party was beating up on a Gladius pretty hard and he was supposed to be the centerpiece of the area, so I told the party they had jarred his core into overdrive. He started crackling with power and statistically I added a point of defense and some hp.
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Aug 16, 2018 21:46
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I asked for one-shot recommendations before, but does anyone have recommendations for full adventure paths?
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Aug 20, 2018 19:08
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Elysiume posted:I asked for one-shot recommendations before, but does anyone have recommendations for full adventure paths? Queen of Gold--Tales of the Pirate Isles is fun if you have Freeport Companion. If not there's a full campaign to be found in Demon Lord's Companion
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Aug 20, 2018 20:59
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The freeport trilogy seems pretty solid also though there are some parts that are a little sparse for a full adventure.
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Aug 20, 2018 21:01
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:The freeport trilogy seems pretty solid also though there are some parts that are a little sparse for a full adventure. The balance is usually good, but there's a few encounters - one of which, tbf, is completely optional - that are tuned weirdly. Also, for better or for worse, it side-steps most of the core conceits of the SotDL setting.
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Aug 21, 2018 14:19
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Is there any particular reaction to, or anything I should know about Survival of the Fittest before running it for some folks that haven't played Demon Lord before, but are familiar with RPGs? I know the usual concerns about level 0 content, and am not set on doing a level 0 over a level 1.
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Aug 22, 2018 18:35
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The Freeport trilogy has some cool poo poo to pluck out and use and I actually like that it's less oppressive than the core setting. Running Shadows in Freeport is the most fun myself or any of the players have had playing a tabletop game, but I wouldn't use that trilogy strictly as written. The atmosphere of a big city in a large archipelago where you can go sailing looking for treasure, or get involved in seedy politics or kill a gluttony demon in the sewers combined with the awesome SOTDL mechanics makes for a good time
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Aug 23, 2018 03:31
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Thanks for the recommendations. Can someone throw together a high-level synopsis of the adventure path(s) in Freeport so I can pitch it to my group before I buy the PDF/book?
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Aug 27, 2018 19:46
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I'm thinking about running Dark Sun in Shadow of the Demon Lord and getting pretty excited.
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Aug 27, 2018 20:53
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I'm thinking about running Dark Sun in Shadow of the Demon Lord and getting pretty excited. http://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/BkvRl6Dwb
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Aug 27, 2018 20:58
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Elysiume posted:Thanks for the recommendations. Can someone throw together a high-level synopsis of the adventure path(s) in Freeport so I can pitch it to my group before I buy the PDF/book? Part 1 is "investigate a thing, uncover a conspiracy and find a hidden threat." Part 2 is "wow, this conspiracy is pretty big and seems deep so let's explore the city and do detective poo poo." Part 3 is "let's party, but oh yeah let's dungeon crawl too, we didn't do any of it last time. Maybe twice!" There are some really clumsy transitions here and there, so you will have some heavier lifting if you want to make it better. Biggest example: You're at a party meeting people. They have some info, allegiances, etc. And basically none of it loving matters because right at the end a random hermit waltzes right into the ballroom, tells the party exactly what to do next, and turns into a snake. I am not making this up.
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Aug 27, 2018 21:21
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dwarf74 posted:Part 1 is "investigate a thing, uncover a conspiracy and find a hidden threat."
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Aug 27, 2018 21:24
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